Don't Look for Me

by Mason Cross

  I looked in the right place, almost too late. He was behind the door. I lunged backward out of the room just in time, hearing bullets thud into the wall at the spot I had just been. I kept low and scrambled back behind the wall again. And then I realized it didn’t provide as much cover as I had assumed. Two bullets punched holes through the wall by my head, sending me tumbling back along the platform. When I was far enough along, I stopped and returned the favor. I fired a couple of shots into the wall, knowing that from this angle I was about as likely to hit my assailant as I was to win the lottery.

  There was a lull. I knew he was still in there, because I hadn’t heard any movement or the sound of the door being rattled again. At least I had managed to determine that he had been lying: Carol wasn’t in that room, dead or alive.

  “Where is she?” I called out.

  There was no answer. Had I hit him? No way, I couldn’t be that lucky. I waited another minute. And then from outside, I heard the sound of a car start up. The engine noise told me it wasn’t mine, but the gray Chrysler I had seen on my way in. Carol: it had to be.

  As the engine noise died away, I heard another sound from within the room, a quiet, scraping noise. Not like the sound of a door opening; more like two rocks being rubbed together. I crept along the platform until I was next to the doorway once again. I tensed and then glanced around it, just in time to see the upper body of Trenton Gage dangling through a large hole in the wall on the far side of the room. He was a big guy, and had obviously spent the last couple of minutes removing enough bricks so that he could squeeze backwards through the gap. His gun rested on the edge of the bricks. Our eyes locked, and he reached for the gun, cursing as he fumbled it. As it dropped to the floor inside the room, he let go with his other hand, dropping back through the gap. I heard a thud and a grunt of pain a second later. I moved to the hole and looked down, seeing only darkness. I rushed back out onto the platform and down the spiral stairs.

  I stopped and listened when I reached the ground floor. I heard a whisper of movement behind me and turned to see him rush me from the shadows. I got my gun up and trained on the spot between his eyes. He stopped in his tracks, five feet from me.

  Gage had stopped in a sliver of dull twilight from one of the windows, giving me my first good look at him. He was a big man, wide at the shoulders. He had a fully shaved head and bushy eyebrows. There was an abrasion on the left side of his head, and blood was glistening on the side of his face. On his right cheek was the white crescent-shaped scar Sarah had described. He wore a black shirt, rolled up at the sleeves. He had an empty holster clipped to his belt.

  Slowly, he raised his hands. His eyes were fixed on mine.

  “Where’s Carol?” I asked calmly.

  Carefully, he reached a fingertip to the side of his bald head and wiped away blood. He examined the bloody fingertip and looked back at me. “That’s a good question. I think I’d like to know the answer more than you.”

  So she was okay. Better than okay, she had obviously gotten the drop on this goon.

  “Trenton Gage, right?”

  He looked surprised for a moment. “I’m impressed. I guess my reputation precedes me. We’ve met before. The woman’s house in Summerlin.”

  His accent was difficult to place. Maybe Canadian.

  “Who sent you?” I asked.

  “Who says anyone did?”

  “You’re not a local: not to here or Vegas. And from what I’ve seen so far, you seem like outside help. Somebody who was brought into this, not somebody with a dog in the fight.”

  “You have a name?” he asked.

  “Blake. I’m a friend of Carol’s.”

  He smiled knowingly. “But not a friend of Freel’s.”

  I didn’t respond to that. Now that the bullets had stopped flying and things had calmed down a little, I became conscious that all of a sudden, I had a prisoner by accident. And I didn’t have the first idea of what to do with him.

  “Where did she go?”

  “You asked that already. And I told you I have no idea, other than wherever she is she’s getting farther away with the merchandise while the two of us keep yapping.”

  The merchandise? Could that mean ...? I shelved the thought and asked another question quickly, not wanting to let Gage know I was still in the dark about exactly why Corinth had recently become such a visitor magnet.

  “You killed Freel. Were you going to kill her, too?”

  A lightbulb went on behind his eyes as he confirmed a suspicion. “You don’t know,” he said with satisfaction.

  “Don’t know what?” I said with a little more irritation than I had intended.

  “You’re just here for her,” he said, breaking into a grin. “Boy, you have some surprises coming.”

  Surprises? I knew it would be pointless to ask him to elaborate and besides, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of confirming he knew more than I did. I glanced back at the door, wondering how I was going to get him out of here, and what I would do with him if I did. One thing at a time.

  “Come on,” I said, jerking my head in the direction of the entrance to indicate he should go first.

  He started to walk. And then I made my first mistake: letting him get within arm’s length of me.

  Gage moved like a snake, knocking my hand up and charging me. My gun clattered to the floor. I ducked a swing from the left and blocked one from the right. If I had learned one thing the other night, it was that I was no physical match for Gage. I might have speed and agility on my side, but those were only advantages so long as I kept my distance. I slammed my fist into the middle of his stomach. He barely flinched. I stepped back and came up against a cracked tile wall as he advanced forward, those big hands reaching for me. Then they were around my throat and he was lifting me off the ground. I gagged and scrabbled at his hands, then gave up and slammed the blade of my hand down on his collarbone. He grunted and his grip released just enough that I was able to struggle free. I staggered backwards and looked across the hall toward the main doorway. Too far. He would be on top of me before I reached it. And then I remembered I had one other advantage: advance knowledge of the terrain.

  I turned and ran. Not toward the door, but in the direction of the stage. I heard Gage’s footsteps behind me. I let him gain, knowing the timing had to be perfect. I kept my eyes on the floor and saw the gaping hole Sarah had fallen through. I launched myself forward, jumping the gap and landing on the other side. I heard a surprised cry from behind me followed by a crash as two hundred and fifty pounds of asshole slammed into the floor of the basement. I stepped back toward the hole and looked down. I could make out Gage lying spread-eagled. No way to tell if he was dead or just unconscious. The memory of those hands around my throat made my mind up that I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

  I went back to where he had knocked the gun out of my hands and retrieved it, then made my way to the doorway, forcing myself to tread carefully. As I reached the doorway, I got an answer to my question. A yell of pure rage erupting up from the basement.

  “Blake—you’re a fucking dead man!”

  I didn’t answer. Even if I had been able to think of a witty retort, my throat was too sore from the choking. When I got to the doorway there was no sign of the Chrysler, as I had expected. Carol was long gone, for better or worse.

  I ran back along Main Street to my car, unlocked it, and got in. As I started up the engine and turned the headlights on, I kept my eyes on the town hall, half-expecting Gage to come stumbling out after me.

  I turned in the road and drove out of the dead town, putting my foot down as I reached the open road heading back to the highway. I hoped it would take Gage a while to find a way out of the basement and retrieve his gun. When he did, he would still be twenty miles from anywhere. Good enough, for now.

  But as Corinth shrank and then vanished in my rearview mirror, I started to think he wasn’t my problem anymore. Carol was. The big man’s words came back to me as the sig
n for Iron City flashed by.

  Boy, you have some surprises coming.

  45

  Sarah lay on the small motel room bed, trying to think about anything but what might be happening twenty miles away in Corinth.

  For the hundredth time or so, she reached for her phone. No calls, no messages.

  She had barely had time to draw breath from the moment she and Blake had arrived in Quarter until checking into this room. First the meeting with Diane Marshall, then the revelation that Carol was indeed in town, and that Blake had spoken to her. From there it had been a rollercoaster: the frantic drive to Carol’s place, the discovery of Freel’s body, Blake’s decision to go back to Corinth alone.

  On a practical level, she understood that that had been the only course of action that made sense. Trenton Gage, or whoever had killed Freel and kidnapped Carol, was armed and dangerous. She knew that her insisting on coming along would have done no good. And yet ... she felt so useless waiting on the sidelines, doing nothing.

  Not quite nothing. She remembered the laptop. She had changed the display settings to make sure the screen never locked, as she wasn’t sure if Gage’s little USB gadget would work twice. They had already gone through the file space, but now that she could connect to the hotel’s wifi, she would be able to see if Freel had left any sort of internet trace.

  A few minutes on, the laptop seemed to be a busted flush. There were two separate browsers installed on the machine: one was never used by the looks of it; the other was set up to erase the history each time it was closed. If Freel or Carol had visited any sites that might give them an idea of exactly what was going on, there was no easy way to find them. Sarah had been briefly elated to find that there was a free Outlook.com email account that was logged in. Then her spirits had sunk when she found the inbox empty, and nothing in sent messages.

  But then she had clicked on deleted items and found three messages, all from earlier in the day. The folder would empty automatically after a few days, or when it was manually purged, but Freel evidently hadn’t gotten around to doing that. And the fact that there were both received and sent items deleted indicated he had wanted to remove them.

  The first message had been sent from this account today, in the early hours of the morning, 2:47 a.m. It was addressed to another free webmail account with the name “Vegas Office.”

  We may need to accelerate the timescale. As in, next couple of days?

  “Vegas Office,” whoever that was, had taken his or her time to respond. Probably he or she was asleep when the original message arrived. A reply had appeared at 8:02 a.m.

  Not easy, but I’ll see what I can do. Come to the new place, noon on Friday. Not empty-handed.

  FD

  What did FD stand for? Somebody’s initials, most likely, or maybe some sort of code.

  Free! had obviously been waiting by the keyboard. His reply was sent at 8:04:

  See you then.

  And that was all there was. No address for the meet, no real hint of what they were discussing. If they were talking about this Friday, that was tomorrow. All she could say for sure was that Dominic Freel wasn’t meeting anybody at noon tomorrow.

  She got up and paced the floor of the tiny room. The window faced west. The flat landscape extended uninterrupted for miles until it met a line of black hills beneath the deep blue night sky. She knew the town of Corinth was out there. She looked back over at the bed where her phone lay. Its screen remained stubbornly dark.

  She groaned out loud. She wasn’t a big drinker, but suddenly she craved something to smooth off the edge off her anxiety. If nothing else, it would be something to occupy her for a while. Anything was better than staying in this room, bouncing off the walls waiting for a call from Blake. And now that she thought about it, she wouldn’t put it past Blake to forget to call her even if there was an important development. That stunt earlier on, going to see Carol alone, had been typical of him.

  She was halfway down the stairs to reception when her phone buzzed again. She took it from her pocket, hoping to see Blake’s number. But it wasn’t him. She had saved Detective Costigane’s number yesterday when he called, and it was his name that showed on the screen. She let it ring out. She wasn’t sure she wanted to take that call right now.

  When the call alert disappeared from her screen, she opened the internet browser on her phone and typed the words “Quarter” and “Arizona” into news, hoping there would be nothing of note.

  But there it was: Quarter, Az. Man Killed in Home Invasion.

  Just a brief paragraph, sketchy on the details other than to say police had been called to a home in the town where they discovered the body of a yet-unidentified male appearing to be in his early forties. No further details had been released so far, but police were warning residents to be vigilant.

  As Sarah had been reading the brief article, the icon at the top of her screen for a new voicemail had lit up. She was surer than ever that she didn’t want to take Detective Costigane’s call now.

  She held on to the phone while she descended the rest of the stairs. She walked across reception, smiling in acknowledgment as the guy on the desk bid her a good evening, and entered the small bar. There were a couple of other people sitting alone. She ordered a Jim Beam and took a seat at a table near the window. She took a sip and felt a shiver as the liquor burned her lips, then her tongue, then down her throat, before sending a pleasant warmth back upwards again.

  The voicemail was brief, terse, and to the point.

  “Ms. Blackwell, this is Detective Costigane again. Please call me as soon as you get this.”

  That was it: no thank you, no goodbye, no apology for disturbing her.

  She thought about ordering another bourbon before calling back, but then steeled herself. She considered several different approaches as the phone rang. Should she sound sleepy? Should she be in a good mood, blissfully unaware of the news Costigane was about to break? No, that would be ridiculous. Cops don’t tend to be calling to give you good news, so anything other than trepidation would sound suspicious. Which was just as well, as it was the only mood she could convincingly pull off at that moment.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” Costigane said when he answered.

  Her mouth felt dry and she swallowed before responding. “Go ahead.”

  “Dominic Freel was found murdered this evening.”

  “Dominic ... you mean?”

  “Yes Ms. Blackwell, your former neighbor.”

  “Oh my God, where did ... what happened?”

  “We’re not sure of all the details right now. He was shot and killed in a small town down in Arizona. The name of the place is Quarter. Does that ring any bells with you?”

  Had she imagined it, or had Costigane injected a meaningful pause there after he had given her the name of the town? Did he know something?

  “No, not at all,” Sarah said, pleasantly surprised at how naturally the lie came out. “Is Rebecca okay? His wife, I mean.”

  “We don’t know where his wife has gone,” Costigane said. The question was implicit.

  “I haven’t heard anything from her at all. Oh my God, this is awful. Do you think it could be related to what happened at my house?”

  “We can’t rule anything out, which is why I need you to come in and speak to us. Where are you right now?”

  “I’m still out of town,” she said, then quickly added, “L.A. I don’t know how I could help, though, I’ve told you everything I know. I mean, like I said, I barely spoke to Dominic.”

  There was a long pause, as though Costigane was making his mind up about what he was going to say next.

  “Do you have access to email on your phone?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m going to send you a picture that I want you to look at. But first I have to tell you something that has to remain absolutely confidential.”

  “Understood.”

  “I’ve been working on the robbery of the Ellison Jewelry Co
mpany a few months back; you might have heard about it on the news. Mr. Freel’s name came up a few times with reference to the case.”

  Sarah was careful in her reply. Costigane knew she was a journalist, and presumably he was assuming she was a person of reasonable intelligence. “You’re saying he may have been involved in the Ellison heist. You think that’s why he was murdered?” Costigane didn’t reply, and she knew he was waiting for her to ask more questions. She asked the question that she would have asked, if this had really been new information. “You don’t just think he was a witness, do you?”

  “That would be correct. We think he was involved. How long did you work for the Tribune, Sarah?”

  “About ten years.”

  “You worked the crime beat?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then you know how it goes. There are loose ends in any investigation. When we get a promising suspect and we can build a good case against him, some of those loose ends get ... swept under the carpet.”

  “What kind of loose ends are you talking about, Detective?”

  “Well that’s the thing. I never gave this particular loose end too much thought before. And then you started asking about your neighbor, and someone realized that the guy who lived next door to you was Freel. One thing led to another and I got ahold of the picture you shared with Detective Stansfield in Missing Persons.”

  “The one with Dominic Freel at the barbecue?”

  “Yeah. Only it wasn’t Freel who got my attention. What did you say his wife’s name was again?”

  All of a sudden, Sarah felt the hairs on the back of her arms stand up.

  “Rebecca,” she said.

  But as Sarah well knew, that wasn’t Carol’s only name.

  46

  I had given up hope of catching up with Carol long before I reached the intersection with the highway. She had ten minutes’ head start, and a binary choice of direction that would multiply into several additional choices by the time she reached the next town, whether she was headed south to Iron City or north to the next place. I decided to go back for Sarah, and the two of us could decide what to do next.