Prey - Debt Collector 6 (A Jack Winchester Thriller)

by Jon Mills

  The day wore on and he was eating when there was a knock at the door.

  “Come in.”

  When the door eased open, he caught sight of her.

  “Hello, Jack,” said Isabel.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jack noticed his fight-or-flight instinct didn’t kick in. She shut the door behind her and placed a cup of coffee down beside him.

  “Thought you might want something better than the dross they serve from the vending machine.”

  “Thanks.”

  She stared around the room and he could tell she was uncomfortable, almost like a woman that was betraying her husband and meeting another man behind his back. Except her man was the FBI. She ambled over to the window and glanced out before turning back and commenting on how he looked.

  “Why are you doing this, Jack? L.A., I can understand, even Oregon, but Peru and this, you are way out of your depth.”

  “And you would know?”

  She took a seat across from him.

  “I spent months looking over your case file, speaking to people who knew you in New York. You were good at what you did for the mob, but this is completely left field even for you.”

  “People have the right to change.”

  She scoffed. “Of course. Lose some weight, put some muscle on, take up an instrument, join a club but tracking down people? Going up against a criminal element that you know nothing about — that’s madness.”

  He picked up the coffee she had brought him and sipped on it. She was right, it tasted a hell of lot better than the sludge he had tasted earlier.

  “A criminal is a criminal, Isabel. You should know that better than I do. I’ve been around all types. I don’t know what case file you read but you wouldn’t have been privy to all I did in New York.”

  “How so?”

  “Because you would be dead.”

  His eyes flitted to hers. He wasn’t joking either. That kind of information could have put him behind bars for life. He went to great measures to ensure that his work for Gafino was clean. There was no trail that led back to him. The only one that had ever come close to catching him was Detective Banfield, and he was pretty sure that he had let him slide a few times.

  “Besides, you haven’t dealt with this either.”

  “No, but that’s why the FBI works as a team to bring down groups like this. It takes months to do it right. Going in there by yourself is not only going to get you killed, which I must say, I’m surprised you’re not. But all you are going to do is cut the head off one of the snakes. There are more out there that will continue.”

  She leaned back in her chair and picked some fluff from her dark pants. She was very particular about her appearance. That was something he had noticed in the short time he had known her. He had to wonder if the reason she was here talking to him instead of cuffing him wasn’t somehow related to her interest in him. What that interest was, was to still be determined. He knew that the FBI loved to get into the minds of criminals. They had formed entire divisions of its organization around the study of the criminal mind. Perhaps she was keen to understand him the way a scientist might be drawn to study a disease.

  “What progress is your team making in finding these kids?”

  “Slow but at least they’re not stuck in a hospital bed with an IV in their arm.”

  He pulled back the sheets on the bed and stepped out. She coughed, and then he realized that he had just flashed his naked rear end. The hospital garb only covered the back when the strings were done up, and they were untied. She smirked. He twisted a little to regain his self-respect.

  He dragged the IV stand over to the door and hollered out for a nurse.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting some clothes and getting the hell out of this place.”

  “Oh, don’t be stupid, get back in bed.”

  “No, I’ve spent long enough here. At this rate, they’ll be gone.”

  She got up and tried to assist him back into the bed but he just pulled his arm away.

  “I don’t need your help.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Or your pity.”

  “You aren’t going to get it from me,” she replied taking her seat, crossing her legs and sipping on her coffee. He continued calling for the nurse and one of them finally showed up.

  “Do you have my clothes?”

  She frowned as if the question was stupid. “You had one pair of pants when they brought you in and they cut those off you.”

  “Great. Well, can I get some clothes?”

  “Does this look like a clothing store?”

  Isabel chimed in. “It’s okay, I’ll get him some.”

  “The problem is not with getting clothes, it’s that you are not up to it. You should be in bed.”

  “Of course I should. It puts more money in your pocket if I am,” he said turning back towards the bed. The thought of coming up with the cash to pay for the hospital stay hadn’t even dawned on him until that moment. With no clothes, no money and now a debt hanging over his head, he was in a worse state than he was before. He stumbled a little and the nurse shot into the room and caught him just in time. Isabel got up and tried to assist but once again Jack shrugged them off. “I’m fine. Just leave me.”

  The nurse backed away and Jack caught Isabel muttering something to her and then she left the room. She watched him work his way around the bed using it to support himself.

  “You know people are just trying to help,” she said.

  “Well, there you go, that’s my reason.”

  “What?”

  “You asked me why I’m doing this.”

  “I was referring to here.”

  “And I was referring to here. Nevada. Those boys. C’mon, Isabel, you know how these things go. In a matter of days they will stop searching for them when the leads go dry and then what? The parents will put on a yearly remembrance and those kids will fade into memories. Just another face on a flyer.”

  He eased himself back into bed and she stood there staring at him.

  “Even if you could leave right now. What good are you to them in the state you’re in?”

  “I’ve been in worse.”

  She snorted. “Typical guy.”

  “What?”

  She turned and headed towards the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get you some clothes.”

  “But you don’t even know what size I am.”

  She was gone before he could finish. He let out a sigh and tried to get some rest.

  Isabel didn’t immediately go to a store, she swung by the address connected with the plates. When she pulled up outside, there was no vehicle in the driveway. When no one answered at the front door, she checked the back. After peering through the window she noticed that the place looked as if it was empty, and yet there was mail stuffed into the mailbox at the end of the driveway. She was still peering through the window when a dog’s bark startled her.

  “What are you doing near my property?”

  An elderly man ambled up the driveway with a vicious German shepherd dog on a leash in one hand. He had flyaway white hair, and was wearing an American flag bandanna and a sleeveless T-shirt with jeans.

  She held her hands out in front of her and told him she was with the FBI and that she was going to pull out her badge and to keep the dog at bay. After showing him, he let out a whistle and told the dog to settle down.

  “I see you’ve got him well-trained.”

  “Have to with all the lunatics I have to deal with.”

  She pulled out a scrap of folded paper that had a license plate number that the FBI had managed to pull on the owner of the vehicle. “You recognize this name, and face?”

  “Yeah. That little bastard left without paying. He owes me two months’ rent.”

  “You know where he went?”

  “Lady, if I knew where he went, don’t you think he’d be having a conversation with my dog right now?�
��

  She nodded, glancing down at the now docile beast that only seconds ago looked as if it wanted to rip her throat out. She slipped the paper back into her jacket pocket.

  “When did he leave?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Last night probably. I spoke to him two days ago about the money he owed. He said he would pay me today. I should have known.”

  “How long was he living here?”

  “Four months roughly.”

  “And how did he pay?”

  “He didn’t. Are you not listening?”

  “Nothing?”

  He shrugged and looked over to the neighbor who had come out to cut his lawn. “A few months but that was it. Damn Mexicans, how the hell they end up in our country is beyond me.”

  “Do you think I can get access to the house?”

  “Yeah. With a warrant!” He started laughing.

  “I might be able to find him and get your money back.”

  His laughter grew. “The FBI couldn’t find a whore in a whorehouse.”

  He spat a big glob of black tobacco juice a few inches from her foot. Pleasant, she thought. She could see that he was far too riled up to even begin to talk him down.

  “Okay, well, thanks for your time.”

  “Hey, listen, in the slim chance you needle-nose dickwads find him. You tell him I want my money!”

  “Will do.”

  She raised a hand but didn’t look back as she walked down the driveway to her vehicle. Slipping inside she looked over at the property and the old man was still standing there like a statue leering back at her as though she represented everything that he detested about America.

  When she returned to the hospital, she had several sets of clothes in hand. Why she was doing this for him was as much a mystery to her as it probably was to him. But there was something about his drive to help others that felt right. It reminded her of a time when she wanted to join the police force, before she learned about office politics and dealt with the bullshit and red tape.

  Isabel pushed open the door and was midway through explaining that if it didn’t fit him he would have to make do with what she got, when she noticed that his bed had been stripped. She looked at the number on the door a second time to make sure she had entered the right room.

  A nurse was doing her rounds, when Isabel flagged her down.

  “Nurse, do you know where the man who was in here went?”

  “Heather deals with this room. One second.” She crossed over into another room and poked her head inside. When she turned back she shrugged.

  “Seems he checked out.”

  “You let him?”

  The nurse who she had referred to as Heather came out of the room. “No, no we didn’t. He just upped and left. No one even saw him leave.”

  If it wasn’t for the fact that she was concerned about the situation at hand, she might have just notched it up to him deciding to take matters into his own hands but she had to be certain.

  “Where’s your security room?”

  “Why?”

  “Where is it?” Isabel asked. The nurse guided her along the corridor all the while peppering her with questions and trying to make it clear that neither she nor her staff were at fault. And she also wanted to know who was going to pay for his stay. Once she was in the security room, she asked the guard on duty to replay the footage over the past hour.

  She stood there with her hands on her hips as the guard fumbled around with the equipment. When he finally brought it up, she spotted him. He was wearing hospital scrubs when he walked out of the main entrance.

  “Damn you, Winchester.”

  Relying on Isabel would have been a mistake, besides he still wasn’t sure it was a good idea to be working with her. He hadn’t expected her to show up, neither had he asked her to. Somewhere in the back of his mind all he could think about was the possibility that she would change her mind and slap cuffs on him. He still hadn’t fully processed what she had done back in Florida. She had to have come under fire for that. Sure, he’d taken the step to contact her again but that was just because he had hit up against a wall, and needed some idea of who he was dealing with.

  Now that he knew, it was just a case of rethinking it through. Assessing his options. And right now they were limited. Twenty minutes earlier he’d ducked into the first available cab outside the hospital. Of course he had no way of paying the driver but he hadn’t thought that far ahead. He was running on a tank half full, and a body that was still dealing with pain. It would take him days, maybe weeks to fully heal but at least that shit they had pumped into him was out of his system.

  The taxi pulled into a ranch just on the outskirts of Winnemucca. The vehicle vibrated as they drove over a cattle guard. Three horses roamed freely behind the ranch-style wooden fencing. For someone who was a minister of a small congregation, he looked as though he had some nice coin. Dust kicked up in a spiral as they made their way to the front of the cabin-style home with expensive looking brickwork for the foundation and wood on the upper portion of the house. Behind it in the distance were snowcapped mountains and a vast green valley.

  As the vehicle pulled around to the front door, Jack realized he was now going to deal with an irate driver when he told him he didn’t have the money to pay him. In New York it wouldn’t have been too bad, he could have slipped out and sprinted into the crowds but here, it was a different matter.

  He got out and the driver wound his window down. “Hey, you owe me.” He rubbed his fingers together.

  “Yeah, about that.”

  Before he finished, he heard Jenna call out to her grandfather. The driver had got out and was already grabbing Jack when Henry came out of the house.

  “What’s going on?”

  “He owes me forty-three dollars.”

  “Sorry, they didn’t have my wallet.”

  Henry looked down at what Jack was wearing and snorted. “Wait here, I’ll get the money.”

  He felt guilty putting them in this position and by the look on the driver’s face which was bright red, he wasn’t exactly thrilled either. Henry handed him the cash and he muttered and cursed before peeling away and kicking up a good amount of Nevada dirt.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Few would ever understand the horror of what it was like to be taken by a stranger. Neither could most begin to wrap their head around being transported like cattle, sold for a period of time and abused. But in the weeks and months he had been away from his family, he had come to know it intimately. It was brutal, absent of empathy and painful.

  His mind searched for ways to find some semblance of normality. Often it was found in the small things like a conversation, sleeping at night or even in being locked in a room. Even though they were locked in to prevent them from escaping, the room itself took on a meaning of its own. At least there behind the doors they were away from the men that brutalized them — if only for a day or two.

  Hope was something that was far from their thoughts. No one talked about escaping because it was frowned upon. They knew that if one of them did manage to escape, the others would be punished and as the bond between the missing boys grew stronger with each passing day, it was no longer seen as an option. But that’s not to say they didn’t try to get a message out to the families to let them know they were alive.

  One of the boys had scribbled on a restroom wall the words Gary Collins is Alive using his own feces. He couldn’t provide a location, as none of them knew where they were. They had no idea what state they were in as they were blindfolded while they traveled. The only time the men took them out of the vehicle was when they needed to use a washroom and it was usually some dirty hole in the back of some isolated gas station. Joshua was the only one that didn’t have to wear a blindfold and that was because he had been with them the longest and they felt they had broken his spirit enough that he wouldn’t run even if he had the chance. And they were right. Joshua even believed they put him in situations where they could see if h
e would run. He figured they were lurking in the shadows just waiting for him to make the choice that would lead to only one consequence — death.

  As for prying information out of him, it was pointless. He spoke very little and the times he did, it was usually related to what the boss wanted.

  Joshua had even been used to drag a boy into a car, that’s why he believed they wouldn’t kill him. In his mind he had done everything they had asked and as long as he continued, they would keep him around. It was easier and cost-effective to control someone who had been kidnapped than it was to find those willing to abduct kids. They had plenty of men who wanted the sexual pleasure that came from abusing them, but when push came to shove and they were asked to assist in the abductions, none of them would get involved.

  The environment in that room was set up so that they never knew whether it was night or day, or even what day of the week it really was. They kept the boys in a constant state of confusion. The few times they had managed to see the world beyond that room, or beyond a hotel room, they were kept awake using different forms of drugs in order to screw with their body clock and mind. All of them including Billy had already been given heroin numerous times. It wasn’t used as a means of escape or to numb the pain from their abusers. No, they wanted them to feel every ounce of pain. That’s what many of them paid for. They liked to see the fear in their faces, to hear them screaming. No, the heroin was used as another means to control them. By making them addicts, now they were willing to do whatever was required to get that next fix.

  Joshua was the only one who seemed to know what day of the week it was, and even then it was a guess. He had glanced at a newspaper that a politician had brought in with him. After getting back to wherever they were keeping them, he had made a point to jot down the date, and he used that to determine roughly what month it was.