The Stolen (2008)
Page 27
hallway. Ray Benjamin managed to dive for cover, but
two of the bullets struck his sidekick square in the chest.
The younger man went toppling backward, his back
smacking against the wall, where he slid down, leaving
a bloody smear.
Benjamin was gone. I heard footsteps running toward
the elevators. He was getting away.
I knelt down by Curt. His hand was pressing down on the
wound, hard, but blood was still seeping through his fingers.
“Benjamin,” Curt said, the pain evident in his voice.
“Don’t let the fucker get away.”
Amanda appeared beside us. She’d taken off her fleece,
then rolled it up and tied it around Curt’s leg. He howled
in pain as she pulled the loop together, trying to stem the
flow of blood.
I looked at them both. Amanda had taken her cell phone
out. She said, “I called 911. Make sure he doesn’t hurt
anybody else.”
I nodded, then sprinted for the exit door. My pulse
raced as I looked for the stairwell. A diagram of the floor
plan was on the wall; the stairs were just to my left. I ran
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for them, banged the door open and hurtled down the stairs
as fast as I could.
By the time I got to the first floor I was out of breath.
When I shoved open the stairwell door, I could hear panic
in the lobby. Several people were screaming, a rolling cart
was overturned and an elderly man looked to be unconscious. I ran toward the lobby exit, but then another thunderous gunshot exploded in the night, and I dove behind a
marble wall for protection. I waited a minute, unsure of
what to do, then took a few quick breaths and ran for the
exit.
As I ran into the warm evening air, I heard a car’s
ignition turn on and a pair of brake lights come on at the
other end of the parking lot. I ran for it, saw a dark BMW
peeling backward. It backed up into a pool of light cast by
a lamp, and I read the license plate numbers, punched
them into my cell phone.
I couldn’t chase Benjamin’s car. The fight was over. I
had to see how my friends were.
Just as I ran back into the lobby, the elevator door
opened and out came Curt Sheffield, hobbling, leaning on
Amanda for support. The fleece was soaked through with
blood. I heard sirens approaching from outside. I ran to
Curt.
“Christ, man, how is it?”
“I’ll live,” he said through gritted teeth. Then he took
one hand from Amanda’s shoulder and grabbed my shirt.
“The Reeds,” he said. “They’re gone.”
“But we found this,” Amanda said. She pulled a man’s
leather wallet from her pocket. “It was down at the other
end of the hall, through a set of double doors. I thought I
heard another noise, like several people running down the
stairs. It’s Robert Reed’s. They must have been approach-274
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ing the room. He was going for his room key, then dropped
it when he heard the gunshots. The key is still inside.”
“I saw them,” Curt said, the pain evident on his face.
“Damn it, if only I could run…”
Amanda helped him sit, kept pressure on his wound.
I took the wallet, opened it. The key card was nestled
inside one of the slits inside. I went through the rest of it.
Credit cards. Driver’s license. And a small slot for photos.
I opened it up. There was a picture inside that looked
awfully familiar.
The shot was of a young boy. It was taken from behind,
from a close distance. There was nothing special about the
shot. The boy’s face was turned away and he was in midstride.
I slipped the photo from the wallet and turned it over.
On the back of the photo was written one word.
Remember.
36
Curt had seen the Reeds approaching from the other end
of the hallway. The family looked happy. Curt recognized
Robert from his driver’s license photo. And when he saw
that Robert was with a woman and two children, he knew
for sure that this was the family we’d been searching for.
I confirmed with the hotel restaurant that the Reeds had
finished a late supper just a few minutes earlier. Then
they’d gone upstairs. They must have seen Curt lying
outside their room, blood everywhere. That’s when they’d
run.
On the way to the hospital, Curt said they’d likely seen
the body at the other end of the hall, as well. If so, they
probably recognized the dead man. If they knew Raymond
Benjamin, chances were they’d met his flunky. And with
all that death and blood, they must have known Ray
Benjamin had come for them.
We followed Curt to the Harrisburg hospital, the
primary hub for all the medical centers in the Harrisburg
area. They’d taken Curt right into surgery. Amanda and I
sat in the waiting room as a doctor explained that the bullet
had nicked his femoral artery. Luckily the bullet had
missed severing the vessel by half a centimeter, other-276
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wise, he said, we’d be having an entirely different conversation.
I’d given the license plate number to the Harrisburg
chief of police, a burly man named Hawley who had a look
on his face that said as soon as they found Benjamin, the
three of us would have hell to pay. An APB was put out
on a dark BMW with New York plates, but an hour later
the license plate was found abandoned in a gas station in
Bethlehem. Raymond Benjamin was gone.
Curt would be laid up for several days. Amanda and I
slept in the hospital that night, occasionally shifted positions in the waiting room. Amanda waking up on top of
me, then moving; me waking up leaning on her shoulder,
not wanting to move.
When morning came and the doctors confirmed that
Curt was out of danger, we went in to see him.
Our friend was heavily sedated. His leg was swathed
in bandages. We approached his bed, cautious, unsure if
he could hear us or understand what happened.
As I got closer, I heard Curt whisper, “Henry.”
“I’m here, buddy.” I took Curt’s hand in mine. Amanda
stood beside me. I noticed her absently rubbing her hands
on her jeans.
“The Reeds,” he said. Curt swallowed, with some difficulty. Then he licked his lips. “The Reeds, man. They
recognized Benjamin. They were scared.”
I nodded, squeezed his hand.
“Find them,” he said. “Now, get out of here before
somebody else shoots me instead of you.”
Amanda and I walked out of the hospital like two
zombies who hadn’t slept in weeks. Her eyes were bloodshot, her tank top caked with sweat and dirt. Her blouse
was in some medical waste bin. Now she wore a gray
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sweatshirt, two sizes too large. The only thing that had
survived the night physically and emotionally intact was
our car.
We began the drive back to New York in si
lence.
Amanda turned on the radio. Found some talk station that
neither of us listened to, but it at least punctured the
quiet. When we saw a rest stop, we pulled in and got a
few fast-food burgers for the road. We ate without
talking, arrived in New York three hours later barely
having said a word.
When we pulled onto the Harlem River Drive in Manhattan, I turned to Amanda.
“Where does Darcy live again?” I asked.
Amanda shook her head. “Just take me home.”
“Where do you mean…” I began to say, but when
Amanda looked at me I realized what she meant.
I parked the car on the street, then walked back to my
apartment, finding Amanda’s arm intertwined with mine.
I found an old pair of shorts that were too small for me,
and a Cornell T-shirt. Amanda put both on. The T-shirt fit
like a nightgown, drooping down to her knees. I turned off
all the lights and climbed into bed.
Amanda lay down next to me. I could hear her breathing, could feel my heart beating next to hers.
She turned onto her side, nuzzling her head into the
nook between my head and shoulder. Her arm wrapped
around my waist. And there she lay, soon drifting into
sleep. I watched Amanda for as long as I could, staring at
that face, knowing how hard it would be to spend one
more minute without it next to mine at night. I thought
about Curt and prayed he’d recover completely, thanked
whoever it was that watched over us that we’d escaped
with his life.
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I prayed that Caroline Twomey was still alive and healthy,
and that we would find her soon. I thought about all of that,
and then my muscles quit on me and I drifted to sleep.
37
I woke at seven-fifteen, like I did most mornings. My
alarm was set every day to go off at seven-thirty on the dot,
but my internal alarm had a wicked sense of humor, always
screwing me out of fifteen minutes of shut-eye a day.
Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I leaned over to see
Amanda rolled up in my comforter like a pig in a blanket,
only if the pig were a beautiful woman and… I decided to
just stop that train of thought before I accidentally said it
to Amanda and wound up with my head shoved up my ass.
She was still wrapped in my clothes, her eyes shut, snoring
lightly. I leaned over and shut off the alarm clock, then
rolled out of bed, picked some clean clothes out of my
dresser, went into the living room and got dressed there
so as not to wake her.
I left the apartment, picked up two Egg McMuffins and
two large cups of coffee, and was setting up breakfast on
my meager dining room table when Amanda appeared in
the doorway.
“Morning,” she said, rubbing her eyes. She looked at
her finger—likely identifying a smudge of eye gunk—then
flicked it away. She offered a goofy smile and noticed the
setup. “You got breakfast?”
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“Straight from the kitchen at Mickey D’s.”
“Yum. Just like Mom used to make.”
“Your mom worked the fry-o-lator.”
“All right, enough out of you, smart guy. What do you
have?”
I unwrapped the sandwiches, opened the coffees. I had
ketchup waiting for her, knowing she liked to slather her
eggs with the stuff. She took a seat, her eyes still red, and
began to pick at the food.
“How’d you sleep?” I asked.
“Better than you’d think after a day like yesterday,” she
said. “Guess your brain trumps all, tells you you’re too
tired to stay up all night thinking about things. Like Curt
lying on the floor bleeding everywhere.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s all you can say?” Amanda said, looking at me
as if I’d just committed to invading Iran by myself.
“Don’t know what else to say. It’s just overwhelming.You
know, seeing Curt injured like that. Seeing Jack in the
hospital the other day. Two of my best friends have nearly
died over the past week. I’m sorry if I’m not as articulate as
usual.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest you didn’t care,” Amanda
said. “But…do you wonder, ever, if it’s worth it? I mean
I’m not a reporter, I haven’t spent a lot of time in the
‘field’…but unless you’re in Afghanistan, I’ve never heard
of any journalist being subjected to this much violence in
such a short period of time. So either you happen to chase
down these stories that inevitably lead to ruin, or…”
“Or what?” I said.
“Or you go looking for them on purpose.”
“You know that’s not true. Wallace assigned me to this
story. He set me up to interview Daniel Linwood.”
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“And so you interviewed him. You wrote a terrific story
about it. Then what?”
“That wasn’t the end of it,” I said. “Once I knew something was being hidden, I had to go deeper. It’s what I do.
If it leads to this, it leads to this, but I never want anybody
to get hurt. Fact of the matter is, I don’t want you coming
along with me. I didn’t want you to come last night.”
Amanda looked hurt, confused. “So why did you let me
come, then?”
“Because the last time I made a decision for you, it was
the worst decision of my life.”
Amanda took the bottle of ketchup, unscrewed the lid
and peered inside.
“What are you doing?”
“Just making sure I’m comfortable with the amount of
congealed tomato paste in here.” She screwed it back on,
squirted a dollop onto her sandwich. “Doesn’t look too bad.”
She took a bite, munched, then put it down. Looked me
in the eye.
“So, what, you’ve grown over the past few months? All
of a sudden things are clear?”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. I felt my feelings
for her were clearer than they’d ever been, and I’d been
worse at hiding it than a silverback gorilla playing hideand-seek. “Yes. Sort of. I mean, personally things are
clear.”
“Really,” she said, in a manner that stated she didn’t
believe me.
“We were good together,” I said.
Amanda chewed. “So that’s your great introspection?
As far as I know, we didn’t break up because things were
going badly. We broke up for other reasons. Do those not
matter now?”
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“They matter, but I know that this…thing…it’s a twoperson thing.”
“Eloquent.”
“What I’m saying is, I shouldn’t have made the decision
for you. And I understand how it would put you in a
position where you’d be afraid to get hurt again.”
“Hurt?” she said incredulously. “You’re worried about
me? Henry, you’ve cornered the market on that front. I’m
not saying this to be funny, but when things happen like yest
erday, I worry that you’re not going to live to thirty. So you
can worry about me being hurt emotionally, while I’m going
to be the one at night wondering if you’ll be coming home.
Or if I’m going to get a call from Curt one day, and I’ll hang
up before he can say a word because I’ll just know.”
“I’m trying,” I said. “I swear. But this Linwood story,
I have to see it through. Especially now. One of my friends
could have died yesterday. I have to find out what Ray
Benjamin, Petrovsky and the Reed family are involved in.
I need to know what Benjamin is going through all this
trouble for. He strikes me as a career thug. The kind of guy
you hire for muscle. Not the kind of guy who orchestrates
a series of kidnappings spanning a decade.”
“What’s he been doing since he got out of prison?”
Amanda asked.
“That’s a good question.”
“Ya think?” she said, taking another bite.
“I mean, he’s had a massive house in his name, a
minivan in his name. Where’s his income coming from?”
I looked at her sandwich. She had one or two bites left.
“What, you want me to leave because you have work
to do?”
“No. I was just wondering if you were going to finish
that.”
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She mocked throwing the last piece at me, then shoved
it all in her mouth and swallowed.
“I’ll walk out with you,” she said. “You heading to the
office?”
“Yeah. But I need to make a few calls and see if I can
track down Raymond Benjamin’s employment records. If
the Reeds knew what was good for them, they’d be in
Arizona by now.”
“What about Benjamin?”
“If yesterday was any indication, he’ll follow them into
hell if he needs to. He was there to kill the Reed family.
His gun was already drawn when he came into the hall at
the hotel. If we don’t find out what’s going on, it won’t
just be another kidnapping to investigate, or having to
deal with at least two people who have already been killed,
but we’d have to live with the murder of an entire family.”
38
Raymond Benjamin sat in the black Ford Escape and
finished his third pack of the day. He rolled down the
window and flicked the butt into the wind, where it landed
among a pile of a dozen other butts that had come from
the same vehicle.