by Nick Thacker
But that hypothetical solution was no longer the simplest.
What if they had wanted me for something other than revenge? What if they thought I was far more involved in this whole thing, and Hannah was their bargaining chip for it?
Specifically, maybe they had no idea who had offed Hannah’s father. They knew they hadn’t done it. So perhaps they were thinking it was me? And in a way, it was me. It was my father’s work, and as messy as it had been, it was still the company that employed me. If they thought I had done it, perhaps they thought I’d moved in to take over the company myself. I watched, waited, planned, and finally attacked, hoping to nab Hannah and Daniel — the other major shareholders — later.
The impact of it hit me all at once. I was tempted to pull over and get out of the car, take in some fresh, salty sea air, and just consider it for a moment. But I wasn’t terribly excited about meeting my friends in the cars behind me, so I kept on heading north toward the turnoff for Edisto Beach.
They’d killed Daniel Rayburn, rendering his shares null and void, as far as I could tell. Maybe there was a clause that stuck his shares back into the pool upon his death, or even split it amongst the remaining shareholders. But they hadn’t been the ones to kill his father, and they likely thought it had been me, which meant they assumed I was carrying around the bulk of the stock.
So they’d grabbed Hannah, knowing that if they wanted full control of Crimson Club, they needed full control of the stock package. Which meant they needed control of me. They wanted me in person because they needed my signature, my permission, my unequivocally positive statement, legally recorded, that they, and no one else, controlled the entity called Crimson Club.
It all came together like a perfectly orchestrated symphony. The initial threads of melody, hinting at and leaning into the harmonies that would be intertwined until they became one, a stronger version of the initial story, told over and over again until the inevitable fourth-movement conclusion.
Four movements of maneuvering, tweaking, planning, and leading, until the first strains were recapitulated into a finale. Hundreds of measures of notes, building toward a climax.
But where was I in the symphony? Was I the melody — the line that would continue onward until the bleeding end? Or was I some inverted counterpart, meant to contradict and surprise the melody?
Life was rarely as simple as music, after all. I enjoyed the moment of fleeting desire for everything to just fall into place, for it all to just simply make sense like Beethoven’s Fifth or the Lacrimosa of Mozart’s Requiem. There might be a ‘grand composer’ up there, putting all the pieces in place for a fantastic rendition of life’s overture, but in my mind the maestro lacked a solid orchestrator.
I had no idea how these pieces would come together. It was equally likely I’d be able to grab Hannah and destroy everyone involved with taking her as it was likely that I’d end up splattered across the floor of her daddy’s mansion. I’d helped write the opening movements, but I wasn’t in full control of the ending.
I was still 45 minutes away, but I hoped Joey was already starting to mentally prepare himself for the challenge. The kid had done a lot for me, but this was something I’d never thought I’d have to ask. I wasn’t ever a good mathematician, especially the statistics component of it, but I figured our odds of survival hovered around zero.
I gripped the wheel and twisted up and down with both hands, turning the deep black rubber between my fingers and hands until tiny bits of old dirt rubbed off and fell to the floor. The car suddenly made me feel claustrophobic, as if all sides of the interior were pressing in and trying to squeeze the life out of me.
The cars behind me closed in, sealing the deal.
36
THE CARS FOLLOWED ME ALL the way into Edisto Beach, where just before entering the town proper one of them turned off and, I assume, went back to headquarters to debrief. The other car, a long black sedan that looked like a plain-vanilla Buick in black, kept on pursuing me. I could tell he wasn’t interested in disguising the fact that he was tailing me, as he kept behind me far enough to adjust to my fluctuations in speed, but close enough that I could see him doing it.
The hell do these guys want? I thought. I considered just pulling over and asking him — in case things turned physical, taking on one of them would be at least twice as easy as taking on two of them — but thought better of it. They were sleuthing, albeit in a not-so-subtle way. They weren’t interested in nabbing me and bringing me down for an interrogation, or they’d have already done it. Nor were they interested in eliminating me from the scene. There were a thousand rocks and trees to hide a sniper behind, and I would never have seen it coming.
So they didn’t want to kill me — yet — and they didn’t want to interrogate me — yet. That left one possibility: they didn’t know what I was doing, but they knew I was involved. How much they knew about the situation with Hannah, her brother, and their father remained to be seen, but I was confident they knew about old man Rayburn’s apparent suicide, and were snooping around his files to see if they could piece together the threads of evidence linking him to the darker sides of the Crimson Club business model.
I’d played the duck-duck-goose game with all the three-letter organizations before, so I knew how it played out. They’d poke around, looking for an obvious connection with their investigation that would provide a foray into my life and work, then they’d bring me down to their chamber for questioning. It was my policy to speak as little as possible, and only answer with single words when I could. I could play their psychological games better than they could most of the time, so I could see the bait-and-switches coming from a mile away.
It made me a bit salty during a questioning session, but I didn’t care much about their hurt feelings.
I was innocent, as far as they were concerned, unless the kid I’d had Joey fishbait after our skirmish behind the bar happened to have been a high-profile suspect, but I doubted the United States government — whichever flavor of them it was keeping an eye on me — cared about a washed-up ex-military prick who’d gotten in with the wrong crowd. They might have been interested in seeing if he had any information about his bosses, but they wouldn’t be bugging me for killing him.
So it had to be Crimson Club-related only. They thought I was involved in the big schtick, and they needed just a little bit of something or other to make it stick. Stick me to the schtick. A solid strategy, but considering I hadn’t been involved with Hannah’s father’s company, I wasn’t worried about it. Even still, I couldn’t waste time proving all of that to them — I had Hannah to worry about.
If there was one thing these acronyms were good at, it was tailing people. I wasn’t going to shake them, lose them, or discourage them, so I decided I’d do the next best thing: work with them. I grabbed the phone from my pocket and dialed the same number I’d committed to memory long ago.
“Truman,” I said the second I heard the ringing stop and the connection begin.
“You’d better have a damn good way of convincing me you were just out for a little midnight tour of Hunting Island, and nothing more.”
I chuckled. “Camping. That’s all that’s on the island anyway, I thought.”
“I warned you, Mason. Out of your league, in every way. I —“
“So it’s you? Your guys, I mean? Out here tailing me?”
“I… You know I can’t…”
“You don’t need to. No plausible deniability on this one, is there?”
“Mason, I like you better alive. But what you’re messing with is a pretty great way to get yourself dead. And I’m not sure either of us would like you like that.”
I sighed, looking out the windshield and watching the old stores and houses roll by. The beach was in sight, just over the tops of the buildings on my left. I slowed down even more to let a group of seagulls fighting over some crumbs scramble to get out of my way.
“I told you before, I’m already in it. Can’t help that, but I
want out of it as much as you do. So tell me if it’s your boys, and what they want with me.”
“Mason, you know the answer to that question. I can’t disclose that sort of information —“
“They think I did it? You think I did it?”
This time Truman sighed, a long, breathy release of air. I could almost feel the warm humidity through the tiny speaker hole on my flip phone.
“I’m not really sure what I think,” he said.
“Fine. I’ll tell you what to think. Bradley Rayburn’s dead, and if you think I did it, you’re insane. I didn’t even know who the hell the old guy was until about a day ago. And his son’s dead now, too. And they —“
“His son’s dead?” Truman interrupted. “How? What do you know about it?”
“You’ll know everything I know in a few hours, I’m sure, whenever he’s found. I needed the head start, and I didn’t want local authorities shutting me down prematurely. But if you want the same head start I had, have your grunts check out Marley’s B&B here in town. Walked in on the bloodbath personally. That’s when I found out they had Hannah.”
“They have his daughter now?”
“Christ, Truman, what do you know?” I raised my voice a little. This surprised me. I would have figured they had been a few steps ahead of me the whole time, but it seemed as though I was the one breaking all the news. “She got taken by the group that wants to take over Crimson Club, I think. They need her to sign some sort of agreement. Not sure why they can’t just forge it, or steal it anyway, but whatever. I’m not a lawyer.”
I didn’t state whether or not I thought there was a connection between Hannah’s captors and her father’s death. I figured Truman and his army already knew Bradley Rayburn’s ‘suicide’ was no suicide at all, but I didn’t want Truman thinking there was a third party involved, or that that third party was my father. Keep it simple, I reminded myself.
“So they have Hannah. And where are they holding her?”
I froze. He had used the word ‘and.’
37
IT WAS SUBTLE, BUT IT was there. The truth. Truman did know that Hannah had been taken. A gruff, to-the-point Truman would have simply run the two sentences together, excited and eager and not a little bit nervous all at the same time. It would have been an honest, truthful sentence, one that asked the question it was asking, and nothing more.
A more elusive Truman, the one I was friends with more often than not, would mask the insincere question with an attempt to pull out more information. He’d let the ‘and’ slip in there in a throwback to schoolyard accusatory insult-slinging. ‘And who do you think you are?’ or something of that sort. I pictured my mother standing on the back porch, my friends and I racing back to beat the sunset, knowing we were already beyond late. ‘And just where exactly were you?’ she would ask. Always the same lilt to the question, a half-veiled attempt to be angry at her cherished cherubim and his devious little friends.
I smiled at the memory, but I soured at the recognition that Truman was in fact a few steps ahead of me. And he had tried to hide it from me. He already knew the answer to the question he was overtly asking, but he had a deeper question he was trying to pose. He wanted to know my true involvement. Not necessarily how I’d met Hannah, and why we had started up a conversation in the first place, but how she had come to happen upon my little speakeasy in a tucked-away corner of South Carolina in the first place.
“I don’t know where they’re holding her,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Do you know what they want from her?” Truman asked.
“They want the company,” I replied, bluntly. “Crimson Club, or at least the part of it that engages in the type of work that interests you.”
“Professionally interests me, Mason.”
“Fine. Why didn’t you tell me you had guys on me?”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be snooping around the Rayburn estate?”
“Because it’s me. You knew I’d come down here, but you told me to get lost. I didn’t want to give you a play-by-play and have you ruin all the fun.” I got serious, even sitting up straighter in my seat. “Truman. You know me better than this. I’m not going to be scared off by your Bureau grunts, even if they start getting real intimate with me. I’ve handled a few of your types before, and I’ll do it again.”
“I know you have, Mason, that’s what worries me. We’ve got enough of an issue with this organization running around and murdering people without babysitting you.”
“Then don’t.”
“I have to, Mason!” Truman was nearly shouting, and the poor phone speakers could only parse the distortion on the words. The volume was compressed and smashed back down to a reasonable level and passed through into my ear. “You are going get yourself killed, or you’re going to get my guys killed. I need you to back off, and I need you to do it yesterday.”
“Where are they holding Hannah?”
“Mason, I —“
“You can’t tell me, but you can also choose not to deny it if I tell you. I’m not backing off. You’ve got red tape and other government bullshit keeping you slow and useless, and you know it. I can be in and out of there in an hour, Truman. What can your guys do in an hour? Decide which of them is going to get coffee and doughnuts during the all-night stakeout of Rayburn’s yacht?”
I was getting a little excited, but Truman needed to understand where I was coming from. “You can use me, Truman. Just give me something. Shit, give me anything.”
“I’m giving you a chance,” he said calmly. “A chance to get yourself far away from this mess of an investigation. You’re going to incriminate yourself or get yourself eliminated entirely.”
“Give me something. Please.”
“No.”
“Let me help you.”
“No.”
“I went to Rayburn’s place. Scouted the entire facility by way of a perimeter march. Slow, steady, not focusing on anything in particular, but keeping my eyes and ears open, just like you taught me.”
Silence.
I had him. Maybe. Just needed a little more pushing.
“It was just like Kuwait. You remember that? The oil magnate’s place? I wanted to run in like an idiot, guns blazing, get it over with, all that? You made me stop and pay attention. The way those guards were keeping their distance from certain spots in the road. You remember that?”
“Of course I remember that, Mason.”
“They were bombs. All over the damn road. This was the guy’s house, for crying out loud. He had kids. They’d booby-trapped the house, for ‘security.’”
“Get out of our way, Mason. I’m not going to tell you again.”
“I did the same sort of thing at this house. Real slow, real easy, just a simple loop around the house. No bombs this time, which was lucky since I was in a car. I saw a lot of folks setting up for the funeral service. Did you know it was on Sunday? Is that a normal day for funerals? I think Gloria’s was on a Sunday, wasn’t it? What about your Debbie’s? Do you even remember —“
“Dammit, Mason. Shut the hell up. You’re about to get the entirety of the US Government’s shit-stick shoved so far up your —“
“Where are they keeping Hannah?” I nearly screamed into the phone. I lifted it completely off the side of my face and yelled down into it.
“The house. You were there. That’s why we were there.”
I stopped. I breathed, once, then again. The house? The mansion I’d just visited? It had been swarming with people setting up for a massive funeral service and wake.
“The house? Rayburn’s estate?”
“We believe, anyway. Haven’t seen any suspicious activity in the last day.”
I was still shocked. I didn’t think he’d just come out and say it, even with all my pushing. And yet I certainly hadn’t thought the answer was the mansion — the same place I just got back from There was a funeral scheduled to take place at that ver
y location two days from now.
“I was just there, too. You know that. Truman, you’re not a liar, so is that really the best place that you can come up with?”
“I’m telling the truth, Mason. You asked for it, I told you. That’s where they’re keeping her. We’ve had eyes on the place since Mr. Rayburn was found in his study.”
“But how would they —“
“We don’t know, but it’s a big house. Plenty of rooms, plenty of doors. They could have snuck in any time.”
“I thought you were watching the place.”
“We were — we still are — but we don’t even know what we’re looking for. One of my agents saw a woman, about Hannah’s size, walking into the house from the west side, followed by —“
“Wait, so you don’t know if she’s there?”
“Look,” Truman said, clearly growing more and more agitated the longer he talked to me. “You wanted me to tell you what I knew, I’m telling you. We’re pretty sure she’s in the house. She’s been in the house, and hasn’t left the house.”
I flicked the mouthpiece button on the tiny phone to put Truman on speakerphone and I tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. I squeezed my eyes shut and pushed at the skin between them with a few fingers. This had just gotten worse. Truman hadn’t been withholding information from me just because he didn’t want me involved — he had been withholding information from me because he wasn’t even sure of what he knew.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I’m sorry, Mason. That’s what we know.”
“Who took her? Any names? Identity? Hell, do you even know how many there are?”
“No.”
“Dammit.”
“We’re struggling to play catch-up, here,” Truman said. “We’ve been behind on everything so far, and we’re not catching any breaks.”
