Realizing what it was hit me not like an electric shock but like a sudden shot of anesthesia. I felt numb. Like I wasn’t there anymore. Like I wasn’t anywhere. Like the bottom of the world had just dropped out from underneath me.
“It’s his safe house!” Emily yelled from somewhere behind me as the soldiers on the screen arrived at the porch.
“In Susanville! My God, his family!” Emily yelled as she burst into the office. “Contact the marshals! Where are the marshals? Perrine is attacking the Bennett family in Susanville as we speak!”
CHAPTER 83
The Skype image was showing a dead marshal on the porch when I stood and walked out of Downey’s office. I walked over to the corner desk Emily and I were sharing and just sat there rigidly, with my feet on a plastic file box, gazing steadily forward at a blank spot on the wall.
Emily rushed over to me.
“The image cut off, Mike. They kicked in the door of the house, and the image went blank. We’re sending everybody there. Everybody.”
I didn’t reply, didn’t look at her. I kept staring at the wall. I needed to be there for my family, and yet it was impossible for me to be there. This did not emotionally compute for me, apparently. It was like being tied to a chair and having to watch your two-year-old climb out and off the ledge of an open window. I felt beyond confused, beyond disoriented. I felt disintegrated inside.
I don’t remember much about the next twenty minutes that went by. I vaguely remember a lot of activity around me, Emily making a lot of heated phone calls and Downey coming over to me a few times in order to assure me that every available unit was on its way to my family.
And what will they find when they get there? I kept thinking.
The next thing I knew, I was being guided by Emily up onto my feet. I followed along obediently as she took me out into the stairwell. But instead of heading downstairs, she led me up.
“What’s going on?” I mumbled.
“They’re bringing you up there to Susanville, Mike. A chopper is going to take you to a plane waiting for you back at the SoCal Logistics Airport. I’m going to be right beside you the whole time, OK?”
I suddenly stopped on one of the landings.
“What have you heard?” I said, breaking her hold on my elbow.
“Nothing yet.”
“But it’s been a while. Someone should have gotten there already,” I said, grabbing her wrist. “They’re all dead. Just say it now. Don’t lie to me.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you, Mike. I’m not sure why no one has responded. All we know is that the US marshal on scene is not answering the radio or his phone, and neither is your family. I swear to you, the second I hear anything, I’ll tell you, Mike. Let’s just get up there and see what’s going on, OK? You need to be up there,” Emily said as we went out onto the roof.
Five minutes later, an MH-60 Black Hawk swooped down out of the night, and a burly young soldier guided me aboard and strapped me in. I would have said it felt unreal as we lifted off, out over the lights of Wilshire Boulevard, with the wind rushing in through the chopper’s nonexistent doors, but it already felt unreal. I’d felt like I was outside my body ever since Perrine had shown me the video of my family’s not-so-safe safe house.
At the airport, an air force jet was already gassed and waiting. A couple more unbelievably gracious and young, competent soldiers strapped me into this new aircraft, and we took off. Emily didn’t tell me to sleep or calm down or talk to her or anything. After a while, I turned away from the window and found her hand in mine.
We touched down less than an hour later at Susanville Municipal Airport. When they dropped the jet door, I could see marked town-police and state-trooper cars parked alongside the tarmac, their lights wheeling. A trooper car rushed us to the state road where Cody’s farm was. There was another clog of official vehicles just in front of the driveway turnoff. There had to be twenty cars, but why weren’t they up at the house? My mind felt like it was exploding. Why were they just sitting there!?
A lanky, brown-haired FBI agent rushed out of the black Chevy Tahoe as we came to a skidding stop.
“What the hell is going on?” I said before he could get a word out.
“I know you’re upset, Detective,” the agent said. The young agent was handsome, square jawed. Instead of the MIB suit, he wore a tweed jacket and jeans, like a popular young college professor.
“My family is up there!” I screamed as I grabbed his tweed lapels.
He tried to shake me off. He wasn’t trying hard enough. I swung him around into the road. “Four boys, six girls, my grandfather and nanny. Why aren’t you helping them?”
The fed was finally able to dislodge one of my hands by punching down on it. I retaliated by punching the agent in his mouth. I was about to do it again when the state trooper who had brought me there linked his big arms around mine from behind.
“Is my family dead? Tell me!”
“Jeez,” the young fed said, thumbing his lip. “We don’t know, OK? We don’t know yet. We can’t get up there because of the fentanyl. We have a hazmat team on its way.”
I went really nuts then. I elbowed the trooper in his ribs and started running for the driveway. Then I was tackled by two more troopers and another agent.
“Get off me now, or I swear to God, I will shoot all three of you!” I snarled as I writhed and fought them in the dirt alongside the driveway. I lost it then. Some wall inside me broke, and I was bawling. My face filled with tears and dust as I sobbed.
“Get off me. Get off me, you fucking cowards,” I said as I wept.
“It’s poison up there, Detective,” said one of the troopers, with a Barney Fife twang. “I know you want to get to your family, but if you go up there unprotected, you’re going to die.”
“I know,” I cried. “I want the poison. Give me the poison. I just want to be with my kids.”
CHAPTER 84
I calmed down after another few minutes of crying. Emily had taken me over to one of the fed SUVs and sat with me in the back. I’d melted down emotionally before, but never in front of so many people. And still I hadn’t faced it yet. Hadn’t faced the unfaceable.
The FBI hazmat squad showed up in a fire truck-like vehicle, already wearing their white hooded jumpsuits. After Emily spoke to them, they allowed me to gear up as well and follow them, as long as I stayed behind them and didn’t hit anyone else.
Emily and I started up the road behind the eight-man contingent. The air filter of the full-face breathing mask had some sort of pine scent in it that made me want to throw up.
The agents halted suddenly as something moved in the distance ahead. One of the SWAT guys raised his rifle.
“Don’t shoot!” I said through the interior mike when I saw what it was.
It was one of Cody’s sheepdogs. He stopped in the road and started barking at us. Good God. Aaron. I hadn’t even thought about him. Was he dead as well? For helping us? The dog barked some more and then ran back up the road from where it had come.
We went around a slight curve in the dirt road and saw the house for the first time, up the slope. There was no light on in the windows. Not a sound. In the dull, grainy moonlight, it was like I was seeing it for the first time. Its fish-scale shingles on the gabled roof, its gingerbread trim. The Queen Anne-style Victorian looked like it should be in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, not out here in the middle of the high desert.
I shook my head and stared at the dormer where Mary Catherine slept.
Mary Catherine.
I pictured her.
Mary Catherine sewing a vintage lampshade she’d bought on eBay. Mary Catherine down on her knees in the hallway with the girls around a bucket of joint compound, teaching them how to spackle and sand. How to fix something. How to make a house, even a safe house, into a home.
In my heart, I’d been planning on our being together someday, I realized as I stopped walking. Now, in a few minutes, I would be making a phone call a
nd telling her family back in Ireland that she was dead. I squeezed my hands into fists when they started shaking.
“You OK, Mike?” Emily said. “You want to go back?”
I shook my head quickly. For a second I thought I was going to throw up, but then it passed.
“Let’s keep going,” I said.
I stepped on something when we got to the front yard. It was a Wiffle ball, or what was left of one. Brian hit them so hard, he caved them in. I thought about Brian then. Watching my oldest son play his first football game back in New York, the smile that creased his face on that rainy, freezing field when the coach sent him in off the bench.
I turned and looked at the open front door as the SWAT team went inside. There was a sudden bang of another door being flung open. “Clear!” someone called. I squatted down and stared at the dirt as I listened to more bangs and more shouts of “Clear!” as the SWAT guys swept the house.
Then one of the agents appeared at the front door. It was the preppy-looking one I’d hit. He waved us up.
“Mike, you really, really don’t have to do this,” Emily said.
I lifted the crushed Wiffle ball and stared at it as I gathered myself.
“Yes, I do,” I said, standing and stepping toward the house.
“Mike,” said the agent, holding up his palm. “I don’t know what this means, but there’s no one here.”
“What do you mean?” I said, staring over his shoulder, into the foyer. “You mean they’re dead? They’re all dead?”
“No, Mike,” the agent said. “There are no bodies. There’s no anything. Your family isn’t here, Detective. The house is completely empty. Everyone is gone.”
CHAPTER 85
The test for the fentanyl powder actually turned up negative. I quickly shucked off the suffocating mask and frantically searched the house.
It was true. Everyone was gone. I looked through the rooms. The beds were unmade. Everyone’s clothes seemed to be all there, including their sneakers. I even found Mary Catherine’s cell phone charging on the bookshelf beside her bed. It was hard to say if there was any kind of struggle, but it was obvious that they had all left quickly and suddenly, in the middle of the night.
I stared out Mary Catherine’s window at the dark mountains, going crazy. Perrine had my family. He’d taken them away.
Roadblocks were set up in the entire area. Troopers and local police came with bloodhounds. The dogs kept running around in circles in the farmyard, indicating that it was unlikely that anyone in my family had left on foot.
I peeled off the hazmat suit in the kitchen and just sat there at the table, rubbing a hand through my hair over and over again as I stared at the worn pine floor, trying to think. Why would Perrine come to kill my family and just take them instead? The implications of it wouldn’t stop coming, the possibilities of what he could do.
It was worse than finding them dead, I decided. I couldn’t believe that this was happening. How could I?
I looked up to see Emily take a seat next to me. She began to cry.
“I caused this,” she said. “You didn’t even want to go to LA, and I came up like a good little soldier and put on the con job and the pressure. You didn’t want to leave for exactly this reason. I caused this. I’m responsible.”
I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but I was in no shape to comfort anyone. The lead jacket of what was happening was too heavy. I was surprised I had the strength to breathe.
That was when the dog came in through the open back door. It was Cody’s border collie. She rubbed against my shins, and I reached out and patted the sad-looking pooch on the head.
As I was doing it, I remembered what Cody had told me about border collies. How brave and smart they were. How they always kept moving, kept circling. How they never quit.
I suddenly stood and took out my phone.
“Emily, listen to me. Stop crying. There’s still a shred of hope,” I said quickly, thumbing through my contacts.
“There is?” Emily said.
I nodded.
“That my guys are not here, all dead, means that Perrine is going to want to use them somehow, right? We need to find Perrine before that happens. We still have one shot.”
I finally found the LAPD detective John Diaz and pressed Dial.
“Emily, call the airport and tell them to get that plane ready to go,” I said to her as Diaz’s phone rang. “We need to get back to LA and pay Tomás Neves another visit, and he’s going to tell me where Perrine is or he’s going to die.”
CHAPTER 86
The plan I sketched out with Diaz over the phone was hazy at first. But as Emily and I raced back to the airfield and the waiting air force jet, refinements were made and remade.
When we touched back down at Southern Cal Logistics Airport, Diaz texted to let me know that our course of action was irretrievably under way, for good or for ill. I no longer had the time or energy to care.
Following Diaz’s directions, Emily and I drove thirty miles southwest, straight from the base to Wrightwood, California, a pine-covered valley north of LA in the San Gabriel Mountains. About a mile north of a ski resort shuttered for the summer, we pulled onto a narrow, winding road called Lone Pine Canyon Road. We followed it to its end and then turned onto a long and steep, thickly wooded driveway.
It was about ten in the morning as we pulled the car into the pine-needle-covered front yard of an old, faded forest-green cabin. Diaz’s Mustang was already there, under a corrugated carport, along with a blue Jeep.
I rolled down the Crown Vic’s window to a low hum of chittering crickets. You could see some hogbacked hills in the distance behind the cabin, but there wasn’t another house to be seen. There weren’t even any power lines. It was like we’d driven back in time.
For a few moments, I stared at the faded cabin, mulling things over. I wondered what I would find once I went in there. Nothing good in the slightest, I knew. But we were past that. Way past that.
“Stay here,” I told Emily as I finally opened the passenger door.
“No. I’m going in,” Emily said, opening her door. “I’m in this as deep as you, Mike. I don’t care what happens next. I’m responsible.”
“No, you’re not,” I said, reaching across her and slamming her door shut again. “I’m the one with nothing to lose, Emily. If you want to help me, I need you to stay and just sit here.”
“But, Mike — ” she was saying as I got out and shut the door.
Diaz had already told me that they were set up downstairs. Around back, I pulled open a rusty sliding door and entered a musty-smelling, pine-paneled room with a stone fireplace. Diaz looked up from where he was sitting on a folding chair in front of the fireplace, smoking a cigarette. He was dressed head to toe in black. Beside him, propped up against the hearth’s river stone, were two AR-15s.
“What’s the story?” I said, shaking his hand.
“He’s in there,” Diaz said, pointing his cigarette at the closed door behind him. “We Tasered the shit out of him as he was coming out his front door. Talk about not knowing what hit you.”
“What does he know so far?”
Diaz blew a smoke ring up at the yellow water stains on the drop ceiling.
“We told him we work for Perrine’s rival, the Ortega cartel, and I think he’s fallen for it. He also thinks we have his family. He came on pretty hard at first, but right before you arrived, I got creative and convinced him that if he didn’t start being helpful, I was going to make a call and turn his wife HIV positive. He started with the waterworks then, boy. Broke like a glass hammer. Funny, the things that can hit a nerve.”
Diaz was putting the cigarette out on the sole of his boot when the door behind him opened and a large man wearing a ski mask stepped out. I stood there with a very puzzled look on my face as the man peeled off the mask. It was Detective Bassman.
“Wow! You’re in on this, too?” I said as I shook his massive hand. “Risking your ass for me? I’m never going to
be able to pay you back for what you’re doing for me. Either of you.”
“No problem, brother,” Bassman said, flashing a smile. “My pleasure, believe me. I think he’s ready to talk to us now.”
Diaz handed me a ski mask.
“Let’s do this,” he said.
CHAPTER 87
Neves was in his underwear, lying on his back at the bottom of an empty, dated six-person hot tub. He had a puffy black eye and was gagged with tape. He was also handcuffed at the ankles and the wrists, and he was wearing a forty-pound weight vest that pinned him down flat onto the floor of the tub.
When I saw Neves lying there, scared and helpless in his underwear, I felt my resolve waver for a second. Gangbanger or not, Neves was a man. A man we’d kidnapped. A man we were about to extract information from by force, if necessary. Staring down at him where he lay shaking, I felt wrong, sick inside.
Then I remembered that somewhere right now, Perrine had my family, my kids, and I steeled myself with a long, deep breath.
Diaz lifted another vest from a corner and stepped into the tub. There was a ripping sound as he tightened up the Velcro straps of the second vest around Neves’s lower legs.
Diaz plugged the drain before he stepped out of the tub and sat on its edge. Bassman flicked open a butterfly knife and slid the blade in between the tape and the man’s mouth. When he cut the tape away, a thin string of blood flowed from a slit in Neves’s lip.
“Dang. Nicked you there, Tomás. My bad,” Bassman said as he violently tore the rest of the tape off Neves’s face.
Neves’s chest heaved as fresh tears sprouted in his light-brown eyes.
“Please,” he said between hacked-off sobs. “Please. My wife, man. Please. She’s pregnant, man. Two months. Don’t hurt her like that. Don’t give her the monster. The baby get it, too.”
When I heard the amount of genuine pain and fear in Neves’s voice for the second time, I felt something sway unsteadily inside me. I squeezed my hands into fists, willing myself to ignore him. I had no other choice.
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