He glanced at the sprawling complex as he drove by, but he kept going, never veering off of Prince William Parkway. He saw no reason to draw focus to himself.
Instead, he drove into the Historic District of Manassas City and found a parking spot there where he could wait outside the place he knew Angelina Garcia would soon be visiting.
According to the research, Angelina was a creature of habit, bordering on obsessive-compulsive. Every day of the week had a different lunch spot assigned. Today was Fat Freddie’s Fabulous Bar-B-Q, located very near the railroad tracks that ran through the center of town—the very railroad tracks that had twice drawn the Union Army into Manassas during the Civil War, only to have their butts kicked both times.
Angelina would arrive between 12:15 and 12:30, driving her yellow Mini Cooper, and she would depart exactly forty-five minutes later.
Patrick planned to take her out with a rifle shot as she was on her way into the restaurant. Whether he could do this or not was yet to be determined. He told himself that if he lost his nerve as she was on her way in, he’d have a second shot—literally—when she was on her way out.
This was for Ciara, after all. He was not performing the dirty work for the Cortez Cartel. He was only trying to defend his family.
Trying to rescue his only child from the grip of a monster.
But first, he needed to bring his heart rate under control. He needed to modulate his breathing. And he needed to look like he wasn’t scared out of his mind in case someone walked by.
Oh, shit. What if someone thought he was acting suspicious and they called the police to investigate? How would he explain why he was sitting in a parking lot with a rifle on the passenger seat and a pistol on his hip?
He told himself that he wouldn’t have to explain anything. For the time being, this was still the land of the free, and in Virginia, he could have nearly any guns that he wanted.
But they’d see through it, wouldn’t they? Patrick had never been a good liar. He’d learned that the hard way as a kid when he’d try to get one past the nuns. They had the most finely tuned bullshit detectors of any people he’d ever known—including his mother, who was also damned hard to fool. If a cop came to his window, he’d sweat and stammer and they’d pull him out of the car and handcuff him because they’d be crazy not to.
“Stop it!” His words were stern, and he’d said them aloud. “Don’t borrow trouble. You can do this. You have to do this.” The biggest danger of all was for him to get all in his head and overthink everything. He knew he was a good shot, and he knew that his scope was sited in at a hundred yards. This shot wouldn’t be that far, but the shorter range would only affect the impact point of the bullet by a fraction of an inch.
He planned to go for a center-of-mass shot, so an inch here or an inch there wouldn’t matter. Really, six inches wouldn’t make that big a difference.
He’d brought his Bushmaster AR-15, chambered in. 223 caliber. It was a tiny round, but it flew superfast. A quick triple-tap would take care of all the business he needed to transact, and then it would be time to drive off and hope no one saw him.
He’d considered an up-close shot with a pistol, but decided against it. As an FBI agent, Angelina Garcia would be trained in hand-to-hand combat, and that was something at which Patrick righteously sucked. Age and lifestyle, along with an affinity for pasta and beer, had taken away what little athletic prowess he had ever had.
Besides, he figured that someone in Angelina’s line of work would be trained to be keenly aware of her surroundings. For a pistol shot to work reliably, he’d have to be within a few yards, and she’d almost certainly notice his approach.
No, the rifle shot would be his best bet. Maybe it was cowardly, but—
His phone rang from inside the cup holder where he’d placed it.
“Come on, Karen, give it break,” he said as he reached to cancel the call. He knew that he’d scared her when he flew in and out of the house—the weaponry didn’t help—but what was he going to talk to her about? This thing had to happen. They could talk about it later, but for the here and now, words couldn’t do anything to help.
Only it wasn’t Karen’s number.
This one said, PVT NUMBER. Yeah, like he was going to deal with a spam call right now. He pressed the disconnect button.
Jesus, could things get any weirder?
Right away, he thought maybe he’d made a mistake. He’d never received spam calls on this phone before. Or, if he had, he hadn’t received many of them. What if things had changed? What if Cristos Silva had come to his senses and changed the rules? Even if the call was coming from Billy Monroe—and that was the most likely scenario, wasn’t it—he wouldn’t call from his own phone, would he?
No, of course not. He’d use some kind of burner phone. And didn’t burner phone numbers all come in as private? Come on, what would be the point of going through all the hassle of getting one if the party on the other end could just call you back?
The phone rang again, this time in his hand as he was watching the screen.
PVT NUMBER.
Shit, shit, shit.
In the end, what choice did he have? He pressed the connect button. “Hello?”
“Is this Patrick Kelly?”
“Who wants to know?”
“This is Special Agent Gerarda Culp with the FBI, and I need—”
He pressed the disconnect button and tossed the phone back into the cup holder as if it had bitten him.
How could they know? He hadn’t even done anything yet.
Was this about the bail money, maybe? Had the feds already figured out that Fernando Pérez had bolted from the country? Did they know that he’d cooked the books so that—
The phone rang again.
Let it go to voicemail.
No, you moron. You don’t want that shit on your voicemail.
He snatched the phone up again and pressed the disconnect button without connecting first.
Ciara.
Could this be about Ciara? The FBI was the agency charged with investigating kidnappings. Could it be that they had information about Ciara? Maybe the whole Agent Garcia thing was just a bizarre coincidence.
The phone range again.
Goddammit.
“Ah, screw it.” He pressed the connect button.
“Yes, this is Patrick Kelly.”
“Don’t hang up on me again, Patrick. I can do this all day, but I need your help. It’s about Ciara.”
“Have you found her?” The question was out before he knew he’d thought it.
“No, but I intend to,” the voice said.
“What’s your name again?”
“Agent Culp.” Her tone sounded reasonable. Helpful. “Tell me what you know.”
Patrick opened his mouth to speak, but he couldn’t make the words form. To answer her question, he’d have to confess what he’d done.
“Mr. Kelly, I know about the bail money for Fernando Pérez, and I’ll tell you right now that I don’t care. That is not my case and not my job. My only job is to find your daughter and bring her back home. We have reason now to believe that she has been transported across the border to Mexico. Once there, things get much more difficult and time becomes an infinitely more valuable commodity. Now, what can you tell me?”
Patrick felt as if his brain had cramped. What could he tell her? Oh, God, where to even start? What could he bring himself to tell her? He didn’t know.
“I’ve spoken with your wife,” Agent Culp said. “I know that you and Santiago Pérez are friends and business partners. I know that you were in the import/export business with him, and I promise you that I won’t ask anything about the commodities you dealt with. I don’t care about them. I care only about Ciara.”
Patrick closed his eyes and steeled himself with a deep breath. He knew that cops were liars. He knew that the Supreme Court had ruled it perfectly legal for police officers of all stripes to lie outright to suspects in order to get them to confes
s to crimes. He knew that sharing details with this lady on the phone could get him put away for a long time. At a minimum, he would lose his business and his income. With that, he would also lose his wife.
But if it can help Ciara . . .
Patrick had no choice but to roll the dice. To trust this Agent Culp.
“There’s a man,” Patrick began. “His name is Cristos Silva. He is an associate of Santiago Pérez, who I imagine you already know is highly placed in the organization known as the Cortez Cartel. He is the man who has Ciara.”
He paused, expecting a question or a comment, but driven by silence, he continued.
“Ciara knows Cristos. He has been to our vacation house in the past.”
“So, she’s with a friend?” He could hear the relief in her voice.
“No. Well, she might think so, but he is not a friend. There’s another man. At least one other man. His name is Ernesto Guzman. He is a terrifying man. A murderer. A hit man.”
“Whom Ciara does not know?”
“Well, she has met him. Silva and Guzman are rarely far apart.”
“You’re not being clear, Mr. Kelly. Do you believe she is safe or not?”
“No, she is definitely not safe. I’m sorry I sound so jumbled, but this has been a very difficult day. Let me explain. . .”
* * *
Jonathan listened to Gail’s conversation with Patrick on his muted phone, along with Boxers and Dawkins. They’d just finished loading the toys into the Hawker when Gail called with the news of her interview with Karen Kelly. They decided together that she should be the one to reach out to Kelly to see what she could find out. Boxers had paired the aircraft’s Bluetooth to Jonathan’s burner so they could listen on the Hawker’s speakers.
Patrick Kelly sounded desperate. Maybe there was some anger in his tone, but it had been pushed away by fear and sadness. Jonathan couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guy.
“. . . but then they changed the rules on me,” Kelly said. “Now it makes sense why they took her. It never was about the bail money. They knew I’d do that. It’s this other thing I have to do that they’re holding her for.”
“Other thing?” Gail asked.
“Yes, but I can’t get into that.”
“This other thing,” Gail pressed. “Does it have to do with the guns you took out of the house?”
Kelly went silent.
“Gotcha, you son of a bitch,” Boxers said.
“I–I don’t want to get into it.”
“Who are you going to kill, Patrick?”
Gail was good, Jonathan thought. Very good. She showed a level of patience in this call that he would have a hard time mustering. He for sure didn’t think he’d be able to keep the tone so . . . conciliatory. Kelly had known his daughter was in the grasp of a cartel operator, and he had let it happen. For money. With that kind of information in hand, he could have stirred the El Paso PD into action despite the kids’ ages.
“Who said I’m going to kill anyone?” Kelly said.
“He sucks at the phone game,” Dawkins said.
“Come on, Patrick,” Gail coaxed. “Remember the stakes. This is Ciara we’re talking about. Your only child.”
“That’s exactly my point. That’s exactly why I have to do what I have to do.”
“Who is it?” Gail pressed. “Who do you need the guns for?”
“I’ve given you plenty to start hunting Ciara down,” Kelly said. “If that’s really your intent, you’re wasting time on the phone with me right now.”
“What happens if you just go home?” Gail asked. “Think about that. Suppose you just go home, go back to your wife? Go back to Karen. Let us work on getting Ciara back. If you kill someone, that will be murder. That will ruin everything for you and your family. It will ruin everything forever.”
“I never said I was going to kill anyone.”
“Come on, Patrick. Don’t be obtuse. It’s obvious. This Silva guy wants you to kill one of his enemies, and he’s leveraging Ciara to make that happen. He’s using you.”
“He’s allowing himself to be used,” Boxers said. “Choosing to be a victim.”
“I have no choice,” Kelly said. His voice trembled. “If I don’t do this . . .” Then his voice faded away entirely.
“Is there a deadline, Patrick? This person you have to . . . This thing you have to do. Does it have to happen before a certain time?”
“Goddammit, didn’t you listen?” Kelly’s verbal explosion made Jonathan jump. “Guzman is an animal. It doesn’t matter what the deadline is. There doesn’t have to be a deadline. Every moment with a beast like Ernesto Guzman is a potential death sentence.”
“Okay, Patrick, calm—”
“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down, Agent Culp. You don’t know. You don’t have kids, do you?”
Gail said nothing, exactly the right play. Once the interview was rolling, information could only flow in one direction.
“Sledgehammers, Agent Culp.”
“Excuse me?”
“That is Ernesto Guzman’s implement of choice when he’s angry.”
“Holy shit,” Boxers grumbled.
Jonathan closed his eyes against the image that was forming in his head.
“I’ve seen him do it, Agent Culp. Have you ever seen what a sledgehammer does to knees and toes? His specialty is not to kill, you know. His specialty is hurting, and he doesn’t need a reason to do it.”
“But surely your friend can rein him in.”
“My friend is the one who took Ciara away in the first place. According to Billy Monroe, Cristos Silva is impatient. He wants this to happen, and he wants it to happen soon.”
As Gail continued to try to pull information out of Kelly, Jonathan addressed his team. “Are y’all hearing what I’m hearing? That is, Kelly doesn’t kill whoever he’s supposed to kill, Ciara is toast?”
Nods all around.
“Do we know who Billy Monroe is?” Dawkins asked.
Jonathan and Boxers answered together: “Nope.”
“Surely you have a few hours,” Gail said. “Just take a step back from the edge and reassess.”
A long moment of silence drew them all to look at the speaker. Had they been disconnected?
“Patrick?”
“There’s something about me that you need to understand,” Patrick said. He had nothing left in his spirit. He sounded utterly defeated. “Agent Culp, I am a coward. And I am selfish. I know these things, and I know that you agree. How could you not? I mean, my God, I talked myself into endangering my daughter for the sake of a little business.”
Jonathan expected Gail to intervene, to tell him he wasn’t such a bad guy, and was pleased when she did not.
“If I don’t do this thing now—if I go home and sit with my wife and have a beer and say a prayer that you guys can get her back—I’ll find a way to talk myself out of it.”
“Just a few hours,” Gail said.
“Do your best,” Patrick said. “And I’ll do mine.”
The line went dead.
After a few seconds, Gail said, “He’s gone.”
Jonathan unmuted his phone. “Nice job, Gunslinger,” he said. “Did you ever consider a career in law enforcement?”
“He’s going to kill someone,” Gail said. She wasn’t in the mood for humor.
“Yeah, I believe he is,” Jonathan agreed.
“Maybe it’s time to take this to the real cops again,” Gail said.
“Absolutely,” Boxers said. “Perfect chain of evidence. The facial recognition software that it’s a felony to possess led us to a name that’s linked to an operation we were able to confirm by burglarizing a school and assaulting a cop after setting off explosives in the parking lot. I’m sure the local prosecutors would be thrilled, but not for the right reasons.”
Jonathan saw this conversation heading off the rails, so he moved to intervene. “There was no mention of Roman through any of this, right?”
“Not from me
,” Gail said.
“What do you think?” Dawkins asked. “Is Roman still—”
“Don’t,” Jonathan warned.
“Ease up, Scorpion,” Dawkins said. “I know the rules. I was going to ask if we think Roman is still with the girl.”
“We have to assume that,” Jonathan said. “Otherwise, we’ve got nothing.”
Boxers gave Jonathan a look that spoke too many thoughts, and it pissed him off.
“Look,” Jonathan said. “I know what y’all are thinking, so let’s just get it out in the open, okay? If this isn’t about Roman, then there’s no reason to keep Roman around. And yeah, that’s a way to look at it. But it’s not the way we’re going to look at it. Here’s how we’re heading forward, and if you disagree, keep your silly-ass opinions to yourselves.
“If they didn’t want Roman, they didn’t have to take him. They could have left him on the street, or they could have popped him on the spot. They didn’t do either of those things.
“And maybe the reason they took him along was to keep him quiet long enough for them all to get away. They didn’t want him calling the police and spoiling every friggin’ thing.
“So, maybe they took him someplace else and killed him there. Because they’re cartel monsters and that’s what they do. Have I covered it all so far? Have I missed any permutations?”
Jonathan glared directly at Big Guy, who couldn’t hold his gaze.
“Okay, then. We’ve talked it out. Now, here’s the reality. Roman Pennington Alexander is healthy. He’s scared shitless, and we’re going to bring him home. And I know this to be a fact because I have known him since the day he was born, and I am not going to his mother and tell her that he’s dead.”
He felt tears pressing behind his eyes, and he swiped them away with an angry flourish. He shifted his glare to Dawkins, who was already engaged in the study of something on the floor.
“And why are you still here?” Jonathan asked.
Dawkins looked startled. “Me?”
“Yeah. You made your introductions, you gave us a place to crash—thanks for that—but what are your intentions from here?”
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