by Ty Patterson
‘Has your memory returned?’
He raised his hand, and Garcia cowered.
‘Wait. How do I know you’re not a cop?’
Zeb studied him in silence through his shades. The stupidity of small-time hoods never failed to amaze him.
Garcia had a decent business in his garage, and he had to go screw it up by dealing drugs.
‘You don’t, but if you think cops will bust you like this, you’re even stupider than I thought. Now, I’m running out of time and patience. Do you know those people?’
Garcia swallowed rapidly and nodded, and when Zeb placed his Benchmade knife on the counter, his resistance drained away.
‘Yeah, yeah. There’s no need for that. The bald guy told me there was fifty Ks for finding the women. He gave me a contact number and disappeared. I spread the word. Honest to God, that’s all I did. I deal in some weed after the garage closes. You gotta believe me, man, I’m not into any heavy stuff,’ he whined.
‘Did you find the girls?’ Zeb asked him as he played with his blade.
Garcia’s eyes were fixed on the point of the blade. ‘I know a couple of guys in Jackson, who push some of my stock. They said they had spotted them two days back. I haven’t heard from them yet.’
He swallowed. ‘Look, man, I’ll forget all about them.’
Zeb looked at him and believed him. I could have done this over the phone, but this is much more effective. He’ll never forget this.
He extracted another photograph and placed it in front of Garcia.
Garcia glanced at it, and his eyes went wide, and his face lost whatever color it had.
‘Yeah, that’s your bald guy. He’s dead.’
He let the silence build.
‘I killed him.’
Garcia bent behind the counter suddenly and retched. Zeb heard him fumble around, and a drawer slid open and closed, and when Garcia appeared again after a long minute, his face had regained some color, the moustache seemed less droopy.
‘You see where this is going?’ Zeb prompted him.
‘Yeah, man. I may be stupid but not that stupid. The hunt’s off. No more reward.’
‘Those women, they’re from a cop family. Their dad was a decorated SWAT hero in Jackson. If anything happened to them, it wouldn’t be just me after you.’
He added when Garcia hadn’t moved a muscle. ‘But I will be the worst.’
The moustache drooped again. ‘I get it, man. I’ll put the word out.’
Zeb looked through the dark glass at the busy work space. ‘You set this up with drug money?’
Garcia was indignant and raised his voice, which lowered fast when Zeb’s gaze swung back at him. ‘Nope, dude. I worked hard at this. The drugs shit is just something I got into.’
Zeb removed his shades and looked at Garcia for a long while, allowing the silence and the depth of his look weigh on the man.
He turned, left, and breathed the sunlight deeply when he was outside.
Maybe he has a chance. He’s not far down the road. He’s still able to turn around if he wants to.
The twins spent the day at Kelly’s home, with his wife, Liz and when it was mid-afternoon, the older woman dropped them back in town.
Zeb had reluctantly allowed them to go on their own to Kelly’s place. There was no more threat but it wasn’t in his nature to relax.
‘You can’t babysit us all our lives. Jeez.’ Meghan had glared at him.
‘Besides we’ll be carrying our guns and will have all the gadgets that Broker gave us,’ Beth backed up her sister.
Zeb had shrugged in defeat finally when he saw their mutinous glares.
They're right.
‘Shopping, getting stuff for some of our clients.’ Beth laughed when Liz asked them their plans for the rest of the day.
The sisters drifted around and separated as they browsed in different stores.
Beth was inspecting a postcard when a hand tapped her shoulder. She turned around and flashed a smile at the man. ‘Oh, hi.’
‘Your sister saw me heading this way and asked me if I could bring you over. She’s a couple of stores down.’
Beth slipped the card back in its place. ‘Sure.’
She followed him out of the store.
You realize there isn’t any way to get site plans of his mansion. There aren’t even aerial photographs available. There are a few shots of his garden, but the rest of his property is covered by foliage or camouflage canopy.’ Broker glared at Zeb.
‘Whatever information on his place is sketchy, and you can bet that whoever gave out that information is likely dead.’
They were in a café in the center of town, seated in a corner with Broker’s laptop plugged into a wall socket. They had gathered there on Zeb’s return from Cheyenne.
By their side ran a row of booths, each of which had a swinging door that gave their occupants more privacy. The café was a mix of the new and the old; bold colors swept through the open seating while darker colors and murals hung in the booths.
They were researching Zubia’s house.
Several customers glanced in their direction, saw three men wearing shades giving off an invisible aura, and seated themselves at a safe distance.
‘There must be something. Just because he’s a drug lord doesn’t mean he can choke off intel. He’s pretty small fish compared to the other cartels around.’ Zeb checked his phone and frowned.
‘What?’ Roger asked him.
‘The Petersens. They should’ve been back from Kelly’s home.’
‘Relax. They told me they would be shopping for trinkets for folks in their office. I’ve accompanied them a time or two, and believe me, time couldn’t have dragged any slower for me.’
‘We could try another route,’ Broker said slowly as he stared at his screen.
They were still there an hour later.
The café’s owner came up from behind them and placed a fresh coffee pot on their table.
‘The Petersen sisters! You know them? Everyone is talking about them.’ The owner cleared the empty pot and glanced at the local newspaper folded by Broker’s side. It had a picture of the smiling twins on the front page.
Roger grunted, giving the owner a hint.
He wasn’t deterred. He had a story to tell, and he had a captive audience.
‘You know, they were sitting at this very table, doing some stuff on their laptop in the evening. And the next day they got attacked in the park.’ The sisters had been elevated to celebrity status by the owner.
Zeb swirled his coffee.
He looked down at it as the brown liquid ran smoothly around in his cup.
Not a single ripple marred the surface, and something about the smoothness of the liquid made an invisible connection in his brain. Dendrites fired and passed messages to neurons which took them back to other neurons, all of it happening in nanoseconds, in the magical way only the human brain worked.
He snapped up and turned around to face the owner. He looked at the name tag on his chest.
‘Pete, the cops questioned you?’
Pete’s head bobbed, happy to be a fount of information. ‘Yeah. Told them everything that I remembered. There wasn’t much to tell. They were sitting here for a few hours in the evening. They were going through some photographs on their computer, and then they left.’
Zeb’s mind flashed back to the timeline and activities the twins had outlined. It matched Pete’s version.
Zeb nodded at him in thanks.
He met Broker’s gaze, looked beyond him, and called out to Pete.
The owner hurried back.
‘The cops check your camera recordings?’
He’d noticed the security cameras discreetly mounted in the ceiling as soon as they’d entered the café. It was second nature to him.
‘Nope.’ There was a note of regret in Pete’s voice. He would’ve liked a proper inquiry by the cops, security tapes, fingerprint dusting, that CSI kind of stuff. It would’ve given his caf�
� great publicity.
‘They said it was a routine check and didn’t return.’
Pete stood there in silence, and when Broker looked askance at him, he said, ‘I can show you the recordings.’
He would show it to anyone if it helped his café.
Pete led them to an inner office, which had monitors that showed various sections of the café.
‘Six cameras, lengthwise in two rows on the ceiling. Two more cameras outside, facing the street and the entrance. I keep recordings for a month, after which they are uploaded to a server.’ Pete beamed as he demonstrated his setup.
‘I realized a long time back that the majority of my patrons are wealthy tourists from larger cities. The kind of tourists who like to feel safe and secure, so I installed these babies three years back. Never had a problem in my café since then.’
He clicked on a keyboard, opened a file, and scrolled down to the recordings, which were stored date-wise.
He selected the file and clicked it open, and it began to play.
Like most security camera recordings, it was in black and white and moved jerkily, but it had good clarity, and they could make out the faces and features of customers.
‘Scroll forward to an hour before the twins come,’ Zeb told him.
Pete’s fingers danced on the keyboard, and the video began running.
Zeb leaned forward when the women entered the frame of the video, and saw them sit at a table near the entrance. Meghan dug out her laptop and turned it on. The two women changed tables and moved to the one the three of them now occupied, and the sixth camera caught them in its lens.
The video jerked to the next sequence. Meghan bending over the wall socket.
‘Must’ve run out of juice,’ Broker murmured. Zeb nodded.
The sixth camera had a view of the rear seating, which covered four tables at the rear and faced the last booth.
Three of the four tables were empty, and the video appeared to remain static for a long time; only the running time counter at the bottom indicated that the video was playing.
Ninety minutes later the images of the women fast-forwarded as they moved to the exit.
Pete moved to turn off the playback and stopped when he felt Zeb’s hand on his shoulder.
‘Wait. Let them leave the café. Let it run for a few more minutes.’
They let it run for five minutes, and then the sixth camera showed activity.
The booth next to the twins opened, and a man came out.
He stood at the table they had occupied and stared at the exit.
The camera caught his face fully.
Broker and Roger heard despair and self-loathing in Zeb’s voice for the first time. ‘I’ve been so wrong.’
‘You could still be wrong,’ Roger argued.
Zeb nodded but didn’t say anything. The thing in him that connected dots and made logic had woken up, and his inner radar was pinging relentlessly.
He knew he wasn’t wrong.
‘How did you know there was someone inside?’ Broker demanded.
Zeb turned to Pete’s computer, gestured, May I? Pete acknowledged, and Zeb scrolled the tape back and froze it.
‘There. Look closely.’
The image on the screen was of the two women and the door of the booth. The door was shut, cutting off sight of its occupants.
Zeb pointed a finger at the bottom of the image, the bottom of the booth’s door, and then they saw it.
Four shadows. But if they looked carefully, they resolved into two pairs of shoes.
Broker looked up sharply.
‘Their stuff? Did they take it with them to Kelly’s?’
‘Nope. This was one time they didn’t. Meghan said she had enough photographs of Kelly’s home,’ Zeb replied distractedly.
His eyes widened as Broker’s question sank into him.
They ran out of the café.
Chapter 22
Beth accompanied George, the hotel’s bellboy, out of the store and followed him to the park in Town Square. George was working part time at their hotel to fund his college tuition, and the sisters made it a point to tip him generously whenever he helped them.
There were a few vehicles, one of them a black van, idling near the pavement leading to the park.
He pointed to a large black one.
‘She said she would be behind those wheels.’
She smiled at him, crossed the road, and hurried across.
Meg wasn’t there.
There was no bench.
There were people lying in the grass in the park. She removed her shades and squinted. No Meg.
Dimly she heard sliding doors open, and the next moment felt a hand cup across her mouth and felt herself lifted.
Realization flooded her too late. Not again, she screamed at herself.
She kicked and lashed out, but she was carried so professionally and quickly, her struggles had no effect. In a couple of seconds she was bundled inside, tied and taped.
Inside, she met Meghan’s eyes. Her sister was spitting mad and was making furious noises behind her tape.
In spite of her circumstances, Beth smiled.
If there were gas fumes in the air, Meg’s eyes would’ve provided the spark.
‘Diversion,’ Zeb shouted as they dashed inside the hotel, heedless of the looks and curses they got as they roughly pushed past other people.
Zeb tossed his SUV’s keys to Broker, who veered off to the hotel basement.
Roger thumbed the elevator impatiently, and when it stayed stubbornly at another floor, they looked at each other and dashed to the stairs.
Zeb dug out his sat phone.
‘Kelly, are you alone?’
When he got an affirmative squawk, he continued.
‘Don’t say anything. Don’t ask anything. I need someone with a car who you can trust implicitly. Who will do what you tell him without fail.’
Kelly clenched his fist tight. He sensed from Zeb’s tone things had gone nuclear. He also knew now was not the time to ask questions.
‘My deputy, Mark Feinberg. I trust him with my life. Have done so on a couple of occasions, in fact. Tell me what, where and when, and it will be done.’
Zeb told him.
They reached the seventh floor where the sisters were staying.
The central corridor was empty.
Roger positioned himself on the left of the door.
Zeb ducked beneath the peephole and moved to the right.
He reached out with his left hand, inserted a spare card key, flipped the door handle down, and slammed the door open.
Nothing.
He dived low into the room, twisted to face the expanse of the room, gun trained and ready.
Nothing. No one. Silence and emptiness mocked him.
‘Clear,’ he called out.
Roger came in and watched as Zeb stormed around the room, grabbed a backpack, emptied it, searched for and found Meghan’s laptop, thrust it inside the backpack, and threw the power cord after it. Roger tossed him the camera, and it joined the laptop.
Less than five minutes and they were out of the room, and in ten minutes they had joined Broker.
‘Nothing.’ Broker looked up from behind the wheel. Zeb was motionless by his side; his thousand-yard stare revealed nothing.
‘The trackers in their jackets and shoes are inactive. Their phones are inactive.’
Zeb thumbed his phone.
‘Kelly?’
He listened silently.
‘Yeah. Nope, can’t involve you. I trust you, no one else.’
He listened at the silence from Kelly’s end as he digested the implications.
‘Yeah, thanks.’ He hung up and met Roger’s and Broker’s looks.
‘Liz dropped them off an hour back. Neither of them heard from the Petersens since then.’
A police cruiser pulled up next to them, and a uniform hopped out and tapped on Broker’s window.
‘Zeb?’
Broker thu
mbed at Zeb by his side.
Mark met Zeb’s eyes.
‘Kelly sent me. I’m Mark. He said if I didn’t do what you said, he’d shoot me. That’s mighty strong motivation for me.’ He grinned, and his even white teeth lightened his tanned, clean-shaven face.
Broker took Zeb’s sat phone, fiddled with it for a moment, and handed it to Mark.
‘Take this with you, and just keep driving to Salt Lake City till Kelly asks you to return. Just drive. Now!’
Mark’s face fell. ‘Is that all? The way Kelly said it, I thought–’
Broker’s face was grim. ‘Son, your driving with just a phone with you for company might just mean some folks come back alive.’
Mark saluted him, turned around without a word, fired his cruiser, and roared away with his lights flashing.
‘You forwarded calls?’ Roger asked from the rear.
Broker held his phone up. ‘All calls to Zeb’s phone are diverted to mine.’
He switched places with Roger, pointed in the general direction of south, and Roger wheeled out. Tracing the movements of the sisters was unnecessary.
They had a rough idea where they would be held.
Silence filled the SUV, broken only by the clacking of Broker on Meghan’s keyboard and the soft hum of rubber on tarmac.
Roger glanced at the volcano beside him. ‘We’ll get them back.’
They left the city behind, and then Roger couldn’t hold it in any longer.
‘I’m just here for the driving and the shooting,’ he drawled. ‘But dang it, if either of you smartasses told me where we were heading, that would be a great help. Thatway is a pretty large country, and after thatway lies Mexico!’
Zeb looked at him. He’d gotten his emotions under control.
Roger read philosophy in his spare time, Chloe was a science fanatic, and Bear and Bwana were members of Mensa. All the members in his team were not just the most elite operatives; they possessed a very high degree of intelligence and reasoning.
Roger’s slow-witted Texan act was just that.
If he wanted to know, it meant he had worked it out for himself and was seeking confirmation.
‘He’s got a ranch somewhere that way. We know that much. We figure he’s grabbed the twins and taken them to the place he knows best. Broker is working on finding out where exactly it is.’
