Stealth Attack

by John Gilstrap

  “So, what are you doing for a living now?” she asked.

  When she saw her answer, she knew she’d found her solution.

  Chapter Five

  The Hawker’s engines were still spinning down when Venice called. Jonathan connected, and she was talking before he had a chance to say hello. “I know where he went,” she blurted.

  Jonathan switched the phone to speaker mode. “You know where Roman is?”

  “Not what I said,” Venice snapped. “I know where he went. I pray that he’s still there, but I don’t know that.” She explained about the cell phones being turned off. “But the last number in Ciara’s phone log was to a man named Luis Alvarez, a RoadRunner Rideshare driver.”

  “Why would she call a RoadRunner driver? Isn’t there an app for that?” Jonathan was not a ride share kind of guy.

  “Mr. Alvarez told me that the kids were not at the official pickup spot, so they called to tell him to pick them up on a different corner.”

  “Do we know where he took them?” Boxers asked.

  “To a place called the Shady Sun Water Park. It’s just a few miles outside of El Paso proper.”

  “Did you check with the park?” Jonathan asked. “Were they seen?”

  “They said they had hundreds of customers today. And as the jerk on the phone put it, half of them were boys and half of them were girls. When I suggested that maybe the differences in skin color between them would make them more memorable, he said, and I quote, The Shady Sun Water Park neither notices nor judges our guests’ racial backgrounds.”

  “Damn,” Boxers said. “Where are the racist assholes when you need them?” Big Guy had an uncanny ability to misjudge his audience. When he saw that his attempt at humor fell flat, his smile evaporated.

  “I want you guys to go out there and talk to those people personally,” Venice said. “Look around. Maybe they’re still there.”

  Jonathan and Boxers exchanged glances. She wasn’t usually the one to be giving orders. “Will do,” Jonathan said. “Have you checked for security footage you might be able to tap into, see if maybe you can find pictures of them?”

  “Of course,” Venice said. “Once I knew what to look for, I was able to find images of them waiting for their RoadRunner and then climbing into the car—an old model Ford, it looked like. And then I was able to trace the Ford as it took them toward the water park. Then, there’s nothing to find. Apparently, this park is out kind of in the middle of nowhere.”

  “And the park itself?”

  “If they have security, it’s not connected to the internet.”

  “Okay, then,” Jonathan said. “You keep working your end, and we’ll keep plowing the dirt here.” He really didn’t want to ask his next question, but he didn’t know how to avoid it. “I know you’ve been going in a million directions, but—”

  “Your car is a white Suburban,” Venice replied, nailing what he was going to ask her. “You found the parking spot I reserved for your plane at the airport?”

  Jonathan looked to Boxers, got a nod. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t you ma’am me. Have I ever let you down?”

  “No, m . . . Venice.”

  “You go and get done what you need to get done. I’ll worry about my job, while I’m worrying about your job. It’s what I do.” She clicked off.

  “A little spun up, I’d say,” Boxers commented.

  “Her son is missing,” Jonathan said. “This is a big deal, cuts way too close to the bone, and it pisses me off. Let’s get this thing done and bring Roman home.”

  “Okay, then,” Boxers said. “Let’s go visit a water park. But I forgot to bring a suit.”

  * * *

  As shitholes went, the Shady Sun Water Park was shitholier than most. In desperate need of maintenance and landscaping, it looked more like a Route One miniature golf park than a place anyone would want to swim. It was nearly ten o’clock, and the place was still hopping, but to Jonathan’s eye, was about half the lights were burned out. The parking lot itself—big enough to hold probably a thousand cars—hadn’t been paved in years. Some of the potholes were eight or ten inches deep. Jonathan didn’t understand how that could even happen when the temperature never dipped below freezing for more than a day or two every year.

  “What a special treat for the family,” Boxers muttered. “Come to the Shady Sun and get mugged in the dark parking lot.”

  “Only after you’ve broken your leg in the craters.”

  They’d armed up for this in the plane—just pistols—but they had big stuff in the back of the Suburban if they needed it, covered with a tarp to hide it from prying eyes.

  As they climbed out of the truck, the stench of chlorine hung like fog in the humid air. “Damn,” Boxers said. “I bet you can smell that from a mile away.”

  “Two,” Jonathan said.

  “How do you want to handle this?” Boxers asked as they started across the parking lot. “We look very coplike.”

  They did, indeed, dressed as they were in matching tactical khaki pants and shirts. This being Texas, they saw no reason to conceal their pistols.

  “Are we playing our FBI cards again?” Boxers asked. Several operations back, when they were doing the bidding of Irene Rivers, the director of the FBI, they had been granted mostly real credentials as agents, each identifying fictitious people with ridiculous names.

  “Not now,” Jonathan said. “Doug is vouching for us with the locals. I don’t want to make anything difficult for him. I say we just take our badass selves into the park and look around.”

  Boxers laughed. “If Roman is still there and he sees us, he’s going to turn to Jell-O.”

  Jonathan laughed, too, but he didn’t think there was a chance in the world of him still being there.

  Jonathan used his Mini Maglite to illuminate the route across the parking lot. As the stench of chlorine got stronger, the noise from the park got louder. Whatever was going on in there, it was a hell of a party. And no one was leaving, at least not in this direction.

  Above them, mounted atop a large pole, a neon sign displayed most of the outline of a breeching dolphin—the dorsal fin was burned out—and in flickering light advertised SH D S N ATER ARK.

  When they were within fifty feet or so of the fence, the pavement transformed into dirt, through which a few hearty tufts of grass were making a valiant effort to sprout. Poor things didn’t have a chance.

  The sidewalk leading to the ticket counter was little better than the parking lot. No potholes, but rebar showed through crumbling concrete in a few places.

  “Can you imagine walking here barefoot?” Jonathan mused aloud.

  The entryway to the park was supposed to be a cutaway porthole, Jonathan figured, most of a circle with faux rivets protruding out of the concrete, forming a photo-op archway. Best guess was that the rivets were once yellow and the edge of the porthole itself was once blue. Inside the adjacent ticket booth, a skinny kid with an unfortunate complexion appeared to be closing out for the evening.

  “Excuse me,” Jonathan said. He had to shout to be heard over the booming music.

  The kid looked up, then jumped a little. “Whoa. Who are you?” When he gauged the size of Boxers, the kid’s body language read, and what are you?

  “We’re here to look for somebody,” Jonathan said. “A boy and a girl, thirteen, fourteen years old. We know they were here a few hours ago.”

  “A few hours ago, that described half the people in here.”

  Boxers added, “The boy is black, the girl is white.”

  “You mean as a couple?” the kid asked. “No. And that kind of thing would stand out here, if you know what I mean.” Jonathan saw the twitch in the kid’s eyes, something subtle. One day, he’d be a good liar, but he wasn’t quite there yet.

  “What’s your name, son?” Jonathan asked.

  “I’m not your son.”

  Boxers stepped closer. “Okay, what’s your name, asshole?”

  The kid wante
d to fire a retort—his face showed that, too—but then he did the math. “Rocky.”

  “How long you been working here?” Jonathan asked.

  “Two years.”

  “How about today?”

  “Since about one-thirty. I go to eleven. I’m closing tonight.”

  Jonathan slid his phone out of his pocket and opened the picture of Roman and Ciara that Venice had sent to them. He turned it so Rocky could see. “And you’re sure you’ve never seen these two?”

  “Positive.”

  “I know you’re a lying sack of shit,” Jonathan said. “But experienced sacks of shit at least pretend to look at something before they say no.”

  Rocky made a show of opening his eyes wide and leaning in close to the screen. “Is this good enough?”

  Boxers struck fast, smacking the side of the kid’s face and bouncing the other side off the wall of the ticket booth. He growled, “You can show some respect, or you can walk with two canes for the rest of your life. Choose.”

  Jonathan clicked his Maglite back on and shined the beam into the kid’s face. No blood that he could see, but the lump was already beginning to grow.

  “That’s gonna hurt in the morning,” Jonathan said. He looked at his watch. Ten-fifteen. “Mind if we look around?”

  “With a ticket.”

  Okay, the kid had balls. You had to admire that. Jonathan and Boxers bypassed the turnstile and entered the park.

  In its heyday, the Shady Sun Water Park had probably been a nice place. With three water slides of varying heights and two massive swimming pools, it must have provided great respite from the desert heat. Hell, it still did, Jonathan supposed, but it was hard to get past the fact that the landing pools at the base of the slides were an opaque green. He didn’t know much about swimming pools, but he knew that he’d never go into one of them without a tetanus shot.

  They split up to wander among the revelers. If you didn’t look at the swimming apparatus, the place had a certain charm, Jonathan had to admit. People had brought in grills to cook dinner, countless coolers provided hundreds of gallons of beer—cans only, no bottles—and if he wasn’t mistaken, weed was the herb of choice. Up on a makeshift stage next to a paper-mache version of the breeching dolphin mascot, a DJ was spinning songs that to Jonathan’s ear weren’t songs at all, but rather just a heavy bass line with rhythmic shouting.

  Two of the patrons called Jonathan a pig—testament to his tacti-cool look, no doubt—and one asked if he’d killed any innocents today. He didn’t respond, but he did keep an eye out for any flailing, flying kids that Big Guy might have launched had any dared to speak to him that way. Turned out that the current generation was smarter than some would lead you to believe.

  Jonathan saw no signs of Roman or Ciara, and given the sobriety status and emotional state of the partiers, it seemed like a waste of time to ask around.

  He met back up with Boxers near the front gate, far enough away from Rocky that they wouldn’t be overheard. “Any sightings?”

  Boxers shook his head no, adding a thumbs-down for emphasis.

  “Did you show the pictures to anyone?”

  “No one would care,” Boxers said.

  Jonathan looked around. Venice was certain that Roman had been here. He couldn’t tell her that they’d struck out unless he was sure he’d swung at every pitch. He pointed with his chin toward a bored-looking lifeguard in her elevated chair, reading a book in her lap. Twelve people could have been drowning, and she’d have had no idea.

  “Let’s check with the rest of the staff.”

  They walked single file down the concrete sidewalk where faded signs made it clear that neither running nor horseplay would be tolerated. The lifeguard looked up as they approached. Her posture stiffened, and she swung the paperback behind her back, out of sight. Very smooth.

  Jonathan approached and Boxers hung back. “Excuse me,” he said as he closed within hearing range. “Can we ask you a few questions?”

  “What did I do?”

  Jonathan flashed the smile that he’d calibrated over the years to melt hearts. “Nothing that I’m aware of. But if you’d like to confess to something . . .” She clearly thought he was a cop, so why let the truth get in the way?

  The lifeguard looked terrified.

  “Seriously,” he said. “You’re not in any trouble. We just need some help finding a couple of kids.”

  “A boy and a girl?”

  Jonathan felt his back stiffen, and Boxers took a step closer. “Yes,” he said.

  The guard cast nervous glances over both shoulders, then turned and climbed backward down the short ladder to join them on the deck. “I get in trouble if I’m not in the chair,” she said.

  Jonathan presented his hand. “My name’s Neil,” he said, using the pseudonym from the FBI credentials he’d chosen not to use. “What’s yours?”

  “Abigail. What took you so long to get here?”

  Jonathan cocked his head, waiting for the rest.

  “They were shoved into those cars hours ago. What took you so long to get here?”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “I didn’t, but I told Rocky to.”

  Boxers seemed to inflate. Jonathan used a gentle shooing motion to tell him to back off. “Did he?” he asked. “Call the police?”

  “I think so. He said he would.”

  “Did you hear him make the call?” Jonathan asked.

  Abigail looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Well, no, I didn’t hear him make the call. But I saw him pick up the phone. I had to get back to my chair.”

  “Tell us what you saw,” Jonathan pressed.

  “I was walking over there near the fence.” Abigail pointed toward the road. “I needed to check the pH levels in the kiddie slide. I heard this noise out beyond the park, on the sidewalk. It was hard to see all the details through the trees, but I saw a boy and a girl—”

  Jonathan pulled up their pictures on his phone and presented it to Abigail.

  Abigail’s face lit up, and she pointed to the screen with her forefinger. “Yes! Yes, that’s them. Who are they?”

  “What time was this?”

  “Two o’clock. That’s when I check the kiddie slide.”

  “Continue with your story, please.”

  “Well, two cars had pulled up—a silver SUV, BMW, I think, and a regular sedan—and two guys got out. One from each. They looked like they were cops, too. Wearing suits, except now I don’t think they were cops, not with the way things went down. It started out okay, but then it went bad really fast.”

  “What does went bad mean?”

  “Well, at first, it looked like they wanted to talk, but stranger danger, you know? The kids backed away. Then one of the guys sort of lunged at the girl.”

  Jonathan’s ears perked. “Lunged at the girl?”

  “Yeah.” Abigail was becoming more animated as she told the story. “But the boy got in the way, kind of pushed her behind him. Then a fight started. The boy looked like he knew karate or something. He put up a good fight. Got one of the men with a kick.”

  Jonathan felt a swell of pride. He liked that Roman had fighting skills and knew how to use them.

  “That bought them a little time,” Abigail continued. “They took off running that way.” She pointed toward the far end of the park, away from the parking lot. “It got hard to see from there because of the trees and stuff, but I know they got to the corner of Thirty-eighth and Herbert, right there, just beyond the fence. But by then, the guys were back in their car, and they caught up with them.”

  “Abigail!” It was Rocky. “Get back in your chair. It’s not your break time.”

  She looked terrified. “I–I was talking to the police here about—”

  “They’re not police,” Rocky said. “Get your ass back up in the chair where it belongs.” He pointed a finger at Jonathan. “Did you tell her—”

  Rocky dropped hard onto both knees as he passed Boxers, no doubt from a punch t
hat was so fast that Jonathan didn’t even see it. From the way Rocky was gasping for air, he figured it had to have landed on his solar plexus. Big Guy feigned concern as he knelt on one knee and put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you all right, sir?”

  Jonathan turned back to Abigail, who now looked totally lost. “What happened at the corner?”

  “Is Rocky okay?”

  “Do you really care?”

  The question seemed to amuse her. The hint of a smile stretched the corners of her mouth. “Did that huge man just hit him?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Jonathan said, and the answer was more true than false. “What happened next, Abigail?”

  “The men put the kids into the cars and drove off.” Her voice started to quaver. “It looked like some kind of kidnapping to me.”

  “When you say put them in the cars . . .”

  “Shoved them, really. One into the SUV and one into the car. They didn’t want to go.”

  “This is bad,” Jonathan mumbled. “Do you remember which kid went into which vehicle?”

  Abigail looked sad. “No. Who were they?”

  Jonathan whirled on her far too aggressively. “Are,” he snapped. “Who are they, not were. No past tense.”

  Tears breached Abigail’s lower lids. Her lip trembled.

  Jonathan dialed it back. “I’m sorry for that,” he said, meaning it. “That young man is very dear to me.”

  “I–I’m sorry, too. I don’t know why Rocky . . .” She couldn’t finish the statement.

  Jonathan lowered his voice to barely a whisper, drawing Abigail in closer. “Rocky is an asshole. You don’t know me from a stranger on the street, but I’ll tell you this. If you quit this shithole right now, you’ll feel proud of yourself. If you’re still here tomorrow, you’ll hate yourself.” He gave that a few seconds to sink in. “I really am sorry about snapping at you.”

  “What’s his name?” Abigail asked.

  Jonathan didn’t understand.

  “The boy. What’s his name?”

  “Oh,” Jonathan said. It was hard to believe that he wasn’t prepared to answer that question. “Roman. Roman Pen . . . Roman Alexander.” As an afterthought, he added, “The girl is Ciara Kelly.”