The peroxide pop climbed a few decibels, right before the door slammed.
Chapter 3
FRANK NARBY WAS dreaming about the packaging concept for KrunchWorks’ New, Reduced-Fat Tac-O’s, Original Flavor and Picante Gigante, when something interrupted his sleep. He blinked at the unfamiliar shadows and reached for a soft, feminine body that wasn’t there. A seasoned traveler, he didn’t succumb to panic but groped for the bedside lamp as a fresh burst of pounding brought him fully awake.
Light flooded the Lilliputian studio apartment he’d moved into five weeks ago when Lucy asked him to move out.
Oh yeah. This rat hole.
Frank shuffled to the door, a mere ten feet from his futon. Scratching his balls through his Ralph Lauren glen plaid boxers, he peered through the peephole. He turned the deadbolt and threw open the door. “What are you doing here? You didn’t leave her alone, did you?”
Wesley McIntyre shoved Frank in the chest, making him stumble backward. “What the hell are you trying to pull, Narby?”
“Shh. Hold it down, will you, Wesley? I’ve got neighbors. It’s—” He glanced at the bedside clock. “Christ, it’s almost five in the morning. It was supposed to be done by now.”
“It was done. Don’t worry. “ Wesley stalked into the kitchenette and began throwing open cabinets. “Your cartoon cuties got there ahead of me. Where do you keep the booze?” He looked under the sink.
“What are you talking about? Did you grab her or not?”
“You gotta have a bottle of something around here.”
“There’s a Coors Light in the fridge.”
From the look on Wesley’s plug-ugly face, you’d think he’d been offered a bucket of horse piss.
“Answer me,” Frank said. “Who’s watching Lucy?”
Wesley grabbed a half-full bag of KrunchWorks Ched’r Wheelz With X-tra Cheese! off the counter and heaved his bulk onto a rickety folding chair. “I trusted you to play straight with me, Narby. Not that this asinine scheme of yours isn’t the stupidest thing I’ve seen in all my years as a PI, but still. We had an agreement, my friend.”
“Yeah, and we still do. What’s your problem?”
“Who’d you figure as the backup team, that’s what I wanna know. Me and Joe or those other yahoos?”
“What other yahoos?” Frank ducked the handful of Ched’r Wheelz Wesley hurled at him.
“The freaks in the kiddie masks, who the hell do you think I mean? The ones that snatched your wife before I could get to her.”
“The ones . . .” A dizzy rush threatened Frank’s balance. “Are you telling me someone else kidnapped Lucy?”
Wesley paused with a handful of Ched’r Wheelz at his mouth, studying him. “You’re shittin’ me, right?”
“Oh Christ.”
“You didn’t send those guys?”
“Oh Christ.” Frank groped behind him for a chair, lowered himself into it. “Oh Christ.”
“Answer me, Narby. Did you send ’em or not?”
“No!” Frank’s head began to throb. “No, I did not send any goddamn freaks in any goddamn kiddie masks. I sent you. What happened?”
A long sigh fluttered out of Wesley, like a beach ball deflating.
“Who?” Frank demanded. “Who were these guys?”
“How the hell do I know? Me and Joe, we let ourselves in with the key you gave me, and there they were, three men in Halloween masks hightailing it out of there with your wife.”
“Was she hurt?”
“Nah, she looked okay. Tied up is all.”
“Tied up. Oh Christ.” Frank scrubbed a hand over his bristly jaw.
“Well, that’s what I woulda done if I’d gotten to her first.”
“Yeah, but just for show,” Frank said. “So she’d think it was real.”
The plan was to have Wesley grab her out of her bed, cart her off to an abandoned cider mill out east, and let her sweat for a day or two until her devoted husband tracked her down, vanquished her fiendish kidnapper, and rescued her.
She’d see how much he loved her, realize how much she still loved him, offer her tearful apologies, and beg him to come home. Frank figured his scheme would ensure the happily ever after he had every right to expect, made happier still with the addition of a few grateful blow jobs.
“Who would’ve taken her?” Frank asked. “And why?”
“Ransom, why else? As for who . . .” Wesley shrugged. “Someone who’s seen your fancy digs in Crystal Harbor, the yacht club, your precious vintage ‘Vette.”
Frank jumped up. “I’m calling the police.”
“Yeah? What are you gonna tell ’em?” Wesley mimed holding the receiver. “Yes, Officer, she was snatched just before three a.m. The way I know, the guys I hired to grab her, they saw the whole thing go down.”
“You don’t need a witness to report something like this. She’s gone, isn’t she?”
“The cops won’t care. A grown woman, practically divorced—”
“Temporarily separated.”
“Until you hear from the kidnappers, the cop’ll figure she’s at Club Med playing grab-ass with the towel boys. No ransom demand?” Wesley shrugged. “Could be days before they’ll even talk to you.”
“Days?” Frank raked his fingers through his hair. “Anything could be happening to her. You were there. Didn’t you try to stop them?”
Wesley drew himself up. “What do you think, I gave up without a fight?”
Frank looked him up and down. “You don’t look like you’ve been in any fight.”
“What I thought at the time, you blabbed to these fellas, maybe trying to get it done cheaper—which, excuse me, but is just the kind of dumb-ass stunt you’d pull—and these other guys never got the message it wasn’t their gig. Either that or you hired all of us, kind of like a Team A and a Team B, just to make sure the job got done. Another brilliant move I wouldn’t put past you.”
“So you did give up without a fight.”
“You kidding? One of these fellas, you should see his nose. But you gotta understand, there were three of ’em. Big fuckers. Plus they were armed.”
“They were armed. What about you? Weren’t you packing?”
“If you’re asking was I carrying a concealed weapon, the answer is yes. I brought a knife to wave in your wife’s face if she gave us any trouble.”
“That’s all?” Frank demanded. “A knife?”
“You know what? I wish to God I never went along with this loony plan of yours in the first place. If me and Joe didn’t need the money so bad, I would’ve told you to shove it.”
“Who’s this Joe? You’re the one bringing other people into this thing—”
“Don’t worry about Joe,” Wesley said. “We can trust him. He’s my partner.”
“I thought you worked alone.”
“I do. Not that kind of partner.” Wesley crumpled the empty Ched’r Wheelz bag. “You got any Doritos?”
“Doritos? You ask the national sales manager of KrunchWorks if he’s got Doritos? What does that mean, not that kind of partner?”
“You just hop off the Way-Back Machine or what? My partner, Einstein. Who lives with me? As in king-size Beautyrest? His and his bath towels?”
“Christ, you’re kidding. You?”
Wesley answered with an amiable, openhanded gesture: li’l old me. He uncrumpled the bag and rooted for crumbs.
“Huh,” Frank said. “You don’t look like a, uh . . . I mean . . .”
“Fag?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“Sure you would,” Wesley said. “You called your wife’s dentist a fag the first time I met you. She can’t be getting it on with Dr. Dwyer, you said. He’s a fag.”
“Well, you had me fooled, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Gosh, that’s a relief. The macho lessons must be working. You owe me money, my friend.”
“What, for letting some psycho creeps snatch my wife?” Frank said. “Way I see it, you owe me
the deposit back. A thousand bucks.”
“Right. That’ll happen.”
“You stand by with your thumb up your ass while my wife gets—”
“I know where they took her.”
Frank stared at him. “You followed them?”
Wesley shrugged. “It’s what I do.”
“Where is she?”
“Eight grand.” Wesley wagged eight thick fingers.
“Eight!”
“You wanna rescue the little missus, you wanna play big-dick hero? Here’s your chance, my friend.”
Here was his chance to get himself killed, was more like it. Going up against real, honest-to-God kidnappers was not part of the game plan. He should leave it to the cops. Still, it might not be such a crazy idea. He had the element of surprise on his side. But he chafed at the money.
“Two grand,” Frank said. “For shadowing them. That’s more than fair.”
“‘Shadowing.’” Wesley chuckled. “Listen to you.”
“All right, all right. Four. What we agreed on.”
“You cheap prick. What, you think I don’t know what you’re worth? I make it my business to know stuff like that. Eight grand is chump change to a man like you. You telling me it’s not worth eight grand to find out where these sick fucking perverts have taken your wife?”
“Six. But for that you have to help me do this thing.”
“No way, my friend.” Wesley put up his hands. “My part in this is over. Finito. You are on your own.”
“Three against one?”
“Actually, you only got two to deal with. They let one guy out along the way. See? The odds are improving. Besides, I gotta go out of town today. Might not get back till tomorrow.”
“Come on, Wesley. You’re a pro. You used to be a cop. You know how to do stuff like this.”
“There you go, mistaking me for Magnum, P.I. I get that a lot, on account of I look so much like Tom Selleck. What I know is how to sneak around and take dirty pictures of people cheating on their spouses. Which is what you hired me for.”
“Initially,” Frank agreed. Only, in Lucy’s case, there’d been no dirty pictures. Almost from the moment she’d given Frank the boot, he’d had Wesley McIntyre following her, observing her every move. She hadn’t so much as shaken another man’s hand. She’d let no one in the house except her mother and sister, her little niece, and a couple of female friends. Oh, and the handyman, but George Fuller was about eighty and suffered from a severe case of plumber’s crack. Frank had been thrilled that his darkest suspicions had not borne fruit. His only problem then had been convincing Lucy to take him back.
Now things had gotten a bit more complicated.
“Can you get me a gun at least?” Frank asked.
“You don’t want a gun. Guns are dangerous.”
“These men are armed, you said. I need something.”
Wesley frowned. “You really gonna do this?”
“They won’t be expecting me. I’ll get the drop on them.”
“Yeah, well, while you’re ‘getting the drop’ on ’em, try not to shoot your dick off.”
“So you’ll get me a piece?”
Wesley sighed. “When I get my eight grand, you get your ‘piece.’”
“Seven.”
Wesley brushed greasy crumbs from his leather-covered paunch and started for the door.
Frank said, “You’re a goddamn thief, you know that?” And a fat, ugly, over-the-hill fag, he thought, but didn’t say it. The PI had four inches and about eighty pounds on him, and it wasn’t all flab.
Wesley turned back to him. “For your information, I have expenses. Me and Joe are getting married.”
Frank failed to squelch a snort of derision.
“A real church wedding—none of this ‘commitment ceremony’ shit. Black tie. Real, live clergy. Our picture in the New York Times Vows section.” Wesley got in Frank’s face. “You got something to say about that, my friend?”
“Tell me where the bride is registered, I’ll buy him a frickin’ crock pot, my friend. You’ll get your eight grand when the bank opens. Now, tell me where my wife is.”
Chapter 4
HAL LYNCH FOUND the old road through the woods as if he’d driven it just yesterday. Whoever owned this section of the mountain liked to hunt, and he ignored the posted trespass notice today just as he had twenty-five years before. It hadn’t been deer season then and it wasn’t now.
This isolated corner of the Catskills was only about two hundred miles from Attica, New York, where Hal had spent those twenty-five years as a guest of the state, but it might as well have been on the moon. Not an hour had gone by that he hadn’t thought about this negligible patch of land and what he’d stashed here in the middle of a rainy March night all those years ago. At the time, he figured he’d be back for it within days—a few weeks at most if he had to lie low for a while. But fate had something else in store for him.
Fate had had a little help putting him behind bars. Judith was his next stop.
Hal kept a keen eye on his surroundings as he maneuvered the borrowed rattletrap along the rutted dirt road. His spine felt every tree root and rock. Early morning sunlight spilled through the budding foliage; it was just past dawn. The road widened near a small hunting cabin. That hadn’t been here back then. No matter. The place he was headed for would have remained undisturbed. He hadn’t told a soul about this place.
As he neared the spot where he’d parked the bus back then, he peered through the trees. There it was: the tooth. Hal smiled. He set the parking brake and retrieved the shovel from the trunk. Time to perform a little gum surgery.
The ground wasn’t half-frozen as it had been back then, which was a blessing. He was no longer a young man, no matter how much iron he’d driven on the inside. It was slow work. Hal paused to strip off his light pullover sweater and toss it onto the tooth—in actuality a boulder nearly his height shaped like a chipped molar. He knew the exact spot; he’d pictured it in his mind’s eye a million times during the intervening years. Periodically he paused to wipe his sweaty palms on his jeans or take a pull from the plastic bottle he’d brought along. He turned the bottle to examine the label. From the springs of Maine. He shook his head in disbelief. Back when he went away, you never could have convinced him he’d pay cash money for a bottle of water.
When Hal had gotten down to about two and a half, three feet with no trace of a plastic-wrapped suitcase, he didn’t worry. The ground settles. By the time he’d gone almost another two fruitless feet, he was sweating from more than the exercise. He peeled off his damp undershirt and mopped his face with it.
This was the spot. This was the damn spot. Right here under the chip in the molar. He studied the ground on either side of the hole he’d made. Okay. Soil shifts over time, right? He picked up the shovel and started in on the patch of ground to the right of the hole.
The sun had passed its zenith when Hal tossed the shovel out of the moat he’d excavated, six feet deep and completely encircling the molar. Every muscle in his body throbbed; his back was on fire. His palms were a mass of bloody, chewed-up blisters. He scrambled out of the hole. He leaned on the nearest tree and took deep, calming breaths until his heartbeat slowed.
Another man might have cursed and raged at the top of his lungs, but that would accomplish nothing. Okay, think.
He hadn’t told anyone, and no one could have simply stumbled onto the site. Only Judith knew he’d even parked the bus in these woods, but she didn’t know the two million bucks had stayed here. She thought it was sitting in five separate safe-deposit boxes. That was what he’d told her.
The kid, then. Somehow he’d seen something. It was the only explanation.
Ricky Baines’s freckled grin flashed across his mind’s eye, the way he’d seen it hundreds, probably thousands of times during the past two and a half decades on the inside. His fellow cons couldn’t get enough of that stupid sitcom. Some snarling gangbanger was always surfing channels in the dayroom
, searching for his In No Time fix. And finding it, more often than not; with cable, the damn show was always on the air somewhere. If Hal had a buck for every time he’d heard that parrot squawk, “I’m having conniptions!” he wouldn’t need the two million.
He grabbed the shovel, reached across the moat with it to pluck his sweater and undershirt off the boulder, and headed for the car.
Good thing he’d never let the kid see his face.
______
“EES BREAKFAST.”
The accent was French, the pitch decidedly feminine. But Lucy, still blindfolded, had not needed to hear the voice to know a woman had entered the room. The overpowering stench of Joy perfume preceded her.
“But first,” Frenchie said, “you need the W.C., I think, oui?”
Oui oui was more like it. Lucy was absurdly grateful for the offer, having dreaded the prospect of waiting for one of the Powerpuff guys to reappear and then begging for a potty break.
The woman worked at the rope securing Lucy’s left ankle to the chair leg, picking at the knots, her long fingernails grazing Lucy’s skin. “Merde,” she muttered. “That Will, he always makes the knots too tight.”
Will. That must be the leader. The one in the gray hoodie. At least she could stop thinking of him as Buttercup.
His name is Will, she would tell the police if she ever got away from here. About six feet tall. No telling hair color, not with that hoodie, but his eyes are blue. She’d made them out standing so close to him in her kitchen.
“Voilà!”
Lucy felt the rope go slack. She sat still like a good little captive while Frenchie released the other ankle and her hands.
“Ah, you are steef. The circulation, eet suffers when one sits for so long.”
Gee, I’ll try to remember that. This woman didn’t seem too menacing. Lucy was tempted to ask her to turn off the music, if one could call it that, but decided not to push her luck.
“You will behave yourself, oui? You will not take off the blindfold. You will not try to get away. Eef you try anything, I will shoot you.” Her tone was amiable. She could have been swapping recipes with a girlfriend. “Ah. You do not believe I have a gun.”
Snatched Page 3