Side by Side wm-3

by John Ramsey Miller

  What was one more hole in the good earth? Who could prove it was Peanut who did anything to Sarnov? Accidents happen and people go missing all the time.

  Planning the bastard’s end made Peanut feel better. Wasn’t going to be as simple as a twelve-gauge root canal. It was a fact that Serge Sarnov had a dirt nap in his close-up future.

  There were so many possibilities for dealing punishment out that a man would have to flip a coin all day to figure which one it was going to be. For example, you might wrap a little foreign bastard in sheets soaked in blood and let a brace of dogs go to work on him for a while to get him screaming and begging. Then, while he was just scared good, you could hang him up in the skinning shed and use lopping shears and take him apart a piece at a time. No, there was no shortage of ways to pay a feller off who’d wronged you.

  Peanut checked his rearview religiously as he drove. Fixes or not, you could never be too careful when it came to the cops. And that wasn’t just the Feds, who were always looking for some new way to stick their noses into your business. If old Judge Fondren did go to the FBI, and they were looking for the woman and that baby, there just wasn’t any way they could tie a Smoot in on it. Only members of Peanut’s immediate family knew about the judge’s daughter and her baby, and not a one of them would ever tell anybody squat. Mr. Laughlin was one secret-keeping son of a bitch. Sarnov and Randall knew some of it, but, they had more to lose if the cops solved it than anybody. So let old Judge Fondren do whatever the hell he wanted, and let him tell everybody he could find-it wouldn’t do him a little bitty bit of good.

  Once Bryce was cut loose, there wasn’t nothing that anybody could do no matter if Fondren said he was forced or not. Double jeopardy wasn’t going to happen, because there wasn’t no proving that Bryce was part of anything.

  Peanut was starting to feel better. His back was going to have a hell of a sore spot where the gun had been tucked in his belt, and he’d have to get a new jacket to replace his personally autographed #3, but Dale sure couldn’t sign it. .

  Peanut picked up the cell phone and dialed Click.

  “Yeah?”

  “Anything?”

  “Naw.”

  “Okay, then get on out of there,” Peanut told his son. “I’ll call if I need you for anything else.”

  “Like when?”

  “Like when I damn well please,” Peanut snapped good-naturedly.

  “To do what?”

  “Wait and see, son.” Peanut closed the phone. Most of the time, Peanut was fond of all his children. Click was the special one. And not just because he was the baby and all. He was as smart as any contestant on Jeopardy, spoiled rotten, and too good-looking for his own good. But once Peanut was out of the picture-and that wouldn’t be very soon-that boy was the future of the Smoots. The others would either accept it when the time came or they’d end up like all those hairy elephants that got stuck in the ice way back when. Extinct.

  Truth be told, once Peanut was dead, it wouldn’t really matter if the whole bunch did piss away everything he had accumulated for them that Mr. Laughlin had legitimized. Not like any of them appreciated any of it anyhow.

  Peanut slammed his Johnny Cash at Folsom CD into the player, turned the volume up, and sang along to the music.

  Click would be all right.

  And to hell with the rest of them hairy-ass elephants.

  22

  The second he was released from his spy duty, Click Smoot shoved his laptop into his backpack and rushed to the parking garage to get his car. He planned to spend the rest of his day burning holes in other people’s credit in a few choice stores.

  He got into his new Nissan Z, laid the backpack on the passenger floorboard, and drove out of the garage. The rain was falling heavily, so he flipped on both his headlights and his wipers.

  Click reached under the dash and pressed a button opening a secret compartment large enough to hold two packages of credit cards each joined with a rubber band. Each package included two or three credit cards in an actual name and a driver’s license also in that name but with a recent photograph of Click on it.

  Click used his intellect to make money the modern way and was already expanding the family’s take despite their amazing technological ignorance. Robbing, hijacking, illegal gambling clubs, whores, drugs, extortion, insurance fraud, murder for hire, and all the rest of what the family was into was the old way, and Click wanted no part of it. He wasn’t interested in being killed over some whore, or drugs, or a failed hijacking because some driver belonged to the NRA and had a gun he wanted to fire at some criminal so he could get written up in their magazine.

  Click was concentrating on a future that few of the people in the family’s business could grasp. As far as his siblings were concerned, anything that was computerized, digitized, or involved something they couldn’t fold and hold was too abstract for them. The average Smoot’s capacity for grasping new technology was akin to a cat’s ability to appreciate fine art.

  Click wasn’t like the other Smoots. Once upon a time the difference had been painful, but as he grew up he had come to appreciate how lucky he was. He had an I.Q. of 160. He had discovered early that a clean-cut young man was practically invisible.

  Click didn’t hate his family. He just felt sorry for and was overwhelmingly embarrassed about them. He had come to the conclusion that the only thing he had in common with them was a larcenous gene. Like all Smoots, Ferny Ernest was repelled by legitimate work, was greedy, and, like a Gypsy, got an almost orgasmic thrill when he was stealing from outsiders. Only a stolen quarter was worth spending and only a sucker depended on a steady paycheck.

  Click had explained to his father that the family could make more money using keyboards than they could with an army of soldiers. And Peanut was smart enough to realize that Click had something different and had supported his son’s forays into the world of computer-related crime.

  When he was ready to make his big move, he would work a dozen big-dollar scams simultaneously, snatch millions, and be cashed out and long gone before anybody saw him coming. He had targeted banks and investment firms that moved millions daily. He would stand beside a flowing river of funds and, using a few keystrokes as his explosives, blow a hole in the levee. He would let the river flow into his canal a bit, then plug the hole and watch the canals he had built, each moving a tributary’s worth, join together and make a river of his own.

  Soon.

  Peanut’s latest interest in Click’s computers was as an avenue for selling pornography, which he was sure he could generate, and in collecting credit card information from the horny hordes that subscribed. For example, you set up a website for bait, and you chose a subject that rich people would be looking at. They visit, you run into their computer and plant a seed in it that collects their financial information from their hard drives. You didn’t even need to ask for credit card numbers, because people usually had that information on their drives.

  Click had to admit that the porn thing would work, but it would attract the mob’s attention since the mob controlled porn and they would demand a big slice. Dixie had all the male and female prostitutes they would ever need. Buck wanted to be a producer, but that would be like hiring a wino to work in a crystal shop and putting him up on stilts.

  He parked in front of the Media Warehouse. Ferny Ernest looked at the credit cards again, decided on an American Express card that belonged to Edmund C. Kellogg, and put the others back in the secret compartment.

  “Another day, another dollar,” Click said as he opened the car’s door.

  23

  Thanks to Clayton Able’s intelligence-gathering, Winter and Alexa knew who the kidnappers were. And thanks to Winter’s knack for remembering faces, they had a subject to focus on.

  After years of recovering federal fugitives, Winter had developed an ability to memorize primary facial features. The shape of the jaw and chin, the nose and the eyes, remain constant, where hair was the first thing people altered. The secon
d change was of their style of dress and by utilizing distractions of one sort or another like hats, glasses, and items of clothing. In the real world, very few fugitives had the means for or the access to reconstructive facial surgery. Despite what movies wanted you to think, there were a limited number of plastic surgeons who fabricated new faces in their secret clinics or the kitchens of hideouts.

  Alexa had cell phones for herself and Winter, connected by speed dial both to each other and to Clayton, who would remain in the hotel room hooked up to his sources. Alexa had acquired a GPS tracker in case they needed to follow a vehicle. Now, since there was moving-target surveillance to be conducted, and the target had seen the members of the covering team, Winter had decided to tag Click’s car and see where he led them.

  Alexa’s tracking unit had a five-mile range. The receiver was similar to the sort of handheld GPS outdoorsmen used, the small screen showing named lines for streets.

  Since they probably wouldn’t be returning to the hotel for a good while, Alexa and Winter took Clayton’s files on the Smoots, and the equipment they figured they might need. To avoid coming out into the lobby, they used the fire stairs, going through a side door that opened into the parking deck. Alexa unlocked her rental car and put everything inside it before she positioned herself near the mouth of the deck, which gave her a view of the entrance.

  According to Clayton’s files on the Smoot crew, son Click had two registered vehicles: a silver 2004 Nissan Z and a 1974 GMC panel van. Winter hoped he was driving one of them. He took one bug, a dark gray plastic wafer with a magnetized disk on one side, and found a silver Z parked on the deck’s second level, its grille facing out. Winter checked the tag to make sure it was Click’s, then he stuck the bug behind the license plate so that only its thin-wire antenna was visible.

  Winter’s cell phone began vibrating in his pocket just before he heard footsteps approaching. He moved silently to a position behind the vehicle parked beside the Z and waited. He heard an electronic chirping, and the door to the Z open and shut. The engine roared to life and the Z drove off down the ramp.

  Winter sprinted to his truck and speed-dialed Alexa while he was backing out.

  “I tried to let you know Click was coming up,” she said.

  “I planted the bug,” he said. “You got a signal on him?”

  “Ten and ten,” she said, her voice flat and professional. “I’m pulling out behind him. Will feed location and direction.”

  24

  Hank Trammel, Winter’s law-enforcement mentor, once told Winter that law enforcement was like a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week gambling casino. The bad guys ran the house, so while there were hot streaks for the cop players, over the course of any lawman’s career the house odds prevailed. The best a lawman could do was to ride the hot streaks and grin and bear it when the deck went against you. Since you couldn’t count on luck, you used your brain, worked hard, and called upon your skills to raise your odds of success. Life-and-death cases like this one were the high-stakes table. If Lucy and her child were still alive, they wouldn’t be breathing any longer than necessary.

  Winter didn’t know why Click had left the hotel, but he was sure the boy hadn’t run because he knew anybody was onto him.

  The rain and the traffic acted as an effective veil. Winter used the cell phone’s earpiece so he could talk hands-free. He stayed a quarter mile behind Alexa, who remained far enough behind Click so she could keep him in sight, but far enough back so he wouldn’t notice her car.

  “You think somebody spelled him at the hotel?” Alexa asked.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “If we’d been a couple of minutes later in realizing who he was, he’d have been long gone. We couldn’t have spooked him, could we?”

  “No,” Winter said.

  “Not like we have a lot of leads, if this doesn’t pan out,” Alexa said.

  “The fact that he was tagging after the judge is more than enough evidence for me that the Smoots are involved in the abduction.”

  “Clayton’s the best there is at gathering and interpreting intelligence. Far as I know, if the man says he’s sure, he’s right on target.”

  “He certainly gathered a lot of information in a very short time. Does he have his own firm?”

  “He’s part of a larger network, I guess you’d say.”

  “They know he hacks intel systems?”

  “Well, if they didn’t trust him, he couldn’t do it. Not in these troubled times. The intel community has been under so much pressure lately.”

  “You’ve used him on official business?”

  “I’ve used him in an advisory capacity. Brass doesn’t like agents going outside, especially when it turns out they are successful where we weren’t. I don’t have to tell you how it works.”

  “Territorial imperative meets the Peter Principle,” Winter said.

  “All I know is that without Clayton, we wouldn’t have been able to get our hands around this one. If he hadn’t come in, I’d have done about as well standing on a median strip with a cardboard sign that said, ‘Stop if you’ve seen any missing people.’?”

  Winter laughed. “You couldn’t say which people.”

  “Click might not know any of the specifics about the grab or where our people are being held,” Alexa said, sadly.

  They were driving on Independence Boulevard in light traffic. Click wasn’t trying to be evasive in the least.

  “What do you hear from Precious?” Winter asked.

  “Why do you ask?”

  Precious was Antonia Keen’s nickname. Antonia was Alexa’s younger sister, but before they had found a permanent foster home, Alexa had also been a mother to the younger girl. Antonia had been a tomboy with a capital “T.” Winter had never particularly cared for her, and perhaps that was because she had openly resented his relationship with her older sister. He understood the psychology, but he couldn’t forgive her hostility toward him.

  “Why wouldn’t I ask?” he said to Alexa. “Last I heard she was burning a path to the top of the Army. That still the case?”

  “You have me in sight, Massey?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Our boy’s turning into a shopping center,” Alexa said.

  “I see him.”

  Winter noted that Alexa had just avoided answering his innocent question about her younger sister. Maybe Antonia had done something to upset Alexa, but more likely Alexa had too much on her mind at the moment to make small talk.

  Winter put his mind on two people being held by scary people.

  25

  Lucy Dockery had lived a life of privilege. As the only child of a successful divorce attorney and a federal judge, she had attended the best schools, lived in nice homes, and enjoyed social contact with wealthy and influential people. At that moment, if she could have gone back to the worst day of her life and relived it over and over for eternity, Lucy would have done that rather than to have gone through the hours since she had been kidnapped.

  Lucy’s previous worst day had begun like any other, and was as mundane as any before it. Walter and her mother had left to go to an antique store to look at a grandfather clock for her father’s birthday. Lucy had intended to go along with them, but she had stayed home with Elijah because he felt feverish. Around four P.M., while she was loading the washing machine, the doorbell rang. She had opened the front door to her father standing with their minister.

  Her father had said simply, “Lucy, Walter and your mother are gone.” The words hit her like a hammer blow that left her seeing everything through a watery filter of shock. After that, he had sat in a chair and cried like a baby. She had stood there wishing that she had been with Walter.

  Battling tears, Lucy thought about that again now, recalling how her sense of life being ordered and perfect had drained away in that moment, leaving her alone in a dark, frightening place. Lucy had been cast out from a paradise into a world where everything had sharp edges and where the super-heated air was
n’t breathable. Her loss had taken her like some predator striking out of nowhere and grabbing her up in its jaws. It had shaken her until she was empty of everything but fear, and an awful, unbearable blackness. And there was no doubt that she would have joined Walter had it not been for their Elijah.

  But the day a drunk driver had killed her husband and her mother was a sunny stroll in the park compared to the day she was now living.

  Hopeless. At that moment, Lucy wished once more, as she had often for the past year, that she could just curl up and die. What did these hideous people have in mind for her child and her? The worst that could happen would probably happen no matter what she did. So, what should she do? What could she do? She knew what Walter would tell her. Save our son. You are the only chance Elijah has. Death will come to you just like it came to me. Live until you die, Lucy. Let our son know me through you-you who knew me better than anybody.

  The distinctive growling of what sounded like an approaching motorcycle refocused her thoughts. She had heard the sound earlier when two or three of them had roared off together.

  The woman left the trailer, slamming the door.

  Another metal door, very near the trailer, creaked open. Lucy had heard that door open and close before, always before someone came or right after they left.

  Straining, Lucy heard angry voices.

  She was sure the male voice was the vile man with scaly hands. The woman and the man were arguing about something. Lucy heard the word “twins” used several times. She also heard the names Buck and Dixie and believed those were probably their names.

  The metal door slammed again.