Middle of Nowhere

by Ridley Pearson

  He scoffed. “Cops are all the same. If it’s easy, then that’s your man.”

  “What if they’d put this on Davie?”

  “Davie didn’t have nothing to do with it!”

  “But you did?”

  “According to the news.”

  “I’m asking you,” she said. “I’m trying to tell you that that’s the primary reason we wanted to collar you: Sanchez. We need answers. I’ve gotta believe,” she said, trying her best to keep her brain functioning, to use vernacular capable of establishing a rapport, “that Davie 452

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  wouldn’t want you going down for something you didn’t do.”

  “You don’t know nothing about Davie. What he did for me.”

  He didn’t complete the thought, but Daphne’s mind raced ahead looking for answers. “What he did for me. . . .” Suddenly she saw it, she understood what he was talking about. Psychologically, it changed everything. Davie was a martyr. She said to Flek, “The robbery he went down for, he confessed to. . . . It was yours. He let slip about a delivery coming into the store, and you pounced. But you were about to get caught. Sitting on two convictions, with a third looming, you’re fifteen to twenty without parole. Three strikes. And so Davie takes the fall for you, and big brother picks up bags and splits for Seattle.” It was Flek who suddenly looked wounded. “But big brother can’t leave well enough alone. He hears about little brother’s work in the private commerce program—a program his brother has qualified for because he’s such a model prisoner—and here comes another scam, and little brother can’t say no.”

  Flek glanced over at her with a look of crestfallen failure. The truth could soothe, or the truth could aggravate, and Daphne had taken a huge chance trying it out on him, but for the first time since climbing into this car in the belly of the ferry, she felt progress. She just wasn’t sure she could retain consciousness long enough to take advantage of it.

  “We couldn’t find any record of Davie having M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  worked the phone solicitation on Sanchez. All your other burglaries were on his list. That is why we wanted to question you, Abby. Granted, our Burglary division would have heralded the arrest. You’d have gone away for five to twelve. But we’re overcrowded, and with the crime being nonviolent, you’d be out in two. But breaking the neck of a policewoman and kidnapping another? You want to think about that for a minute?”

  “That’s a bullshit charge, and you know it.”

  “The kidnapping?” asked the hostage.

  “Sanchez,” he said.

  “Do you have an alibi?”

  “What if I do?”

  “Then I shot myself in the foot. It’s my gun—it’ll fit. It happens more often than you think.” She added,

  “Besides, I’m a woman. None of these guys think a woman can handle a sidearm.”

  “You’d lie through your teeth to save yourself right now.”

  “You’re missing the point, Abby. What would Davie want you to do? That’s got to be your focus. You want his name linked to this assault? Does he deserve that? He was a good kid, Davie was. He stepped up when others would have walked away. But now you’re dragging him through it, and there’s nothing he can do about it. But you—”

  “Shut up!”

  “He’s dead,” she said bluntly, knowing this was the button that had set him off. “He’s dead and gone, all through a string of mistakes. Your mistakes, Abby. And 454

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  if he’s looking down right now, then his soul is tortured. Is that what you want? Did he take the fall for you to have it end up like this? Him dead. You a cop killer?”

  She let this sink in. “That’s what you have in mind, isn’t it? Kill Boldt. Or me? Or both of us? Put the blame onto Boldt instead of yourself? Do you see that’s all you’re doing? Do you realize it won’t do anything to take away the voices?”

  He snapped his head toward her as if she’d poured salt on a wound.

  “You hear voices. They started right after your brother’s death.” She said, “You think they’re bad now? You’ve never killed a man, have you, Abby? It’s not something you forget. It’s not something you walk away from and all is forgiven. You blame Boldt for Ansel—

  but you’ve got that wrong.”

  His eyes burned into her as he turned the car right onto a street marked Sid Price. A damp and dark narrow lane. Enormous trees. Close quarters. She couldn’t be sure he’d even heard her.

  He drove down a small dirt track, a dead-end driveway that led down to a muddy patch of lawn and a boat launch into Miller Bay. The narrow waterway was only fifty yards wide at this point. Flek parked the car up from the boat ramp. He lowered both windows, shut off the car and turned off the lights. Daphne could smell the low tide and mud flats. It smelled like death.

  “Don’t do this,” she pleaded. “I can still get you out of most of this. But if you go through with it. . . .”

  Paying little attention to her, he leaned over awk-M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E 455

  wardly and reached under the seat and worked to untwist some hidden wire. If she was to have a chance to fight back, it was then, with his head lowered. But she couldn’t summon the strength, nor the courage. She could barely keep herself conscious. She had lost great quantities of blood. Perhaps she was dying. She had heard Flek mention one hour and she no longer believed she could or would make it that long, certainly not conscious.

  “Please,” she said.

  He sat up, the Chinese assault rifle in hand. The German scope. He had wired it high under the seat, so that even a thorough check under the seat by a traffic cop might not have revealed it. He said, “Cops lie, lady. They lie about me doing that other woman, and now you lie to save your ass. They’ll lie about anything, if it makes their job easier.”

  He sought out the oily rag and gagged her again, a man going about his business. He turned on the car’s interior light and met eyes with Daphne. “If I get Boldt, I’ll spare you. If I don’t, it’s you who’s gonna pay. Say your prayers.” Then he was gone, down toward the water, the rain and the darkness absorbing him.

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  “Gaynes says the signals have stopped moving,”

  LaMoia reported.

  “Then that was them,” Boldt said, his attention fixed on the entrance to the street marked Sid Price. The Crown Vic was parked down a muddy lane, called Quail, from which they had an unobstructed view across Miller Bay Road. A big monster of a car had turned through the rain only a few minutes before, its taillights receding. LaMoia had guessed it was an Eldorado.

  “Shit, Sarge,” LaMoia complained. “He could lay in wait for you anywhere down there. We gotta rethink this.”

  “We’re at least a half hour ahead of when he expects us,” Boldt reminded. “That’s in our favor. We need to move while it still means something.”

  “We may have the jump on him, but he’s got the sniper’s rifle. Our peashooters are good at ten to thirty feet, Sarge. He’s dead on the money at two hundred yards.”

  “We had his sight recalibrated,” Boldt informed the man, who knew so little of the investigation to this point. “He wanted a hundred and fifty yards. Manny Wong gave him seventy-five.”

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  “No shit? And you’re counting on that? What are you smoking? If he’s tried the thing out on a range—

  which you can bet your ass he has—then everything’s back on target. I wouldn’t put a hell of a lot of faith in this guy missing, Sarge. I’d be thinking about shooting him first. That usually has the more desired effect.”

  “His first shot will miss,” Boldt said confidently. “You have to hit him before he throws that second shot.”

  “Me and who else?” LaMoia complained. “I got me a peashooter here. I got to know where he is if I’m to be useful. And I won’t know until after that first shot.
”

  Boldt cupped his penlight so the light barely shone down onto his open notebook, but it was enough to see by. He had sketched in the information provided by Dispatch and analyzed by Patrick Mulwright, head of Special Ops, who volunteered to help out. Intelligence, a division where Boldt had been lieutenant for a year, provided high-resolution military satellite images of Miller Bay. Within fifteen minutes of Boldt’s request, Mulwright had come back to him with three likely sniper points: rooftops; either of two high-tension electric towers that strung four hundred thousand volts suspended across Miller Bay; and a marina, directly across the water.

  Boldt and LaMoia ruled out the nearby rooftops. Shooting a cop from the roof of a neighborhood house left too great a possibility of witnesses.

  “It’s one of the two towers,” LaMoia said confidently.

  “Across the water,” Boldt added. “It gives him the 458

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  distance for the scope, and the water gives a natural break to slow down or prevent any pursuit on our part. He escapes while we’re attempting to catch up.”

  “And what,” LaMoia asked skeptically, “he goes on foot from there?”

  “Osbourne confirmed he’d been over here at least twice. He could have anything planned. He could have friends on the reservation. He could have left a car or a bike for himself.”

  LaMoia agreed. “That tower over there makes sense.”

  “So you take the car,” Boldt said. “I’m on foot.” He had rearranged the vest to sit beneath his sport coat, his weapon at the ready.

  “The advantage of the towers,” LaMoia said, pointing out through the windshield, “is that he can see over the houses. He can see us if he’s looking.” Boldt quit the flashlight. “Not that he’s up there yet. But he could be any minute now.”

  “He can see you coming,” Boldt warned. “And if he does, he’ll take out Daffy. If he can’t get me, he’ll take her.”

  “Now you’re getting the point,” LaMoia fired back.

  “And he wants you coming alone. He’ll want to see a car drive up with one person inside. If there’s backup, he’ll see it.”

  “But I’ve still got that half hour.”

  Faint light from cars passing out on the main road cast enough light for LaMoia to trace a finger across M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  Boldt’s notepad. Boldt could now clearly understand the man’s awkward speech patterns caused by his wired jaw. “You drop me over here. Right now. Believing he’ll be facing this direction, I come up from behind. You drive back and park someplace with no view of either tower. You give me a good ten minutes because you’re right: I’m a little slow. You can’t scout it, Sarge, as much as you want to. He could see you. Even now, he could see you, and that blows it for Matthews. Who knows what he has planned for her? Maybe the car’s rigged. Maybe the first bullet is meant for her if he smells a double-cross. At the appointed time, you drive in and see what you see. If my phone worked, I could call you, but it doesn’t, so we do this blind.” He added, “You hear a couple guys throwing shots, you’ll know I’m onto something.”

  Boldt wouldn’t give up. He didn’t want to drive into the drop blind. Protecting Daphne meant knowing the layout. He wanted a first look. Pointing to his crude map, he said, “I could make for this tower now, after I drop you off, and at least provide cover if he spots you—”

  “As if you could hit him at that distance.”

  “He doesn’t know what I’m shooting,” Boldt protested. “Providing there aren’t any shots thrown, then there’d be plenty of time for me to still arrive by car. If Mulwright described this right, this closer tower is far enough above the drop site that it wouldn’t really be in the direction he’s facing.”

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  LaMoia didn’t like it, but he said, “Okay, so I agree. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear,” Boldt agreed. M

  Boldt dropped LaMoia on a dead-end lane on the opposite side of Miller Bay, about a half mile from the high-voltage tower and the flashing red light that topped it. He crossed back to the west side and parked the car well off Miller Bay Road where it could not be seen by passing traffic.

  He crouched as he walked through the tall grasses and marsh plants, the high-voltage tower dominating his view. It rose a hundred feet or more on four interlaced steel legs, looking like an incomplete version of the Eiffel Tower, its four outreaching struts supporting six high-voltage lines, each the thickness of a man’s forearm, that drooped lazily before rising again to the tower on the opposite shore. The sign hung on the chain link fence surrounding its base warned of the lethal electricity, punctuating its message with yellow lightning bolts. Boldt climbed over the fence and dropped to the other side, arching his back to look up and take in the enormity of the tower and the gray night sky that cried down its rain.

  The metal was wet and slick, and just the thought of water and electricity turned his stomach as he made a strong jump to reach the first of the steel ladder rungs welded to the westernmost corner. He pulled himself up, slipped, dangled, and tried again, his rubber-soled M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  shoes finally finding purchase. A moment later he started to climb.

  The Eldorado had been parked on a muddy patch of grass facing the water, its dim interior light revealing what appeared to be a single figure on the passenger side of the car. It was too far for him to see if it was her, but he sensed it was. His chest knotted. His eyes stung. The car was perhaps a hundred yards south of the tower, the nearest home up a rise forty or fifty yards west. A concrete boat ramp led down to the water immediately in front of the Eldorado. The inlet was narrow at this point—no more than twenty or thirty yards across—shaped like a crooked finger, with Boldt at the knuckle as it gently pointed east.

  He looked for LaMoia across the narrow body of water, but did not see him. He studied the opposing tower, silvery black in the night rain, knowing now how a person would ascend and looking there, on any of the rising legs, for a human silhouette or similar pattern that did not belong.

  He felt Daphne in Flek’s crosshairs, if for no other reason than the man would be using the rifle’s scope to sight the opposing shore as he anticipated Boldt’s arrival. He hoped that scope might also commit Flek to tunnel vision, focused so intently on the car and his hostage that he might fail to fully take in the surroundings. Boldt climbed higher, and higher yet. M

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  Ten minutes passed, the weather vacillating between a light drizzle and a moderate downpour. Boldt, chilled and soaking wet, imagined LaMoia and Flek as equally miserable. A half moon briefly appeared, turning the unseen, invisible night rain into a shimmering curtain of silver wire, extinguished a moment later by a low rushing cloud and more drizzle. Perched as he was, remaining quite still, Boldt finally discerned movement to the left of the opposing tower as LaMoia emerged from marshland and waited, stone still.

  After several agonizing minutes, LaMoia moved again, keeping toward water’s edge. He reached the base of the tower, hesitating only briefly before moving on, and thereby signaling his lieutenant that the tower was empty. He approached the boatyard on the opposite shore. Boldt took his eye off the man long enough to sweep his surroundings—the rooftops, the main road, and some of the houses beyond. His next thought sent a shudder of panic through him: What if Flek was hiding in the trunk, waiting for Boldt to step up to the car? What if he didn’t trust himself at two hundred yards, and wanted only a few feet instead? What if the person in the passenger seat was Flek himself and Daphne had been left in some situation where she would perish if not saved, and would not be saved unless Flek was successful? His panic mounting, Boldt began to descend the tower’s treacherous steel ladder. He wanted to get closer to that car.

  The first reports of gunfire—a series of quick, dull M I D D L E O F N O W H E R
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  pops—barely reached across the water, muted by the wind and falling rain. Boldt lifted his head and concentration away from the next descending ladder rung to see several more soft yellow flashes followed a moment later by the echo of the more slowly traveling report. The shots briefly illuminated the boatyard as a mosaic of geometric shapes, silhouettes of masts and daggerlike keels. Some of the shots had come from Boldt’s left—

  LaMoia, he figured—the rest, quite a volley of shots, from high up on the deck of one of the dry-docked boats: Flek.

  By the time Boldt had his weapon in hand, there was near total silence. He knew there was no point in making any attempt at cover shots, no point in revealing his position. He hurried down the ladder at a brisker pace. To Boldt’s right came the clunking, soft metallic sound of shots landing in the body of the car. Flek was shooting for Daphne. The shots had fallen low. The next shot took out the windshield of the Eldorado. Boldt hurried his descent, now taking two rungs at a time. He squeezed off three quick shots out over the water, hoping to distract Flek.

  He saw the white of a muzzle flash and knew from the color that the barrel was now trained on him. He heard a shot whiz by, ripping its way through the falling rain. Flek’s scope was giving him trouble. Two more dull pops from the left. LaMoia had sneaked closer to his target.

  Flek returned a volley of high-powered rifle shots at LaMoia, the bullets chewing into boats. And then all at 464

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  once, the tiny figure of a man jumped from a boat and ran for water’s edge, carelessly spraying a few bullets behind him in hopes of keeping LaMoia low. Flek splashed into the water, keeping his weapon held high, and walked the mud bottom, making straight for the opposite shore. The Eldorado.

  Daphne.

  The cornered animal, pressured by LaMoia’s deadly proximity, had reacted and was heading to the nest to finish the job. Heading away, making his opponent’s handguns even less effective.

  Feeling the heat of LaMoia’s firepower, Flek had fled to the cover of water, offering only the smallest of targets as he swam.