by Michael Kerr
ABDUCTION
A Joe Logan Thriller
-5-
By
Michael Kerr
Copyright © 2016 Michael Kerr
Discover other Titles by Michael Kerr at MichaelKerr.org
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this Author.
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Also By Michael Kerr
DI Matt Barnes Series
A REASON TO KILL
LETHAL INTENT
A NEED TO KILL
CHOSEN TO KILL
A PASSION TO KILL
The Joe Logan Series
AFTERMATH
ATONEMENT
ABSOLUTION
ALLEGIANCE
The Laura Scott Series
A DEADLY COMPULSION
THE SIGN OF FEAR
Other Crime Thrillers
DEADLY REPRISAL
DEADLY REQUITAL
BLACK ROCK BAY
A HUNGER WITHIN
THE SNAKE PIT
A DEADLY STATE OF MIND
TAKEN BY FORCE
DARK NEEDS AND EVIL DEEDS
Science Fiction / Horror
WAITING
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE STRANGE KIND
RE-EMERGENCE
Children’s Fiction
Adventures in Otherworld
PART ONE – THE CHALICE OF HOPE
PART TWO – THE FAIRY CROWN
According to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an estimated 800,000 children are reported missing every year in the USA. The vast majority of them are found, but many have been snatched by people who steal a child for criminal purposes which may include:
Extortion: To elicit a ransom for the child’s return.
Illegal Adoption: Whereby a stranger steals a child with the intent to rear the child as their own or sell to a prospective adoptive parent.
Human Trafficking: A stranger steals a child with the intent to exploit the child themselves, or to trade to a third party that deals in forced labor, slavery, sexual abuse, or even organ trading and murder.
“I’m not a social animal. It suits me to keep moving. Some folk need to have a false sense of permanence and familiar surroundings. I’m always wondering what’s up ahead around the curve of the road, or over the next hill.”
~ Joe Logan
PROLOGUE
THE sun was sinking fast, no longer a hot, blinding white and blurry circle hanging in a steel-blue sky. It was a perfect late afternoon in the Sunshine State, if you were sitting next to a swimming pool with a cold beer in your hand. Jimmy Carson wasn’t. He was driving an old Ford SUV with a false plate along highway 41. The aircon was shot, and beads of sweat were forming on his scalp and running from his thick black hair, down his forehead, his neck and behind his ears. The faded Hawaiian shirt he wore was soaked, stuck to him, and the traffic was heavy and slow, making him angry and giving him a headache. The sooner this snatch was a done deal the better.
Jimmy always got a little edgy before a job. He had only been out of the Bay Correctional Facility in Panama City for six months and was still on parole. He had no intention of ever going back inside, so was prepared to do whatever it took to remain free. Problem was, he also had no intention of going straight. The job he had at the Clean Machine Car Wash on South Cleveland Avenue in Fort Myers was not in reality something he actually did. The owner, Clem Parker, had been a friend of Jimmy’s late father, so agreed to put him on the payroll, although the paychecks were never given to Jimmy. It was just a blind to satisfy his parole officer, whom Jimmy had decided to waste after he was signed off and free from the inane conditions. The dyke bitch had a mean streak; an attitude with ex-cons, and seemed to get a lot of pleasure out of dissing them. But the day would come when she would be on her knees, taking it in the ass and begging him not to cut her fucking throat. But he would.
Meeting up with Gary Kaplan in the joint had been fortuitous. Kaplan was connected to a guy in Fort Myers who was a serious player in drugs, prostitution, gambling, porn and human trafficking, and Gary arranged for Jimmy to meet the ‘Man’, as he called him, and it had led to well paid work.
In the main, all Jimmy had to do was lean on small business owners that were slow or reluctant to pay for protection, hurt anybody deemed to be in need of some pain, and steal women and children to order when required to. There was a big market for both. Childless couples were prepared to pay a lot of money for babies, and older kids could be fed to pedophiles: seemed like there was no downside, just big pay days. It was easy money.
Jimmy pulled off 41 at South Venice and parked in the lot of a strip mall, outside a Perkins family restaurant. He, Diego and Jade climbed out of the Ford and went inside the diner and waited to be led to a window booth. A waitress came and they ordered a pot of coffee. And when she returned with it they ordered food and then ran through the simple plan again.
“You keep the engine running, Wolf,” Jimmy said to Diego Lopez. “Jade comes in the back door with me and lifts the baby. I’ll deal with the woman. We then drive to the motel and wait for them to be collected.”
“What if there’s someone else in the house?” Wolf said.
“The broad’s divorced, and she and the kid live with her invalid mother. There’s nothing to worry about,” Jimmy said. “If she has any other company I’ll take care of it.”
Jade had nothing to add. They’d made several abductions as a crew and so far it had gone like clockwork. Lifting a kid and its mother was a breeze.
Jade had moved up from being a full-time hooker. The boss had thought that she was too intelligent to spend most of her time on her back in hotel rooms. And at twenty-nine she was up for a change of lifestyle, although she still serviced a few regular punters that paid big bucks to bang her. It was like any habit; hard to break. She had been a working girl for fifteen years now, and didn’t do it just for the money. It was something that she enjoyed doing, especially because there were no strings attached. No commitment either way, or emotional involvement. Every lay was for pay. And it had been that way since shortly after being raped by two of her cousins, back when she had lived in a doublewide on a trailer park in Pinecrest, which was a shithole in the Everglades. Having two retard relations take her repeatedly by force had been traumatic, but had given her the incentive to rob her momma’s cookie jar, empty her step-dad’s wallet and hitch a ride to Miami. Maybe the abuse had been a blessing in disguise; a wake-up call. It had got her away from the mosquito-ridden swamp to the big city. And that kind of living had made her hard-hearted. Other people’s suffering didn’t touch her any more. Living and then working on the streets had fostered a ‘not give a fuck’ attitude. You had to build up a lot of defenses if you were going to survive. Life was a war against attrition that she had so far been winning.
“Let’s go,” Jimmy said as he finished a third cup of coffee and got to his feet.
With Wolf now behind the wheel, they traveled the two miles to the mark’s house, which was only a few hundred yards from the beach.
CHAPTER ONE
DEBBIE Ford was making the best of coming to terms with being a single
parent living back at her widowed mother’s house and raising her daughter, Kelly, without the support of her ex, who had decided that marriage was too restrictive a relationship for him to accept. Jeff had been thirty-four going on seventeen. He had found it impossible to adjust to being a husband and father. Responsibility for others was something he still wasn’t mature enough to handle. His best friends were booze and any woman that was willing to drop her panties for a quickie. And he didn’t work for a living. He considered labor and being on a beach in warm weather incompatible. He now lived on welfare, having been wounded whilst serving in Afghanistan and milking the fact that he had been hit in the hip by a piece of shrapnel from an IED. The Joe next to him had taken the full force of the Improvised Explosive Device and lost both legs. He had bled out on the sand, and Jeff had thought it probably for the best, due to the fact that the guy’s genitals had also been creamed by a shard from the bomb’s metal casing.
“You want some help, kiddo?” Connie Parker said as she limped through to the kitchen from the living room, where she had been sitting on a La-Z-Boy recliner watching the Cooking Channel on TV.
“No, Mom, I’m fine,” Debbie said. “Dinner is almost ready. I’ve made a ham, broccoli and mushroom quiche. I’ll fix some salad to go with it.”
“I’ll go and freshen up,” Connie said. “And I’ve been thinking that I may have to start sleeping in the living room. My legs are getting too bad to make it up the stairs.”
Connie suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic inflammatory disorder that was primarily affecting her hands and knees, and was deforming her joints and slowly leading to loss of function. She used an old hickory walking cane to get around, and her features had been remodeled by pain and long-term suffering, making her look twenty years older than her age, which was just fifty-eight.
“We need a half bath downstairs,” Debbie said as she sliced tomatoes on a hardwood board that had belonged to her grandmother.
“Better win the Lottery, then,” Connie said as she limped off down the hall to slowly climb the stairs, stopping three times to rest before reaching the landing.
Debbie felt her eyes fill up with tears. Apart from her three-year-old daughter, Kelly, who was the center of her universe, the other components of her life were a mess. She couldn’t work fulltime and be what she considered a proper mother, and professional childcare was expensive. Thank Christ her overheads were relatively small. Her late father had paid off the mortgage the year before he had suffered a massive heart attack while replacing some of the cedar shingles on the roof. And if the heart attack hadn’t killed him, then the fall to the concrete driveway below would have almost certainly finished him off.
They got by, just. And maybe that was enough. Having a home, food on the table, and being able to pay the utility bills was more than a lot of people enjoyed in these times of seemingly permanent austerity. She needed to remain positive and be grateful for what they had got, not what they hadn’t.
“I’m hungry, Mommy,” Kelly said, looking up from where she was sitting on a rug in the corner of the kitchen with a Disney coloring book open and a bright red crayon in her hand.
“It’ll be ready in ten minutes, sweetheart,” Debbie said, and thought that her daughter’s brown eyes were almost as sad looking as a spaniel called Spencer that had been her pet dog when she was a teenager.
Diego Lopez knew that his surname meant Son of Lope, and that Lope was a Spanish given name deriving from the Latin lupus, meaning wolf, which was a nickname that he had always been proud of. He thought of himself as cunning and intelligent, and more like a lone wolf, in that he was stronger, more aggressive and far more dangerous than the average wolf that is a member of a pack.
Diego was twenty-six and had been born in the town of Clewiston, which was dubbed as ‘America’s Sweetest Town’, due to it being home to the US Sugar Corporation. His father was still a truck driver for the ‘Company’, and his mother picked vegetables for a living. With five siblings, Diego had known hard times. The family had lived in a large three-room shack near the shore of Lake Okeechobee, and life promised nothing but hard work and little to show for it, apart from perhaps the relief of going to an early grave. He had not been prepared to wear hand-me-down clothing from his two older brothers, so at an early age had started venturing southeast to Miami to become adept at shoplifting and picking pockets. Tourists were his preferred marks. They came from all over the globe and were not as streetwise as the local inhabitants. One day he’d just made the decision to stay in the city, and had never gone back to the shack in Clewiston. And now he was at the other side of the state, living in an apartment in Fort Myers; a professional criminal, willing to do anything for the right amount of money.
“Take the next right,” Jimmy said. “Then kill the lights and make a left on the gravel top next to the canal. It’s the fifth house up. Park outside and open the back. We should only be a couple of minutes.”
Diego made the turn and switched off the lights. The rising moon afforded enough illumination for him to see the lane that had a row of houses on the left and the narrow canal to his right. He rolled up to the rear of the target house, to brake and push the lever into the park position.
Jimmy and Jade exited the vehicle and walked briskly up to the four-foot-high plank gate that was set in a picket fence the same height. The gate was closed on a latch, but not bolted. They entered the small back yard and approached the kitchen door as relaxed as if they were cold-calling salesmen. Prospective victims like this were no threat to them. Most people still felt relatively safe in their own homes.
Looking in the window through gaps between the slats of a partly open Venetian blind, Jimmy could see a slim blond woman wearing a T-shirt and shorts standing with a loaded plate in each hand. He twisted the old nickel door knob, but there was no give, so he backed-up, turned sideways and slammed his shoulder into the side of the door, to feel a satisfying give as it was ripped free from the frame and sprang open, causing him to stumble forward into the kitchen. As he regained his balance he drew the nine-millimeter pistol from where he had tucked it in his belt at the small of his back under the Hawaiian shirt.
Debbie dropped the two plates that she had been about to place on the table and just stood frozen in place with her mouth hanging open.
Jimmy looked about him. Saw the little girl sitting on a rug. She stared up at him wide-eyed, but didn’t move or make a sound. He took a silencer from a side pocket of his pants and screwed it onto the muzzle of the gun.
“Scream or do anything stupid and the kid gets an extra navel,” Jimmy said as he pointed the Glock at Kelly. “You need to do exactly what I say if you want to live. Understand?”
Debbie slowly nodded. She couldn’t have screamed nor done anything stupid or otherwise. Her body seemed to have frozen up like a chicken in the freezer. She was fixed in place with pieces of the hot quiche and salad ‒ that had flown up into the air as the plates hit the floor and shattered ‒ sticking to her bare legs. And as the intruder pointed the gun at Kelly, she felt her bladder voiding, and the resulting warm piss ran down the inside of her thighs to wash away some of the food particles.
Connie had been on her way down the stairs, holding on to the banister with one hand and supporting her weight with the cane in the other. She heard the door burst open, and then what sounded like crockery shattering. She made as if to call out to Debbie to ask if she was okay, but a man’s voice caused her to bite the words back. The deep voice was threatening Debbie. It had to be a burglar. Turning, ignoring the pain, Connie headed back upstairs to her bedroom and took a handgun from under a stack of sweaters on the top shelf of an oak wardrobe. The weapon was a Model 60 .38 Smith & Wesson revolver that held five rounds. Her late husband, Robert, had insisted that she own it and take lessons. He had always said that it was like buying insurance; something you hoped you would never need, but invaluable if and when you did.
Tossing the cane on the bed, Connie checked the load, gri
tting her teeth against the pain in her inflamed finger joints as she opened the cylinder to ensure that it was fully loaded. An adrenaline rush overcame the throbbing discomfort, and she shambled in an ungainly yet speedy fashion back to the stairs and carefully made her way down.
“Where’s your mother?” Jimmy said to Debbie.
Her voice sounded small and full of fear when she answered him. “In bed,” she said. “My Mom isn’t well.”
“Have you got a stroller for the kid?” Jade asked as she walked over to Kelly.
“Don’t touch her,” Debbie said, finding her voice and almost screaming at the young woman.
Jimmy stepped forward and backhanded Debbie across the face, knocking her on her ass among the broken pieces of the plates and the still hot, squishy portions of quiche that was adhered to the floor amid the salad that had been drizzled with Newman’s Own Creamy Caesar dressing. Blood sprayed out from her split top lip to add even more color to the artistic mess.
Kelly started to bawl.
Fucking Marvelous, Jimmy thought, and said, “Answer the question, do you have a stroller?”
“In the living room,” Debbie said, feeling droplets of blood drip from her mouth.
“Get up and fetch it in here,” Jimmy ordered, and then saw movement at the door leading into the hallway.
“Drop the gun or I’ll shoot you,” Connie said, holding the revolver two-handed and attempting to keep it pointed at the intruder.
Jimmy didn’t need this. He had thought that it would be plain sailing to lift the woman and her infant daughter. Complications seemed to just appear from nowhere to fuck up the simplest of plans.
“Are you deaf or just plain stupid, son?” Connie said.
“Neither,” Jimmy replied as he raised his silenced Glock and loosed off a shot at the woman.