Cut and Run

by Ridley Pearson

  “You’re overreacting.”

  “As if you know what he’s like.”

  “I have a fair idea, believe me.”

  And there it was again: that same unbuttoning of her blouse. For a moment they were sixteen and seventeen again. For a moment he couldn’t think. But then the shock of her believing she could buy his participation in willfully letting her go so revolted him that he took a step back to signal his refusal. Yet by the fifth button, the first of the bluish patches appeared. By the time she allowed her blouse to hang open the discoloring began beneath the stark, bleached whiteness of her bra and spread down, covering both sides of her, unmistakable handprints across her ribs.

  “Against my will,” she said. “It’s his way of punishing me, I suppose. Some shrink will work it all out into neat little boxes, but it’s not so neat and little when you’re on the receiving end. And I’m done. I’m out of here.”

  He failed to speak.

  “The trouble with him-with both of you-is that it’s all about the money. How much is enough? I ask Ricky that and he can’t answer me. What good is the money if all it buys you is higher walls and more bodyguards?”

  “It’s not the money.”

  “That’s a lie, and you know it.”

  She buttoned the blouse and tucked in the tail, her hand stuffed low into the crotch of her riding pants, and despite himself he wanted to take her right there and then-no better than Ricardo. She’d driven Ricardo half-mad with her open contempt of him. He wondered how he would have fared under such reproach.

  “So go,” he said, the words tasting foul in his mouth.

  Her face brightened beneath the gloom of the tree. “I was thinking the back gate.”

  “Were you?” He realized she wouldn’t have left him like this if she hadn’t seen their hostage. “Life is not without its irony.” He climbed back onto the horse, already feeling a soreness in his ass. His efforts to wrestle-some would say steal-control of “the company” from Ricardo had largely been based on his fantasy of one day winning this woman back for himself. Now, all for naught. She was leaving, with barely a good-bye. If she hadn’t needed something from him would she have lured him out here like this?

  As he rode away, he imagined her calling out to him, imagined her laying herself down beneath that tree and opening herself to him, that same wet, warm pleasure he’d tasted. Once. He imagined her begging him to come away with her.

  But in fact that sound was nothing but a bird or some other wild thing out there alone in the forest, hungry for company, contemplative, mistrustful of all things foreign and new.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  The late-afternoon sky darkened with the threat of storm, leaving ghosts and false images on the small black-and-white television screen.

  The tall wrought-iron fence, supported every thirty feet by a column of rock and mortar, contained the rolling swales of fairways, the out-of-bounds populated with towering cedar, white pine, and hemlock. The bleached sand traps surrounded the greens like neck pillows. The black pavement of a road rolled out like a tongue through the columns that supported a heavy gate over which hung a swirl of metal fashioned in twisted curls forming an M over a solid line with a W reflected beneath it.

  Larson took his eyes off the television monitor. He had parked a rental a half mile down the road from the Puget Sound Energy truck they now occupied. Hampton had done his best to call ahead and find a federal strike force capable of immediate surveillance, but in the end had settled for the Seattle Police. Larson checked his watch. Hampton and Rotem would be landing at Sea-Tac any minute.

  “Wireless cameras?” Hope asked.

  The Seattle sergeant was dressed in pressed jeans and outrageous cowboy boots. “Exactly. Used to be you wanted to watch a place, you parked across the street. Now we’re three-quarters of a mile away, watching the tube.”

  The cop wore his long curly brown hair almost to his shoulders, looking more like an icon from the ’70s than one of Seattle ’s finest. A brown mustache overpowered his mouth, and he had Mediterranean eyes that looked deceptively sleepy.

  He said, “Of course, they’ve probably got cameras, too. Watching that fence, the fairways, the various roads. So what you’ve got yourself right here is a real Kodak moment: cameras watching cameras.”

  Headlights from a passing car illuminated the far left of the four screens, and then moved one to the next. The compound’s gate was seen in the third monitor, where the vehicle passed.

  The sign out front read: MERIDEN MANOR.

  “It looks like a country club,” she said. “But that sign makes it sound like something from the Cotswolds.”

  Larson didn’t appreciate how these two hit it off so quickly. To him it looked more like a fortress and sounded like something made up.

  “If the Romeros are in there, it’s news to us,” the sergeant told Larson.

  “Sorry, I’ve already forgotten your name,” Larson said, maybe a little too intentionally.

  “LaMoia,” the sergeant said. “This is Billy and Duke,” he added, reintroducing the technician and the van’s driver, who sat behind Larson facing out toward the road. “This Meriden Manor is a corporation. If the Romeros are in there, maybe they’ve changed their names or had a couple of Mexican face-lifts, maybe they’ve paid some people off to look the other way, because we should have been all over that, otherwise.”

  “Penny’s in there,” Hope stated. LaMoia looked over at her. “My daughter,” she explained.

  Larson cringed, seeing clearly in LaMoia’s surprised reaction that this was more information than he’d been supplied.

  “Is that so?” He gave Larson a look.

  “It’s entirely speculative,” Larson was quick to point out. Technically, Seattle Police were here at the request of the Justice Department. But those lines could get real fuzzy with a young girl captive and the smell of headlines in the air.

  Hope hit Larson with a stinger of a look, intended to hurt him, but he knew what he was doing and looked right back at her, condemning her for her honesty while begging her to let him handle the sergeant.

  He didn’t have any sense of the future beyond that he wanted to spend it with Hope and Penny, if they would have him. He hadn’t given any thought to what shape that would take, only its importance, the connection with his daughter intense in spite of the fact they’d never met. He’d not even seen a photograph, as Hope never carried one in case she were ever caught or killed by the Romeros.

  “It’s down as an assisted-care facility,” LaMoia told them. “Health care corporation. We’ve got no record of ever having set foot in there-SPD I’m talking about. We got a request in to King County, but I’ll bet it comes back the same. Whoever they are, whatever goes on in there, it’s all theirs. And they’ve kept it nice and private.”

  “That fits for the Romeros.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “And if we need your guys in there?”

  “You give us probable cause, and we can put ERT inside.”

  “Does my daughter count as probable cause?” Hope asked.

  “No,” Larson answered, pained to do so. “Not until I get inside and confirm she’s there.”

  LaMoia explained to her, “He’s federal. Right now there’s some AUSA working up papers to justify his snooping around. For us it’s a different story.”

  “There are bound to be people coming and going,” Larson said, thinking of the meeting. “I’d like to get her”-he indicated Hope-“closer to the gate. She was an eyewitness several years ago. It may help us with probable cause if she can make a face.”

  Hope’s look of total confusion nearly wrecked things. Larson tried to quell her expression with one of his own: a scornful drop of the brow and a hardening of the eyes. Yes, it was a gross exaggeration-a lie-but he needed them out of this truck and closer to the estate. Thankfully she caught this, and stopped herself from saying whatever it was she’d had on the tip of her tongue.

  LaMoia instructed B
illy to reposition the camera that covered the gate. The image moved as the camera-mounted temporarily atop a telephone pole, it appeared-panned to the left. LaMoia pointed out an area on the screen. “You should be able to make your way up into this ground cover by crossing the road right where we are and going it on foot. Through the woods maybe a quarter mile this direction. Just make sure you stop well short of where you might be seen.” He pointed again. “About here. You know the drill.”

  “Yes, I do.” Larson knew LaMoia might offer advice but would not try to stop him. If a federal agent wanted to take a damn fool position, LaMoia was ready to allow him that mistake.

  But not without a word of caution, as it turned out. “If you decide to go in there without a call from the U.S. Attorney’s Office-well, it’s clearly posted as private property. Without some kind of warrant, that makes you the criminal, not those assholes. We get a call, and we gotta come bust you, not them. So think about that.”

  For Larson, it was a matter of getting free ahead of Rotem’s arrival, of establishing that Penny was captive and getting a firsthand look at the setup.

  He, Stubblefield, and Hampton were going in there, and he wanted a firsthand look, not Spectravision.

  The woods were dense. Slow going. Deadfall and thornbushes caused them several detours as Larson fought to maintain his sense of direction. After ten minutes they arrived at a spot with a distant view of the gate. Larson hunkered down.

  “How are we going to get in there?” she whispered, echoing his present thoughts. The two of them were on their haunches with a view of the gate now.

  He wished he’d come alone, that he’d left her safely behind in the step van.

  From within his coat pocket, he removed her original cell phone and its battery.

  “Hey,” she said, recognizing it. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m putting the battery back into it.”

  “I can see that.”

  “We have to consider another possibility.”

  “The first possibility being?”

  “Maybe we weren’t as smart as we thought,” he told her, clearly frustrating her with his obliqueness. “I’m thinking now we may have been suckered into that mess in Florida. That it all went horribly wrong for them but that Markowitz not using a firewall was no mistake.”

  “They wanted us to find him?”

  “They wanted you to find them. To lure you there. What have they ever wanted? You dead, right? Listen,” he said, answering her doubting expression, “it’s just conjecture. But they were so quick to get over to the hotel, and they only sent the one man. I’m just saying there are a lot of things that don’t add up perfectly.”

  “So they’ve lured us here.” She made it a statement.

  “I’m just saying they wouldn’t mind if you walked through that gate.”

  “Penny’s not in there,” she moaned. “Is that what you’re saying? It’s all a trick to get to me?”

  “I hope not, but I can’t rule it out.”

  Indicating the Siemens phone, he said, “The point is, in terms of psychology with guys like this, you work their blind spots as much as possible. You exploit their weaknesses. You feed them what they want, but not when or how they expect it.”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “We’ve kept your phone off, meaning they had no way to locate you,” he said, clicking the battery in place. “And we’ll keep it off until we want them knowing you’re here. At that point, I’m convinced they’ll try to track you down and kill you.”

  She laughed at that. “Whose side are you on?”

  He placed the phone into the pocket of his black windbreaker, waiting to activate it.

  “Once it’s on, it shouldn’t take them long to know where you are. At that point, if Penny’s in there, they’ll want to reinforce her position, or even attempt to move her.”

  She speculated, “And by doing so, they reveal her to us.” She nodded, understanding his thinking now. “And if they don’t react as you want them to, aren’t we seriously outnumbered? I count five of us, one of whom’s a video technician and another a driver.”

  “There’re more than that,” Larson assured her. “The radio tech had a list in front of him with seven call signs-handles-written out. He keeps LaMoia in radio contact with his teams.”

  “I didn’t catch that.”

  “That could mean seven to fifteen or twenty of their guys around here someplace,” he speculated. “There are only two ways to do something like this. You go in small and quiet or big and noisy. If you go big, you have to go very big.”

  “And you obviously don’t like that.”

  “My squad is small, but we work very fast.”

  “Hampton and Stubblefield.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So we wait for them?” Her voice returned to anguish.

  Headlights.

  Larson reached out and placed a hand on her forearm. She was unusually warm, the shirt damp from the thick air.

  The headlights were from a car on the inside of the compound. It slowed as it approached. The gate opened-perhaps automatically, perhaps not-and a sedan pulled through, turning out onto the road. A high-end Mercedes four-door. It stopped at a stop sign twenty yards to the right and then continued on.

  When it was well out of earshot, he tugged on her and whispered, “Okay, let’s go.”

  She shook off his grip. “Go where?”

  “Back to the van.”

  “I want to stay here!” she protested. “This is the closest I’ve been to her. I’m not leaving.”

  “You’re cold.”

  “We stay here until your friends arrive. I’m not going back to that van.”

  He stripped off his windbreaker and made her accept it. It was heavy on the side with the phone.

  “When do we turn on the phone?”

  “Soon.”

  In a sudden burst of light, the gatehouse and entrance were illuminated as a pair of overhead lights came on.

  For the second time he noticed the ornate ironwork above the gate. But this time it wasn’t on a small TV monitor in the back of a stuffy van that smelled like a locker room.

  His breath caught in a gasp as he picked up the significance of the M and the W encircled in an oval of twisted wrought iron.

  He mumbled, thinking aloud. “That’s not a W. It’s an inverted M. Meriden Manor.”

  Hope followed his line of sight and turned her attention to the logo as well. “Yeah?”

  “M,” he said, “and M.” Sounding foolish. “ Meriden Manor.” He made the fingers of both hands into Ws and connected them.

  “Yeah? So?” She didn’t see it.

  He spread his fingers, making what vaguely looked like a diamond. Like a bowtie.

  “The scar on the cutter’s forearm.”

  Then she saw it.

  A gleaming razor’s edge sparked across Larson’s memory. He felt it like a clean cut down his spine.

  “I think we’ve got the right place.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Philippe Romero steered the sleek Mercedes sedan onto the I-5 southbound ramp and located the abandoned truck stop along a dark, winding road that aimed west toward a seaside town that had once been a lumber port. The truck stop’s back lot consisted of a pale, claylike mud and deep potholes that looked to him like open wounds in the moonlit surface. Derelict gas pumps, now nothing but sawed-off pipes protruding from the ground into hulks of rusting sheet metal, rose like headstones from the ooze.

  Philippe pulled around back of the boarded-up restaurant and mini-mart, per instructions, facing a rusted-out Dodge pickup truck and an eighteen-wheeler with Iowa plates. He carried a Beretta semiauto in the door’s leather pouch, a round chambered and ready to fire. He had another weapon, a.22 meant for target practice, tucked into the small of his back inside the black leather jacket. A hunting knife warmed in his right sock.

  He pulled alongside the tractor-trailer and a moment later a male figure ste
pped out of the broken-down Dodge. Paolo came toward him in the headlights. He opened the door and climbed inside. His face glowed blue in the light of the dashboard. He smelled foul. His face looked like he’d bobbed for apples in a deep fat fryer.

  “You were smart to call,” Philippe said. “We don’t need a stolen eighteen-wheeler on the property.”

  “You want her in the trunk?”

  “No. Put her in the backseat with the kiddy lock on. We’re decent people.”

  Paolo didn’t move.

  “She’s okay, right?”

  “Yeah, she’s fine.”

  “You haven’t done anything to her, right?”

  Paolo leveled his blister-encrusted eye at the driver. “I’m not going to hurt this kid. You understand me? You want that done, you’re going to have to ask someone else.”

  “Okay, okay. You can relax now. We’ll get you fed and cleaned up, all right? You smell like low tide and your face looks like you’re still doing Halloween.”

  “I stay with the girl.”

  “You do what I tell you to do.” Philippe felt his hand slip toward the leather pouch. It brushed the stock of the gun. “We’ve got a hell of a night ahead of us. Don’t make trouble for me, Paolo. You’ve done good. Keep it that way. We’ll get that face looked at. That’s got to hurt.”

  “I’ve got pills.”

  “Get the girl.” Philippe reached down to the dash and switched off the car’s interior light so it would not come on when a door was opened. “And no names when she’s in the car. You got that?”

  Paolo didn’t answer. He climbed out of the car, shutting his door, but then opening the back door a moment later.

  Philippe leaned over. He felt the.22 at his back. “Put her behind me, so you can keep an eye on her.”

  Paolo shut that door and came around and opened the opposite door. He moved heavily, under the weight of great fatigue.

  Philippe put all the windows down to air it out.

  It stank in there.