by Greg Iles
I saw you today, it begins.
You were talking to that doctor I see running all the time. Y’all were being shady as shit, too. You found a new source, didn’t you? You didn’t go to a dentist, you went to a doctor. I saw how you were with him. You’re giving your shit to him, all right. He wouldn’t give you the dope without some kind of payment, and what else do you got that he’d want? Of course you won’t see it that way. You probably think you’re in love. Well, I got something for you, Cinderella. You don’t shit on Cyrus and walk away clean. You ain’t clean. And don’t think your doctor man can help you. He may look big, but I’ll take that motherfucker down. How did you get this way, anyway? Does your mama know you do this shit? Or did she TEACH you this shit? I bet that’s it. Have a nice day, okay? Enjoy your ride in that boxy-ass Volvo. It ain’t gonna last long.
“What’s the date of that e-mail?” I ask.
“There’s no date. It’s just copied text.”
“What’s the date of the Notepad file?”
Mia checks it. “The twenty-eighth.”
“Three days before Kate was murdered.”
I pull the flash drive from the computer and get to my feet. My neck and back are stiff from staring so intently at the computer.
“What are you going to do?” Mia asks.
“Get to work. That letter is going to save Drew’s life.”
“Will it, really?”
“This letter alone will create reasonable doubt in the mind of the jury.”
Mia nods, but she doesn’t look convinced.
“What is it?”
“A lot of people get upset when they’re rejected,” she says. “You know? A lot of people say they want to kill the person who hurt them. Or at least they think it.”
“Have you ever thought that?”
She looks straight into my eyes. “Yes.”
“Who was the person?”
She shakes her head. “I told you I’m not the angel you think I am.”
I want to know more, but right now I can’t make myself concentrate on the love life of my babysitter. It’s late—probably too late to wake Quentin—but I need to get Mia home and start working on Drew’s defense. It’s hard to get my mind around the fact, but his trial begins next Wednesday. At least now we’ll have a big surprise for Shad Johnson.
“You want me to go, don’t you?” Mia says.
“Well, I’m going to be working all night on subpoenas and things like that. Drew doesn’t have much time.”
“I understand. I’ll go.” She picks up her backpack and starts toward the door.
“Mia, it’s really late. Let me run you home.”
She stops. “You don’t have to. I’ve got my car.”
“I’ll follow you then. And tomorrow I’ll let you know everything that happens related to this. I know you want to know about it.”
“I do. Thanks. And to tell you the truth, I don’t feel like driving. I can pick up my car tomorrow.”
“Good.” I open the leather portfolio I brought Kate’s journal in and zip Kate’s flash drives into one of its inside pockets. Then I slip the envelope containing Marko’s hair into another. “I’m not letting this stuff out of my sight.” As I reach for Marko’s flash drive, which is still in my pants pocket, it hits me that Mia is seriously upset. I walk to her and put my hands on her shoulders.
“Mia, I can’t tell you how much help you’ve been tonight. Helping me find Marko, getting these disks hacked. You’ve been critical throughout this investigation. When Drew is acquitted, it’s going to be due to your efforts more than anyone else’s.”
A smile touches the corners of her mouth. “You really think so?”
“Absolutely. Drew’s going to have to make a large contribution to your college fund.”
She laughs, her eyes sparkling. “How large?”
“Five figures for sure. Hell, I think it ought to equal Quentin’s fee.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not. If Drew doesn’t take care of you, I will. That’s a promise. But he will. I know him. Now, let’s get you home.”
Mia shoulders her backpack and leads the way through the door. As we enter the elevator, though, I realize that her smile is gone again. Wake up, stupid, says a voice in my head. It’s not paying for college that she’s worried about. It’s what happened in front of the computer ten minutes ago.
We’re standing about two feet apart, facing the elevator door. Our reflections are staring at us from the brass plating. Mia looks tiny and vulnerable with her backpack slung over her shoulder. I’m so glad I didn’t cross the line with her upstairs.
“Mia…”
She gives the slightest shake of her head. She can’t bear to discuss what happened between us. As I stare at her reflection, I realize there are tears on her face. After a moment’s hesitation, I reach out and take her hand in mine. It’s very small and soft, not so different from my daughter’s hand. After a moment, she squeezes my hand in return, then steps close to me and lays her head on my chest.
Putting my arm around her, I feel ineffable sadness at the plight of this girl. Her father abandoned her when she was two, yet she and her mother somehow struggled through, not just to the point that they’re okay—which would have been triumph enough—but to the point that Mia has become a self-possessed young lady accepted into one of the finest universities in the country. If Drew really is acquitted, I’m going to make him set up a college account for Mia. And the first deposit is going to be a hundred thousand dollars.
The elevator dings, and the doors open onto the empty lobby. To our left, a clerk behind the desk stands and gives us a sleepy wave.
“Do you need anything, sir?”
“No, thanks.”
“My car’s in the back lot,” I tell Mia, stopping by a large sofa. “Stay here until I bring it around.”
She slips her heavy pack off her shoulder and drops into the soft cushion of the sofa.
“Don’t fall asleep.”
“I might.”
I point to a side door that leads to the hotel’s check-in lanes. “That’s where I’ll be. You’ll be able to see me pull up.”
“Can you bring a pizza with you? I’m hungry.”
“We can grab something on the way home.”
I walk past the desk and out the back door.
The Eola parking lot occupies the hollow center of a large city block. It’s mostly empty, so I jog straight to my Saab. Laying the portfolio on the passenger seat, I crank the engine, back out of my space, and pull around to the check-in lanes. With six stories of hotel sitting on top of them, they’re effectively in a tunnel, and for some reason the arrows painted on the ground go against the normal American traffic flow. The right lane—which would put me in front of the hotel door—is painted with an arrow coming straight toward me, as it would in the UK.
“Screw it,” I mutter, pulling into the right lane.
As I come abreast of the glass doors, I see Mia waiting just inside them. Then I see a man standing behind her. Not a man, really, but a boy. A boy with an Asian face. He’s pressing a gun against Mia’s right temple.
And he’s smiling.
Chapter
33
The Asian boy kicks open the glass door and shoves Mia through it, the gun still hard against her head. Mia’s face is drained of blood, her eyes blank with terror. I want to reach for the gun in my jacket pocket, but that would probably get Mia a bullet in the head. As I stare, I realize I’m looking at the guy who shot Sonny Cross from the black Lexus on Beau Pré Road. He’ll have no qualms about blowing Mia’s brains out.
What does this guy want?
I start violently at the crack of metal against my window. I look to my left. A second Asian boy is aiming a stubby submachine gun at me. It looks like a Heckler and Koch MP5, a favorite of law enforcement. He motions for me to roll down my window. I do.
“Keep your hands where I can see ’em,” he says in a Southern accent.
For some reason I expected him to speak Vietnamese, but why should he? He’s from the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
“Keys!” he snaps. “Give ’em here!”
If Mia weren’t part of this equation, I’d hit the gas and peel out of this tunnel. But she is part of it. I shut off the Saab and hand the boy my keys.
“That, too,” he says, jabbing the gun at the portfolio on the seat.
I brought the portfolio with me because I knew other people had access to Quentin’s suite, and I didn’t want to take a chance on losing it. I glance at Mia as I reach into the passenger seat and pass the portfolio across my chest. Her mouth is hanging slack.
“Get his gun!” yells the boy holding Mia. “We’ll take his car.”
As the boy at my window reaches inside, a shadow appears behind the one holding Mia. I assume it’s another member of his gang, but then the right side of his forehead explodes, and he drops like a sandbag.
Mia screams and looks down.
The hand at my chest jerks out of the window.
“Run, Mia!” I shout, ramming my door into the gunman’s midsection. Then I yank out my father’s pistol, fire three times through the window, and scramble over the passenger seat for the opposite door.
Whoever shot the guy holding Mia is firing to give me cover. I shove open the passenger door and dive onto the cement, wondering who the hell it could be.
“Get in here, Penn!” shouts a male voice. “Move!”
As my unknown savior fires, I crab-walk across the cement and dive through the glass door. It’s swinging shut behind me when a burst of machine-gun fire blasts plate glass all over my back.
“Over here!” shouts Mia. “Hurry!”
Mia is hiding behind a gigantic Oriental vase. I crawl to her and take cover, searching for whoever saved us. Gunfire from the tunnel sends glass spraying through the lobby. Thank God it’s two in the morning.
“Get her clear!” screams a voice from my right.
“Who are you?”
“Logan! Don Logan!”
The chief of police…
“Get her out of here, Penn! There’s probably more of them!”
He’s right. “We’ve got to run for it, Mia.” I look out into the seemingly empty lobby. “Call for backup, Don!”
“On the way! Get moving!”
As I pull Mia to her feet, Chief Logan rises from behind a club chair and begins firing his handgun through the shattered windows.
Where do we run? The door to the parking lot is beside the check-in desk, but the lot offers no guarantee of safety. There’s another exit on Main Street, but that’s a long run from here, and something tells me the Asians will be covering the main doors. I sprint across the lobby toward the hall that leads to Main Street, pulling Mia alongside me.
“Don’t go outside!” Logan yells.
I’m not headed outside. There’s a staircase in the hall that leads to the mezzanine, which has sheltered access to the elevators. When we reach the stairs, I start to send Mia up first, then change my mind. As I lead the way, I try to do what my father often preaches: realize the danger before you’re in it.
“Don’t hesitate,” I say as I run. “If something happens, shoot first, sort it out lat—”
Mia screams so sharply that it hurts my ears.
I whirl, figuring someone is chasing us, but Mia is pointing past me, up the stairs. I half pull my trigger as I spin, then depress it the final distance as a blurry figure comes flying down toward me. I don’t know if he’s armed or not, but I keep pulling the trigger until a hundred and fifty pounds of muscle slams into me, knocking me back onto Mia.
“Is he dead?” she grunts, trying to scramble out from under me.
There’s an Asian boy lying half on top of me. I don’t know if he’s dead or not, but he’s still clutching a pistol in his hand. I slam my father’s Browning against his elbow. Nothing happens. Not even a reflex jerk.
With great effort, I roll the kid off us and pull Mia to her feet.
“What do we do?” she asks, her chin quivering. “Where do we go?”
“Up. Back to the suite.”
We race up to the mezzanine elevators. The wait is almost intolerable. When the door opens, I’m so nervous that I nearly fire a slug into the empty car, but we board, and before long I’m opening the door to Quentin’s master suite. I thought the gunfire would have awakened half the hotel, but no one on the seventh floor seems to have noticed anything.
Inside the suite, I go straight to the window. Flashing red and blue lights bounce off the buildings on Pearl Street. The cavalry has arrived. Blue lights mean police, red lights the sheriff’s department. It seems everyone has responded to Chief Logan’s distress call.
Mia walks up beside me, panting. “Who was that? Why did they do that?”
“Those kids killed Sonny Cross. I guess they never left town after all.”
The phone beside the sofa rings. I pick it up. “Hello?”
“Mr. Avery?” says the desk clerk.
“No, this is Mr. Cage.”
“Hold, please. I have someone who wants to speak with you.”
A ragged voice says, “Penn? Are you okay?”
“Don?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re okay. Is it secure down there?”
“Yes. We’ve got the PD and the sheriff’s department here now.”
“What the hell were you doing here?”
“I’ll explain in a minute.”
“Is my car still down there?” I ask, desperately wondering about my leather portfolio.
“No. The guy who had the drop on you stole it and made a run for it.”
“Did you catch him?”
“Not yet.”
“Don…I shot a guy on the mezzanine staircase.”
“We found him. He’s dead. Why don’t you two come back down? It’s completely safe, and we’re going to need you to answer some questions.”
“We’ll be down in a minute.” I hang up and look at Mia. “Are you up to talking to the police?”
She nods slowly. “I guess. God, my mother’s going to freak.”
My laughter starts as a chuckle, then blossoms into full-throated hysteria. Mia soon joins me. After we calm down and walk into the hallway, I consider waking Quentin. There’s really nothing he can do tonight. And since Chief Logan, the hero of the hour, can’t stand to be in the room with Quentin, it’s probably best to let Drew’s lawyer sleep. Especially since it looks like I lost Cyrus’s threatening e-mails.
Quentin can cuss me out in the morning.
The lobby of the Eola looks like the site of a terrorist attack. More than a dozen uniformed cops and deputies move through the capacious room with their guns at the ready, eyeing each other suspiciously. Chief Logan is standing by the doors he was shooting through only minutes ago. At his feet lies the body of the boy who murdered Sonny Cross. I seat Mia in one of the club chairs and walk over to him.
“Hey, Penn,” Don says, his voice muted. “The girl okay?”
“Yeah. I need to get her home, though.”
“Who is she?”
“Mia Burke. She was a friend of Kate Townsend.”
“I see,” says Logan, but his eyes tell me he doesn’t see at all.
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time. Why do you think they attacked you?”
I point at the corpse. “Probably because I saw this punk kill Sonny Cross. They were wiping out the only witness against them.”
Don looks down at the boy’s shattered skull. “He doesn’t even look human anymore. Are you sure that’s the same kid?”
“Positive. I knew it the second I saw his face.”
Logan looks relieved. “Good.”
“What were you doing here? I mean, if you hadn’t been…we’d be dead.”
“An off-duty cop called in a report that he’d seen a black Lexus near the hotel this afternoon. I knew this was Avery’s command center for Drew’s defen
se, and I knew you’d seen the Asians hit Sonny. I haven’t been sleeping too well the past couple of nights, so I took a ride downtown. I saw you go into the hotel with the girl. I decided to hang around and see what was gonna happen after that.”
I clap him on the shoulder and squeeze hard. “I owe you, buddy.”
He shakes his head. “Just doing my job. Sonny Cross may have worked for the sheriff’s department, but I knew him for most of my life. He was a good cop. He shouldn’t have died the way he did.”
“No.” I look around at the deputies prowling the lobby. “Who called the sheriff’s department?”
“I did. They were closer.” Logan laughs quietly. “When the chief of police calls the sheriff’s department for help in this town, you know he’s desperate.”
As I chuckle, Chief Logan turns to make sure no one is within earshot. “Did they take anything from you, Penn?”
I think about the evidence lost in the car. “No. Just the car.”
He watches me carefully. “I imagine we’ll find that soon enough. You sure there’s nothing in there I need to look for, if we find it?”
The chief must have seen the portfolio in my hand when I walked across the lobby with Mia. “Spell it out, Don.”
He looks over at two deputies talking a few yards away “I’m talking about something you wouldn’t want to accidentally get lost before it could be returned to you.”
Christ. If things have come to the point where the police chief can ask me this, this town is truly in bad shape. I look deep into Logan’s eyes. I don’t know him well—we’ve talked a few times at our daughters’ softball games—but what I see in his face now convinces me that the time has come to take a chance. I hate to rely on anyone but myself—especially with a friend’s life at stake—but sometimes you have to have a little faith. I lean toward Don and speak in a whisper.
“There was a leather portfolio in the car. There were two computer flash drives in it, and one envelope. I need that stuff bad, Don. Drew’s life depends on it.”
Logan nods. “What’s in the envelope?”
“A hair from the head of Marko Bakic.”