by Meg Gardiner
“Okay. But if you need me, you holler.”
“Thanks, Lucky.”
She put on her turn signal and pulled out, headed for the police station. Your description would go out to all law enforcement agencies.
Great: a BOLO to the Los Angeles County Sheriff and the California Highway Patrol. And of course to the Ransom River Police Department. The same outfits that would have been informed about the Geronimo Armored delivery could now hunt her down instead, and make her the delivery, trussed and bound. She drove, her hair swirling in the wind.
Oh God.
“No,” she said, so loudly that Chiba raised his head and gave her an inquisitive look.
Who had tipped off the gang before the robbery? An inside man. Somebody from the Ransom River Police Department.
She tried to rid her mind of the thought that had just overcome her. She tried to think it through, telling herself she was imagining things. But as the miles unspooled, the road seemed to carry her along to an appalling conclusion.
“No,” she said again.
When her phone rang, she grabbed it hoping to hear Seth’s voice.
“Ms. Mackenzie, it’s Detective Xavier.”
Good cop, bad cop. Tag, you’re it. It never ended.
She said, “I’m on my way to the station. If Detective Zelinski wants me there any faster, I’ll have to break the sound barrier.” She wrung her hands on the wheel. “And I’m bringing my dog.”
Xavier paused, maybe startled. “Forget Zelinski. Get to your place right away.”
“Why—”
“Don’t worry about Zelinski right now. There’s been a break-in at your house. Somebody tried to start a fire.”
“What?”
“We got a call that there’s a fire at your residence.” She rattled off the address. “And there’s a woman in distress on the front porch. It sounds like your mother.”
“Oh my God.”
“I’m on my way there now,” Xavier said.
She accelerated. “Fire department? Paramedics?”
“Backup will be coming. Get home ASAP.”
Twenty minutes later Rory rounded the bend toward the end of her street. It was a workday, a school day, and the street was empty. She hadn’t been able to reach her parents. She saw no hulking black SUVs, no police cruisers.
No fire.
No sign of her mother.
Detective Xavier’s unmarked Chrysler was parked at the curb outside the house. Rory pulled up behind it and cut the engine.
“Chiba, boy,” she said, “I’ll be right back.”
She got out and stood for a moment, listening. For what, she wasn’t sure. The street was eerily quiet.
“Detective Xavier?” she called.
From a distance, a woman called back: “Here. Coming.”
A second later Xavier rounded the corner of the house. She had a phone in her hand and was shaking her head.
“Everything’s quiet. No signs of a break-in or fire,” she said. “False alarm.”
Rory leaned against her car and rubbed her eyes, trying to calm down. Xavier’s lips were pursed.
“Call went through the department switchboard. Caller asked particularly for me. Gave the address. Hinted that it had something to do with you, like they knew you live here.”
Rory looked at the house. “You walked around?”
“All the way. No sign of anything wrong.”
“Somebody’s yanking both our chains.”
“You got any idea who?” Xavier said.
Chiba barked and looked at Xavier with delight.
Rory said, “The call came to the police department switchboard—the caller never identified themselves?”
“Woman. Said her name was Candy Graves. I just got off the line with the department. Nobody in the phone book by that name.” She put the phone in her jacket pocket. “Want to tell me what kind of game somebody’s playing? ’Cause I don’t like being made a pawn.”
An old game, Rory thought. With new rules. She debated and decided in favor of disclosure.
“It could be my cousin Nerissa.”
“Cousin.” Xavier looked nonplussed. “This is a family feud?”
Rory nearly barked, louder than Chiba, with disgusted laughter. “I think she and her brother Boone also took my dog yesterday and let him out on the freeway off-ramp at Cloud Canyon Road.”
A veil fell over Xavier’s expression. She looked fatigued. Like a cop’s lot was full of this bullshit, winter, spring, and summer.
She nodded at the house. “When I did my walk-around, the phone kept ringing. Off the hook. I heard the answering machine pick up and a woman’s voice leave a message. She sounded distraught.”
“Who? Did you hear her name?” And was it for real, or another game?
“Didn’t hear a name. After the message ended, the phone started ringing again right away, like maybe you’d come home in the preceding seven seconds. Somebody wants to talk to you awfully bad.”
Rory glanced anxiously at the house. “Will you wait while I check it out?”
“I have work to do. Real crimes to investigate. Possibly involving you.” She turned. “And you need to get down to the station. But if you can listen to the message before I put my car in gear, I’ll still be here.”
Xavier turned and walked, albeit slowly, to her car. Rory jogged to the porch, keys jangling, and unlocked the door.
She walked in and found Boone waiting inside.
46
Rory stopped, shocked still.
“Cuz,” Boone said. “You aren’t much of a hostess.”
From the hallway, three men in black suits stepped into view.
“We got no coffee, no nothing,” Boone said.
Three men, all wearing dark glasses, black suits with pressed white shirts, two with skinny black ties—the carnivorous worms. One wearing a broad and garish purple paisley tie, swarming with shapes, nearly leaping from his chest like crimped heartbeats.
It was Grigor Mirkovic.
She spun to flee back through the door. Outside at the curb, Detective Xavier climbed into her unmarked car. The first suit, the night crawler of a man who’d followed her the previous morning, blocked her path.
She lunged and cried, “Detective—”
He grabbed her around the waist as though she weighed no more than a sack of laundry and pulled her back.
“Xavier,” Rory shouted.
The detective hesitated.
“Help!” Rory yelled.
For a second Xavier didn’t move. She didn’t look toward the house. She sat with the door open, hand on the windowsill.
Rory screamed, “Help me!”
Xavier closed the car door and started the engine. She put the unmarked car in gear and calmly drove away. She took Rory’s breath with her.
Xavier had heard her. She hadn’t waited. She’d driven off and left Rory here with these men.
Xavier knew. She knew Boone and Mirkovic and his men were in the house. She had lured Rory into a trap.
Rory shouted and kicked and grabbed for the doorframe, trying to pull away from the Nightcrawler.
He swung her into the air and silently shut the door.
With a grunt he set her down. Rory turned again to bolt. The second suit approached her from the front and the Nightcrawler clamped her arms from behind.
She fought. “Let go.”
The sound of Xavier’s engine faded to nothing. Rory’s chest heaved and her mouth went dry with disbelief.
The suits closed around her, a cage of human meat, and nudged her toward the living room. She looked toward the kitchen, hoping against ridiculous hope that the door was open and maybe a freak lightning storm would strike these guys and fry them where they stood. Boone loitered there, leaning against the wall. A hot light burned in his eyes.
The men dragged her past the answering machine and the cup of pens and a letter opener that might have let her grab something sharp. She looked at the phone and the Nightcrawl
er grunted, “Don’t bother; we cut the wires.” She tried to dig her heels into the floor but the Nightcrawler hoisted her off the ground. They slogged her into the living room and set her down before Mirkovic. He sat on a lounge chair, reclining, his legs crossed, his hands resting on the arms of the seat like a medieval liege being presented with a disobedient peasant.
“What are you doing here?” Rory said.
The Nightcrawler held her arms tight, bent back.
Up close, Mirkovic’s face was heavily lined, with the rough skin of a heavy smoker. His eyes were hard and watery. They looked like teary gray marbles. His hands, resting on the arms of the chair, were thick, scarred, as though he’d cut them punching the shit out of men with steel teeth. The ring on his pinkie, for all she knew, may have come from a heavyweight champ he brained with a crowbar.
He looked implacable and ready to uncoil like a whip. “It’s time to have a serious talk.”
“What do you want?” she said.
“Justice.”
His voice was accented, and he seemed uninterested in pronouncing words in a familiar way. It was up to others to understand him.
“And to deliver punishment,” he said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
She saw no flicker of interest on his face.
“I know you,” Mirkovic said. “Aurora Faith Mackenzie, juror number seven.”
Don’t lose it. But a sound like a loud dial tone took up all the space in her head.
Mirkovic said, “You sat in the jury box staring at the defendants. You looked so enamored of them.”
Get it together. Get it all the way to hell together. “No.”
“And I saw you looking at me.” His gray marble eyes were flat. “In the court, you look at me like I am an insect. A bug that smells bad, and you wish should be removed from polite society. Not like now. Now you are showing me respect. This is better.”
She tried to breathe. She tried to stand straight. If she hadn’t been so afraid of peeing her pants, she would have spit in his face.
“Your job disappeared. I know this. I see all the research for voir dire. Yes. This surprises you?” He remained so still that it was like being spoken to by a mummy. “Before the charity went broke, you were aid worker. I know this too.”
The Nightcrawler said, “Huh. Overseas? Like, the Peace Corps?”
“Exactly like,” she said.
Mirkovic eyed his goon. The Nightcrawler shut up.
Mirkovic said, “Aid workers, I know them. They come to Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, all of former Yugoslavia. Like lice. Infesting the countries. We saw the UN vehicles and your pious pity for towns that should have accepted defeat.”
He held up one hand, index and middle finger extended. Suit Two took a gold cigarette case from his jacket, placed an unfiltered cigarette in Mirkovic’s waiting fingers, and lit it with a silver lighter. The room filled with gray and acrid smoke.
Mirkovic took a drag, squinting. “This disgust, it is one reason I come to United States. To escape the hate of you aid workers. I come to America, nobody cares. I am European immigrant, hard worker, a self-made man. I don’t have to put up with aid workers looking down their noses and talking shit about my country. America likes my bootstraps and my can-do spirit.”
The smoke trailed up from his cigarette and fractured into drifts. “And then they put you on the jury. To judge the killers of my son.”
It wasn’t a conversation but a lecture. The suits stood like fence posts, listening attentively. But she figured they’d soon get to the inquisition.
“They put you, this woman who hates self-reliance, on the jury. They put you, this person who cannot accept how power works, to judge the beasts who shot my son. What do you know about vengeance?”
The ash grew long on his cigarette. “You would see my boy as a thug, and judge the police officers helpless? Or you would knead your hands like a granny and worry that these police will feel frightened in prison with street scum, and give them a slap on the wrist?”
Slowly, he raised the cigarette to his lips and took another drag. He exhaled through his nose.
“Is a joke,” he said.
Like a zipper slowly coming undone, she understood it wasn’t about her deliberative skills as a juror. He didn’t think she was in on the courthouse plot.
He knew she wasn’t.
He eyed her with the dead bright eyes of a shark. The smoke hazed the air around him like a nimbus.
She knew all the rumors about Grigor Mirkovic. His businesses involved not only nightclubs but construction—concrete and rebar, particularly. Perfect covers for burying people he had killed in cement. But his off-the-books businesses were hijacking, theft, drugs, prostitution, gun running. There were rumors of human trafficking from Mexico. The royal flush of organized-crime poker hands.
“You hired the gunmen to attack the courthouse,” she said.
She didn’t think it mattered if she confronted him. He wasn’t here to let her buy her way out of the situation. He didn’t care if she knew, not at this point. He was the one Boone and Riss had made a deal with. He wasn’t going to let her go free.
Mirkovic tapped ash onto the wood floor. “You are not so stupid after all.”
“Why did you do it?”
Now, at last, he smiled. It was the empty and chilling smile of a great white showing its teeth.
“Delay will not become rescue,” he said.
The zipping sound intensified in Rory’s head.
The smile stayed on Mirkovic’s face, humorless and bright. His new American teeth were large and very white.
“Share the joke, then,” she said. “Give me that much.”
Behind her, the Nightcrawler smirked. She wondered if she’d just earned some twisted kind of respect, for not peeing on his shoes. Boone lurked at the back of the room, saying nothing, but his hands clenched and unclenched, and he bounced on his toes, like a boxer dancing around the ring.
Mirkovic said, “It was the only way to capture you without anybody getting wise that you were actual target.” He shrugged, as though it made perfect sense. “You would look like a random victim.”
“And Judge Wieland?” she said.
“Quick and clean, get you and the others from the courtroom—it has been done before many times, in places where you and your aid worker friends like to sit in Internet cafés with your cappuccinos, flirting and pretending you are tough.”
Rory had a weird and awful feeling: the sensation that the ties that bound her to life had just been cut with a sharp and shiny knife. That she had spun around the sun almost thirty times and learned to speak some Thai and swum in near-Arctic seas, she’d nestled in her mother’s arms and made her parents smile, and she’d taught girls to read. That she’d loved the best friend she had ever had, shared his heart, and at least held the flash of a life they created together.
She felt herself giving it up. Not flying apart, but letting the cord spin free, letting everything spill out.
Maybe this was the final cut in the rope. Maybe there was nothing beyond the horizon. She had nothing left to fight for. And at least she’d come home.
She felt a weightless and sun-bright terror that seemed to throb through the air in the room. But she wasn’t going to beg. Whatever happened, she was free.
Fall seven times, stand up eight.
If they were going to take her, it wouldn’t be on her knees.
“You hired Sylvester Church and Kevin Berrigan,” she said.
The suits straightened. Yeah. They had no clue that she knew the gunmen’s identities.
Mirkovic continued to smoke.
“You’re after the money from the Geronimo Armored car heist. You think I can help you recover it,” she said. “You think you can dangle me from the end of a hook and force my uncle to turn it over to you.”
Mirkovic stared at her through the haze of cigarette smoke. “Who told you this?”
“Nobody. I figured it out myself. But I am not
the only person who knows. Not by half.”
“Okay. So you tell all your friends this on Facebook. So what? Nobody believe you. Nobody know I am sitting here enjoying your hospitality.” He flicked the cigarette carelessly to the floor. “Now shut up.”
Suit Two stuck out a toe and ground out the cigarette on the wood.
Mirkovic said, “Where is the money?”
“I don’t know.”
He raised his index finger. Behind Rory, the Nightcrawler took hold of her hand and twisted.
She gasped at the pain. “I don’t know.”
“You know. All your life.”
She shook her head. The Nightcrawler twisted her hand harder. She bent, trying to curl away from it, but he held her fast. Her mouth opened with the ache.
Mirkovic’s expression didn’t change. “Where is your uncle Lee?”
“Mexico,” she hacked. “Last I heard from him.”
“Where in Mexico?”
“Beach. Yucatán.”
“Jokes not funny,” he said.
“I haven’t heard from him in years. I don’t know how to contact him.”
“It’s okay. Somebody will.”
The pain in her hand was spiking like nails. “Nobody knows where Lee is. Nobody’s heard from him in twenty years.”
“You think I am greedy? You are the one who won’t tell me where the money is even to save your life. That is so greedy it is foolish,” he said.
She leaned forward as far as possible to ease the near-breaking pain in her arm. “I don’t know.”
She wasn’t one to pray. But right then, she practically begged any deities to make her forget. Erase the knowledge that her father could pinpoint exactly where the cash lay buried. Cut it from her mind. Because the pain the Nightcrawler was inflicting was sharp but transient. She was already frightened. If he took up tongs, or got the disposable lighter from her pocket, she didn’t know what she’d say. Forget. Forget.
He said, “Of course you know. You left your palm print.”
She twisted her head to see him. “What palm print?”
“Must we do this?” he said.
“What palm print?” But her hand had begun to sting, and not from the Nightcrawler’s grip. From a memory. Then. That night.
