by G. M. Ford
“No . . . go ahead,” he replied.
She brought the phone to her ear.
“Gus . . . Gus . . .” someone was shouting. Grace recognized the voice.
“Maddy?” she said.
“Gus . . . Gus you gotta . . . Mom . . . she . . .”
“Is that you, Maddy? It’s Grace. What’s wrong?”
“There’s men!” she screamed. “Behind us in a car.”
Grace turned her back on her companion and made an effort to keep her voice down. “Where’s Gus?” she asked, as calmly as she was able.
“Home . . . back home,” Maddy said. In the background, Grace could hear the rush of the wind, the roar of the engine, and Tessa’s high-pitched keening floating over the top of it all, like the plaintive whine of a steel guitar.
Grace got to her feet. “Get home to Gus,” she said. “Can you do that Maddy? Can you get home to Gus?”
“Mama’s lost,” Maddy said. “We’re in some neighborhood.”
“Help her,” Grace implored. “Use the MapQuest app. Remember?”
“I remember,” Maddy said after a moment.
“Help her get back to Gus.”
“Okay . . .” took a while.
“Tell your mom I’m on the way. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Get home to Gus. Do you hear me, Maddy? Get home to Gus.” The connection went dead.
Grace looked down at Paul Reeves. His face was slack with concern.
“Emergency,” she said, with an apologetic shrug. “Sorry, but I’ve got to go.”
He held up a “don’t worry about it” hand. “Thanks for all your efforts,” he said.
Grace pocketed the phone and began to sprint across the hotel lobby toward the front door.
“I need this,” Edwin Royster said. “Just make it happen, Dorothy.”
“You’re not listening to me, Edwin,” she said. “This isn’t something I can do for you. If I could, I would.”
“All you’re doing is providing the means for your own judicial order to be carried out. That’s it. Nothing more.”
“Enforcement is outside my purview,” she said.
“Well, move it inside. Put it in your front parlor. I really don’t care,” Edwin Royster said. “I expect this done first thing tomorrow morning.”
Three knocks rattled the office door. Royster pushed the phone hard against his chest and frowned. The door opened and Travis came hustling into the room, closing the door behind himself. He was carrying an open laptop.
“What . . . are you blind? I’m on the phone here,” Royster growled. He pointed at the door. “Why don’t you—”
“You’re going to want to see this,” Travis insisted as he set the laptop on Royster’s desk and pushed two buttons.
Edwin Royster began to nod at the screen, as if he’d expected this all along. He brought the smothered phone back up to his ear. “I’ve got to go,” he said into the mouthpiece. “First thing tomorrow morning,” he repeated, before breaking the connection.
“Hardwig?” he asked Travis, without pulling his eyes from the screen.
“Ten minutes ago.”
Royster pointed at the slide show on the screen. “Those are my daughters.”
The image changed. His face went dark. He pointed again. “That dumb-ass bitch,” he spat. “I want that sow arrested.”
“Team one has them under surveillance. I’ve got a backup unit on the way to Hardwig. As soon as they’re in place, we’ll move in.”
As they raced up the street, the neighborhood kaleidoscoped past the car windows, the colors flashing past Maddy’s eyes like a ribbon in the wind.
She popped her seatbelt and crawled up onto her knees, so she could see over the top of the seat. The Mercedes was still half a block behind. She peered down at the phone in her hand. Keyed in the address of their new apartment, realized she’d put it in the wrong place, and started over.
“Stop,” Maddy said. “Stop the car, Mama.”
Cassie Royster was glassy-eyed and breathing like a distance runner. “I don’t know where we are,” she admitted to nobody in particular.
“Pull over Mama. Please,” Maddy said.
Cassie threw her eyes at the mirror. “I can’t,” she said. “They’re back there. If I stop . . .” She banged the steering wheel with her hand, “Oh God . . . what did I do?”
“Just for a second, Mama. Just stop for a second.”
Cassie Royster hesitated, and then reluctantly began to slow the car. She licked her lips and checked the mirror again. The Mercedes was still maintaining its distance, so she began to feather the brakes, pulled over to the curb and stopped.
She checked the mirror again. Same deal. They were sitting half a block behind, nestled up against the curb, waiting to see what she did next. Maddy was squinting down into her hand, inputting something into the phone.
“Are they going to take us back to Daddy?” Tessa wanted to know.
“No honey . . . it’s going to be alright,” Cassie said.
Maddy looked to her right. The number on the nearest house read 2611. She keyed it into the phone. The green street sign up at the corner said they were sitting on Muldowny Road. 2611 Muldowny Road.
She keyed that in too, and then pushed the button. A map appeared on the screen. Maddy turned the map in a circle, trying to orient herself. She looked out through the windshield, then back into her palm again. And then again.
“Go up two blocks,” she announced finally, “and then turn left. Teller Street,” she said. “Turn left at Teller Street.”
Mickey Dolan let the FedEx truck pass him. He was four cars behind the white van Grace Pressman was driving and figured the FedEx truck might provide a little bit of highway camouflage.
They were rolling north on 156, doing about five miles an hour over the speed limit, in the right-hand lane. Whatever had been said during that phone call Grace had fielded back at the hotel . . . whatever it was had galvanized her. She hadn’t looked back once.
Dolan could feel her impatience from a quarter mile behind. The way she darted in and out of lanes, looking for an angle and then, after a moment, seemed to regain her composure, as the surge of anxiety abated. This was a woman in a big hurry to get where she was going.
He reached for the radio. His inner cop was telling him to call Dispatch. Tell them where he was and what he was doing. That was the protocol. Everybody knew where everybody else was one hundred percent of the time. That’s how it worked.
His fingers seemed to have a life of their own, though. They stopped just short of making contact with the microphone. He frowned as he eased his hand back on the steering wheel, telling himself that since he didn’t actually know where he was going, maybe he ought to wait. At least, that’s what he told himself. Himself didn’t believe a word of it, but what the hell?
Five miles later, Grace’s turn signal began to blink yellow, announcing her intention to take the Hardwig-Allensville exit, about half a mile up. Dolan lifted his foot from the gas. The car began to slow. The cars behind began to swoop around.
Mickey felt a familiar pang begin to build in his chest. He knew this exit all too well. If you drove west for long enough, past the winter orchards, with their frosty fields and shuttered fruit stands, in one end of Hardwig and out the other, and then kept on going for another fifteen miles or so, the land began to rise around you like dark fingers, until you eventually found yourself in the thick virgin forests of the Spellman Wilderness Area. Right where Jen’s great-great-grandfather had built that cabin along the banks of Bluewater Creek. Where . . . He lost the thread on purpose. No point going there.
Dolan hung back. The exit was a long, sweeping arc, with a stop sign at the bottom. No place to hide if he got too close, so he backed off the gas and let the van sweep down onto the plain all by itself. Left to Allensville. Right
to Hardwig.
Right toward Hardwig. “Had to be,” he groused to himself, as he watched the white van get smaller and smaller as Grace accelerated down the two-lane blacktop.
The rental car bumped up into the driveway and lurched to a stop, rocking back and forth on its springs like a hobbyhorse.
Cassie rummaged in her purse, trying to locate the house keys. She cast a furtive glance back the way they’d come. Her breath caught in her throat. A block to the west, the blue Mercedes had settled ominously against the curb. As she watched, the passenger-side window slid halfway down. The long lens appeared. She looked away. Her rummaging became more frenzied.
“Come on, Mama,” Maddy pleaded.
“Oh God,” Cassie groaned.
And then she had the keys. Holding them in her hand like a trophy. She grabbed the door handle and started to get out of the car, but the seat belt had other ideas, jerking her to a halt, forcing her to reach back across the seat to get at the release button.
As Cassie struggled out onto the driveway and slammed the car door, the girls made a mad dash for the front porch. Maddy was wide-eyed at the blue Mercedes across the street. Tessa was jumping up and down as she waited for her mother to stop fumbling with the keys and get the door open.
Took three tries with the key and twenty seconds before the three of them disappeared inside. Cassie leaned against the inside of the door and threw all the bolts. She looked over at Maddy, who was peeping between the drapes.
“Maddy. Go get Gus,” she panted.
Tessa made a beeline for her room and slammed the door. Maddy ran toward the back of the house. That’s how they’d practiced it. Going from one duplex to another via the back doors, so nobody could see they knew each other. Gus said it was best that way. Safer for all of them.
Gus had a white towel slung over one shoulder. His face was covered with soap.
Maddy blurted it out. “Mama put Tessa in the same school as me,” she said. “There’s men in a car. Across the street.”
Gus was a quick study. “Go back and look after your mom and sister, Maddy. Tell everybody to pack. I’ll be over in a second.” He left the door wide open as he turned away and disappeared into the duplex’s dark interior.
Seven miles from Hardwig. Mickey was so focused on Grace, a half mile in front of him, that when a huge Chevy SUV with blackout windows blew past him at better than a hundred miles an hour, he nearly jumped out of the seat. His unmarked cruiser rocked from the buffeting of the air as the Chevy powered by. Even the cattle in the nearby fields seemed vaguely startled by the hullabaloo.
Mickey gave it a little more gas and watched as it took them all of ten seconds to do the same thing to Grace and then disappear over the horizon in a cloud of dust.
And so it was with no small amusement when, five miles later, just as they were coming into the city limits of Hardwig, he saw the blackout Chevy SUV pulled over to the side of the road. Just like Charlie Hellman had described, the GI Joe driver was dressed in fatigues, sporting a butch haircut and aviator sunglasses as he stood by the side of the car, right next to the glowering state trooper. It was all Dolan could do to keep from honking the horn on the way by.
He had barely finished chortling ten minutes later when Grace pulled the white van to the curb, got out, and ran up onto the front porch of what looked to be a duplex on West Collier Street.
Dolan backed the cruiser into an unnamed side street, rolled down the window and waited. Protocol said he should inform local law enforcement that he was conducting an operation within the Hardwig cops’ jurisdiction, but he’d decided to wait until he had something more concrete.
Gus eyeballed out through a crack in the blinds. The blue Mercedes was right where it had been for the past fifteen minutes. He turned back to the room. Both girls had hurriedly packed their belongings and stood like refugees, awaiting further orders.
After a moment, Cassie staggered out of her bedroom dragging an overflowing suitcase along the floor, with a pair of garment bags thrown heavily over her shoulder. Her face was a mask of defeat. “I’m sorry, Gus,” she said for what seemed like the two thousandth time, “I wanted Tessa to . . . I wanted the girls—”
“We’ll talk about it later,” Gus said, cutting her off.
A loud knocking rattled the front door. Gus brought his hand to his hip and turned to Cassie and the girls. “Leave the bags. Go into the kitchen,” he said in a low voice. He took a step and then turned back. “Go!” he mouthed. They went.
Gus had to bend at the waist in order to look out through the peephole in the door.
He looked once, and then again, just to make sure, before flipping the bolts and pulling open the door.
Grace stepped into the room. The girls had been peeking out from the kitchen. They called her name in unison and rushed to her side. She threw a protective arm around each of them. She looked to Gus.
“We got company,” he said. He walked over and used his big fingers to part a couple of slats on the venetian blinds. Grace let go of the girls and took a peek.
“The blue Mercedes back at the corner,” Gus said. “Followed them from the school this afternoon.”
“How’d that happen?” Grace asked.
Gus rolled his eyes, and Grace immediately knew the answer. Had to be Cassie.
“Just trying to please,” Gus said disgustedly.
“So what now?” she asked.
“This place is blown,” he said. “We gotta go.”
“Where?”
He shrugged. “Someplace else. We’ll figure it out as we go along.”
Grace nodded. “What can I do?” she asked.
He told her. Grace told him she understood.
She followed him to the back door, standing with a hand on either side of the doorway as Gus trotted the length of the yard, nimbly hopped over the neighbor’s decorative garden fence, and disappeared from view.
She grabbed both girls’ suitcases and carried them over to the door.
“Everybody be ready to move,” she said.
Mickey Dolan thought, for a moment, he’d witnessed a murder. His attention was focused on the West Collier Street duplex, when a flash of movement in his peripheral vision pulled his eyes to the left. Took his brain a few seconds to sort it all out.
Enormous guy in a black suit walking up the street. Blue Mercedes parked at the corner. As he approached the car from the rear, Black Suit stepped up onto the grass. Guy looked to be eight feet tall. From the inside pocket of his coat, he pulled the unmistakable silhouette of a revolver. He held it down against the side of his leg as he approached the Mercedes.
Mickey was just reaching for the door handle when a flat report echoed around the neighborhood. Looked like the Hulk maybe shot the guy in the passenger seat. Mickey jumped out of the cruiser and reached for his weapon. But no. The Mercedes was leaning now. The guy had shot out the right front tire, and then kept on walking, like nothing had happened.
Mickey slid his weapon back into the holster and waited. The passenger was out of the car now. Incredulous. Inspecting the damage. He shouted after the big guy, but the Hulk kept on walking. Not about to be ignored, the passenger broke into a run, sprinting over the corner of somebody’s lawn, in hot pursuit of the tire shooter.
Might have been better if he hadn’t gotten there at all. About the time he put an angry hand on the black suit jacket, the big guy pirouetted, drew back an arm, and punched him full in the face . . . hard enough to stop a train. Two blocks away, Mickey Dolan winced at the sound of meat on meat.
The passenger’s feet flew from beneath him. He landed flat on his back and lay there twitching, one arm spastically flailing in the wind, like a signal flag.
The big guy kept walking, out of the grass now, crossing the pavement toward the duplex. As the black suit got closer, Mickey recognized him. That was Gus Bradley. One of S
ean Keenan’s old-time head busters. A collection specialist, as Mickey recalled. Word on the street said Gus had killed three guys with his bare hands. Last Mickey recalled, Bradley had drawn a double nickel for felonious assault and, as a guy with a sheet as long as his arm, had been invited to spend a decade or so as a guest of the state. Probably explained why Mickey hadn’t seen him in so long.
Mickey watched as Gus raised his arm as if to beckon somebody forward. Five seconds passed before the front door of the duplex flew open. Dolan sunk down in the driver’s seat. He was peeping over the dashboard when two little girls with backpacks came bursting out of the duplex on the right. Grace Pressman, carrying a pair of suitcases, was a foot and a half behind them as they hustled down the sidewalk and threw everything into the white van.
What had to be Cassie Royster was bringing up the rear. Looked like she was walking in mud as she dragged a distended suitcase and a couple of bags across the asphalt.
The driver was out of the Mercedes now, kneeling in the grass, trying to revive his friend, with little result. Gus grabbed Cassie Royster around the waist and hauled her, suitcases, garment bags and all, over to the van and dropped her unceremoniously inside the sliding door. He slid it shut with a bang and then trotted around to the other side and levered himself into the driver’s seat.
No telling what the Mercedes driver was thinking. Stress does strange things to people. He still hadn’t managed to coax his punched-out partner into the sitting position when Gus Bradley started the van, dropped it into gear, and began rolling up West Collier Street at a stately Sunday afternoon pace.
Must have been frustration rearing its ugly head. All driverman knew was the people he was charged with keeping an eye on were about to drive off up the street and, what with an unconscious partner, and a shot-out front tire, he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Probably explains why he, all of a sudden, came down with such a serious case of the stupids.