“Only one house it could be. You go about a mile and then turn at the first right. It’s about a half mile down. Mailbox at the road, but the house is behind trees. Nobody lives there, but every now and then you’ll see several cars there. I always figured something hinky was going on in there, gambling or women or something. But we don’t stick our noses in other people’s business out here, you know?”
I looked at the bleak landscape of tall weeds and overgrown trees. “Doesn’t look like many people live out here.”
“Only a few of us. Most are mobile homes or RVs. We all know each other, watch out for each other. But that house is one nobody knows about.”
I could tell she couldn’t wait to spread the news about my rich uncle and his eccentric ways.
I said, “You think I can drive through that sand and not get stuck?”
“You just got to be careful, is all. Don’t hit it hard.”
“Actually, I think I’ll skip it. If his limo driver was here this morning, then my uncle’s fine. I’ll get out of your way now.”
I sprinted back to the Bronco and pulled it back to the main road so the woman could drive through the Empire Estates entrance. She tooted her horn and waved at me as she drove past. At the rutted sand, she slowed to a crawl and eased her way through.
Zack said, “What?”
“She said a black limo got stuck in the sand. Also said there’s only one house where nobody lives full-time. Sometimes cars are parked there, but most of the time it’s empty. She told me how to get there.”
Zack twisted his torso around to look at Cupcake. They exchanged some kind of silent communication that made them both solemnly nod their heads.
Zack fingered the phone speaker attached to his ear and spoke quietly. “We’re on the road to the house. Stand by.”
Turning to me, Zack said, “Dixie, after we talked to you, Cupcake and the other guys agreed on what we’d do if we found out for sure that Opal was here in a house.”
“What’s your plan?”
“I’ll explain it later. Let’s drive on.”
Everybody wanted to wait until later to tell me important things. I hate later.
I said, “You’re not afraid we’ll get stuck too?”
He shook his head. “Different tires, different weight, different driver.”
We rolled on, straining to see ahead, our tires gnawing their way through the ruts Vern’s limo had left. The road got more narrow and uneven, with deep holes dug by rain and time. We bumped along until we came to a side road with a rotting sign that gave a street name we couldn’t read. There were no houses on the road. Evidently, the Empire Estates hadn’t sold well. At another intersection, we drove to the end of yet another lurching sandy road. The car’s motor hummed in concert with the whine of mosquitos rising from the surrounding palmettos and sawgrass.
After about a mile, the road made a right angle. Another quarter mile, and Zack’s forefinger pointed toward a copse of trees ahead. “A house is in there. Pull over.”
I couldn’t see it, and from Cupcake’s silence I didn’t think he could either. But a metal gate ran across a driveway that one could assume led to a house, so I pulled to the road’s edge and parked. I could barely make out a chain running from a gatepost to the top of the gate, but I knew people rarely lock gate padlocks. Too much trouble for the owners to get out of their cars and unlock the things every time they go through, so the chains only serve as notice that the place is off-limits. If you drive in, you could be shot for trespassing. If you sneak in like we intended, you could be shot and displayed on a metal spike as a warning to others.
We sat panting like stressed dogs for a moment, then Zack pushed his door open and slid out of the car. I leaned to grab my 4-C-cell flashlight from the space between the front seats, touched the .38 at the back of my jeans to reassure myself it was still there, and got out too.
With flashlight and gun, those two “weapons of opportunity” that no cop is ever without, I felt as if I were back in uniform. Hit somebody on the head with a gun barrel, that’s using a “weapon of opportunity.” Hit them with the handle of a flashlight, that’s another “weapon of opportunity.” With the woods full of feral hogs and other swine, I figured I needed all the weapons of opportunity I could lay my hands on.
Cupcake got out last, squeezing his bulk through the opening like an enormous baby being born of a Bronco. We stood a moment beside a ditch that ran beside the road, getting our bearings and letting our feet get accustomed to the lay of the land before we moved forward. On the other side of the ditch, a swath of sawgrass lay silvered by wan moonlight. Beyond the sawgrass, a dark morass of trees and shrubs led to the spot where Zack thought he’d seen a house. As I looked across the ditch, I made out the dark outline of a vulture in a skeletal cypress tree. It may have been my imagination, but it seemed to me that the bird turned its head and looked at me.
Speaking low, Zack said, “When we get there, we’ll go to the front door and engage whoever’s inside while you go around to the back door. You’ll go in and look for Opal. When you find her, you’ll bring her out and get in the car. When we see you, we’ll leave.”
“That’s your plan?”
He nodded solemnly, his head bobbing like a shadow puppet against the muzzy night. “The other guys will cover our backs.”
I stifled a nervous giggle. He had left out so many moves that it was almost funny, except I knew very well what those moves were going to be, and it wasn’t at all funny.
Cupcake leaned forward and spoke close to my ear. “If you want me to, I’ll go inside with you. Just in case you need muscle.”
That made me actually sputter a laugh that sounded like the bark of a teacup chihuahua puppy. Zack was a Boy Scout with a keen mind for electronics and motors and speed ratios and probably a lot of things I didn’t know diddly about. Cupcake was a mountain with a sweet smile and dainty feet who could stop other mountains carrying footballs. But when it came to rescuing Opal, they were babes in the woods. In a few minutes I would be confronting hardened criminals, and all I had for backup were two innocent children.
I said, “I have my gun.”
Zack said, “You won’t need that.”
Cupcake said, “Nah, we won’t need no bullets.”
From the tone of their voices I knew they were thinking I was a female on the verge of hysteria.
Zack pointed into the thick growth beside the road. “Okay.”
Zack and Cupcake crossed the ditch and melted into the shadows under the trees, and I followed them. Cupcake led the way, his massive bulk pushing through palmetto fronds like the prow of a boat winding through mangroves. I walked in his footsteps, close enough to his broad back to avoid being hit by swishing fronds, and Zack brought up the rear, plodding stolidly through swarms of mosquitos and veils of spiderwebs. Every now and then one of us would catch a toe on an exposed root and stumble with whispered curses.
Above us, the tree canopy was so thick it blotted out every glint of night light. Below us, our shuffling feet stirred composted leaves that gave off a dank odor of mold and mildew mixed with animal urine. We moved through a timeless place that would have been cheerless even in bright sunshine. In the darkness, it seemed downright sepulchral.
After what I judged to be about the length of a football field, Cupcake stopped, held his left forearm out to the side, and waggled his fist. The movement must have been some sort of code for Zack, because he touched my shoulder and mimed for me to veer right and come up at the rear of the house.
This was apparently the moment when Zack and Cupcake expected me to slip into the house and grab Opal while they chatted up her kidnapper at the front door. It was a stupid plan, but for the moment it was the only plan we had.
Zack and Cupcake angled to the left and continued parallel to the road, while I tried to guide myself in a kind of arc that would take me to the back door of a house I still hadn’t seen. I wasn’t even positive Zack had seen it. For all I knew, all that la
y ahead was more of what we were in.
Without Cupcake’s back to shield me, I walked with one hand raised to touch tree trunks and hanging palm fronds before I stumbled into them. With every step, I prayed my booted toes didn’t disturb a rattlesnake’s sleep or catch the attention of a marauding wild hog. To my left, the trees along the road had thinned to a narrow strip, but I didn’t see any sign of Zack or Cupcake.
After a century or two, I spotted a weak light glinting through a narrow gap in the curtain of trees. Cautiously, I navigated a shallow ditch and continued forward through undergrowth and low branches.
The dark rectangle of a tall house emerged in such sudden relief that it startled me. Like a lot of Florida real estate gone to seed, the house had probably been built as a summer getaway with living quarters upstairs and a screened “Florida room” downstairs. Its redwood siding was blackened by mildew and mold, and in the screened lower half, where somebody had once planned to hold neighborhood get-togethers, a few lawn chairs sat at awkward angles. Upstairs, a dull light shone through a small square of opaque glass—most likely a bathroom window—but I didn’t see any movement behind it.
In its dark isolation, the house had the appearance of a melancholy memory of things best forgotten. As my eyes adjusted to its shape, I made out the outline of a compact sports car parked on a depressed graveled area to my left. It appeared to be red, probably a BMW. The last time I’d seen a car like that, it had been leaving Myra’s house.
A twig cracked with the sound of a pistol shot. It could have been Zack or Cupcake who stepped on it. Or a lookout guarding the house readying his gun to empty into me. Or an owl peering down to see what fool thing a human was doing.
Around me, the night had gone silent, the way it does when an intruder causes nature to hold its breath. No tree frog chirps, no screech owl cries, not even whirrs of insect wings. As if it bore witness, the night waited for the house to divulge its secrets. Cautiously, I moved to the back of the BMW and dropped to my knees. From that angle, I could make out the rectangular frame of a door set in the screened lower half of the house.
A blurred silhouette moved behind the opaque glass of the upstairs window, and then the window went black. The shadow behind the glass was adult-sized, but it could have been male or female. In a minute heavy footsteps thudded down invisible stairs, and a man-shaped shadow moved through the gloom behind the screen. I had hoped it was Angelina, and a nasty taste of disappointment burned my throat when the door opened and an unmistakable man stepped out, furtively catching the screen door before it slapped shut. He was broad-shouldered, muscular, looked as if he could defend himself in a fight. He could have been Vern. Or he could have been one of the men with Vern when I was kidnapped. Or he could have been an innocent man who lived in this house and had no connection to Vern at all.
He walked a few feet away from the house and lit a cigarette. In the flare of the lighter I caught a momentary glimpse of his features. Not enough to identify him, but enough to see that he was Caucasian and clean-shaven. He smoked in concentrated drags, pulling on the cigarette as if he wanted to reduce its length in a hurry. I couldn’t see any sign of a weapon, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t armed.
My heart pounded so loud I was afraid he would hear it. I wondered if Cupcake and Zack were watching the man too, or if they were at the front door of the house. As naïve as they’d seemed about the dangers in what we were doing, I could imagine them drawing straws to see who would knock.
A muffled wailing noise sounded from inside the house, and the man spun as if the noise frightened him. Flipping his cigarette to the ground, he jerked open the screen door and charged through, letting it slap shut with a sharp cracking sound. The man’s dark outline melded with the blackness inside the screened enclosure, and in a minute the dull crying sound stopped as abruptly as it had started.
My mind ticked off all the possible sources of the oddly muted sound. It could have been a cat mewing. It could have been the sound of an electronic alarm of some kind. But I believed it had been a crying baby. I believed it had been Opal. Not Opal crying in a baby’s normal cry, but in a way that had been strangely baffled. My mind backed away from images of all the possibilities for that dulled sound, along with reasons the crying had stopped so abruptly. I clung to the hope that Angelina was in the house, and that she had rushed to pick Opal up and give her a bottle. The chances of that being true seemed fewer every second.
The red BMW was an unexpected worry. Myra wasn’t the only person in the world who drove that model, but its presence seemed too coincidental. Myra had left Sarasota in a car that looked like this one to bring Angelina to this house. If her car was here, that had to mean she was here as well. But why would Myra be upstairs in that unlit house with the man who had come downstairs?
A nagging voice in my head suggested that the BMW belonged to the man who had tossed away his cigarette when he heard his baby cry. His wife might be working in town while he watched their child, and Opal and Angelina might be miles away in another house.
28
Something wide loomed at my side and set my heart chuddering.
Cupcake’s hoarse whisper cut through the darkness. “Is that you, Dixie?”
My own whisper sounded too much like a bobcat’s hiss. “Yes! Where’s Zack?”
“In front. A limo’s hidden in the yard.”
For a moment I felt elated at the presence of a limo, because it had to mean that Vern was in the house. Unless it was somebody else’s limo. In the next moment, the futility of what we were doing suddenly came in waves. Our entire trip was insane. We were insane. We had strung together a theory based on a story told by a drunken braggart at a bar, then leaped to follow directions from a woman who might have been having fun with visiting yahoos, and set off into dark woods where we could get shot by a limo-driving homeowner who heard us blundering around his property.
So low my words were more exhaled than spoken, I said, “I’m not sure Opal is in there.”
I could hear Cupcake’s breathing. He probably used up as much oxygen in one breath as most people take in ten. When he spoke, it was in the same exhaled whisper I’d used. “We’re not sure it’s not her, either.”
I couldn’t argue with his logic, and for a moment I argued our case to an imaginary judge with a robotic voice. I admitted that even though any thinking person could have driven a fleet of trucks through the big holes in our evidence, we weren’t entirely off the wall in thinking Opal was inside that house. We weren’t hundred percent kooks, only maybe seventy-five percent. But as I told the imaginary judge, if everybody waited until they were positive before they took risks, no babies would ever get rescued.
The imaginary judge was not impressed. He reminded me that if my evidence was sound enough to justify my hiding in the darkness with a loaded gun stuck in the waistband of my jeans, it was sound enough to notify the local law enforcement office. The imaginary judge got specific. He suggested that I call Sergeant Owens and fill him in on all the information Zack, Cupcake, and I had collected. He stressed that Owens could then pass the evidence on to the FBI agents when they joined the case so that county, state, and federal agencies could team up and come streaming to our side.
The imaginary judge must have read too many action comic books or seen too many episodes of CSI, because his idea of how the law worked was laughably unrealistic. Following his advice would mean losing critical time trying to convince disbelieving law enforcement professionals that a leading citizen of vast wealth was behind the kidnapping of a baby, and that the baby was being held in a remote house outside a little town forty miles from the kidnap site. Even if we succeeded in convincing them, vital time would be lost while various agencies sparred over who had jurisdiction. After that was settled, a search warrant would have to be issued for an address we didn’t have, something that could take several hours. And while we waited for the wheels of justice to make their agonizingly slow turns, the likelihood was high that word would lea
k to Kantor Tucker. If that happened, Opal would be disposed of before anybody went looking for her.
We had no choice but to save her. Furthermore, Zack’s idea of going to the front door and distracting the kidnapper while I went in the back and got Opal no longer seemed so squirrelly.
Hunkered beside me, Cupcake seemed to realize I’d come to a decision. “Now?”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “Let’s do it.”
I’m not sure what I expected him to do, but it wasn’t what he did. Still squatting on his heels, he lifted his head and whistled. Not a referee kind of whistle, but a long, quivering, mournful trill like a screech owl makes, starting low, rising to a tremulous wail, and abruptly ending. An answering cry came from the darkness at the front of the house. Hearing one screech owl’s eerie cry in the dark woods is enough to make rational people look over their shoulders for ghosts. Hearing two raises the hairs on the back of your neck.
Cupcake grinned, his white teeth flashing like the Cheshire cat’s smile.
In the next instant, a loud pounding cut through the darkness, a sound like a heavy stick hammering against a front door.
At the same time, a man’s drunken voice yelled, “Hey, Clyde! Open up! It’s me, Leon! Clyde? I know you’re in there! Open up! Hoo-ya! Hey, Clyde! You hear me, Clyde?”
It took a minute for me to realize the drunk at the front door was Zack.
The house remained dark and silent.
The pounding got louder and Zack’s voice raised to a sharp-edged roar that half the county could probably hear. “Come on, Clyde! I got women coming! Open the door! Women are behind me, good-looking women! They wanta meet you, you old dog! It’s Leon, dude! We gonna party! We gonna party hardy! Woo-ha!”
Cupcake touched my shoulder. “Let’s roll.”
For such a large man, Cupcake moved across the sandy yard with surprising speed. With me behind his elbow, he went through the screened door and moved directly to the wall-hugging stairway to the upper floor. With my flashlight’s barrel resting on my shoulder, I gripped it by the bulb end and followed Cupcake to the second level.
Cat Sitter Among the Pigeons Page 18
