by K. T. Tomb
“But he helped me find my daughter. He’s not a bad man.”
“I know he’s not a bad man, but there are plenty of questions to be answered concerning his complicity in your daughter’s abduction, as well as in the abduction of another child whose case fell through the cracks. I aim to fix that.”
“But he wasn’t involved.”
“Maybe not directly, ma’am, but he was aware of information in at least the last two cases that might have been related to his son’s crimes. Now, it’s three cases. At the very least, he will likely be charged with obstruction.”
“But, Agent Calder, he helped me find my daughter.”
Tears formed in her eyes. Fighting for Ira Rabb had suddenly become important to her.
“I’m well aware of that, ma’am. That will be a consideration if and when formal charges are filed. He is expected to die and the problem will be moot. So, our paperwork is paused, shall we say?” Agent Calder paused for a moment and studied her face.
“He was helpful. Very helpful. And isn’t each count of obstruction something like a ten-year sentence?”
“Give or take.”
“Please reconsider. Without him, my daughter might have been killed.”
“Look, ma’am, I understand your concern. At this point, we are more interested in his complicity in crimes, though his assistance in finding Cassidy will also be taken into consideration. At this point, he has been very cooperative and I think when all is said and done, the obstruction charge will amount to little, if anything at all. Because you know, he’s at death’s door. It’s going to be moot soon, so I am not rushing to process my reports.”
“I understand.” She forced a smile through her tears. “Thank you, Agents Calder and Graves.”
“We’re glad it all worked out.” Both agents nodded and left the room, pulling the door closed behind them.
Mary moved to the chair beside the hospital bed and moved it closer so that she could take Ira Rabb’s hand. She could hardly believe how much her heart had changed toward the man over the past several days. As she took his hand, her tears started anew.
Looking down at his hand, Ira understood her tears. “Mary, honey, don’t worry about me. Cassidy is safe. That makes all of this strife worth it.”
“But still…”
“But still nothing. Let your heart be at peace.”
“I’m so sorry for your troubles.”
“Water under the bridge. Soon.”
“Thank you for helping Cassidy and me.”
“Don’t mention it. Hell, in a lot of ways, you helped me, too.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Well, you’ll notice that I’m resting comfortably in this bed with just this breezy little nightshirt on and only one blanket.”
“How are you doing with that?”
“I’m just fine. Cured, for all I know.”
She knew he was lying. “How are you? What did they find?”
“I’ve been poked, prodded, and drained of every fluid I have in my body and they’ve taken pictures of everything. As far as I know, they haven’t found anything yet. They did give me a good bath, though. At least I can go out of this world smelling like a rose.”
“Why did you collapse on the trail?”
“Mary, I think I was just flat played out. I’ve been packing on weight over the years and, by God, I’m just not young and strong enough to carry it all.”
“Are you going to be okay? I mean….” She thought through her words. “They’re asking you to help them by telling the whole truth about your son.”
“He’s in a better place. Maybe, just maybe, we will end up at the same place in the afterlife and properly mend things. Love each other, as father and son should.”
“I hope so.”
There was a long pause as Mary weighed her feelings and tried to put them into words. She’d grown very fond of the old man and she felt like she needed to tell him so. She just didn’t know how to without sounding corny. She was spared that awkward moment when Agent Calder came back into the room without knocking.
“Dr. Rabb,” he said. “I thought that you would like to know that they just picked up your son’s body out of a ravine on the northern side of Plumas National Forest. It looks like he fell by accident. A swift exit from this plane.”
“Thank you for telling me, Agent Calder,” Ira replied without surprise. There was no way he was going to tell the FBI what really happened. That his son had committed suicide in front of him. It did not matter now. He knew that Cassidy was in the room, so he couldn’t tell the whole truth.
Agent Calder nodded at him and then at Mary and then turned to exit.
“I’m sorry, Ira, for all of your loss.”
“Maybe the next life will be happier,” he said.
After Calder was gone, Mary said, “Goodbye, Ira. I’ll come back and visit tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
“I’m going to die tonight,” Ira said softly. “But it’s okay. I have had such an amazing ending to my life. You and Cassidy, and even Zack. I mean, who could ask for more than to make a difference to someone? I finally have made a difference, so my work here is done. The rest is up to God.”
“Don’t say that,” Mary said and hugged him gently. “You’ll get better.”
He looked at the sweet little girl. “It was nice knowing you, Mary, and meeting you, Cassidy. You take good care of your mom.”
“I will,” she said. “Are you my grandpa? I heard people say weird stuff, so I wanna know.”
He coughed. “Oh, my. Just a pretend grandpa. One who just loves you for you. That’s all.”
“Okay,” Cassidy said, smiling. “When you see him, will you tell God hi for me? And thanks?”
“I sure will, pumpkin.”
“My daddy used to call me that. I remember now. I remember everything about him from when I was little.”
“So long, darlings. Be good to each other,” Ira said and closed his eyes. Monitors started beeping everywhere.
Mary cried softly when he died. She got Cassidy out of there as nurses rushed in to attend to monitors and close the curtains on Ira Rabb’s life.
Mary and Cassidy crossed paths with Special Agent Zack Donovan in the elevator.
“Hey, Mary. I was just trying to find you,” Zack said. He looked down and smiled. “Hi, Cassidy.”
“Hi,” she said, unsure of who he was. She looked at her mom for reassurance.
“Cassidy, this is FBI Special Agent Zack Donovan. He came to our house and figured out a lot of the mystery so we could locate you. And Zack and Dr. Rabb, and me—the three of us—we went to the forest to find you and get you away from Bobby Rabb.”
“So, you are the real guy who saved me and not that dweeb, Agent Calder, who Mommy said took the credit?”
Zack laughed and laughed, the first time he had done so in Mary’s presence.
Mary smiled through her tears and said, “Shh, baby. I told you to keep that quiet.”
“Okay, Mommy.” Cassidy grinned back. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Special Agent Zack Donovan.”
“It’s nice to finally meet you, too, Cassidy Lynn Gordon.”
They gingerly shook hands.
Cassidy asked Zack, “Do you like my mommy?”
Zack blushed. “I sure do.”
Mary blushed, too. “Can we please have a ride home to L.A.?”
“Of course.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Two Years Later
Zack Donovan turned off California Highway 49 into a parking area that served one of the many trailheads leading deeper into the Plumas National Forest. As he parked the Jeep and turned off the ignition, he looked at the woman sitting next to him. “You ready to do this, Mary?”
“Yeah, the psychologist said it’s time for us to get over our fears by confronting them directly.” She looked in the back seat where her seven-year-old daughter was undoing her seat belt. “Are you ready for
this camping trip, Cassie?”
“Yes, Mom. I think it’ll be fun. This time.”
“That’s the spirit,” Zack said, and began to unload the Jeep of their backpacks and a pop-tent. After he did that, he pulled his gun out of the glove compartment and put it in his hip holster.
Cassidy climbed out of the Jeep and chose her little pink backpack from among the pile of camping gear. She slipped the straps of the new backpack over her shoulders as Mary and Zack shouldered their own backpacks.
“Okay, I’m ready. I have the snacks and the stuff to make S’mores tonight!” Cassidy said, cracking a big smile.
“Because S’mores are the most important part of camping, right?” Mary said, smiling back.
“Oh, Mom!” Cassidy giggled. “Of course they are. It’s all about the S’mores!”
He displayed the permit in the window and locked up the Jeep
Zack, Mary, and Cassidy walked around the trailhead sign and started up the trail. Cassidy trotted in front of them, her backpack bouncing against her back.
“Come here, Cassie. Let me adjust those straps for you,” Zack said. He shortened the straps to make it snug against her back and asked, “How’s that feel?”
“Comfy. Better. Thank you, Daddy.”
“You’re welcome, pumpkin.”
The End
Return to the Table of Contents
THE HUNTERS
A thriller by
K.T. TOMB
The Hunters
Published by Quests Unlimited
Copyright © 2018 by K.T. Tomb
All rights reserved.
(Previously published)
The Hunters
Chapter One
Madeline
Things were definitely getting worse, Madeline decided.
He had voted for Reagan, twice, and despite all his bluster about how much better the average American was doing, she certainly saw less and less money in her purse. Putting missiles in space to stop the Commies was all well and good, and oh, good for you Wall Street, but where did that leave an eighty-one-year-old widow with a crumbling townhouse that sucked away at her savings account? Behind the minorities and the gays, one inch from the welfare line. It was an obscenity. There were even foreigners on the police force nowadays; her dear departed husband must be turning over in his grave. There was no chance any goddamn colored would have got on the force when he was around.
She fingered the chain of the ornate jewel around her neck, a great diamond her beloved Charles had acquired during his great expansion of the family business. The war was good for that, at least. So much of a fortune to be made, so many opportunities after Hitler was destroyed by the heroes, and the Japs had been sent back to where they had come from. If the government would get off the pot and stop crying about gay marriage and crap like equal rights, and do something about the Ruskies once and for all, she might not be in the mess she was in.
The Rock of Rhodesia bounced against her paper-thin skin and decaying bosom as she released the chain it hung on, the reflection of the great diamond glinting in the morning Georgian sun. Her brow furrowed with displeasure, not at the pain that the diamond should not have inflicted on her. She was always in pain, these days, and the Rock was feeling heavier to her by the day anyway. Marcos, her gardener, had missed a spot of grass just by the beautiful reddish-brown black birch that her father had planted in the garden, decades before. As soon as the tree had grown to maturity, her husband had become embroiled in his second great war, as terrible for his enemies as he had been against the Nazis. The squirrels that feasted on the nuts grown by the black birch fell in droves under the fire of his .22 rifle, but they returned again now that their exterminator could fire his rifle no more. Dive bombing Madeline’s bird table; the gall they had. She had tried to get Marcos to take action against them, but the man’s response every time she pleaded with him was to say, “No, Senora Frome, I cannot do that. I am only a gardener.”
And now, the useless man was shirking on the mowing of her pristine lawns, she was sure. Not only was he the most expensive gardener in town, there were certain expectations in society, of course, and Madeline Frome would not allow her gardens’ beauty to be surpassed by her neighbors, especially the damned Oswickis or Goretskys. The new money Polacks, who were barely Americans at all. What was the use in paying all this money, chipping away at her savings year after year after year, if he was going to scam her with the lawns? Sure, his work on the flower beds was a wonder, but that didn’t matter. Action must be taken, or she would look like a fool.
Madeline moved away from the window, disgust on her lips, muttering soundlessly to herself. With the use of her cane she inched her way painfully toward the telephone, the ivory handle wobbling of its own volition in her hand as her modest heels clicked over stained wood floors that could have used another coat of varnish a decade ago, but then in Mrs. Frome’s formerly grand townhouse much of the interior could no longer be considered classic, and would be found by most critics to have passed into decrepitude beyond antiquity.
The gilded mirror that had adorned the hall at the bottom of the stairs showed Madeline’s reflection as she passed. Once when she had looked into the great oval of polished glass, it had shown a picture of a southern belle, high society in the years after The Great War, before the depression that had nearly ended the Frome family, before the second war and before the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam that had taken not one but two of her sons, before her third son had become one of those miserable degenerates and run off with a goddamn black boy to who knows where. Hell, most likely.
She looked like hell now, white-haired, wrinkled and unsteady on her feet. Her eyes at least retained their steel that had made men shake in their boots once with desire and later with fear. Her tongue remained sharp as winter, unthawed by decades of life in the Deep South. She did not need the mirror to tell her that. All that the mirror told her was that she was old, too old to miraculously come into enough money to preserve her house and the life that she had in Savannah for much longer. She had no relatives left to support her, and even if she had, it would be unseemly to go begging. There were elderly people living on handouts from her Baptist church, but Madeline Frome had stopped going to services when her husband passed on. Passed on to what? Madeline didn’t know. Nothing, she supposed. What use was a life, bowing and scraping right to the end?
No. No matter the cost, no matter what she had to do, Madeline Frome would not depart this life in disgrace. That was not for her, the bitter degradation of sitting in a chair in the old folks home, losing her mind along with her teeth, with barely educated orderlies cleaning her- no. That would be unacceptable. What had she come here, to her corridor, to do? She had stood in her own mind for only a few minutes, but it had been long enough for her to momentarily misplace the memory. What was it? The damned squirrels, of course! She would call her husband at work, and remind him to pick up ammunition for his rifle; they’d clean the vermin out once and for all.
No. Victor Frome had been dead these last twenty years, a heart attack while driving his fine old Cadillac, and running into the courthouse for good measure. His gavel never rang again, no more thieves and murderers and rapists sent to the cells. It wasn’t Victor she was calling at all, as much as her heart ached and pounded when for that brief moment she believed he still drew breath. She dialed the number written down in her Rolodex, in which there were only three cards. The dial tone burred and clicked in her ear, and Madeline repeated under her breath what she would say to her errant gardener. There was no reply, and after a minute she hung up the telephone. Hateful device, she thought. What was the use of such technology if people were never on the other end of the line?
The doorbell rang, and through the old, rippled glass and her bifocal, horn-rimmed spectacles Madeline saw a figure she did not expect. Marcos, that treacherous man, stood bold as the brass on her doorknobs. With a grunt and a twinge in her bicep, the heavy oak front door finally opene
d, and she managed to pant out one word.
“You.”
“Si, Senora Frome!” The Mexican man grinned, portly in his comfortable mid-forties, sweating heavily through his light T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Savannah Cardinals Baseball.’ His mustache was drooping from the heat and accentuated the south-of-the-border style that Madeline detested.
“Don’t you Senora Frome me, you ingrate!” Her voice returned with the force of a shrill wind, albeit a mere ghost of the power she once commanded, “You missed a spot on the lawns! Right under the tree! I knew you were trying to hoodwink me, goddamn you, you bastard. You are fired! No settlement pay; I’ve had enough of people like you, shirking work, ruining this town. Get off my porch!”
Marcos protested that he had, in fact, had a blade on his lawnmower break and had to return to his truck to make repairs, and had already done so. If Senora Frome would only look again. He had just returned and finished the task, and had even managed to tidy up her begonias which had begun to wilt. Madeline slapped him, weakly, and he left with a downcast expression on his broad face.
Good, she thought.
He might have tried to rob her, but she had been too clever, had always been too clever for the likes of him. Now her hand hurt. She had once slapped Victor so hard that she had broken a finger along with his sunglasses after she caught him peeking at a woman immodestly dressed on the street. Now the weak push of an old woman. She cursed her weakening body that it could not keep up with her sharp mind, and picked up her cane again from where it had fallen. Her back creaked, and she feared she might get locked up again. What an embarrassment that had been.
Some minutes later, she was sitting in her rocker again on the rear porch, admiring her garden. Marcos had indeed trimmed the grass by the tree, as he had said. It didn’t matter. It was only a matter of time before he had tried to swindle her out of all her remaining money, people always did. She fingered the chain around her neck again, and thought of Victor, of happy days past, and how she would do anything to have her glory back once again.
