by J. A. Jance
As Ali put the car in reverse and turned to see where she was going, a giant of a man materialized from behind one of the nearby trees. He reached in through the open window and grabbed Cami. Using only one hand, he managed to wrestle her out of her seat belt and drag her, screaming and struggling, out through the open window. The window control buttons were right there on Ali’s armrest, but by the time Ali realized that, Cami was half in and half out of the car, and she couldn’t touch them. A hard clap on the head silenced Cami. As she slumped in the man’s arms, Ali saw the gun in his left hand.
“Who are you?” Ali demanded.
“Who I am doesn’t matter,” he snarled. “What matters is this: You give me a ride and we go where I say. Now, unlock the back door here. The girl and I will ride in back. If you try anything—anything at all—she dies. Got it?”
Ali hesitated, but only for a moment. Cami was in mortal danger at that moment. And who had put her there? Ali Reynolds had. Ali glanced at the house to see if one of the officers had heard Cami’s scream. No one appeared at a door or peered out a window, so apparently they hadn’t. If Cami Lee was going to be saved, Ali Reynolds would have to be the one to do it.
“Got it,” she said.
“Well?” he demanded impatiently. “Are you going to unlock the door or not?”
“Just a minute,” Ali said. “It’s not my car. I need to find the right button.”
She made a show of pushing buttons, raising random windows up and down. By the time she finally unlocked the door, Cami had come to enough that she was the one who opened it. Her captor gripped the terrified girl with one hand while holding a handgun that looked like a .38 to Cami’s head. Her eyes were open wide with fear and pleading for help. She was obviously terrified.
Once the door opened, the man lifted Cami off the ground and shoved her into the vehicle. He had to push her bodily across the bench seat before closing the door behind him. In the split second he was preoccupied with that, Ali managed to extract the Glock from her small-of-back holster. Once she had the weapon out, she slipped it under her thigh where it was out of sight but still close at hand.
“All right,” the man said. “We’re in. Now turn around and get going.”
Ali listened for the distinctive sound of seat belts locking, but none came. The man with the gun wasn’t belted in, but then, neither was Cami.
Ali took her time and made several tries before finally executing the U-turn, hoping all the while that either Detective Carpenter or the deputy would emerge from the house and see what was happening. No one did.
“Where to?”Ali asked once they started back down Holzmann Road.
“Away from here,” he said. “The place is crawling with cops, and leaving in a cop car seems like a good idea to me.”
There was indistinct radio chatter on the radio. Nothing Ali heard told her that the roadblocks had been dismantled. She hoped they hadn’t been, but in an attempt to distract the man from what was being said over the air, Ali turned herself into a regular chatty Cathy.
“They caught your buddy,” she said conversationally. “You know, the guy in the Hummer?”
“They caught Julio? So what?” he said. “He’s got connections around here. He’ll get out.”
“I don’t think so,” Ali said. “He killed the four drivers,” Ali said.
A quick check in the rearview mirror told her that hearing about the dead drivers had blindsided the guy. “Julio killed them?”
“Yup,” Ali said. “Gunned them down right there in the warehouse. Your friend Julio sounds like the kind of guy who wouldn’t want to leave any witnesses behind,” she added. “Once he had all those LEGO boxes, maybe he was going to take you out, too.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“He said he’d come get me once the trucks were taken care of. All I needed was time to finish what I’d started. The thing is it took longer than I expected to get the old man to tell me where Hans was hiding.”
“You killed both of them?” Ali asked.
“Of course I did. Hans was a cheating son of a bitch,” he said. “That’s the whole reason I came here—to teach him a lesson.”
With his every casual admission, Ali slipped deeper into despair. If their captor was this forthcoming, it probably meant that the other two officers—both Detective Carpenter and the deputy—were dead as well. This guy was spilling out all the details because he had no intention of leaving Ali and Cami alive to tell the tale. Still, right at that moment, Ali knew her best option was to keep him talking.
“Cheating you out of stolen LEGO sets?” Ali asked.
“Look, me and Hans were supposedly partners,” he said. “It turns out he’s been robbing me blind the whole time, and I only just now found out. Those old sets he had stowed away here—ones I knew nothing about—are worth a fortune. Who would do something like that?”
“My father told me once there’s no honor among thieves,” Ali said. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo.”
“Shut up,” he said.
So Ali shut up. By then they were nearing the end of Holzmann Road and approaching Highway 92. Creeping up to the stop sign, she paused and looked both ways. There wasn’t a single vehicle in sight in either direction. That probably meant that the roadblocks were still in place.
“Which way?” Ali asked. “Right or left?”
“Suit yourself.”
It suited Ali to turn left and head back toward Bisbee. She knew exactly where that roadblock was located, and she also knew a little about the lay of the land. She suspected the one near Bisbee was closer to Holzmann Road than the one near the river. Ali expected that as soon as the guy saw the roadblock, he’d go ballistic. At least, she hoped that was what would happen. With his attention focused elsewhere, maybe she’d have a chance—her one and only chance—to use the gun.
“So you like to play with LEGOs, then?” she asked, ignoring the fact that he had told her to shut up. “You must.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about LEGO sets,” he growled. “I was in it for the money, and that jackass Hans was scamming me out of some of my share and probably other people out of theirs, too.”
That’s when Ali realized this was more than just a one- or two-guy conspiracy. There were lots of people involved.
“So you showed him,” she said.
“I sure as hell did. Taquito had hauled stuff for us before. The first time I saw him down on the docks, picking up something I knew nothing about, I worried that something was up. After that, I kept an eye on him. This time around I kept track of the ghost pallets, and it’s a good thing I did. Turns out there were a couple of extras that Hans had hidden away. Everybody knew about the extra pallets, but Hans was the only one who knew about those extra extra pallets. This time, when Taquito showed up down on the docks when there wasn’t a shipment scheduled for us, I knew it was time to pull the trigger.”
“Are you saying you shot him yourself?” Ali asked.
The guy laughed at that. “I mean I pulled the trigger in a manner of speaking. You meet a lot of useful people in a job like mine—you know, people who can get stuff done or who know people who can get stuff done. Years ago, one of them put me in touch with Julio, who happens to be a very useful guy from Naco, Sonora. He also happens to have all kinds of connections. When I told him what was up, he told me he knew of a place close to Hans’s dad’s place—an empty warehouse—where we could store the stuff temporarily once we laid hands on it. He found the drivers, located the trucks, handled the whole thing.”
“Including shooting Taquito?”
“Sure. I put a GPS tracker on the bumper of his truck and knew his every move. By the time he came through Palominas, Julio was ready and waiting.”
They were nearing town. Ali saw, to her relief, that the roadblock was still in place. With the risky maneuve
r she had in mind, she needed to have all other vehicles safely off the road. The man in the backseat spotted the roadblock almost as soon as she did. He leaned forward in his seat, peering warily out the windshield. “What the hell? Turn around,” he ordered. “Go the other way.”
“But they’ll see us,” Ali warned. “They’ll come after us.”
“I don’t care. Go the other way. Now.”
Ali slowed and put the car into a careful U-turn. She briefly considered ramming an abutment on a nearby bridge crossing a dry wash, but she chose not to. With Cami in the back and not wearing a seat belt, she was afraid to try it. Moments later, with the Yukon back on the pavement and westbound once more, Ali checked in the rearview mirror, hoping one of the cops at the roadblock had noticed the turning vehicle and come after them, but so far no one had. As her mother, Edie Larson, liked to say, “God helps those who help themselves.” This time around, the only help available was Ali herself.
Ali’s mother also despised liars in the worst way, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and lie she would—to the very best of her ability.
Ali felt the Glock pressing painfully against the back of her leg, but she wasn’t ready to bring it out into the open. She had already calculated what her next moves would be, and she couldn’t afford to have her only weapon get away from her and go clattering around on the floorboard of the front seat. No, when the time came, she needed to have that gun in her hand and nowhere else.
She made a show of peering into the rearview mirror. “Oops,” she said aloud after a long moment. “Here they come.”
As the man behind her leaned forward again, peering into the rearview mirror to check for himself, Ali slammed on the brakes. The sudden change in momentum threw him forward against the back of the front seat. Cami, too, was propelled forward. Praying that the man’s .38 had been knocked from his grip, Ali used both hands to pull the Yukon out of a 360-degree spin and bring it to an abrupt stop.
“You bitch!” he screamed behind her. “I’ll kill you both.”
Feeling a sudden pressure against the back of her seat, Ali knew for sure that her wild zigzagging had done the job. The man had crawled behind her seat and was reaching for his fallen weapon. That meant he was now on Cami’s side of the SUV. Without a moment’s hesitation, Ali pulled the sweat-covered Glock out from under her leg, raised it, and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet cleanly through the safety screen. The shot, fired at very close range, plugged him in the shoulder. Ali knew at once that it wasn’t a fatal wound—she hadn’t intended for it to be fatal—but the shot had succeeded in taking that damned .38 out of play on a permanent basis.
With the man bleeding, writhing, and howling in pain, Ali opened the back door. The .38 had come to rest against the doorjamb. Ali immediately grabbed it and flung it into the underbrush. Then, with a strength she didn’t know she possessed, she took Cami by the arm and dragged her from the vehicle. Once Cami was safely on the ground, Ali slammed the door shut. The Tahoe was a cop car after all. Anybody who was imprisoned inside the back passenger seat behind the safety divider and with the doors locked wouldn’t be going anywhere until someone on the outside opened the door.
Cami simply sank down on the pavement as though she didn’t trust her legs to support her.
“Are you hurt?” Ali asked.
“You shot him!” Cami exclaimed breathlessly. “How did you do that?”
“First off, you have to have a gun,” Ali said. “And if you’re going to keep working on this job, you’re not only going to have one, you’re going to learn to use it. Now, call 911. Tell them we’re about two miles east of the Bisbee roadblock with a gunshot victim in the back of Sheriff Brady’s Tahoe. In the meantime, I’d better call B. I have a feeling all of this is going to take time, and I don’t think we’ll want to have that helicopter on standby while everything is being sorted out.”
“Hey,” B. said cheerfully when he answered. “I was worried about you and I’m glad to hear your voice. Are you on your way?”
“Not exactly,” Ali said. “Cami and I may need some help getting back home.”
“Why?” B. asked, sounding suddenly worried. “Did something go haywire with the helicopter? Did you wreck the rental car?”
“No to both,” Ali said. “You’ll be happy to know that we seem to have solved at least part of your missing-LEGO problem, and I just shot one of the responsible parties.”
“You did what?” B. demanded.
“You heard me,” Ali said. “I shot the guy. He’s not dead. He’ll be fine eventually. Cami just called 911, and the cops are coming this way even as we speak. I’ll have to tell you the rest of it later. Just get in the car and come get us. Please.”
• • •
Joanna dragged her weary body into the house a full twenty hours after leaving it. Butch was already sound asleep. She’d called him earlier to tell him what was going on. Now, with him snoring softly beside her, Joanna lay on the bed and tried to force the day’s ugly images out of her head.
What had started out as a single dead truck driver the day before had turned into the wholesale slaughter of eight people. The first victim, Alberto “Taquito” Mendoza, a small-time hood who regularly hauled stolen goods for Hans Holzmann and some of his coconspirators, had been shot to pieces gangster-style on the far side of the San Pedro.
Then there were the four truck drivers gunned down together in what was probably a single volley of bullets from an AK-47. It would be a long time before Joanna would be able to wipe that bloody carnage from her memory bank. They’d been slaughtered, mostly likely with the same weapon a Naco, Sonora, gangster wannabe had been carrying when Spike knocked him to the ground and chewed a hole in his wrist.
So far Joanna’s people had managed to identify only one of the slain drivers. Undocumented immigrants, they had been recruited from the day-laborer pool at a Home Depot store in Tucson. None of them had been carrying driver’s licenses at the time, so three of their names were still a mystery. The one they had identified was “known to law enforcement” due to three separate DUIs. He had been identified through fingerprint records.
Next came Helmer and Hans Holzmann, father and son. As far as Joanna knew, Helmer was a good man who had raised a wretch for a son. Ernie Carpenter and a relatively new member of the department, Deputy Jim Rider, had found the bodies of both Helmer and Hans Holzmann in the barn behind the house. Helmer’s body exhibited clear signs of torture. Both men had been bound, gagged, and then shot to death execution-style.
And who was the mastermind behind all this? A lowlife named Lester Kraft who turned out to be pissed-off longshoreman from Long Beach who supplemented his “meager” $100,000-a-year salary by joining forces with group led by a corrupt U.S. Customs guy to smuggle contraband LEGO sets into the country. The fact that Hans Holzmann had been caught cheating on one of his erstwhile partners-in-crime was what had set this whole ugly killing spree in motion. Lester had hired a thug from Naco, Sonora, Julio Archuleta, to do the job, and he had evidently been responsible for most of the wet work—with the exception of Helmer and Hans. Archuleta was someone who had long been a person of interest in any number of criminal enterprises in southeastern Arizona, but this was the first time anyone had been able to catch him red-handed. Thank you, Spike.
Joanna still thought the whole idea of people being killed over LEGO sets was utterly preposterous, but those eight bodies lined up in Kendra Baldwin’s morgue, awaiting autopsies, were all too real.
At last Joanna’s brain shut down. She fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. Her eyes blinked open in the morning to see the sun shining in through her window high enough for her to understand that she was already late for work. When Butch opened the bedroom door, she knew exactly what he was doing—something he often did: bringing her that first morning cup of coffee. But this morning the very smell of it sent her racing into the bathroom, retc
hing repeatedly into the toilet bowl.
Once she flushed the toilet and cleaned her face, she opened the door to find him standing there, still holding the coffee, his face awash in worry. “What’s wrong? Are you sick?” he asked. “What can I do?”
“Get rid of the coffee,” she said. “I can’t stand the smell of it.”
“But you love coffee.”
“Not right now I don’t.”
He turned on his heel and took the coffee away. When he came back, he was grinning from ear to ear. “Are you really?” he asked, taking her in his arms and holding her close.
“I think so,” Joanna groaned into his chest. “But when you go to the store later, pick up a pregnancy test. We need to know for sure.”
“What’s your reelection committee going to think?”
“It’s none of their business. What do you think?”
“I’m delighted,” Butch said. “And do you know what I want?”
“What?”
“A little girl with bright red hair and green eyes,” Butch said, “just like her mother’s.”
Follow Ali Reynolds as she investigates the most extreme crimes.
Don't miss J.A. Jance's next installment in the Ali Reynolds series, Cold Betrayal, where Ali finds out revenge isn’t the only dish served cold. . .
Cold Betrayal
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* * *
In this “engrossing” (Publishers Weekly) thriller from New York Times bestselling author J.A. Jance, journalist- turned-investigator Ali Reynolds unearths a cold case that puts her in danger from a deadly arsonist.
Moving Target
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Can Ali Reynolds piece together enough clues to connect a frightened teenager, two dead bodies, and $300,000, before the body count rises?