“Where are the others?” I said. “Guards?”
“Coming,” Rake said.
We snaked down the hallway. There was a rush of footsteps behind us and then the soft clatter of Rake’s submachine gun.
“Scratch two,” he said.
We were kicking their asses and we didn’t have far to go. I keyed my radio and said, “Ryan, Sarah, bring the vehicles up the driveway now.”
There was no response.
We rounded the corner into the big living room and they were there waiting.
Miss Emerald.
Wollheim.
Armando and Petey and Leroy.
And Ryan and Sarah, huddled together on the floor.
As we raised our weapons, Armando racked the slide of his shotgun and pointed it at Ryan and Sarah.
“Hey, maricon!” Armando said, a huge smile on his face. “You brought your friends. And you found the little bitch, too.” He nudged Sarah with the shotgun muzzle. “I found me one, too. Sitting by the side of the road, so pretty. I’m going to have fun with her.”
Ryan shoved the muzzle away and Armando butt stroked him without a pause. Blood started from Ryan’s nose.
“Don’t you move, little man,” Armando said. “I’ll put your brains on the wall.”
Rage grew in me and I leveled my rifle at Armando. “You want to die?”
Armando stepped back and kept the shotgun on Ryan and Sarah. “You want to bet I can kill them before you kill me?”
Petey and Leroy pointed pistols at us. Rake and Marcos had moved up on line beside me, the prisoners behind our backs. I pointed my rifle at Miss Emerald.
“They die, you die, we all die,” I said. “I’m crazy, what the fuck do I care?”
“That’s right, motherfuckers,” Marcos said. “We’re all crazy.”
Luella whimpered in fear.
“So we have a stand off,” Miss Emerald said. There was no fear in her voice. “You truly are a piece of work, Frank. More than I had imagined. And you brought your friends.” She pointed at Ryan and Sarah. “Did you bring these two for me? I can’t imagine that you’d think they’d be of use to you here. Your thinking is flawed, Frank. It’s your sentimental nature. You’re so predictable. I knew you’d be back. You wouldn’t leave it alone, you wouldn’t leave poor little Luella here. We were waiting for you, though you surprised us by being so fast. And surprise of surprises, you brought your little family of friends with you. So what do we do now, Frank?”
“Get out of my way,” I said.
“No, Frank,” she said. “I have more security on the way. They’re not going to be happy with you for killing so many of their friends. So violent, Frank. I’d thought you’d be more discreet.”
I took up the slack in my trigger.
“Is it worth it, Frank?” she said. “Is it worth it, to kill me only to see these two children die in front of you, and then the rest of your friends? You may kill me. But maybe you’ll have to live with the memory of your failure. Can you live with that?”
“You want to play?” I said. “Let’s do that. What’s it worth to you? Is it worth playing the game to die playing it? You and the Man, you’re dead.”
Wollheim was terrified and not hiding it. “Let them go! Get them out of here!
“Shut up, Manfred,” Miss Emerald said. “I know Frank better than you do. He’d never let this go. Frank has his teeth into us now. Nothing less than blood, right, Frank?”
Nothing less than blood. That much was right. I had my rifle shouldered and my sights aligned on her head. She had a faint smile. No fear. Only curiosity, and the almost sexual excitement of wondering what would come next. I thought of how many lives she’d tarred with her touch. Deep in my chest I felt where she’d touched me. A dark place made darker.
She reached into her trousers pocket and pulled out a small shiny automatic pistol and pointed it at me. “Shall we play?”
Armando laughed out loud.
Rake made a peculiar sound. His eyes glazed over and the muzzle of his submachine gun wavered. Miss Emerald tilted her head and turned suddenly to Wollheim.
“What did you say?” she said.
“Now,” Rake whispered.
I shot Miss Emerald in the head at the same time Marcos put a burst of automatic fire into Armando’s chest. Petey and Leroy fired at us. I shot Wollheim with a quick double tap to his chest. A pistol bullet scored my leg. I heard a cry behind me. When they were all down, I turned to look. Luella clutched her arm. A dark spot swelled on the sleeve of her dress.
“Move, move, move!” I said.
I grabbed Luella. It was only a graze, but her eyes were already rolling with shock. Ryan and Sarah scrambled to their feet.
“Where are the vans!” I said.
Ryan wrapped one arm around Sarah. “In the driveway.”
“Keys?”
“In the ignition.”
We went out the front door, all my people ringed with warriors and steel, Rake and Marcos and I, even Ryan, who plucked a pistol up and held it ready. We loaded into the vans, put Ryan on one wheel and Marcos on the other.
Then we raced away into the dark.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
i.
It was another crowd in my front room, with a new addition – Elena. She held the sleeping toddler on her lap. Luella Pound huddled in an armchair, a blanket round her shoulders, her eyes red and glazed, rolling fearfully. Sarah stood beside her, one hand on the pregnant girl’s shoulder. Ryan stood beside her, his pistol concealed beneath his T-shirt, protectiveness oozing from every pore.
“I’ll do what I can, Frank,” Elena said.
“You can take care of these people,” Marcos said. “You don’t have to tell anybody how they came to you.”
“I can’t be party to a crime, Marcos,” Elena said.
“You don’t know that a crime was committed, Elena,” I said. “All we’re asking is that you do what you do. Take care of the wounded. There won’t be any come back to you.”
She favored me with a slow smile while she slowly rocked the sleeping toddler. “You’re a walking contradiction, Frank Lovelady. Yes. I’ll take care of them. All of them. Luella will need to go to the hospital so we can see to her baby. Cyrus can stay with us and the baby…we’ll need to make special arrangements for him.” She stroked the sleeping boy’s forehead.
“We need to do this now,” Rake said.
“I can take them,” Elena said. “You’ll have to drive them over…can you do that?”
“I’ll do it,” Rake said.
He waited till Elena went out, and her lost ones followed her. Luella Pound took off her blanket and handed it to Sarah.
“Thank you,” Luella said. “All of you.”
“We’ll talk again soon,” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Lovelady,” she said.
“Call me Frank,” I said. “All my friends do.”
ii.
As Rake had predicted, Spenser showed up the next day. He came alone and knocked on the door. When I opened it, he stood there without speaking for a long moment. He had a small package under his arm.
Finally he said, “May I come in?”
“Sure, Spenser,” I said. “You’re always welcome.”
I led him into the front room.
“Why are you limping?” he said.
“Hurt my leg mountain biking.”
“You mountain bike?”
“A little. On the trails down by the river, and over by Cedar Lake.”
“You got a lot of interests, Lovelady.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do. You want something to drink?”
“Cold water or a pop, you got some.”
I brought him a bottle of spring water. He sat on the couch, kicked his legs out and crossed his ankles. He set the package down on the side table.
“Not much of you in this place,” he said, sipping water.
“What do you mean?”
“Most people, they got pictures of their families,
souvenirs, trinkets. You’ve got nothing. Anybody could live here.”
“I like to keep things simple.”
“I bet you do.” He sipped more water. “What would I find if I searched this place, Lovelady?”
“Not much,” I said. “What are you looking for? You could just ask, you know.”
“That’s a laugh. Asking you a direct question is like yelling down a well. It all goes in and nothing comes out.”
“Nice metaphor.”
“You sound like a writer.” He toyed with the water bottle. “What would you say if I told you that Manfred Wollheim and Miss Emerald were dead?”
“I’d say I was shocked by the news. And then I’d say good riddance.”
“I thought you’d say that.”
“What’s the story?”
“Hastings Police got a phone call from a cell phone belonging to an Armando Reyes, who was employed by Miss Emerald. Caller didn’t identify himself, and his voice was so muffled we can’t get a good voice print off it. Said there was an emergency out at Emerald’s property, that farm estate we talked about the other day. Hastings PD goes out there and finds a bunch of dead bodies, our friends Wollheim and Emerald among them. They search the house and they find a torture chamber, an auditorium, and a bank of video tapes showing the sexual abuse, torture and murder of a number of missing people. There was evidence that there had been children in there.”
He studied my face carefully before he went on.
“There were a series of cells, just like a jail, in the middle of the house. Three of those cell doors had been blown off with military explosives. There was a ton of casings from military type weapons. Somebody went in and rescued some people and killed everybody who got in their way.”
He paused.
“You know anything about that, Lovelady?”
“Not me,” I said. “Guns scare me.”
“What about knives?”
“I don’t care for them either.”
“Funny you would say that.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out an Spyderco Military-Police and flicked open the blade. “You ever see this knife?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s funny. I saw you had one clipped to your pants a week or so ago, when we had a little talk. Just like this.”
“Maybe you made a mistake.”
“I don’t make mistakes like that, Lovelady.”
He closed the knife and held it in his fist. “There’s probably thousands of knives like this, aren’t there? This one came off a body in that house.”
“Interesting.”
“You know, there were horrible things on those tapes. I’ve never seen anything like that, and I’ve seen plenty in my time. They were selling them on the Internet. There was a computer room with state of the art servers and high speed access lines. Downloading that hard core shit to every perv that had a way to pay for it. Wire transfers to offshore accounts. Very sophisticated. The computer forensics examiners found records of selling girls and babies. Kids. Runaways, or maybe they just stole them. Your girl Luella Pound was on one of those tapes.”
“You saw her?”
“One of the last tapes. I’ve been running through them with the Bureau. There was a tape of her being raped on a stage.”
“Jesus.”
“The tape had something else on it, too.”
“What would that be?”
“It was raw footage, this tape. They hadn’t edited it yet. There was a close up shot of you, cuffed, in a chair. Being forced to watch.”
I didn’t say anything. What could I say?
He opened up his little package. Inside was a VHS tape. An original. He set it down on the table and placed the knife on top of it.
“I’m a man of the law, Lovelady,” he said in a conversational tone. “Always have been. You learn something out on the street. The law, it’s not always black and white. It’s chaos out there and it’s my job to impose order. Order on fucking chaos that just grows and grows. Do you believe in evil, Lovelady?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“So do I. Can’t not believe in it, you see the shit I do. Small stuff most of the time, but sometimes it gets to you just how twisted people can be. It’s always there, just under the surface. Every once in awhile it bubbles up and comes out into this nice clean neat orderly world we live in. Like that house. When I saw those tapes. And I thought, what would I do if I walked in on that?”
“What would you do?”
“There’s only so much I could do, Lovelady. I’d have to arrest them, read them their rights, bring them in. Then they’d have their damn expensive lawyers come in and work the system and you know, no matter how damning the evidence, they might get off. There wasn’t one picture of Emerald or Wollheim on those tapes. Not one. But there was a tape with you on it.”
He tapped the VHS cassette with one finger, sipped more water.
“So what are you going to do?” I said.
He shoved the tape and the knife into the center of the table. “I’ve done it. But you don’t get a walk on this, Lovelady. No matter how justified, you’re not above the law. You crossed a line, but you know what? I couldn’t prove it.”
“You might with that,” I said, pointing at the tape.
“You overestimate the legal system,” he said. “A half way decent attorney could cast reasonable doubt on the tape, given the computer enhancement and digital video equipment we found in there. And it’s a short segment.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“That’s smart, Lovelady. Deny, deny, deny. Stick to your story.”
“It’s not a story.”
He pursed his lips, drank more water. “So what do you think of Rake?”
“Seems like a nice guy.”
“He’s done some stuff for us.”
“The police?”
“Helped us find a lost child once. Eeriest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“We just bullshit about things. He doesn’t talk much about his work.”
“Like somebody else I know. Seen him lately?”
“Yeah.”
“You and Marcos are tight, aren’t you?”
“He’s a friend.”
“I saw him down at the gym. He’s working to get back in shape.”
“He was pretty rough for awhile.”
“Yeah.” Spenser sighed. He pushed the water bottle to the center of the table beside the tape and the knife, then stood up. “Make sure and keep your nose clean, Lovelady. And spare me any bullshit about what you do and don’t do. I’ve got my eye on you. There’s something wrong about you, even if you were on the side of the angels this time. I don’t think you always have been.”
He leaned over and tapped the knife. “Nice knife. Bet it’s got some history.”
I saw him to the door and watched while he got into his cruiser. He stood with the car door open.
“You ought to come down to the gym and work out,” he said. “You can tell a lot about a man’s heart, you watch him do martial arts.”
“That stuff scares me.”
He shook his head. “Fuck you, Lovelady.”
He got in his car and drove away.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
i.
It was just past ten o’clock on Friday night in Gigi’s. Max the piano player was running through Lover Man, and Gigi belted out the words. Marcos and Rake and I sat at a table together and listened while the warmth of the music washed over us.
The cocktail waitress was new, but she hovered over our table like a pro. “Get you another drink, Frank?”
“Another round for the table,” I said.
She took off for the bar, and Rake watched her go. He had a strange look on his face.
“What do you see, Rake?” I said.
He shrugged. “Bits and pieces. Happens all the time.”
“Can you shut it off?”
“I don’t want to,” he said. “It’s my world and I like it this way. It’s who I am
and it’s as natural as breathing.”
He twirled his glass in his big hands. “How are you, Frank?”
“I’m good.”
“I mean from…”
“That.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve recovered. The meds, they help.”
“You know, you have a lot of native psychic ability. It might be interesting some day, in a controlled environment, to go off your meds and see what comes to you.”
“I have a hard enough time managing this reality without another one intruding on top of it,” I said.
“You two freak me out,” Marcos said.
We laughed.
Gigi finished her set and came to the table. “How are you, boys?”
“Better now that you’re here,” I said.
“I love you when you’re like that, Frank,” she purred. “Mind if a lady joins you?”
We all stood while she sat down. “I love gentlemen,” she said. She signaled for a drink and the waitress brought her a Vodka Collins. She studied each of us in turn. “The knights of the round table. Have you saved any princesses lately? When do I get to hear your story?”
She smiled knowingly at the silence. “You all are closed books. You’re such good men, but you reek of violence, you know that?”
She sipped her drink. “I hate to think of you being violent.”
“You only sleep soundly because there are rough men in the world willing to do violence to protect you,” I said.
She considered that, then nodded in agreement. “I see that. Are you one of those men, Frank?”
“Yes,” Rake said. “He is.”
He tipped his glass in salute and I clinked it. Marcos and Gigi joined us. There was a long silence. Then my pager went off. I picked it up and looked at the message display.
time to go to work, frank.
THE END
Lovelady Page 22
