Bo finished his coffee and stood up. Special Agent Todd Blakemore was flanked by four federal officers, all looking edgy and a little excited. Blakemore showed his badge and FBI credentials to Bo.
“FBI special agent Todd Blakemore, Mr. Ellsworth. We’ve met before.” He dropped a document on the rough-hewn table. “I have a federal warrant to search this property. I’d like to ask you to read it, sir.”
Bo cursorily glanced at the warrant and dropped it back onto the table. “All of the firearms at the Minutemen Ranch are protected by the Texas legislature. All of the permits for the handguns are here in the main ranch house.”
“And the permits to carry M4 assault rifles?”
“Inside in my den.”
Bo made another secret signal. His cousin came trotting along the porch, his M4 over his shoulder. “Kyle, show these officers into the main ranch house. Do not impede their progress. They have federal business here.”
Kyle stepped up to the ornate wooden door with the other federal officers. Bo turned back to Blakemore.
“I’m going to get a beer. Y’all have yourselves a pleasant day now,” Bo said, echoing the words Special Agent Blakemore had said to him a few days ago.
Bo jumped down from the porch and walked to where his 2014 black Ford Explorer XLT was parked. He powered it up and swung away from the compound. In his rearview mirror he saw federal officers moving through the door of the main ranch house into the interior. More officers were moving to the second ranch house. A couple of them jogged to the smaller buildings. They were shadowed by Bo’s minutemen, but at a discreet distance. The Feds wouldn’t find anything in the ranch buildings.
It was the violation of Bo’s rights that put the burr under his saddle.
He hated these sons of bitches.
Bo drove down State Highway 46, past Kronkosky State Natural Area into Boerne. He drove past the Alley on Main Street, past the El Chaparral Mexican restaurant, turned left on Frederick, and right into the driveway at the Alamo Plaza Bar and Grill. The asphalt was jammed with SUVs and pickup trucks. Music pounded faintly from the bar. Bo parked his Ford Explorer and walked to the main door with its Live Oak Brewing Company flowering-oak motif and pushed it open.
A wall of noise hit him. The bar was packed. Some good ole boys and some hard-bitten cowboys were at their usual spots. Bo spotted Randy Wyatt and Jeremiah Buchanan in earnest conversation in one of the booths. He acknowledged Big Teddy Danfield at the bar, who was already getting the gal who served there—Damn, she was looking spectacular today—to pull him a beer on draft.
Bo’s cell phone chirped. It played “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” but you couldn’t hear it over the jukebox playing fifties oldies. Bo answered it as he made his way to the bar, acknowledging two other minutemen off duty, nursing beers. If Bo had wanted to, he would only have had to whisper to them that the compound and been overrun by federal officers and they would have come running, guns blazing. But Bo didn’t do that. They had to keep a low profile. Business as usual.
Until it wasn’t.
The man’s voice on the phone said two words: “I’m home.”
Bo hung up and reached the bar, where Big Teddy Danfield handed him a brew.
It had started.
CHAPTER 30
College Boy #1 came for Emily about seven o’clock. She thought he had a pretty hefty beer belly for a twentysomething. Droopy eyes and sallow skin. Exactly the one she had been praying would come for her. She’d been flirting with him for days. She got to her feet and put on her black high-heeled shoes. College Boy #1 unlocked the padlock and opened the cage door. His sports coat was unbuttoned to show her the Colt Anaconda .44 Magnum in his belt. As if he’d need to use it. Emily didn’t look as if she had the strength to strangle a mouse. He gripped her shoulder.
“Blake wants to see you.”
Melody stirred from a restless sleep beside Emily and rose up on one elbow.
“He’ll get to you when he’s ready,” College Boy #1 told her.
“Where is Blake?” Emily asked.
“Right now at his office in Rockefeller Center. But he’ll be here soon.” He half dragged Emily out of the cage, slammed the door, and snapped the padlock.
“You’re Calvin, right?”
“Yep. Named after Coolidge. Not much of a role model.” He started to wrap a thin leather thong around Emily’s wrists.
“How much do you weigh, Cal?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “Maybe two-forty.”
“I’m probably down to one hundred and ten pounds right out of the shower. You really think you need to tie my wrists? You don’t think you could grab me if I tried to make a run for it? Let me keep my hands free, okay?”
He considered, then unwrapped the cord from her wrists. He dragged her into one of the deeper shadows, as if mindful of her privacy. He lifted her dress and ran his hands up her inner thighs looking for a concealed weapon. There wasn’t one. His knuckles brushed across the crotch of her black panties, then he ran his hands over the cheeks of her ass. He dropped the hem of the dress, turned her around, unzipped the back of her dress, and let it fall to her waist. He groped her bare breasts, ran his hands over her shoulders, reached up into her hair, found nothing. He zipped the dress back up and motioned to some wooden stairs leading up to a second floor. More of the prisoners stirred in their cages. A couple of them shouted out obscenities. A few pleaded to be let out. They just wanted to go home. “Please, let us go home.”
Calvin ignored them and shoved Emily toward the stairs.
It had taken her almost four weeks to rip a small, jagged piece of metal from the bottom of her cage. She had hidden it under her dress. Before Calvin had let her out of the cage, she had pulled down her panties and slid the piece of steel up into her rectum. It was cold and uncomfortable, but she didn’t believe Calvin would have been ordered to do a cavity search. Theoretically, no weapons were available to any of the victims.
She needed her hands to be free. That was the crucial part of her plan. And her plea had worked. Now she had to initiate the other part of her plan. One of Blake’s college chums—Emily thought his name was, swear to God, Chip—usually sat in a chair at the bottom of the stairs, but he was on a bathroom break.
She had to get to Cal before they reached those stairs.
“Let me go,” Emily whispered. “I know you want to fuck me. Afterwards you can say I kicked you in the nuts and scrambled away. You went after me, but I just vanished. This is a big place.” He said nothing, but she thought his asthmatic breathing was a little more labored. “I’ll do anything you want. Why should Blake get all the pussy? No one will ever know.”
Calvin grabbed hold of her shoulders suddenly, steering her away from the stairs. Emily had never been in the other part of the warehouse room that stretched out in deep shadow. Now she saw it was honeycombed with small abandoned offices. Calvin dragged her into one of them and threw her against the desk.
“You’ll let me go? After I fuck you?”
“Sure. We’re in this together.”
He kissed her hard. He smelled of wine and sweat. She pulled out of his grasp and ran to the office door. He caught up with her in two strides and grabbed her.
“I was just going to lock the door!” she gasped.
Calvin smirked. “To give us some privacy? Good call.”
He shoved her back into the shadowed office. She stumbled. He gripped her shoulders to steady her and stepped in front of her. She pulled up her dress from behind, slid her hand down her panties, grabbed the tip of the piece of steel, and pulled it out of her rectum, without his seeing a thing. He turned back to her.
She stabbed the piece of steel up into Calvin’s throat. A geyser of blood spurted as if a faucet had been turned on. She rammed the skeletal splinter up higher and he fell to his knees. She wanted to grab his .44 Magnum, but he fell onto his side, right onto the gun. She abandoned that idea, threw open the office door, and looked back. Calvin’s body was shudderi
ng, but he wasn’t getting up.
Emily plunged back the way they’d come.
A door on the other side of the cages was never used. Behind her she heard the cages rattling. It was as if the other girls were urging her on.
If the door was padlocked on the other side, she was done for.
It wasn’t.
Emily pushed open the door. Fresh night air swept over her.
She ran down the narrow alleyway between two huge warehouse buildings. She had no idea where it led. There was no sound of pursuit behind her. She fell over some broken crates, sprawled onto the cobblestones, scrambled back to her feet, and ran on. She could hear muted traffic now. She made three more turns into identical narrow alleyways, then she burst out onto Broad Street. There was a lot of pedestrian traffic and she caught a few disapproving glances. She looked like a hooker. She could go into a store, ask to use a phone, and dial 911—but she had no idea of the location of the warehouse. So she just started walking north. She didn’t know long it would be before one of the Blake’s cronies saw that she was missing from her cage. It would take them longer to find Calvin’s body. Would they rush out after her? Probably not. But she wanted to put as much distance between herself and that warehouse prison as possible. She walked fast, not once looking over her shoulder. She had to get away.
But to where?
* * *
McCall walked through JFK International Airport and paused by one of the Hudson News stands. The New York Post headline read, “Vigilante Foils Madison Ave Robbery.” McCall bought the paper and took a yellow cab into Manhattan. There had been a jewel robbery on Madison Avenue, in broad daylight. The Equalizer had come out of nowhere, taken down the thieves, and killed them both. A salesgirl had been shot in the stomach. She was in critical condition at Mount Sinai Hospital, undergoing surgery. McCall read that Detective Steve Lansing from the Seventh Precinct was helping the Nineteenth Precinct homicide cops in their investigation. A grainy black-and-white picture of the Equalizer had been taken by one of the salesgirls in the store on her cell phone. It had already gone viral, but the man’s face was too blurred to be recognizable. The vigilante had escaped in the chaos, already making him an urban legend. The cops had an APB on him and several BOLOs in other states.
McCall’s cabdriver was a native New Yorker with an accent so thick you could spread it on the sandwiches at Artie’s Delicatessen on Eighty-Second Street.
“How about this Equalizer guy, huh? He’s bringing the crime rate in the city down single-handed!”
“He shot and killed two men.”
“Lowlifes, right? Better they should be off the streets. You gotta love this guy!”
“The cops want to catch him.”
“Yeah, ’cause he’s making them look bad, right? This Equalizer takes the odds against ordinary citizens and makes them better. He’d be a sensation in Vegas. He knows how to beat the house.”
“He’s an amateur,” McCall said. “That’s why innocent people are getting killed.”
“And what if my man the Equalizer hadn’t been in that jewelery store? The cops would have been haulin’ body bags out onto Madison Avenue. My man takes care of business and gets out before anyone can discover his secret identity. He’s already got a hundred thousand followers on Twitter. Guy’s a folk hero. Here we are!” The cabbie pulled up outside the Liberty Belle Hotel. “Enjoy your time in the city. If you get into any bad neighborhoods, the Equalizer’s got your back.”
McCall stepped out of the cab and pushed through the glass doors into the lobby.
It was a madhouse. Chloe, Lisa, and two new front-of-house girls were busy with guests, while uniformed bellmen pushed the brass luggage carts back and forth to the elevators. Sam Kinney had changed from his apartment clothes into his gray slacks, a crisp white shirt, and his LIBERTY BELLE HOTEL blazer with the lettering stitched on the breast pocket. He detached himself from the reception counter and made his way to McCall. Sam had a folded copy of the New York Post under his arm.
“Glad you’re back. Here’s the scoop on your real estate mogul Norman Rosemont. He doesn’t much like his new apartment, but his neighbors are starting to grow on him. How long did you give him to live with the rats and the overflowing garbage bags?”
“Two weeks.”
“He should come to appreciate my breakfasts by then. Did you see this headline in the Post?”
“I saw it when I came through JFK.”
“I just heard on CNN that that gal in the jewelery-store robbery is out of surgery. She’s going to make it. You know about this Equalizer wannabe?”
“I know about him.”
“You know who he is?”
“Not yet.”
“Better find out. You had a call at reception right before you walked into the lobby. A woman’s voice. Maybe that hottie who was waiting for you in your hotel suite a few nights ago? Classy dame.” Sam motioned to the Irish bellman who was passing by with an empty luggage cart. “Hey, Vinnie, take Mr. McCall’s backpack up to the seventeenth floor, will you?”
“Sure thing.”
Vinnie grabbed McCall’s backpack and dropped it onto the cart. Sam beat McCall to the reception counter and handed him the cell phone there.
“This is Robert McCall.” McCall listened. “Stay right where you are. I’ll come to you.”
McCall hung up and walked fast through the lobby.
“She sounded like she needed the Equalizer’s help?” Sam called out after him, somewhat hopefully, but McCall was already out the lobby door. He took out his cell and dialed a number.
“Sure, don’t include me in your life,” Sam muttered.
McCall didn’t notice the young man in blue denims with a hoodie pushed back sitting in the lobby on one of the plush couches. He was looking through the lobby doors where McCall had just hailed a cab. It pulled away from the curb. The young man nodded. He would bide his time. No one was looking for him. The staff in the jewelery robbery had all given conflicting descriptions. You could always depend on eyewitnesses to get their stories all mixed up.
The young man watched Sam Kinney move over to help Chloe behind the reception counter. This hotel manager was a good friend of McCall’s. The young man had watched them on a number of occasions chatting together. McCall trusted this man.
The Equalizer had decided that the best way to lure Robert McCall into a trap would be to kill someone he was close to.
CHAPTER 31
Emily was waiting for him at a table at the back of a Starbucks on Fulton Street. McCall walked past the usual line of folks desperate for a caffeine rush and sat opposite her. He noted she was wearing the same dress he’d last seen her in, a little more ripped up and disheveled. She immediately reached for his hand and gripped it tightly. She was trembling.
“I’m glad you remembered my phone number,” McCall said gently.
“Told you I would.”
“Where have you been for the last month?”
“In a cage. And I mean, really, in a fucking cage.”
“Tell me what happened.”
She kept her voice soft. She told him how she’d been grabbed by one of Blake Cunningham’s asshole cronies in the old Mercury Theater. Calvin, a big guy. He’d jabbed a needle into her arm and she had lost consciousness. When she’d awakened, she’d found herself curled up in a steel cage bolted to the floor in some big abandoned warehouse. She hadn’t been alone. Other young women were in other cages, all of them prisoners. Emily had had some company in her cage over the five weeks, two different girls who’d been brought in, bewildered and terrified. But over time they’d been taken out again and never came back. There’d been a new victim, a blonde in a blue dress who’d been thrown in with her a couple of nights ago.
“Did she tell you her name?”
“Yeah, Melanie or Melody, something like that.”
“How did you get out of there?”
Her voice dropped so low McCall could barely hear her. “I killed one of them.”
<
br /> “How?”
She told him about convincing Calvin to take her into an empty office for sex and then stabbing him with the piece of jagged metal.
“You can’t be sure you killed him.”
“I’m sure,” she whispered.
“How did you escape from the warehouse?”
“There was a side door that was unlocked.”
“Where is this warehouse?”
“I don’t know. I ran down these narrow little alleyways, and then I was out onto a street and I just starting walking away as fast as I could. I couldn’t take you to that warehouse if my life depended on it.”
“Nothing you heard while you were incarcerated?”
“No foghorns, no train whistles, none of the things the plucky heroine hears in movies so she can figure out where she is. There was just silence.” Her voice was softer again. “Except for the girls sobbing and pleading in their cages.”
At that moment Tara Langley walked into the Starbucks and made her way to the back.
Emily stiffened. A look of panic leaped into her eyes. “I told you, that’s not my mother!” she said tersely.
“She’s a private detective. Impersonating your mother was her cover.”
Tara reached the table, touching McCall’s arm. “I was so happy to get your call.” She sat down and smiled at Emily. “My name is Tara Langley, Emily. I can’t tell you what it means to me that you’re alive.”
“Yeah, well, it feels pretty fucking good to me, too. My mother really hired a PI to come and find me? That’s so cool. My mother can’t make a decision on which breakfast cereal to buy in the supermarket without agonizing over it.”
“I didn’t do a very good job. If it wasn’t for Robert McCall…”
Emily looked at McCall. “So that’s your name? Yeah, my tarnished white knight.”
“What’s Blake into?” Tara asked.
McCall said, “Women in cages in an abandoned warehouse somewhere near the docks. Being sold into slavery.”
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