Inside, the television had either lost its picture or gone extremely fuzzy. That would be significant. Larson knew protection work. Live by the tube, die by the boob tube.
The darkness left nothing but shifting shapes and made the going difficult as he worked his way over the edge of the roof. He squatted, prepared to jump.
He could hear grumbling and bumps from inside. He waited.
When the front floodlights popped on, Larson let himself drop to the carpet of spongy pine needles.
A male voice complained loudly to the others inside. “Where’s the fucking cable again?”
Larson grabbed the club like a bat and stepped up to the plate.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
DELMONICO’S DELIVERS
Hope read the name on the back of the panel truck, her patience draining. She stabbed the small keys on the BlackBerry, spelling out:
caterer? @ gate
and sent the message to Larson.
She’d not returned to the van as Lars had asked. The next time she saw Penny, she’d throw herself onto the road if necessary. She was too close now to go sit with the boys while they played with her life. She’d been through too many months of such treatment. That part of her life was over.
The panel truck was kept waiting while the gate guard, dressed head to toe in black, circled it. Finally arriving at the back, he rolled open the back door and shined a flashlight inside. Hope was prepared for a team of military operatives to storm out, take down the guard, and open the gate. Instead, the powerful flashlight beam found stacked plastic boxes, collapsible tables, flats with serving trays, and bags of ice. His inspection concluded, the guard pulled the rolling door back down. In his haste, he did not secure it, and as he rounded toward the gate, the back door bounced open, first a crack, then a foot or more.
Hope looked left and right. Nothing.
With Penny inside the compound and this truck her best chance at getting inside, she slipped out of the bushes, used the truck to screen her from the gatehouse, and sprinted across the road. She reached the truck’s partially open back door before the gate had fully opened.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
The guard rounded the corner, looking up toward the eave, straining to follow the thin black TV cable.
Larson, both hands gripping the broken stick like a Louisville Slugger, stepped into the swing and put the man’s unsuspecting forehead into the nosebleeds. The guard fell on his back with a whomph of released air, clearly unconscious before he landed.
Larson considered tying him up, gagging him, but feared he had no time. If he could bag all three guards, then he’d return to this one. He rolled the man onto his side, so he wouldn’t drown in his own vomit, and left him.
With no choice but to risk it, he entered the glare and hurried up the wobbly front steps. He thumped an elbow onto the door and said in a gruff, intentionally muffled voice, “Hey, help me out here…”
As the door came open, he thrust the broken limb like a battering ram into the gut of the guard, connecting just below the V of the rib cage. He stepped inside, past the one staggering back, and clipped the skull of the next, who, at that moment, had been kneeling in front of the TV, his back to the door. The one behind him went for a gun.
Larson broke the man’s wrist with the stick and, as he cried out, dimmed his lights by breaking his jaw. The guard’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he slumped. Out cold.
Sweating profusely now, Larson surveyed the fallen. He kicked the door shut, and breathed for what felt like the first time. He rounded up weapons and pocketed their magazines.
He’d bought himself a few minutes at most.
The guard with the broken wrist moaned himself awake, grabbing at his flapping hand. Larson raised the club above his head and lowered it like a camper going after a snake.
The shabby interior reeked of years of cigarettes and beer. It reminded Larson of a crappy college dorm lounge. A Formica galley kitchen offered a two-burner stovetop, a microwave, and a fridge under tube lighting. The building’s modular design left the kitchen and living room at one end, a bath, and two other doors off a narrow hallway lit by an overhead fixture missing at least one bulb. Larson’s heart remained in his throat as he carried the bloodied club with him down the hall. The doors seemed to stretch farther away the more he walked.
He threw the first open, club hoisted and ready.
Two sets of bunk beds, complete with sheets and wool Pendletons. Signs of bachelor life: Ashtrays that needed emptying. Copies of men’s magazines with cover shots of bare-breasted starlets. Soiled laundry in a far corner, looking like an animal’s nest.
Clear.
He hurried to the second room, threw this door open, expecting either the fourth guard or the expectant eyes of the two kids. Another bunk room, not dissimilar to the first.
No kids.
He tried to wrap his mind around all this. The speed with which the two guards had fled the main lodge had convinced him they’d taken the bait of Hope’s phone coming online.
The most pressing thing now was to buy himself time to find the children. He could bind and gag all three guards, leave the one out back, perhaps behind the trash bins, the other two here in the bunkhouse.
He felt a rumble in his legs and knew it to be a vehicle. He switched off all the interior lights and cracked open the front door in time to see only the back of a panel truck up at the top of the hill, rounding the north corner of the lodge. He couldn’t make out its writing on the back from here.
He shut the door, set down the club, and grabbed for Hope’s mobile.
caterer? @ gate
Party time or a Trojan horse, courtesy of Rotem? Something was wrong: Hope should have been supplying him with more information than this.
Where to go from here?
He spotted two rolls of silver duct tape-further evidence of the kids, or wishful thinking?
No matter, he would put them to good use.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
“What the fuck is this?”
Philippe watched the panel van disappear around the far corner of the lodge. But his attention was elsewhere, out into the night, down the hill to the bunkhouse, which he couldn’t see from here.
Paolo would reach the bunkhouse any minute. Philippe had the rest of his guards patrolling the manor. Representatives from the other families were due any time now. All this should have made him feel more confident than he did. But the mark’s cell phone coming alive while on this property did not sit well. That had yet to be explained, and was the most troubling of his concerns.
Ricardo, older than him by a year, but technically his nephew, answered from behind him. “Jimmy Nans decided to make a little contribution to your meeting.”
“I don’t want his contribution.”
Philippe had never learned to feel comfortable around Ricardo. Never had. Never would.
“Not the way to play host,” Ricardo chided.
“They’ll set up upstairs. Then I don’t want them anywhere near the meeting.”
Philippe decided to follow the van around the building and make sure his guys were on it. “Where you going?” Ricardo called out. “You got something going with Katie?” Philippe stopped in his tracks, then decided that the worst response was any at all.
“She’s a nervous twitch. Can’t stop moving around the house. You know what’s up with that?”
“Katrina is miserable, Ricky,” Philippe answered, using a nickname Ricardo loathed. “Everyone around here knows that. We’ve known it for a long, long time. But at least you don’t have to worry about losing her.”
“How’s that?” Ricardo asked, suddenly all the more curious.
“Because you never had her.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Prostrate, Hope peered out of the back of the catering truck. By the time it rounded the second corner of the lodge and descended down a small ramp, she anticipated its coming to a full stop and slid out, feet first. As her shoes made co
ntact, she fell onto the pavement, tucked into a ball, and rolled an ugly back somersault. She quickly came to her feet and stuffed herself into a cave of steel formed between two massive Dumpsters. The catering truck continued another thirty or forty feet, its brakes squealing as it stopped.
Odds were that Penny was somewhere inside this building.
She heard a male voice first: “Stupid shit…” Then the rolling open of the truck’s back door, the driver angry at the gate guard for leaving it unlatched.
A smallish man not with the catering crew walked within inches of her and started shouting at people. Hope leaned back, put her hand into something disgusting and had to bite her tongue to keep from groaning out loud.
The one barking orders explained that the caterers would be let inside. The back door would be opened for them. If caught anywhere in the building other than the basement or the first-floor dining room, they were told they’d spend the rest of the night in the truck, under guard, and could say good-bye to any tip.
“And I’m a big tipper,” he said, his voice fading into the building.
She wondered if she could pull off being part of the catering crew. She picked out the voices of two women and a man, all three having arrived in the truck, she assumed. The back door now open, they went about unloading the truck. Hope sat up into a crouch, brushed herself off, and poised herself.
Prepared to head to the back of the truck, pick up a crate and act like she knew what she was doing, she willed her feet to move, but they remained frozen to the pavement. Terrified, she collapsed and hunkered back down.
She couldn’t do it.
It was then, sitting there between the two Dumpsters, with only a wedge of visible landscape and sky in front of her, looking out across an empty golf green where sprinklers made rain with random precision, that she spotted a flicker of movement high in a tree at a great distance. She saw a low stone pillar that supported the wrought-iron fence. This tree was on the far side of that fence.
There! Another similar movement, about twenty yards to the left of the other, also high in a tree.
She stared and stared. No more movement.
And then she understood.
Hands trembling, she removed the BlackBerry, shielded it carefully before lighting up its screen, and began typing.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Having taped and gagged the three guards, Larson finished with the unconscious one outside and moved across the road and higher up the hill in order to see three cars arriving in succession. As Larson finished binding the guard outside, the headlights of arriving cars lit the treetops, the light dancing and shifting as it advanced one crown to the next. Criminal royalty, if Rotem’s information were correct.
Frustrated at having used up time and energy, Larson wondered where Penny could be hidden. A search of the trailer had yielded nothing.
He scrambled out from under some bushes and broke out onto an open fairway, dividing his attention between several things at once. The house. The edges of the fairway. The fairway itself. The possibility of more guards, people, cameras, dogs.
He caught movement well down the fairway and slightly to his left, moving right to left. He lay on the damp grass.
A lone, dark figure-female, he thought, judging by her walk- moved quickly between two large white pools-sand traps, he realized. He rose up slightly onto his hands and, as he did so, caught sight of a massive roof, well out of bounds from the golf course. A barn.
He added this up. A woman, not using any flashlight, heading toward the barn. Nearing midnight… Eccentric at best. Secretive came to mind.
To check on sleeping children? he wondered.
Yet another car pulled up to the lodge, another passenger dropped off. That made five or six just in the past ten minutes.
Then, on the cart path, not thirty feet away, a man’s silhouette. Larson angled his face away from the man, to hide the white of his skin, while he simultaneously hid his hands beneath him. Larson froze.
Judging only by sound, Larson determined the man continued walking a few more yards. Larson braced for his own discovery, plotting a course toward the woods.
“Katie!” the man called out.
Larson saw that the woman in the distance stopped. She seemed to turn but then moved on, continuing down and out of sight, toward the barn.
“Shit.” The man seemed to give up. The soles of his shoes ground sand onto the cart path as he headed back toward the manor house at a brisk pace.
The substitute cell phone vibrated in his pocket. Larson rolled onto his hip to put it completely beneath him, compressed and silent.
The footsteps stopped. “Who’s there?” the man called out toward Larson. But his mobile chirped and he answered it. Over the device’s speakerphone a man announced, “The visitors have all arrived. Assignments, everyone.”
The man’s footfalls faded as he headed away from Larson and back toward the lodge.
Larson scrambled a good forty yards and into some woods. Well concealed, he withdrew the mobile, reading the text message sent from his own phone.
2 men in trees. Police?
He found the message in some ways welcome, but disturbing as well. If she was in the police van, shouldn’t she know if these were police or not?
Torn between the confusion of the message and his instincts that this woman he’d just seen would lead him to Penny, he crept to the edge of the woods and then hurried after her toward the barn.
Such a perfect place to hide a child, he thought. All little girls love horses, and a few errant noises from a barn would not attract attention. Wouldn’t surprise anybody.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
“What have we got?” Rotem asked the long-haired detective who sat at the console in the back of the now-crowded Puget Sound Energy truck.
The civilian, Billy, operated the equipment. The long-haired plainclothes homicide dick, who had a wiseass disposition, mustache, and exotic-skinned, cream-colored cowboy boots, clearly considered himself in charge.
Rotem had his work cut out for him.
The man on the green nylon camp stool to Hampton’s left was the deputy Special Agent in Charge, a man by the name of Forsyth. He wore a business suit with a blue handkerchief in the breast pocket. The heels of his polished Oxfords showed a great deal of wear. Pronated. He had a fairly good attitude-unlike the detective-able to let Rotem tug the reins. The wheelman was an SPD officer whose name Rotem had missed. He occupied the driver’s seat on the other side of a blackout curtain that lay on Hampton’s back like a cloak. There were two opposing consoles of electronics. The men gathered around the four television monitors as if watching a Sunday game.
“Birds aloft,” Billy reported. “We’ve got two men in place with visual. They’re looking over the wall, down into the compound.”
“Can we put them on speaker?” asked Rotem.
With the flip of a few switches, everyone in the van could not only hear the spoken words of the two Emergency Response Team officers, both Seattle police, both twenty feet up trees overlooking the compound, but the fourth television monitor now carried fuzzy green-and-white still images returned from the electronic-assisted night-vision binoculars each man wore.
The officer described a quiet golf course with a main clubhouse beyond. Those in the van saw still images of two, possibly three, individuals off-loading a panel truck.
“It might be food,” an electronic voice reported.
“Copy that,” the other field officer said, agreeing.
Rotem double-checked his watch. A catering truck and five cars had entered the premises in the past fifteen minutes. The information they’d gotten on the meeting-the auction-appeared good. A small but necessary step forward.
The long-haired detective took a call on his mobile, stripping the headset away to allow himself to hear. He ended the call, turned to Rotem, and reported, “Plates on the third car come back a livery service with known OC ownership.”
Organized Crime. Looking bet
ter. What they were seeing fit what they’d been told: an exclusive compound; luxury cars and limos arriving. The fact that there might be one or more child hostages on-site was the one wild card on Rotem’s mind.
“We still need probable cause,” the long-haired detective said, “in order for my guys to go in. A license plate is not going to cut it.”
“Agreed,” said Forsyth. “Let’s work on that.” He looked over at Rotem as if he might pull a rabbit out of his hat.
“You’ve got a deputy inside,” the long-haired detective said. “Has anyone tried calling him?” This slight to Rotem and his operation did not go unnoticed.
“We have,” Hampton answered. Stubblefield groaned a complaint from the passenger seat on the other side of the blackout curtain. He was far too big to fit into the back with the others. “He’s not picking up.”
“His presence remains unconfirmed at this point,” Rotem said. He racked his brain for probable cause, even a suspicion that might entitle him to appeal to the AUSA for a phone warrant.
One of the two ERT operatives checked in.
The detective, a hand to his headphone, informed Rotem of the communication. “We got a set of high tension lines crossing the property,” he said.
“I’ve forgotten your name, Sergeant,” Rotem finally admitted.
He lifted an ear of the headset. “LaMoia,” he said. “No sweat.”
“What about these power lines?” Rotem asked.
“High-voltage overheads crossing the property. Might be for irrigating the course. Thing about tension lines… they’re well-hung.” A knowing smile curved under the mustache. “As in they’re strong enough to support an adult male-two adult males to be more precise.” He added, “My guys go in suspended from Skyjacks-motorized rubber-wheeled pulleys-so there’s a bit of a noise factor, hum of the motors and all, but it’s not much.”
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