Eye for an Eye (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  It started to dial, and then the connection failed message came up. I had no reception. “Shit.”

  “What are you doing?” Cody demanded. “We need to go, now.”

  “What do you think they’re going to do to your wife and kid when we go?” I snapped.

  I heard a door slam from the direction of the house. We were running out of time.

  “Paige?” he said. “Avery?”

  I ignored him and raced to the edge of the barn. I could see people: Chief, and Marco, and a few of the other goons. The cellphone showed one bar now. I dialed again.

  The screen displayed a dialing message.

  A shot rang out, and wood splintered a few yards away from me.

  The line connected. A female voice, maybe the same woman who had answered my call about Callaghan’s body, answered: all business, nothing but calm in her tone. “Sheboygan County Emergency Services. What is the nature of your emergency?”

  “My name’s Owen Day,” I said. “I’ve been kidnapped–”

  Another shot rang out, and another barn board exploded, much nearer this time. I dropped the phone, because I couldn’t take it back with me, not without losing reception; and I ducked back behind the barn, because I couldn’t stay there without being shot.

  Cody still held the gun. He was aiming it at the corner of the barn, where Chief and his men had been shooting at me.

  “Give it to me,” I said.

  He didn’t budge.

  Someone called, “Give it up, Day. There’s no way you get out of this alive.”

  Cody started to shoot, wildly. He had no control. He was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. A puff of dirt went up six inches away from my feet, where a bullet hit the ground. A board splintered behind me.

  I hit the deck. There was nothing else for it, not until Cody ran out of bullets anyway.

  He did, half a dozen shots later. And when he ran out of ammo, he went on pressing the trigger anyway. I started to get up.

  But it was too late. A voice behind me called, “Freeze, assholes.”

  “Don’t shoot,” Chief’s voice said. “He’s out of ammo.”

  Cody went on pressing the trigger with a wild, frantic expression in his eyes, like he didn’t understand why the gun wasn’t working.

  Dark-haired guys rushed us, four of them in total. Two took hold of me, twisting my arms up behind me. Two took Cody, smacking him hard in the jaw and sending him sprawling. Then they seized him the same way they’d seized me, twisting and contorting him until he screamed in protest.

  Then Chief marched up between us, shaking his head. “Well, well, well. Imagine that. I tell you not to do something stupid, and what do you do, but something stupid?”

  I said nothing. Cody said nothing coherent. He just went on struggling and whimpering.

  Chief glanced us over. Then, his eyes fixed on me. “I take it this was your idea?”

  “Not my idea,” Cody said. “Please, I’ve got a wife and a baby.”

  Chief’s eyes didn’t leave mine. “What about you? You going to beg?”

  “No point,” I said. “You’re going to do whatever you’re going to do.”

  Chief smiled. “You’re right about that. Why’d you kill Tyler?”

  I said nothing.

  “That wasn’t you, I take it?”

  I said nothing. Cody insisted he’d had nothing to do with it.

  “He had the gun, boss,” one of the guys holding Cody said.

  “Well, lucky for you – whichever of you did it – he was part of Joey’s team. So you might have a problem with those other two clowns inside, but not with me.” He held up the phone now, the one I’d taken from Tyler’s pocket. “This, on the other hand, is a problem.”

  Chapter Thirty

  We stood there for a long moment, waiting to learn our fates. The longer the better, from where I was sitting. Hopefully it would give the cops time to act. It would probably be too late for Cody and I, but not for the kids and Paige.

  “Luckily for you,” Chief said, “it looks like the call failed. They won’t have had time to trace it. But now, I have to say, I’m disappointed. I thought we had an understanding, me and you.”

  “Me and Joey’s crew don’t,” I said.

  Chief shook his head. “That’s not how this works. They’re useful to me now. You can’t be bumping them off as you feel like it. That’s going to seriously impede my work.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t part of the plan.”

  “No,” he said. “I guess it wasn’t.” Then, he smiled. “You’re a man with an eye for opportunity, aren’t you, Owen?”

  I said nothing to that. I didn’t know where he was going with it.

  “Don’t look so worried. You’re not in trouble. I told you: I don’t really give a shit about Tyler, except that he was useful in his way. The call is more to the point. It tells me I’ve got to keep my eye on you. But I knew that already. I knew that the moment I laid eyes on you.”

  The smile was back. He watched me quizzically. “And then that business upstairs? Well, that was the icing on the cake, so to speak.”

  I froze at that. Cody turned a shade paler.

  Chief gestured toward us, and asked one of his men, “You believe these guys? They’ve been chewing man-sized holes through the walls, and they thought we wouldn’t find them.”

  The guy laughed and shook his head. Chief turned back to me. “I mean, I guess maybe you thought you were dealing with another Joey. Because Joey was stupid enough to miss it. But I’m no Joey.”

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “Now, we take a new approach. First of all, we need to keep you safe, now that you did in Tyler. Because if Jimmy or Shannon find out, you’re a dead man, the first chance they get. Which – though I don’t expect gratitude, in the circumstances – I would appreciate you not making this harder for me.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  “And second, the cell idea is not going to work. That’s obvious. Plus we’re down two bodies. So you’re going to come down, and pitch in. Earn your keep.”

  I thought about the kids, waiting for my return in our dark room. “What about the kids?”

  “They’re already down. I put them with the Millers. Shannon put some cartoons on.”

  “What about Paige?” Cody asked. “And Avery?”

  “The woman and baby? They’re down there too. Close quarters in the living room, but they’re getting on.”

  Chief’s plan was simple: Cody would finish the hole, since he’d been the one to pull the trigger. Tyler would go in the grave first, and then Joey, just in case Shannon or Jimmy decided to look for their missing comrade. Unburying Joey might deter them from digging further.

  One of Chief’s men stayed to supervise the work, with clear orders: “He blinks wrong, you shoot him.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  “I thought you didn’t want civilian casualties?” I asked.

  “I don’t. I told you: don’t get in the way of my money, and we have no problem. You know how to get out of this alive, and you know how to die. So you go and get yourself shot now, that’s on you.”

  As for me, I’d be in the kitchen. “We’re all hungry,” he said. “So are the old folks, and the kids. You can make yourself of use.”

  But first, he had me hand over the keys. There was no point in pretending I didn’t have them, and no point in arguing with him. He knew I had them. Not only that, but I didn’t want them to search me. I still had Maisie’s switchblade in my pocket, and a search would certainly turn it up.

  So I handed them over without protest, and we went in. Cody stayed at the grave with a guy called Tony, scowling at me like I was some kind of traitor. The rest trailed behind us.

  Jimmy was lurking in the hall expectantly, with Marco hovering behind him.

  It didn’t take much to figure out what had gone down when the first shot rang out: Chief had ordered Jimmy and Shannon to stay inside, and he’d left Marco w
ith them. Ostensibly to wait alongside them, but really to make sure they followed orders, and stayed put.

  “What was it?” Jimmy asked.

  Chief shook his head. “Nothing much. Tyler had it all under control.”

  Jimmy stared at him, waiting for more.

  Chief obliged. “Wise guy here tried to get Tyler’s gun. They were both holding onto it, and he started pressing the trigger. Wasted an entire magazine.”

  “You think anyone heard?”

  “Probably. But it’s Wisconsin. Everybody and their brother has a gun here.”

  Jimmy nodded, not quite easy, but not as wired as he’d been when we walked in. “And the other one?”

  “I left him and Tony with Tyler. This guy’s trouble, so I brought him inside. He’s going to whip something up for us to eat.”

  Jimmy nodded again. “You need me to watch him?”

  Chief considered for half a beat. “Yeah, you and Marco. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

  “Okay.”

  “And Jimmy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Owen and me, we came to a kind of understanding. He tries a move like that again, we waste him. So keep that in mind: if he comes at you, he’s asking you to shoot him.”

  Jimmy cracked a grin for the first time since Chief had begun his interrogation of Joey. “You got it, Chief.”

  * * *

  Deputy Austin Wagner, 3:50 PM

  We got the report from Dispatch about three minutes after Owen Day’s 911 came in. They’d tried to call the number back, but it had gone straight to a message about a voicemail account that hadn’t been set up.

  Someone had recognized the name and passed it to us.

  Which set off a few separate efforts at once. First, we needed to track the phone. The tech guys would take point on that. The number had been an out of state cell number, with a Boston area code. A burner, probably: something someone had probably paid cash for at a box store somewhere.

  But a Boston area code was telling in its own right. Which bled into my assignment: keep Travers in the loop.

  He was in his car when I reached him, and he listened without interruption – except for the occasional break to yell at other drivers. It was, in his eloquent turn of phrase, a fucking jungle at the moment.

  Which struck me as weirdly amusing. I had not, thus far during our brief acquaintance, heard him this riled about anything. But, then, we’d only covered topics like robbery, kidnapping and murder. Nothing as serious as heavy traffic.

  “I assume you believe me now?” he said. “That it’s Rabbitt?”

  “I’m leaning that way, yes.”

  “Okay. So I’m going to make a recommendation.”

  Here it comes, I thought. Aloud, I said, “Okay.”

  “I’m recommending you work with our tech analysts on this, to track both phones: Day’s and this new one.”

  “We’re already working with the phone company. They narrowed Day’s down to a tower. But it serves somewhere between fifteen to twenty miles of country roads.”

  “There’s a lot more than that we can figure out,” Travers said.

  “Like what?”

  “For starters, we can look at the other phones that hit that tower in the same time frame.”

  “Is that legal?”

  He ignored that question, and said instead, “And we can see where they’re at now.”

  “How does that help us, if they’re hiding out in those twenty miles?”

  “They didn’t come to Wisconsin to hide out. They came here for another hit. Which means once we see those cellphones on the move, pinging off of other towers, we can figure out where they’re going and what they’re doing.”

  That was a good point. “Okay,” I said again. “Who do I call?”

  “They’ll call you. In the meantime, do you have a canvass going?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the area covered by that tower.”

  “That’s almost a twenty-mile radius,” I reminded him.

  “I know. But start with Jay Road. It’s farm country, right? There can’t be that many addresses there.”

  “There’s enough,” I protested.

  “I don’t know your resources, Deputy,” he said. “Obviously, it’s your call. If you can’t, you can’t. But Day found the body on Jay Road. Which means they were heading to or from somewhere nearby with it. My money’s on somewhere on the road itself.”

  I told him I’d run it by the sheriff. He said that was good enough for him. He asked the best number for his tech people to call. I gave him our tech people’s line.

  Then, we hung up. I let the tech team know to expect the call; and I brought the sheriff up to speed in turn.

  He thought for a moment, then nodded grimly. “We better canvass Jay Road. If we don’t, and we end up with dead tourists…”

  He didn’t need to elaborate. Anyway I looked at it, it’d be bad news. Starting with the most obvious issue, of course: dead people. I didn’t want dead people. Day might be something of an odd duck, but he was a good guy. The kids were kids. I didn’t want them dead.

  But there’d be political considerations, for the sheriff certainly if he ignored FBI counsel in a case where civilians ended up dead. Probably for the rest of us too. There was an election a year away. A new boss, brought in on a wave of scandal and death wouldn’t bode well for any of us.

  There’d be economic implications for the county. Kidnapping and murder wasn’t exactly a selling point to tourists.

  And there’d be media implications. You could take that to the bank. Any story that involved dead civilians, much less dead kids, and even the question of police incompetence would mean news coverage. National, maybe even international.

  And rejecting FBI advice would look like incompetence, whether it was the right call or not. Which made things simple, in a way. We didn’t have to figure out the right call. We just had to take action. Then it was the FBI’s decision, and their judgement on the line.

  And Day’s and the Welch kids’ lives.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The Millers didn’t have much in their refrigerator. Not much edible, anyway. There was half a gallon of milk, half a week past its sell by date; half a dozen eggs that had been fresh a month ago; two bananas that still looked edible; and a box of takeout that smelled so bad I tossed it without checking. I felt confident there was a whole colony of molds inside.

  I found ice and an ancient frozen meal inside the freezer, all crusted over with ice particles.

  So I moved on to the cupboards. Once upon a time, it had been well-stocked, by a woman who did a lot of cooking and baking. There were pans and pots of every shape and size, and lots of them. A promising start, but it ended there.

  I found flour and sugar in one of the cupboards that had expired eight and nine years earlier, respectively; spices from the Reagan era; and baking mixes that were probably as old as I was. The canned food wasn’t much better.

  I found more baked beans and raviolis, and low sodium canned soups and vegetables. Most of them were reasonably close to their expiration dates. I didn’t think we’d die of food poisoning.

  I didn’t think anyone would be thrilled, though, either.

  Still, I headed to the living room. Jimmy wanted to stop me, but Marco shook his head. “It’s fine. He can talk to Chief.”

  The gang, sans Marco, Jimmy, and Tony, were gathered there around the television. The kids had some cartoon on, and they watched with the same awkward, deliberate attention the old folks had paid the soap opera.

  The Millers and most of the guys looked bored out of their minds.

  Chief, on the other hand, hollered at the creature on the screen. I wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to be. An animal of some variety, I assumed, because it was covered in fur; but with purple fur, giant eyes and anthropomorphized expressions, it looked like no animal I’d ever seen. “Not that way, you big dummy.”

  I cleared my throat. The kids
looked up, relief flooding their features. “Uncle Owen,” Maisie said. “You’re alive.”

  “Didn’t I tell you he was?” Chief asked.

  “We thought they killed you,” Daniel said.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Everything’s okay.”

  They looked like they might cry with relief, but they didn’t. Maisie nodded stoically, and Daniel said, “They found the holes.”

  “I know.”

  Chief threw up his hands in disgust at the little purple figure on the screen, who was apparently nearing a hunter’s trap. “He deserves to be caught,” he declared. Then, to me, he added, “Aren’t you supposed to be in the kitchen?”

  “I need to know what you want,” I said.

  “Surprise me. You can cook, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “When I have food to cook with.”

  That got his attention. He looked away from the screen, toward me.

  “You got two options: canned raviolis or baked beans.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “What? That’s it? In the whole house?”

  “They ate our freezer meals,” Mrs. Miller put in. “A whole week’s worth of them.”

  Chief glanced at Marco and Jimmy, as if confirming either my words or Mrs. Miller’s. They both half-shrugged and half-nodded.

  “Cupboards are pretty bare, boss,” Marco said. “Slim pickings.”

  “Well, I can tell you one thing, I sure as hell am not getting stuck in a house with you guys when you’ve been scarfing down beans,” Chief said.

  “Not to be the bearer of bad news…but it looks like some of your boys are going hungry, then. Because there’s two cans of raviolis,” I said.

  Chief made another face. “Goddamned Joey. How the hell do you manage a hideout without thinking of food?”

  “There was enough,” Jimmy put in. “Except we had to feed these clowns too.”

  Chief said nothing to that. He just sighed and turned to Shannon. “You know this place, right?”

  “Sure,” she said. “A little.”

  “You know where there’s a grocery store?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. You and Sal go shopping. Get us enough food for tonight, and breakfast tomorrow. And maybe a little extra, for grandma here after we’re gone; on account of their hospitality and all that.”