by Robert Ward
“Look just off to your left. Slowly, don't be obvious about it.”
Jack turned and looked across the green field to where he saw a brunette in her late thirties, wearing skin-tight Levi's and a form-fitting green sweater. And she had the body to fill it out. And those lips . . . even thirty feet away, Jack could see she had luscious, full lips. She smiled his way and he managed a half-smile back.
But then there was a nasty little surprise. A big, sandy-haired guy in his forties walked up behind her, took her hand, and they turned and walked away toward the parking lot.
“Well, there goes that fantasy, Jack said. "HE next time you find me a new Mrs. Harper please see if she's married first, okay, pal?”
Kevin laughed and shook his head.
“Well, she looked like she was alone, Dad, and you gotta admit she was staring at you with that lean, hungry look.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “But she's probably a team mom.”
“Not for our school,” Kevin said. “Must be for Brentwood.”
“She looked too fancy for me even if she was single,” Jack said.
“Not my type.”
Jack carried the lacrosse bag to the car and had just locked it in the trunk when his cell rung.
“Hello.”
“Jackie, thank God it's you.”
Michelle? What's up? It was his Michelle Wu, the most gorgeous and trickiest woman he'd ever met. Michelle specialized in hot cars. She worked with a gang who stole them, gave them to her to break down, and then resold the parts all over Mexico and Latin America.
Jack had busted her three years ago and recruited her as a snitch, but it had become a lot more complex during their last case. Michelle had risked her own life to save his.
Jack was uncomfortable being in her debt. And even more uncomfortable because he had feelings for her that were strictly taboo, given her line of work.
Now he tried to gauge the degree of panic in her voice. How much of it was real fear, and how much acting? Michelle Wu was a consummate actress and drama queen.
“I'm in Santa Fe, Jack. My sister Jennifer and I came here for a little holiday. We rode up to Taos to see the pueblo and got separated. Now she's gone. Someone has taken her.”
“You sure she didn't just wander off, Michelle?”
“No way. She would never do that.”
“You contacted the local cops?”
“Yes, of course. But they say they can't do anything for twenty-four hours. They gave me that ‘most people come back on their own’ bullshit.”
“But they do, Michelle.”
“Jackie, I would never ask you to do anything that interfered with your work, but please come out here. Please. I know this is bad.”
“How do you know that, Michelle?”
“I can't talk about that on the phone, Jack. I can't. I'm at the La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe.”
“Michelle, I'm sorry but I—”
“Jackie, are you going to make me say ‘you owe me'?”
“You don't have to say it,” Jack said. Jesus, he was already stressed out. His vacation had barely begun.
But it was true. He owed her.
“I gotta get some things together but I'll be there. By tomorrow, Michelle.”
“Thanks, Jackie. I wouldn't bother you but this is freaky, man. Please call me as soon as you make your reservations. You can always stay with me in my room, Jack.”
“No, thanks, Michelle. I'll get my own.”
“I knew you would say that, baby,” she said. “Thinks, Jack. This is really serious.”
Jack hung up the phone and looked across the parking lot at his son.
“Hey, Dad, you want to hang out and get some pizza at the farmer's market with the guys?”
“Not tonight, Jack said. Something's come up.”
Kevin's face flashed severe disappointment.
“Oh, man, he said. You gotta go? I thought you were on vacation.”
“I was. I mean I still am. This should only take a couple of days.”
Kevin shook his head.
“Yeah, right.”
“I have to call Grandpa. He'll come down and stay with you. You'll have fun together.”
Kevin sighed.
“I don't need Grandpa, Dad. I'm almost sixteen years old. I can stay by myself.”
“No way,” Jack said. “Hey, think of all that fried food he's going to make for you.”
Kevin made a “gag me with a spoon” face and his shoulders slumped as he got inside the car.
“Kev, I'm sorry. But this is someone I can't turn down.”
Kevin slammed the door and looked straight ahead.
Chapter Three
An hour later, Jack's father, Wade Harper, showed up in his battered 1965 Ford Mustang. Once dark green, the car badly needed a coat of paint. Gray primer showed through on both sides and the front bumper was cracked and about to fall off. The engine, however, was perfect, and Wade constantly claimed he was going to get the “old warhorse” cleaned up.
The joke between them, one repeated almost every time they saw each other, was that once the car was patched up, Wade would start showing it at Mustang shows, with all the other sixties guys who made a fetish out of the beloved model. Wade swore he would soon have the best-looking car at Bob's Big Boy's weekly classic car contest. But Jack knew better. If Wade actually fixed the car up and showed it at the old-car contest, that would be a tacit admission that he was sixty-four years old and that he had an “old guy” hobby. By not fixing the car up, he got to drive around like he was some kind of badass looking for girls and hot-rod races.
In short, Wade was having a lot of trouble admitting he was getting old, a lot closer to the end of the line than the beginning.
He lived in an apartment near the farmer's market and spent most of his retirement hanging out at EB's Wine Bar with a raffish assortment of roofers, welders, criminal lawyers, rockers, and wannabe actresses who enjoyed the camaraderie of beer, wine drinking, gossip, and occasional romances that flowered after a few too many drinks. Still good looking and fairly trim, Wade was dating a forty-eight-year-old ex-dancer named Billie Stone who taught elementary school at Carthay Circle. She was crazy about Wade, but he worried that she secretly thought he was too old for her. Whenever Jack asked him if was going to marry her, his father would say, “If I do she'll get all my money. I mean when we get divorced in two or three years. You know how that goes. Then what am I going to leave you and Kevin?”
You could get her to sign a prenup, Jack said. But his old man just sighed and shook his head.
“Any good attorney can find ways to break one of those. Nah, I'm finished with marriage. Been there, done that. I'm fine living alone. Can't stand women more than three times a week anyway.”
Jack laughed. Maybe being a fucked-up renegade ran in the family. Maybe the scientists were right. It was all in the genes and there was little you could do about any of it.
As Jack packed for his flight to Albuquerque, he went over the rules with his dad.
“I want Kevin in bed at ten. Not staying up all night listening to your stories.”
Wade took a sip of Wild Turkey and laughed at Jack.
“You don't trust me to take care of my grandson, then maybe you ought to hire a professional babysitter!”
From the bedroom, Kevin gave a horselaugh.
“Yeah, like I'm a baby. I'll be sixteen soon, Grandpa.”
“That's right,” Wade said. “You gotta let the boy become a man, Jackie.”
“All in due time, Dad,” Jack said. “Ten o'clock bedtime for you, Kev. I'm not kidding.”
“No problem,” Kevin said.
“Yeah,” Wade said, lighting a Marlboro. “And if he's five minutes behind schedule I'm going to go in there and spank his butt!”
There was a mocking laugh from the other room.
“Right,” Kevin yelled. “I'll kick your butt, Granddaddy!”
“Hey,” Wade said. “If you hit me and I hear about it, I'm gonna really be p
issed off.”
Jack laughed and shook his head. His dad had used the exact same lines on him when he was Kevin's age. It was comforting to hear the old saw, and Jack felt relieved that Kevin had laughed at the joke. Maybe he was feeling a little less furious at Jack for leaving.
He went into his son's bedroom and found him lying on his bed reading a manga called Death Note.
“Hey, Kev,” Jack said, sitting down next to him, “I'm sorry I have to go right now.”
It's that woman you talk about sometimes, Michelle Wu, isn't it? Kevin asked.
It is, Jack said.
“Why do you have to fly off to save her butt? Isn't she a criminal?”
“Yeah,” Jack said, “she is. But she also saved my life about two years ago.”
“You told me already,” Kevin said.
His tone was filled with doubt.
“It's true,” Jack said. “She really did. I owe her.”
Kevin put the book down and Jack took the opportunity to give him a hug.
“I'll get back as soon as I can, Kev, Jack said.”
“I know,” Kevin responded, “I just wish you had more time for me sometimes, Dad.”
“I'll make time, Kev. I promise,” he said.
But even as he spoke the words he felt as though they were a lie.
Chapter Four
Jennifer Wu felt as though she'd been hit over the head with a fifty-pound weight. Every inch of her skull was racked with a pulsating pain. Staved in by a ... what? A gun barrel? No, something bigger than that. A big iron pole of some kind? Maybe, but that would make a huge lump, and as she raised her left hand and felt around her head, there was no lump, on either temple or anywhere else.
So she was wrong. There wasn't any pole used on her.
But why the terrible pulsating headache? Like with a migraine, her skull seemed to expand and contract with every beat of her heart.
Maybe . . . maybe she'd been drugged.
She felt herself waking up a little more. She blinked her eyes and saw a deep blackness in front of her.
God, she wanted to scream, and nearly did, but then she thought about it for a second. No, she wouldn't scream for help. Because it was obvious that she'd been kidnapped, and whoever had taken her had probably used drugs.
She realized that she was in some kind of cell. What else could it be? (Even though she could see nothing at all in front of her.) She had free use of her arms and legs. She could move around, and she didn't seem to be beaten anywhere on her body. So whoever had taken her hadn't hurt her, except for her head.
But why then? Why had they grabbed her out of the Indian pueblo and brought her here?
It didn't make any sense at all.
It wasn't as though she was a rich person whom they could ransom for big money.
Unless they thought that her sister would pay for her. She wasn't sure if Michelle was all that rich. Nobody quite knew how much money her sister had.
But maybe whoever had snatched her had thought Michelle was rich and would pay a ransom for her return.
She sat up and blinked. Gradually, her eyes got used to the darkness. Now she could see she was on a bed, that there was a toilet in the corner with a shelf where things had been laid out for her. Toothpaste, a toothbrush. A washrag, soap, a towel.
Yes, and toilet paper. How thoughtful.
But over on the other side of the room . . . just as she had suspected . . . prison bars. She was in a cell, somewhere.
Jesus, now she could see a hallway. She got up, and on shaky feet walked over to the cell bars. There was a small blue light down there somewhere, like a night-light.
Again, such a thoughtful touch. She almost laughed.
Then she had another thought, a weirder one. If she was in a cell block, then there might be other prisoners in here as well.
Which meant. . . which meant what?
That some lunatics or—or terrorists, yes, it could be terrorists—had picked up a group of normal Americans and were holding them for ransom.
But what kind of terrorists? Certainly not al-Qaeda. Not in an Indian pueblo. No, the weird thing was that the most logical terrorists would be the Indians themselves. Did Indian nationalist groups do this kind of thing?
She had never heard of anything like that before.
It made no sense whatsoever. But there were fights over Indian casinos. Maybe it had something to do with that. Because there was a big casino, the River Rock Casino, just three miles away from Taos. She didn't think it was Indian-owned though . . . wasn't it partially owned by a consortium of business people who merely used the Indians as a front? She wasn't at all sure. Could this be some kind of crazy part of a war between the whites and the Indians?
But as soon as she thought of such a thing the notion seemed even more absurd.
Native Americans weren't into kidnapping people.
But who was? One thing for sure was that she'd never be able to figure this out by herself.
She was dying to yell down the hall and see if someone else was here. But there had to be guards. And if she called out they'd come running and maybe they'd beat her.
Yeah, maybe this time they really would split her brain open with a club.
There had to be some way to find out where she was, and who else was down here.
Jennifer crept over to the left side of the cell and whispered around the corner, “Is there anyone over there? Can you hear me?”
There was no answer.
Okay. It was night (she thought) and they were asleep.
She tried again, a little louder. “Anyone? Anyone there?”
She jumped as she heard a voice whisper back to her.
“Yeah, girlfriend. Who are you?”
A woman with some kind of an accent. What was it? New York? The Bronx maybe?
“My name is Jennifer,” she whispered. “Who are you?”
“Gerri. Gerri Maxwell. From the Bronx. Where you from?”
“I'm from Los Angeles. I'm just visiting here with my sister and we were touring the Indian pueblo in Taos, and somebody came up behind me and—”
“And shot you full of some kind of sleeping shit, and here you are.”
“Yes, I guess so. I don't remember how it happened. I have the worst headache.”
“Yeah, I know ‘bout that, too. It lasts maybe three, four hours, then it goes away.”
“But what the hell is going on?” Jennifer asked. “Why are we here?”
“I don't know. There was another person down here, too. Woman named Mary. But now she's gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean?”
“I mean that this guy came down today and said they were letting her out.”
“They did?”
“Yeah, that's right. They said she was getting sprung.”
“Did they say why she was getting out?”
“No. He just said it was time for her to go.”
Jennifer felt a cold chill up her back.
“Did he say exactly that?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what were the exact words the guy said?”
“Jesus, girl, how the fuck should I know? Does it matter?”
“Yes, it could. It could matter very much. Try to remember, won't you?”
“All right. . . The mother came in here . . . said, ‘It's your turn.’ Yeah, that was it, he said, ‘It's your turn, sweetheart.’”
“Oh, Jesus,” Jennifer said. “What did the guy look like?”
“Big guy, looks like a ... what. . . like one of them bugs. A praying mantis. Dressed all in leather. With a mask. Scary son of a bitch! Man's a fucking hyena. He likes to punch you in the . . . inna private parts, if you get my drift. Anyway, when they come to get Mary, she changed her mind. All of a sudden she dint want to get out no more. Put up one hell of a fight, hanging onto her jail bars. The son of a bitch had to kick her around a little to get her loose. Then they had to use the needle on her.”
Jennifer felt the chill c
oming again.
“The needle. Christ. Why, why do you think she had that kind of reaction?”
“Well, she told me she was real worried that wherever they took you next was going to be a lot worse than here.”
“Like what?” Jennifer asked.
“Like nothing. She didn't itemize it, baby. Just ‘worse.’ But that don't make no sense. Look, the way I see it, we were put in here like for ransom or something. You know? The mantis-baby even joked about it once to me. Last week.”
“How long have you been in here?”
“I don't know, you lose track of time. Maybe a week.”
“A week?” The thought made her want to cry. She could barely stand another minute, much less a week.
“Well, I don't know about you, but I ain't lived a perfect life, so maybe they're having a hard time finding anyone who would want to go my bail.”
Jennifer felt her knees weaken and her breath get short.
Hey, Jennifer. Yes?
“Don't worry. You seem like a nice girl. Somebody will pay to bail you out pretty soon. I'm sure of it.”
“Yeah, thanks, Gerri.”
“I'm going to sleep now,” Gerri said. “We can talk more tomorrow.”
“Yeah, good night, Gerri,” Jennifer said, scarcely believing her own voice. This couldn't be happening. Not to her.
Jesus, what was Michelle doing?
Was anyone looking for her?
And what would happen when that hyena, Mr. Mantis, came to take her away?
Chapter Five
In Albuquerque, Jack rented a Ford Mustang and headed up the interstate to Santa Fe. He'd never been there before but knew that Hollywood movie stars and wealthy Los Angelenos went there to chill out. Also, an actress he'd dated a couple of years ago had told him that the town was filled with New Agers. The kind of people who scurried to that posh burg in the Sangre de Cristo mountains to find some deeper meaning in their lives. His partner, Oscar Hidalgo, who had been out there before, laughed at them for buying crystals, getting themselves rubbed down with “ancient stones,” and taking two-day courses in meditation supposedly taught by some curandero, or witch doctor. Yeah, maybe old Oscar was right, but what Jack found funny was that Oscar actually believed in curanderos himself but only if they came from his town—Juarez. All of the other witch doctors were hustlers and cons.
