“Fuck you!” Taggert snarled. Blood dripped from his mouth and nose.
Infuriated, Avery let out a crazed yell and swung him against the urinal. Taggert’s head hit the porcelain, and he howled in pain.
“Give me a name!” Avery demanded. He pushed the policeman’s face toward the bottom of the smelly receptacle.
Officer Taggert started crying. “All right, all right! It was all arranged by higher-ups in the organization….” Blood and saliva dribbled down from his mouth to the rusty drain. “The one who did the job on her is dead now. His name was Lyle Bender. They used your sperm samples from a fertility clinic to make it look like you’d raped her. That’s all I know about it, I swear.” Taggert started coughing and choking. Avery let go of him. It took a few moments for the cop to recover. He sat up a little, wiped the tears from his eyes, then spat a wad of blood and phlegm into the urinal. “Goddamn prick,” he gasped. “You fuckin’ broke my nose.”
With his last drop of adrenalin, Avery reeled back with his fist and punched Taggert in the face. The policeman flopped over on the tiled floor.
Avery snatched up the gun, then braced himself against the wall.
Almost out of nowhere, a set of handcuffs flew past him and hit the unconscious Taggert in his shoulder. Avery glanced up. The Native American cop had dragged himself to the doorway. “Cuff him to that pipe over there, will you?” he said, nodding toward a corner conduit by the urinals.
“Jesus,” Avery murmured, starting toward him.
Officer Pete impatiently pointed to the set of cuffs by Earl Taggert. “Hurry up, okay?”
Avery backed away and grabbed the handcuffs. He managed to drag Taggert over to the corner of the bathroom, then cuffed him to the pipe.
“It was—a—a rewarding experience, watching you—beat the crap out of Earl,” Officer Pete said between gasps for air. Sweat covered his forehead. “I’ve been wanting to do—to do that for three years. Pat him down, take away his keys.”
Avery followed his directions. “This guy’s with a hate group out of Opal. They’re responsible for several celebrity deaths. They tried to set me up for murder and rape. Did you hear any of what he said to me?”
The young cop nodded. “I knew he belonged to some kind of—of good ol’ boys’ club, but I thought it was just about keeping Opal white.”
Pocketing Taggert’s keys, Avery hobbled over to Officer Pete and helped him up. He walked him to the bench in the waiting room. His leg started to go numb, and he tried to ignore the burning pain in his thigh. “You need to lie on your side and not move around,” he said, lowering him on the bench. “Is there someone I can call? Someone you trust?”
Pete nodded. “Just dial 9-1-1. It’ll patch through to my boss, Sheriff Goldschmidt. Tell him Peter Masqua is badly wounded—and so are you. We have someone in custody. We’re in the old train station. Tell him I said to move his ass. We’re expecting some more trouble here within the hour.”
In the last two hours, Dayle hadn’t moved from the kitchen table. Now she pushed aside the script, picked up Fred, and tiptoed down the hallway to the guest room door. She checked for a strip of light at the threshold. It was dark and almost too quiet. She didn’t hear any snoring. Maybe Ted was lying there with the lights off, listening for her.
With the cat cradled in her arms, Dayle retreated to the foyer. Every creaking floorboard seemed like a loud groan. She checked the front door’s peephole. She couldn’t see the guard, but her view was limited. Quietly, she unlocked the door and opened it. To her immediate right, the guard sat in a folding chair with a Coke, a box of Archway cookies, and a walkie-talkie on the floor beside him. A husky kid in his late twenties, he had curly brown hair and a baby face. His tie was loosened. He’d been reading The Fountainhead. Dropping the book, he jumped up from the chair. “Ms. Sutton? Um, is everything okay?”
She smiled and shifted Fred in her arms. “Oh, hi. Yes, everything’s fine.” Down by the elevator, she noticed a second guard muttering something into his walkie-talkie.
“I really don’t think you should be out here,” the husky kid said.
“Oh, I thought I’d go for a walk before bed. I’m kind of keyed up. Maybe it’ll help me sleep. I just need some fresh air. In fact, I figured I’d go up to the roof. It’s perfectly safe up there….”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I’ll have to clear that with Ted first.”
“Oh, now don’t be silly—”
“He’s right, Dayle.”
She spun around.
Ted stood in the foyer with her. He’d thrown on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and his shoulder holster. He had a walkie-talkie in his hand. “We’ve taken all these precautions for your safety,” he said. “If you want to step out of the apartment, you need to see me about it.”
Dayle frowned at him. “I’m not sure I like that.”
“I wouldn’t like it either if I were you, but it is necessary.” He smiled at her, then set the walkie-talkie on the hallway table. “It’s late, Dayle. Why don’t you get some sleep?”
Sighing, Dayle retreated back into the apartment. Ted stepped inside after her. She heard him close and lock the door.
Sean’s tape recorder picked up everything Larry Chadwick had to say. It wasn’t so much a confession as it was an hour’s worth of steady gloating. Despite the stranger with a gun in the backseat of his car, Larry seemed to think he had the upper hand. He was still at the wheel, still in control.
Yes, he knew who she was. His friends were quite aware that Avery Cooper’s lawyer was in town, and they had a full description of her. They also had Avery Cooper in custody: “Last I heard, he was being held just outside Lewiston, two hours from here. He might still be alive. I’m not sure. My friends were trying to determine his exact whereabouts when you lured me away with that phony phone call.”
He explained about his friends, the Soldiers for An American Moral Order, who were going to bring back family values and godliness to the people of this country. He defended the torture and mutilation deaths of Tony Katz and his friend: “Faggots aren’t human beings. And right now, those two deviates are burning in hell.”
Larry freely admitted to having participated in the murder of Leigh Simone. They had made it look like a drug overdose: “Leigh Simone got what she deserved. She advocated homosexuality, abortion, and the restriction of our constitutional right to bear arms.”
They didn’t set out to kill people. They merely wanted to silence those celebrities who posed a threat to moral order and traditional family values. Often, all it took was a little research into their pasts or intimidation. A good scandal could always discredit a loudmouth liberal celebrity’s cause.
“And if you can’t dig up dirt on someone, you manufacture it,” Sean said. “Did SAAMO arrange the murder of Libby Stoddard?”
“Yes.” Larry studied the dark, winding highway.
In the last hour, they’d encountered only six cars on this road. The most recent was a minivan, which had been keeping a steady, respectable distance behind them for several miles now. They were driving through a forest preserve. The unlit two-lane snaked around clusters of trees.
Sean adjusted the volume on her recorder again. “You had a nurse named Laurie Anne Schneider steal Avery Cooper’s sperm samples from the fertility clinic. One of those samples was planted in Libby Stoddard. Is that correct? Yes or no?”
“Yes,” he said, with a hint of a smile. “And we still have some of those samples, Ms. Olson.”
“You framed Avery Cooper for murder, because he’s a threat to your fundamentalist agenda. Is that correct?”
“He’s no threat anymore,” Larry replied.
“Dayle Sutton, she’s the next to die, isn’t she?”
Larry didn’t hesitate to answer. “Yes. But I’m not in on that one. The wheels are already in motion. We have people in L.A. handling it. She’ll get hers on the set of her movie. It’s slated to happen in the next day or two.”
“Talk about a cold-bloode
d bastard,” Nick whispered from the backseat. “Lare, you must piss ice water.”
Unfazed, Larry scratched his chin, then glanced at the tape recorder in Sean’s hand. He seemed so blasé. It was almost as if he somehow knew that all the information he was revealing would never make it outside of this car.
Sean looked over her shoulder at the minivan, still trailing several car lengths behind them. Nick caught it too. Frowning, he turned forward and tapped Larry’s shoulder with the gun. “Both hands on the wheel, Lare. This is the fourth and last time I’m telling you. See the little trail up ahead? That’s where we’re going.”
With a sigh, Larry pulled off the highway onto a gravel road that dipped into the woods.
“Are they still following us?” Nick asked Sean.
“I can’t see,” she said, twisting around in the passenger seat to check the rear window. “They might have moved on, I’m not sure.”
Engulfed in darkness, they steadied themselves as the car bounced over the rocky trail. Eventually, the gravelly road gave way to a smoother, narrow dirt path.
Sean wondered if perhaps the minivan had switched off its headlights and was now following them. She couldn’t see a thing back there. Larry and his hunting buddies probably knew every inch of this forest. No doubt, he and his friends could maneuver these trails blindfolded. Meanwhile, she and Nick were totally out of their element here. The deeper they moved into the bowels of these woods, the more doomed she felt.
Ahead, she could only see as far as their headlights pierced the blackness. The path grew more narrow and hazardous with tree roots and rocks. An occasional branch from above scraped against the roof of the car. Twigs snapped under the tires.
She turned to Nick. “As soon as we can,” she whispered. “Let’s swing around and head back to the main road.”
He nodded distractedly. “In a minute.” He tapped Larry’s shoulder with his gun. “Someone in Dayle’s camp has been providing you guys with information. It’s how you know I was here. Who’s the stoolie?”
Larry studied a curve in the path ahead. “It’s a guy who works for her, his name’s Dennis Walsh.”
“Well, well, that fat piece of shit….”
Sean watched Larry casually slide his left hand off the wheel, down to his lap. She wondered why he kept doing that. Nick had already warned him about it four times.
They hit another bump, and she dropped the recorder. It landed between her seat and the car door. She went to reach for it.
“Slow down,” Nick barked.
Sean heard Larry laugh a bit. “Sorry.” He sounded so damn confident. What did he know that they didn’t? Or was he just so self-righteous that he figured no one could hurt him? Why wasn’t he scared? It had become so dark in the car, she couldn’t quite see his expression. But somehow she knew Larry was smiling.
Sean pried the recorder from under her seat, and an image suddenly hit her. She remembered the first time she’d set eyes on Larry Chadwick—in the parking lot of the My-T-Comfort Inn. He’d pulled up in his car, opened the door, then reached under his car seat, and taken out a gun.
“Nick?” she said. She sat up and stared at Larry. For a moment, her heart stopped. He had only one hand on the wheel, and in the other he held a semiautomatic, pointed at her.
“Oh, God, no,” she whispered.
A loud shot rang out. Sean felt as if someone hurled a punch in her shoulder. The force of it took her breath away and sent her slamming against the passenger door. The back of her head hit the window.
Another shot resonated, and the car lurched forward. Sparks exploded from the dashboard. A third blast immediately followed, and Larry let out a howl as the gun flew from his hand. Sean felt a spray of blood hit her in the face. Dazed, she watched Nick club Larry over the head with the butt of his gun. Larry flopped against the driver’s door. A pungent smoke from the singed fuse box began to fill the car as it rolled to a stop.
Sean slouched against the door, not wanting to move. It was as if someone had stuck a hot steel rod into her upper chest—beside her right shoulder. Larry was still half conscious as Nick climbed out and opened the driver’s door. He yanked him out of the car. Larry vaguely grumbled in protest, then fell to the ground.
Nick snatched his gun off the car floor, then stared at Sean. “Where are you hit?” he asked, trying to catch his breath.
“My upper chest,” she murmured. “By the shoulder…can’t feel my arm.”
“Shit, you’re bleeding bad. We have to get you to a hospital, doll.”
“Don’t call me doll,” Sean replied in a shaky voice. “We—we can’t go anywhere. The car’s dead. The fuse box is shot….”
Nick tried and tried to restart Larry’s Honda Accord. The engine made a grinding noise, but refused to turn over. Meanwhile, Larry had managed to sit up on the dirt path. He held on to his bleeding left hand. A trail of blood slid down from the gash on his forehead. Yet he was laughing like a crazy man. “You screwed yourselves!” he called, staggering to his feet. “You’re trapped! You’re not going anywhere….”
He kept laughing and taunting them, until finally Nick jumped out of the car. Half delirious, Larry didn’t even see him coming. Nick coldcocked him. He might as well have been swatting a pesky fly. One expedient, forceful hit, and Larry Chadwick went down.
The last thing Sean heard him say was: “She’ll bleed to death. That cunt’s going to die out here.”
Earlier, when they’d driven up the dirt path, Sean hadn’t noticed all the other forest trails merging into this one. Those few minutes in the car had covered several miles.
They’d been trudging through the woods for close to an hour now—lost, swallowed up in the darkness. Cursing, Nick stumbled over rocks and tree roots while she staggered behind him. With her good hand, Sean clung to his belt at the back of his jeans and faltered along with him.
She tried to ignore the pain in her shoulder. Her arm was in a sling—crudely fashioned by Nick from Larry’s khaki trousers. Her arm and her right side down to the hip were sopping wet with blood that had turned cold. Sean could see her breath in the chilly night air, yet she was burning up inside. Drops of sweat trickled from her forehead. She had a fever—an infection from the bullet, or maybe from all the blood she’d lost. Still, she pressed on.
In addition to relieving Larry of his trousers, Nick had also stripped him of his shirt and undershirt. He tore up the shirt and tied Larry’s hands in back of him with the shreds. After shooting a couple of breathing holes in the Accord’s trunk lid, Nick had dumped the unconscious, underwear-clad Larry inside. Sean weaker protested that he’d freeze to death. Nick said he didn’t give “a frog’s fat ass.” He shut the trunk, then pocketed Larry’s keys.
He found a bottle of water in the glove compartment. With that and Larry’s T-shirt, he tried to clean the bullet wound by Sean’s shoulder. Then he made a sling out of Larry’s pants. As they started down the path, Larry must have regained consciousness. They heard him pounding on the trunk lid, the muffled yelling and cursing.
That had been nearly an hour ago. Now, Sean blindly held on to Nick. For all she knew, they could be heading deeper into the forest, away from the highway. She felt herself growing weaker and dizzier with every step. Suddenly, the ground seemed to drop out from under her. She tripped over a tiny rivulet, almost pulling Nick down too. The fall knocked the wind out of her.
“You okay?” Nick asked, hovering over her. “From what I can see, you don’t look so hot.”
“Flatterer,” Sean murmured. She didn’t think she could stand up again. “How can you even see anything?” For the last hour, she’d been praying for some point of light that might lead them to the highway—some wonderful, bright, artificial light. But there was only darkness.
“Let’s rest here for a sec, okay?” Nick said.
Sean nodded again. Shivering and sweating, she listened for the sound of a car, a radio, maybe some people talking at a nearby campsite. Nothing. Yet she and Nick weren�
�t alone. She could hear creatures moving in the shrubs all around, twigs snapping beneath feet—or claws.
“God, listen to that,” Nick whispered. “I’m a city boy. Gentle Ben or Bambi, either way, I don’t like this shit….”
Sean laughed, but she felt herself slipping away. She didn’t think the darkness could become any blacker, yet it was happening. She couldn’t move. Nick was still talking to her, but through a fog.
Sean thought of Danny and Phoebe. She remembered them playing on the beach with their aunt a couple of nights ago. And she felt her body shutting down.
Twenty-five
Tom glanced in his rearview mirror at the white Taurus—his escort to the studio. He wore his blue seersucker—along with his disguise: glasses and a fake mustache. Beside him in the front seat, Hal was reviewing details for Dayle Sutton’s execution one last time. When he started to explain about the “getaway” afterward, Tom told himself not to believe a word.
“In the ambulance,” Hal said, consulting a notepad, “you’ll be furnished with a new passport and all the necessary papers. By the way, your passport photo is just an old picture of you that we doctored up. Your new name is Robert Allen Bryant. You’ll receive ten thousand dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks in the van—”
“Ten thousand?” Tom interrupted. “But you told me—”
“You have reservations tonight at The Best Western Golden Park in Rio,” Hal went on. “Under the name Robert Allen Bryant. It’s not the Hilton, but it’s affordable until you find your retirement villa. Three days from now, you’ll receive an another eighty thousand in traveler’s checks. It’ll be sent to the hotel. After that, additional payments will arrive every month. You’ll end up with a quarter of a million—as promised, Tom.” Hal grinned and patted his shoulder. “Or should I say ‘Robert’?”
Gazing at the traffic ahead, Tom bit his lower lip. Suddenly, the whole Rio dream didn’t seem like such a lie. He thought about last night. He could still see that drag queen dropping his self-incriminating letter to the Los Angeles Times in the mail. Had he screwed up his chances for a clean break?
The Next to Die Page 35
