by Mason Cross
Gage poured the lemonade over the ice and took a drink. “Thank you. Now, what can I do for you?”
Walter’s eyes surveyed the room, to make sure nobody was within earshot. The barmaid was watching the wall-mounted television, the two soaks at the bar paid no attention to them.
“We’re attempting to find somebody,” he said. “Despite our best efforts, we haven’t gotten very far.”
“Find?” Gage repeated.
“That’s correct.” He lowered his voice. “This is not a hit, okay?”
Gage affected a look of surprise. “What makes you think that’s the sort of work I do?”
Walter didn’t answer. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out a sheet of paper, folded in half. He opened it up, flattened it on the table with his palm, and slid it across the table top to Gage.
Gage took the sheet and flipped it around. It was a police wanted sheet. It showed a mug shot—straight ahead and profile. The name was Dominic Freel. Approximately five-nine, a hundred and eighty pounds, blond hair, blue eyes, no visible scars or tattoos. The date showed the sheet was five years old, for a bail violation.
“You got anything more recent?”
The tall man reached into his jacket again and brought out another sheet of paper. This one was a color printout of a picture. It showed three people in what looked like a backyard. Gage guessed it was some kind of party. There were two women in the picture flanking a man who looked like the same guy from the wanted sheet, a few years older. One of the women was short, early forties, with dark hair tied back in a ponytail. She was holding a bottle of Coors and smiling at the camera. The other woman was a little taller, had red hair and wore sunglasses. She had one hand on her hip, and was talking to the man, their faces angled toward one another, maybe unaware of the fact they were being photographed.
“Who is he?”
It was Grant’s turn to speak. “He’s a guy we need to talk to.”
“What did he do?”
Grant looked at Walter, as though checking for permission, before continuing. “He worked for my friend here. He left abruptly, and we’d like to talk to him about that. We need to talk to him before the police do.”
Gage guessed he meant the other police.
“He knows something you don’t want anyone else to know.”
No reply.
“It must be important,” Gage continued. “It would have to be.”
David caught the implication right away: no dummy, when it came to financial matters. “How much are you going to charge?”
“Just finding him? You want him brought to you?”
Walter shook his head. “Just find him. We hear you’re good at that. Find him, pick up the phone, and wait until we get there.”
They were definitely keen, which suggested this could be a worthwhile meeting. The money in his account from the Farnam job was only there temporarily. Once he had settled his debts, there would be enough left to get back home, and maybe eat for a couple of weeks once he got there. He thought about his usual figure for a job of this kind and added fifty per cent. “Thirty grand. Half up front.”
David’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t make any theatrical moves toward the exit this time. He exchanged a glance with Walter, who looked back at Gage and gave a nod. “That’s acceptable. This is a matter of principle.”
Gage tried not to betray his surprise that his fee had been agreed to so readily. This was supposed to be an extra job while he was in the area. If this panned out, it would double the payday for killing Farnam. After a few very lean months, it appeared this trip had been more than worth his while.
Gage took a drink, pretending to think it over. Inwardly, he cursed himself for not upping the fee a little more. If they agreed to thirty without blinking, they would have agreed to forty. Perhaps he could bulk things out on expenses a little. In any case, he was intrigued now. Who were the three men who didn’t seem to go together? Why did they want this Freel guy bad enough to go down this route? Thirty thousand dollars was a lot of money on a point of principle. It meant that either Freel had something they wanted, or he had seen something he shouldn’t have.
“You have a deal,” he said after a minute. “Now tell me where you want me to start.”
9
GRAND ISLE—SUMMERLIN
The used Ford Fusion I had bought three months ago had done less than a thousand miles in that time. I was about to give it a workout.
In an ideal world, I would have traveled to Vegas by air. Sarah Blackwell had responded quickly to my suggestion that I come and see her, providing an address. She lived west of the city, less than twenty miles from McCarran International. But I hadn’t attempted to get on a plane in eighteen months, ever since Winterlong had upgraded me to the No Fly list. I wasn’t certain I was still on the list, but I did know that satisfying my curiosity would be a risky endeavor. It’s much easier to get on the list than to get off it. A great deal of the broad strokes of counterterrorism rests on the maxim Better safe than sorry. Understandable, when you think about it. Nobody wants to be the guy who downgraded a terrorist to low risk right before he carries out his mission. If civil rights get a little bruised in the process, that, unofficially of course, is a price worth paying.
So ever since my name had been flagged on the system at Seattle Tacoma Airport, I had avoided air travel. It hadn’t been any great hardship, for most of that time. For the last year and a half, I had had no pressing need to be anywhere in any kind of rush.
But that had changed with one email and one picture.
Within an hour of receiving Sarah Blackwell’s message, I had cleared out the few belongings I wanted to take with me and packed them into the trunk of the Ford. I put the spare key in an envelope and dropped it through the door of the rental place with a note saying I was going to be out of town on business for a while. I spent another five minutes plotting the journey. Eighteen hundred miles. I was going to have to split the trip over two days, minimum.
As I put the keys in the ignition, I allowed myself a few seconds to take one last look at the Gulf of Mexico, thinking about another old saying: Be careful what you wish for.
I headed north and west, following the 90 past Lafayette and Alexandria, heading back inland. The drive gave me a lot of time to think. I thought about the last time I had seen Carol, at the little hotel out on Long Island. Drinking cold beers and listening to Sam Cooke. The look on her face when I told her I had to leave. Perplexed and pissed off in equal measure.
And then I thought about the last time I had spoken to her, weeks later, over the phone. The men I was working with had come very close to killing me, and had succeeded in killing her boss, Senator John Carlson. I thought we had been careful. We hadn’t been careful enough.
I still felt the pain as I remembered the accusation in her voice. I knew she had put the pieces together and decided I had gotten her boss killed, and I had put her in danger. And the worst thing was, she wasn’t entirely wrong.
I had told Carol to lay low for a while, directed her to an off-the-grid apartment I had set up for the purpose of evading pursuers if it became necessary. By the time I got back stateside and made arrangements to keep Winterlong off our backs—temporary arrangements, as it turned out—she was gone. She left nothing behind but a note: Don’t look for me.
I wondered if she knew how ironic the message was. She couldn’t know that it was a big part of what I did for a living: looking for people. She had tied my hands with four words. She knew I wouldn’t go against her final request to me.
Until now.
Maybe everyone has someone like Carol Langford. The one who got away. The person you meet, fall in love with, and lose. And then think about for the rest of your life. Carol and I had been together for a matter of weeks, but somehow it had felt a lot longer. I had never given any thought to settling down before I met her, but if things had taken their natural course, I believed deep down that somehow we would be together now. Life had oth
er plans.
I crossed the Texas state line a little after six o’clock in the evening. I was tired, but I was less than halfway to my destination. I pushed on past Dallas and made it as far as Amarillo by two a.m. I took a room in a motel and found myself wide awake now I was away from the road. I went for a walk around the neighborhood to stretch my legs, then ate a solitary dinner at a pizza joint that was the only place still open. I went back to my room and fell into a deep sleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. At seven a.m. I was up, showered and back behind the wheel for the second leg.
I tried to think about what I was going to do when I got to Vegas. Sarah Blackwell had my email address, which meant that there had been at least one tie that Carol had not cut. I wondered what that meant; if it meant anything. There was every chance there was a benign explanation for her disappearance, and that Carol would not welcome my intrusion. But I owed it to her, and myself, to find out more. Speaking to the neighbor was a precaution, nothing more. Chances were that Sarah Blackwell had an overactive imagination, and there was nothing to worry about. If I could find a simple explanation for Carol and her husband disappearing, there would be no need to take it any further.
Or maybe there was more to it than that. Even supposing there was, perhaps I would be able to find Carol without her knowing. Put her friend’s mind at rest—and mine—without her ever realizing I had gone against her wishes. I wondered if I would be able to get that close to her and walk away.
I didn’t like to dwell on that thought, and so I busied myself with logistics; potential courses of action depending on what I learned in Summerlin. I tried not to think about the way Carol’s voice had sounded the last time we talked. But underneath all of that was a quite different impulse, a feeling I tried to deny was there. A feeling that didn’t have a whole lot to do with the subject of the search: the excitement of starting out on a new case. A new puzzle to be unlocked. It had been too long.
I drove direct, stopping only for gas. I passed through New Mexico and Arizona and crossed the Nevada state line at the Colorado River just after seven o’clock in the evening.
The 95 freeway took me right through the heart of Vegas, not that you would know it. The famous welcome sign and the fountains at the Bellagio and the neon cowboy were all out there somewhere, but all I could see was miles of concrete channel and sound walls. The Spring Mountains rose ahead of me as I took the exit onto the Summerlin Parkway.
Summerlin was an affluent settlement by the looks of things. Big houses, generous yards, expensive automobiles parked outside. Sarah Blackwell’s street was on the far western edge, just before civilization gave way to the Mojave Desert. I parked outside the house and turned off the engine. The house was a wide two-story structure with a generous yard. Two big ferns in terracotta pots flanked the glass doorway. The houses on either side were similar, and I guessed one of those had been Carol’s. Perhaps the one on the left-hand side, since it was the one without a car in the driveway.
The warm Mojave breeze drifted through the open windows of my car. The evening was clear and quiet, the street deserted except for some kids playing hopscotch at the far end of the cul-de-sac. A nice place. I was glad Carol had wound up somewhere so pleasant. And then I remembered why I was here: to find out why she had left all this behind in such a hurry.
I heard a door open and turned my head to see a woman standing at the door of the house, her arms folded as she regarded the car parked outside and its occupant. I recognized Sarah Blackwell from the photograph: in her mid-forties, shoulder-length dark hair, a composed, inquisitive expression. She wore sandals, jeans and a white blouse. Her stance was wary, as though she didn’t know whether what came next would be a good idea.
That made two of us.
10
LAS VEGAS
As was so often the case in Gage’s experience, the trail to one man began with another.
Walter and his two compatriots had been somewhat successful in tracking Freel’s movements, actually managing to find the place where he had been living. Unfortunately, they had found it several weeks after Freel had skipped out, along with his wife. That break had been down to blind luck. Someone had posted a picture on Facebook showing Freel at some neighborhood barbecue. They had narrowed it down to a particular neighborhood, and narrowed the house down by finding the one place that had been rented to a couple answering the description of Freel and his wife.
Gage had the address as a starting point. Walter told him they had already checked the place out a few nights before and had found nothing; just an old laptop with nothing of use on it. He wanted to give the place a once-over himself, but not until after dark. One of the neighbors had called the police last time, so he would have to exercise caution. In the meantime, Gage thought it would be worthwhile to look a little deeper into the other piece of information they had given him. The wanted sheet from five years ago.
Freel had not just been wanted, he had been got. He had served two years in High Desert State Prison for aggravated robbery, which meant he had committed the felony with one or more accomplices. Gage contacted a friend of a friend in the Nevada Department of Corrections and negotiated a copy of Freeh’s file. He was interested in known associates. He was disappointed when he discovered that Freel seemed to have kept out of trouble since his stretch inside. A guy named Logan McKinney had been Freel’s collaborator on the job that had led to the jail time. McKinney had been released six months after Freel.
Gage returned to his hotel, a crumbling fifty-dollar-a-night dive just off the Strip. It looked worse in the daylight than it had the previous evening. He undressed and showered, and then he wrapped a towel on and lay on the mean single bed. The couple in the next room were having a full-on yelling match. Occasionally the wall would shake as one or other of them hurled an object or a fist at it. He tuned it out and made another couple of calls. Ten minutes later he had McKinney’s record. This was more promising, because McKinney had either been busier, or just less careful than his friend. In contrast to Freel’s relatively sparse criminal record, McKinney’s was dotted with felonies and misdemeanors at regular intervals over the few years since his incarceration.
McKinney’s last known address was a rooming house in Carson City. Gage found the number and dialed it.
“McKinney?” the weariness the man at the end of the line invested in that single word spoke volumes. “Not here anymore. And good riddance. He owe you money?”
“When did he leave?” Gage asked.
“I don’t know, weeks ago.”
“Any chance you could be more specific?”
The volume of the fight next door stepped up a couple of notches, the woman screaming an unintelligible curse at the man. It blocked out the voice on the other end. Gage switched the phone to the ear farthest from the wall and retreated to the far corner of the room.
“Sorry about that. Excuse the noise.”
There was a pause, and when the man on the other end of the line spoke again his voice had gained a suspicious edge. “Who did you say you were again?”
“I’m sorry, I should have explained. Mr. McKinney doesn’t owe me anything, but he did borrow some money from a friend of my mother’s. She’s kind of vulnerable, and ...”
“That sounds like the son of a bitch all right. Give me a second.”
There was a rustle of papers and the voice came back on the line.
“I cleared out his room on April 16th.”
That was interesting. Freel had last been seen a couple of days earlier.
“He left on the 16th?”
“No. Rent is a week in advance. If memory serves, McKinney disappeared a couple days before. Fair’s fair, so I gave him until the end of his week and not a minute longer.”
Gage couldn’t help but grin. He had no doubt that McKinney’s belongings had been decorating the sidewalk at one minute after midnight.
“Any idea where he might have gone?”
“Sure, he went to Phoenix.”
&
nbsp; “How do you know that?”
“A guy down there called me for a reference. Some bar. I told him to run a mile. Just a second ...” more paper noises. He came back on the line with the name of a bar and a street. Gage scribbled the address down.
“Thank you, you’ve been very helpful.”
He hung up and looked at the mugshot of McKinney, and then the one of Freel. Associates on one robbery, time in the same prison, probably keeping in touch afterwards, too. And they had both disappeared within days of one another. It might be a coincidence, but it didn’t feel like one. The room had grown darker since Gage had started making the calls. The couple next door were still fighting, but not as loudly or intensely. They seemed to have peaked. He got up and looked out of the window, facing west where the sun was beginning to dip below the jagged outline of the mountain range. The suburb of Summerlin was somewhere in between. He had one more call to make first, though, and this one had nothing to do with Dominic Freel.
The phone rang four times before it was answered by a tired female voice, the effect of a pack of cigarettes a day making the voice sound older than its owner.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.”
There was a long pause. Gage was patient.
“What do you want?” Courtney finally asked.
“Is he there?”
“What makes you think he’ll want to talk to you?”
“Go ask him.”
Another sigh. Then a clunk as the phone was placed down on a surface. Gage pictured the old red plastic telephone lying on the table in the hall of the apartment on Exeter Street. Courtney hadn’t given him her new cell number, but she hadn’t bothered to change the land number either.
He heard footsteps approaching on the worn carpet, voices from off-mic.