Bennett 06 - Gone

by James Patterson

  The only high point, if you could call it that, was a fresh palm print in one of the upstairs bathrooms that matched the one we had in Perrine’s file. That proved, at least, that he had been in the house and was probably still in the country.

  There was some grumbling in both the bureau and the LAPD that someone in our task force might have tipped off Perrine, but I wasn’t buying it. It wasn’t so much that there couldn’t be a mouse in the house as it was that I knew Perrine was an extremely paranoid individual. There were a hundred different ways he could have learned about our siege on the house in enough time to sneak out via what Parker had come to refer to as the mansion’s “crazy man cave.” I preferred to call it the California billionaire sex chamber escape hatch myself, but I guess that was like the man we were searching for: neither here nor there.

  For all my griping about the LAPD, the entire task force had come together after the botched raid and redoubled its efforts. They were all, even Bassman, extremely dedicated, extremely professional cops. It wasn’t their fault that Perrine was such a slippery fish.

  On the third day after the fiasco, Parker was called off the hunt to do her FBI mandatory pistol qualification. With my partner out of commission for the day, I decided to take a much-needed break. I woke around seven and took a shower and got dressed and headed out on a self-guided day tour of LA.

  Our Santa Monica hotel was on Ocean Boulevard, right across the street from a park that had enormous palm trees. As I was standing there, staring out at the Pacific glistening between the palms, a Harley chopper pulled up at the light beside me. Riding it was a white-bearded, tuxedo-clad guy with a little white Benji-like dog panting happily in his lap. A moment later, a neon-teal lowrider with an elaborate Virgin Mary painted on the hood arrived behind it.

  How do you like that? I thought, watching the vehicles rumble off. One foot out the door, and I’d already spotted a random act of randomness under the sunny Cali sky.

  Following the recommendation of the guy at the hotel desk, I walked over a few blocks to the Third Street Promenade. It was a really neat pedestrian-only outdoor mall lined with shops and restaurants. After a block or two of window shopping, I stopped in this place called Barney’s Beanery.

  At first, I thought it was a coffee shop, until I spotted the large screens blaring a soccer game, license plates on the walls, and the line of car seats that were used as bar stools. It turned out the zany sports bar actually did have breakfast, though, so I sat and tore into a massive delicious Mexican breakfast of shredded beef and eggs and chili on flour tortillas.

  After breakfast, I walked back toward a Hertz I had spotted near the hotel and rented a car. Staying off the highways, I drove around aimlessly at first, then headed inland, east up Santa Monica Boulevard. When I got to Beverly Hills, I hooked a left and somehow found myself on a twisty road called Coldwater Canyon Drive. I took it north, marveling at all the cutting-edge architectural-glass houses up and down the slopes of the Hollywood Hills.

  I made a right after a while onto iconic Mulholland Drive, then another onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard. When I came to the intersection with Hollywood Boulevard, I found a garage and parked and walked around.

  I did the full tourist tour. I stopped at the TCL Chinese Theatre first and looked around, smiling down at Old Hollywood’s hand- and footprints. I found the Walk of Fame, and when I came to Elvis’s star, embedded in the cement, I laughed as I snapped a pic of it for Mary Catherine, who couldn’t get enough of the King. Then I bought some postcards for the kids and, for ten bucks, had my picture taken with a Jack Sparrow pirate look-alike who was walking around.

  I texted the pictures to Mary Catherine:

  Just me and Johnny on the set. We’re heading over to Tom’s later to do lunch and play some hoops. How’s your day going?

  She texted back:

  Not as good as yours, apparently, Mr. Movie Star. Don’t let all that fame go to your head. ☺

  I texted back, for some unknown reason,

  But you’ll always be my number-one fan, won’t you?

  Actually, I did know. I was missing home, as well as the great relationship Mary Catherine and I had had up until pretty recently.

  I knew I’d probably pushed it when she didn’t text back. Then my phone beeped as I was starting the car.

  ?

  was Mary Catherine’s reply.

  CHAPTER 59

  I DECIDED TO HEAD back to Santa Monica and Barney’s Beanery for lunch. In the midst of washing down a slice of white pizza with a pint of Guinness, I received an e-mail from Emily. It was some good news, for a change. Sort of.

  The FBI lab had finally isolated and identified the poisonous white substance found at the two Los Angeles crime scenes. Apparently, it was some kind of weaponized fentanyl, an incredibly powerful narcotic over a hundred times more potent than morphine. The Russian special forces had used a similar offshoot of the extremely toxic drug to gas some Chechen terrorists in a Moscow theater takeover in 2002, and the fentanyl ended up killing 117 people.

  It was chilling to think Perrine had access to such an incredibly sick and deadly weapon, but at least now we had another lead to follow.

  After that not-so-cheery note, I ordered another Guinness and found a booth in the back and decided to call home to see how everyone was doing.

  “Hola,” I heard Seamus say in a bad Spanish accent after the second ring.

  “Hola? You didn’t just say hola?” I said.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Seamus said. “Of course I said hola, Michael. It’s called tradecraft, ya know. The art of deception. Even an infirm old man like your grandfather needs to develop some when he’s running for his life. Hola is what you’ve reduced me to. Now, please tell me you’ve finally bagged the devil himself.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “How are you holding up? How are the kids?”

  “Oh, keeping me on my toes, as usual. They’re out there now, playing Wiffle ball with the new fella. What’s his name? Leo.”

  “Leo?” I said, baffled.

  “He’s the tall, nice-looking young fella. The marshal who works the night watch. He just showed up here about an hour ago with a Wiffle ball and a bat and some pizzas. Turns out he pitched in the Astros’ farm system, he did, until he tore something in his shoulder. He’s teaching the boys how to throw sliders. He’s a real wizard, like. I can see Mary Catherine laughing out there right now from the window. She’s having more fun than the kids, looks like.”

  I nodded. Aha. So that was what the question mark was all about.

  “That’s just grand,” I said.

  “’Tis,” Seamus agreed.

  “’Tisn’t, old man. I know your game,” I said. “You want me jealous so I hurry up and catch this guy already so we can all go home.”

  “Now that sounds like a plan, young Michael. Stick with that one,” Seamus said. “Gotta go now. They’re waving to me. It’s my turn to bat.”

  CHAPTER 60

  DODGER STADIUM

  DOWNTOWN LA

  RAYMOND BOWIE, ARMS FILLED with beers, had to open the glass door of the luxury suite with his butt in order to get out onto the patio.

  “That’s OK, guys. Really. I got it,” he said sarcastically to the three folks completely ignoring him as they leaned and cheered along the field-side railing.

  “Here, let me help you lighten the load, bro,” his best friend, Kenny Cargill, said, winking as he grabbed a brew for himself and his wife, Annie.

  “Hey, you’re welcome, jackass. Really, anytime,” Ray said, laughing.

  It had been a whopping twelve grand for Ray to rent out the Dodger Stadium luxury suite for opening day, but Kenny was leaving at the end of the month for a finance job on the East Coast. Kenny, Ray’s oldest and best friend, had introduced him to Denise, had helped him to turn his life around. It was the very least he could do.

  Ray’s wife, Denise, was sipping her Coke when they heard the crack. Down on the field. Dodger second baseman Mark Ellis took off a
s the frozen rope of a line drive he’d just hit skidded off the grass in right and headed for the corner. Ellis made the turn at first, then laid on the speed as the Giants’ right fielder scooped it.

  Oh, no! Ray thought. The right fielder couldn’t hit for shit, but he had a gun for an arm. It was as if the entire stadium, the entire City of Angels, was holding its breath as the ball lasered toward second.

  Ellis’s headfirst sprawl and the ball arrived simultaneously. Ray groaned as the second baseman’s tag swept toward Ellis’s outstretched left hand. But no! At the last instant, Ellis pulled his hand in. He sailed past the bag and, at the final moment, hooked it with the toe of his spike. The umpire spread his arms wide. Safe! No outs, game tied, 3–3 in the seventh, and now they had a runner in scoring position!

  The whooshing freight-train roar of the crowd rose and then rose again as the Giants manager walked out of the dugout, toward the mound. Lincecum, the Giants’ freak of an ace pitcher, was being taken out!

  Ray’s breath caught as the air crackled with the hair-raising energy of fifty thousand people going nuts all at once. Annie pulled the Dodger-blue bandanna she was wearing off her head and started whipping it around as the stadium DJ busted out the “Ya’ll ready for this?” anthem.

  “Yeah! Wooohahoooo!” Kenny screamed as he pounded Ray on the back.

  Ray, smiling and getting beer spilled on him, soaked it all in. The churning sea of Dodger blue and white, the checkerboard pattern in the outfield grass, his best friend on one side, his wife on the other.

  As the crowd continued to roar, Ray dried a palm on the leg of his shorts and reached under Denise’s vintage Piazza jersey and cupped her belly, where their child was growing inside her.

  At eight weeks, their son or daughter had fingers now. Wrists and ankles, facial features, tiny eyelids squeezed shut. Its brain and lungs and liver were starting to form. He’d read all about it in the stack of baby books they had bought after Denise had shown him the two blue lines.

  Dodgers versus Giants. Doesn’t get any better than this, Ray thought, feeling the warmth under his hand. Hell, life didn’t get better. Especially when you considered other alternatives.

  Up until a year ago, Ray had been heavily involved in the LA nightclub drug scene. He’d bounced at first, then started dealing. Then he’d made enough to buy a club. Then two more.

  High on ecstasy and coke, paranoid and soul broken, he had awakened one afternoon after five years of the fast lane and put a gun in his mouth. As he was sitting there, searching desperately for a reason to keep on going and coming up empty, he had glanced at his phone and seen that he had gotten a text the night before from his old buddy Kenny.

  Once extremely tight, they had lost touch in the decade since high school. Kenny’s father had died, the text explained, and Kenny asked if Ray would come back up north to their hometown of Carmel for the wake.

  Going up there had been the greatest, wisest thing Ray had ever done in his life. Kenny was a normal guy, worked at a bank, had a wife, a kid, a house, a grill, a lawn. His friend had somehow managed to be happy without any strippers, hookers, criminals, coke, or hefty bags of dirty money anywhere in sight.

  Hanging out for the weekend, Ray suddenly remembered that he, too, had once been a human being instead of a disgusting, self-absorbed, cruel, drug-pushing scumbag. When Kenny set him up with Denise, a teller at his bank who was the sweetest, most delicate, most innocent, most beautiful woman he’d ever met, that was all she wrote. He sold the clubs, his drug business. Got out, got clean, climbed right the hell out of hell.

  Ray had hardly done a religious thing in his whole life—quite the opposite, in fact. But at that moment, as the Giants reliever threw his warm-up pitches, Ray Bowie looked up above the terraces of happy people to where the last silver burn of the sodium lights touched the black of the sky.

  Thank you, he mouthed.

  For all of it, he prayed, as a knock came at the glass at his back.

  CHAPTER 61

  RAY TURNED. BEHIND THE patio door was a heavyset Hispanic guy with a necklace of access passes over his Dodger-blue stadium-staff polo shirt.

  “What’s up?” Denise said.

  “I don’t know,” Ray said. “You stay here. I’ll figure it out.”

  Ray pushed through the door. There were three other Hispanic stadium guys with the pudgy one. They were all staring at him funny. They were tense, Ray noticed. Like him, they were big, meaty guys, and they were watching him closely, like they were bouncers and Ray was going to give them trouble. Something was wrong.

  “What’s up?” Ray said, squinting at them.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir, but we were wondering if we could start clearing the buffet,” said the one who had knocked on the door.

  Ray stared at the guy in pissed-off shock. He’d paid twelve grand to have some privacy for himself and his friends, not to have his chops busted by busboys while Dodger history was being made out there on the diamond.

  “No,” Ray said testily. “Come back when—I don’t know, the game’s actually over. Give me a goddamn break.”

  That’s when the figure stepped out of the suite’s private bathroom.

  “Sorry, Ray,” the man said, “but giving you a break is the one thing we can no longer do.”

  Ray, looking at the man’s face, felt suddenly dizzy. Inside, at the center of himself, something slowly began to wobble like a coin spun on a tabletop.

  It was Perrine. Divine Mother of God, Ray thought. It was Manuel Perrine.

  Ray took a step back, raising his balled fists. One of the thugs pulled something out of the Dodger messenger bag he was holding. Ray saw oiled black metal. It was a Heckler and Koch submachine gun.

  Manuel Perrine stepped over to him and put an arm over his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt the festivities, but it’s been a while, my friend.” Manuel grinned widely. There was a dreamy quality to his smile, a dreamy quality to everything.

  “What the fuck is this?” Ray whispered.

  “Come with us, Ray,” Perrine said, lifting a hot wing from the buffet beside them. He sniffed it and tossed it back on the pile. “And we’ll talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax. Of cabbages and kings. Or we can take care of matters here, if you wish to involve your friends.”

  Ray swallowed.

  “No, no, Manuel. I’ll go with you. Whatever you want. Just let me say good-bye.”

  “Yes, of course,” Manuel said. “But no monkey business now.”

  Ray went back out onto the patio. He stared at the flashing scoreboard. The crowd. His wife.

  “What is it?” Denise said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Something about my credit card. I’ll be back in a second. I love you, OK?”

  He kissed her hard, his lips burning, his fingers tracing her belly, and then somehow peeled himself away.

  CHAPTER 62

  THEY LED HIM OUT and into another suite down the hallway, which had its privacy blinds pulled down. Inside the door, one of the thugs slammed his head off the concrete wall hard enough to split the skin and began frisking him.

  “Nothing,” the thug said.

  “That’s quite unfortunate for you to go about unarmed, Raymond,” Perrine said, sitting and swiveling around in a Dodger lounge chair. “Considering how vulnerable a man you are.”

  Ray stood there, blinking. He had met Perrine a few years back at one of his clubs. They quickly went into business and had become fast friends. He’d actually visited Perrine’s villa in Mexico. Manuel had been like a mentor to him, taught him how to move drugs, how to keep an eye on the cops.

  “I’m out of it, Manny,” Ray said. “I don’t know what you heard, but I’m out of it. The whole thing. I gave it to Roger.”

  “That’s precisely the problem,” Perrine said. “Roger is a DEA informant. What am I saying? That’s wrong. What I meant to say is, Roger was a DEA informant. Your recommendation of Roger lost me at least fi
fteen million, Raymond. In fact, during the seizure, my brother-in-law was popped. To add insult to injury, my brother-in-law was then killed about six months into his sentence by one of my rivals. My sister, still to this day, continues to make my life unpleasant.

  “Do you see my dilemma? You screwed me, Raymond, and the sad fact of the matter is that I have to unscrew myself. And, as you well know, there is only one way to do that.”

  “But I’m out of it.”

  Perrine peered at him.

  “Look around you, Raymond. You are very much in it. Such a shame. You were so good at it, too. The looks, the street smarts, the LA charm, truly a natural. Believe it or not, I had big plans for you. But that was then. Any last words?”

  Ray’s face slackened with an almost catatonic bewilderment. He was going to die now?! Just like that!?

  “I, uh. I, uh,” he said.

  “Hmmm. Strange choice. I, uh, what? I, uh, therefore I am?” Manuel asked.

  The thugs began giggling. A heavy blow to his kidney knocked him to his knees. There was a shriek, and then duct tape was smeared hard over his mouth and ears.

  Ray stared down at the carpet, half unconscious with terror. He was unresisting as his shoes, socks, shirt, shorts, and finally his underwear were stripped from his body.

  He had been adopted. That was why he’d been so excited about becoming a father. A lot of adopted people acted all forgiving about their biological parents, talked about how brave they were for abandoning their own flesh and blood, but not him. Once his kid was born, he’d been planning to show them. He was going to attach his kid to himself, hold the tiny, brand-new human in his arms and never ever let him go.

  Only now he never would.

  A hand grabbed his hair, pulled him up on his knees, yanked his head back, exposing his throat. Ray pinched his crying eyes shut as bright white camera light torched his face.