Hothouse Orchid

by Stuart Woods

  Holly sat in the passenger seat while a state trooper, Charlie Towns, drove. She watched the blip on the GPS. “Got him on the screen,” she said. “Let’s go, but don’t close on him. Stay out of sight.”

  They drove across the bridge, and Jimmy turned north, toward the southern terminus of Jungle Trail. As he did, he put a hand on her thinly clad thigh, and she put her hand on top of his. It was dark out; the moon had not yet risen.

  Teddy alternated between watching Jimmy’s taillights and looking for the police cars. Where the hell were they? How were they going to help Lauren if they couldn’t see her?

  Jimmy made a left turn off A-1A, and as he did, Lauren saw him take a long look in the rearview mirror. She knew that he wouldn’t see anything and that they would be picked up by the GPS in all three pursuing vehicles, so she felt safe. Nervous but safe.

  Teddy watched Jimmy make the left turn. He had an idea of where the lead car was going; he and Lauren had driven Jungle Trail once. He fell back a little, switched off his headlights and, without using his turn signal, followed the lead. He saw no other cars turn behind him. He watched as Jimmy turned right on the trail proper, then he slowed to let him gain more distance before he turned, too.

  If it had been dark before, it was pitch black now, what with the canopy of trees shielding them from even the starlight. Lauren nearly panicked when, for a moment, she couldn’t remember the code word. Then it came to her: bastard. Jimmy’s hand slid higher up her leg to her crotch, but she didn’t stop him.

  They drove up the trail for another five minutes, then Jimmy stopped the car.

  “Here okay?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Teddy saw Jimmy’s brake lights come on, then go dark. They had stopped, and he had turned off his lights.

  Hurd Wallace, riding in the surveillance van, watched the GPS screen. “He’s stopped,” Hurd said. He looked at the series of video screens. “She looks calm,” he said. Then the screens went dark. “What happened?” Hurd asked.

  “He’s on Jungle Trail, so the tree canopy is blocking any light,” Mike Green replied. “He’s turned off his lights, so his dashboard lights have gone off, too, so we just can’t see. But don’t worry; we’ve still got audio.”

  “You didn’t anticipate this?” Hurd asked.

  “What, anticipate total darkness? Did you want me to install lights in his car?”

  “You okay?” they heard Jimmy say.

  “I’m just…” Lauren was saying, then stopped talking.

  “What’s going on?” Hurd asked.

  Mike pointed at a dial on his control panel. “They’re not transmitting audio,” he said. “The system must have powered down when he switched off the engine.”

  “But it’s supposed to continue running for thirty minutes,” Hurd protested.

  “What can I tell you?” Mike replied. “It didn’t happen.”

  Hurd picked up his handheld radio. “Cars one and two: we’ve lost both video and audio, and oh, shit, the GPS isn’t transmitting, either; it’s blocked by the trees. They’re somewhere on Jungle Trail. Close on them fast!”

  Teddy saw the white sand of a road to his left and pulled a few yards into it. He got out of the car and peered into the darkness up the road but couldn’t see a thing. He got back in, unlocked the glove compartment and took out a small but powerful Surefire flashlight and the 9-mm pistol he kept there.

  “Step on it, Charlie,” Holly said. “God, I hope we’re not going to be too late!”

  Jimmy reached down between his legs and released the seat adjuster, allowing the bench seat to move backward a good foot. Lauren suddenly realized that now she couldn’t reach the gun under the dash, and she tried to calm herself. There was still the one under the front seat, though.

  Jimmy put an arm around Lauren and moved his left hand to her crotch.

  “Is this how you did it with the others, Jimmy?” Lauren asked. “Did they like it?”

  “Sure,” Jimmy said. “They loved it. They loved every minute of it.” He stuck his hand inside the elastic band of her pants and reached downward.

  Lauren still didn’t stop him “They were unconscious, though, weren’t they?”

  “A little,” Jimmy said, “but they could still feel my dick inside them. I got the dosage just right.”

  “You bastard,” Lauren said. She didn’t know if what Jimmy had said was enough of a confession, but she was beginning to panic. “Not so hard,” she said, pushing his hand away. “You bastard.”

  “Bitch!” Jimmy shouted. “You want it just like they got it, don’t you?”

  Lauren moved across the seat and was about to go for the gun underneath it, when Jimmy’s fist smashed into the side of her face. In the darkness, she hadn’t seen it coming. She fell onto the floor of the car, between the seat and the dash, but she couldn’t seem to think clearly. She wanted something, but she couldn’t think what. She fought to stay conscious.

  Jimmy reached down, grabbed the waistband of her pants and hauled her back onto the seat face down. There was a loud ripping sound as he tore her clothes from her body, then he got an arm under her and pulled her to her knees.

  Her face pressed against the plastic seat, Lauren began to come to. Then she felt something cold and wet in her crotch. Jimmy had produced a lubricant from somewhere and was slathering it onto her vagina and anus. She reached under the seat and felt for the little Colt Mustang clipped there. She got a hand on it and pulled it free, but she was pinned face down and couldn’t turn over, and her elbow couldn’t rotate enough to point the gun at him.

  Switch on the goddamned siren and the lights!” Hurd shouted at the driver. “I want him to hear and see us coming!”

  “There’s no siren on the van,” the man called back.

  Hurd pressed the switch on his radio. “Sirens and lights on!” he yelled into the instrument.

  Lauren could hear Jimmy unzip his trousers and pull them down. She tried again to turn over, but he had her pinned with one hand. God, she thought, he’s going to rape me, and there’s nothing I can do about it. She had a flash of the scene with Bruno in his car years ago, and she felt the helplessness she had felt them.

  Suddenly, the car was filled with an amazingly white, bright light. There was a loud noise, and then she was showered with glass, but Jimmy’s hand was no longer on her back. She twisted around and, momentarily blinded by the light, pointed the Mustang in his direction. She fired three times and heard glass break again. Then Jimmy was on top of her.

  Teddy heard the sirens and, looking back down Jungle Trail, saw flashing lights coming. He dove into the underbrush and began making his way back down the trail through the palmettos as fast as he could. He had gone perhaps fifty yards when the two police cars and the van blew noisily past him. As soon as they had passed, he moved back into the road and began running down the trail. A moment later, using the red setting on the flashlight, he found his car, got it started and was driving back up Jungle Trail. He avoided using the brakes and didn’t switch the lights on until he thought he was near the turn back to A-1A. Above him, he saw the spotlight of a helicopter come on, but it was pointing behind him.

  He slowed down when he reached A-1A, and drove toward home, keeping to the speed limit. A police car and an ambulance drove past him fast, in the opposite direction.

  Lauren might be hurt, he thought, but she was in safe hands now.

  61

  Holly sat with Lauren in the back of the ambulance, mop-ping Jimmy’s blood from her breasts with a wad of cotton soaked in alcohol. At first, she was hysterical, but soon she calmed down.

  “I don’t want to go to the hospital,” she said.

  “You need to be checked out, Lauren,” Holly said.

  “I’m not hurt, I’m not raped, and I want to go back to the office, where my clothes are.” She was naked now, since Jimmy had ripped off her pants and panties, and the EMT had cut off her tank top.

  “Are you sure, Lauren?”
<
br />   “Damn it, I’m sure!”

  Holly got on the radio. “Hurd, Holly isn’t hurt, and she insists on going back to the office for her clothes instead of to the hospital.”

  Lauren took the radio from Holly’s hand. “Hurd, I am perfectly all right; all I need is my clothes.”

  “Roger, Lauren,” Hurd said. “We’ll see you at the office for debriefing.”

  Lauren, dressed now, sat at the conference table, holding an ice pack to her face where Jimmy had slugged her, and gave a vivid account into a tape recorder of everything that had happened.

  “You’ll have to testify at the inquest,” somebody said.

  “There doesn’t need to be an inquest,” Lauren replied. “I shot a man who was attacking me. Didn’t you hear everything?”

  “We lost audio transmission,” Mike Green said, “but I had a tape recorder planted in the dash that kept running.”

  “Is there any inconsistency in my story?” she asked.

  “No,” Hurd said, then he switched off the tape recorder. “This is off the record, everybody. Lauren, there are two things I don’t understand.”

  “What?”

  “One, the flash of white light.”

  “I think it must have been the muzzle flash in the darkness,” she said.

  “All right. I buy that,” Hurd replied. “But there’s one other thing: the driver’s side window was smashed, but I understand that one of your shots must have gone through him and hit the window. What I don’t understand is that the passenger’s side window was smashed, too.”

  “Maybe one round went through the passenger window,” Lauren said, “or richocheted.”

  “From what I could see, the window was broken from the outside; nearly all of the glass was in the car. It was all over you when we got there.”

  “Okay, Hurd, you’ve got me there; I have no explanation for that. All I’ve got is what I’ve told you. I think I was unconscious for a moment after Jimmy hit me, and I was semiconscious for another moment. Maybe something happened then that I don’t understand.”

  “It’s just a loose end,” Hurd said, “and I don’t like loose ends.”

  “Well, Hurd,” Lauren said with some heat, “I was pretty busy in that car, and I’m sorry I didn’t have time to tie up your loose end.”

  Hurd held up a hand. “It’s all right, Lauren, I’m not going to make an issue of it. Anybody here have any problem with neglecting to notice the passenger window?”

  Everybody shook his head.

  Holly thought she knew how the window was broken, but she kept her mouth shut.

  An hour later, Holly drove Lauren back to her car at the police station parking lot. She was remembering how she had mentioned the operation to Jack Smithson at the pack-and-ship store.

  Lauren,” she said, “did you tell Jack what you were going to be doing tonight?”

  “God, no!” Lauren said. “He would have gone nuts! He wouldn’t have let me do it.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Holly said. She dropped Lauren at her car but took another close look at her. “Are you sure you’re all right to drive?”

  “Holly, I’m just fine. Really I am. When you think about it, this operation turned out better than we could have hoped for. There’ll be no trial for Jimmy, so the families won’t be put through that, and so the whole thing is just over. I’m feeling really good about that.”

  “Okay, Lauren, just drive carefully on your way home.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  But Holly followed Lauren at a distance, until she saw her turn into Jack’s driveway.

  Back home, Josh was waiting.

  “When are we taking off north?” he asked.

  “I’m going to stay one more day, just to be available to Hurd if he has any more questions for me. I also want to have dinner tomorrow night with Ham and Ginny; you can join us. I’ll fly home the day after. I’ve been checking the weather every day, and Wednesday should be a perfect flying day.”

  “And when do you go back to work?” he asked.

  “Monday morning, bright and early.”

  “I’ll be at your house Thursday night, I think,” Josh said.

  “I’ll just take a cab home from Manassas airport,” Holly said. “I’ve already arranged for hangar space there.”

  “You want me to take Daisy with me in the car?” he asked.

  “No, she’s flown before with Ginny and me, and she’s fine with it.”

  They fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  The following morning Holly called Hurd Wallace. “Thanks for your help last night,” he said. “I think it was a good idea having a woman with Lauren.”

  “She was perfectly fine after she calmed down,” Holly said. “How is she this morning?”

  “She didn’t come in,” Hurd said. “She left a letter in my in-box, and I found it this morning. She’s resigned.”

  “I’m surprised,” Holly said. “Did you see that coming?”

  “No, but I think it had more to do with her new boyfriend than it did with anything that happened last night,” he said.

  “Do you know what her plans are?” Holly asked.

  “No, but she said she’d be in touch. We don’t really need her to wrap up the case.”

  “Well, I’m off to Virginia tomorrow morning,” Holly said. “It was good seeing you and even better working with you again, Hurd.”

  “Thank you, Holly. Same here. You keep in touch, hear?”

  “Will do.” Holly hung up. She was surprised at Lauren’s resignation; it didn’t seem like a spur-of-the-moment thing. She wanted to say goodbye, and she wanted one more conversation with Jack Smithson, too, so she got into her car with Daisy and drove over to his beach house.

  When she pulled into the driveway, there were no cars parked at the house. She got out and went to the door. No one came when she knocked, but there was an unsealed envelope stuck in the door, addressed to a real estate company. Holly was too nosy not to look inside.

  There were some keys, a check and a note from Jack saying that he was vacating the premises and paying the remainder of the short-term lease.

  Holly used one of the keys to unlock the front door. She walked inside and looked around, but it had been cleaned out. The big safe was still in the closet, its door open and a note left on top of it, again addressed to the real estate company. She read it. “The safe is yours,” it said. “The combination is TEDDY.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I am happy to hear from readers, but you should know that if you write to me in care of my publisher, three to six months will pass before I receive your letter, and when it finally arrives it will be one among many, and I will not be able to reply.

  However, if you have access to the Internet, you may visit my website at www.stuartwoods.com, where there is a button for sending me e-mail. So far, I have been able to reply to all my e-mail, and I will continue to try to do so.

  If you send me an e-mail and do not receive a reply, it is probably because you are among an alarming number of people who have entered their e-mail address incorrectly in their mail software. I have many of my replies returned as undeliverable.

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  Please do not send me your ideas for a book, as I have a policy of writing only what I myself invent. If you send me story ideas, I will immediately delete them without reading them. If you have a good idea for a book, write it yourself, but I will not be able to advise you on how to get it published. Buy a copy of Writer’s Market at
any bookstore; that will tell you how.

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  A list of my published works appears in the front of this book and on my website. All the novels are still in print in paperback and can be found at or ordered from any bookstore. If you wish to obtain hardcover copies of earlier novels or of the two nonfiction books, a good used-book store or one of the online bookstores can help you find them. Otherwise, you will have to go to a great many garage sales.