Gil Mason/Gunwood USA Box Set

by Gordon Carroll

  After hanging up with him, I put out a BOLO (Be On the Look Out) to surrounding agencies.

  Marsh vetoed contacting APD, (need to know and all that secret squirrel stuff) and said he’d send a squad over to take care of the mess and that I should concentrate on finding the girl and Jerome and nothing else. Couldn’t argue with that. Besides, I was too tired and sore to argue about much of anything.

  The SUVs were pulling up out front as I started my car. I saw the Mountain step out of the lead car and look over at me, but I was in no mood for congeniality just now. I had work to do, so I just drove off.

  Max had cleaned most of the thug’s blood from his coat and looked way less psychotic than he had a half hour ago. I called Jared Darling on my way to Castle Rock, and despite Marsh’s orders, had him put out the BOLO for the vehicle. I said to consider Jerome armed and dangerous and in possession of a kidnapped girl. I gave him their descriptions and vitals and told him I couldn’t say any more. He wasn’t real happy, but he went with it.

  My guess was that Jerome would want to get out of the state fast as possible. But to do that he’d need money, and his job would be where he would have to go to get it. They had a pretty good head start on me so I had to hope for two things. First, that Jerome would be smart enough not to draw attention to himself by speeding, and second, that I’d miss all the State Troopers between here and there while I drove like my Escalade was a DeLorean trying to reach the 1.21 gigawatts threshold. Not that my car had a plutonium-powered nuclear reactor, but she was pretty fast and could do well over the standard 88 mph without even trying. Of course I know a lot of the troopers. Some of them even still like me.

  By the time I passed C-470 on I-25, I was zipping in and out of the light traffic at a steady hundred and twenty. Who knows, maybe at this rate I wouldn’t have to go back in time after all.

  12

  Jerome made five turns then stopped the car and strapped Clair into her car seat.

  “Daddy, you’re bleeding,” said Clair. Jerome had changed her name from the beginning, knowing that they would be looking for her. Clair seemed the logical choice to him. “That bad man hurt you.”

  “Ain’t nothing, little one. He’s gone now.” He closed the door, went to the trunk and sorted through several stolen license plates, finally deciding on the newest. Unscrewing the old one with a flat tip he always kept in a gym bag for just this reason, he quickly replaced it with the new one.

  His shirt stuck to him, wet and cold. It would look to anyone who saw him like he’d been through a massacre. Most of the bleeding had stopped, but the stab wound to his thigh still leaked. He’d have to attend to it before approaching his boss. If they saw him like this they would call the police and he couldn’t have that now. The gym bag held four shirts, a hoodie, two pair of pants and a pair of shorts, as well as two different licenses and a spare gun with two magazines. Jerome kept a separate bag for Clair with a lot more supplies, including a doll and a coloring book and crayons.

  Jerome took the gym bag and got back in. He started driving, heading for the interstate, his mind plodding along at the same calm, calculating pace that it always operated. Jerome never felt excited. He didn’t get scared or worried. He almost never got mad. The only time he ever got mad was when it concerned Clair’s safety. Whatever damage had been done to him because of his mother’s addiction didn’t completely work where it concerned Clair. She was different. She made him feel different. He didn’t know why exactly and he didn’t care. It was enough that she did. But even though he didn’t feel things like most people, he could see that other people did. Sometimes it seemed to help people, but usually it made them do stupid things. Things that made them vulnerable and easy to take control of. The man at the house had been different. Even when Jerome had hit him his hardest, something that would usually break people, the man had kept calm and kept on coming. Also, the man had somehow made Jerome angry just by saying that he had come to get Clair. Again, the fact that it made him angry didn’t scare Jerome, but it made him think about how to handle this strange man if they met in the future. Jerome decided it would be best to shoot him as quickly as he could. Yes, he would shoot him. And not just once. He would shoot him a lot.

  “I want to go home, daddy,” said Clair from the back.

  “We have to go to a new home,” said Jerome. Jerome never lied to her.

  “I don’t want to go to a new home,” said Clair and in the rearview mirror he could see her scrunch her face up like a tiny fist.

  “I know,” said Jerome.

  “I want my toys.”

  “I’ll get you new toys.”

  “I want my old toys.”

  “I know.”

  She pouted for a while.

  “Daddy, can I have a new doll?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “Will I have my own room again?”

  “Yes.”

  She thought for a second.

  “I want to sleep with you. I’m scared of under the bed.”

  “Okay.”

  “But I want my own room for toys.”

  “Okay.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes?”

  “I didn’t get to finish my sandwich.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want to eat?”

  She thought again and in the mirror he saw the little lines that always creased her forehead when she thought really hard.

  “French fries.”

  “Okay.”

  “And nuggets.”

  “Okay.”

  “And a shake.”

  “Okay.”

  Jerome would have preferred a more out of the way place, but he had to change before reaching Castle Rock, so he pulled in at a McDonalds at the outlets and tugged the hoodie over his blood soaked shirt. In the glovebox he found a package of Baby Wipes with a few inside that were still moist and used them to wipe off most of the blood on his face. The cut over his eye oozed a little, but at least he didn’t look like he was set for Halloween. His nose felt broken and his lips were badly swollen. He took a last look in the mirror and dragged the hoodie up over his head and down over his face as far as he could. After unstrapping Clair from her seat, he hoisted her up in his huge arms and carried her back to the bathroom. He locked them inside the handicap stall and stripped off his shirt and pants. Clair played with the doll he brought in from the car, while sitting on the fold out changing station inside the stall.

  The stab wounds didn’t feel very deep, but they left nasty punctures that he couldn’t get to stop seeping blood. He had to rip one of the other shirts into sections and wad them up and shove them into the holes before wrapping them with longer strips and tying them off. He told himself he should have had a First-Aid Kit in the gym bag and Clair giggled when she heard him talking to himself. Jerome repeated the actions on his thigh wound then slipped on a new pair of pants and exited the stall to look in the mirror.

  He looked bad. The darkness of his skin helped hide it a little, but not enough. The wound over his eye had started bleeding again and he wouldn’t be able to get away with shoving anything into it to get it to stop without looking even weirder than he already did. He dug through the bag, but he couldn’t find any Vaseline or even toothpaste to jam in there, so he tried five minutes of direct pressure with a paper towel and then scooped up Clair and took her back to the car. He ordered from the drive through, keeping his face averted as much as possible, and then parked in the lot so Clair could get out of the seat to eat. As soon as she finished, he strapped her back in and drove to his job site.

  His foreman was a Hispanic guy named Tony, but he wasn’t in so he talked with the site supervisor, a white man named Steve Hollow. Steve was big, taller than Jerome, but with a gut and a heavy beard. His forearms were like steel pillars.

  Jerome left Clair in the car while he went up the steps of the work trailer and opened the door. He
made eye contact with Steve, who took one look at Jerome and indicated with a nod of his head they should talk outside.

  “Man you look like you been through a meat grinder,” he said to Jerome.

  “No, not a meat grinder,” said Jerome. “I need my pay.”

  “You quitting?”

  “Have to,” said Jerome.

  Steve looked toward the car and Clair.

  “That your little girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pretty.”

  “I need my pay.”

  Steve had been through this more times than he could count. Drifters, migrants, regular guys that drank a little too much. Construction was hard work and it took hard men to live the life and hard men tend to live and play as hard as they work.

  Steve nodded. “Hate to lose you, Jer. You’re a good worker.”

  Jerome didn’t say anything.

  “I suppose you’d prefer cash to a check?”

  “Yes,” said Jerome.

  “I’ll get it.” He went back into the trailer and came out a few minutes later. He counted out seven hundred dollars and handed it to Jerome, who he knew as Jerry Jefferson. “I tossed in a fifty as a bonus. Hope you make it back this way, I can always use a strong hand.”

  Jerome took the money.

  Steve held up a finger. “Anybody looking for you I should know about?”

  “Looking for me?”

  “Yeah, like the law, maybe? I know how custody battles go. I’ve got two exes of my own.”

  “Maybe,” said Jerome.

  “Okay,” said Steve. “I haven’t seen you since Friday.”

  Jerome nodded then walked back to the car.

  As they drove away, Steve, the site supervisor, shook his head. Hate to lose a good man.

  13

  The construction site looked pretty much like most. Big dirt area with temporary metal fencing. Twenty-foot high mounds of fill dirt and deep-laid pits, crisscrossed with rebar and bordered by thick cement foundation walls. Large yellow machines dotted the landscape; bull dozers, cranes, generators, forklifts, squatting like giant bugs ready for work. Near the entrance sat a series of work trailers. Basically construction mobile homes used as offices. A few cars littered a makeshift parking lot just east of the trailers. Jerome’s car was nowhere in sight, so I parked near the other cars and started out to the main trailer. A big man, with a thick beard and the traditional hardhat, opened the door and gave me a look like he expected me and wasn’t happy about it. He walked down the wood-slatted walkway and came up to me.

  “Whatever you’re selling, we ain’t buying.”

  “You the boss?” I asked. My whole body felt like a bruise and I wasn’t in the mood for jerky.

  “Site Manager,” said the big man. “And it’s ‘bout quitting time. So like I said…”

  I pulled out the Secret Service badge Senator Marsh had bestowed on me, figuring it would hold more weight than my PI credentials.

  “Has Jerome Larkin been here?”

  He gave me stupid; like he didn’t know who or what I was talking about.

  “Jerome Larkin, Jerry Jefferson.” I held out one of the check stubs from under the mattress and a picture of Larkin. “This guy.”

  “Oh, Jer. Yeah, he works here.”

  “I know he works here,” I said. “That’s not what I asked.”

  He gave me a once-over. “Looks like maybe you already ran into him.”

  “Well that tells me you’ve seen him today, otherwise you wouldn’t know that he’d been in a fight. So how long are we talking since he left?”

  That shook him a little. The great detective showing off his deductive reasoning skills. Poof…like magic.

  “I ain’t telling you nothing…” he started.

  I didn’t have time for tough-guy games, so I stopped him cold. “He has a kidnapped little girl with him and he murdered her mother, along with a couple of other people. You really want to obstruct a federal investigation involving these types of crimes for a guy that you barely know?”

  All the blood drained from his face and I thought he might faint. “Oh Lord. He kidnapped that little girl?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “How long ago did he leave and did he say anything about where they were going?”

  “I think I’m gonna be sick,” said the big man. “I even gave him a bonus; cash.”

  “How long have they been gone?”

  “Twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes. And no, he didn’t say nothin’ about where they was going. Ah, I’m gonna be sick.”

  “Which way did they go?”

  He shook his head, his face still bone white. He pointed north. “Back to the interstate, toward Denver.”

  Toward Denver? “You sure, north toward Denver?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I watched him go. He was a good worker, ya know?”

  “What was he driving?”

  “Same as always, the brown Malibu.”

  “Did you happen to see the license plate?”

  “No…no why would I? Ah, man I feel sick.”

  I wrote my name and number on a pocket steno pad I keep on me and handed it to him. Ordinarily, I would have given him one of my coins, but I figured it would diminish the secret agent charisma I had so carefully crafted here.

  “If he contacts you, call me. Day or night. And don’t let on like you know anything. This man is dangerous. You understand?”

  He nodded again, still looking like he wanted to puke. Couldn’t blame him.

  I got back in my car and started toward I-25. I’d half expected Jerome to keep going south toward New Mexico or Texas. If he was heading north, and as beat up as he was, chances were he’d hold up for the night and that meant a hotel.

  My phone vibrated and I saw it was Senator Marsh.

  “Mason,” I said.

  “This is Senator Marsh. We have the men from the house in custody and I have my boys going over it to see if they can find anything useful.”

  “I already did a cursory search,” I said. “I found where he works and some aliases he goes under. He got there before I could and picked up some cash. He headed north on I-25 from Castle Rock. He’ll probably hold up for the night, so I’m going to start checking hotels.”

  “What makes you think he won’t just drive through the night?”

  I felt my cheek and winced. “We had a tussle and if he feels anything like I do, he’ll need to rest up.”

  “Yes,” said that smooth Morgan Freeman voice, “I saw the results of your…tussle. Did you actually torture one of those men to get information?”

  “I think they call it extreme interrogation techniques these days,” I said. “You know, like waterboarding.”

  “Waterboarding has been deemed unconstitutional by the United States Congress,” said the senator, who sounded more like Freeman’s character in London Has Fallen where he played Vice President Allan Trumbull; all authoritarian like.

  “Actually,” I said, “it was my dog Max that did the extreme parts of the interrogating. I just asked the questions.”

  Vice President Trumbull didn’t sound amused. “Remember that you are working under the authority and constraints of the United States Secret Service. I expect you to conform to their standards and operate under official parameters and guidelines. Do I make myself clear, Mr. Mason?”

  “Hey, you came to me,” I said.”

  “Yes,” said Marsh, “But that doesn’t mean you have carte blanche to go wild through the streets. We have rules.”

  “Sure,” I said, “I understand. Now let me ask you something. Do you want me to find this little girl or not?”

  There was a pause and I could hear him breathing in the phone. And when he answered, he sounded more like the Morgan Freeman from the movie Seven when he was asking Brad Pitt not to look in the box. “Of course I do.”

  “Good, then we understand each other. If you wanted to play by the rules, you wouldn’t have brought me in. You would have turned it over to the local aut
horities or gone with the FBI. But that’s not who you came to. You came to me because you want that little girl safe more than you care about the rules. That’s why I took the case and that’s why I’m going to find her and that’s why you are going to skip the lectures from here on out and let me do what I do. Deal?”

  When he spoke, he was the Vice President Morgan Freeman again, full of authority and strength, but I could tell I’d won.

  “What do you need?”

  “I need everyone you have out and about looking for the car. This Jerome is street savvy so he may have switched the plates, or he may change cars altogether. He had the same Chevy when he left the worksite, according to his boss, but that doesn’t mean he’ll keep it since he knows we are on to him. He’s managed to stay hidden for two years and that’s not easy, especially with a little girl. Next, I want you to lean on the Bloods that were at the house and find out what you can. I especially want to know how they found out Jerome and Keisha were here at the same time I did.”

  “What are you saying?” asked the Senator.

  “I think it’s self-explanatory,” I said. “You have a leak. Someone on your team or in your office. I don’t believe in coincidence, so that means someone let on you were coming to me. The only way they could have arrived at his place the same time I did was that they followed me. And I didn’t tell anyone about Jerome, which means the leak has to be on your side of the street.”

  “Ok,” he said. “That makes sense. I’ll check into it.”

  Senator Marsh looked over at Clyde. They were on the top floor of The Hilton Denver Inverness Hotel in the luxurious Presidential Suite. He’d finished a round of golf just before speaking with Mason, coming in at two under par. He was feeling good. Except for the talk of a leak.