“Frank, have you been drinking?”
“Sweet pea, if I’m drunk, it’s on love. I’m awed—awed—by the devotion you have demonstrated with this act.”
“All right,” she said, “back up. This Lucy—”
“At first I couldn’t figure out how you two found out about each other.” He merged into the sparse traffic on the Southern State Parkway. “Then it came to me. She hired a PI, just like I did. I should’ve anticipated that.”
“You hired a private investigator?” Anne Marie sounded wide-awake now.
“Lucy’s PI must’ve found out about you and reported back to her,” he said. “She called you, just to make sure you’re for real, and that’s how you find out about her. You’d think I would’ve seen that one coming. Hope it didn’t upset you too much—in your condition and all.”
Her voice was hard. “Frank, are you trying to tell me you’re having an—”
“I know why you had her snatched,” he said. “To shake her up, rattle her cage, scare her into giving me up without reporting me to the authorities.”
“Reporting you?”
“It’s a solid plan, sweet pea. I think it’s going to work. There’s just one thing I need you to understand. I’m not going to divorce Lucy.”
“What!”
“Now, hear me out. My life with her is over, as of tonight. She and I will never again live together as man and wife. You’re so much better for me, Anne Marie. You’re my soul mate. The ironic part? Which if you’d known it, you might’ve thought twice about the kidnapping? Lucy wants to divorce me. She kicked me out weeks ago. I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “You spend twenty years with someone and they call it quits, just like that.”
“Twenty years,” Anne Marie groaned. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
“I know, I was shocked, too. But you know me—I refuse to put asunder what God has brought together. Plus John doesn’t deserve to have his family broken up. So I’m going to stay married to her, but in name only. The rest of your plan is good, sweet pea. You should’ve seen her, all trussed up in this bare cell, scared out of her wits, talking crazy. She won’t give us any trouble, not after this. I can’t see her reporting me for bigamy.”
Anne Marie didn’t respond. All Frank heard were these strange gurgling noises. Poor thing. The morning sickness never stopped with her. He’d better let her go.
“Kiss the kids for me, sweet pea. I’ll be home before you know it.” Frank gave her a loud, smacking air kiss and broke the connection.
______
“YOUR WHITE KNIGHT couldn’t wait to flee the premises,” Will said. He leaned indolently against the closed door, arms crossed over that broad bare chest.
It was just the two of them now, both in their jammies—which might have lent the scene a cozy intimacy if Lucy weren’t tied to a wooden chair, her mouth sealed with duct tape. Just take the tape off, she silently urged him. Let me speak. Then this will all be over.
“Frank changed his tune at the end,” he said. “He pretended to buy my explanation about how you hired me. I don’t think he believed it for a minute, but I had to let him go. My only other option was unlawful imprisonment. You might be a master manipulator, Lucy, but even you can’t make me kidnap someone for real. He could still go to the police—I can deal with that if I have to—but I’m betting he won’t. He did a one-eighty after seeing you. The guy was downright gleeful by the time he left. What was that about, do you think?”
Lucy jerked her chin and made noises behind the tape, pleading with Will to remove it.
“You’ve got three more days with me, Lucy, and I guarantee they’ll be three days you won’t soon forget.” Will pushed off the door and came to stand directly over her. His smile held more than a hint of malicious anticipation. “You want a little excitement, you said? You want to lose control, be dominated? There’s an old expression—you might’ve heard it. ‘Be careful what you wish for.’”
Her grunts became more vociferous. She rocked the chair in her desperation to be heard. Take the goddamn tape off my mouth. A fraction of a second was all she needed.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said. “Just so you know what your loving spouse has been up to. Seems he couldn’t bear the thought of you leaving him—so much so that he hired those other two yahoos who tried to grab you last night. Not for any nefarious purposes,” he added in response to her poleaxed expression. “Those guys were supposed to carry you off so Frank could come to your rescue and save you from the evil abductors. At which point you would realize the error of your ways and beg your husband’s forgiveness for even thinking about divorcing him. What do you have to say to that?” He ripped the tape off her mouth in one savage, eye-watering pull.
“Smarg.”
Chapter 10
HAL FINE-TUNED THE binoculars, bringing Ricky Baines’s house into sharp focus. Only, Ricky wasn’t calling himself Ricky anymore. Best not to forget that. A tree limb obscured his view, so he shifted his stance to peer around the trunk. “Who’s the kid?”
“Kid?” Mick leaned against a nearby tree, ostentatiously bored. It was close to noon. The two of them had skulked into the woods adjacent to Will’s spread so Hal could case the place and get some idea of how best to proceed. “Must be Tom.”
“Tom, huh?” Hal handed Mick the binoculars. “I don’t think so, sonny.”
“I told you not to call me that.” Mick grabbed the binoculars and scanned the front lawn. “Oh, baby. Didn’t know there were actual titties under that Boy Scout shirt.”
“Barely. Who is she?”
“Her name’s Cuba.”
“How old?” Hal squinted toward the distant figure chasing a lop-eared rabbit across the grass. It was another warm day, and the girl wore a snug white undershirt and stretchy athletic pants.
“Uh . . . fourteen? fifteen? Something like that,” Mick said. “The fuck she do to her hair?”
“Give me those.” Hal tapped Mick’s arm.
“Just a minute.” Mick giggled. “No bra—we got a little jiggle goin’ on. Hey, sweet thing.” He grabbed his crotch. “Cousin Micky’s got something for you.”
“She’s your cousin?” Hal snatched the binoculars from his son and trained them on the house. Shadows moved behind the windows.
“Not really. Cuba’s a runaway. Will took her in last winter.”
“Is he banging her?”
“Who knows? Maybe they’re into three-ways—him, Cuba, and Gabby. That, I’d pay money to see.”
A scraping noise drew Hal’s attention. “Knock that off.” His genius son was etching his initials into the tree bark with a key.
“How long we gonna be here?”
“Till I decide I’ve seen enough,” Hal said, as Mick continued to gouge the bark. “I said quit that.”
Mick’s dismissive sneer faded as Hal treated him to the scary dead-eye stare that had served him so well inside. Mick punished the tree with one last jab and pocketed his keys.
“It’s not like that between him and Gabby, is it?” Hal asked. “I mean, the woman changed his diapers.”
“The fuck should I know? She’s old but—whaddayacallit—well preserved.”
Hal trained the binoculars on the house, then on the other building—what Mick had called the Goo—before scanning the lawn once more. The girl, Cuba, sprawled on the grass, cuddling the rabbit.
“I cannot believe my mom, man.” Mick’s eyes shone with mixed incredulity and pride. “She never said word one about all this. I mean, I know about the groupie thing, the drugs and all that. She figured if she was up front about that stuff, if she ‘kept the lines of communication open,’ it’d keep me from making the same mistakes.”
The strategy appeared to have failed, Hal mused.
“But kidnapping her own brother.” Mick giggled again.
“Half brother.” Hal set the binoculars in the crotch of the tree. “Judith detested him.”
“They’re pretty tight now.”
“Yeah, well, back then it was a different story. Her mom and dad split when she was a kid, and she got caught in the middle of this big battle. Custody, money. He was balling his secretary. The usual crap.”
“Yeah, I know all that. When Grandpa married Will’s mom is when she really started ‘acting out,’ the way she puts it. Getting high all the time, cutting school, staying out all night with guys.”
“Ricky was treated like a little prince,” Hal said. “The heir apparent. I’d listen to Judith bitch about him for hours. Star of his own TV show. So adorable, with the freckles and all. He could do no wrong. Even her own mother, wife number one, fawned all over the kid once he was on TV. His manager got him a sweet deal. Everyone figured him for the next Jay North.”
“Who?”
“Judith got shunted to the side—at least that’s the way she saw it.”
“So she wanted to get back at her brother,” Mick said.
“That wasn’t it. She was afraid of being disinherited. She’d been the bad girl for so long, even when she was in college. Barely managed to graduate. And then when she did graduate, Daddy’s checks stopped coming. He told her it was time for her to start supporting herself. She convinced herself he was fixing to alter his will, to cut her out and leave the whole shebang to the little prince and his mother. The ransom money was supposed to be her insurance.”
“Oh, like so at least she’d walk away with a piece of the pie.”
“That was the idea.” Hal peered toward the house. The lawn was deserted. Cuba must have gone inside. “There’d be just enough ransom money, after my cut, to keep her in coke and Cristal till she could decide what to do with her life.”
“Aside from blowing second-rate rockers.”
Hal calmly advanced on Mick, who flinched and backed against the tree. Hal got in the kid’s face. “If my old man ever heard me talk that way about my mother, he’d have beat me within an inch of my life.”
“What?” Mick blustered, while avoiding Hal’s flat gaze. “Everyone knows about her. It’s not like I’m making it up.” Hal waited. “All right, all right, my mom was a virgin on her wedding night. She found me under a fucking cabbage leaf. You happy?”
Who did this little cockroach think he was? Hal had spent the past two and a half decades butting heads with men who wouldn’t have hesitated to gut him like a trout for looking at them the wrong way. One of these days he was going to have to take this insolent pup down a peg or two.
“I’ll tell you what Mom didn’t find,” Mick said. “She didn’t find any two-million-dollar ransom, if that’s what you’re thinking. She was working as a diner hostess when she hooked up with my dad. I mean, you know, my stepdad. Anyway, until then, we were staying in this crummy apartment in someone’s basement. We couldn’t afford steak. It was spaghetti on a hotplate four, five nights a week. I was only seven when we moved out of that two-room shit-hole, but I’ll never forget it. I can tell you one thing—Mom never dug up any two million bucks.”
“If I thought Judith had the money, why would you and I be here right now, scoping out Ricky Baines’s place?”
“The fuck should I know? It’s your big fucking secret.”
“Because you have a big fucking mouth, sonny.”
“There he is.” Mick pointed, and Hal quickly trained the binoculars on the man now descending the house’s porch steps and loping toward the Goo. He was youngish, mid-thirties, on the tall side and fit. He had red hair.
Ricky Baines. Looking far different from the last time Hal had seen him, when the nine-year-old had been practically catatonic from terror and pain, pale as death with his left hand swathed in a filthy, blood-encrusted bandage.
The man he’d grown into moved with an air of confidence and self-assurance. Do you think about it? Hal silently asked Will Kitchen, watching as he disappeared behind the Goo.
A minute later a dark sedan—a Camry, it looked like—emerged from behind the far end of the Goo and stopped about halfway down the driveway. Will got out and waved to someone. Hal swung the binoculars back toward the house and saw a woman on the porch, wearing pajamas and plastic flip-flops. “Who’s this, a girlfriend?”
Mick glanced toward the house and was instantly galvanized. “That’s the bitch that smashed my nose. Lucy Narby.”
“A woman did that?” Hal’s long-lost son was making him prouder by the minute.
“Why’s she walking around free?” Mick cried. “She should be hanging by her tits for what she did to me.”
Hal hauled Mick back behind the tree. “Keep your voice down. And stay out of sight.” Mick had described Will’s bizarre kidnapping business on the way there. This Lucy must be one of his weirdo clients.
“The doctor says my nose’ll never be the same,” Mick griped. “He says it’ll always be a little crooked from now on.”
“A tragedy,” Hal muttered. Someone might see that nose and mistake the whiny weasel for a real man. “Let’s stick to the business at hand.”
“She is the business at hand.” Mists of spittle punctuated Mick’s rant. He stabbed his finger toward Lucy, now crossing the lawn to the car. “She’s totally the business at hand. You need my help? Fine. I help you, you help me.”
“Help you what?”
“Get back at that miserable cunt, that’s what.”
Will met Lucy near the sprawling, thick-trunked tree in the middle of the lawn and escorted her to the car. His hand rested briefly on the small of her back. A young boy bounded out of the house and raced to catch up to them. He tried to wheedle his way into the car. Will turned him away.
He wanted to be alone with her. Interesting. “Get back at her how?” he asked.
“However I feel like,” Mick said. “What’s it to you? That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
What did Hal care, as long as Mick played his part? “Fine,” he said. “But all that stuff comes after. If you do what you’re supposed to and my thing goes as planned, Lucy Narby will be the next item of business. I promise.”
______
WESLEY’S KNEES THROBBED. Shafts of pain speared his left butt cheek and right shoulder. He was perched ten feet up a tree overlooking the property where those Powerpuff goons had brought Lucy Narby on Friday night. Wesley had taken up position just inside the woods with his high-powered mini scope, only to have to scramble up the branches like a squirrel at the sound of someone else approaching through the woods. Two someones, as it turned out.
Gingerly he shifted his weight. This was misery. Wesley had assumed his tree-climbing days were long over. He still worked out, still had the power to haul himself up the branches. Only thing, nowadays he was hauling a hell of a lot more of himself than he used to. He’d chosen a stout limb to support his bulk; he hoped to God it held.
Joe was right. He had to get a grip on this flab. Maybe he’d give that Atkins thing a try again. Joe made a mean bacon-wrapped filet mignon. Wash down a few of those with some heavy cream and you’d never miss the potato.
Wesley had gone there to scope out the situation, to see if Frank had, by some miracle, managed to rescue his wife—which, he was less than shocked to discover, he had not. Of course, he could simply have asked his client, but Narby was not what you’d call forthcoming. So he’d decided to check it out firsthand before paying Frank another surprise visit. With that in mind, he’d gotten an early flight from Chicago, retrieved his car from JFK’s long-term parking, and driven straight there.
The property belonged to one Wilbur Kitchen. The name meant nothing to Wesley, though he suspected if he ran it past some of the contacts he’d made during his fourteen years with the NYPD, he just might hit pay dirt. The house where the kidnappers had jettisoned that young loudmouth Friday night was owned by a Judith Drinkwater. No bells had rung there either.
With his scope, he had no trouble watching the two men, some twenty yards away. They had binoculars and were doing what Wesley himself had gone there to do: spy on Wilbur Kitchen’s place. One of them was the hothead from F
riday. Wesley didn’t recognize the other one, who looked like an older, harder version of the kid. Father? Uncle?
Wesley was too far away to hear their conversation, though their body language came through loud and clear. The older one wasn’t taking any shit from the kid, who tried to act tough but was hopelessly outclassed.
Wesley tried yet again to rearrange his weight on the limb, to ease the pressure on his knees, with no luck. The tree bark was scraping the hell out of his new, seven-hundred-dollar lambskin jacket.
Forget the jacket, he commanded himself. If this thing with Narby paid off, he’d buy the damn jacket in every color—after paying off the hall, caterers, band, florist, printer, tailor, and all the rest. Plus something nice for Joe. Maybe that new bedroom set he’d been jonesing for.
When Wesley and Joe had made up their minds to get married, they’d agreed on a simple, inexpensive affair. A handful of close friends for a morning service, followed by an omelet brunch. Two, three grand, tops. Then Joe started listening to his stepmother and sisters, to his thousand and one gal pals, and before Wesley knew what was happening, their modest little wedding had morphed into something better suited to Westminster Cathedral.
Joe had been in hog heaven planning this extravaganza. Wesley didn’t have the heart to deny him. Naturally, finding a way to pay for it was his headache.
He wondered how hard he’d have to lean on that bigamous schmuck Narby to squeeze out a healthy chunk of hush money. Probably not all that hard. The man was obviously determined to maintain the status quo, to hold on to both the East Coast wife and the Midwest wife. KrunchWorks was set to expand to the West Coast in a couple of years. The national sales manager could find himself the sultan of a far-flung harem.
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