At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  Thorne shrugged. “Shouldn’t be hard to find out. Why?”

  “I’m going to pay her a visit.”

  Thorne shook his head vehemently. “Bullshit. That’s suicide.”

  “I can make her believe,” Jake insisted. “I’ve reasoned with her before, back in the body shop when all of this began. If I can set her on the right track, I think she’ll be able to prove it to herself.”

  “No.” Thorne was unequivocal.

  “You’ve got a better plan?” Jake’s frustration caused his voice to crack. “We’re dead in the water here!”

  The big man seemed to struggle for an answer, then looked away, his jaw set angrily. “Well, I got no part in it,” he said. “There’s no way Mr. Sinclair will allow himself to walk into a buzz saw.”

  Jake hiked his shoulders into an extended shrug. “Do you see him here?”

  Thorne didn’t bother to answer.

  Jake shifted his gaze. “Nick?”

  Nick recoiled at the thought. “I don’t think so!”

  “All you have to do is drive, okay? I promise. I need your help to pull it off. You’ll never have to leave the car.”

  Nick cocked his head warily. “Look, Jake. You know I’m committed to helping, but I’ve got to start thinking about damage control.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Nick looked to Thorne and got a supportive, understanding nod. “God’s honest truth, I don’t think you’ve got a chance. It’s too big. I came here with the idea of staying away from the law. Now you’re seeking them out.” He broke eye contact. “I just can’t do that.”

  “It’s stupid, Jake,” Thorne repeated. “Listen to him. There’s got to be a better way.”

  Jake just stared. “And searching for better ways takes more time than I’ve got.” He felt himself flush with anger as he realized they were abandoning him. Well, to hell with them. He’d make it all right, with them or without them. He looked to Thorne again. “Let me have the keys, then.”

  Thorne paused for a long moment before hesitantly handing them over.

  Jake bounced the keys in his palm. “Some tough guy you turned out to be,” he said bitterly. When his eyes landed on Nick, he just broke his gaze and headed for the door.

  As Nick listened to the quiet click of Jake’s rubber-soled shoes disappearing down the hallway, he looked to Thorne and felt ashamed. It was foolish, he knew-and sentimental-but he just couldn’t let Jake down like this. Not again.

  “God help me,” he groaned, rising from his chair. “In for a dime, in for a dollar, right, Thorne?” He had to hurry to catch up.

  Alone, finally, in the sprawling house, Thorne poured himself a drink and reached for the telephone. It was time to catch his boss up on everything that had happened.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The guards wouldn’t tell Carolyn a thing. She’d begged. She’d cried. Still, no one would tell her how Travis was doing. She knew he was alive, but beyond that, they said nothing. More precisely, they insisted they had no information. Of course, if she found a way to be more forthcoming with details about Jake, well, they might just be able to scavenge up a tidbit or two. Assholes.

  She lay on the concrete shelf that served as a cot in her isolation cell, bathed in the yellow light cast by the wire-reinforced fixture overhead. She’d unrolled her mattress, such as it was, but the threadbare Army blanket and plastic pillow remained folded and stacked on her bed, serving as a convenient footrest. Officially, her celebrity status was responsible for her isolation, but she knew that it was just more mind games.

  She worried how much longer she could hold out. Fear was hard to manage when you were all alone, and the fact that her tormentors took such pleasure from her fear made it that much worse. She tried to focus on Jake and on all she knew he must be doing to get her out. They’d been married nearly fifteen years now, and he’d never once let her down. God only knew how he’d do it, but she had to keep believing in him. Without that hope, there was nothing.

  She’d heard over the years that one of the worst adjustments to life in prison was the constant noise. The air handlers thrummed endlessly, keeping the place cold enough to hang meat and preventing even the few quiet moments from being truly quiet. Already, she missed the rushing sound of an autumn breeze, the silence of a snowy night. Over time, though, she knew she could adjust to mechanical noise. It was the human noise that frightened her.

  She was all alone in her little four-cell isolation wing, yet the sounds of other inmates still reverberated off the walls. People conversed at the top of their lungs, discussing issues as mundane as the weather and as newsy as the addition of the Newark terrorist to the jail’s population. “You ain’t seen terror yet, missy,” one inmate yelled. “Wait till you get out here alone with us! You’ll wish you had some nerve gas!”

  Carolyn just closed her eyes tighter and tried not to think about the future. These were tough, violent people, who’d been led to believe that she was just as tough as they. Once they found out how truly terrified she was, they’d eat her alive. The thought of institutional violence, with no place to run, made her stomach seize.

  You can’t think that way, she silently told herself. You’ve had dark days before. But never a day as dark as this.

  She tried to think of Travis. When dark days had turned bright in the past, it had almost always been his doing. He had that smile, and that knack for knowing how to make her laugh; just as he knew exactly which buttons could launch her into orbit. She closed her eyes tight and concentrated just on the smile-the way his front teeth crossed ever so slightly, and the way his whole face lit up at any punch line involving a body part south of the navel.

  When she concentrated on these things, the pain in her heart eased up a bit, and she nearly allowed herself a smile.

  Then she saw him back inside the car, drooling and frothing, struggling for every breath. What he must have been thinking of her as she wrestled with him in the water! Why couldn’t he understand? Why did he have to be so angry at the end?

  I killed my own son.

  No! He wasn’t dead, dammit. For all Carolyn knew, he was as good as gold again, and the jailers were keeping it from her just to torture her some more.

  She found herself thinking back to the time three years ago, in Baltimore, when he stepped on a bottle, barefoot, and opened up a gash under the arch of his foot. The poor kid howled, begging her to stop as she dug the grit and dirt out of the wound. What he needed was a hospital; a place to get stitched up. But they couldn’t take him to an emergency room. Too many cops there. If it had been life-threatening, sure. And probably, if he had torn any ligaments or broken any bones. But something as mundane-as painful-as torn flesh just wasn’t worth the risk. The wound took weeks to heal, hobbling him well into the winter of that year.

  Carolyn tried now to make the memories go away. What kind of parent would let her child suffer like that?

  And now he was alone.

  A noise at her cell door startled Carolyn back to reality, and she sat up quickly, swinging her feet to the floor. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, surprised she’d actually fallen asleep. The lock turned, and the steel door swung open, revealing a Wagnerian jail matron named Gladys, in the company of a rugged-looking older man in the requisite gray pinstripes of a government cop, carrying the standard-issue leather briefcase.

  “Got a visitor for you, killer,” Gladys said. “FBI.”

  “Agent Wiggins,” the man said with exaggerated patience, as if this weren’t the first time he’d had to remind her of his name.

  Gladys eyed him like he smelled bad. “Right. She gives you any trouble, give us a yell.” She closed the door on the way out. And locked it.

  Carolyn eyed Wiggins cautiously, fearfully. He had a predatory look about him that made her instinctively uncomfortable. “What time is it?” she asked.

  He seemed a little surprised by the question, as if such details as the time of day were somehow irrelevant. After d
ropping a beat, he looked at his watch. “A little after one,” he said.

  She had an instinct for people, and something about this guy put her on edge. That Rivers lady she’d sparred with earlier in the day had been a certifiable jerk, but in an arrogant, professional sort of way. She had a job to do, and that job was to put Carolyn away forever. With her, the rules of engagement were clear. Wiggins was different. He frightened her. And in a distant sort of way, she’d have sworn she’d seen him before. “I’ve already said all I’m going to say,” she growled, masking her fear with testiness.

  He seemed amused as he checked his reflection in the stainless-steel plate that served as a mirror over the toilet. After adjusting the knot in his tie and smoothing an errant hair, he helped himself to a corner of her cot. “Well, Mrs. Donovan,” he said softly, “what you have to say really doesn’t interest me much.”

  She narrowed her gaze. It was coming back to her. Something in the intensity of his eyes, his face. She considered calling the matron but abandoned the notion right away. What would she say to her?

  He caught her quick glance toward the door and turned to look. “Oh, don’t do something stupid, Carolyn,” he said. “Fact is, you’re in one hell of a mess. If you ask me, you’d have been much better off had you stayed in hiding.”

  She felt the color drain from her face.

  “Damned unfortunate set of circumstances, you know? Bringing you back into the limelight and all. If you’d have just continued lying low-hell, if you’d just stayed away from Arkansas-we probably never would have had to meet again.”

  Meet again? Her mind raced to put the pieces together. Again? Then she had it. The guy on the hill. The guy with the gun and the camouflage. “Oh, my God,” she breathed, bringing her hand to her mouth. She looked frantically to the door again.

  “Don’t do it,” he warned, reading her thoughts. “That would be a huge mistake. So I see you remember.” He smiled and shook his head slowly. “Goddamned worst shooting I’ve ever done. I don’t know how you and hubby got outa that place, but I gotta tell you, when I saw you come stumbling out of that fire, I just couldn’t believe it.” He laughed softly. “I was so scared of that smoke cloud, all I wanted to do was run. I just kept pulling the trigger till I had an excuse to get the hell out.”

  She stared, her mouth open, her brain overflowing. “But why?” The question sounded more like a gasp.

  He eyed her and shook his head. “Actually, that’s none of your concern,” he said. His manner was all business again. “Your concern, Carolyn, should be to keep that handsome young Travis from getting hurt.”

  The sound of her boy’s name passing this predator’s lips made her want to throw up. “Don’t you dare…”

  He interrupted her with a laugh. “And you can stop me, right?” He laughed. “Look, for what it’s worth, I checked in on the little tyke just before I came here. He looks so small and helpless there in that big bed, tubes coming out from everywhere.” He shook his head pitifully. “Doctors say he’s sick, sick, sick. But with the right care, he’ll probably be just fine.” He paused and looked straight through to Carolyn’s heart. “Unless, of course, something terrible happens to him.”

  An icicle materialized in her chest, and for the briefest of moments, she thought she might pass out. There had to be a way to stop him…

  “I’ve scared you,” he observed. “How rude of me. Relax. I only kill adults. Well, mostly.” He smiled. “Here, I’ve got something for you.” He opened his briefcase and removed a pad of paper, a calculator, and his FBI credentials and placed them all on the cot next to him. He shot her a conspiratorial glance, then removed a false bottom, to reveal a coiled length of nylon clothesline, which he handed over to her.

  “Here’s how this works,” he explained as he placed everything else back into the briefcase and latched it. “With this rope, you can save your son’s life.” He pointed to the ceiling. “I think that light fixture there is plenty strong enough to support a tiny little thing like you.”

  The horror of what he was suggesting hit Carolyn hard. Without even knowing it, she started to cry.

  “Oh, relax,” he coached. “People hang themselves in jail all the time. So here’s the deal. If you’re still alive for morning roll call, poor little Travis will be dead by breakfast. See how simple that is?” He smiled and stood.

  She stared dumbly at the rope in her hands, then back up at him. “But why?” Her voice was merely a sob.

  He shrugged. “Because I said so, Carolyn. How’s that?”

  She just stared. It was too much to comprehend.

  He bent close and took the rope from her. “Let’s just tuck this in under the covers here,” he said, laying the coil underneath the stacked blanket and pillow. “That way, the matron won’t get wind of our little plan.” He patted her on the head. “I’ve given you a lot to think about, Carolyn, and I apologize for that, but there’s really no other way. Now, I can only imagine that you’ll wonder at some point if maybe I’m bluffing. I’d wonder that if I were you.” He leaned in even further, until bare inches separated their faces. “But I swear to you, if you let me down, he won’t go easily. Do you understand?” He was whispering now. “I’ll make him suffer. He’ll suffer, Carolyn.”

  He let the words sink in for a long moment, then straightened. “Well, this has been fun.” He called for the matron. “By the way, where did Travis get that scar on the sole of his foot?”

  Carolyn’s heart cramped hard, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. This man had been looking at her little boy.

  “He’s growing up fast, too, isn’t he?” he added with a smile.

  She felt ill. She wanted to rip this man’s eyes out, but even as the image flashed through her brain, she knew the futility of it. Her mind swirled out of control, propelled by the purest form of fear she’d ever known.

  A key slid into the lock. “I’ve got to go,” he said heavily.

  “Wait!” she insisted, even as she heard the lock turn. “How do I know you won’t kill him, anyway?”

  The door opened, and they weren’t alone anymore. He flashed his humorless grin one last time. “You don’t,” he said. “Sweet dreams, Carolyn.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “All you have to do is drive,” Nick mocked under his breath as he crossed the once-grand lobby of the Radford Hotel. He carried the pizza box on his shoulder, bearing the logo of Papa Lorenzo’s Perfect Pizza Parlor. The box was empty, of course. Nick and his coconspirator had consumed the whole thing while sitting down the block in Thorne’s rental car, working out the fine points of the plan. Tasted pretty good, actually, considering the fact that Papa Lorenzo and his staff all wore turbans.

  Even though Little Rock was a small city by most standards, the task of locating a single needle named Irene Rivers in a haystack of several dozen hotels seemed hopeless at first. Then Jake got an idea. In fact, he seemed flooded with ideas. Good ones, even. An amazing turnaround, Nick thought, given the quivering mess he’d been just scant hours before.

  Their approach was simple: divide the Yellow Pages in half and burn up a ton of quarters in pay phones calling front desk after front desk and asking for Irene Rivers’s room. They were just shy of four dollars into their strategy when Jake got a hit on the Radford. After the phone in her room rang ten times without anyone answering, he just hung up, confident she was still out saving the world from the likes of himself.

  Finding the hotel was only the first step, though. They still needed a room number, and for that, Nick needed to do some legwork. Between the two of them, his was the face that hadn’t dominated the news.

  The Radford was a big old place, which once had been the destination of choice for visiting presidents and celebrities. On the heels of more than a few slow years, though, the Radford had been unable to keep up with the Grand Marquis and the Crown Plaza, and its once-dependable clientele had shifted its loyalties elsewhere. The place was still several giant steps away from homeless-shelter status, but
there was precious little charm left in the threadbare Oriental carpets and scratched cherry walls.

  To be put up in a place like this was clear evidence that Irene Rivers had seriously pissed off her travel agent.

  As Nick approached the two teenagers manning the front desk, they looked up simultaneously and smiled. “Hi. Can I help you?” one of them said.

  Nick noted the similarity of the girls’ features-even down to the matching zits on their chins-and he wondered silently if maybe they were sisters. He smiled back, trying his best to look a little sheepish while praying that his hands wouldn’t shake.

  “Hi,” he said back. “You sure can.” With hopes of making himself look more like a local, he spoke around a toothpick he’d picked up at Papa Lorenzo’s. “One of your guests called and ordered a pizza. Unfortunately, I lost the note with her room number on it. Got a name, though. Rivers. Irene Rivers. Can you give me her room?”

  The Bobbsey Twins exchanged glances, then shook their heads in unison. “No, I’m afraid not,” said the one on the right. “We can’t give out people’s room numbers to anyone.”

  “I can call her, though, and have her come down and pick it up,” offered the twin on the left.

  Nick’s stomach knotted. He felt a burst of panic, then forced a smile. “No,” he said quickly. “Please don’t do that. Listen, truth of it is, I’m already running fifteen minutes late with this thing, and this is the second time I’ve lost an address tonight. Boss told me this Rivers lady is a pain as it is. If she gets ticked and calls, I’m sunk, know what I mean?”

  The girls shared a significant look this time and nodded again. Obviously, they’d known some difficult customers in their time and maybe even worked for an asshole or two along the way.

  “We really shouldn’t…” hedged Bobbsey Left.