by Chris Angus
She climbed up to a small room at the top of the anchor. This seemed to be storage space, filled with cable and drilling equipment. Since the rig wasn’t actually drilling, maybe no one would have reason to come here. But she knew once the search began, storage rooms would likely be among the first places they would look.
Still, the room had a single window that gave her a view onto the second level of the platform. She could see the approaches to her hideaway and would have some warning if anyone was planning to enter her space. She settled down to wait.
It was warm enough to take off her soaking coat. She squeezed as much water out of it as she could, along with some that had penetrated to her clothes beneath. Then she stashed the coat behind a pile of cable. She wanted to be able to move quickly when the time came, and lugging a heavy, water-soaked coat would only slow her down and probably leave a trail of water as well.
She explored her surroundings and found a heavy wrench. It was the only thing that might remotely be considered a weapon. She clung to it and then picked up a hard hat. It would make her less recognizable outside.
She was about to settle down and wait when a siren went off. It blared for thirty seconds and was followed by a voice over a loudspeaker that announced all hands were to begin a search for “our missing hostess” was how the voice described her. It almost sounded like a game. They knew there was no place for her to go and that she couldn’t get off the rig. They had every expectation of finding her.
She thought grimly about the scene she’d left behind in her room. The man with his clothes off and his brains bashed in. It ought to give them pause. She wasn’t going to be anyone’s pushover any more. Having taken action, she no longer felt the sense of utter helplessness that had overwhelmed her ever since Lloyd had ordered her to take her clothes off. She’d fight tooth and nail if they caught her again, even if it meant being killed.
She peered out her window and saw a handful of men moving about the rig. A couple had climbed up into the superstructure and were exploring every crevice and cranny. Several others had begun to search the level outside her window. It would only be a matter of time before someone came into her room.
Directly in front of her was a steel ladder that ran up the side of a massive pipeline. About fifty feet up, there was a small steel platform that appeared to hold only an electrical box or grid center. It looked like a dead end, though she couldn’t actually see the base of the area to be sure.
She watched as men moved around the rig. She’d been right about one thing. There didn’t seem to be too many of them, though it was difficult to keep track as they appeared and disappeared. She counted only half a dozen within her limited sight range.
Two men started up the ladder, and she watched them climb to the open platform with the electrical panel. They only peered over the rim, then turned and went back down. She took this to be proof that the platform was a dead end, one they wouldn’t be likely to bother searching again.
It was her chance.
As soon as the men disappeared to another part of the rig, she opened the door, hesitated only an instant, then raced to the ladder and scrambled up it as fast as she could.
The platform with the grid boxes was better than she could have hoped. As long as she kept back from the edge, she was totally invisible from any other part of the rig. There was even a small indentation between grid panels where she could wedge herself, comfortably out of the wind. It wouldn’t hide her if someone else climbed up to look over the edge, but barring that, she felt a small degree of security for the first time since getting off the chopper.
She put her wrench and the hard hat on the steel platform beside her and settled down to wait, as men continued calling to one another all over the rig. They seemed excited at the search, something to help pass the time during their boring duty at sea. These men might be experienced roustabouts, but it was also clear they knew precisely what went on below decks on this particular oil rig.
She prayed DeMaio wouldn’t come back. He had undoubtedly been informed about what happened first thing and would be furious that his aide had been killed and his important guests spurned. They’d have to come up with some way to explain how the man was killed, though head injuries from falling objects on an oil rig were undoubtedly not uncommon. In any event, DeMaio would assume, like the others, that there was no way for her to escape. Eventually she would be caught and returned to her duties.
She thought again about Garrett. Sarah would give him her message, but there was nothing she’d said to give a clue as to her whereabouts. At least she had mentioned Lloyd. That would give them something to go on, though if pressed Lloyd would almost certainly say that he and Kitty had been together but he didn’t know what had happened after she left. Absent any proof, it would be a dead end for Garrett.
She lay on her back and stared at the clouds running across the sky far above. The sun felt warm and reassuring on her face. She could almost imagine she was lying in a meadow somewhere, without a care in the world.
Almost.
46
GARRETT SLAMMED THE PHONE DOWN for the tenth time in the past two hours. He’d been trying futilely to get hold of Lonnie and in between had tried Alfred Nichols, the intel man in charge of keeping an eye on DeMaio. Lonnie didn’t answer, his cell phone turned off, and Nichols apparently wouldn’t take his call. He’d even put in a call to Ecum Secum’s Haven for Troubled Youth to see if Lloyd was around. Maybe he could squeeze something more from the scumbag. But no one knew where Lloyd was. He’d obviously gone to ground after his confrontation with the big man. That alone suggested he hadn’t told Lonnie everything.
Sarah’s insistence that he do something about Kitty put him on the spot. What the hell could he do? He wasn’t sure she would be on the oil rig and if he called in support only to find her not there, all he would succeed in doing would be to make DeMaio and whoever else was involved very cautious. Kitty would be hidden and guarded even more closely, maybe even killed, if they thought the authorities were getting too close.
He’d about come around to the idea that his best bet was going to be another sleuth attack by kayak. At night. His stomach churned just at the thought. Marcia would kill him if he screwed up his two-hundred-thousand-dollar foot in salt water again. Especially if the next time she saw the expensive bit of hardware it was attached to a corpse lying on a gurney in the morgue.
Where the bloody hell was Lonnie? He decided to drive back to the city to see if he could locate his cousin at any of his usual haunts. The hours-long drive seemed like a terrible waste of time. His mind was filled with images of what Kitty must be going through. He wasn’t exactly fond of the reporter, but no one deserved such a fate.
He also thought about Roland. The odds the fisherman could really turn his life around seemed remote. It would require a makeover of near-biblical proportions. Since they were kids together, Roland had been a sort of outcast. No one at their small school befriended him. Garrett had felt sorry for him and made one or two attempts to be civil, but the efforts paid no dividends. Roland was just an unpleasant character. And nothing about that had changed in the thirty-odd years since. It was going to be interesting to see how it all worked out.
He hit the greasy spoon on Barrington Street, but Lonnie hadn’t been seen since they’d been there together. He drove to a quiet residential neighborhood and located his cousin’s house on Henry Street. It was an inner-city street, an easy walk from the waterfront. The house was an attractive Victorian with an apartment on the third floor that Lon rented out to the college-aged daughter of still another cousin in return for some housecleaning and keeping an eye on the place when he wasn’t around, which was often.
The selection of the house had always seemed incongruous to Garrett. It was a neighborhood filled with young couples just starting out, lots of kids on the streets, a sort of Ozzie and Harriet environment. Lonnie liked it because it surrounded him with the normalcy he longed for in his own life. Garrett could hardly
imagine what his cousin’s neighbors thought of the frightening-looking giant in their midst.
But no one was home. Garrett sat in his car in the driveway trying to think what he could do next that would be constructive when he noticed a van parked across the street with two men sitting in it.
One of the men was looking at him. Slowly he raised what looked like some sort of walking stick and rested it on the open window. As Garrett stared at it in puzzlement, the stick suddenly let loose with a loud crack and his rear window, inches from his head, exploded. He ducked instinctively as three more shots were fired, then the van’s tires screeched as it pulled in tight behind Garrett’s car, blocking the driveway.
He leaped out of the car and ran into Lonnie’s back yard, which consisted of a postage-stamp plot of grass surrounded by shrubs and flowers. The back yards of at least six other houses all intersected, with picket fences between each of them. He looked back to see if the men in the car were coming after him, but they appeared to have decided it was too much work to chase him through the warren of busy backyards with kids, barking dogs, neighbors mowing lawns and gardening. Too many witnesses. Or maybe this had just been a warning. The van backed out and roared off down the street.
By the time he got back to his car, his attackers had disappeared. He thought about what it all meant as he cleaned up the broken glass in his back seat and threw it in Lonnie’s trash can.
An old man who’d been sitting on a porch across the street cackled loudly.
“Better than TV,” he said, banging the porch with his cane, a demented grin on his face.
Garrett crossed the street and smiled at him.
“You know how long those guys were sitting there?” he asked.
The old fellow shrugged his thin shoulders and cackled again, revealing a mouth full of missing teeth.
“I jest came out ten minutes ago,” he said. “Soon’s Law & Order ended. Better show out here.”
“Any idea who they were?”
“Nope. But it’s not the first time. Big guy, my neighbor? I think he knows some pretty bad people. But he always rakes my leaves for me in the fall.”
Garrett just nodded. Maybe he and Lonnie had been targeted by DeMaio. He wouldn’t put anything past the CEO. A big power broker like that would think nothing of stomping out any little bugs that irritated him. Of course, given what Lonnie did for a living, the attackers could have also been from any of a dozen other interests that Lonnie had annoyed. Still, it seemed unlikely anyone would mistake Garrett for his cousin.
He retreated to his car and drove slowly down the street. He wasn’t so sure it was a good idea for Lonnie to rent out an apartment to their cousin’s daughter. She might get in the crosshairs by mistake. He’d mention it … if he ever found him.
Someone was playing for keeps. He wondered if Lloyd might have sicced the Global Resources people on them. But the more he thought about it, the more he doubted that scenario. Lloyd was too much of a coward and was well aware of Lonnie’s reputation. He would avoid having anything to do with him.
That left DeMaio himself. It wouldn’t have been hard for the CEO to determine who Garrett was, following the press briefing, though it was pretty hard to believe the man would actually attempt to kill an RCMP officer. Still, DeMaio had been more than surprised when Garrett said he’d been on the oil rig and seen the accommodations himself. If word reached the CEO that Garrett was a Special Constable with expertise in prostitution … well … that put Garrett with way more information than DeMaio would be able to accept. The CEO had too much to lose.
Things were heating up. He wondered again what was happening to poor Kitty. Then he slammed on his brakes in the middle of the street. A man in a sports car careened around him, cursing loudly out his window. But Garrett hardly heard him.
DeMaio would hire only professionals. One thing you could count on from the very rich was for them to always hire the best. If they had wanted to kill him, they would have done so. Which meant they were sending a message. One that worried him a lot more than just getting shot at.
He picked up his cell phone and called Sarah. By the tenth ring, he was already speeding down the highway toward the bridge, his temporary police light stuck on his roof. The message he feared was that someone close to him might be at risk—as a warning to him.
47
HIS WORST FEARS WERE REALIZED when he turned in to Sarah’s little cottage. Milling around outside was Tom, along with his counterpart from up the shore, Arthur Parmenter. Even Alvin was there, in his Halifax patrol car.
Garrett just nodded at them and said, “Where is she?”
Before anyone could speak, Lila and Ayesha came running out of the house. Lila had an angry bruise on her cheek.
“Oh, Garrett,” she cried, “Some men came and took Sarah away. We tried to stop them but they just knocked me down. One of them told me to tell you it was time to stop poking your nose where it wasn’t wanted.”
Garrett’s heart sank. He put one hand gently on Lila’s cheek. “They did this to you?”
She nodded, tears running down her face. But they weren’t for the bruise. She’d been hit plenty of times during her years at Sweet Angels. The tears were for Sarah. “Why did they take her, Garrett? What’s going on?”
“We’d like to know that too,” said Alvin. “Tom here called it in to Tuttle and he sent me down to see if I could help.”
“Thanks, Alvin. And you too, Tom and Arthur.” He took a deep breath. “They took her to get to me. To get me to stop investigating this DeMaio character who runs Global Resources. They think they’re more powerful than God.”
“What do you want us to do?” Tom asked.
Garrett stared at the wharf. What would they do with her? Would they take her to the oil rig like Kitty? He didn’t think so, or at least he didn’t want to think about that possibility. They’d want to hide her away some place safe, where no one else would find or see her. Until they were certain Garrett would do as he was told.
He thought about Madame Liu’s high-end Victorian house and that little barred bungalow where the girls were locked up at night on the island. “Tom, can you and Arthur check out Madame Liu’s compound on the island in Lake Micmac? I’ve talked to Tuttle about it. He’ll help you set up a raid.”
Tom nodded slowly. “Okay. What about you?”
“Another possibility I’m going to look into. Alvin can help me.” He looked at his friend, who nodded. He was glad Alvin had come. He was a short, wiry little guy with a chip on his shoulder, but he was a pit bull.
Garrett turned to the girls. “Will you be all right here by yourselves?”
“Of course,” Lila said indignantly. “We’re not babies. But isn’t there something else we can do?”
“Yes,” he said. “Can you tell me anything at all about Lloyd that might be useful? I’ve got to find him. He’s in this up to his neck, but he’s disappeared. Lonnie put the fear of God into him. I should have collared him when I had the chance. You have any idea where he might go to hide out?”
Lila looked defeated. “No, I’m sorry, Garrett. He has a house down the other side of Necum Teuch, but he wouldn’t go there if he was hiding.” She hesitated.
“What?”
“He used to take one of the kids at the home away with him sometimes. Said he had some yard work for him to do at his cabin. But the kid was gay, and we all kind of thought that had something to do with it.”
“Lloyd is gay?” Garrett could hardly believe it. The man obviously relished his power over the young girls, and the way he looked at Kitty … it just didn’t seem likely.
“I think he’s bisexual,” Lila said. “We got them sometimes at Sweet Angels. Even a few who would ask for a girl and a boy at the same time. Anyway, he was obsessed by sex. It’s practically all he thought about. He liked for the guys to see him when he was naked just as much as the girls.”
“All right, thanks, Lila. It’s important to know. I want you to call anyone you can think of
who might know something about Lloyd’s whereabouts. In the city or at Lloyd’s Haven. If you call the Haven, pretend you’re a parent wanting to talk to your child.”
She perked up. “All right, Garrett. I can do that.”
He gave her his cell phone number.
Alvin said, “You have any idea at all where we’re going to look for this guy?”
“We’ll start at Lloyd’s Haven. It’s the only place I can think of. Lloyd knows more than he told Lonnie. I’m certain of it. He’s the loose thread in all of this, and I’m going to pull it until his head explodes.”
48
IT WAS A WINDY NIGHT on the ocean, signaling, perhaps, yet another storm moving up the Atlantic seaboard.
Lonnie lumbered along the Halifax waterfront. It was after eleven and the streets were mostly deserted. Only the requisite derelicts, a handful of hookers, and a police patrol car or two occupied the quiet byways. All of them watched Lonnie pass uneasily. The police knew who he was and had come to have a grudging respect for him. Some of that came from Lonnie’s connection to Garrett. That he was often engaged in activities of borderline legality didn’t escape the authorities, but they’d learned that the big man’s word was good and that they could rely on him for an occasional tip when it came to pimps or the odd mugger.
But there would be no tips tonight. Lonnie was on a mission. He’d seen Kitty on TV a few times. She was a looker, and he knew she had to be deep into the worst nightmare of her young life. He couldn’t really describe the way he felt. Anger that a promising young reporter should have to find herself in such a position. He felt a slow rage building deep within him, its source long ago primed by his grandmother.
His years in the business of enforcement on the docks of Halifax and Dartmouth had given him many contacts. Now one of them waited for him beside a deserted wharf in a speedboat with a powerful engine.
His intentions were still not fully thought out. But he was dressed in dark clothes and armed with a nine-millimeter Luger, a short-nosed .45 in an ankle holster, and an ugly looking knife with a six-inch blade. Normally a walking fortress of muscle and determination, the extra firepower made him an arsenal that no one in his right mind would want to come upon on a dark night … on the docks or anywhere else.
