The next thing he knew, it was morning. Birds were singing, a faint glow of daylight had crept in under the neck of the rubber sack, Skip’s head was pounding, and the old familiar pain in his lower back and hips had turned feral, like a family pet gone rabid. Rolling onto his right side for relief, Skip felt something in his right front pants pocket digging painfully into his right thigh.
Something hard.
Something like a cell phone.
3
Pender used his cell phone to call 911. He was waiting outside Epstein’s door with his badge case clipped to the breast pocket of his sport jacket and his badge hanging in plain sight when the first cruiser arrived. The rest was attitude—he treated the responding officers as if they’d been dispatched to his crime scene, directing them to stand guard outside Epstein’s door and make sure nobody touched the doorknob until it had been dusted.
Pender maintained control of the scene until a pair of veteran SFPD homicide detectives arrived in an unmarked car. Their initial assumption was that the missing man had shot his cleaning lady and fled; it took Pender a good deal of effort to convince the locals that they were dealing instead with a homicide-kidnapping case involving a serial offender.
Pender’s next move was to give the San Francisco detectives the names of their counterparts in Santa Cruz and Monterey. When he’d finished doing that, his job as liaison support was over. Or so Steve McDougal informed him via his cell phone a few minutes later.
“You don’t understand, Steve,” said Pender, who had stepped off the curb and was now performing a primitive cell phone reception dance in the middle of Francisco Street, shuffling around in circles holding the phone to one ear and sticking his forefinger in the other. “Epstein was working with us—we can’t just turn our backs on him.”
“What’s this we stuff, kemo sabe?”
“All right, I was working with him. So there’s—”
“Ed.”
“No way I’m—”
“Ed?”
“Walking away from—”
“Ed!”
“What?”
“I want you on the next available commercial flight home. You’re a fifty-year-old liaison support specialist, not a case agent, not a field agent. If field assistance is requested, the Bureau has field offices and resident agencies from one end of California to the other, and if any liaising needs to be done, you can do it from here as easily as you can from there, with considerably less damage to my budget.”
“What if I pay my own expenses? It’s already Friday—what do you care where I spend the weekend?”
There was no immediate response. Pender wasn’t sure whether McDougal had been struck dumb, or if they’d lost the connection—either way, he decided to take the silence for permission. “Thanks, Steve, you won’t regret it,” he said, and hurriedly pushed the End Call button.
4
“Luke?” you call. “You there, Luke?”
No response. You lie still, holding your breath and listening intently for the faintest rustle to betray the other man’s presence. Then when you’re sure you’re alone—or as sure as you can be: there’s always the possibility Sweet is also lying still and holding his breath—you roll onto your stomach, wriggling and squirming, squirming and wriggling, until you’ve twisted your pants around on your hips far enough to bring the pocket with the phone in it within reach of your hands, which are still tied together behind your back, palms facing.
Somehow you manage to slide both hands into your pocket, but not far enough to reach the phone, which is jammed into the very bottom of the pocket, just out of reach of your yearning fingertips. So you stretch and strain and arch your spine backward and your shoulder blades downward, fighting for one…last…crucial…mini…micro…millimeter…
There! Got it!
Now bring your thumbs into play…trying to flip the phone open…can’t quite…almost there—Ouch, ouch, cramp, thumb cramp, sonofa——
Calm down, wait for the cramp to pass, try again. Work your thumbs up, up…force them into the gap…try to leverage the—
Sonofabitch! It can’t be done. You can’t open the phone without taking it out of the pocket, any more than you could open a sandwich without taking it out of the Baggie.
Okay, okay, don’t panic. Slight adjustment necessary. Plan B: instead of working the trousers sideways any farther, work them downward, down over your hips. One of those if-you-can’t-raise-the-bridge-lower-the-water deals. Or in this case, if you can’t raise the phone, lower the pocket by lowering the pants. It doesn’t have to be far…just far enough…an inch, another inch…
Ta-daaaaa! The phone is out. Now work your thumbs between the gap again, pry the halves apart…a little farther…
Ta-daaaa again: the phone is open.
Now visualize the faceplate. Small buttons numbered like a telephone dial. Larger buttons above them marked with little telephone icons—the one on the left is for placing or answering calls. But first you have to turn it on—that’s the larger button on the right, that’s the one you need to press and hold first.
Problem: the buttons are set nearly flush with the base—you can’t tell which is which just by touch.
Solution: just keep pressing buttons and holding them down, one after the other, until you find the one that goes beep.
Okay, pressing buttons now. Trial and error: no beep…no beep…no beep…
Beep.
5
Lacking permission to request support from the Bureau’s San Francisco field office, Pender decided to try a different approach. Before leaving for Marshall County, he dropped by the Buchanan Street offices of Epstein Investigative Services. The receptionist, Tanya, an otherwise attractive young lady with Smurf blue hair, was bristling with rings, studs, and so many piercings it looked as though someone had taken a riveting gun to her face. Even before Pender tinned her, he could tell that she was as yet unaware that Epstein had been kidnapped only a few blocks away.
He broke the news gently, stressing that there was every reason to believe Skip was still alive. Tears sprang to Tanya’s eyes nevertheless. Don’t cry, Pender wanted to tell her, you’ll rust.
Minutes later, he was addressing the assembled staff in a small conference room behind the bull pen—you could tell by the ping-pong table that it was seldom used for conferences. A motley crew, casually dressed for the most part in T-shirts, bowling shirts, jeans, and cross-trainers, they sat in stunned silence after Pender finished talking.
“Come on,” he urged them. “You guys are all pros, you find people every day of your lives. If you’ve got any ideas, now’s the time to speak up.”
A tiny woman wearing a softball jersey raised her hand tentatively, revealing a heavily tattooed forearm.
“Yes, what’s your name, dear?” said Pender.
“Sandy Pollock—and don’t call me dear.”
“Sorry, no disrespect intended. What’ve you got?”
“Do you know if Skip had his cell phone with him when he was taken?”
“I believe so. I know he had it with him yesterday—he called me from it while he was driving home from Salinas, and I didn’t see it anywhere around the apartment.”
“Great. Far out. Tanya, would you get me Skip’s cell number and his service provider so I can get hold of their security people? Then assuming he has his phone turned on, if he makes a call or takes a call, it doesn’t matter how short or long it is, they can still get the GPS coordinates by triangulating from the location of the microwave relay towers.”
“Sandy, Sandy!” Short guy, big head, tragic acne, trifocals. “Give me the number. I’ve got an automatic dialer rigged up back in my cubicle—you know, for radio call-in contests and stuff. I can set it to continuous calling.”
“And let’s hook it up to a tape recorder,” the office manager suggested. Older than the others, sideburned and pudgy, he was the only necktie wearer in the room apart from Pender. “Even if he can’t say anything, they might be able to nar
row down the search parameters based on ambient sounds, stuff like birdcalls, traffic noises, railroad crossings. I saw that on Tales of the FBI,” he added, with a friendly nod in Pender’s direction.
Twenty minutes later, Pender was still trying to process this new information about cellular call tracking. The implications for law enforcement in general were staggering. But then again, so were the implications for a special agent who had been thinking about calling his boss to report that he was at the San Francisco airport but couldn’t get a flight out until Monday, when he was actually calling from a rent-a-car on the road to Marshall County, because his gut told him that’s where Sweet was holed up with his latest captive—assuming, of course, that he hadn’t already killed him.
6
It should have been easier to call 911—wasn’t the 9 button at the bottom right and the 1 at the top left? But Skip’s fingertips were so numb and clumsy and the buttons set so flush and close together he could hardly differentiate them from the faceplate, much less from each other.
After several failed attempts, it finally occurred to Skip that he didn’t actually have to call 911. Any number would do. Even better, somewhere toward the top of the faceplate there was a redial button that would reconnect him with the last number he’d called. And as far as he could remember, the last number he’d called was…Pender! Pender of the Eff Bee Fucking Eye.
Of course, finding the redial button with both hands tied behind your back was no walk in the park. He had to switch the phone on, try a button, switch it off, try another. Trial and error, trial and error, story of my life. If at first you don’t succeed—
Suddenly Skip heard the skreee of the rusty, off-track sliding door. Quickly he folded up the phone and hid it between his palms. He heard footsteps coming toward him.
“On your feet, Epstein.”
Skip sat up, the cell phone concealed between his bound hands. Luke, or Asmador, or whatever he was calling himself, untied Skip’s ankles. Skip got his feet under him and tried unsuccessfully to stand up; his legs felt like fat water balloons.
“I think I’m going to puke,” he said between clenched teeth, when suddenly the Clash started playing “Rock the Casbah” behind his back—it was, of course, the ring tone of his cell phone.
“What’s that?” The phone was snatched from Skip’s hands. He heard “Sorry, dude, you got the wrong number,” followed by a rending noise, followed by two hollow thuds he took to be the sound of his cell phone being snapped in half and thrown against a wooden wall a few feet away.
CHAPTER FIVE
1
Lieutenant J. B. Sperry, in command of the Marshall County Sheriff Department’s tactical response squad, jabbed with his pointer at a tiny red-penciled cross on the topographical map spread out across Sheriff Mike Lisle’s desk.
“X marks the spot where Epstein’s cell phone was triangulated,” he explained to the recently arrived Pender. “Access is via either the county road here”—jabbing the map with his pointer again—“or this old fire trail coming in from the south”—jab—“which is going to be slower and rougher, but should provide better cover.”
“The problem is, we don’t have any information on the site itself, such as how many buildings are still standing, if any,” said Sheriff Lisle, who had graying temples and a Batman jaw. “That’s why I want to wait for the satellite photos before we mount an assault.”
“But while we’re waiting, Sweet could be on the move,” argued Sperry, a beefy Joe Montana type, dimpled chin and all. He had, he’d been sure to let Pender know, done his tac squad training at Quantico. “In which case, every minute we delay increases his chances of getting away.”
“Whereas going in blind increases our chances of sustaining casualties,” Lisle said wearily—obviously, they’d been over this ground before. “What do you think, Agent Pender?”
“I think we need to move as quickly as possible. If Sweet hasn’t killed Epstein already, it’s only because he’s still torturing him. And since we’re only going up against one man, I can’t see how deploying sooner rather than later is going to put your people in any additional jeopardy.”
After mulling it over, or giving the appearance of having mulled it over, Lisle nodded decisively. “Okay, let’s do it.”
In the muster room, the tac squad was buddying up, each team member double-checking his or her partner’s weapons, armor, and communication gear, and being double-checked in return. The tense mood, the nervous banter, and the clatter of equipment reminded Pender of his old high school football team suiting up before a game. All that was missing was the click-clack of spikes on the locker room floor.
Pender didn’t stick around for the coach’s pep talk. Instead, operating on the Hopper principle—it’s more effective to ask forgiveness than to ask permission—he slipped out the back door while Sperry was still addressing his squad, and climbed into the back of the shiny black Lenco BEAR, the multiuse, ballistic engineered armored response vehicle that was to ferry the tac squad up into the foothills.
Air-conditioned for stakeouts, armored for assaults, with run-flat tires, bulletproof portholes, shielded gunports, a rotating turret, and a sniper’s platform on the roof, the BEAR had padded benches running the full length of the cabin on either side. Pender hunched his shoulders and tried to make himself inconspicuous as the squad began belting themselves in around him. But somehow the sharp-eyed Lieutenant Sperry, sitting in the swiveling command seat next to the driver, managed to pick the six-four, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound federal agent in the houndstooth-checked hat and tomato-soup-colored sport coat out of a dozen armored, helmeted deputies in paratrooper boots and desert camo. They locked eyes. You need me, Pender vibed him. You know you need me. I’m the only guy you’ve got who knows Sweet and Epstein both, you’d be crazy not to—
Sperry broke eye contact first. “Somebody get that man a vest and a helmet,” he barked.
2
Skip was marched stumbling out of the barn. He could tell he was outside even with the rubber sack over his head.
Dull as his mind had grown from the ordeal and the unrelenting fear, he was still capable of forming coherent thoughts. Schmuck, he told himself, you’re letting him walk you to your death.
For like many American Jews of his generation, Skip Epstein had at one time or another blithely measured himself against the victims of the Holocaust, and had convinced himself, however naïvely, that if it ever happened here, he wouldn’t allow himself to be led like a lamb to the slaughter the way they had. No way they take me without a fight, he’d always promised himself—and yet here he was, letting himself be marched along by a single psychopath with a gun.
When the path, if it was a path, turned uphill, Skip found the ankle-high grass tough going. At times only his captor’s firm grasp on his bound wrists kept him upright. Both hips were screaming as he stumbled along, and beneath the stifling hood the sweat pouring into his eyes stung like liniment. Do something, Skip told himself. For God’s sake, do—
“Down you go,” said the other man, swiping Skip’s legs out from under him. Unable to break his fall, he landed hard on his side, on his elbow, knocking the air out of his lungs.
When you can’t breathe, everything else is irrelevant. It wasn’t until his diaphragm had begun functioning again and he’d managed a few exploratory sips of air that Skip became aware of the stench creeping in under the hood—it smelled as if he were lying next to an open cesspool filled with roadkill.
Distracted first by the struggle to breathe, then by the terrible odor, Skip was only vaguely conscious of the way his body was being manhandled, rocked and shoved, lifted and dropped. Eventually, though, he managed to piece it all together, and concluded that he was being tied up again—and this time he was not alone. His captor had knocked him down alongside some other poor bastard and was now lashing the two of them together, back to back, with coils of rope.
Once he was securely bound, Skip’s hood was removed. After being blinded by
darkness for so long, he was suddenly blinded by the light. He quickly shut his eyes, but not before the hulking, round-shouldered silhouette of his departing captor was imprinted in negative behind his eyelids.
“Hey,” Skip whispered after a few minutes of silence. “Hey, I think he’s gone.”
No response from whomever he was tied to.
“Man, what a stink. You know where it’s coming from?”
No answer.
“Say something, man. Grunt if you can’t talk.”
Nothing.
One last try: “Can you hear me?”
Apparently not. Skip opened his eyes again. The terrain ahead of him was pretty much what he’d expected—a sideways view of a grassy, green-gold hillside that could have been almost anywhere in Northern California. Leaning back, Skip wiggled his shoulders, trying to jostle his new companion awake. “Hey, wake up—maybe we can untie each other.”
Still no response. “C’mon, man,” he said, more urgently. But when he closed his fingers around his fellow captive’s wrists and began rubbing and chafing them to bring him around, the flesh—the dead man’s rotting flesh—had the texture of crackling pig at a luau, and slid loosely over the bone.
At least now you know where that god-awful smell is coming from, Skip told himself, when his diaphragm finally stopped spasming. By then, however, the vultures were already circling overhead, so the realization was far from comforting.
3
The Sierra foothills were greener than they’d been during Pender’s last visit, and the streams ran higher. A few miles out of town, Pender heard “Third Rate Romance” playing quietly on his mental jukebox. A moment later he caught a glimpse, through the inch-thick acrylic of the view port, of a familiar-looking old roadhouse, its doors and windows boarded up and a FOR SALE OR LEASE sign on the lawn.
The Boys from Santa Cruz Page 17