by Frank Hughes
Devil’s Run
Frank Hughes
Copyright © 2012 Frank Hughes
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
DEDICATION
To Rick Sill, for a whack up the side of my head.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Cover model: Valua Vitaly/Shutterstock.com
Cover skier: Ilja Masik/Shutterstock.com
Table of Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
59.
1.
Sunday was the hardest day, the day the dead came to visit.
For years, I’d kept busy working long hours in the hot sun, usually seven days a week. As a result, the past remained the past and I had no trouble sleeping. Now, with normal working hours and weekends free, the roll call of my victims began early Saturday morning and by Sunday their cries could no longer be ignored. To deal with it, I spent Sundays working myself to exhaustion in the Chelsea Piers gym and then walking the streets of Manhattan until I was able to sleep.
This particular Sunday I was vamping on the walking part. An icy December rain was pelting New York and I wasn’t quite ready to face the slick sidewalks and half-frozen dog shit. Instead, when I finished in the gym, I got my clubs out of storage and went to the driving range, a four-story structure that faces the Hudson River, offering the unique opportunity to aim golf shots at passing vessels and even the occasional ditching airliner. Not that I could hit anything. The only real danger zone was to my immediate right.
I was halfway through a thirty dollar ball card and seeing if I could do any better with the woods. When the next ball popped through the Astroturf – we don’t need no stinking buckets at Chelsea Piers - I aimed for Hoboken, but the ball went towards Weehawken.
“You have a terrible slice,” said Raviv Peled. Despite three decades in Brooklyn he still had a thick Israeli accent.
“Hello, Raviv,” I said without looking back. “Good-bye, Raviv.”
Even though I would have welcomed the distraction of work, the fact that my employer knew where to find me on my day off annoyed me, so I ignored him.
“I don’t believe I have ever seen you play,” he said, clearly not taking the hint. “I wonder now why I have taken your advice.”
“Because I improved your game.”
“Yes, you did. To which I say, physician heal thyself.”
“Those who can do, those who can’t teach, and those who can’t teach, teach gym. Now, if you don’t mind, as Garbo said, ‘I vant to be alone’. See you Monday.”
My next drive was longer, but just as errant.
Raviv whistled. “You really are terrible. It is fortunate that there are nets, else the river would be strewn with injured boaters and dead fish. What is your handicap?”
“Right now it’s you,”
“I begin to see what my clients complain about.”
“Yes, I am a miserable prick,” I said. “I am also off the clock.”
“You are on salary, there is no clock.”
“Thank you, Yoda.”
He had the good grace not to speak until I hit the next ball.
“That one was straighter.”
“I was distracted. Go away.”
“If you want to be alone, why not just stay in that miserable apartment of yours. Even there it must be warmer than here.”
“That's my home you're denigrating.” I set my feet and addressed the next ball.
“It is a hovel.”
“That building has a great view of the High Line and is home to a dozen teenage fashion models.”
“Male models, if I recall.”
“I'm a complicated man.” The next ball was a pop fly. “Besides, I obviously need my practice time.”
“I have a job for you.”
“It's Sunday. I may as well go back to taking loops.”
“I thought you had moved on from that phase of your life.”
“It's looking better and better. Nice and warm in Florida right now. And nobody bothers me there.”
“You may have no choice, if you keep treating clients the way you did Meyer.”
I stepped back from the new ball and turned. “Meyer is an idiot.”
“A rich idiot. For such idiots, we make allowances.”
Raviv was one of the most respected security consultants in the country, but he looked like an Olympic weightlifter gone to seed. Well into his sixties and running to fat, he still had the chest of a bull and a respectable pair of guns, but his belly was an almost perfect sphere. Vanity and women were his only weaknesses. Divorced for the third time, he battled to look young, wearing clothing inappropriate to his age and physique, while adhering to a regimen of facials and steam baths. His weekly massage was more rigorously observed than temple, as was the bi-weekly styling of his remaining hair into something resembling a rusted Brillo pad. He thought he looked smashing, and no one, including me, had the onions to tell him otherwise.
“He took a swing at me,” I said. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Not wrestling him to the carpet in front of his entire board would have been an acceptable reaction.”
“Easy for you to say, you weren’t there. Blame it on the training. It was 'a programmed reaction to a stressful stimulus' as the saying goes.”
“Bullshit,” he said, but without much heat. “You deliberately embarrassed him.”
“He had it coming.” I turned and stepped up to the ball. “Good night.”
He said nothing until I was in the middle of my swing.
“Consider this a favor.”
I lost my concentration and sent the ball soaring straight towards New Jersey, a perfect drive of over two hundred yards.
A favor. The son of a bitch.
Ten minutes later we were in the rear seat of his Cadillac Escalade, navigating the crowded streets of Manhattan. The SUV was one of the few places outside his office where Raviv felt comfortable discussing business. It was swe
pt twice a day for listening and tracking devices and kept under constant guard at his corporate headquarters in Brooklyn. I felt that anyone who needed that much car should drive a tank, but Raviv liked expensive things, especially when they were armored and bristling with weapons. This love of size and firepower applied to his hulking bodyguards as well, one of whom was doubling as our driver. A set of Bose headphones was clamped to his massive skull so he would not be privy to our conversation. It wasn’t that Raviv didn’t trust him, but, as the old saying goes, what you don’t know can’t be tortured out of you.
“Why me?” I said. “I’m not a private investigator.”
“I beg to differ,” said Raviv. “Your license, which I must reluctantly remind you I paid for, says you are precisely that.”
“You made me get that license,” I said. “I’m not trained to look for missing people. I find security holes.”
“Nonsense, you are a natural. All the skills you bring to the Red Team: inquisitiveness, instinct, intuition, and-”
“Sparkling personality.”
“-independence will serve you well.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Besides, the case is routine and I need to be seen as disciplining you.”
I gave him a look. “Are you?”
“No,” he said, “but your reassignment serves that purpose for Meyer, not to mention my staff. I do not want your attitude to become contagious.”
“Am I really that bad?”
“Yes. Now, to this assignment.” He produced a buff-colored folder. “Your client is Jeffrey Boyd, Esquire.”
“Lawyer,” I said, pouring myself a glass of single malt from the vehicle’s bar. “I don't like him already.”
“You are like a child,” he said, handing me the folder.
“Part of my charm.” A name was printed on the tab. “Kenneth Boyd. I take it that's the missing person?”
“His son.”
“You're right, this is easy.”
The file contained some photographs, a credit report, college records, bank statements; the sort of spoor with which modern man marks his trail.
“Tell me about papa,” I said.
“Jeffrey Boyd is a partner at Tarantino, Rosen, and Parisi.”
“Gee, I guess they're not mobbed up.”
“Yes, please mention that early in your conversation, just to make your usual good impression.”
“What is Mr. Boyd's specialty?”
“Corporate law.”
“Rather broad.”
“It is irrelevant to the subject at hand.”
“What else do we know about him?”
“Mr. Boyd is very active in charitable circles. He has for many years personally headed an anti-malaria group providing mosquito nets to impoverished countries in Africa. He is also a board member of an international organization called Lutte La Faim. That is French, by the way, for fight hunger.”
“Bon for him.”
“Yes, quite the philanthropist.” He didn't sound that impressed.
“Why is he coming to you? They must have their own people on retainer.”
“His reasons are not my concern.”
“Yeah, money talks. How does he know you?”
“I met him on the golf course. We played in the same foursome at a charity tournament.”
“You meet the most interesting people on the golf course.”
“That is where I found you.”
“I rest my case. Is there a Mrs. Boyd?”
“Not at the moment. She died several years ago.”
“Let me guess. Malaria.”
He shook his head. “She was attending a seminar at Windows on the World.”
I tossed the file back in his lap. “You're kind of a bastard, aren't you?”
“That had nothing to do with it, Nicolas.”
“I'll bet.” I drained my drink.
“Would you care for another?” said Raviv.
“No. One's my limit on this stuff.”
“I must tell you, it continues to surprise me that you did not choose to lose yourself in drink as well.”
I put the dirty glass back in the rack. “I considered it, but it seemed so cliché.”
“And she would not have approved, eh?”
“Leave her out of it.” I snatched the file off his lap and studied it for a few minutes. “Any other children?” I said.
“No, just Kenneth.”
“How is their relationship?”
He shrugged. “You will have to ask him.”
I thumbed through some of the stuff in the file. “He goes to school in Seattle?”
“That is what it says.”
“I'm not sure you pick a college a continent away if you like hanging with dad.”
“All I know is the boy is missing.”
“But, we don't know if it's voluntary or involuntary.”
“Correct, again. There has been no ransom demand or any other indication he’s been kidnapped.”
“How long has he been gone?”
Raviv shook his head. “Not clear. Possibly two months.”
I sifted through the bank and credit card statements. There were no purchases, deposits, or withdrawals since early October. His checking account statement showed Ken, or someone, made the maximum withdrawal of five hundred dollars from the same ATM in Seattle for five straight days in early October.
“Did you see these withdrawals?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Twenty-five hundred dollars total over five straight days.”
“What does that tell you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “There's still three thousand in the account. If someone was forcing him to take the money out, why not take it all? And why not ask Poppa Boyd for more money? On the other hand, if he was financing his own little getaway...”
“Why not take it all?”
“Exactly.” I looked at the bank statements again. “There's another possibility.”
“I knew you would be good at this.”
“Drugs. Pacific Northwest is a good place to grow pot. Perhaps he decided to go into business.”
“Possible, except?” He paused, Socratic-ally, allowing me time to puncture my own argument.
“Except he took the money out in October, at the end of the growing season. Why start a pot farm then?” I closed the file. “Maybe he was buying finished product and was careless about security. Those Mexican cartels are pretty entrenched up there. He could be rotting in a ditch.”
“Lots of possibilities.”
I turned to look at him. “You seem awfully sanguine about the whole thing.”
He shrugged. “I have complete faith in you.”
“You know,” I said, “the cops say that after twenty-four hours the trail is cold. This kid has been gone nearly two months.”
“I have complete faith in you.”
“You keep saying that. It doesn't make me believe it more.”
“That is your problem. You lack the faith we have in you.”
I closed the file. “I've told you more than once, Raviv, I don't need rescuing.”
“Then why did you agree to work for me?”
“Maybe I was bored. It's beginning to look like a poor decision.” I caught up with the conversation. “What do you mean, 'we'?”
“Just a figure of speech. Although, I am sure there are others who wish you would employ your talents in a more constructive way.”
“Like I did a few years ago? Like you did, before that?”
“Someone needs to slay the dragons.”
“Yeah, and if there's a little collateral damage, what the hell.” I opened the file again. “We're all dragons, Raviv, that's the problem. When do I meet Mr. Boyd?”
“Ten tomorrow morning at his office on Maiden Lane. The address is in the file. Wear a suit. You are on the early plane to Seattle, out of Newark, the next day.”
“I hear it’s lovely there this time of year.”
“It is mi
serable. You and Seattle were made for each other.”
The driver stopped in front of my building at the corner of 28th and 10th.
“Keep me informed,” said Raviv.
“Yes, mother.” I stepped out into the cold.
“My sister was researching first names,” he said.
“Why,” I said, pointing at his stomach, “you having a baby?”
“Your humor escapes me. She is having the baby. As I was saying, your name, Nicolas, do you know what it means?”
“My name is Nick.”
“Victory to the people is what it means.”
“I didn't pick it,” I said, and slammed the door shut.
2.
Jeffrey Boyd’s office was on the twentieth floor of a glass tower. I arrived early to deal with the inevitable security obstacle course. A friendly intern from the law firm escorted me upstairs and suggested I wait in the lunchroom across the hall, where I could avoid the crowded waiting room and enjoy a spectacular view of the East River. The Brooklyn Bridge seemed much closer than it should, oddly intimate. Then I realized I was comparing it with the views from a much higher building and the room suddenly felt colder.
“Mr. Nicolas Craig?” said a female voice.
A tall young woman in a black pantsuit had come up quietly behind me. She was late twenties or early thirties with thick, highlighted blonde hair cut stylishly short. Bright blue eyes appraised me coolly. She wore little makeup other than some eyeliner and a pale lip-gloss. Her only jewelry was a simple necklace of thick gold links that disappeared beneath her starched white blouse. The gold looked very nice against her tan skin and she smelled faintly of White Satin.
“That’s me,” I said.
“I am Isabella Ricasso, Mr. Boyd’s executive assistant.” Her voice was lightly accented.
“Hello,” I said, “please call me Nick.”
“Please call me Ms. Ricasso. Reception told me I’d find you here,” she added, in a faintly scolding tone.
“I was admiring the view.”
“Of course you were,” she said, leaving little doubt that such activities were a waste of time.
The more I examined her, the less I liked her looks. The face was a trifle too narrow, the ears a little small, and the pointed nose and close set eyes gave her a feral look.