Cut and Run

by Ridley Pearson

  “It’s why I called,” Larson said. “It is him: the guy who did Benny; I’d put money on it. And my best guess is I’m only a few minutes behind him. A half hour, at most,” Larson explained. He weaved his Explorer through traffic. “I was calling in for backup.”

  “Gimme your ten-twenty,” Hampton said.

  “It’s a Jefferson Square address.” Larson recited the exact street and number.

  “Me and Stubby have made some progress on Markowitz. We’ll catch you up. We’re probably ten minutes behind you. We’ll stay on com.”

  For Larson, the air marshal’s spotting the tattoo connected the passenger to the Romeros. Homeland Security could now interface with the Bureau and perhaps even Interpol to track the suspect’s travel, his true identity, his route, his finances; everything that could be generated and gathered.

  Larson ran two red lights, narrowly avoiding a collision as he raced through the second intersection, a not-so-subtle reminder for him not to lose focus.

  By the time he reached the apartment complex off Jefferson Square, he first heard and then spotted a squad car a block behind him and closing fast, siren blazing. Larson pulled over and hurried out of the Explorer. The sirens grew steadily louder and more shrill. With his third kick, he dislodged the door from the jamb and he shouldered his way through. The siren wound down-they’d reached the curb.

  Larson had not seen a listing for any Stevenson or Stevens on the buzzer board. But 202 had held a blank card, and it won Larson’s attention. He sprinted for the EXIT sign and the stairs he knew he’d find behind it, avoiding the slower elevator and hoping the cops might sucker into it.

  He had his weapon out and at the ready by the time he nudged open the door to the second-floor hallway. The corridor was empty and quiet. He worked his way past one apartment-204-and reversed directions. 203… 202…

  He braced himself. Hope might be dead, murdered only moments before; or the cutter might be inside the apartment with her, prepared to use her as a hostage, the sirens having alerted him; it might be empty; it might be lit on fire.

  He placed his ear to the cool door. The gun’s grip warmed in his hand.

  Silence.

  A trickle of sweat escaped down his face. A syncopated, jolting rhythm occupied the space below his rib cage.

  Into the mix he now added the sound of hurried footsteps as the cops followed up the stairs.

  Larson reeled back and drove his heel into the door. With the second blow, it tore open, banging against the interior wall and rebounding.

  “PUT DOWN THE WEAPON!” a male voice screeched from behind him.

  “Federal officer!” Larson roared as he charged into 202. He wasn’t waiting around to share a moment with the two patrolmen.

  Larson hurried from one interior door to the next, his weapon held in both hands at the ready. A loft apartment with an open floor plan, the wood planks creaked with his every step.

  “PUT THE WEAPON DOWN! HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM!” shouted one of the cops from behind him in the doorway.

  If Larson failed to answer, he knew the man would enter without further warning and might shoot him out of a bad case of nerves. Nonetheless, Larson headed down a narrow hallway, now facing two closed doors to his left, and two to his right. Bedrooms and closets, he thought.

  “ U.S. marshal,” Larson called back, intentionally engaging them even though it would reveal his position to anyone else inside. “You’re interfering with a federal fugitive apprehension. Stay where you are and guard the door.”

  “Not happening, buddy. I’m coming inside, and if that gun is not on the floor…”

  “It’s not!” Larson called out as he moved down the dimly lit hallway. He reached for the doorknob of the first door.

  “Drop it!”

  Very close behind him now.

  The tension in the cop’s voice cut like a knife blade. Larson shot a glance back there, far enough to see the toe of a polished shoe.

  He shouldered his way through the door and swept his weapon corner to corner, beads of sweat now trickling down from his temples and armpits.

  A little girl’s room. Larson felt a pang of dread. A jolt of connection. Stuffed animals. A low bookshelf crammed with thin, colorful books.

  The cop was suddenly right there behind him. Larson could feel him.

  He chose his words carefully. “Listen, Officer… we have one more room to clear. The apartment isn’t safe until we clear that room.”

  “Drop the weapon.”

  “Guard your backside… Don’t get yourself killed out of stupidity.”

  A second cop now entered the apartment, calling out now for his partner.

  “Guard the door!” Larson shouted. “The suspect is considered armed and dangerous. He may have two hostages: a woman and a child.”

  “What the fuck is going on here?” the cop behind him asked.

  Larson squatted and gently placed his weapon on the floor. These guys were too green and uptight for him to take any more chances.

  Larson ordered, “Whatever you do, clear that room behind you, Officer. Now!” He turned slowly, to reveal his credential wallet hanging from his coat pocket.

  “Fed… er… al off… i… cer…” Larson repeated syllabically. “Clear that fucking room, and both closets, before somebody throws shots!”

  The banter increased between the two cops. The one guarding Larson collected his weapon and required him to kneel with his hands behind his head. His partner abandoned the front door and cleared the remaining room and closets.

  A minute later, weapons drawn, the two carefully followed Larson out into the hallway.

  Then he heard a woman’s voice. A familiar voice.

  “You?” She was panting from having run the stairs.

  He saw her first in a dreamlike blur-a rush of memories, love, lust, and confusion overtaking him. His only thought: It can’t be. But it was. She was. Right there. Not twenty feet away.

  Six years compressed into that singular moment as they met eyes.

  And he froze.

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Larson and Alice climbed into his parked Explorer. This was their first moment alone together after an hour of negotiations that had included Scott Rotem in Washington, D.C., the Missouri-based U.S. Attorney, SLPD, and the regional office of WITSEC. Justice, represented here by FATF, had won custody. She was Larson’s.

  She displayed a reticence in closing the car door, and he wondered if he should read anything into that.

  After an awkward few seconds of silence, they turned to face each other. He saw a mother’s anguish on her face and realized this was neither the place nor the time to express what he was feeling-joy, exhilaration, a sense of completion-but as usual, his mouth betrayed him.

  “It’s incredibly good to see you again.”

  The shock that registered on her face told him he’d gone too far. But then her expression warmed, however briefly.

  “We’ll find her,” he said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I don’t mean this,” he said, sweeping his hand to include everything outside the windshield-the lights, the uniforms, the huddled discussions. “I mean you and I. We’ll find her.”

  She fought back tears and won. “I appreciate the sentiment, Lars, I really do. But we both know that when Debbie dropped him off-” She might have managed to get the sentence out, but she couldn’t complete the thought, couldn’t allow herself the image of Penny at the door unable to get inside.

  She’d held up unbelievably well over the past hour-perhaps her months with WITSEC had conditioned her. At some point she would need to release what she now bravely contained. But not now. She was either numb, or far stronger than he’d imagined.

  She said, “I’d hoped for a happier reunion.” That would be all she would offer him for now, and they both knew it. It was enough.

  “Yeah.”

  The Explorer had a view across a corner o
f the park to the entrance to her apartment building. A dozen uniformed police and two detectives continued to comb the neighborhood, conducting interviews in an attempt to locate Penny. The one report they had, confusing as it was to some, put a young girl matching Penny’s description with a policeman boarding a city bus. The eyewitness put the policeman’s uniform as blue, but Larson was betting black. He and the others knew who was wearing this uniform, since the same disguise had been used at the hospital. Rodriguez.

  Nonetheless, the local police were conducting a full canvass of the area, both because it was dictated by procedure and because when it came to a child’s abduction, all bets were hedged.

  In profile, her nose turned slightly upward, her lips looked a little less full than the lips he remembered kissing. Larson adored the perfect pear shape of her ears and was reminded of the dead woman in Minneapolis. There was so much more to tell her, both personally and professionally, but first was the question of Penny’s whereabouts.

  Larson believed Penny’s abductor might call Hope’s cell phone, as Penny was believed to have the number memorized. The call wouldn’t be for ransom, though. All the Romeros wanted was this woman dead.

  For the moment Larson was authorized to oversee Hope’s protection (he couldn’t think of her as Alice) while his FATF team continued to pursue Markowitz and Laena. When and if WITSEC stabilized, Hope would be turned over to Justice for more permanent protection.

  He said, “We can’t take you to our offices because they’re too public and could be being watched.”

  “All I care about is getting Penny,” she said, looking out the windshield now. Searching.

  “That’s all I want, too,” he said. He decided to trust her with the truth. “We think we may have a mole, either in WITSEC or FATF. We’ve lost something valuable to us. That’s why the alert went out. While we figure out how to get Penny back, I’m taking you into a safe house to ride this out.”

  “Ride what out? Finding Penny, or the return of whatever was taken from you?”

  “Both,” he said, speaking only for himself. Rotem and others would see Penny as an unfortunate; her life would not measure well against the lives of thousands of other witnesses and dependents. While trying to ensure her safety, ultimately they would use her, lose her, if necessary. Larson could not go along with that, but neither could he tell Hope this now.

  After a few painful moments of silence, during which the only sounds were her occasional sniffing back a runny nose, Larson said, “We should go.”

  “We can’t leave. She’ll come back home.”

  “Your apartment building will be watched twenty-four/seven. I’m in constant contact.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “They want you, Hope.” He didn’t bother to correct himself-he wasn’t going to get used to her as Alice. “We are leaving. We’re going to get you to safety. Every effort is being made to locate Penny. There’s nothing to be gained by staying here and putting you so out in the open.”

  “And if I get out of this car?” she asked, her hand on the car door. “I’m allowed to do that, right? WITSEC, any kind of government protection, is voluntary, right?”

  She remembered her orientation materials well. “Technically, but we can hold you as a material witness to a crime.”

  “Those crimes happened over six years ago!”

  “There’s no statute of limitations on federal capital murder cases. You’re in this now.”

  “I’ll get an attorney,” she said, still resisting.

  “And it’ll get ugly,” he shot back. “And all that energy, time, will be diverted away from where we need it most: finding Penny.”

  Again, she looked at Larson directly. “Do something.”

  Larson turned the ignition.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Larson drove his Explorer down a perfectly straight farm road. Less than forty minutes west of St. Louis, the McMansion suburban developments finally stopped sprawling and the flat expanse of generational farms took over, the small white houses and silos surrounded by brown tilled ground, rail fence, and pasture. The almost geometrical landscape looked familiar to both passengers. Six years earlier, Larson had sequestered protected witness Hope Stevens in the same Marshals Service safe house-the Orchard House-that now was his destination.

  The closer they drew to the final turn, across a wooden bridge and up the hill, the more those memories weighed on him. It was at the farmhouse where they’d first found each other-and had last seen each other.

  For six years he’d avoided reliving such moments, no great fan of nostalgia and unwilling to be one of those people who lived constantly with one foot in the past. But now, with her finally in the seat beside him, something allowed him to revisit another time in this same place, and he gave in to it willingly.

  Larson had run the protection squad back then, and the rotation of assignments had conveniently left him inside the farmhouse with her, while Stubblefield and Hampton had perimeter patrol. He later wondered whether he’d been set up, whether Hamp and Stubby had felt the chemistry between them and arranged this one night for them. But he wasn’t thinking such things at the time. He was thanking his stars.

  The two-story, hundred-year-old farmhouse had not been restored since the thirties and remained in a state of neglect. It sagged, with wandering cracks, like lightning bolts, in the green-painted plaster walls and white ceilings, gaping chips drawn by gravity out of the dining room’s elaborate ceiling molding, swollen black fingers of cigarette and cigar burns at the edges of much of the furniture, especially the dining room table where witnesses and their deputies had whiled away the hours with games of poker and scotch. The house had been shown little respect since its incorporation into the Marshals Service. The exterior, once a fashionable gray, was now peeling paint, curling away from the western sun and sloughing off like reptilian scales.

  What had once been a proper and formal staircase led up to a narrow second-floor hallway off of which were two small bedrooms and a narrow bath wedged between them, probably originally a linen closet or nursery. Another, smaller corridor, added hastily years before and without the care given the original construction, led over a study below and into two oddly shaped bedrooms connected one to the other through an ill-fitted communicating door. A foul-smelling, twisting set of back stairs led from the added bedrooms down to the small kitchen below. Because of these additions the house had a wandering, cut-up, and unpredictable feel to it, seeming larger than it actually was.

  She’d called him upstairs. “Lars?”

  And he knew before arriving that despite other nights of comforting, of intimacy, that this was their moment of consummation. He knew what she had in mind not from anything said but by the pent-up energy that had been forced to simmer between them while in the company of others. He couldn’t identify the moment between them that accounted for the way he felt, nor had she directly communicated to him her own emotions or desires, and yet he knew. He knew this was wrong, against all regulations, and he knew this was going to happen. Knew they wouldn’t have long.

  All windows in the house had been retrofitted with removable blackout cloth that Velcroed into place. The two exterior doors had blackout blankets that tied to the side by day but hung as light barriers by night. The fixtures in the house, and all lamps, burned compact fluorescents, the government’s idea of how to save on energy costs; the resulting light, slightly blue or oddly yellow on the eyes, never looking quite right.

  Her bedroom had one jaundiced bedside lamp aglow. The house, closed and shuttered as it was, and without air-conditioning of any kind, sweltered in the late-summer heat, with only ineffective and noisy floor fans left to stir the turgid air. One such beast was at work in the corner, grinding and clapping as its paddles scraped the wire protection meant to defend fingers from accidents. It forced a mechanical rhythm into the room, clippity-clippity-clapping and then whining asthmatically before starting the pattern again.

  Hope stood just i
n front of the lamp, casting herself in a dark shadow. She’d shed the pale-violet blouse, one of two such shirts she alternated day to day, revealing the low-cut, sleeveless saffron tank top that held to her loosely, her egret’s neck and strong arms glistening in the bedroom’s heat.

  “Close the door,” she commanded.

  The idea of locking the air in the room went against all logic. It had to be for privacy.

  He pushed the door shut with a click.

  “Does it lock?”

  Larson’s heart responded in his chest. “I don’t think so.”

  “Will they come in the house?”

  “Not until shift change.”

  “What if they need to use the facilities?”

  She’d clearly deliberated on the obstacles that faced them.

  Larson’s heart continued to race. “No, I seriously doubt it.” The fact was they’d piss into bushes if need be, but he didn’t want to get crude at such a moment. Furthermore, both his men would keep well away from the farmhouse in an effort to not place motion near it, not bring any attention to it.

  She unfastened her belt, unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans, leaving them hanging on the width of her sumptuous hips, her purple underwear showing. “I want to take a bath,” she said. “Warm, not hot. To cool off, if that’s possible.”

  Standing just inside the shut door, Larson walked toward her.

  “I’ve slept in my clothes the past several nights. We all have, haven’t we? I’m sick of sponge baths.”

  He took another step closer. “I’m not sure I know where you’re going with this.”

  “Oh, I think you do,” she said as she dragged the jeans lower, tugged them over her hips and down her legs. She leaned over to step out of them and her tank top fell away, offering a flash of round, pale skin and the white from her bra. She added, “Am I the only one who’s been thinking about this?”