Ten-thirty. Fine. We’d be there.
We showered, separately and in silence, lovers again, eternal, but focused now on what was next. When Tom went into the bathroom, I moved the desk chair over to the air conditioner and eased the contraband phone out of my purse. My gut told me that there was no video, but I was taking as few chances as I could. I climbed up on the chair, as if I were trying to make the laboring box work better. I slapped the machine in pseudo-frustration and jiggled a knob as I pushed the speed dial number. Valerio answered on the second ring.
“It’s me. Can you hear me?”
“Yeah. Barely. What’s that noise?”
“Air conditioner. This room is bugged. We’re meeting the kidnapper at 2370 Salter Road, off 152nd, in Collinwood at ten-thirty.” I repeated the address and time, hung up, and said a prayer for my gut to be right about a couple of things. Then I turned the damned air conditioner off. The sound of it not being on was a beautiful thing. Tom liked it, too.
***
When we got into the car at ten, I expected to see Christine, but there was no sign of her. Maybe the bad guys were understaffed. They needed to cover the exchange—please, let it be an exchange—and be ready to blow town. I wanted to reassure Tom about Valerio, but if the car were bugged, that would be a fatal error.
I pulled through the rusted-out gate to the parking lot at 2370 Salter at 10:23. The place was a big warehouse facility that had been vacant and trashed for about twenty years. A huge red brick eyesore. The lot could have parked maybe fifty cars in its heyday. It stretched out around us to a chain-link fence full of gaping holes.
I described it all to Tom as we went. “Here’s the door. And it’s unlocked, like they said. In here it’s…an office? Maybe a reception room. The windows are boarded up, but the boards are rotted and some have been pulled off. So there’s sun enough—”
Dusty rays of light broke through and fell in bands across the floor which was littered with all kinds of debris. Animal, vegetable, and mineral. Also a dead man in a pool of blood.
This was happening way too often.
“Tom. There’s—I’m sorry. There’s a body here.”
The dead man was a cop. And the cop was Officer Tony Valerio. Here was my answer. Stricken by guilt and regret, I led Tom over to his body and knelt down. “It’s Tony.”
“Valerio?” Tom knelt down beside me. “Are you sure it’s him?” He gingerly touched the inert form.
“Yes. It’s him.”
“What happened?”
Ah, God.
“I’m afraid he came to help us and met up with the kidnapper…he was our last hope…we’re so…”
What is the square root of screwed? I let my voice trail away. Tony’s gun was on the floor by his hand. A gun might come in handy.
“Tom. His gun is here and—”
A voice from behind us. “Leave the gun where it is, Allie. This is your fault. You should never have involved Tony. Now you stand up and come in here with me.”
I turned.
It was Bob Clark.
All along.
I stood up.
“It’s you.”
Not an accusation. Statement of fact. Process of elimination. Valerio was dead. Nobody else here but Bob. Bob was DIRTY!!!. I couldn’t fill in all the blanks, but I didn’t have to. The logic was standing in front of me. Pointing a gigantic black gun at the center of my chest. Smiling.
“You got it.”
“Why? Bob?”
“Allie,” Tom was getting left behind. He got to his feet and stretched his hands out. “Stay with me.”
“That’s okay,” Bob’s voice grated. He was standing where a narrow shaft of light penetrated the dusty little room. The sun glinted on his golden head. His blue uniform fairly bristled with insignia, baton, mace, Taser, what have you. He could never have looked more like a knight in shining armor than he did at that moment. “Come with me, Tom.”
Bob grabbed Tom’s arm and dragged him, stumbling, through the door into the main room. I followed, having nowhere else on Earth to go.
This room was vast and mostly empty, a rectangle probably three hundred feet long. It was lofty, too, with catwalks running back and forth in the gloom above us. Windows up at the tops of the walls—you could call them clerestories, if they were in a cathedral—let in all the light they could.
The light was streaming down—glorious, as from real cathedral windows—but this was no sanctified space. Some of the windows were broken. Birds fluttered around up there, cooing like pigeons, looking like them, too. There were droppings everywhere. Shadows. More shadows. Shapes in the shadows. Nasty. Spooky.
Directly in front of us about ten yards from the door was a packing crate. On that packing crate, Rune was lying. Dead still. In one of those lovely, heartbreaking pools of sunlight. I didn’t say anything. No reason for Tom to know about this in whatever time we had left.
But Bob needed us to believe Rune was alive.
“Rune’s asleep. I gave him something to knock him out. He’ll be fine. You need to call and start the transfer. When the money is in my account. I’ll tie you two up and leave you here with him. He’ll wake up in a little while and untie you.”
That was a pretty story. I liked it. It could have made sense. It might even have been true. I didn’t believe it for a minute.
Tom didn’t either. He shook his head. “No. I need more assurance than that. I need you to let Allie go with Rune. Then I’ll call.”
“Then you’ll die. And she will. And the kid. You don’t have much to bargain with here.”
“On the contrary. I have 152 million dollars.”
The inevitable stalemate.
Not. Bob let go of Tom’s arm and strode over to where I was standing. He grabbed my arm and twisted it. Hard. I cried out.
“I’ll kill Allie, Tom. And you can listen.”
Tom shook his head. “You’re going to kill us both as soon as I make the call. Allie, I’m sorry. The most I can do is not give him what he wants. That’s not much revenge for everything. But it’s all I can control.”
“How about hearing her scream? How’s that going to affect your ‘control’?” Bob snarled. He stepped away from me and fired his gun into the dimness over our heads. The pigeons went nuts. “I’ll shoot her in the leg first, to be nice. And then I’ll work my way up.”
“Allie,” Tom’s anguish made his voice harsh. “Allie, talk to me.”
“Tom.” I answered him, loud and clear, with the force of every emotion in my heart. “I love you. Forever. No matter what.”
Right then a most remarkable thing happened. Tom produced a gun from under the tail of his Rock Hall visit shirt, and before Bob could respond in any way at all, Tom shot him three times. In his chest. Bull’s-eye. Bob dropped like a rock and lay very still.
“Tom?” My world had turned slow and dreamlike. I was lost, underwater, with no idea of how or where to swim.
“Tom? How did you do that?”
Tom lowered his arm and let go of the gun. It clattered on the floor. He smiled a thin bit. “You beeped on the left. He beeped on the right. And you said my aim was crappy.”
Then he went bleak again. “Check on Rune.”
I stumbled to the packing crate and put my hands on the boy. He was warm. And he was breathing, slow and deep. So beautiful. “He’s alive, Tom. He really is sleeping. Drugged. We need to get him out of here.”
The room kept moving around me in the most disorienting way. My ears were ringing from the shots. I turned slowly back to Tom, but I couldn’t resist a glance at Bob Clark. I remembered Margo, at the start of all this, saying “Even seeing someone you barely know shot dead, is worse than I imagined.”
It was bad. Knowing the person enough to believe he was a friend made it even harder.
Bob opened his eyes to g
lare at me.
This was the worst.
His face was a terrible bleached color. A dying color. He looked scared. And young. And enraged. Maybe about dying when he was planning to live it up on Tom’s jackpot. He was struggling to speak, choking, but determined to have his last words. What he said was his simple truth. It had confused me yesterday that The Voice sounded as if it wanted revenge for something. Now it got clear.
“That…night, Tom. All that…money.” He forced the words through clenched teeth that were painted with his blood. “You…you didn’t even want it…you…upset you’d won?”
His expression was pure, incredulous exasperation.
“I was…working so hard…overtime. Sold my soul. For…pennies.” He spat the word, a bitter taste. His voice rose. “Pennies! What the hell did you expect me to do…?”
All the emotion sank out of him then, and he was gone.
That did it. I couldn’t move. I stood staring down at Bob. I had been dead like that, too—as good as dead—seconds away from Bob’s promise to shoot me slow so Tom could hear me scream. I had absolutely no idea how to be alive again.
“Allie?”
Tom hadn’t expected to be alive either. I heard it in his voice and read it on his face. The way his arms dangled at his sides. Slack. Empty. “Allie?”
I came back partway. For him.
“I’m here, Tom. You saved all of us. You shot him. You shot him dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty damn sure.”
Bob looked pretty damn dead to me, but I’d proved to be a unreliable judge of deadness, back at the beginning of all this, with Renata. I was taking no chances this morning. I picked up his service revolver and threw it as far from us as I could.
After that, I took aim at Tom’s gun….
This one had to be Valerio’s gun. I remembered whispering, “Tom, His gun is here….”
Bob, behind us, waiting unseen. Then commanding me to come to him.
Tom, left behind, still kneeling by Tony.
Tom, slow to rise…
This gun had been a last gift for us from Valerio. I blessed him as I kicked it safely away.
You saved us, Tony.
“Come on,” I urged Tom. “I’ll carry Rune. You put your hand on my elbow and we’re out of here.”
“That is never going to happen.”
Marie Clark stepped out of the shadows, walking slow and sure. Bob’s widow. Deadly determined. As crisply beautiful and impeccably dressed as always. Her cool composure trained on me like the weapon in her hand. All her rage and turmoil glaring from her eyes.
I could read those eyes. It was easy. She didn’t want her Bob Clark back alive. She didn’t want her 152 million dollars. She didn’t want a private jet with two pilots and an escort to the airport. She wanted to shoot a bunch of very large holes in me and Tom and Rune.
She had an evil little gun to do it with.
Me first.
She pointed the gun, dead on at my heart.
“You made me sorry.”
Chapter Fifty-five
I learned something in that moment. It may have been the crowning lesson of my first venture into the world of crime-solving. Somebody raises a gun and points it at you? Ignore everything you’ve ever seen in popular culture. Almost always in the real world, the next thing that happens after they raise the gun and point it at you, is not an improbable miracle. What happens next is they shoot you. That’s what Marie did. She shot me.
It was like being socked with a mean fist. Appalling. Rude. Burning, but not terribly painful. Frightening beyond belief. I looked down and there was a hole in the front of my shirt on the left side, and blood was starting to come out of it. Out of me.
It scared me so bad I fainted. The room got all sparkly, and as the sparkles were turning black, I heard another shot. Tom. I tried to call his name. This wasn’t fair. If I was about to die, I wanted him to hold me while I did it. If we were both going to cross over, I wanted to cross over holding hands. Too late. Exactly like in popular culture, everything went dark.
Score one for me. I didn’t die. I didn’t even stay fainted very long.
I woke up maybe one minute later, and Tom was holding me saying a lot of desperate, wonderful stuff, his mouth warm and alive against my cheek. Two for two. My chest hurt like hell and I was covered in my own blood. Okay. Two for three. But I wasn’t dying yet.
God bless Tony Valerio. While Marie was busy shooting me, he’d managed to reclaim the gun Tom snagged from his apparently lifeless body—the exact same gun I’d kicked away from Bob Clark’s definitely lifeless body—and fired it to kill Marie with a single shot before he passed out and started looking dead again.
I consider myself fortunate beyond anybody’s power to comprehend that I owe my life to accurate shooting by a blind man and a dead cop.
Chapter Fifty-six
I bet it had been decades since the parking lot at 2370 Salter enjoyed the level of traffic that met my eyes when the EMTs, having confirmed that, although I was impressively bloody and at a level of pain I considered considerable, my wound was probably not life-threatening, wheeled me out into the sunlight.
Multitudes of East Cleveland and Cleveland police cruisers. Three boxy chartreuse ambulances. A scattering of intimidating black vehicles for FBI and assorted others. Plus a silver SUV that belonged to Skip. And all around the scraggly chain-link fence, the curious, the awestruck, the neighbors, and their kids. If it weren’t for the dead and wounded, it could have been a dynamite block party.
Valerio had alerted Bukovnik and the other FBI guys as he sped to Salter Road. When he’d finally had his hands on my purloined note, it told him “BOB!!!” but not the where or when. The FBI had arrived too late to get in on the action and were royally bent out of shape about that. Skip was right behind them in spite of the fact that Agent Bukovnik had ordered him to stay put. They’d all convened in time to hear the last round of shooting and been baffled but pleased by how well that had gone, given the givens. The concept of blind beeping marksmanship and dead cop firepower was far, far beyond their experience.
The first ambulance took Valerio away. Bob had shot him twice. Once in the arm which might sound minor but a ton of a person’s blood supply goes through there. Once in the chest.
Turned out, Valerio had been a stickler for never wearing his vest, so it hadn’t occurred to Bob that today might be different. Nonetheless, he’d lost a shocking amount of blood and was unconscious again by the time they got him onto the gurney. The EMS guys were frowning as they slammed their big green doors.
The second ambulance was for me and Rune. I was woozy and trying not to cry anymore. Rune was woozy and absolutely thrilled by all the excitement. He blinked at me.
“Allie? Is that real blood? Are you all right? Are you crying? What happened?” Before I could make any reassuring replies, he continued, “Wowww. There’s like a hundred cop cars here. Cool.”
If you’re a resilient seven-and one-quarter-year-old, an ordeal you have no memory of is hardly any ordeal at all. He told us he’d been surprised to see Marie rescuing him from the fire drill in the Hall of Fame, but not scared a bit. Everything got way dark. And then something stung him and he’d gone to sleep. It sounded to me as if she’d maintained him never more than semi-conscious for all the time they’d had him.
He talked a little about bad dreams, but he wasn’t a kid to get freaked out by a nightmare. His life had been way too interesting so far for that to impress him very long. He mentioned, too, that while he had slept, Michael had come to him and sung him the same song, over and over.
“Which song?” I was not one to take issue with anything that he found the least bit comforting.
“‘You Are Not Alone,’ of course. Like angels.”
I saw no reason to dispute that. I could have use
d Michael singing to me during those days.
All the same, a shiver ran up my back when he added. “My mom was there with him, too.”
Agent Bukovnik had helped Tom get Rune outside before he woke up all the way to the mess in the warehouse, so he was oblivious to that. He was delighted by our twin gurneys, with Tom walking in between. The center of our twin universes.
He was bewildered by how emotional we both were. “Don’t cry, you guys, I’m okay and Allie’s going to be fine. It’s just some blood,” he’d insisted. “What’s wrong with you?”
After that there was a cool ambulance ride. Rune’s day could not have gone any better. Mine was improving too.
They were keeping me and Rune overnight at The Cleveland Clinic downtown, whether we needed it or not. There had been a brief scuffle about insurance cards, but Tom waved that away. There was also some mild resistance to putting Rune and me in the same room until Tom requested one of the Founders’ Suites. That greased the skids.
The cash was back.
Once Skip realized I wasn’t shot too much, he’d grinned from ear-to-ear, happy to inform us that, what with one financial thing and another, we still had a major chunk of 190 million dollars socked away.
One day it will mean a lot to Rune to know that Tom would have paid 190 million dollars to save him. Laid it on the block without a backward glance. That should make a guy feel pretty good about himself. Plus give him some deep insight into the character of another guy, I’d say.
Now that most of the MondoMegaJackpot was back in place, Tom was discovering that ridiculous amounts of cash were good for something besides getting people killed and buying Legendary Desserts at Morton’s. We had this super room with flowers. And carry-in. Skip brought the carry-in from Table 45, The Clinic’s fancy restaurant. He assured us this would be even better than whatever fancy food came with our fancy digs.
Too Lucky to Live Page 25
