The Second Hostage

by Jeffery Deaver

  Nine

  Near sunset, they were in Dobbins’s office: Shaw, Ruskin and the sheriff.

  Drinking Budweisers, all three of them. Shaw didn’t know the rules regarding alcohol on government property in Cimarron County. Maybe okay or maybe not. In any event, here they were.

  The sheriff’s conversation with Richard Quinn had been brief. Well, more of a monologue than a chat. To the effect: If anyone dies when your asshole crew shoots up the transport truck on the interstate, it’ll be like you pulled the trigger. And if any innocents get hurt, the best defense attorneys in the state aren’t going to save you from a lethal injection.

  But, provide the particulars and Dobbins would go to the DA and recommend a reduced and maybe witness protection after. Quinn had handed over the whole crew—including McNab.

  Shaw suspected that Sheriff Dobbins ginned up a whole lot of cooperation this way.

  The county deputies and state police intercepted a box truck filled with a hundred tidy packages of opioids and cocaine; the Texans inside, connected to a Chihuahua cartel, went down in the bust, not a shot fired. Quinn’s Brooklyn crew—the would-be hijackers—had indeed gotten spooked when he didn’t pick up the phone in the lake house. They’d fled just over the Missouri border, where they too were picked up.

  The sheriff pointed with a bottle. “Now, Shaw, ’fess up. How’dya figure it out?” The rich, grumpy sheriff apparently considered it a sign of affection to call you by your last name.

  “Ed told us himself.”

  A sip and a grunt. Meaning: explain.

  “You didn’t hear it, Sheriff. But Ed said there was a clue to his troubles. Used the word clue a couple of times. He said, ‘Happiness eludes land-working people.’ And after that was the phrase ‘me and my family.’”

  “No, I didn’t hear it then and I don’t get it now. So what?” One beer vanished. Another was opened.

  Ruskin laughed. “Sure. The first letters: H, happiness. Then E, then L, then P. Damn. ‘Help me and my family.’”

  “Jesus Lord. What is he, one of those sudoku players?”

  “That’s numbers, Sheriff.”

  “I know it’s goddamn numbers.” Now the bottle poked Ruskin’s way. “You missed that, boy.”

  “My first hostage taking, Sheriff. Wasn’t really thinking ’bout word games.”

  Shaw said, “I doubted there was any way it could be a coincidence, that phrase. But there were some other things too: three other tracks of vehicles in the parking area in the past day. The mud, you could see it. One was heavy, a van. And two sedans. Maybe nothing, just seemed curious to me. Why all the visitors, if they’d really been a couple of guys from New York?

  “Then, animals’d gotten into the trash. There was at least two days’ worth. But Lansing and McNab hadn’t used the boat. It was still covered. Why come to a lake house, pay for a boat to fish and not use it?”

  Ruskin said, “Bet they were going to use it, though. To dump the bodies of Ed and his family in the lake.”

  “My thinking,” Shaw said. “And then there was the question: If Ed’d really snapped, why would he drive seven miles to a house on the lake to ask for a banker? Why not go to his bank? And did you notice all those pauses when he was speaking? Quinn was coaching him about what to say to us. Nothing added up, so I figured I had to go inside and see what was what.”

  In his job as a reward seeker—in fact, in his life—he assessed decisions as his father, the survivalist, had taught him: assign percentage likelihood to each option, and always choose the most logical approach. In this case, he’d figured that it was, as he’d told Ruskin, a ninety percent probability that Ed was innocent. Of course, that left a potentially disastrous ten percent. Still, sometimes you just have to rappel down cliffs on dark windy nights.

  Just because.

  Sheriff gave a gruff laugh. “Hey, Shaw, you want a job here, you got one.”

  “Think I’ll pass.” A moment later: “But I do have a favor . . .”

  * * *

  • • •

  Ten minutes later, Shaw was in a small room off the main office of the Cimarron County Sheriff’s Department. He was sitting beside Peter Ruskin as the deputy was scrolling through videos. The images were the various angles from the traffic cam hovering over the five-way intersection where Shaw had lost the trail of Emma Cummings.

  “There,” Shaw said. “That’s her at the light. The orange Dodge.”

  “Damn. Girl drives a Charger, and I know that model. It’s got some horses under the bonnet.”

  Red went to green and Emma angled to the right onto Old Highway 47.

  “Anything Native American that way? Reservations?”

  “Matter of fact, yeah. A small reservation. Museum or two. Casino, of course. ’Bout fifteen miles up the highway.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Deputy.”

  Twenty minutes after that, Shaw was in the Winnebago, an aromatic bag of Ling Yu’s fried chicken on the passenger seat. He was driving along the route Emma had taken. Was she fifteen miles ahead or fifteen hundred?

  In Shaw’s pocket was the envelope that her mother wanted him to deliver. He was, naturally, curious what it contained. A letter of apology? A diatribe casting her from the family? And what was the small object inside?

  In the reward-seeking business, Shaw frequently told himself, stay at arm’s length. Someone made an offer and he pursued it. If he was successful, he moved on.

  Never get involved . . .

  A good rule.

  Occasionally, though, one to be ignored.

  He had a feeling this would be one of those jobs.

  There was nothing Colter Shaw could do to help Emma and her mother, though, if he didn’t find her.

  First things first.

  Keep reading for an exciting preview of Jeffery Deaver’s next novel, The Goodbye Man.

  Chapter 1

  2 p.m., June 11

  Seconds to decide.

  Swerve left? Swerve right?

  A steep drop into brush? Or a narrow shoulder that ends in a cliff wall?

  Left.

  Instinct.

  Colter Shaw spun the wheel of the rental Kia sedan hard, braking intermittently—he couldn’t afford a skid. The vehicle, which had been doing forty along this winding stretch in high mountains, plunged into foliage, narrowly missing a collision with the boulder that had tumbled down a steep hillside and rolled into the middle of road before him. Shaw thought the sound of a two-hundred-pound piece of rock rolling through brush and over gravel would be more dramatic; the transit was virtually silent.

  Left was the correct choice.

  Had he gone right, the car would have slammed into a granite outcropping hidden by tall, beige grass.

  Shaw, who spent much time assessing the percentage likelihood of harm when making professional decisions, nonetheless knew that sometimes you simply had to roll the dice and see what happened.

  No airbags, no injury. He was, however, trapped inside the Kia. To his left was sea of mahonia, otherwise known as Oregon grape, benign names both, belying the plant’s needle-sharp spikes that can handily penetrate shirt sleeves on their effortless way into skin. Not an option for an exit. The passenger side was better, blocked only by insubstantial cinquefoil, in cheerful June bloom, yellow, and a tangle of forsythia tendrils.

  Shaw shoved the right-side door open again and again, pushing back the viney plant. As he did this, he noted that the attacker’s timing had been good. Had the weapon fallen sooner, Shaw could easily have braked. Any later, he’d have been past it and still on his way.

  And a weapon it must have been.

  Washington State certainly was home to earthquakes and seismic activity of all sorts, but there’d been no recent shivering in the vicinity. And rocks that are this big usually stay put unless they’re leveraged off intentionally—in f
ront of, or onto, cars driven by men in pursuit of an armed, fleeing felon.

  After doffing his brown plaid sport coat, Shaw began to leverage himself through the gap between door and frame. He was in trim fit, as one who climbs mountainsides for recreation will be. Still, the opening was only fourteen or so inches, and he was caught. He would shove the door open, retreat, then shove once more. The gap slowly grew wider.

  He heard a rustling in the brush across the road. The man who’d tipped the rock into Shaw’s path was now scrabbling down the hillside and pressing through the dense growth toward Shaw, who struggled further to free himself. He saw a glint in the man’s hand. A pistol.

  The son of a survivalist and in a manner of speaking a survivalist himself, Shaw knew myriad ways of cheating death. On the other hand, he was a rock climber, a dirt bike fanatic, a man with a profession that set him against killers and escaped prisoners who’d stop at nothing to stay free. The smoke of death wafted everywhere around him constantly. But it wasn’t that finality that troubled him. In death, you had no reckoning. Far worse would be a catastrophic injury to the spine, to the eyes, the ears. Crippling, darkening the world, or muting it forever.

  In his youth, Shaw was called “the restless one” among his siblings. Now, having grown into a self-professed restless man, he knew that such incapacity would be pure hell.

  He continued to squeeze.

  Almost out.

  Come on, come on . . .

  Yes!

  No.

  Just as he was about to break free, his wallet, in the left rear pocket of his black jeans, caught.

  The attacker stopped, leaning through into the brush, and lifted the pistol. Shaw heard it cock. A revolver.

  And a big one. When it fired, the muzzle blast blew green leaves from branches.

  The bullet went wide, kicking up dust near Shaw.

  Another click.

  The man fired again.

  This bullet hit its mark.

  Chapter 2

  8 a.m., June 11, six hours earlier

  Shaw was piloting his thirty-foot Winnebago camper through the winding streets of Gig Harbor, Washington State.

  With about seven thousand inhabitants, the place was both charming and scuffed around the edges. It was, to be sure, a harbor, well protected, connected to Puget Sound via a narrow channel through which pleasure and fishing craft now glided. The Winnebago motored past working and long-abandoned factories that manufactured vessels and the countless parts and accessories with which ships were outfitted. To Colter Shaw, never a sailor, it seemed like you could spend every minute of every day maintaining, repairing, polishing and organizing a ship without ever going out to sea.

  A sign announced the Blessing of the Fleet in the middle of the harbor, the dates indicating that it had taken place earlier in the month.

  Pleasure craft now welcome too!

  Perhaps the industry was now less robust than in the past, and the organizers of the event wanted to beef up its image by letting lawyers and doctors and salesmen edge their cabin cruisers up to the circle of the commercial craft—if that geometry was the configuration for fleet blessing.

  Shaw, a professional reward seeker, was here on a job—the word he used to describe what he did. Cases were what law enforcement investigated and what prosecutors prosecuted. Although after years of pursuing any number of criminals Shaw might have made a fine detective, he wanted none of the regimen and regulation that went with a full-time job of that sort.

  He was free to take on, or reject, any job he wanted. He could choose to abandon the quest at any time.

  Freedom meant a lot to Colter Shaw.

  He was presently reflecting on the job. In the first page of the notebook he was devoting to the investigation, he’d written down the details that had been provided by one of his business managers:

  Location: Gig Harbor, Pierce County, Washington State.

  Reward offered for: Information leading to the arrest and conviction of two individuals:

  —Adam Harper, 27, resident of Tacoma

  —Erick Young, 20, resident of Gig Harbor

  Incident: There have been a series of hate crimes in the county, including graffiti of swastikas, the number 88 (Nazi symbol) and the number 666 (sign for the devil) painted on synagogues and a half-dozen churches, primarily those with largely black congregations. On June 7, Brethren Baptist Church of Gig Harbor was defaced and a cross burned in the front yard. Original news story was that the church itself was set on fire, but that was found to be inaccurate. A janitor and a lay preacher (William DuBois and Frederick Estes) were inside and ran out to see the two suspects. Either Harper or Young opened fire with a handgun, wounding both men. The preacher has been released from the hospital. The janitor remains in the intensive care unit of a local hospital. The perpetrators fled in a red Toyota pickup, registered to Adam Harper.

  Law enforcement agency running case: Pierce County Public Safety Office, liaising with U.S. Justice Department, which will investigate to determine if the incident is a federal hate crime.

  Offerors and amount of reward:

  —Reward one: $50,000, offered by Pierce County, underwritten by the Western Washington Ecumenical Council (with much of that sum donated by MicroEnterprises founder Ed Jasper).

  —Reward two: $900 offered by Erick Young’s parents and family.

  To be aware of: Dalton Crowe is actively pursuing the reward.

  This last bit of intelligence wasn’t good.

  Crowe was an unpleasant man in his forties. Former military, he opened a security business on the East Coast, though it wasn’t successful and he shut it down. His career now was freelance security consultant, mercenary and, from time to time, reward seeker. Shaw’s and Crowe’s paths had crossed several times, once or twice violently. They approached the profession differently. Crowe rarely went after missing persons; he sought only wanted criminals and escapees. If you shot a fugitive while using a legal weapon in self-defense, you still got the reward and could usually avoid jail. This was Crowe’s approach, the antithesis of Shaw’s.

  Shaw had not been sure he wanted to take the job. The other day, as he sat in a lawn chair in Silicon Valley, he had leaned toward pursuing another matter. That second mission was personal, and it involved his father and a secret from the past—a secret that had nearly gotten Shaw shot in the elbows and kneecaps by a hitman with the unlikely name of Ebbitt Droon.

  Risk of bodily harm—reasonable risk—didn’t deter Shaw, and he truly wanted to pursue his search for his father’s hidden treasure.

  He’d decided, however, that the capture of two apparent neo-Nazis, armed and willing to kill, took priority.

  GPS now directed him through the hilly, winding streets of Gig Harbor until he came to the address he sought, a pleasant single-story home, painted cheerful yellow, a stark contrast to the gray overcast. He glanced in the mirror and brushed smooth his short blond hair, which lay close to his head. It was mussed from a twenty-minute nap, his only rest on the ten-hour drive here from the San Francisco area.

  Slinging his computer bag over his shoulder, he climbed from the van and walked to the front door, rang the bell.

  Larry and Emma Young admitted him, and he followed the couple into the living room. He assessed their ages to be mid-forties. Erick’s father sported sparse gray-brown hair and wore beige slacks and a short-sleeved T-shirt, immaculately white. Emma wore a concealing A-line dress in lavender. She had put on fresh makeup for the visitor, Shaw sensed. Missing children disrupt much, and showers and personal details are often neglected. Not so here. Two pole lamps cast disks of homey light around the room, whose walls were papered with pink and russet flowers and whose floors were covered in dark green carpet, over which sat some Lowe’s or Home Depot Oriental rugs. A nice home. Modest. When he’d spoken to them on the phone about stopping by, th
e Youngs had suggested a café or restaurant. But Shaw had said he’d prefer to meet them in their home. They might have something of their son’s that could help him track the young man down, he’d said. This was true, though in his profession Shaw also liked to see where the offerors lived. This helped him assess the job. Had someone run away for safety? Was it possible an offeror had posted a reward for information leading to the discovery of a missing person they had killed? Peering inside homes gave Shaw a better idea of the players involved.

  A brown uniform jacket sat on a coat rack near the door. It was thick and stained with Larry stitched on the breast. Shaw guessed the man was a mechanic.

  “Sit down, sir,” Larry said.

  Shaw took a comfortable overstuffed armchair of bright red leather and the couple sat across from him. “Have you heard anything about Erick since we talked?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What’s the latest from the police?”

  Larry said, “He and that other man, Adam. They’re still around the area. The detective, he thinks they’re scraping together money, borrowing it, maybe stealing it—”

  “He wouldn’t,” said Emma Young.

  “What the police said,” Larry explained. “I’m just telling him what they said.”

  The mother swallowed. “He’s . . . never. I mean, I . . .” She began to cry—again. Her eyes had been dry but red and swollen when Shaw arrived.

  Shaw removed a notebook from his computer bag, as well as a Delta Titanio Galassia fountain pen, black with three orange rings toward the nib. Writing with the instrument was neither pretense nor luxury for Colter Shaw, who took voluminous notes during the course of his reward jobs. The pen meant less wear and tear on his writing hand. It also was simply a small pleasure to use.

  He now wrote the date and the names of the couple. He looked up and asked for details about their son’s life. In college and working part-time. On summer break, following the end of term. Lived at home.