She thought of all the people fleeing inland. All the people who hadn’t fled, but huddled in the dark, afraid of this wall of chaos that roared down on her. The storm! The storm! She screamed into the wind. Crying out to the hurricane as sister. Breathless, she collapsed on the sand, thinking, Now all those fleeing, huddling, faceless people know. Now they know how it feels to be me.
She walked over a mile back to the house. The crime scene, she reminded herself. Leproate was where she’d left him. Good boy. She considered the scene for a while and decided it would play as it was. There was just one more loose end to tie up before she called in “Agent down.”
This time the old man had the shotgun at high port as she drove up. Wellsley left the car running. She opened the door and stood. “Do you have a phone?”
“Jesus Christ, little lady, what happened? Sounded like a hell of a lot of shooting.”
“I said, do you have a working phone?” Jesus, did men never listen?
“Yeah, sure,” the old man said.
As Wellsley walked toward him, he repeated his question: “Was that gunfire?”
“Yes,” she answered, and shot him three times in the chest. She walked over to where he lay on the ground, clutching his chest and leaking life into the sandy soil, and asked, “Is that purty enough for you, sweetheart?”
PART FIVE
AN END TO IT
ONE
Three months after
Wellsley and Detective Mazerick went into the garage, guns drawn. When she saw the hole knocked in the inside wall next to the garage door, her pulse jumped, and she had to remember to breathe. Mazerick crossed the cool darkness of the concrete floor and peeked through the hole. Then he waved her up with a nod of his head.
He stacked on the wall on the outside of the hole. She opened the door and saw his eyes go wide as she pushed through first. Didn’t he think she could do this? She was goddamned FBI.
She saw the alarm keypad on the floor, surrounded by a scattering of plaster. He was here. He’d have to still be here, wouldn’t he? An old man. Wounded, tired. They’d find him asleep someplace, for sure.
Except for the hole in the wall and the alarm system, the rest of the house was untouched. Like a house in a magazine. None of that shit that everybody had but nobody wanted to see. It was like a full-size dollhouse.
They cleared it quickly and quietly, finding only one staircase leading up. She had to give Mazerick this, he moved as if he knew what he was doing. At the first few corners, he looked back to check her, and smiled that asymmetric smile when he saw that she had her gun pointed in the right direction. As if he was proud of her, or just glad she wasn’t going to accidentally shoot him. She could still taste that kiss and had to fight off the urge to spit.
They padded upstairs. The hallway at the top of the stairs went left and right. They looked at each other to decide a direction. Then they heard a noise from the left. It sounded like a muffled groan or a yawn.
Through that door was the master bedroom, and the bed had been slept in. It took an effort to check the corners and not stare at the bed. The unexpected is the hardest thing when you’re clearing a room. Your brain wants to continue to look at the first new or unexpected thing you see, but it’s the thing you don’t see that will kill you.
She cleared the far side of the bed and nodded to Mazerick. He moved to the bathroom door. It was closed. He made a motion—Should we kick it open? Jackass. What was this, a TV show? She shook her head and pushed it lightly with the fingertips of her left hand. It swung noiselessly open onto a travertine floor.
The bathroom was like a cathedral, if cathedrals came with skylights, sunken tubs, and his and hers vanities. They heard the noise again, and it echoed in the empty bathroom. On the far side of the room was an open door.
Mazerick went first. As soon as he looked through the door, he started laughing. What the fuck? Wellsley checked the hallway behind her. That’s where she would be if she were setting a trap. He kept laughing and she walked over and looked into the closet, gun still pointing toward the hallway.
On the floor were two men and a woman, tied with lamp cord and gagged with fabric.
“I think we missed him,” Mazerick said. Then he laughed at his own obvious joke as if it were funny.
Wellsley knelt down beside the closest man and removed the gag. “Thank God you are here,” he said. “I was showing the house, and there was a man. He attacked us. He stole my car.”
“What kind of car?” asked Mazerick.
“An Escalade, but the stupid son of a bitch. He can’t get away, you can track it with my phone.”
Wellsley said, “Show me,” and untied his hands.
The man dug around in his pockets and came up with a fancy phone. While he did, the couple beside him made whining noises through their gags. “Shhh,” said Wellsley. “Do you want me to catch this guy or not?”
Mazerick was still chuckling as he undid the other man’s gag. The first thing the guy said was, “Is my car all right, my Maserati? I was parked close behind.”
Rich people, thought Wellsley. She’d have to remember to hate herself as soon as she became one.
The Realtor handed her his phone and she saw a map interface showing the location of his SUV. Heading south.
Mazerick reached for his radio, saying, “We got him!”
“Bang,” said Wellsley’s gun.
TWO
The Realtor stared at the spray of Mazerick’s brains on the closet wall and ceiling. Then he screamed. His client repeated, “Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod” over and over again. Wellsley was thankful that the woman was still gagged.
She hit the Realtor in the face and he stopped screaming. “What’s the unlock code for the phone?”
“I-I-I-I,” he stammered.
Wellsley interrupted him by firing her pistol again, the round passing right between his legs.
“Sixty-nine sixty-nine!” he screamed, and then turned his face away.
Wellsley locked the phone, then entered the code to verify that it worked. Then she shot all of them in the head. She felt bad about shooting the woman, but not very. She took the client’s keys and stepped back into the bathroom.
She carefully ripped out a few of her hairs and sprinkled them onto the tile. She clawed at the closet doorframe until two of her nails broke. Then she lay down and kicked a hole in the drywall. She scattered some more of her hair by the bathroom door and went downstairs. Not much of an abduction scene, but she didn’t think she’d need the time.
In the driveway was a Maserati Ghibli. Not a scratch on it. It looked as if it wouldn’t have any trouble catching an SUV. She unlocked the phone and set it on the dash. She had to get him before he changed cars. The engine was smooth and powerful, a beautiful thing to hear. Before she put the car in gear, she remembered. Her cell phone went under the front of the rear wheel. Then she drove over it and away.
Wellsley took it slow out of the neighborhood, careful to avoid the patrol cops. Then she put her foot down and smiled at the roar. She knew she couldn’t hold on to this car for long, but she would enjoy it while she could.
THREE
As she drove, her mind worked the angles. Her first thought was to catch him, get him to talk, plant the murder weapon on him, then bring him in. She could be the hero and still get the money. But that was what had gone wrong the last time. She had let herself be fooled by a lying man. That was never going to happen again.
Back on Alligator Point, her call of “Agent down” should have unleashed the full power and righteous fury of the FBI, but it hadn’t. When she had finished explaining how all of it had been Agent Leproate’s orders, she had been told to shelter in place. Nobody was sending anybody into the path of what was now a category three hurricane.
So she holed up, in that innocent old man’s block house. The building had been there fifty years at least. No reason it wouldn’t be there for fifty more. When the eye of the storm passed overhead, she came out for a look
around. Most of the trees were gone. The old man’s body had blown or been washed away someplace. The wind picked up again, and she didn’t waste time looking for it. The house flooded, but the walls and roof stayed on.
They sent a Sea King search and rescue helicopter to pick her up with a medic and a field team. She told her story and it held, but they interrogated her as if they thought she was lying. In the end they put her on administrative leave pending further investigation. It was her word against nobody else’s. They might not trust her, but what could they prove? One way or the other, it was effectively the end of her career with the FBI, but what did she care? She wasn’t going to need a paycheck anymore.
She went to the location that she had gotten out of the kid. There she found a scummy pool of brackish water in the middle of the swamp. She stripped to her underwear and dove beneath the water. There, twenty feet below the surface, was the armored car.
She surfaced and hyperventilated, trying not to think about the alligators that most certainly lurked around this pool. When her bloodstream was full of oxygen, she dove all the way down.
The rear doors were open and the truck was empty.
She surfaced again, cursing. It was the truck from Saint Louis. She had killed five men and her career for nothing.
FOUR
When word got around that Wellsley was working the case on her own, from the outside, ASAC Harberg had warned her off. She told him to fuck off. That she was trying to avenge her dead partner. She made a big show of it, charging right into the field office. After that, one of the investigating agents, John Tabitha, had come to talk to her off the record.
From Agent Tabitha she learned that they still hadn’t found the boat. She asked him for a copy of the case files. He agreed, but he said, “Two conditions. Don’t ever tell them you got it from me. And if you get anything, it comes back to me.”
He said the last part as an afterthought. As if the idea that she, a mere girl, could find something he had overlooked was beyond the realm of possibility. She hid her hatred and nodded as submissively as she could. Jesus, she was sick of playing the game.
She got another guy to run NCIS for all GSWs and all John Does admitted to hospitals after the hurricane. The emergency clinics were full of John Does. But almost all of these were quickly claimed and identified. Of the three remaining GSWs, two were looters. The last one had walked out of an emergency clinic in Apalachicola.
The trail was cold. Somewhere out there were millions of dollars that might never be found. Weeks passed. She told her story three more times to internal affairs, but there was no resolution in sight. So she lived in limbo. Running, reading the case file, looking at maps, going running again. She didn’t sleep much.
That truck was down there somewhere. Lost amid the same unforgiving swamp where Ponce de León had looked for the Fountain of Youth. For his troubles, Ponce de León had died from a poisoned arrow in the leg. Doing a grid search would be like looking for a needle in an alligator-infested haystack. But still she lay awake at night and thought about trying.
Then she got a strange call. Her computer guy told her that, out of boredom, he had widened his search from 150 miles to four hundred. He got a hit in Charlotte, North Carolina. Tabitha had laughed at it. A guy found behind a Dumpster with multiple GSWs, days old. The hospital couldn’t revive him. So they finally sent him to a state-run rest home. The tech had joked, “Well, he ain’t going nowhere. He’ll be there if you need him.”
“Sure,” said Wellsley, “I’ll check it out.” But by the time she got there, it was a murder scene. And Hobbs was gone.
But this time there would be no escape. She caught up with the Escalade just south of town. She got close enough to verify the pale, haggard man at the wheel, then she hung back about half a mile. She barely kept him in sight and relied on the tracker to do the rest.
She hung with him through Columbia, where he veered off onto US 1. Just shy of Augusta, he stopped for gas. She wondered if the old man was going to have to sleep anytime soon. She thought he might, but didn’t count on anything. This was a long race and she would run it until the end.
Somewhere in the middle of Georgia, even the tracker wouldn’t help her. It was late, and between the Maserati’s surprisingly shitty in-dash GPS and trying to follow the Realtor’s vehicle tracker, she got turned around. She panicked a little, then she realized she knew where he was going and that she didn’t have to get there the same way.
She punched “Tallahassee” into the GPS and continued.
Just after dawn she hit Florida. And after that Tallahassee. Things started to make sense, and with the aid of the tracker, she picked him up at a grocery store on the south side of town. She saw him exit the store with a sub sandwich and a gallon of filtered water. He drank from the jug and ate the sandwich while looking at a map spread out on the hood of the Escalade. Then he got in and headed south again.
Fifteen minutes after she picked him up again, Hobbs pulled into a tiny used car lot on the edge of town. He was there for twenty minutes, and when he pulled out, it was in an old blue pickup truck with plates that read, “Farm Use.”
Following him was harder now, but she didn’t have to work at it for long. He drove on for another mile and then pulled into the Palm Court Motor Inn. She drove past and pulled into the strip mall next door. She left the car and walked quickly to where she had a view.
If there ever had been any palm trees at the motor court, it looked as if they had been sold long ago to pay the power bill. Or the water bill. One thing was certain, the money hadn’t been used to buy a new coat of paint.
Hobbs stumbled as he came out of the office, and dropped the key as he caught himself. Wellsley could see that this old bastard was going to be sleeping awhile, for sure. She watched him go into room number three and close the blackout curtains.
The strip mall had a prepaid mobile phone store. She bought a Motorola i290, a refurbished candy-bar phone that, instead of a fancy touch screen, sported actual buttons. She also bought a Samsung Galaxy Prevail, a smartphone with a big screen. She signed up for sixteen gigabytes of data and unlimited cell service for three months for both of them. When the salesman, a young black kid in a Cuban shirt, asked her for her address and credit card numbers, she smiled at him and said, “Is it OK if I pay cash? I just moved here.”
He upped the price without batting an eye. She laid bills on the counter and said, “Keep the change.”
When she got back into the Maserati, she plugged a charger into the cigarette lighter and connected the cheap phone.
She pulled the car around where she could keep an eye on the old truck, just in case. Then she went to work on the phone. It was one thin bar off a full charge. Good enough. Wellsley went into the settings and muted every sound the phone might make.
Then she used the phone’s crude web browser to navigate to a site called ZippyMapper. A few painfully awkward clicks with the phone’s keypad interface started a download.
Then she turned her attention to the Samsung. She navigated to ZippyMapper using the touch screen, and signed up for a new account using a Tor Mail e-mail. Theoretically the FBI could track it, but it would be very difficult, and they could only really do it if they knew what they were looking for.
When that was done, she activated the software on the Motorola, connected to her account, and waited. It took two minutes before the large display on the Galaxy showed her location. Her ghetto LoJack was open for business.
She drove north, back along the boulevard, until she came to a home improvement warehouse. There she bought a roll of duct tape. She carefully wound tape around the outside of the Motorola until she had doubled its diameter. Then she drove back to the motel.
In the heat of the afternoon, nothing was stirring at the palmless Palm Court Motor Inn. The pickup truck was parked nose-in. She walked in the shade of the balcony above, right to the front of the truck. Then she bent down, maybe tying a shoelace, maybe picking up a dime, and tried to slide
the wrapped phone in between the bumper and the frame. Too big. She took two wraps off the duct tape and it wedged in nice and tight.
As she drove away she allowed her guard to slip for a moment. She closed her eyes at the light and let the excitement shiver out of her. A car horn let her know the light had changed. She also needed rest. But there was one more thing she needed to do. This car was about to be the second-hottest vehicle in Florida.
FIVE
Pedro López-Famosa y Fernández, known to his few friends as Perrucho, stared at the expensive green sports car that pulled onto his car lot. This car, he thought, might be worth more than his entire inventory. What were the odds that two such expensive cars driving onto his lot in one day was coincidence? Zero, thought Perrucho.
The cars that Perrucho sold were, of course, crap. Sold to people who could not, or would not, pay. The kind of people who spent the money that should have been their car payment on renting ridiculous wheels at exorbitant rates. Whatever they had left over would go to purchasing used tires.
It was good for business that he did not identify with the creatures he called his customers. That kept the conscience pure and the interest rates high, and made it easy for Perrucho to take the cars back. But, as this blond woman in a suit entered his tiny office, he realized he might understand this gringa less than he understood his usual customers. For a second he thought she might be a cop, but a cop in that car? Could not be. And a cop who looked like that? It was the kind of thing that could make a man like Perrucho pray for the handcuffs, but not the squad car.
“Can I help you?” Perrucho asked, wearing his most professional smile.
“I’ve got a trade-in, and a friend of mine told me you could help me out.”
“Señora? You mean that beautiful car? I do not know what friend we could have in common, but he or she was very badly mistaken. I would not know what to do with such an expensive car. I cannot sell it to my customers. They are all too poor. Besides, none of my cars would be suitable for your luxurious tastes.”
The Soak Page 17