Middle of Nowhere

by Ridley Pearson

“He wouldn’t know how to play it, would he, Abby? Because Davie wasn’t like you. Davie took the straight road. Davie was doing fine until you talked him into letting you hit that delivery.”

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  “Shut up!”

  “There’s a tower,” she said, pointing through the windshield. Sweet and sour—she needed to be both for him, play both roles herself, one moment the accuser, one moment the accomplice.

  Flek slowed, but kept driving. He tried the phone and once again nearly lost his patience. He reached over the backseat and fished in her purse and came out with her phone. Same reaction to his attempt with it. Daphne didn’t believe in coincidence—Boldt had trained her not to, along with every other detective with whom he’d worked over the years. If the circuit was busy, then that was Boldt’s doing. And if that was Boldt’s doing, then she still had hope.

  “What the fuck am I thinking?” Flek said. He sped up the car. It had finally occurred to him, she realized, to use a pay phone. She had wondered how long it might take him to see this. Get him into town—Boldt was on the same page as she.

  The clock continued running in her head. Osbourne had said triangulation took time. Did they have a location on her? Was there a radio car waiting around the next corner, and three more coming up their tailpipe?

  “My guess is Davie would encourage you to work it out, not get yourself killed.”

  “I told you to shut up!” He shoved the beer can onto the dash so that it wedged tightly between glass and vinyl. He tugged the gun from his waist and extended his trembling arm toward the floor of the car. 438

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  “No!” she hollered.

  But Flek pulled the trigger, shooting her left foot. The bullet traveled through her and out the floor of the car. “That’s one!” he shouted madly, saliva spraying from his wet lips. “I got eight more in here, and I’ll use every damn one before I bother to finish you. NOW

  YOU SHUT UP!”

  For a moment she felt no pain whatsoever, her brain frozen with shock. But then the burning began. It raced up her leg, through her gut, and she vomited.

  “You disgusting bitch!” he screamed at close range, beating her with the butt of the gun, directly on the wound he’d caused with the bottle.

  Her head swooned, but she struggled for consciousness and managed to sit herself upright and turn her head slowly to face him. The burning in her left foot was now an inferno. She could barely hear her own voice as she spoke. “What now, Abby?”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  “You’re going to have to bandage that, or pull a tourniquet, or I’m going to bleed out on you. And then what? Then I’m a dead cop, and Boldt isn’t going to deal with you. You’re damned if I die, Abby.” She needed to speak but could barely find the strength.

  “You . . . know . . . that, don’t you?” Her words were long strings of stretched taffy, her mouth disconnected from her brain. The purple goo loomed at the edges of her eyes, pulsing with each tick of her heart. She pushed it back, but it consumed her, determined to M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  shield her from this pain. For a moment she maintained consciousness. She thought she saw a phone booth up ahead. A streetlight in the rain. But then the black hood of unconsciousness slipped over her head, and all hope was lost.

  C H A P T E R

  59

  The fix on the transmissionpoint forFlek’sfirstcall came only moments after Boldt turned right off 305 and onto Suquamish Way NE, a minute or two after Daphne had been shot.

  Reading from the back of his hand where he’d scribbled notes, LaMoia said, “The exact fix is North 47 degrees 45.45 minutes, West 122, 36.2 minutes. Give or take forty feet.”

  “In English,” Boldt requested.

  “A couple hundred yards east of something called Stottlemeyer Road NE. It’s in the north end of the Indian Reservation.” LaMoia fished the official SPD road atlas from the glove box where it was required to reside, and leafed through the nearly three inches of pages at a blistering speed. “You know what, Sarge?”

  “It isn’t in there.”

  “Correctomundo,” LaMoia answered.

  “Dispatch!” they said, nearly in unison.

  “What do you want to bet they can track us from there?” Each and every SDP vehicle now carried a GPS

  location transmitter, enabling Dispatch computers to monitor location. On radio cars that carried MDT terminals, this same technology allowed patrol officers to M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  monitor their GPS position on a moving map, and follow computer-generated directions for the fastest possible route, taking into account reported traffic delays. Boldt’s unmarked car lacked the MDT, but still possessed a GPS transmitter in the trunk.

  “The system goes out wireless,” Boldt instructed his sergeant. LaMoia never paid any attention to in-house memos. “As long as our phones are working, so’s the GPS.”

  “It’s ringing,” LaMoia said. Less than a minute later Boldt turned left on Totten Road, following LaMoia’s instruction. Precise directions followed, as a woman twenty-three miles away, on the other side of Puget Sound, stared at a computer screen tracking Boldt’s car to within a margin of error of forty feet. Right on Widme Road, and straight through the dark woods, Boldt driving twenty miles an hour over the posted limit and nearly rolling the car on a sharp right that appeared out of nowhere. The road bent immediately left and continued to its conclusion at Lincoln, where LaMoia pointed left and the driver followed. The darkness combined with the rain to lower visibility to a matter of yards, not miles. Two cars passed them on Lincoln, both Boldt and LaMoia straining and turning to get the best possible look.

  “I don’t think so,” LaMoia said after the first. “That ain’t no Eldorado,” he declared of the second.

  “You’re the gear head,” Boldt said, his driving strained by the divided attention. “Tell Dispatch we 442

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  want a ‘Lights Out’ a quarter mile from our last turn. We’ll leave the car there and go on foot.”

  “Affirm,” LaMoia answered.

  Stottlemeyer was the fourth right.

  “Three tenths of a mile, Sarge,” LaMoia announced. Boldt pulled the car over into muddy gravel, less than two hundred yards from where Flek had phoned him. The moment his hands left the wheel, they grabbed for the vest in the backseat. He announced,

  “One vest, one field operative.” LaMoia looked ready to object. “You’ll stay here, monitor the Poulsbo channel, and keep with Gaynes at AirTyme.” He fiddled with his own phone. “Mine is set to vibrate. You call if anything breaks. I call if I spot them.”

  “And when you do?” LaMoia said optimistically.

  “I’ll try to direct you in around back. Then we ad lib. If I can’t get close, then I’ll make myself a target and lure him to where you get a shot.”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s a brilliant plan. There’s a good match: my nine-millimeter on him; his German scope on you.”

  “We ad lib,” Boldt repeated. “We’re not going to know ’til we see the situation. Maybe there’s an old farmhouse or something. Maybe we wait for backup.”

  “You’ll pardon my rank, Lieutenant, but you’re full of shit at the moment. You’re not making any sense.”

  “My orders are for you to stay in the car,” Boldt said. LaMoia objected, “Why? So you go get yourself killed by some worthless skel?”

  “Those are your orders.”

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  “Bullshit!” LaMoia fired back.

  Boldt double-checked that all the phones came with similar services. “You’ve got call-waiting, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” a disgruntled LaMoia answered.

  “So stay on the line with Gaynes and listen up for my in-coming call.”

  “As ordered, sir!”

  Boldt said calmly, “You�
�re injured, John. You’re slow. And doubling up out there only doubles the noise we make. This is not heroics; it’s what makes sense.”

  “To you.”

  “To me,” Boldt said.

  Boldt checked the car’s interior light before opening the door, making sure it would not light up as the door came open. He adjusted the vest as he stepped out into the rain—its woven plastic exterior would act as something of a raincoat. There would be no flashlight. He would allow his eyes to adjust and do his best in the dark. He walked slowly at first, unable to see more than a few feet in front of himself, his pace and stride increasing the longer he stayed out in the rain. He reached a muddy track to his right not far down the road, and stayed to the edge, where his sinking into the sloppy turf wouldn’t show up in headlights, in case Flek was suddenly on his way out. He stooped low and felt the mud. The tire tracks seemed recent to him. Given the rain, they would have been beaten down in a matter of hours.

  He was less than a hundred yards down that track when he heard a car roar to life. With the sound bounc-444

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  ing in the trees, it seemed to come from behind him, not from in front as expected. He crouched and reached for his weapon, only to realize that in his haste he’d strapped the vest in the way of his gun—an amateurish mistake that made him realize he had too much emotion working against him.

  When the car horn sounded out on the road, he realized it was his own car that he’d heard start, LaMoia behind the wheel. He ran for the open road.

  “What the hell?” Boldt said, as he jumped into the passenger seat, dripping wet. LaMoia was just shy of being a qualified stock car racer. He was the best and fastest driver of all the detectives. Boldt’s car took off like someone had switched engines in the past few minutes.

  “Turns out Osbourne had a couple guys working on a hunch—”

  “Gaynes told me as much,” Boldt recalled.

  “The hunch had to do with a part of the reserved bandwidth that isn’t used for the calls themselves, but, as I understand it, has to do with tower handshakes.”

  “What’s it mean, John?” Boldt asked impatiently, strapping himself in.

  LaMoia glided the car on all four tires through a left turn that had Boldt clutching to the dash. Both hands on the wheel, the driver said, “It means that the reason we see those little bars on our cell phones for signal strength is because the phone and the towers are constantly talking to each other—and here’s the catch: whether or not we’re currently making a call. As long as M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  the phone is on, it’s looking for the nearest tower and reporting to its own processor what kind of signal strength is available, which comes back out of the phone as those little bars. To do so, it sends its own ID every time—like a few thousand times a second!”

  “And Osbourne can see it’s his phone,” Boldt mumbled.

  “Both their phones, but, yes, that’s right. He can see them real-time—no more fifteen-minute delays. They can’t triangulate. They can’t pinpoint them unless he makes a call—and we’re back to a delay at that point. But they can watch movement, tower to tower, as the phones continue checking for the best handshake. And both those phones are currently moving, Sarge.” He didn’t take his grip from the wheel, but his index finger pointed straight ahead. “East. They’ve been moving east for the last ten minutes or so. The phones appear to be at rest at the moment.”

  “Which means we’re gaining on them,” Boldt said.

  “Bingo!” said the driver, as he pushed the car past ninety on a two-lane road swollen with rainwater.

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  Daphne awakened to Bryce Abbott Flek pouring lukewarm beer down her face. It spilled down her chest and into her blouse, and she pushed him away as she came to. The first thing she did was look down at her foot because it felt different. He had removed her boot and sock and used the bootlaces to tie two cotton ends of the Tampax she carried as plugs on the entrance and exit wounds. One of the shoelaces was tied tightly around her left ankle, reducing blood flow. It hurt, but surprisingly held short of screaming pain.

  “Key to the cuffs,” he said, sipping from the beer he’d just used to shower her awake.

  “Zippered pocket of my purse.” He went after them.

  “How long was I out?”

  “Five minutes. Maybe less.”

  It had felt like hours to her. But she doubted she had hours now, and that thought electrified her. If Flek had his way, this was meant to be the last night of her life, she realized. She would bleed out if she didn’t receive medical attention. Regrets and fear piled up inside her, and she struggled to be rid of them. Eventually, they won out. She said, “What you wouldn’t let me tell you—we only want you as a witness. We have M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  nothing but circumstantial evidence against you. But there was an assault that we don’t think you’re good for, and we wanted you in to clear that up.”

  “Sure you did,” he said. “Here’s how it’s going to be.” He glanced outside nervously. The sidewalks were empty due to the hour and the rain. “I’m going to take those off,” he said, meaning the cuffs, “and help you over to the pay phone. And we’re going to call your friend and you’re going to say hello. And if anyone sees us, you’re going to hold onto me tight like you’ve been loving me a hundred years. And if you don’t, the next shot goes through the other foot, and then up the legs, and so on. Clear?”

  “I got it.”

  “Fast and easy,” he said. Then he added, “You got any change in here?” and dug deeper into her purse.

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  “Hang on!” Boldt hollered into his cellular. “Let me write this down. I’m not thinking too clearly right now.” It was no exaggeration. When his phone had rung he had not expected Flek, believing the man’s cellular phone was jammed. He scribbled into his notebook. “Miller Bay North . . . directly across from Quail. The street’s name is Sid Price?”

  LaMoia, overhearing his lieutenant, said, “Sounds like a game-show host.”

  “Okay. . . . Okay. . . .” Boldt said into the phone. LaMoia tapped his watch frantically.

  Boldt acknowledged the signal with a nod and spoke into his phone. LaMoia wanted time. Boldt had to remember that Flek considered him still on the mainland, not a few precious miles away.

  “I can catch the nine-fifty ferry if I hurry,” he said into the phone. “No . . . we don’t have a helicopter. . . . No, we don’t! And that means an hour or so at the earliest. I understand that, but there’s nothing I can do. . . . It’s the best I can do. . . . Exactly. . . . Yes, alone. But I want to talk to her. If I don’t hear her voice, the meet’s off.” He waited. “Okay.”

  Boldt felt his heart pounding in his chest. M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  “Lieutenant?” her weakened voice inquired. She avoided use of his first name; she didn’t want to give Flek any hint of their friendship, not so much as an ounce of added leverage. “I’m wounded—” Boldt heard a struggle as the phone was ripped from Daphne’s hand—he could visualize this as clearly as if he were standing by whatever pay phone they occupied. Wounded! His stomach knotted.

  “One hour,” the man said. The line went dead.

  “She’s wounded,” Boldt reported in a whisper.

  “Wounded, how?”

  “He hung up.”

  LaMoia one-handed the wheel. “Yeah? Well, the only reason he wants a meeting is to take you out.” With the call to Bobbie Gaynes pressed to his ear, LaMoia warned his passenger, “My batteries are going to go, Sarge.” Boldt’s had already failed, though a cigarette lighter cable now powered his phone. They’d be down to that one phone in a matter of minutes. “Get back to Dispatch,” LaMoia instructed his lieutenant, slamming on the brakes and skidding the car thirty yards to within a few feet of a stop sign and a T intersection that offered either a r
ight turn to the south, or a left to the north. The quick braking pasted Boldt to the dash. Concentrating on the phone, LaMoia reported, “They’re rolling again—east, northeast. South end of Suquamish.” He pointed out the windshield to the right. “A mile or two that way.” Osbourne’s tower-tracking technology was working. Boldt called Dispatch and reported the proposed 450

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  location for the meet. The car idled smoothly at the intersection. Both men held tightly to their phones, their faces screwed down in impatience. LaMoia said something about them being “men of the millennium.”

  Boldt shushed him with a raised finger and explained to the dispatcher, “I need a look at three hundred yards in any direction. Elevations. Obstructions. Get a detective in there and pick a spot that has the best long-range rifle shot at the location I just gave you. A long-range rifle shot,” he repeated. “Right. . . . Right. . . .” Boldt began to sketch a slightly crooked finger onto a blank page of his notebook. It angled thinly to the right. He marked an X to the left of the middle knuckle. “Fastest route from here?” he asked. A fraction of a second later he pointed north, and LaMoia left two plumes of steam and black-rubber smoke behind the vehicle as it jumped through the turn. “I’ll hold,” Boldt said. He didn’t mean the dash, but he held to that too. He cautioned LaMoia, “You’ve got to keep them reporting their movement. If you step on it,” he said, indicating his crudely drawn map, “we beat them to the drop an hour before he expects to see us.”

  “And we get the jump on him,” LaMoia said gleefully.

  “Maybe,” Boldt said, grabbing for the dash as they skidded through the next turn, the burning rubber crying out its complaint.

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  “You need to focus on what Davie would think of all this,” Daphne advised.

  “I warned you to shut up!” he reminded angrily.

  “Yes, you did. It’s true. And maybe I’m just delirious from blood loss,” she suggested, “but I want to help you if I can.”

  “Fuck you.”

  She said, “Does the name Maria Sanchez mean anything to you?”

  “I seen the news,” he said.

  “Was that you? The Sanchez place?”