by Tim Green
“Fine.”
“So you’ll really do it, Jeremiah?”
“Yes,” he told her solemnly. “For you, I’ll do it. Tonight.”
CHAPTER 29
Kurt came out of the boathouse in the early evening and looked anxiously up at the muggy brown sky. Its hue was as unnatural as the smoggy afternoon sky that hung over a big city. The leaves hung limply from the trees and only on occasion would a feeble waft of air mar the flat surface of the lake. On his way to the house, Kurt thought he heard, from far away, the low murmur of thunder.
In the living room, he opened the cabinet and turned on the TV to find the Weather Channel. A screeching bright red screen suddenly replaced the radar image of the local forecast. A flashing bulletin scrolled down the screen to warn people in the region of severe thunderstorms. As recent as that morning, the ugly weather was predicted to pass to the north. Now it appeared that the Finger Lakes were going to take a direct hit from a front that had already savaged the Midwest with tornadoes, high winds, and golf ball–sized hail.
How bad it would be and when it would pass were the questions that pulled Kurt’s face into a tight mask of anxiety. After the storm warning and during a commercial break he went to the refrigerator and took out a tall can of Ruddles, an English pub ale. With the creamy brown liquid nearly foaming over the edge of his glass, he sat down on the edge of the coffee table and tapped his foot until the weatherman returned to the screen. It was with great relief that he saw the forecast now predicted that the storm would move through the region shortly after midnight. Tomorrow should be a bright, blue day.
Kurt stood and raised his glass to the unknowing weatherman before taking a sip that left him with a frothy beige mustache. This forecast would open the door for history to be made. He flipped the TV off and paced the length of the cavernous living room a few times before wandering into his library. This was the hard part. Everything was ready, right down to the fresh bait he’d purchased that afternoon for fishing. He had spent much of the past several days tooling across the quiet countryside, perfecting the escape route on his motorcycle, but even with the myriad choices he was satisfied that he had the best combination of back roads and farm fields to avoid detection. All he had to do now was wait and somehow remain within the bounds of sanity.
The storm came with the suddenness of an accidental death. One minute the strange calm was loitering about like an unemployed teenager, the next a deluge of ice, water, and wind was blasting the side of the house and ripping down tree limbs. The lights flickered and went out. Kurt found a flashlight in the kitchen. He was alone in the house, but his only concern was that the storm not impede his plans in any way. He was suddenly struck by the horrifying thought that the president might somehow be killed before the morning. It was a ludicrous notion, but it crawled into his brain.
Still, it made Kurt acutely aware of how important it was for him to be the one to look the man in the eye and pull the trigger that would blast him from this world. He was empty now of everything but that. He hadn’t spoken to Jill and he had worked hard not to let himself think of her. It was just him, and the ugly thing in the back of his mind that he was certain would tear him apart the moment all this was over, the moment he stopped to think. It didn’t seem to matter as much to him now whether or not he got away. He wanted to escape, and would do his best, but without Jill . . .
He found another can of beer in the icebox and poured it into his tall glass. He sat down at the kitchen table to look out over the lake and the distant hills. Malevolent blue-and-white cords of electricity pounded the earth. The power came on for an instant and then went out again. Kurt sat in the darkness, watching the brilliant light show as the storm flashed up and down the lake. Water raged from the sky and hail clattered against the roof. Thunder fractured the night with the frequency of a horrifying battle. After a time, the torrent of rain abruptly diminished into a thin drizzle. The lightning, however, continued to illuminate the sky like a flickering lamp. A few seconds later, Kurt thought he heard someone pounding on his front door.
Mystified, he groped his way through the blackened house until he stood staring up through the open door at one of the biggest men he’d ever seen. The visitor was dressed sharply in the uniform of a state trooper, and Kurt could only think that the man, whose long, powerful flashlight illuminated everything within twenty-five feet of its beam, had for some reason come to inquire if he was okay.
“Mr. Ford?” the trooper said brusquely. “I have to ask you to come with me, sir.”
Kurt’s heart skipped a beat. He looked at the man in disbelief, and then scanned the flickering gloom outside beyond the police cruiser. If this had anything to do with the president, he wouldn’t be standing there alone with just a single New York state trooper. He’d be facing down a pair of agents backed up by a platoon of snipers.
“I have to ask you to turn around and put your hands up against the wall, sir,” said Jeremiah, his voice quavering ever so slightly.
“Obviously there’s been some kind of mistake,” Kurt told him calmly. “Do you know who I am?”
Nevertheless, Kurt stepped out of the house and turned to put his hands up against the wall outside the door. Before he knew what was happening, the trooper, with speed that belied his size, had his hands cuffed snugly together behind his back.
“Hey!” he cried out in surprise. “What the hell?”
The trooper, whose name Kurt still didn’t know, grabbed him firmly and led him across the blacktop before tucking him into the backseat of the car. The trooper’s hand practically swallowed Kurt’s head as he guided it in under the lip of the car’s roof. Kurt sat bewildered without bothering to struggle. The size and strength of the man who was arresting him would be tough to overcome, if he could overcome it at all, and Kurt still held the image of tomorrow’s fishing trip like a bright clear beacon in the forefront of his mind. He knew there must be a mistake somewhere, and there was no sense at all in exacerbating the situation by tangling with a cop.
Again he reminded himself frantically that if the president’s security were involved, it certainly wouldn’t be a lone trooper they sent to secure or interrogate him. He laughed quietly out loud, but broke off suddenly as they turned left onto West Lake Road, heading south instead of north toward town. Kurt searched his memory, but couldn’t remember ever seeing the location of the nearest state police barracks, so he presumed they were headed down toward Cortland, the next real city of any kind to the south.
“This is a ridiculous mistake,” he said after a mile or two of wet road in the flickering light. “Do you mind giving me some idea why it is you’ve put me in handcuffs and where you’re taking me? Do you realize I’m taking the president of the United States out on a fishing trip tomorrow afternoon?”
The enormous man said nothing. He merely checked Kurt out in the rearview mirror before turning his eyes back to the road. Kurt thought he saw a nervousness that he didn’t like. Why would the trooper be nervous? Kurt’s stomach sank. He searched the inside of the vehicle for some sign of a ruse, but everything he saw said this was a real police cruiser.
Kurt decided to say nothing more. There was no need. The cop wasn’t talking. He wasn’t the brains behind this. That was obvious. Kurt would save his breath until he met whoever was in charge. But when the car slowed and turned into some rural road, he sat up straight and couldn’t help from asking again, “Where are you taking me?”
His eyes darted about in alarm when the cruiser took another turn and began a slow climb up a gravel drive. The breath left his body as if he’d been socked in the stomach. Suddenly he took a deep breath and his panic was replaced by a total calm. It was a reaction he’d experienced before. In critical situations, Kurt suddenly became calm. He knew police didn’t arrest people and take them to rural locations to see a judge. He was being taken to this remote place to die. But when the realization was fully formed in his mind, instead of being blinded by horror, he was able to somehow coolly
assess the situation.
The people responsible for killing Collin had found him. This man wasn’t a trooper at all. The car was the real thing and must have been stolen. It was still almost unthinkable that the president of the United States could be connected with such diabolical lawlessness. But the image of Collin, lying dead in the morgue, filled his mind and Kurt knew that if that could happen, anything was possible.
Objectively, he looked around the inside of the cruiser. There was nothing at hand he could use as a weapon. If he were going to have any chance at all, it would come outside the car. If an opportunity came, he would have to see it and seize it instantly. He presumed they weren’t going to waste much time. He would be taken out and killed within minutes, possibly seconds. There was nothing anyone could learn from him. Kurt looked outside his window, taking in the terrain. If he could somehow disable the big man and flee, he needed to know as best he could where to run.
As the tail end of the storm passed to the east, a flicker of lightning allowed him to examine the farm fields bordering either side of the driveway. To his right was corn, tall and thick, bordered by a patch of old timber that seemed to trail off down the hill into a lowland. On the other side was nothing more than field after field of wheat and beans. If Kurt could get away, east was the direction he would take, into the corn and hopefully the woods beyond.
He didn’t have time to think much more about it before they crested the hill and followed the drive around one side of a very stately old farmhouse that rose up out of the gloom. In a flicker of lightning, Kurt could make out the neatly trimmed lawn and a handful of towering old hardwood trees that surrounded the white clapboard house. Even in his desperate condition, he was aware of the panoramic view that flashed into view before them as they rounded the corner. It was as if the house straddled the top of the world. It was an altar.
An altar of death.
CHAPTER 30
Instead of stopping at the house, Jeremiah drove down the grade in back and pulled out of the thin rain into the main barn. At one time the building had held dairy cows, but now it was used for little more than storing hay until the stables from Florida came for it with their tractor-trailers during the winter months. The odor of fresh-cut hay was heavy and thicker than the dust that danced in the broad beams of the cruiser’s headlights.
Jeremiah got out of the car and walked past his glowering prisoner, out of the barn, and back up to the house. There was still no power, but the phone lines were working and he dialed the Sherwood Inn. The town had its own electric company, so while most of the lake rested in prehistoric darkness, Skaneateles twinkled brightly. Jeremiah gazed down at it through the clearing sky from his kitchen window and asked to be connected to Jill’s room. She answered on the first ring in a tone that bordered on hysterical.
“I’ve got him,” Jeremiah told her.
“Is he all right?” She fretted. “Are you?”
“He’s fine,” Jeremiah said, exhaling with relief. “Everything’s fine. He’s in my barn and there’s no way for him to get out until tomorrow night when the president takes off and we let him go.”
“Do you think I should come there and see him?” Jill asked.
“No,” he said, “definitely not. He needs to cool off. Tomorrow night will be fine. You’ll come then.”
“Jeremiah?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you so much,” she said emotionally.
“Like I said,” he told her, “there’s not much I wouldn’t do if you asked.”
Jeremiah returned to the barn and eyed his prisoner warily in the darkened back of the cruiser. In the gloomy light, he could make out Kurt’s face staring back at him with cold intensity. He took a length of heavy chain off a nail on the wall and looped it around one of the thick square beams that supported the hayloft before clasping it shut with a heavy padlock he removed from his pocket. He returned to the front seat and opened the rear window just enough so that Kurt could reach outside with both hands. Then he got back out of the cruiser and picked up the other end of the chain.
“Now,” he said addressing Kurt in his best trooper’s voice, “you can do one of two things. You can put your hands outside that window so I can undo one of those cuffs and hook you up to this chain so you can move around a bit and take a leak or whatever, or you can stay right there in the back of this car. I don’t really care which, although on second thought, I guess I’d rather not have to hose out the back of my cruiser if you pee in your pants . . .”
Kurt looked out through the open space above the window, his eyes boring hatefully into Jeremiah. Nevertheless, he nodded and turned his back to the window so that he could stick both hands outside the car. Jeremiah wasn’t taking chances. He had planned to be careful anyway, but there was something about Kurt that reminded him of a coon in a trap. They’d sit there looking sadly at you like a little girl’s stuffed animal. Then you’d get within striking distance and they’d explode like a wet cat straight out of hell.
Well, the way Jeremiah was handling things wasn’t going to give Kurt that chance. He’d take one cuff off and hook it to the chain, then get in the car himself, safely protected by the barrier between the front and back seats, and then open the window to let Kurt climb out. After that, Jeremiah would simply back the car out of the barn, close the big heavy door, and try to forget about his prisoner until the president was on his way out of town and Jill was here to calm him down.
Carefully, Jeremiah unlocked the cuff on Kurt’s left wrist. With Kurt’s right hand in his left, he reached down and picked up the heavy chain.
CHAPTER 31
Kurt tried not to shake, but a wild torrent of adrenaline flowed through his body. When his hand came free, he knew it would be his only chance. As Jeremiah straightened his back, rising from the floor with the big chain in his fist, Kurt spun his body around and grabbed the big man with both hands by the wrist. With all his might, he braced his feet against the car door and yanked the trooper toward the car. Jeremiah’s head hit the doorframe with a resounding thud.
Without letting go of the trooper, Kurt kicked viciously at the open window. It shattered into a net of glass cubes that dropped to the ground like broken candy. Yanking the stunned cop halfway into the car, he grabbed the big Smith & Wesson .45 from Jeremiah’s holster and brought the handle of the gun down viciously on the base of his skull. Then he cocked the hammer of the gun and crouched down, ready to fire at whoever else might be coming. He waited. The sound of his own breathing was heavy and audible even with the continuous rumble of the passing thunder.
When the eternal minute had passed, Kurt began to wonder if the two of them might be alone. That made no sense at all.
The confusion was unsettling, and he felt a sudden bolt of panic return. He scrambled up from the floor of the car and wormed his arm outside the window, groping for the handle. Jeremiah filled the space almost entirely, and Kurt was unable to get his arm at the right angle to open it. There were no handles on the inside. Frantic, he began to stuff the cop back out the window. His frenzied efforts soon left the big man lying unconscious, maybe even dead, on the barn floor.
Kurt stood over the body, his chest heaving from the struggle, and tried to think. He pressed the big .45 down against the enormous trooper’s temple. He hesitated, then let the hammer down gently with his thumb.
He wasn’t certain what stayed his finger. It was a feeling more than a thought. It just didn’t make sense. Nothing did. Without thinking, he fished the key out of the trooper’s pocket. He freed himself and cuffed Jeremiah to the chain, then instinctively turned and ran into the darkness for the cover of the woods.
CHAPTER 32
Reeves had all but given up hope. Nothing either he or Vanecroft had tried turned up anything on the girl. Reeves had pumped a contact he had at the NYPD down in the city, and Vanecroft had talked to a guy he knew at the FBI. It was as if Jill Eisner had disappeared from the face of the earth. His boss was frantic, edgy, and hypercritical
of his and his partner’s failed efforts. Reeves had the sense that other people were searching hard for the girl as well.
Still, he watched and waited. It was all he could do and it was what he’d been ordered to do. It was the night before the president’s visit, when the storm hit, that he finally decided enough was enough. He was trudging up through the woods in the midst of the horrendous wind, rain, and hail when he saw a pair of headlights flashing through the trees.
Despite his skepticism, Reeves was professional enough to jog back through the trees just to see who it was. As the car wound down past him, he thought he’d seen a rack of lights on the roof during a particularly sustained flash of lightning. By the time he got back to where the trees opened onto the lawn, the cop—it was a cop car—had gotten out of the cruiser and was headed for the front door. As suddenly as it had started, the torrential downpour stopped. In its wake was a pesky drizzle.
Reeves yanked the microphone out of his dripping pack and fumbled with the headset. All the while his mind was chewing on the scene. The best thing he could come up with was that the girl had been found. Maybe she was even dead. That would explain why no one—her friends, family, or work associates—had seen her for days. Reeves felt like a candle inside him had been doused. Sanctioned kills didn’t come along every day, so when he got one, he cherished it.
He got his equipment set up just in time to hear and see Kurt answer the door. The cop said nothing about the girl, and when he flipped a set of cuffs on Kurt Ford, a faint sigh of relief escaped Reeves’s throat. She was still out there, waiting to be taken out, but now he was more puzzled than ever. The cop was arresting Ford without any apparent reason. Reeves knew that if it had anything to do with what Ford was planning for the president, there would be a lot more than one cop at the scene.