When You Can't Stop (Harper McDaniel Book 2)

by James W. Hall

  She unsnapped the metal buttons on his shoulder straps and dragged down his overalls across his chest, peeling them to his waist and muscling them past his butt to his ankles.

  She squatted beside him, took a deep reinforcing breath, then looped the cord around the base of his testicles, binding the cord around his scrotum as tightly as it would go to create an inescapable cinch.

  She tied a knot and then another just for safety’s sake. Stood and wiped her damp hands hard against her slacks until they were dry.

  Pagolo was a heavy sweater.

  Confident he was secure, she went back to the grave site, got the shovel, and began to dig in the mushy, discolored ground she’d noticed earlier. It took fifteen minutes before she’d reached the first sign of the body, a few more minutes to uncover it by hand.

  His face was purplish black, and maggots thronged over his remaining flesh. The reek was so intense her stomach constricted, and she swallowed back a spurt of bile in the back of her throat. She leaned away from the putrid grave to draw a clear breath, then held it as she came back into the halo of stench.

  He had been a lean man, maybe five ten, wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt that was in tatters from the rot. She had to lie on her stomach and reach her arms into the shallow grave to turn his body over. It was ugly work, the cloth of his shirt crumbling in her fingers, his flesh as pliant as fresh dough.

  Mastering her revulsion, she turned him facedown, then reached into his back pocket and extracted the leather billfold she’d been hoping was there. Fat with cash and membership cards and an American Express and a driver’s license. John Jefferson Dickens, a street address in El Paso, Texas.

  Back at the Jeep, Pagolo howled, a cry of horror at his predicament.

  She walked back to him and squatted nearby and held out the wallet, letting him have a look at Dickens’s driver’s license. He blinked at it several times, his eyes still out of focus.

  “You killed this man.”

  Pagolo turned his gaze down to his crotch, the knotted cord, his eyes tracking the length of rope to the olive tree.

  “Soon I kill you.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Vaffanculo!”

  “And fuck you as well.”

  Moving beyond the range of his legs, Harper reached out for the cord, giving Pagolo time to observe what she was doing before she gave the rope a tug. He cringed and wrenched his heavy arms against his restraints. The ropes held fine.

  “Baldracca! Puttana.”

  “You’re the whore, Pagolo. Who is your pimp, your protettore?”

  He tried to spit at her but his mouth had gone dry.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s make this easy. Give me the number, the code to your phone. You do that, I’ll consider cutting you loose.”

  “You lie.”

  “The code to your phone and you might go free.”

  He spat another vaffanculo.

  “All right,” she said. “If that’s how you want it.”

  She rose and walked around to the driver’s side of the Jeep, slipped behind the wheel, depressed the clutch, put the shifter in neutral, and cranked up the engine. She revved it and revved it again.

  Pagolo yelled something inaudible, and Harper yelled back, “I can’t hear you.”

  She gunned the engine one more time, then cut it off.

  She climbed down and went back to Pagolo. Sweat was rolling off his face, coursing down his hairy chest. His testicles had turned bright red and seemed to be pulsating, though that might have been Harper’s imagination.

  “Four, six, five, eight, five, two.” His English had improved.

  She got the phone from the back of the Jeep and tapped in the code and opened the phone.

  She went to “Recenti.” His recent calls. The last one he’d made, a few minutes earlier, was to an international number with a 41 country code, Switzerland. She tapped the number, and after a few connecting clicks, the line rang twice before a voice answered in British English, “Ms. Larissa Bixel’s office, this is Millicent. How can I help you?”

  “Thank you,” Harper said. “You’ve done quite enough already.”

  She scrolled through the rest of his calls and found several to that same number in Switzerland. From what she could see, the calls had started back in April, not long after Adrian Naff suggested Harper might want to look into Albion’s olive-oil business in Puglia.

  She supposed it was possible Lester Albion had farmed out this scheme to Bixel, his chief understudy, but it was also possible Bixel had plotted this on her own and had been using her daughter to keep the project in the family and secret from Albion.

  She went back to Pagolo and squatted down to grip the cord.

  “I give you what you ask.”

  Harper tugged the cord and tugged it again, light twitches, nothing more. Pagolo shut his eyes and rolled his head back and gasped.

  “Who ordered you to kill Dickens?”

  “Woman.” His eyes were open now, and he was concentrating on her hand. “Boss woman.”

  “What is the name of the boss woman?”

  “Pixel. Pixel.”

  “Bixel with a B?”

  He nodded, the sweat streaming. He bent his head to the side, trying to shoulder away the sting in his eyes, but the restraints didn’t allow it.

  “Did you ask Bixel for permission to kill me?”

  He grinned at her. “Bixel no answer phone. Not there.”

  “Does Bixel have a boss?”

  He shrugged. “She the boss.”

  “She never mentioned any other name? The person she works for.”

  “Only talk to her. She calls, tells me to do a thing. Money arrives.”

  “Cash?”

  He nodded.

  “How does it arrive? Does someone bring it to you? A person?”

  “Come into bank by electricity.”

  “She wires it to you.”

  He nodded, eyes fixed on her hand. He was being most cooperative. She knew that torture wasn’t supposed to work. That victims confessed to whatever they thought their torturers wanted to hear. So she was trying to make her questions open-ended. Not lead him or hint at anything.

  She dropped the cord and opened her purse and dug out the damaged branch and showed it to him.

  “What is this?”

  He shook his head.

  “You don’t know? Or you refuse to say?”

  She moved it closer to his face.

  “Tree dying,” he said. “Una moria.”

  “What disease? Blight?”

  “Don’t know name. Bad disease. Un morbo.”

  “Is it just here?” She waved her hand in a circle around her. “Is it only in this grove? Or is it in other groves too?”

  Harper’s hand inched toward the cord. Pagolo followed the action with unblinking attention.

  “Segue l’insetto,” he said in a defeated whisper. “La malattia va dove va l’insetto.” The disease goes where the bug goes.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Albion International Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland

  Later in the afternoon, Larissa Bixel hand delivered the last of the Manfred Knobel closing documents with Albion’s signature to the legal department.

  Her contact on the legal team was Wolfgang Weber, a satisfactory lawyer, but his legal acumen was not the reason she’d chosen him to handle the paperwork for her Puglia transactions.

  Before last July she had never laid eyes on Wolfgang Weber and had no interest in doing so. It had always been Bixel’s habit to keep Albion employees at arm’s length, choosing instead to devote her attention exclusively to Lester Albion and avoid the ordinary rabble who occupied the offices of the headquarters. But when she’d devised the Manfred Knobel plan, she knew she would require the assistance of one of the in-house attorneys, so she’d set about searching for a candidate.

  Wolfgang’s name had landed on her desk early in the spring in the form of a sexual-harassment complaint. Several femal
e lawyers on the legal team had filed actions against Wolfgang with Albion’s human resources office. Each of their claims gave explicit details of Wolfgang’s naughtiness. It seemed that he was fond of exposing his private parts to women in his office as they passed by his desk.

  Since these claims had been made by lawyers against another lawyer, they had been written with great care and used graphic descriptions of Wolfgang’s male apparatus so there could be no doubt about the veracity of their charges.

  Bixel had summoned Wolfgang to her office and confronted him with the women’s claims, and when the young man began to deny them with dramatic indignation, she told him that he could prove his innocence simply by showing her his organ so she could compare it to the detailed descriptions in the grievances.

  “You’re sure this is what you want?” he said, a repellant smile flickering on his lips.

  “Quite sure.”

  Wolfgang unzipped his pants and drew out his male equipment and let it dangle outside his suit pants.

  Bixel rose from her seat and came around her desk and gave the offending organ a closer look. And yes, it was, as the women described, quite long with a mole as big as a bottle cap halfway along the shaft.

  “I have a job for you, young man,” she’d said as she went back to her chair. “If you complete it to my satisfaction, I will make these claims against you disappear. But I don’t want to hear that you’ve exposed yourself to another worker at Albion International. Now put that creature away.”

  And so it was that Wolfgang Weber became her legal point man on the Manfred Knobel project. He never questioned the purpose or the motivations behind his legal activities on her behalf. He simply executed each of her commands with speed and accuracy.

  “These are the final documents. Signed by Lester Albion and ready for your review.”

  Wolfgang stood at attention behind his desk, as he did each time Bixel entered his office. An obsequious gesture that Bixel found quite charming.

  “You might be interested to know,” he said, “that I’ve received a communiqué from Manfred Knobel.”

  Bixel was taken aback but showed nothing to Wolfgang except a charitable smile.

  “Yes? And what did Mr. Knobel have to say?”

  “He wanted me to let Mr. Albion know that he has invited another party to attend the closing in Bari this Friday. I thought I should run this past you before presenting it to Mr. Albion.”

  “What other party has Mr. Knobel invited to the closing?”

  Wolfgang consulted a legal pad on his desk and said, “A woman by the name of Harper McDaniel.”

  “I see.” Bixel’s throat clenched, but she tried to keep her face the picture of tranquility. “And did Mr. Knobel happen to say why he asked this particular woman to attend the closing?”

  “No, he did not. Only that I should let Mr. Albion know.”

  “Well, I’ll take care of that,” she said. “As I’ve told you more than once, Mr. Albion is not to be bothered with any of these transactions. Now you finish up with these documents and let me know when they’re done. I want them before you leave today.”

  “Not a problem,” he said.

  “So happy to hear it.”

  When Bixel returned to her office, she found Derek Müller entertaining Millicent, her secretary, with what sounded like the punch line to a dirty joke.

  Seeing her enter the office behind Derek, Millicent tried to shush him, but Derek blundered on:

  “And he never wiped his own butt again.” Derek chuckled. “Get it?”

  “Young lady, is this how you behave behind my back?”

  Millicent blushed and lowered her eyes.

  Turning slowly to face her, Müller appeared properly mortified.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Bixel, but . . .” Millicent’s blush deepened.

  “But what?”

  “You received a call from a gentleman in Italy. He said he would call back.”

  “Did he leave a number?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “His name?”

  “I believe he said his name was Pagolo, but I’m not sure, the connection was very poor, and his English was not clear.”

  “If he calls again, put him right through.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “All right, Müller,” Bixel said. “In my office. Now.”

  “Again, I’m sorry,” he said, when she’d shut the door. “But I do have good news.”

  “Let’s hope it’s very good.”

  “Adrian called. I told him about the package, the story you wanted me to relate, about Lucia Campos and the documents. He bought it.”

  “Did he?”

  “I know him quite well, and yes, ma’am. I’m sure he believed me.”

  “And did he tell you where to send this package?”

  “A hotel in Bari, Italy. He’s staying in a room with a woman named Harper McDaniel.”

  “Is he now?”

  “What’s wrong? I thought this is what you wanted.”

  She sat down in her desk chair and swiveled it to the side so she could see the wall of photographs, her Gerda performing on the world stage. Triumphs of athletic skill, years of hard work and determination that had led to zero financial reward. Gerda, her darling girl.

  “So Naff has teamed up with McDaniel,” she said. Derek looked on mystified. “Which puts my girl in grave danger. She’s quick and strong with excellent instincts, but Naff is a warrior, a professional assassin. This changes the calculus.”

  “You’re thinking out loud,” Derek said and nodded appreciatively as though, now that he understood he was being left out of the conversation, he could relax.

  “So, in that case, I must resort to another approach with Naff. Fortunately, I have done the background work and know his vulnerabilities, and thus how I must proceed.”

  Derek nodded again, pleased to be on the sidelines.

  “Do you suffer jet lag, Derek?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I want you to go on a journey, a crucial passage back and forth across the Atlantic. Can you do this for me?”

  “Of course, but will it involve . . .” He swallowed. “Violence?”

  “No, but it will require a modicum of stealth.”

  “I will be honored to do what I can to help.”

  “Do you have your passport with you in the office?”

  “No, it’s in my apartment, at home.”

  “You’ll leave now, go directly to your apartment, retrieve your passport, pack a single bag. Where you’re going is warm, no sweater, no jacket necessary. You’re fond of hoodies, I believe.”

  “They’re okay.”

  “I will make your flight arrangements myself. You’ll leave today. A car will be waiting downstairs to take you home, then off to the airport.”

  “And my itinerary?”

  “A sunny spot in America, then off to Italy. I’ll text you the details. Your number is still the same as before? During that whole Campos hotel incident?”

  Yes, his number remained the same.

  Gerda checked out of the Santa Claus B and B, a wretched place in the old town, Barivecchia, located on the headland between two harbors. Noisy and unclean.

  She booked a suite at the Villa Romanazzi about a mile from the waterfront. A posh hotel with an Olympic pool and a first-rate gym. She’d been needing a workout in a well-stocked weight room for days, but the true reason she picked that hotel was because it was where she’d discovered Adrian Naff was staying.

  A very trusting concierge had swallowed her cancer story. Her poor father and his mixed-up diagnosis.

  After checking into her suite overlooking the shutdown pool, she texted her boss.

  Naff is staying at the Villa Romanazzi Carducci Hotel. Don’t know room number yet. Shall I take him when I find him?

  Your information is incorrect. He’s sharing hotel room with McDaniel. You have fallen one step behind

  I think it is you who is incorrect

  Stand d
own. Take no action on Naff or the woman

  Why?

  Leave them to me came the reply.

  Don’t understand

  No answer came immediately. Gerda unpacked some of her shopping bags and fitted her new wardrobe into a suitcase she’d bought that morning. She had lost her favorite scarf in the scuffle at the Madrid hospital, leaving her only one more that she could use as a weapon, so she’d purchased two more during her shopping spree on the Via Sparano and Via Manzoni, both the correct size and weight to suit her purpose.

  Her phone buzzed with a text.

  Sending a helper. Will arrive soon

  For me?

  For you

  I need no help

  Repeat, stand down. Do nothing till helper arrives. He will explain next step.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Bari, Italy

  Harper used an arm bar to restrain Pagolo while she hauled him upright. It was an excruciating hold that hyperextended his right elbow, and with only the slightest additional pressure, she could ruin his arm for the rest of his life. Even the most pain-tolerant combatants Harper had gone up against couldn’t take more than a second or two before they did a quick double-tap signaling their surrender.

  With the arm bar paralyzing his right arm, she frog-walked Pagolo to the Jeep, leaving his overalls in a sweaty heap where he’d been sitting. The cord that was still knotted tight around his scrotum dragged behind him through the sandy soil like a grotesque tail.

  At the Jeep, she released the hold, wrenched his weakened right arm behind him, and tied a length of rope around his wrist. While she was knotting it, Pagolo lurched around and tried to attack her, but she sensed it coming and bent his wrist hard against the joint and locked it. Pagolo froze.

  “Do that again, I’ll break every bone in your wrist.”

  He went quiet, and she finished securing his hands together behind his back and prodded him into the passenger seat.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going for a drive,” she said. “Hold on, don’t want to lose you.”

  Once he was settled in the seat, she took the cord in her hand and walked around to the driver’s side and got behind the wheel. She wrapped the cord around the steering column several times and tied it off, leaving only a few inches of slack. If pantsless Pagolo tried to jump out of the vehicle, he’d have to leave his gonads behind.