Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

I’d made up the name Natasha. She sounded like the kind of woman Jim would get involved with and then want chased off. It was believable fiction because it had happened before.

  “It’s all right,” Rosemary said. “I won’t say a thing. He’ll be home at eight.”

  “The condo?”

  “No—he’s working from home tomorrow.”

  “He’s going to Skyline?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Thanks, Rosie.”

  “Don’t mention it—and I won’t mention anything either.”

  We hung up, and Elijah drove another ten miles while I thought about what to do. Then I picked up the phone and called Olivia Gravesend. The butler gave me his usual icy barrier and then handed me off to Olivia.

  “Mr. Crowe?”

  “I’ve got a good lead now,” I said. “So I wondered if I could borrow Mr. Richards tonight.”

  “You were just talking to him.”

  “I thought maybe if you told him, it’d go better.”

  “You want me to tell him to do what?”

  “Get a car—a big one—and meet me at half past seven.”

  “Where?”

  “The Saratoga Gap trailhead, off Skyline Drive. And before he gets there, he should line the trunk with a plastic sheet.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ll have him home by ten.”

  “At which point I’ll get answers?”

  “I’m hoping we all will.”

  “All right, Crowe,” she said. “I’ll send him.”

  Skyline Boulevard followed the peninsula’s wooded spine, miles of curves and hairpin turns, with chances to pull out and look down at the towns below. San Mateo, Menlo Park, and Palo Alto—the sorts of places that had no use for someone like me until things went wrong. Then I was welcome, as long as I remembered to park down the street and ring the bell at the service entrance.

  At the intersection with Highway 9, where that road crossed the mountains on its roundabout route from San Jose to Santa Cruz, there was an open space preserve, a trailhead, and a parking lot with room for twenty or thirty cars.

  “Ten bucks that’s him,” Elijah said.

  He used his chin to point at a silver-gray Jaguar parked at the end of the lot. A white-haired man sat in the driver’s seat, both hands on the wheel.

  “That’s him,” I said. “Pull up alongside.”

  We got out of the van and into the back of the Jaguar, and then I explained what we were going to do. Mr. Richards listened to everything, nodding in all the right places. He didn’t ask any questions until I was done, and then he only had one.

  “Did James Gardner kill our Claire?”

  “No,” I said. “But he knows who did.”

  “That’s enough for me.”

  I looked at Elijah. He’d called work ten minutes ago, coughing hard into his fist while he explained he wasn’t coming. If the only question was the money, it would’ve been an easy choice. I’d offered him a couple of months’ pay for a few hours of work. But he also had to think about the consequences. Five thousand dollars for five hours of work was one thing. Throw in twenty-to-life for aggravated kidnapping and it was another consideration.

  “Same,” he said. “I’m cool.”

  “Then I’ll see you guys in about half an hour.”

  Mr. Richards pulled back his cuff-linked sleeve and looked at his watch.

  “At five after eight.”

  “On the dot,” Elijah said.

  “Or more or less. This isn’t a precision operation.”

  I got out of the car and opened the van’s sliding side door. I grabbed the black pillowcase that Elijah and I had filled with the supplies I’d need, then swung it over my shoulder, shut the door, and started walking.

  At first, the trail clung to the top of the ridgeline, but then it dropped down. I began by walking through damp, golden grass. Then I was passing beneath mossy oaks and short bay laurels. Ahead, the path descended still more, and grew darker. My new shoes, with their smooth leather soles, weren’t made for this kind of thing. Twice I slipped on slick patches of rock and went down hard. Maybe it wasn’t just the shoes. I still hadn’t regained my equilibrium after the Creekside.

  When I descended a little more, into the shadows of the taller trees, the highway noise disappeared, as though everything but the forest had vanished. There was the sound of the wind. From somewhere higher up, where the woods thinned out to allow a meadow, an unmated mockingbird was winding up to sing all night. I walked another mile listening to him.

  The trail had been leading down into a hollow. I reached the end of the little valley, where two ridges joined each other like the delicate curve between a pair of fingers. I stopped there and took Elijah’s phone from my pocket. I pulled up a satellite view and checked my position. I was in the right place. If I bushwhacked up the slope toward higher ground, in a quarter of a mile I would cross from state land to private property. Jim’s woods.

  I closed out of the map and called Mr. Richards. Elijah answered right away.

  “What’s it look like?” I asked.

  “Flying in now.”

  He was in the back of the van, guiding the drone and watching its camera feed on the small flatscreen displays.

  “The gate’s shut,” he said. “I’m going over the driveway now—looks like it ends in a turn circle.”

  “Any cars?”

  “None outside. There’s a garage.”

  That meant his cook and his housekeeper were off for the night. Jim’s secretary had told me that Jim planned to work from home tomorrow morning. Those two facts should have told me something, but I didn’t make the connection. Otherwise, I might have changed my plan, or called the whole thing off. I had a lump on my head the size of a baseball, and I was still jittery from whatever Juliette had given me. If I’d been playing chess against Death, I would have lost in three moves. My one advantage was that chess has rules and real life doesn’t. And anyway, I’ve always had a flexible attitude toward rules.

  “I’ll fly around the house and peek through the windows,” Elijah said.

  “Do that.”

  I shifted the pillowcase off my shoulder and began to climb, pulling myself up the steepest places by hanging on to tree trunks. I had to stop every fifty feet to catch my breath. I heard Elijah talking and brought the phone back to my ear.

  “I didn’t see anything—place is dark inside.”

  “Okay. I’m coming up. Be ready.”

  I hung up the phone and checked the time. Ten to eight. Jim hated being early as much as he despised being late, so I could count on his driver to deliver him to the house in ten minutes. I’d need to hurry if I wanted to be in place when he got there. I opened the pillowcase and dug through it until I found the black ski mask. I slipped that over my head, tugging until my eyes were lined up. Then I started up the hill again.

  29

  At three minutes to eight, the slope flattened out, and when I emerged from the trees, I was looking up at the concrete pylons that held the rear half of Jim’s house aloft. I went under the broad back deck, then came out along the side of the house and went toward the front. I looked up, checking the gray sky and the tree limbs. It took me a moment to find the drone. I’d never have noticed it if I hadn’t known it would be there. It was hovering a hundred feet up, behind a screen of younger redwoods.

  I went over to the same copse of trees, knelt in the soft red mulch that had built up beneath them, and opened the pillowcase again. Inside was a basic kidnapper’s toolkit. There was a high-voltage stun gun the size of an electric razor, capable of delivering a crippling jolt with the push of a button. Assuming that put Jim on the ground, I had duct tape. After my experience in Laytonville, I wasn’t planning on cutting corners. I’d brought enough tape to bind Jim like a mummy. Once the pillowcase was over his head and cinched around his neck, he’d be as easy to move as a suit‑case.

  I knew I had to do more than scare Jim. I didn’t have any other choice.
No cover story was going to get him into Olivia Gravesend’s car. If he came with me, he’d be bound, gagged, and riding in the trunk. That was a line I’d never crossed. I picked up the stun gun and held my thumb over the button. The anodes looked sharp enough to pierce clothing, delivering their charge directly into his musculature. The way I imagined it, I’d come up quietly behind him and press the thing into the back of his neck. He’d go down, and then I’d have his keys and the remote for his house alarm. I would own the situation.

  I was thinking through the angles and the approach when I saw lights wash over the driveway and heard the swish of tires over smooth pavement. I thought I was ready, but ten seconds later, when the black Range Rover stopped in the circular drive, everything changed.

  I watched Titus step out from the driver’s side and open the rear door. That was normal. That was what I expected to see. Then I watched a shapely bare leg step down, a high heel click onto the blacktop. I saw a knee, a pale thigh, and then the hem of a crimson dress. The woman stood up and stepped away from the door. She brushed her red hair off her right shoulder, then stepped back and waited as Jim came out through the same door and slipped his arm around her waist.

  I still had the stun gun in my hand, but my grip was failing. I hadn’t planned for this at all. Jim was supposed to step out alone, and his driver was supposed to clear out, leaving us alone. That was how it worked every time I’d visited Jim’s house. That was the scenario I’d prepared for. I wasn’t prepared to do to this woman the things I was ready to do to Jim. I wasn’t going to zap her with a couple hundred thousand volts and take the risk of whatever that might do to her heart. I wasn’t going to move in on her with my fists if the electricity didn’t do the job. So I froze. I knelt there in the grove of trees and watched Titus drive away, and watched Jim use the remote on his keychain to disarm the house. He used his key in the lock, led the woman into his house, and hit the door with his left foot.

  I watched it slam shut, and watched my window of opportunity vanish.

  I stood up and put the stun gun back into the pillowcase. Before I could start my creeping retreat toward the back of the house, I felt Elijah’s phone vibrating in my pocket. I pulled it out and answered it.

  “Damn,” Elijah said. “Who’s the lady?”

  “You saw that?”

  I looked up. The drone was still hovering directly overhead, nearly invisible now except for the small red light on its side.

  “Sure—but now what? You got a plan?”

  “Not really.”

  “He’s in there with a girl, right?” Elijah said. “Quiet night, all by themselves. So you need him to come out, alone.”

  “It’s not like I can go ring the doorbell.”

  If I did that, he’d see me on a closed-circuit camera, or through a peephole. He wouldn’t open the door for a masked man. If he saw my face, his reaction would be no better.

  “Hold tight,” Elijah said. “I got an idea. Just watch.”

  “Watch, and do what?”

  “Be ready.”

  Before I could answer, he killed the connection. I looked up. The drone hovered for another second, then whirred off toward the south. Elijah was calling it home. I shifted so that I could lean out. Lights were coming on in the house. Downstairs, outside. The upstairs was still dark. As far as I knew, Jim’s bedroom was on the second floor. That was the only level I hadn’t really seen. His study was in an all-glass cube on the third floor, and that was dark too. No surprise there. He had company. He’d be entertaining her downstairs before he—

  My thoughts stopped with a screech of rubber, a long blast from a car’s horn, and then a crash of bending metal.

  I whipped around. I could only see part of the driveway. As it rose up the hill toward Skyline, it curved out of sight. The sound had come from somewhere up there, in the invisible distance. Still, I knew what I’d heard.

  Elijah.

  I turned back to the house and watched Jim step through the front door. He closed it behind him and walked purposefully up the driveway. He’d taken off his jacket and tie. He was holding a semiautomatic pistol in his right hand, down near his hip. As he walked up, he passed within five feet of my hiding place. Close enough that I could smell the woman’s perfume as he went by.

  While I waited for him to get out of sight, I untied my shoes, slipped them off my feet, and put them in the pillowcase. Then I stood up, pillowcase in one hand, and stun gun in the other. I followed Jim up the driveway in the failing light. My socked feet were silent on the blacktop.

  I stopped where the driveway began to curve, and listened.

  “Dude crossed right over the centerline,” Elijah was saying. “I didn’t have no choice.”

  “You dumb shit—let me see your license.”

  “My license?”

  “Your driver’s license.”

  “C’mon, man—”

  I took another ten steps. Up ahead, there was the gate. It was ten feet high and made of cast-iron bars. Elijah had driven the van into its center so that it buckled inward. It must have been well built, though, because it hadn’t come open. Or he’d only hit it as hard as he needed to. Just enough to create a ruckus outside and set off an alarm in the house.

  “—​what’s my license got to do with it? The dude, he came over into my lane.”

  “You’re the one who hit my gate. You got any fucking idea how much that’s going to cost?”

  Jim was fifty feet away, standing with his back to me. I was in Elijah’s line of sight, but he didn’t acknowledge me. I kept walking. I imagined I was walking on water, each step so gentle that my weight wouldn’t break the surface tension.

  “I got two hundred bucks in my wallet,” Elijah said. “There’s a Viking stove in the back of the van.”

  “Not even close.”

  “It’s a good stove. You put it up for sale, you’d get four thousand. Easy.”

  Jim stepped to the side so he could see the van over Elijah’s much taller shoulder.

  “A-Star. That’s where you work?”

  “You don’t gotta get my boss into this, man. He’s not in this. This is just you and me.”

  “You want to keep your job?”

  “C’mon.”

  “You think you’re getting out of this? You haven’t got a clue, son.”

  “What’s that for?” Elijah asked, nodding toward Jim’s right hand. “I’m just a guy had an accident. Let’s kick it down a notch.”

  Jim looked down at the gun in his hand as though he’d forgotten it was there. He seemed to consider it for a moment, and must have decided it was an escalation this confrontation didn’t need. He tucked it into his waistband. I was ten feet away from him.

  “All right,” Jim said. “We kicked it down a notch. Now let’s see the license. The gate camera already got your plate. So what’ve you got to lose?”

  “Really? You’re not kidding?”

  “I’m dead serious.”

  Elijah took out his wallet. He began to slowly thumb through it. I was five feet away. Elijah handed Jim a card and took a step back from the gate.

  “This is a library card.”

  “It’s got my name.”

  “It’s got a name.”

  I was three feet away now.

  “Just do it,” Elijah said. “Go for it.”

  I shoved the stun gun into Jim’s back, hard enough to bury the anodes in the muscles next to his spine. At the same time, I pushed the button. There was a loud crack, like a fuse blowing. Jim stiffened. I hit the button again, and he tipped forward into the gate. I pulled the gun out of his waistband and slammed its butt between his shoulder blades, and he went down.

  “Damn,” Elijah said.

  Jim was on his side. I kicked him so that he was facedown, then straddled his waist, his hands pinned to the pavement under my knees. I put the gun into my own waistband, then took out the first roll of duct tape, pulled his hands together behind his back, and started binding them. Fifteen, twenty w
raps. Jim stirred and I punched the back of his head, which flattened his nose into the pavement.

  “Damn.”

  “You could help me.”

  “Gate’s closed.”

  “Fine.”

  I moved down and began taping Jim’s ankles. When I was done with that, I put the pillowcase over his head and taped it in place with a loose wrap around his neck. I patted down his pockets, found his keys, and took his wallet and phone. Then I stood up and looked around. On Elijah’s side of the gate, there was a code box and an intercom mounted on a low stone column so that a driver could reach it through a rolled-down window.

  “Check his keys,” Elijah said. “There’ll be a button on the alarm remote.”

  I found the right button, tapped it, and the gate began to swing open, coming toward me on its hinged arc. Elijah saw the problem and slipped through the widening crack, trotting toward me. I took Jim’s ankles and Elijah got his shoulders, and together we lifted him up and moved him back before the opening gate hit him.

  “We better load him up quick,” Elijah said. “Someone’s gonna drive past.”

  We started toward the van, Elijah carrying most of the weight.

  “We’ve still got the redhead to worry about,” I said. “It’ll screw everything up if she stays in the house.”

  “I got an idea about that.”

  “That makes one of us,” I said. “But it better not be anything like this.”

  We reached the van and Elijah shifted his half of Jim’s weight into one hand and used the other to slide the door open. We shoveled Jim into the cargo space and he began to let out a weak groan. Elijah slammed the door, and then it was quiet again.

  “C’mon,” he said. “You know me better than that. She’s gonna get a ride home in a fine car with a professional butler behind the wheel.”

  Which, in the end, is how it worked out. Thirty minutes after I headed south, driving an increasingly frantic Jim in the A-Star Appliance van, Mr. Richards rolled up to Jim’s front door, rang the doorbell, and told the redhead that Mr. Garland had been called away. An unexpected emergency. It had thus fallen on Mr. Richards, the backup chauffeur, to take the young lady wherever she wanted to go. Elijah watched all this from the trees, narrating it to me over the phone. When the butler and the redhead drove off, he stepped out of the woods, opened the front door with Jim’s keys, and had the house to himself. We were back in business.