“Fourteen twenty-six cash or check. It’s getting cold.”
“It was only like twelve bucks last night.”
Winter shrugged. “Take it for twelve,” he said.
“I didn’t order it.”
“Fine. Ten then,” Winter said. “It’ll just go in the garbage.”
“What’s on it?”
“How should I know? What’d you order on it?” Winter asked, trying not to laugh. Young Click wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to eat pizza just because he didn’t order it.
“Ten bucks. And that’s tip included.”
“Sure.”
“Hang there. I’ll go get you the money.”
When Click returned, Winter heard the sound of something heavy being set down, and knew it was a gun Click was putting on a table by the door so he could open it and pay for the pizza. Winter had been right not to try and muscle his way in.
Click opened the door with the bill in his hand, looking hungrily down at the pizza box. He didn’t raise his eyes until Winter handed the box over and Click realized it was empty. When he looked up at Winter, there was mild confusion in his eyes, which changed instantly to fear when the deliveryman raised a gun and aimed it directly at Click’s chest.
Click backed up, hands still clenching the empty box. Winter entered, lifted a blue-steel revolver from the narrow table cluttered with junk mail. He opened the revolver’s chamber, tilted its barrel up, and let the rounds drop into a half-filled trash can before tossing the gun on a stack of newspapers in the corner.
“Wait a minute!” Click said. “You’re robbing me?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Do I know you?” Click’s brain was racing, trying to sort through its memory banks to figure out where he’d seen Winter before.
“Where would you know me from?” Winter asked him.
“I don’t know, but . . .” His eyes were darting back and forth between Winter’s face and the SIG. He seemed more curious than frightened. “Have we met before?”
“Maybe you remember me from the Westin this afternoon. That’s where I saw you.”
Click’s expression changed, a smile growing as he remembered. “Yeah, I saw you there. Why are you here?”
“Why were you there?”
“I was meeting an exotic dancer. She didn’t show.”
“I don’t think so, Slick,” Winter said. “I think you followed somebody there.”
“It’s Click, not Slick. No, I didn’t follow anybody anywhere.” Click sat on the arm of the recliner, tossed the box down, and crossed his skinny arms. “You’re what, FBI?”
“Why would you think that? The FBI only deals with federal crimes. You committed any of those? Extortion, auto theft, crossing state lines in the commission, Mann Act, drug trafficking, wire fraud, insurance fraud, spying, credit card scams?”
“No.” Click’s smile widened.
“Who did you follow to the Westin, Click? Or should I call you Ferny Ernest?”
“You don’t have a warrant, do you?”
“Why would I need a warrant?”
“To come in here.”
“You opened the door to me.”
“I know the law. You forced your way in by pointing a gun at me.”
“Knowing your rights will come in real handy when the cops ask if you understand your rights.”
“You know who my lawyer is?” Click blustered.
“It’s probably Ross Laughlin. Your father’s lawyer and crime boss or partner, depending on who you ask.”
The smile melted. Click was trying not to look worried, and he wasn’t terrible at it.
“Answer my original question,” Winter said. “Who were you following? And by the way, I already know the answer.”
“Who was I following?”
“Judge Fondren.”
A sudden tic almost closed Click’s right eye.
“I don’t even know who that is.”
“You know very well who he is. And you know his daughter and her baby were kidnapped, because members of your family did it at your father’s direction. That’s why you were following the judge, and that’s why you thought I might be with the FBI.”
“That’s crazy. My father is a legitimate businessman.”
“Kidnapping’s a federal crime that carries the death penalty for everybody involved in the conspiracy . . . if the Dockerys are murdered. If they aren’t, it could be probation for somebody who was only following a federal judge around and calling in that information to others. There’s always phone records, positioning locators on cell towers, voice-pattern identification, surveillance cameras, and wiretaps all together pinpointing who did what to whom and where.”
“Arrest me then,” Click challenged, smiling again. “You got proof, take me in. I know my rights.”
“Arrest you? You aren’t listening to me. I am not a cop or an FBI agent. I couldn’t arrest you if I wanted to. You’re missing the whole point.”
“What is the point?”
“I don’t have a badge, so you don’t have any rights. If you tell me where the Dockerys are, you’ll live. If you don’t, I’m going to move straight up the Smoot family tree, clipping off every diseased limb I come to until one of your kinfolk is smart enough to tell me.”
“You don’t scare me.”
“I know you’ve been threatened by people with guns before.”
“I sure have.”
“You think Sarnov would have shot you if you hadn’t gone belly-up and agreed to join up with his firm?”
This tic fully closed Click’s eye.
“Not fifteen minutes ago, Serge Sarnov sat right there on the couch and said that your family abducted the Dockerys and that they are going to kill them. I have it on audio and video tape.”
“Why would something some Russian I never laid eyes on before says to me mean anything? The man broke into my house.”
“I’m going to ask you nicely where Lucy Dockery and her boy are, and you’re going to tell me. If they are where you say, I’ll turn you loose. If they aren’t, I’m going to ask again, but not nicely.”
Something flickered beyond Click’s right shoulder. Max Randall’s illuminated face seemed to be floating out in the darkness. As a gun rose to Randall’s shoulder, Winter kicked out, sweeping Click’s feet out from under him and falling to the floor as he did so.
There was a flash outside.
The window shattered and large fragments of glass blew into the room and showered the two prone figures.
Winter knew immediately that the weapon was an MP5-SD. There’d been a total lack of sound except for the thuds of the rounds punching through Sheetrock and the high-pitched whines of the ricocheting subsonic 9mm rounds. Grabbing Click’s ankle, he dragged the skinny young man into the hallway. As he pulled the boy, a second shooter opened up and the recliner spewed chunks of cotton and foam rubber as rounds chewed into it.
One of the shooters whistled, and Winter heard their feet as they fled across the stone patio.
“Want to live, don’t move a muscle,” Winter ordered, and got to his feet.
Gun in hand, Winter vaulted through the empty window frame and sprinted around the house in the opposite direction the assailants had taken, figuring they might be lying in ambush around the corner.
As he rounded Click’s house, Winter saw their running shapes and aimed at them, but there were too many houses behind the fast-moving men, and he didn’t want the immediate attention that firing a gun in this neighborhood would bring. The two shooters jumped into an SUV parked half a block away. It roared off, leaving Winter standing on the sidewalk in front of Click’s house, pelted by the rain.
He remembered Click’s Smith & Wesson and the rounds in the trash can. “Christ,” he mumbled and ran back toward the house, praying he wouldn’t have to kill the kid, or take a round in his chest for losing track of the fact that Click was the enemy.
The front door was standing wide open, and Winter knew he hadn’
t left it that way. He’d been flanked.
45
“Oh my God,” Click pleaded, “don’t shoot me! Please, please . . .”
Winter turned the corner and aimed at the back of the person who stood aiming a gun down at Click’s upturned face. The young man lay on the hallway floor on his back. In one hand he held the unloaded Smith, and in the open palm of the other, a pair of bullets. Click had been stopped from loading the handgun by the unblinking eye of a large-bore FBI-issued Glock.
“Shoot her!” Click yelled when he spotted Winter.
“I thought you left,” Winter said, putting his SIG in its holster.
“Did you see who did this?” Alexa asked.
“One was Max Randall. The other shooter was too large to be Sarnov.”
Alexa snatched Click’s gun away from him, slipping her own into her shoulder bag. She looked into the den and shook her head slowly. “What the hell were they using?”
“Where did you come from?”
“I found your truck empty and I was standing at the front door when I heard glass breaking. I came in and found Ferny Ernest here loading his piece.”
“A pair of MP5s firing subsonic rounds, noise suppressors. That the sort of weapons the good colonel was dealing?”
Alexa nodded.
“So, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I had an epiphany. I doubled back.”
“I didn’t see your car on the street.”
“Parked on the next street and cut through the Lathams’.”
“What was this epiphany?”
“I figured you planned to do something insane and that I should be with you so I’d know what you didn’t do in case I’m ever asked officially. I thought about what you said about this guy’s value weighed against the Dockerys’ lives.” She winked at Winter and smiled. “You were right. I was wrong. This is new territory for me.”
“It was Max Randall?” Click asked, from the floor.
Winter nodded. “Yes, Click, I saw his face clearly.”
“Why would he shoot me?”
“I’d bet he came back to cancel the job offer Sarnov extended to you earlier this evening.”
“Why would he do that?” Click demanded.
“Because Sarnov as much as told you that he was planning to wipe your family out, and Max probably decided it was too much information too soon. He knows nothing you can do with a computer is unique enough to jeopardize his ass after Bryce is free.”
Click said, “You saved me—so I know you aren’t going to hurt me.”
Alexa laughed and shook her head slowly. “Boy, for a genius, you do not know Shinola.”
46
Winter Massey looked in his rearview mirror at Alexa’s headlights, and then beside him at sulking Click’s profile. Being almost killed had a sobering effect on people lucky enough to be able to remember it after the fact. Click was still wearing his red-and-blue plaid flannel robe over his T-shirt and boxers. The athletic sock on his right foot was bunched around his ankle like a badge of defeat.
“Your girlfriend was going to kill me,” Click said.
“You were trying to load your gun. If you had, I would have killed you. What are you bitching about? You’re murdering a young mother and her child.”
“You have children?” Click asked.
“No,” Winter lied.
“Married?”
“No.”
“Girlfriend?”
He shook his head.
“Gay?”
“Don’t talk to me unless you’re ready to tell me where the Dockerys are.”
“Why?”
“You really want to know?”
“Du-uh,” Click said. “I wasn’t asking so I could smell your breath.”
“I don’t want anything personal about this. It’s business. I intend to keep your family from killing two innocent people, and I am willing to do whatever I have to do. I don’t want to remember you as a real person because it might make me feel bad about what I had to do to you.”
“I was just making conversation.” Click looked at the road ahead, sullen. “I mean, somebody saves your life, keeps their girlfriend from killing you, and plans to torture you, you have to wonder about them.”
“I didn’t save you because I like you or give a damn if they kill you. I did it because I want to find out what you know. You’re just a map to me. Whatever happens to you depends on how it affects my route to find the Dockerys.”
“I can’t help you hurt my family.”
“You’re not like them. They’re killers, you’re not.”
“They might be what you say they are, but they’ll be around a long time after you’re dead. I’m no Judas.”
“If they murder the Dockerys, I’ll make sure you spend the next thirty years in prison without access to computers.”
“Smoot blood goes back hundreds of years. Our ancestors came here from England. No Smoot has ever ratted out another one.”
Winter figured the first Smoots came kicking and screaming, clapped in irons, straight from the bowels of some British penal institution.
“One way or the other, you’re going to tell me where the Dockerys are. That, Click, is a dead-certain fact.”
“You can’t make me tell you anything.”
Winter smiled.
“I bet you’ve never beaten anybody up or tortured them before. You don’t have the eyes for it. You didn’t even shoot back at Randall.”
“No need to make a racket that would have brought the cops.”
Click reached down, opened his robe, and pulled up the T-shirt. Even in the dimly lit cab, Click’s torso looked like Jackson Pollock had created a masterpiece on the young man’s canvas of skin by using a variety of blades and red-hot objects to get the desired effect.
He sneered. “Do anything you want to me. We have this family tradition that gets passed down from father to son. You can burn me with cigarettes, break bones, pull out my fingernails, or carve me up like a Thanksgiving turkey and all you’ll get for your trouble is your own sweat.” Click dropped his shirt and closed his robe. He said offhandedly, “Whatever you can do, I’ve already had. You might as well just shoot me and go on about your snooping business without wasting any more time than you already have.”
Winter thought about a man who would do such a thing to his own child. He thought then about his own son and his infant daughter, and deep inside he was on fire.
He intended to find Lucy and Elijah, but after he did, he wanted to kill Peanut Smoot.
Maybe Click truly believed he wasn’t going to rat out his father, but Winter knew differently.
47
The sign that had been suspended from a bar between the brick columns had been taken down. As a precaution Winter handcuffed Click’s wrists behind him before he got out of the truck. He opened the padlock and swung open the steel pole that stretched, from hedgerow to hedgerow, across the asphalt driveway. The No Trespassing signs on either post glowed in the headlights. Winter watched Alexa drive through, took his truck in, then locked the gate.
The parking lot had been cut into the side of a hill studded with pine trees. The building at the base of the hill stood on a flat beyond a rock-walled stream. Its dark roof, accented by pools of rainwater, looked every bit as large as a football field.
“What is this place?” Click asked.
“Isolated,” Winter said.
Winter led Click and Alexa down a long run of wide stone steps, across a wooden bridge over a rushing brook. The slopes and flower beds were buried under a carpet of rust-colored pine needles. A motion-sensitive light came on, illuminating the walkway and the front of the structure. The trio crossed an expanse of concrete, beneath a cantilevered awning, to arrive at a set of glass doors. Streaks of adhesive were evidence of logo graphics that had been removed from the inside of the glass at some point with a razor. Subtle lighting from a fixture over the reception counter, which was faced with wood veneer, allowed the arrivals a view
of a lobby that had been stripped of all other furniture. Winter took his keys from his jacket and, isolating one, used it to unlock the door. As he ushered the others inside, a rhythmic beeping filled the space.
“What is this place?” Click asked again, sounding like a curious tourist.
Winter strode behind the reception counter and, using another key, opened a steel box and typed in the numbers to disarm the alarm system. He removed an odd-shaped key that hung inside the alarm box and came back around the counter.
Winter gripped Click’s arm and led him roughly through a door, into utter darkness.
“No!” Click screamed, whirling in the dark. Winter pressed him against the wall with his left hand while he located and flipped a switch. The lights in the wide hallway came on.
When Click yelled, Alexa had pulled her gun, and the lights caught her crouched with her back against the wall, aiming at Winter and Click. She blinked, frowned, straightened, and put her gun back in her handbag.
Click’s face had lost all its color and was twisted into a mask of horror.
They walked fifty yards to a steel door. Winter unlocked it and pushed Click into a narrower hallway, where four very solid doors ran along one wall. Each door had an eye-level, sliding peep panel. Winter unlocked the first door.
“This a jail?” Click said.
Winter hit the light switch on the wall beside the door, illuminating a bare bulb in a cage fixture high up in the ceiling.
“Get in,” he said. He shoved Click and the young man hit the cell’s back wall.
“What is this place?” Click asked, his eyes darting around.
“A padded cell,” Winter said.
“What’re you going to do to me?”
“Like you said, I can’t torture you into talking. So I’m going to shelve you and move on. Sort of like a private maximum security cell block.”
“You can’t leave me in here!”
“Why not?”
“It’s kidnapping for one thing.”
“Now, that’s ironic,” Alexa said.
“Your family kidnapped the Dockerys. I kidnapped you. I don’t know where they are. Your family doesn’t know where you are. I don’t find the Dockerys, they’ll die. The Dockerys die, so do you.”
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