by James Swain
“Yeah, they headed west. I ran into the street after them. I wanted my money, you know? The driver was heading toward 595.”
I released his shirt and patted him on the head.
“See how easy that was?” I said.
I went outside. The uniform was long gone. I called Burrell and got voice mail. I left a message and asked her to call me back. After a few minutes had passed, I started calling the other detectives in Missing Persons whose numbers were in my address book.
On my last try, Detective Rich Dugger picked up. I had hired and trained Dugger. With his school-boy face and calm demeanor, he could extract more information out of a witness than any cop I’d ever worked with.
“Hey, Jack, what’s shaking?” Dugger asked.
“I need to speak to Burrell. Any idea where she is?”
“She’s racing down the shoulder of I-95. I’m in a car behind her.”
“What’s going on?”
“There’s a Jeep Cherokee in the median, and the driver is refusing to get out. Two highway patrol cars have the vehicle surrounded, and traffic is backed up in both directions. We think it’s Sara Long’s abductors.”
It was not uncommon for vehicles to pull into the median on I-95 when they had mechanical problems. “What’s the color of the Jeep in the median?” I asked.
“I’m driving on the shoulder, and can’t see the car yet,” Dugger said.
“The manager at the Sunny Days motel made the getaway vehicle. Sara’s abductors are driving a navy blue Jeep Cherokee with a dented rear bumper and a scratched driver’s door.”
“Shit! Now the traffic’s stopped dead.”
“Can I make a suggestion? Climb onto the hood of your car, and try to see the Jeep that’s stuck in the median.”
“That’s not a bad idea. I’ll call you right back.”
The line went dead. I let Buster out of the car, and watched him chase his shadow. Finally my cell phone rang. It was Dugger calling me back.
“The Jeep in the median is blood red. It’s not them,” Dugger said.
“You need to turn around and get everyone back here. Sara’s abductors are heading west on 595.”
“I can’t. The highway patrol officers are pointing their guns at this guy. We’ve got to deal with this. Later.”
Again the line went dead. Sara’s abductors were in Broward, and I couldn’t get a cop to help me find them. I kicked my front tire in anger, then jumped into my car.
CHAPTER 32
ven with the windows down, the interior of my car was broiling hot. I put on the air, then punched in Karl Long’s number. His secretary stuck me on hold.
“Pick up your damn phone,” I said angrily.
My heart was pounding in my ears. Mouse and the giant were on the run. They’d been waiting for two days to move Sara Long out of Broward County, and now they had no choice. If they didn’t immediately get out, they were going to get caught.
Desperation time.
I knew how to catch them. The motel manager had said they’d driven west. That meant they were either heading for the swampy Everglades, or would drift north through Palm Beach County. My guess was that they’d pick the Everglades. The back roads were desolate, and they wouldn’t have to drive fast, or risk getting stuck in traffic.
Finally, Long picked up the line.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” Long said.
“Your daughter’s abductors are making a run for it.”
“For the love of Christ. Do you know where they are?”
“I’ve got a general idea. Is your private helicopter still available?”
“It’s on the helipad behind my office. My pilot is here as well. Tell me where you are, and I’ll have him pick you up.”
I was still parked in the Sunny Days lot. The motel’s address was printed on the manager’s door. I read it to Long.
“I’m staring at the map of Broward hanging behind my desk,” Long said. “I own a ten-acre parcel of land three miles west from where you are, on the same road. Go there, and my pilot will pick you up in ten minutes.”
“Make it five minutes,” I said.
“I don’t know if he can move that fast.”
“Then kick him in the ass. This may be our last chance to find Sara.”
I dropped the phone in my lap and burned rubber leaving the motel lot.
Karl Long had to be one of the richest men in south Florida. The number of office buildings and pieces of undeveloped land that bore his name were endless. I parked in front of the parcel where I was going to meet his pilot, and leashed Buster.
The land was surrounded by a white three-board fence. I hoisted Buster over the fence, then climbed over myself. My dog quickly found a stick in the grass and offered it to me. He wanted to play. I was in no mood for games, and I pulled the stick from his mouth, and tossed it onto the other side of the fence.
“No,” I told him.
Dead center in the property was a billboard with Karl Long’s name printed on it. As Buster and I headed toward it, a chopper roared overhead.
I glanced at my watch. Four and a half minutes.
The chopper landed fifty yards from where I stood. It was a metallic blue and had the initials KL painted in gold on the wings and on the tail. Through the tinted windshield I spotted two individuals, one of whom waved to me. My jaw tightened.
“For the love of Christ,” I said.
The passenger door banged open. Long jumped out, wearing combat fatigues and a leather holster with a sidearm. A red bandanna was tied around his forehead that made him look like a mini-Rambo. Had he not given me fifty thousand bucks to find his daughter, I would have laughed in his face. Instead, I scowled at him.
“What are you doing here?” I yelled as he came toward me.
“I’m going with you to rescue Sara,” Long replied.
“Bad idea, Karl.”
“You don’t want me along?”
“No. You’ll only be in the way.”
Long grabbed my arm and squeezed the biceps so hard it made me wince. The desperation in his face was all too real. I didn’t back down.
“Stay here,” I said.
“I can’t do that,” he yelled back at me.
“I’ll give you my car keys. You can drive back to your office. I’ll call you once I know something.”
“No! I’m coming with you.”
I would have stood there and argued with him, only Sara’s life hung in the balance. I picked up Buster and put him into the backseat of the chopper, then climbed in myself. Long climbed into the front seat, and told the pilot to take off.
People thought flying in helicopters was glamorous. My guess was none of them had ever been inside a chopper. The engine noise was deafening, the vibrations scary, and if you didn’t focus on the ground as you rose into the air, you threw up.
I buckled myself into the backseat, grabbed my dog, and braced myself for the ride. Long introduced me to the third man in the chopper, a silver-haired, retired air force chopper pilot named Steve Morris.
“Which way do you want to go?” Morris asked.
I pointed at I-595, which was off to our right.
“Follow the interstate toward the Everglades,” I shouted.
“What are we looking for?” Morris said.
“A navy Jeep Cherokee with a dented rear bumper and tinted windows.”
“Got it.”
Morris lifted the chopper into the air, steered us over I-595, and headed due west. The legal flying limit for choppers was a thousand feet. It felt like we were flying much lower, and I was able to tell the makes of the cars speeding down the highway. None matched the getaway vehicle.
Within minutes we reached the exit for U.S. 27, the last exit before the tollbooth for Alligator Alley. Traffic had thinned, and I asked Morris to lift the chopper into the air as high as the law would allow. He complied, and we hovered in the cloudless sky.
“Do you have binoculars?” I shouted.
“Sure do,” Long
replied.
Long removed a pair of binoculars from a bag lying at his feet and passed them to me. Holding them up to my face, I looked down Alligator Alley. The Alley was ninety miles of four-lane highway that dissected the lower half of the state. It was ruler-straight and had no housing developments or strip centers on either side of it. If Mouse had gone this way, all we had to do was follow the Alley, and we would eventually spot him.
I lowered the binoculars into my lap. I didn’t think Mouse had gone this way. The Alley was bordered by swamps on either side, and contained only a handful of exits. It was a bad road to use as an escape route.
I looked down at State Road 27 directly beneath us. Twenty-seven ran due north, and had plenty of cut-offs. Mouse would feel safer on 27, and I envisioned him taking it north until he reached 441, where he could then easily get lost. I tapped the pilot’s shoulder.
“Let’s take Twenty-seven,” I yelled in his ear.
Morris gave me a thumbs-up. The chopper turned, and we roared north.
Broward is one of the most populous counties in America; when you head west into the swamps the population drops to nothing and vast farms spring up. If Mouse had driven this way, we would find him soon enough.
I glanced at the pilot’s instruments and found the speedometer. We were pushing a hundred twenty miles per hour, or a mile every thirty seconds. Long turned around in his seat and addressed me through cupped hands.
“How can you be sure they went this way?”
I stared down at the highway. “I’m not,” I yelled.
“But what if—”
“Shut up, and watch the road.”
Long didn’t like that. People hired me to do a job, and that didn’t include explaining my actions. I grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around.
“Look at the road!”
“You’re a real prick!” Long said angrily.
“Who cares?” I replied.
The chopper suddenly slowed. Morris waved to me, then pointed straight down. He had spotted something and wanted to take a closer look. I gave him the thumbs-up, and he took us down. It felt like the floor had dropped out from beneath our feet, and Buster buried his head in my lap and shut his eyes.
I continued looking down at the highway. A crew of tree cutters were trimming back the overhang on 27, and had traffic stopped in both directions. If Mouse had run into this during his escape, it would have slowed him down considerably. I hadn’t had much to cheer about lately, but this turn of events lifted my spirits. Maybe I’d finally caught a lucky break.
We flew another five minutes, each of us focused on the backed-up line of vehicles below. Long had stopped speaking to me. I supposed I could have apologized, but I didn’t look very good on my knees.
Another minute passed. Off to my left, I spotted something strange. A compound of white, deserted buildings sat in an overgrown field, the buildings surrounded by a chain-link fence topped by razor wire. It looked like an abandoned prison, yet I knew of no prison in this part of the county.
“I want to take a look at that,” I yelled to Morris.
The chopper dipped, making me feel weightless. Morris brought us down directly over the compound’s entrance. I stared at the shell of a guard house. At one time, the abandoned place had been some type of institution.
A single road made of crushed seashells led into the compound. I spotted a fresh pair of tire tracks in the shells, their indentations several inches deep. Someone had recently been here, and I told Morris to see where the tracks led.
Morris followed the road into the compound. It was an enormous facility, and I counted six towering buildings, each painted an institutional white. The buildings’ windows had been knocked out, as had the doors, giving them a ghostly feel. On one building, rusted bars covered the windows on every floor. Not a prison, I thought, but a mental institution.
The tracks stopped in a courtyard, then made a complete circle, and went back out. It could have been teenagers, or some curious tourists looking for a photo opportunity. Or it could have been Mouse and the giant, looking for a place to hide.
Long turned around in his seat. “Why are we stopping?”
“I think they came here,” I said.
“You’re nuts. This is a ghost town.”
It was a ghost town, its memories long since displaced. But sometimes people returned to places that filled their souls with darkness. Mouse and his partner had been in Broward eighteen years ago, and something told me that this was where they’d lived.
“Let’s go!” Long told the pilot.
The chopper left the compound. Flying over the entrance, I spotted a rotting wood sign lying on the ground beside the front gate. The name of the institution was painted on the sign in bold letters, and it screamed up at me like a horrible voice from my past.
Daybreak.
CHAPTER 33
he air escaped from my lungs, and I felt light-headed. An old joke came to mind. A Buddhist walks up to a hot-dog stand and says, “Make me one with everything.”
I had become one with everything about this case. I knew exactly what was going on and who these guys were. All from staring at a rotting wooden sign lying in an overgrown field.
The infamous Daybreak Mental Health Center had once stood in this field. Up until the 1980s, this was where the county’s mentally disturbed citizens had been put, usually against their will. It had been a state-funded snake pit of abuse, neglect, and wasted lives, with more people dying here each year than in all of the state’s jails combined. It had gotten so bad that the governor had shut the place down.
I had focused on Daybreak when I’d first starting looking for Naomi Dunn. Because it was closed, I had relied on phone interviews and had spoken to different people associated with the facility, including the center’s director, the doctor who ran the ward for the criminally insane, and two Broward County cops who worked there.
I closed my eyes and plumbed my memory. My conversations with the director, the doctor, and the two cops quickly came back to me. Each had sworn to me that they had no knowledge of a disturbed giant as a Daybreak patient. Their denials had almost been identical, like they were reading off a script. I should have seen through the ruse, but hadn’t. They had lied. And men lied when they had something to hide.
I opened my eyes. We had stopped and were hovering in the air, the pilot waiting for instructions. I glanced at Long. He was still livid with me, his face bright red.
“This is it,” I shouted.
“How can you know that?” Long asked.
“It’s an old mental institution. Sara’s abductors were inmates here.”
Long acted stunned. The idea seemed to upset him more than if I’d said his daughter’s abductors were convicted murderers.
“We need to look around down there, and see if the Cherokee is stashed somewhere,” I said.
The pilot looked to Long for approval.
“Do what he says,” Long told him.
We circled the grounds. Daybreak was surrounded by a chain-link fence with several gaping holes in it. Each time we passed over one of these holes, I looked for tire tracks leading out. I had hunted for mentally disturbed people before. They were difficult to track down, their behavior unpredictable at best. But they shared one thing in common. When they were being chased, they would often hide instead of running. In the past two days, Mouse and his partner had hidden all over Broward County, and I sensed they were doing the same thing right now.
“Look! Down there!” the pilot said.
I strained my eyes to see what Morris was pointing at. Just north of Daybreak was an orange grove with a brown dirt road running through its center. There were fresh tire tracks in the road, and I felt my heart start to race.
“Follow that road,” I said.
Morris brought the chopper directly over the road, then headed down it. It was hard to judge distances from the air. After what felt like two or three miles, we came to a clearing with a cracker house that had a
corrugated metal roof covered with mold. The structure appeared to be part of a farm, the surrounding yard filled with rusting tractors and farm equipment. The brown dirt road ran past the cracker house and all the way down to 27, it’s length over a mile long. The tire tracks appeared to stop at the house.
“We need to go down,” I shouted.
Morris landed the chopper in a pasture two hundred yards from the cracker house. The grass was knee-high, and my foot sank in a pile of ancient cow dung as I jumped from the cockpit. Buster strained at his leash, the enticing smells too much to bear.
Long climbed out and headed straight for the ramshackle structure. The strap on his holster was unbuckled, his fingers gripping the handle of his gun. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to shoot himself in the leg.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to storm the house and rescue my daughter,” Long said.
“That’s a good way to get Sara hurt.”
“Do you have another plan in mind?”
“We need to find their vehicle, and make sure those tire tracks are theirs,” I said. “For all we know, they might belong to someone else.”
Long backed down. “All right. We’ll do it your way.”
I made Long get behind me, and approached the house. The windows were covered in plywood, and a yellow “No Trespassing” sign was stuck on the front door. I tested the knob, and found it locked.
I circled the house while checking the boards on the windows. They were nailed down tight. The house had not been lived in for years, and I turned my attention to the grounds. There was farm equipment scattered around, including rusted combines and ground busters. The age of the equipment confirmed that the place had been abandoned. Buster continued to strain his leash. A part of me wanted to let him go to see what he could find. But I knew the woods were filled with gators, wild boars, and panthers. If Buster ran across one of these animals, he’d be ripped apart, and my company would lose half of its employees.
“This is a goddamn waste of time,” Long said a few minutes later.
“You can leave if you want to,” I said.
