The Final Twist

by Jeffery Deaver

  The second man too was treated.

  “We’ll drop them off at a hospital, take a picture of their licenses and tell them to get amnesia.”

  Shaw said, “She needs to be safe. Out of the area. Where can you go?”

  “My sister’s in Vegas.”

  Russell said, “We’ll get you on a plane. It has to happen now.”

  Adelle nodded.

  “I’ll drive you to SFO.” He nodded at her Impala. “Report it stolen to the rental company.”

  “But—”

  “Report it stolen.”

  “Okay.”

  The car would be cubed within the day and in a scrapyard by tomorrow.

  Russell asked, “You have things somewhere? A hotel?”

  “Motel Six. Near the airport.”

  Karin took a call, listened then disconnected. “Possible facial recognition hit on Blond from the alley. Came up at a joint OC task force in San Leandro. They’re cross-referencing. We should know soon.”

  The brothers shared a glance. If they could get his ID, that might be enough to crack the code of the Hunters Point gang, which would lead to finding out who the SP family was and stopping the hit.

  Shaw checked his motorcycle for damage—there was little.

  He said to Adelle, “You know you’ll meet somebody, you’ll have children. You’ll never forget Jamie. But you can move on. Not in a cult. In the real world. We’re diminished by things that happen to us in life. But we can find a separate happiness.”

  In his rewards business, Colter Shaw had on occasion had to counsel the grieving. Not all jobs ended happily.

  There was a salute that was used in the cult, an open palm touching the opposite shoulder. By reflex Adelle started to do this now. Then stopped herself and gave a small smile and hugged Shaw hard.

  60

  After stopping along the way to make a purchase, Shaw returned to Pacific Heights to pack up. The brothers could now return to Alvarez Street, as the safe house was indeed safe once again. Mary Dove and Dorie and her family would not be in danger any longer either. There’d be no point in targeting them, though out of prudence Shaw texted them to keep Plans A and B in place for the time being.

  Shaw brewed another cup of coffee, this one Guatemalan, and a fine brew it was, deriving from a grower that, in his opinion, had been sadly overlooked for years. He and the farmer knew each other. The man had suggested Shaw come to Central America, where abductions were common, and said, “You, Mr. Colter, can make a great deal of money, I would think, at rewards.”

  Shaw had explained that he was familiar with Latin American kidnappings. They occurred for two reasons. One was snatching corporate execs. The bad guys throw a CEO or general manager into the back of a van, submit a demand for a quarter million and release him or her when the money is dropped. The victim’s company and family never post a reward offer; they buy kidnap insurance and in ninety-five percent of those cases the victim is returned largely unharmed.

  The other reason people are kidnapped down there is because of politics or cartel business, in which case the vics are dead five minutes after they vanish and rescue is not an option.

  This put Shaw in mind of SP and his, or her, family once again.

  Confirmation from Hunters Point crew.

  6/26, 7:00 p.m. SP and family. All ↓

  Did SP have some connection with the voting tally? If so, the kill order might have been rescinded, now that the document was in Devereux’s possession. But Shaw and Russell couldn’t make that assumption. It seemed more likely that since the gangs in Hunters Point were involved, SP was targeted because they knew something about the Urban Improvement Plan. Maybe they had discovered the source of the opioids and other drugs being strewn around the city by BlackBridge and its subcontracting gangs.

  He was lifting the cup to his lips when a knocking on the door resounded.

  A man’s low, threatening voice shouted, “Police! Warrant. Open the door!”

  61

  Colter Shaw stood, leaning forward, with his hands against the yellow-painted living room wall of the residence, a pleasant shade. His feet were back and spread. His palms were in roughly the same spot that the Davis & Sons Rare Books frame had rested before it had been stolen. He was looking at the nail, eight inches away from his face, on which it had hung.

  “Don’t move,” the voice instructed. It belonged to a large Black SFPD officer, uniformed.

  “I won’t.”

  “Don’t turn around.”

  “I won’t.”

  Shaw knew the drill. He’d been arrested before. Detained too, which was arrest lite. He’d never been convicted, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be a first time.

  “I’m armed.” It was always a good idea to tell this to law enforcers when they were confronting or arresting/detaining you. In some jurisdictions it was required to so inform them.

  “Okay.”

  Police always said that. Every single cop who’d arrested or detained him had said “Okay” pretty frequently.

  He lifted Shaw’s untucked shirt and plucked the Glock 42 from the Blackhawk holster. The gun would be tiny in his hand. The man was massive.

  The cop wore a Glock 17, the full size, double-stack model, with seventeen rounds to play with. Nine-millimeter. Shaw’s was a .380, and had only six in the mag.

  It’s never the number of rounds you have; it’s where you put them.

  The gun, Shaw’s knife and the black velvet bag went on the coffee table.

  Another cop—a short man, Anglo, with similar close-cropped hair, though blond in his case—was going through Shaw’s wallet.

  “He’s got a conceal carry. California. Up to date.”

  “Okay.” The big cop, named Q. Barnes according to the tag, was the one in charge. He un-holstered his cuffs and stepped closer. Shaw knew this was coming.

  “I’m going to cuff you now for my safety and for yours.”

  More or less exactly what he’d told Earnest La Fleur in Sausalito.

  “Put your hands behind your back, please.”

  Polite.

  Shaw did and he felt the cuffs ratchet on. The man did a good job. They were tight enough so he couldn’t get free but there was no pain.

  “You’re not under arrest at this point.”

  Because I haven’t done anything that I can be arrested for. Shaw did not verbalize this, however. He said, “Okay.”

  The man turned Shaw around.

  That was when he saw her.

  Consuela Ramirez.

  The young woman was walking into the safe house suite with a policewoman, an intensely focused redhead, hair in a tight ponytail. Makeup-free, save for a little blue eye shadow. She was petite but stood perfectly erect, even with all the cop accessories she wore: gun, mags, Taser, cuffs, pepper spray. You needed to be in good shape to do public safety. The bulletproof plate alone had to weigh ten pounds.

  “Consuela,” said Shaw. “What is this?”

  She cocked her head with a faint frown. But she said nothing.

  “This is the man you told us about?”

  “Consuela . . .” Shaw repeated.

  “Yessir,” she said.

  “It’s okay, miss. Don’t worry. You’re okay. He’s not going to hurt you.”

  “Hurt you?” Shaw said, frowning. “What’s going on? What did she say?”

  “Ms. Ramirez filled out an affidavit saying that she saw you with a significant quantity of narcotics. She had a relative who overdosed and was doing her civic duty to get them off the street. Now, you can help yourself here by cooperating. And I’ll tell you, sir, it’ll go a long way if you do.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve never done drugs, let alone sold them.”

  “Cooperation?” Barnes reminded, steering back to his theme.

&n
bsp; “Of course. Sure.”

  Barnes’s face registered some relaxation. “So,” he said. “The drugs?”

  Shaw frowned broadly. “I don’t know anything about any drugs. I assume you’ve looked my name up in NCIC. Nothing there, right?” His eyes were fixed on the young woman’s, which were cast defiantly toward Shaw. She really was quite beautiful.

  Barnes asked, “How do you know each other?”

  Shaw beat her to whatever she was going to say, “I don’t really know her. We have a mutual friend.”

  To Shaw, he said, “Tell me about the drugs.”

  “There are no drugs.”

  “Ms. Ramirez tells a different story.” Barnes sighed, as if autonomically responding to what he’d heard a thousand times before. The officer returned to his favorite subject with: “You should be more cooperative than you’re being.”

  “Doesn’t get any more cooperative than this. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “All right.”

  A variation on “Okay.”

  Shaw shrugged. The cuffs jingled.

  Barnes asked Connie, “Where?”

  She pointed to the end table beside the couch, where she’d sat earlier. “The drawer.”

  Barnes jerked his head toward another patrolman, an underling, a short, uniformed cop with a shaved head and the complexion of mixed races. He fit the description of Roman, Tessy’s stalker former boyfriend. The man opened the drawer. “Got something.” After donning blue latex gloves, he removed the bag and set it on the table, near Shaw’s accessories.

  The woman’s look of vindication was smug.

  “About eight ounces, Quentin,” the woman officer said, eyeing the bag. “Way over felony.”

  Barnes sized up Shaw, assessing the offense not of drugs but of failure to cooperate. He nodded to the underling who’d discovered the bag. The officer removed a folding-blade knife and cut a small slit in the top of the bag. From one of the many pockets in his service vest he extracted a small bottle. He broke a liquid capsule inside and added a bit of the white powder. He shook it. There was no color change.

  “More,” Barnes said.

  The young officer added powder. It still didn’t turn blue or green or red, whatever it was supposed to.

  “What?” Connie whispered. Her expression registered a minor Richter number of concern.

  Shaw said, “It’s not drugs.”

  Barnes asked, “No? What is it?”

  “Chalk. I rock climb. This is just a misunderstanding. I appreciate her concern. Drugs are terrible.” He looked into her lovely eyes. “I see why you’d think that, of course, but I’d never have anything to do with narcotics.”

  Barnes took the knife and sniffed. He handed the blade back to the other officer. He looked from one to the other. “Whole room,” Barnes ordered. “Search it.”

  The others—four cops in total—began searching. They were good. Every place where a four-by-eight-by-two-inch pouch of cocaine could be hidden was examined.

  After the dining room came the kitchen then the two bedrooms, the living room. All of the closets, of which there were a fair number, and they were big ones. For a last-minute safe house, it really offered some nice features.

  Barnes was frustrated. He snapped, “Dog,” to the patrolman who’d searched Shaw’s wallet.

  A moment later the canine made his appearance with a young Latina handler. He was a lithe and focused Malinois, one of the four Belgian herding breeds, the others being the Tervuren, Laekenois and the Belgian sheepdog. The Malinois was smaller and wirier than the German shepherd and had largely taken over law enforcement duties from the latter around the country.

  The dog—whose name was Beau or Bo—zipped up and down the floor twitchily. Nose up, nose down, turning corners fast, sticking the lengthy muzzle into cushions and the gap between cabinets. Everywhere.

  But he never once sat. Sitting is the signal that police K9s learn to indicate that they’ve found what they were searching for: the drugs, the explosives, the body. They don’t point or bark and they never bring a treasure back to their handler in their eager and powerful jaws.

  They sit.

  But Beau or Bo didn’t.

  Barnes was no longer relaxed. And he definitely wasn’t happy.

  The handler gave the dog a dried meat treat. His confirmation that the suite was drug free was as much a win for the muscular animal as if he’d found a thousand pounds of smack.

  “Officer Barnes?” Shaw asked.

  The man continued to scan the residence, then finally looked toward Shaw. His massive, round face displayed no expression whatsoever. “Yes?”

  “In your experience how many people who have CCPs are involved in criminal activity?”

  To get a concealed carry permit you undergo an extensive background check. If a criminal past shows up, you’re disqualified. If you can legally carry a sidearm—especially in California, where the requirements are more rigorous than in any other state in the union—that means you’ve been vetted about as well as a civilian can be.

  Barnes looked at Connie. “Ms. Ramirez?”

  “I’m sorry. I saw the package. I just thought . . .”

  Barnes stepped away to make a radio call. This left Shaw and Connie in the living room, standing near each other. The woman officer with the taut hair was nearby, keeping an eye on them but she was out of earshot.

  Shaw whispered, “Here’s the deal, whoever you are. You come back here later. Alone. If you don’t, I give the cop the video of you planting the real drugs in the drawer when I was getting you that tissue. I saw you wipe it, so it may not have your fingerprints on it, but it still has your DNA. Roll you up for felony possession.”

  The tears had been real, but a little Tabasco on the fingertips does the same thing as true sorrow or method acting.

  “Do you understand?”

  Silence. Her lip trembled. A nod.

  Barnes and the others returned. The blond male cop took the cuffs off Shaw.

  “Chalk,” the big officer muttered. As the men and women in blue left, he added, “You should leave too, Ms. Ramirez.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was worried. All those drugs . . . I did it for the children.”

  Which, Shaw reflected, was rather a nice touch.

  62

  Shaw opted for an Altamont Beer Works IPA and drank long.

  Typically, he’d been cautious about the Maria Vasquez reward offer.

  From Teddy Bruin’s starting the conversation with “coincidence” to Mack McKenzie’s assessment—“probably legit”—he had remained wary. There were too many people in the San Francisco area—from a video gaming exec in Silicon Valley to BlackBridge—who were not pleased with his recent visits here.

  He was always skeptical of those posting rewards and he generally spent hours, sometimes days, researching the offerors. It was not unheard of, for example, for a murderer to post a reward for the “loved one” they themselves had dispatched, in a numb-headed attempt to appear blameless. Tessy’s disappearance, though, had happened fast. He was no less cautious than on any other job but he didn’t have the luxury of in-depth research. And, if her mother was telling the truth, she could have been in real danger from her abusive ex, Roman.

  Of course, the girl’s disappearance and the reward offer turned out to be one hundred percent genuine.

  The “dear friend,” though? He just didn’t quite trust that scenario. Why hadn’t Maria given him her name as someone whom Tessy might contact?

  So he’d simply ignored the keep-it-between-us plea and called Maria, asked her about Tessy’s godmother.

  Alarmed, Vasquez had said, “Dios mio! Did something happen in Guadalajara?”

  Answering his question.

  Then he’d inquired: Had anybody called and asked her about the reward? Yes, a woman had se
en the offer and called her and said that she too had a missing child, a son; did someone answer Maria’s ad?

  Yes, someone named Colter Shaw, Maria had explained to the woman. She had given her Shaw’s number and address. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . . I thought, maybe she has more money to pay you than I do.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “This person, is she a problem?”

  “I’ll handle it.” Shaw had told her, “It’s probably nothing, but I’d recommend you go stay someplace else for a few days.”

  “Yes, of course. Okay, we’ll leave now. And, Mr. Shaw, again, bless you!”

  Immediately after disconnecting, he’d called up the security camera recording and watched “Connie” planting the drugs. Using a plastic bag, to avoid transferring his fingerprints, he’d collected the coke and put it, and the necklace, in another bag and hid them some blocks away in a vacant lot. Then on the way back from Hunters Point, he’d stopped at a sporting goods store and bought a bag of hand chalk. He returned to the Pacific Heights safe house and awaited the law. He was sure officers would descend at some point. What he didn’t know was what the woman’s game was.

  Now, sipping more beer, he heard the buzzer.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me,” came the sullen voice through the intercom.

  When she arrived at the door upstairs, he checked her eye movement once more, hand on the gun.

  She was alone now too.

  He let her in and told her to stop. His voice was abrupt. “Hands.”

  “Come on,” she whined.

  “Up.”

  She grudgingly complied and he frisked her. She was clean. “Sit down.” Pointing to the couch.

  The woman complied. He pulled up a chair across from her.

  “Did you really think I wouldn’t call Maria?”

  “You said you wouldn’t.” As if he’d cheated at checkers.

  “Is this something you do? In addition to tricks? Planting drugs and getting people busted?”

  He suspected she was a call girl.

  She tried to look offended but it didn’t work, and that answered his question. Shaw was continually amused at how the guilty can look so indignant when they get caught.