Eye for an Eye (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  Shannon looked over, annoyed. “Shopping? Now?”

  “Unless you like going hungry.”

  She scowled, but then nodded. “Fine. I’m going to need money, though. We ran out in Illinois.”

  Chief didn’t seem surprised to hear that. “What have you been doing since?”

  “Using the Carters’ cards.”

  Paige flinched but said nothing.

  Chief considered, then nodded. “No one knows they’re missing, right?”

  “No. That was a clean job.”

  “They can pay, then. You don’t mind, do you, Mrs. Carter?”

  She scowled at him, and he grinned.

  “See? She don’t mind.”

  Shannon got up with a huff and was ready to leave until the debate over what everyone wanted ensued. In the end, Chief gave her a whole shopping list. The Carters, he decided, would treat everyone to a steak dinner.

  “And pick up something sweet for dessert.”

  “Can we get ice cream?” Daniel asked.

  “There we go: ice cream it is.”

  Shannon shot him and the kids a dirty look, but she headed out anyway. One of the guys with a medium build, presumably Sal, followed her. An engine roared to life a moment later, and the crunch of tires on gravel followed.

  “Well, why don’t you take a seat, Owen, until they get back?”

  It had been phrased like a request, but of course it wasn’t. So I took a seat by the kids and pulled them close.

  Paige was in an armchair, cradling Avery tight to her. She glared at me.

  Chief watched all this and smirked to himself.

  The show went on playing. The purple animal ran from the hunter, across colorful landscapes that bore about as much resemblance to real life as the creature itself.

  “I told you it wouldn’t work,” Paige whispered. “I told you you’d get us caught.”

  I ignored her. The purple creature ducked into a dark cave. Only its eyes were visible in the absolute black, large and white and frightened. The hunter followed. Now there were two sets of eyes in the dark.

  “You left him out there,” she said.

  “Quiet now,” Chief said. “You’re interrupting.”

  The hunter struck a match, and the cave burst into light. The creature, reacting to its peril, blew out the match.

  Paige stared daggers my way. The hunter struck another match, and the creature blew it out too.

  “There we go,” Chief said. “That’s using your brain.”

  They went back and forth, until the hunter used his last match. Then the creature slipped away under cover of darkness, with the hunter still behind him, still insisting he’d find him.

  Chief laughed and declared himself happy. The hunter was too stupid, he said. He deserved to lose. “Not that the whatchamacallit thing was much better. But at least it was a dumb animal.”

  That, apparently, was the end of the episode, but another followed. It featured the same purple thing, which was, I learned, supposed to be a bear. This time, its nemesis was another bear: a big, bluish gray thing with a scar running down its cheek.

  I understood the boredom I’d seen in the gang’s eyes. The bears went round and round, predictably. The big bear bullied the little bear, the little bear felt bad, and so on. Then the big bear fell into a ravine, and only the little bear’s ingenuity could get him out again.

  It had been many years since I’d been a kid, and many years since I’d voluntarily watched cartoons. But I was pretty sure they had gotten dumber since my time.

  I’d thought, at first, that Chief enjoyed them. I realized I’d gotten it wrong as we sat through a second, and a third and a fourth, episode. He was as bored as any of us. But he enjoyed our aggravation. He amused himself by watching us watching the cartoon.

  By the fifth episode, Paige needed to use the bathroom. Chief assigned a tail. She took Avery with her, and came back a few minutes later. The guy who had followed her went back to leaning against the wall.

  The episode finished, and another started.

  “Jesus,” Jimmy wondered. “Shannon butchering the cows herself?”

  About halfway through episode six, though, we heard the familiar crunching sound of an approaching vehicle. Then came voices and footsteps, and a minute later, Shannon and Sal entered the house, arms full of grocery bags.

  “Well, good news, boss,” Sal said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That Mrs. Carter? She’s a real generous kind of woman. She got porterhouses for everyone.”

  “And wine,” Shannon said. She glanced at the kids. “For us, I mean.”

  “Ice cream sandwiches for the kids,” Sal said. A few of the guys made grumbling sounds, and he rolled his eyes. “You too, you fat bastards.”

  Chief nodded. “Good. Sal, dish them out. I’m hungry now. Day, you and Marco go take care of dinner. Jimmy, you go with them. Make sure Owen doesn’t do anything stupid.”

  “You got it, Chief,” Jimmy said.

  I started to get up, and Marco pushed off the wall. “Can this jester cook?”

  Chief glanced at me. “Can you cook, Day?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He arched an eyebrow. “Careful there, Champ: you’re going to bowl us over with all that confidence.”

  “What do you cook?” Marco asked.

  I shrugged. “Whatever.”

  Chief glanced at Maisie and Daniel. “Your uncle cooks for you?”

  Maisie didn’t answer him. Daniel nodded.

  “What does he cook?”

  They seemed confused by the question. They glanced at each other. Chief rephrased. “What’s your favorite thing he makes you?”

  “Pancakes,” Maisie said.

  “Macaroni and hotdogs,” Daniel said.

  Marco shuddered, and Chief shook his head. “Right. Day, you’re on pots and pans duty; whatever Marco needs.”

  “I’ll handle cooking,” Marco said.

  Sal volunteered Shannon for the job with a grin. “It’s women’s work after all, isn’t it?” She volunteered in turn to relieve him of his manhood if he didn’t shut his mouth.

  Chief grinned at the banter, but seconded Marco’s plan. “Please. Don’t let this guy touch nothing.”

  Which wasn’t exactly how it worked out. I touched just about everything, but only in the preparation phases. I laid out the steaks. Fifteen of them in total: one for everyone but Avery. One for Tyler, though, of course, he wouldn’t be eating it.

  I ferreted out the salt and pepper from the cupboards, and a grill pan too. Then Marco set me to work peeling potatoes: a whole sack of them.

  Jimmy sat on a stool and watched us both. I studied them both in turn.

  Jimmy found the entire thing amusing. “Come on, Day,” he’d say. “You can go faster than that.” But he watched Marco with the same kind of sneer.

  Finally, he asked, “I guess you’re real serious about your steaks, huh?”

  And Marco was. He’d started by dicing up fresh garlic, and mixing it with olive oil, all paid for by the Carters. He salted and peppered each of the fifteen steaks and brushed the oil over them. He unwrapped three separate trays of take and bake dinner rolls and preheated the oven.

  Then, he grabbed a peeler too, and joined me. “Potatoes got to be ready at the same time as the steak. And we’re going to be dead and buried by time you finish.”

  Jimmy didn’t offer to help. He just went on watching and smirking. “Shouldn’t you be working on the steak?”

  “They got to get to room temperature,” Marco said, with enough disdain to at least temporarily shut Jimmy up. “You don’t cook a porterhouse fresh out of the meat case.”

  When we neared the end of the bag, he switched to dicing the potatoes, presumably because pieces would cook before whole potatoes, and tossing them into a giant vat of a pan. Then, he got the pan boiling, and started grilling the steaks.

  “Look for a masher,” he told me. “The old lady’s bound to have one. You don
’t raise a house full of farm boys without making mashed potatoes.”

  She did, in the second of three utensil drawers. Jimmy watched my search, training the gun on me every time I neared the knives.

  “I’m watching you,” he’d say. Or, “I got my eye on you.” Or, “Give me a reason, Day. Just give me a reason.”

  I didn’t, and Marco tasked me with finding a strainer, and unwrapping both blocks of cream cheese and two sticks of butter. The cream cheese and butter were still in the shopping bags. Sal had shoved them into the refrigerator and then left the room.

  “Get me plates,” he told me. “And aluminum foil.”

  This required a bit of searching. I knew where the Millers kept their plates – I’d seen those earlier – but I hadn’t noticed aluminum foil.

  Jimmy repeated the same song and dance with the gun and his threats as I looked. I found the foil in an upper cupboard, and delivered it.

  Marco shook his head. “Make a tent with it.”

  “What?”

  “Over the steaks. So they can rest, but’ll keep their heat.”

  Which I did. Just like I strained and mashed the potatoes when the timer went off and mixed in the cream cheese and butter when Marco told me. He diverted from the pan grill long enough to add salt and pepper and milk to the potatoes. Then he popped one of the trays of rolls in the oven and went back to work.

  At which point, I really had a moment to take stock of my surroundings. I’d seen the kitchen in bits and pieces so far. I’d seen it the first time with Marco and Jimmy at my back as I searched for food. Then I’d seen it in quick glances, while I peeled potatoes or searched for whatever Marco needed.

  Now, I took it all in.

  The room was a large rectangle, long and thin with cupboards running the length of it. There was a door, presumably leading to the cellar or basement, at the furthest end. The other led via an open doorway into the hall that bisected the first floor.

  The table at which I’d been working sat a few feet removed from the basement door. Jimmy had a full view of it from his countertop vantage, and the stove and hallway too.

  It was a little point on the wall behind Jimmy, though, that caught my interest: a set of hooks with a lifetime’s worth of keys accumulated on them. There were big, ancient keys that might have belonged to sheds or garages that predated the current ones. There were slim brass ones, and slim stainless steel ones that belonged to door locks. Decades and decades of keys, by the look of it. There were old vehicle keys, with fat, plastic fobs on top of long silver keys. Some had buttons at the end, and others were plain plastic.

  But amid all the detritus of two people’s long lives were new keys – or, rather, the remotes that served as keys for new vehicles. Several sets of them. There was the key to Cody’s truck, and more for the SUV’s: the rented ones, and Chief’s.

  Which was good to know. I didn’t have any immediate plans. But it was good to know all the same.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Deputy Austin Wagner, 5:55 PM

  The FBI guys were something else. That was what the sheriff said. It’s what Lori said. It’s what our IT guys said. By which they all meant good things. They were somewhere between wizards and geniuses in their eyes.

  I wasn’t willing to go that far. Part of their success came from the sheer stupidity of the criminal element. The guy who had purchased the phone Owen Day last called from had purchased four phones in total. He’d used a credit card, belonging to someone called Eliza Washburn. Eliza had also purchased a host of clothes and food at the time.

  The real Eliza reported the card missing a week later, but the investigation had gone nowhere. Until now. Because three of the other phones had been pinging off the same tower until about forty-five minutes ago.

  Then, one of them had disappeared from the network for around forty-five seconds, before reappearing a mile down the road.

  The FBI techs had tracked the signal into town, to a local grocery store, and then back to Jay Road – somewhere.

  I’d gotten the security footage from the store. It showed a man and a woman perusing the aisles, purchasing several hundred dollars’ worth of steak, spirits, and miscellaneous groceries, and heading out again.

  Getting the footage had been no trouble at all. I knew the manager, professionally. He’d called in a drunk and irate tourist a few months back, threatening the girl at the service desk. I’d happened to be just down the road, and solved his problem inside of two minutes. He’d been very impressed.

  And right now, he was only too happy to make us a copy and hand it over, especially when he heard it was for the FBI. As a matter of fact, I was pretty sure that made his day. I was pretty sure he was envisioning his grocery store being the next Little Bohemia, with a mob history that tourists would lap up.

  “If they get the guys, tell me all about it,” he said.

  I said I would, and took the footage back to my car, where I uploaded it for the FBI guys to start on. Then, I drove back to the department, and rejoined the crew in the situation room. They’d made good headway in my absence.

  They’d ID’ed the woman. She was called Shannon Braden, sister of Jimmy Braden – Joey Rabbitt’s right hand man. They ID’ed the man, too. And he, apparently, was a bigger deal than Shannon, or Jimmy, or even Joey.

  Travers was on a video call from his plane. Which apparently you can do, when you’re an FBI agent. He was oozing excitement out of every pore, but he was talking to the tech guys so he was too busy to answer my questions.

  The sheriff did instead. “The guy is Salvatore Orsi. American citizen, some priors for low level mob work. Spent two years in the slammer for assault. Might have been more, if the victim gave evidence. Then he went off the grid. No one’s heard from him again. But the rumor – or so they say…”

  He gestured toward the wall with the projected video call, with the faces of all of the various FBI agents’ in the call.

  “Is that Orsi is running with some guy called Fasano. Goes by the moniker Chief. Real name’s Thaddaeus Wallace Rupert Fasano.”

  “I can see why he goes by Chief,” I said.

  “No kidding. Apparently it’s a family thing. All the kids have weird names.”

  “All the kids? Big family, then?”

  “Big enough: six boys, three girls.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Fasano’s crew is suspected of five hits over the last eight years. Big hits.”

  “How big?”

  The sheriff threw a sour glance at the wall with its rows of faces. “They’re playing things close to the vest. It sounds like some of it happened in Vegas. Casino money. But, for obvious reasons, I guess they don’t want that getting around. Not them so much as the casinos themselves.”

  “Because they got away with it, whatever it was?”

  He nodded. “Exactly. My guess is, it’s related to transporting money, same as what Rabbitt is doing. But they haven’t told me one way or another. Just that they’re implicated in five distinct situations.”

  I thought about that for a long minute. “They can’t have been that big.”

  He’d turned back to the conference, where they were picking apart the footage I’d got. But he focused on me at that. “What?”

  “These hits: they can’t be that big. You don’t go from Vegas to Wisconsin if you’re doing that well.”

  He considered and nodded slowly. “Maybe that’s how they got away with it, whatever it was. They figured out some kind of system to get pocket change. Pocket change Vegas style, anyway. But they couldn’t pull it off for real money. So they came up here instead.”

  “Lucky us.”

  “So this case just got a lot bigger than Day and those kids, or Rabbitt and his crew.”

  I started to say Lucky us a second time. But my cellphone rang. I glanced at it. The number was from the grocery store, the one where Braden and Orsi had shopped. “Got to take this,” I said.

  The sheriff nodded, and I stepped out of the room.
“Wagner here.”

  “Hello, Deputy Wagner?” It was the store’s manager. I recognized his voice, but he identified himself anyway. Then he said, “That footage you were looking for? I pulled the transactions for that register. I got a name, if that helps you?”

  We already had a name, but I didn’t tell him that. He was trying to be helpful, and that was always a good thing to encourage. “Yeah, definitely.”

  “Okay. She used a card. Her name is Carter. Paige A Carter, according to the receipt.”

  I started to thank him, and then stopped. “Wait, did you say Carter?”

  “That’s right. Paige Carter. Why? Is that who you were looking for?”

  Nice try. “I can’t comment on that – but thank you. That makes a big difference.”

  I could hear the smile in his voice. “Well,” he said, all modesty, “just doing my part.”

  I rung off and stared at the wall opposite me. I remembered my conversation with the kid in the ranger station at the state park where Day had been camping. I’d asked if Day’s group cleared out yet. The kid had said, “No, they’re still checked in. The only checkout we’ve had in that loop since yesterday was the Carters. No one else.”

  Paige A Carter.

  The Carters.

  There’d been someone a few sites away from Day called Carter. Now, Day’s kidnappers were paying with a credit card belonging to someone named Carter.

  That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  * * *

  Chief insisted the kids ate first, which pissed just about everyone off – not least of all because the steaks were massive, and the kids could barely make a dent in them.

  So six hungry guys watched as they picked through their food, eating a little of this and a little of that. Chief was unmoved. “They’re our guests,” he’d say, with clear appreciation for the lie in those words. “Guests eat first. Anyway, they’re kids. You don’t let kids go hungry. Who raised you, Sal?”

  Paige didn’t seem thrilled by it either. “Cody’s working hard,” she said when I ran the plates out. “In the hot sun. I don’t see why they can’t share a steak.”