Bryce looked at Troy. “Wonder what we’re stopping for?”
Troy craned his neck to see out the right-hand windows. “We’re not stopping,” he said. “We’ve just taken another road.”
As Bryce looked out, he saw they now traveled a narrow, unpaved road. He turned back to Troy, a puzzled look on his face. “This isn’t going to lead us to I-10. We should have taken a left. We’re headed toward the ocean.”
Up front, Tillie and Chick made the same assessment.
“Where in the world are they headed?” she asked. She slipped her glasses down over narrowed green eyes.
Chick stared ahead. “I don’t know. But I don’t like the looks of this road.”
“Blow your horn and stop,” she said. “Let’s find out what’s going on.”
Chick gave a couple of blasts on his air horn, then braked to a stop. Up ahead, the flashing blue light also stopped, then the black van began moving in reverse toward the bus. The vehicle halted just in front of the clacking windshield wipers. Chick opened the door as two men jumped out of the van and ran toward the bus.
To Chick’s shocked surprise, he watched as two of the New Jersey “businessmen” they had encountered in Natchez bounded onto the bus.
The younger man shook the water off his large hands and wiped them across his face, then turned to Chick. “Shut the damn door.”
Though uncertain what he should do, Chick didn’t like the wind blowing all that rain into his bus. He closed the door and looked up at the husky man, a scowl on his dark face.
Tillie glared at the intruder. “What’s going on?”
“This,” he said, pulling a semi-automatic from his jacket, “is a pistol, lady. And this is a hijacking. Where’s the microphone?”
Tillie’s eyes widened. Chick stared in silence, still unable to comprehend what was happening. The man looked around and found the mike, then snarled at Chick. “Turn on all the lights in here. I want to be able to see everybody.”
After the overhead lights had flashed on, he lifted the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “we’re going to take a short ride and then conduct a little business. Just keep your seats and do what you’re told and you won’t get hurt. Otherwise, it could get rough. I assure you, this is no toy.”
He waved the gun for all to see. Then he turned to the heavyset man who stood on the steps drying his face with a large handkerchief.
“Take out your piece and get up here, Ziggy. Keep an eye on everybody while I deal with Old Black Joe.”
Chick bristled at the words.
“Blow your horn, then follow the car,” the man said. He pointed the gun at Chick for emphasis.
Chick looked around as the man called Ziggy yelled, “Hey, what the hell!” He bolted down the aisle, heading straight for MacArthur. “Gimme that thing,” he said. He snatched a cellular phone from MacArthur’s grasp.
“Anybody else got one of those things?” the younger man demanded. He looked around and grabbed one off the seat beside Tillie. Then he glared out at the frightened and helpless passengers. “If you got one, you damn well better hold it up. We find anybody else trying to use a phone, they’ll have hell to pay.”
34
On the back seat, Bryce had watched with a shock more pronounced than Tillie’s as Locasio’s tall frame suddenly materialized at the front of the bus. At first, Bryce sat stunned, unbelieving. Clearly, he had miscalculated. The Mafia hoods had obviously ditched their Cadillac and switched to the black van. With all of the gasps and murmurs coming from the seats around him, he couldn’t hear what was being said up front. But as he awaited the next move, he caught a flash of headlights beyond the window. Looking out, he saw a red pickup truck moving slowly past the bus.
Whoever was driving would unlikely be of any help even if he were to stop, Bryce realized. And in this rain, with that blue light flashing up front, he figured the odds extremely long that anyone would take the trouble to stop.
When Locasio’s voice came over the speaker, Bryce concluded that his pursuers still had no idea which passenger was Pat Pagano. If they had known, they would have marched back to his seat, forced him to accompany them off the bus and then disappeared into the storm. He had no idea what the “little business” was that they planned to conduct. But if the Vicario enforcer intended to trick him into revealing his identity, Bryce thought, Locasio had better have a really clever scheme up his sleeve.
Marge sat close enough to see and hear everything. Watching the man wave his gun in a threatening manner was frightening, but she quickly found herself more incensed than scared. Robbery was the only motive she could imagine. Had they been stalking the Silver Shadows since Natchez, just waiting for an opportunity to strike?
As the younger man turned and gave his orders to the driver, she thought back to Tuesday afternoon at the rest stop, when he had asked her to point out Bryce. She puzzled over why he had specifically asked about Bryce. Obviously Bryce did not know him or his father, if that story about the father’s friend had been something more than an imaginative concoction.
“What do you think they’re going to do?” Sarah Anne whispered, her eyes wide with fear.
“I wish I knew.”
They felt the bus begin to move again as the rain continued to pour and the wind drove the droplets against the windows with the sound of hail.
In the front seat across the aisle, Polly and Sadie sat with horror-filled eyes as the two men brandished their weapons and glared out at the passengers they held at bay. The idea of being pursued by a deadly hurricane had been enough to shake everyone to their foundations. And now this. The women cringed beneath the cold stares and held hands as if in an effort to shore up their faltering courage.
Seeing their reaction, Tillie bit her lip and fought back the rage that had begun to seethe inside her. She had managed to cope with Hurricane Nora, but this went beyond her imagination. Torn between fear and outrage, she held herself in check, waiting to see what would happen next.
Claire Holzman slammed the door to shut out the storm as soon as Ike jumped inside, water dripping from sun-browned ears, bushy beard, and a blue cap inscribed “Save the Whales.” He grabbed her by the arms, blinking big dark eyes that appeared as wide as an owl’s.
“Are you okay?”
She gave him a wan smile. “You’re the one I’ve been worried sick about. Did you have your phone turned off?”
He pulled her to him for a big hug, apologized for the dampness of his T-shirt, then took out a large handkerchief and began to clean the spatter from his hornrims. “The stupid battery went dead on me. I thought I had charged it. Good thing yours still works. I considered stopping to call you, but I was afraid if I got off the highway I’d never be able to get back on. I never saw such a mess.”
“Deputy Carl Floyd came by earlier, warning us to get out of here. He says we can go to a shelter at the high school if necessary.”
“I’d just as soon head out of town and keep going,” Ike said, knitting his heavy brows into a pronounced V. “I’ve had about enough of this place.”
“I sort of feel the same way.”
His face suddenly stretched into a broad grin. “Hey, I almost forgot. How could I?” He patted his shirt pocket, then removed a note pad and slipped out a folded piece of paper. “Got some good news. The Wells Gallery sold two paintings and has a nibble on another. I picked up a nice check. Remind me to call them with a forwarding address.”
Claire moved over to switch off the TV. “If we don’t get moving, we may not have anything left they can forward to. I’ve got most everything packed but your easel and those paintings. What do you want to do about them?”
“Just fold the easel up and stash it away. I’ll put the paintings with the others. God, it’s wet out there.”
“I know. Do I need to help you hitch the trailer to the truck?”
“I’ll handle it. No need for both of us to drown. Oh, I meant to tell you about the bus.”
“Up the road a way, not far off Highway 90. I passed this big red and white tour bus. I think it had Tennessee plates. Looked like it was full of people. I don’t know if they had gotten lost, or what. There was this black van in front of it with a portable blue light on top. Wasn’t one of the sheriff’s. He doesn’t have any black vans.”
“Maybe it was D-O-T.”
“I don’t know. They’ll probably have to pull into a field somewhere to turn it around.”
Claire crossed her arms and grasped her shoulders as wind gusts pummelled the trailer. “Put on your poncho and go hitch us up, Ike.”
As he stepped out into the driving wind and rain, Ike thought back to his childhood in Haight-Ashbury, where horizontal squalls would come calling on short notice, battering the white houses that camped along the steep streets like lines of pot-smoking hippies. Ike’s mother had divorced his father in the mid-sixties, taking the boy to raise in the counter-culture of San Franciso’s peace and love generation. He had somehow survived and made his way through art school, then headed east in search of those quaint New England scenes his mother had described in her more lucid moments. Urged on by a wealthy patron, he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. But success, he found, quickly led to an unwanted feeling, one of being corralled, hemmed in, restrained like a caged songbird. Breaking the chains had led to the wandering odyssey that he and Claire still pursued.
As Johnny Barbarino, dressed in the yellow poncho, drove the van down the narrow road, he dodged a succession of small branches that had blown off the trees. The sandy surface was littered with leaves and clumps of Spanish moss torn loose by the wind. He slowed to a crawl when they came to a line of massive old live oaks on the left. Some of them had long limbs that reached out and down to the ground like octopus tentacles.
“This is it,” he said. “I haven’t been over here in a good while, but those trees are the landmark. There should be an old trail...there it is.”
“What’s back in there?” Joe Blow was not happy about playing around in this storm. He had never been this close to a hurricane before.
“There’s an open field beyond the tree line. The property belongs to a friend of the family. We used to come out here and camp, go fishing, swim, get drunk, you name it.”
“You sure there’s nobody around?”
“I called to check before I left. The place is still vacant. There’s some people with a mobile home down the road, but they should have got the hell out of here long before now.”
“What about that red truck?”
The Barber shrugged. “May have been checking to see if everybody down this way was gone.”
He drove through the opening in the trees and followed the trail on out into the field, then stopped to wait for the bus to roll up behind him. “Okay,” he said, pulling the slicker up over his head. “Let’s make a run for it.”
With an occasional glance back at the cold steel of the automatic, Chick had followed the black van with grave misgivings. They took a turn for the worse as he saw the vehicle head between the trees. If his bus got mired up in the sand, he’d never get turned around and out of this godforsaken place.
He started to object but cringed as the younger man drew back the pistol as if to aim a blow at his head.
“Follow the damned van,” the man said.
Chick drove out into the middle of the field and parked behind the flashing light, which was abruptly extinguished. Looking around, he saw the visibility had become so poor the trees were little more than a blur in the distance. He opened the door on command and two men jumped in, one the yellow-slickered “officer,” the other a short, wiry man with a sharp nose who gingerly carried a plastic bag.
Locasio picked up the mike again and let his gaze slowly drift about the sea of frightened faces. They were scared shitless, he gloated. Good. That should make them easy as putty to pull or push or twist as he chose. He held the mike to his mouth.
“Here’s the deal, folks. My friend Joe here has a little gift for you. Show it to us, Joe.”
Joe Blow reached into the plastic bag and lifted out a large block of white material with a small device attached with copper wire. He held it up for everyone to see.
“He’s going to take it back and place it under a seat in the middle of the bus,” Locasio said, his voice matter-of-fact. “I wouldn’t advise you to mess with it. You see, it’s a big hunk of plastic explosive. The Army calls it C-4. Maybe some of you gents have heard of the stuff. It packs enough force to turn this bus into scrap metal. I won’t say what it would do to anyone inside. Just let your imagination run wild.”
Gasps went up from the passengers.
As Joe returned to the front, Locasio held out his hand. “Give me the other gadget.”
“Be careful,” Joe said. He handed over a small plastic box. “It’s pretty damned sensitive. I didn’t have enough warning. It’s sort of a make-do job.”
Locasio held up the device, which had a small metal rod protruding from one end and a toggle switch on the other. He spoke into the microphone. “This is an electronic detonator. One little flip of this switch and we’re all history.”
He paused to let that have the desired effect, which was manifested in a chorus of moans, a few whimpers and a new wave of horrified facial expressions.
“Now I hope it won’t be necessary to flip that switch, but there’s something we need from you. We have reason to believe there’s a guy among you whose real name is Pat Pagano. We would like Mr. Pagano to stand up and identify himself, then we’ll send you on your way. If Mr. Pagano should fail to do that, my friends and I will leave the bus, then we will flip this little switch.”
He held up the detonator again. The Silver Shadows began to look around at each other, staring in wonder.
35
Troy turned and whispered to Bryce. “That’s the wildest thing I ever heard of.”
“Yeah,” Bryce said. And though he appeared calm on the outside, he was churning wildly on the inside. He had not anticipated anything remotely like this. But was the threat for real, or just a bluff? He had concluded earlier that they would not purposely harm anybody else just to get at him. Now it appeared they were prepared to take forty-four other lives, if Locasio was to be believed.
Bryce simply could not bring himself to accept that they would follow through on such an inhuman threat. He knew Tony Vicario would never approve of it. The old Don had insisted that no harm come to innocent civilians. According to what he had heard, the only Mafia mass murder had been the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929 when members of Al Capone's gang had killed seven rival mobsters.
These were Italian-Americans, not Middle Eastern terrorists. The prospect was beyond his imagination. But could Locasio be a rogue elephant?
What if he were wrong?
In the middle of the bus, Hamilton MacArthur exhibited a look of dismay. He also found the whole scenario unbelievable, but the plastic bomb had been placed directly beneath his seat. Was one of the men on this bus actually named Pat Pagano? he wondered. Who was Pat Pagano? The name had a vaguely familiar ring, but he couldn’t remember where he might have heard it.
He wondered if someone among them would actually stand up and admit to being the wanted man. And, more imperative, did these people really intend to blow up the bus if Pagano were not identified?
Now that his fate was suddenly and inextricably linked to that of his fellow passengers, he found his perspective somewhat altered. He was no longer the privileged outsider looking in. All around him others experienced the same fear, the same dread, the same apprehension over what fate might have in store for them. And the same feeling of helplessness.
He had always prided himself on being an effective agent of compromise in the corporate boardroom, but when he tried to think of some way he might defuse this situation, he drew a blank.
MacArthur had discovered humility.
Marge was having thoughts in somewhat the sam
e vein, though a more disturbing path of reasoning had begun to insinuate itself into her mind. She recalled those strange mood shifts she had observed in Bryce, his inquiring about Pauline when she was talking at Gloucester House with this man who now held them captive, and the incident at the rest area, when the same man approached her as to where he might find Bryce. Was there something here more than mere coincidence?
After a short span of silence, during which no one rose to identify himself as Pat Pagano, she saw the young thug reach into his pocket and pull out a medallion with a star-studded ribbon attached. He held it up next to the microphone.
“Know what this is?” he asked. “It’s the Congressional Medal of Honor. On the back it reads, ‘Sgt. Patrick O. Pagano, December 22, 1944, Bastone, Belgium.’ You’d think a man with that kind of bravery wouldn’t be afraid to admit who he is.”
Marge’s heart nearly stopped. Bryce had admitted that he fought in the Battle of the Bulge at Bastogne, Belgium.
As Locasio stood beside the woman on the front seat with Ellis on her badge, she squirmed and leaned forward. “Why do you want him? What do you intend to do with him?”
“That’s none of your damned business,” Locasio said. He swung his arm, catching the side of her face with the back of his large hand.
A red welt rose on her cheek as she tucked her head, raising a protective arm.
The driver shouted, “Leave the lady alone!”
“Keep that nigger quiet,” Locasio ordered.
Using the butt of his gun, Ziggy Ferrante struck the black man in the head.
As the driver fell back, dazed, a man leaped to his feet a few seats back. “That’s enough. I’m Pagano.”
Locasio took a few steps down the aisle, reached over and shoved the man with the Scott badge back into his seat. “Sit down, old man. You’re too tall.”
From across the aisle, an attractive woman looked up at him with a frown. “And you, sir, are a coward,” she said. “With that gun, you think it’s great sport to push elderly people around, don’t you?”
Hellbound Page 19