The Hotspur Affair: A Richard & Morgana MacKenzie Mystery

by Jack Flanagan

  “This is a legal matter. It isn’t to be taken lightly,” grumbled Luger.

  “Then you’ll have to talk to my lawyer because I have nothing else to say.”

  Firmino then grabbed hold of my arm, slapped my shoulder in playful comradeship, and ushered me quickly toward the front door. “If I don’t get you to the restaurant,” he said in a clear, loud voice, “your wife will send your brother, the sheriff, and the entire local constabulary will be here to retrieve you. No one, I think, would want that.”

  In our wake, Luger and Krauss gave protests to my leaving. Their two associates tagged silently along.

  As we were about to exit the house, I had a worrisome thought.

  “Firmino,” I said in a hush. “What about Chester?”

  “Who?”

  “The man who owns this house.”

  “What about him?”

  “He may be in some danger,” I said under my breath, not daring to say more.

  “Vera,” I calmly called out, “Please tell Chester that I—”

  “Richard, are you leaving?” asked Chester as he came out from the kitchen, followed by Fordor. “Richard, has everything been worked out?” The two men caught up with me in the front vestibule. Wanting to leave quickly, I answered as positively as I could.

  “Not quite,” I said. “But hope springs eternal. I’m sorry that I can’t stay.”

  “Please, don’t take offense to what I said about linking the theft and you, but—”

  “Not at all,” I lied. “But my ride is here, and I have my uncle’s funeral luncheon.”

  “Krauss and Luger wanted you to stay and to listen—”

  “Mr. Luger has said everything he had to say. There is nothing more to keep me here. I really must be going. My ride is here.” I gestured to Firmino, forsaking an introduction. “I’ll talk with you all later. I’ll call you, Chester.”

  In seconds, we were out Chester’s front door and headed for the road where Baldewin’s car was parked. For a time, I thought that I’d never get away. With each step we took, we were closer to safety. With every yard we crossed, my heart beat a little harder than the previous one. Nearing the end of the driveway, I could make out, through the trees, a car parked on the far side of the road. Then from several feet behind us—

  “Halt!”

  The command rang in my ears and grabbed my heart.

  The two of us slowly turned around. One of Luger’s associates was running up to Firmino. “You forgot your mobile.”

  My companion cautiously took the phone with a very subdued, “Grazie.” And without looking back, we continued to the car.

  “Did Morgana really send you to get me?” I asked.

  Firmino grinned but didn’t answer. In fact, the two of us didn’t speak until we were both safely inside his vehicle.

  “Did my wife send you?”

  “Ah, no.”

  “If my wife didn’t send you, what in hell are you doing here?” I asked.

  “To rescue you.”

  “Rescue me?”

  “Please, brace yourself. We are not out of the forestry yet.”

  With no explanation about what he meant, Firmino started his car. The engine roared, and in seconds we were traveling down the road like a rocket sled. Gravel and dust flew in every direction. The sudden acceleration pushed me into my seat so violently that I thought the base of my spine hit a support brace that was buried in the seat cushion.

  “Lordy, take it easy,” I said, hastily tightening my seat belt.

  “Take this,” ordered Firmino as he tossed me his reclaimed cell phone, “and throw it out the window when I tell you.”

  “You want me to do what?”

  “Throw, eject, ah . . . propel my mobile out of your window when I tell you.”

  “Throw this out my window?”

  “Si, and don’t touch any buttons.”

  As I tried to process the reasoning for ditching the cell phone and the environmental consequence of such action posed, I powered down my window. We were about to cross the Old Stone River Bridge when Firmino yelled, “Throw it out now!”

  “Why?”

  “Do it!”

  More out of reflex than by thought, I heaved the device out of the car, over the metal railing, sending it down to the boulder-strewn river below us. Within two heartbeats after the cell left my hand, there was a flash-bang and a small cloud of greenish smoke.

  “I never knew that cell phones could explode,” I said in astonishment.

  “They don’t,” replied Firmino, “unless someone wants them to.”

  #

  CHAPTER 29

  “I could have dropped the damn thing in the car. It might have blown my foot off.”

  “I don’t think so. A few cuts and burns, maybe. It might have killed me if I kept it in my jacket pocket. But don’t worry; it wasn’t the impact that made the mobile explode.”

  “Oh, really? ”

  “Really,” said Firmino with his eyes flitting back and forth from the road ahead to the rearview mirror and back again. “But that greenish gas released by the explosion, on the other hand, that probably could have killed us both.”

  “Poison gas? There was poison gas in your cell phone.”

  “If not exactly poison, the gas would make us very, very sick . . . very, very quickly. I lose control of the car. Then poof! We crash and die. No one knows how. The gas is almost untraceable.”

  “What type of accident-prone spy are you?”

  “I am no spy. I am a security officer.”

  “Well, I don’t feel very secure with somebody who has . . . eh, poisonous gas in his phone.”

  “I didn’t put gas in the phone or make it explode.”

  “Then who did?”

  “Probably the people who are following us.”

  “ Following us? Who is following us?”

  Firmino poked his thumb toward the back. “Them.”

  I stretched to turn around to see in the rear window for myself. Sure enough, there was a car about forty yards behind us.

  “Firmino, are those people actually following us?” I asked, secretly wishing that my gun-toting brother was with us.

  “Let’s find out for sure,” said Firmino as he took an abrupt right turn onto a rutted dirt road marked by a rustic sign that read “Pohl’s Farm.” Within moments the car did the same.

  “Yes, Richard,” said Firmino with tension in his voice, “we really are being followed.”

  “Why?” I stupidly exclaimed after being kidnapped just an hour ago.

  “I don’t know, but I don’t think that we should stop and ask them.”

  As we bounced along the farm road that cut through the middle of a large harvested cornfield, I asked, “Do you have any idea where you are?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Not a clue. Do you have GPS?”

  “Not anymore. It was on my phone.”

  “You probably should not have had turned off the main road,” I growled.

  “But we definitely know that we are being followed.”

  “That fact, somehow, doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  “Any ideas about what to do now?”

  “Phone for help?”

  “You have a mobile?”

  “No, but you—”

  “It went out the window,” we said in chorus. Our simultaneous acknowledgment of our situation led to me spouting several short bursts of untranslatable expletives at my companion. Then in the middle of some regrettable things about Firmino’s competency, our bumpy journey through the corn-stalk-stubbled field had suddenly ended at a juncture with another muddy tractor path. This one ran perpendicular to the soggy trail we were on and parallel to a long stone wall that lay directly in front of us.

  Firmino glanced to his right and left and sighed, “Which way, my friend?” he asked. “I think left would be better.”

  Going left was as good or bad as going right would be to my thinking. “Left it is.”

/>   Firmino gave the car gas; its engine roared. Mud sprayed into the air. The vehicle shook—we didn’t budge.

  “We are . . . How you say? . . . Stuck,” said Firmino looking at me for guidance.

  I instantly let go another round of colorful expletives, which, surprisingly enough, seemed to have cleared my head. I had come up with a plan, “Get out of the car. Go over that wall!”

  To our good fortune, our pesky friends were slow in making up the distance between us. Thankfully, their vehicle didn’t fare much better, if not worse, over the rough and sloppy New England farmland than ours did. Their difficulties allowed us an opportunity to safely evacuate our car unnoticed.

  With the doors closing behind us—why we bothered to shut them, I don’t know—Firmino and I jumped over the wall and crouched behind it for cover. Landing more on my backside than my feet, I again felt discomfort, like a poking sensation, at the base of my spine. It didn’t hurt, but it was annoying.

  “Where do we go now?” asked Firmino, who by this time had his gun drawn.

  I quickly scanned our surroundings. About fifty feet of flat ground lay between the wall that we were hiding behind to a brush-covered slope of a hill. I also saw that the hill’s thickets and bushes got denser on its long gentle ascent. At about forty or so yards up from the base of the rise, I could just make out another wall. This second wall, about halfway up the hill, looked very overgrown and unkempt. Native vegetation even protruded from its interior, giving the appearance of it devouring the man-made structure. In short, it could be an excellent place to hide.

  “We go up.”

  “Up?” responded Firmino, staring at the sky overhead.

  “No, no.” I pointed up the hill. “There’s another wall up there.”

  “Oh, si.”

  I peeked over the edge of the wall and watched our two pursuers getting out of the black car. They looked into our abandoned vehicle and then at the ground. I heard them cursing. I assumed their displeasure was about Firmino and me, or it may have been about the mud they were stepping in. In either case, they were angry, and they were heading in our direction.

  “They’re coming,” I said in a harsh whisper.

  “Let’s go,” said Firmino, starting to retreat to higher ground.

  Just then, a new concern crashed into my thoughts. I grabbed my partner by the arm and gave him a word to the wise. “Be careful of ticks.”

  “Tacks?”

  “No, ticks.”

  “Picks?”

  “Ticks. Ticks!”

  “Sticks?”

  “Ticks! Bugs that will make you sick.”

  Then in a flash of clarity, I admonished myself for my over-cautious wariness of the outdoors, something that Morgana had instilled in me when living on Long Island. “Forget it. They will be too small to see anyway . . . Let’s go.”

  With all the agility that a clumsy, overweight senior citizen could muster, I trailed the young, spry Vatican security officer who sprinted across the stretch of unmowed grass to the base of the hill. Always crouching and keeping our heads down, we then scrambled up through the bushes, weeds, and trees toward our objective—the second wall.

  “Hey, Mr. MacKenzie,” said an accented voice several yards behind me. “We know where you are. The leaves and plants move when you do. Don’t go away. We just want to talk to you.”

  I looked over my shoulder in the direction of the voice. Through the leaves and branches, I saw my old watchdogs, Mr. Nagy and Fordor. They were looking in our general direction. I made a note to myself, “ Stay low. Don’t jostle the bushes.”

  “Come out, come out wherever you are,” demanded Nagy. “You can be a very rich man if you do.”

  “Or a very dead one,” countered Firmino, whispering the undesirable possibility as he helped me over a fallen tree trunk.

  Cautiously, we continued our ascent. My companion led the way, silently pushing the wild vegetation out of his way. Unfortunately, many of these small branches and leafy obstacles sprang back to smack me in the face. This inconvenient situation forced me to let Firmino get further ahead of me, more than I would have liked.

  The rough terrain was not easy to traverse while trying to be invisible to our trackers. Sometimes, I was creeping on all fours. At other times, I was crawling almost on my belly. With every yard, gained I scraped my knees and got riddled with thorn pricks. Keeping my head down and worrying about ticks, I often moved about blindly, having only the sound of Firmino’s rustling the bushes and the upward incline to guide me.

  Eventually, I came to a large three-foot-high, moss-covered boulder that resembled a super-sized, green English muffin. I deftly pulled myself behind the rock and looked for Firmino. I wanted to tell him that the second wall was just about ten yards away, but he wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  I softly whispered his name.

  No answer.

  I whispered his name again.

  What came next was a gunshot.

  I flatten myself on the ground behind the rock.

  “No more hiding and seeking,” yelled Nagy. “Come out!”

  I spied around the protective muffin boulder and saw Nagy standing on the wall that I had just cleared moments ago. With his gun pointing in the air, my pursuer stared out in my general direction.

  “Can he see me?” I asked myself as I again hunkered down behind the rock. I could barely see him through the brush. Could he see me? I really didn’t want to find out.

  Then from out of nowhere, a second shot was fired. A puff of rock dust sprang from the wall mere inches below where Nagy was standing. The obnoxious fellow hurriedly dropped out of sight with his companion behind the stone barrier.

  “Baldewin,” yelled Nagy from behind the stones, “did those fools give you your gun back with the bullets?”

  “No. I had more bullets in my car,” answered Firmino from somewhere further up the hill.

  “Very good thinking.”

  “I thought so,” affirmed Firmino from his hidden location.

  “Why don’t you and Mr. MacKenzie come down and talk? You both can get something for your cooperation. No one needs to get hurt, and everyone can be a few euros wealthier.”

  “If no one needs to get hurt, then why did you . . . booby-trapped my mobile?”

  “Fordor and I did not booby-trap your mobile.”

  “No? Then who did?”

  “The same fools that gave you back your gun . . . Mr. Luger’s associates.”

  During the banter between the foreigners, I took the opportunity to continue my uphill climb. Seconds seemed like hours; inches felt like yards, and all the time, my heart beat like a drum. There were moments when I thought its pounding would give my position away. Half in panic and with my blood pressure up—no doubt soaring to a new personal high—I reached the second wall. Luck must have shadowed me because I arrived at a two-foot-long breach in the old structure hidden by a patch of tall leafy weeds. Crawling behind overgrowth and passing through the wall where several large stones had been dislodged, I found cover and Firmino.

  “So MacKenzie, you got here, okay? No?”

  “I’m okay,” I answered, catching my breath.

  As I sat on the ground leaning against a tree, I felt again something poking me in the back along my waistline. I reached around and felt something hard, like a small pack of cards in my jacket. “What in God’s name is that?” I muttered in frustration.

  “What are you talking about?”

  My annoyance set me off to find the source of my discomfort. In my contortions to removed my coat and jacket and to stay within the cover of the stone wall, I muttered the mantra, “I’m not taking it anymore. I am sick of this. I am not taking this anymore.”

  “Why are you getting undressed?” asked Firmino, looking very concerned, as he kept watch.

  “There is something in my sports jacket that has been jabbing me in the back since we left Holland’s place.”

  “A booby-trap?” asked my companion with wide-open
eyes.

  “Can’t be,” I said with certainty, “I didn’t take it off. No one had the chance to plant a device that big on me without me noticing.”

  With my jacket off, I spread it open on the ground with the lining facing up. It was easy to see a small rectangular shape bulging up from beneath the shiny material. I wasted no time ripping the cloth at the bottom seam to discover the source of my annoyance.

  “It’s my phone!”

  “Be careful. It may have gas,” warned Firmino.

  “I think if it were messed with, our friends would have set it off already.” I quickly examined the inside breast pocket of my jacket. “The hole! The darn thing slipped through the ripped opening in the pocket and traveled down the lining.”

  “It is not a bomb or a GPS tracker?”

  “It is just my phone,” I said, flashing the device so Firmino could see it.

  “You are right. No booby trap in that old thing.”

  Without hesitation, I flipped opened the phone and turned it on. I had mixed results. I had reception but little power. I quickly scrolled through my contact list and called . . .

  “Kyle!”

  “You on a cell phone?” answered my brother, sounding as if he was munching on something chewy.

  “Kyle, I need help.”

  “Ayuh, you certainly need help from someone. The luncheon is just about over, and Morgana is gunning for you.”

  “She’s not the only one. I am with Baldewin. We are being chased and shot at—”

  “You haven’t gone over to the Mapledale’s again, have you?”

  “No! Please shut up and listen. Baldewin and I are somewhere not far from Chester Holland’s place, at a place called Pohl’s Farm or something or other. Our car got stuck in the mud. We’re on a hill—”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Trying not to get shot! Just listen. There are two guys chasing us—”

  Firmino jostled my shoulder and pointed to the northwest sky.

  “What?” I barked at the interruption. “I don’t have much power.”

  “Luger’s helicopter,” Firmino replied.

  Sure enough, the copter in Holland’s backyard was hovering and then approaching us at a slow, steady pace.

  “Kyle, now a helicopter is after us.”