by Greg Enslen
“That’s her,” Peters whispered from next to him. “From the ransom drop.”
Frank nodded. “I’ll bet that’s the guy as well. He fits the general description and the age range.”
“They’re not very bright—what kind of idiot steals your car and then keeps it?” Peters said quietly. “Even if they don’t know it’s being tracked, it’s still dumb to keep a stolen car.”
Frank started to say something about how dumb people make the best criminals, but then he stopped when the front door opened suddenly, casting a long square of light out onto the front porch and the rusty Corolla parked out front.
The young woman came out.
“I’m leaving, George,” she shouted. “I don’t like this at all, and one of us needs to be gone when he gets here.”
The young man nodded and picked up a large bag, handing it to her along with a fistful of keys.
“It’s okay, Chas,” the young man said with concern in his voice. “I’ll meet you in town, as soon as it’s over. By the big fountain.”
She seemed to hesitate, then leaned in and kissed him. “You be careful, Georgie,” she said quietly, but Frank was close enough to hear.
“Deputy, circle around the house—we need to know how many are here,” Frank whispered, pointing toward the kitchen and rear of the home. “Be careful and look for any access to the second floor from the outside. The third floor looks like an attic—the girls could be on either floor.”
Peters nodded and left, working his way through the darkness until Frank couldn’t see him anymore.
A phone began ringing from inside the house.
While he was talking to Peters, the young woman had walked down to the Corolla and dropped her bags inside the open window. Frank cursed quietly to himself—if he’d been smart, he would have disabled their vehicle. Maybe he was slipping—
“Just stay for a second,” the young man said loudly to the girl by the car. “That might be him.”
She sighed loudly and crossed her arms, but stayed, and the boy walked back into the house. Frank thought about knocking out the girl, but that would give them away, and he had no idea how many more people were inside.
After a few seconds, the boy walked back out onto the porch. This time, he was carrying a rifle.
“Chastity, come back inside,” he said quietly.
She stomped her foot like a petulant child.
“No, Puddin,’ I want to leave before he gets here—we talked about this! If we’re both here when he—”
“It’s too late for that,” the young man said quietly, looking around at the trees, his shotgun up. “Chastity. Inside.”
And Frank realized the young man knew the cops were here.
How?
Either the phone call, or Peters had given them away.
Frank watched helplessly as the girl glanced around at the bushes and walked quickly back inside. The door closed loudly, and someone inside began closing all the curtains. Lights started going out.
Shit.
Surprise was out. That meant this was going to turn into a hostage situation in moments.
Frank shook his head and stood, making a decision that he would probably soon regret. He crossed the driveway and stepped up onto the wooden porch. Frank adjusted his shotgun and stooped over, looking in both windows before walking right up to the front door.
There was sudden movement off to his right. Frank turned and saw Peters emerged from the bushes next to the porch.
“There’s only the two occupants, I think,” Peters whispered. “And there’s no ladders or anything—there’s a tree, but it’s too small for me to climb.”
Frank thought about it for a moment.
“OK, we’ll take the direct approach,” he said.
Frank stood up, stepped next to the door, and rang the doorbell.
“What are you doing?” Peters hissed, incredulous.
Frank smiled.
“Go around back, then get inside while I’m talking to them,” Frank said. “Don’t worry about anything except finding the girls. Get them out, or barricade yourself inside with them.”
Peters nodded and slipped away.
“Who’s there?” came a voice from the other side of the door.
“It’s the police,” Frank said loudly, standing off to one side of the door. No need to take one in the stomach if they took a shot through the wood. “You’ve got my car in your barn. Open up.”
“Um, no,” the young man said.
Frank shook his head.
“Look, I’ve got three cops with me and another dozen on the way. I know it’s just you and the girl—I’m only interested in recovering Charlie Martin and her friend. You guys can leave, as far as I’m concerned.”
It was quiet. Frank couldn’t tell if they were buying it or not, but he could hear whispers inside. It didn’t matter as long as the—
A loud shot rang out from the back of the house, and he heard a scream.
Frank kicked in the door.
The doorframe exploded next to his head, and he ducked back outside. Two more shots rang out, missing him. One blew out a large front window, and the second shattered the side mirror of the Corolla in front of the house.
Frank ducked down and peeked in—he could see a foyer and stairs going up. Beyond was a long hallway—the rooms he’d seen through the windows were to the left—and beyond that, a kitchen.
Peters was down.
Frank could see him on his face on the floor of the kitchen, not moving at all. Blood was spreading out in a pool around him.
“Stay away from us!” the young woman shouted from somewhere on the first floor. She sounded completely hysterical. “Or you’ll get it too!”
Two more shots followed, forcing Frank away from the front door.
He considered circling around, but it looked like the doors were all covered. With Peters down, he was outnumbered, and the element of surprise was gone.
Maybe a window.
He jumped the porch railing to the left of the door and worked his way along the curtained windows. The third one he tried was ajar. He slid it quietly up and climbed inside, being careful to not disturb the curtains.
In moments, he was inside the house, hidden by the thick curtain.
Frank parted the curtain slightly—he was in a formal dining room. A large table, surrounded by chairs, took up most of the room. He ducked down behind the table, trying to figure out where they were.
He saw them both in the hallway. The young man and woman were both watching the front door, and she was crying loudly, wiping at her face. They each had shotguns. Clearly, they did not expect Frank to swoop in from the side.
Frank knew this was his only chance before King and the others arrived and turned this into a long, drawn-out hostage situation.
He crept away from the table and stood next to the wall that separated the dining room from the hallway. Frank kept low and approached the man first—he was the closest. Frank would have preferred to incapacitate the woman first—she was the one who had started firing first, but she was farther down the hallway.
Frank stepped quickly from the doorway and hit the man hard on the side of the head with an open-palm strike to his ear. It was always a good opening strike—it surprised the victim with an amazing bout of instantaneous pain, but little actual damage. Cupping the palm made air rush into the ear canal—if done with maximum force, it could shatter the eardrum, knocking someone out of a fight immediately.
The man staggered away, a hand to his ear. Frank had expected the woman to fire at him, so Frank stepped around the young man, putting him between Frank and the woman. Instead, she screamed and sprinted away, running to the foyer and turning up the stairs.
Frank struck the wounded boy in the stomach and caught the shotgun as the young man dropped it. The boy crumpled to the floor, obviously in pain.
Go after the girls or check on Peters?
His instinct told him the girl would not harm the girls—but
he could be wrong. Frank stepped over to Peters. He had been hit in the vest and shoulder. Blood was seeping from the shoulder wound. Lucky, but out cold.
Frank rolled him onto his back and grabbed a kitchen towel from the island, stuffing it into the shoulder wound and tucking it under the edge of the vest. It would at least slow the bleeding.
The rest of his mind was trained on the upstairs, straining to hear gunshots or the sounds of a struggle. In their desperation, kidnappers were sometimes known to execute their hostages just moments before capture. Frank tried not to think about it. He watched the stairs for the young woman and held the kitchen towel against Peters’ shoulder.
Every fiber in his body told him to go upstairs, to find the girls and stop the young woman from doing something horrible. But King was coming, and Graves, and the ghost of Ben Stone kept reminding him to wait for backup. Ben’s gun had still been in his holster. A fat lot of good his range rating had done him.
In the distance, Frank heard a siren.
62
Charlie heard a lot more shouting.
They had been fighting nonstop for the last few hours. Even when the man had brought Charlie her dinner, the woman had kept yelling at him from the bottom of the stairs. Yelling at him, calling him names that Charlie was not allowed to use. Bad names, mean names.
The man hadn’t said anything, but Charlie could tell the mean names hurt him. He had tried to ignore the woman by telling Charlie another story, this one about a place called Griffith Park, a big observatory and museum that sat up on a hill above some place called Los Angeles. The story kept getting interrupted, but the man had kept with it until Charlie was done eating and he had left.
The woman kept yelling while the man fed Maya—Charlie didn’t know if he told her stories as well, but Maya’s English was pretty good.
After dinner, Charlie had waited a little while, just listening to the fighting. The woman wanted to leave, but the man didn’t want to leave Charlie and Maya. The woman didn’t care—she seemed to think that someone was coming to hurt her or hurt them, and she kept threatening to leave.
Charlie slipped out of the zip tie and tiptoed across the floor to the door, trying the lock. As always, it was bolted shut.
She was walking to the bathroom when she heard the first gunshot. It was so loud, it rattled the glass in the windows. Another gunshot rang out, and another—they sounded like wood cracking, like when she’d been on the construction site with her dad, and the men would be building walls or cutting two-by-fours. They would have those saws with the spinning blades that cut right through the wood like butter, but sometimes the wood would snap off loudly instead of cutting cleanly.
If people were shooting downstairs, maybe the police had come.
Her father was on the City Council, and the police worked for him. He’d said once that the police were a little sore at him for taking away some of their money. Did that mean they didn’t have enough money for bullets or guns? As the days had dragged on, Charlie had wondered if her father taking away the policemen’s money meant that they weren’t looking for her.
But her father also knew the Mayor and a bunch of other important people in town. He had even introduced Charlie to the Mayor once, a nice old gentleman that made models of buildings out of tiny wooden sticks. The Mayor had seemed nice, loud but nice. And he had clearly liked her father, with all the smiling and hand shaking. So there were people that liked her father and their family. She just hoped that the cops downstairs were ones that liked her father.
Charlie went to the window. She saw a police car coming up the driveway. So who was shooting, if the cops were just getting here? Maybe the young man and woman were fighting.
Charlie heard feet coming up the stairs.
She had only a moment to decide—get back into bed and pretend she couldn’t get away? Or run?
The police were here. That meant she was going to be rescued. And staying inside the house seemed like a bad idea, especially if she knew she could get away.
Charlie ran to the bathroom and closed the door, then went to the window and slid it open. She stood up on the edge of the bathtub and climbed out. Charlie had thought about all the different things she could do, and she’d decided that the smartest thing to do was for her to escape and go get help, instead of trying to free Maya herself.
She pulled her way up onto the roof, walking the roofline. Her father always told her she would make a good gymnast. It must’ve been all those afternoons killing time around her father’s construction sites, walking on planks of wood and two-by-fours and negotiating the tops of cinder blocks and basement walls.
Charlie scampered along the roofline and found the tree. Steadying herself, she ran and jumped. The half-second in the air was terrifying, but she caught the tree around the trunk, grabbing on tightly. She sighed and let out a quiet laugh, then began climbing down to the ground.
63
“Peters? Harper?”
Frank had heard the police car come to a stop and cops approaching the front of the house. It sounded like Sergeant Graves. Frank wasn’t sure why he’d used the siren, but Frank was glad he was there all the same.
Frank still had a hand on Peters, who hadn’t moved.
“Back here!” Frank yelled from the kitchen. “One suspect, upstairs.” The front door still stood open, and Frank could see the police lights out front. “There are two shooters—one female armed upstairs, and one male down, in the hallway. Circle around and come in through the kitchen!”
Frank heard someone walk in through the front door and down the wooden floor of the hallway. Sergeant Graves appeared from around the corner, wearing a bullet-proof vest.
“You okay?” he asked, looking at Frank, then down at Peters.
“I’m good,” Frank nodded. “Peters took two from a shotgun,” Frank said, nodding at the man’s shotgun on the floor next to Peters. “One in the vest, but the other in the shoulder. It’s a good thing we were both wearing—”
“The other one is upstairs?” Graves asked, cutting him off. He was looking around the kitchen.
Frank nodded.
“I’m assuming she’s up there with the girls, if they’re still alive.”
“Good,” Graves said. “Good you cornered her, so at least she can’t get away. Backup and EMTs are on the way.” Graves stood, picking up the young man’s shotgun, checking the chamber. “Come help me take out the woman,” he said.
“What about Peters?” Frank asked, his hand still on Peters’ shoulder.
Sergeant Graves shook his head. “He’ll be okay for a minute. Looks like you stopped the bleeding. We need to end this before something happens to those little girls.”
Frank nodded and stood, grabbing his shotgun.
“Okay, let’s go,” Graves said, a shotgun in each hand.
They walked down the hallway to where the young man lay on the wood floor, still out cold. Frank checked his neck for a pulse, finding one, and then stood, starting up the hallway toward the foot of the stairs.
“The young woman went upstairs,” Frank said, gripping his shotgun. “She’s also armed with a—”
The shotgun blast caught him squarely in the back.
The power of the shotgun at such a close range hurled him nearly ten feet down the hallway. His back bloomed with burning pain that spread to every nerve in his body. He landed with a thud, hitting his face against the wooden floor, knocking the wind out of him. Frank slid nearly to the open front door.
The house went quiet. After a second, Frank heard someone yelling.
“You can come down now,” he heard Graves call.
Every single part of Frank’s body was screaming in pain. He tried to not move, tried to stay still. He concentrated on the voices, and looking out the open front door at the police car and the Corolla with the busted mirror and the trees beyond, splashed regularly with red and blue light.
He felt blood oozing from his mouth.
“Is it safe?” Frank heard the you
ng woman ask from upstairs.
“Yup,” Graves said quietly. He could hear him reloading the shotgun, sliding more cartridges into the bore. “There are more cops coming, so we gotta hurry. George is hurt—you better check on him.”
He heard footsteps coming down the stairs.
“You get the other one?” It was a young woman’s voice, the young woman Frank had seen. She sounded frightened.
“Yup, he’s dead,” Frank heard Graves say. “But more cops are on their way. I was already on my way, or they would’ve gotten here first.”
Frank heard the young woman’s feet on the wooden floor—she stepped down from the stairs, walked past Frank, and let out a little sound. She must have seen the young man. Frank heard her hurry down the hallway to check on the young man—
The next shot was much louder, filling up the entire world with sound. Frank heard the sound of a person crumpling to the ground.
“Stupid bitch.”
Frank’s mind was racing.
Graves was the leak, the cop, the kidnapper, in charge of the kidnappers, who made sure they got away. He had the duty roster, helped set the roadblocks, heard the call in to dispatch. He didn’t need to call King to get the address. Maybe he did anyway, just to explain how he knew where to go. But Graves had the zip ties and knew about the second ransom. He was probably the one who jumped Frank, hit him over the head, and took the files and the money.
And carried him into the field to die.
Sergeant Graves also had been the last one in the room with Lassiter.
The answers flashed through Frank’s mind. There were all the answers, all in one place, falling into place like dominoes. And now Sergeant Graves was cleaning everything up. He’d known about the money, had the zip ties, been the first on the scene after the kidnapping. Graves had found the water bottle or planted it. King had given him the lead on looking into who might be dirty.
Frank heard Graves start up the stairs.
