Trigger Warning

by Allan Leverone

  Fucking asshole.

  Mike felt his blood pressure rising and worked to calm himself. Hopefully things would go smoothly and Chilcott would never get the opportunity to throw Mike under the bus. But if the shit did hit the fan, Mr. Bigshot Lieutenant Governor would find the tables turned on his sorry ass before he knew what hit him.

  Because Mike had secretly recorded several hours of their strategy sessions using a tiny voice-activated microcassette recorder slipped inside a shirt pocket. It was decidedly low-tech for the former CIA field operative, but was more than sufficient for Mike’s purposes. He retained the recordings that incriminated his boss and eliminated the benign ones.

  And now he possessed the power to destroy Chilcott.

  Better yet, the man had no fucking idea. It never occurred to the boss to ensure their meetings weren’t being recorded and even if it had, someone like Bradley Chilcott wouldn’t have stood a snowball’s chance in hell of finding the little recorder. He was a politician: soft as a marshmallow and clueless regarding operational matters. If he’d gotten a hand within twelve inches of Mike’s pocket, Mike would have slapped him into next week.

  As it turned out, violence—or even the threat of it—had not been necessary. Chilcott never even considered the possibility of a double-cross.

  Maybe—hopefully—Mike would never have to use the tapes. Maybe—hopefully—they would remain safely inside his pocket during this operation. Mike would then transfer them to his safe-deposit box following successful completion of the op and they would never see the light of day.

  But if worse came to worst, Mike Hargus would do what he’d always done—protect his own ass. In any conspiracy, law enforcement would look to utilize whatever they had on a small fish in order to land the bigger fish. Should things go sideways in this little escapade, Bradley Chilcott would represent the big fish. Mike’s secret recordings would provide more than enough evidence to nail that fish to the wall, so to speak, which in turn would allow Mike to negotiate a sweet deal.

  The sense of security Mike felt from having this insurance policy was palpable.

  But for now, the goal was to do everything in his power to make the primary plan a success. The Chilcott gravy train was a rich one, well worth the effort and risk of keeping it on the tracks.

  ***

  Mike watched intently from a safe distance as Sheridan and his two women—one a petite but beautiful adult, the other a petite but adorable child—climbed into his big red Dodge Ram pickup and drove slowly out of the playground’s lot. Night was falling and the lot was emptying quickly and Mike was glad he wouldn’t have to hang around much longer because he would soon stick out like a sore thumb to anyone paying attention.

  And Sheridan would be paying attention.

  The truck turned toward town and accelerated away. Mike briefly considered following, but only briefly. If he were spotted by Sheridan everything would fall apart before it had even gotten started, and the odds that the target was going anywhere but to drop his girlfriend and her daughter at their home and then continue on to his own house were negligible.

  He’d learned enough about his target anyway.

  The time had come to put the plan—the primary plan, Bradley Chilcott’s plan—into motion.

  Mike lit a cigarette and went over the situation in his head one last time. The plan was a simple one as these things went. With his decision to seek reelection, Maryland Governor Jim Studds had positioned himself directly between Bradley Chilcott and the presidency.

  Studds would thus have to be eliminated.

  Since Sheridan would never agree under normal circumstances to assassinate an innocent man, he would need to be properly motivated. To properly motivate him, Mike and Bradley would need leverage.

  The little girl should provide that leverage quite effectively.

  Mike sat in his car, staring into the gathering darkness and thinking.

  When the cigarette had burned down to a nub, he tossed it out the window and drove off in the same direction Sheridan had gone a few minutes earlier.

  7

  The car sat motionless on the side of the road, its idling engine sending a thin plume of exhaust curling into the chilly afternoon sky.

  Mike Hargus sat inside, craving a cigarette and waiting for the girl to appear. He ignored the craving for now. He would need to move quickly and efficiently when little Janie Tolliver rounded the corner, and the last thing he needed was to worry about extinguishing a butt at the exact moment he should be moving his.

  He’d tried to time his arrival in the neighborhood so that he wouldn’t need to sit here long.

  He’d done his homework and he knew where Janie Tolliver attended school.

  He knew the dismissal time for that school.

  He knew the little girl always walked home. Several school-aged children lived in the Tolliver’s neighborhood, including a couple of older ones, and they always returned from school in a group.

  They had obviously been taught to stay together. Safety in numbers and all that. Plus, this small Southern New Hampshire town was quiet and safe. Mike guessed it had been decades since the last violent crime occurred here, if ever.

  From the parents’ perspective, allowing the kids to walk home from school was a perfectly reasonable option.

  But there was one small problem with that option, and it was a problem Mike immediately knew he could use to his advantage: Janie Tolliver lived farther away from school than anyone else in the group. Her house was located at the end of the neighborhood cul-de-sac.

  Thus the rest of the children would peel off, one by one. They would walk up their driveways and into their homes, eventually leaving Janie alone to travel the last couple hundred feet.

  Undoubtedly Edie Tolliver had set up some kind of arrangement with a stay-at-home neighborhood mom to keep an eye on her child until the girl disappeared inside her house. It only made sense.

  It would also fail to keep the girl safe.

  Mike would need just seconds to snatch her and drive away. He’d stolen the vehicle in which he now sat, and had stolen a second vehicle and parked it less than a mile away. He would grab the girl, drive the short distance to the second car and hustle her into it, then drive that car away at a sedate speed, invisible and anonymous and safe.

  There could be a hundred wary eyes watching the girl walk home from school, fifty people writing down the license plate number of the suspicious car sitting on the side of the road, and unless one set of those eyes belonged to an Olympic sprinter with a weapon at the ready it wasn’t going to make a damned bit of difference. Janie Tolliver would be long gone before anyone even knew what the hell had happened.

  That was the plan, anyway.

  Mike checked his watch. He could feel a stress headache trying to take hold. This was taking too long. Time was ticking. The longer he sat here exposed, the greater the chance that something would go wrong.

  He checked his watch again and muttered a curse. Maybe the little brat had stayed after school for some reason, or maybe her mother had picked her up today for a goddamned doctor’s appointment, or maybe—

  Jesus Christ, settle down, you fucking pussy. You’ve faced Taliban fighters and Iraqi insurgents. You can handle one suburban little girl.

  He forced himself to relax. Took a deep breath. Checked his watch again; he couldn’t help it, he knew he was being obsessive but—

  There she was.

  A small group of children rounded the corner down by the main road. They were meandering, moving slowly as children do unless the lure of ice cream is involved. The group diminished in size as it progressed until it was just Janie and one other girl.

  Then the other girl veered off and Janie Tolliver waved goodbye to her and continued on.

  Alone.

  On a vector that would take her directly past Mike Hargus and his stolen car.

  It was finally time to set this little drama in motion.

  Mike leaned across the front seat, pretending
to look for something in the glove box, with no idea whether the little girl was even paying the slightest attention to him. Probably she wasn’t.

  He monitored her progress in his peripheral vision. When she had almost reached the car, he straightened up, opened the door and stepped out onto the side of the road. He continued to ignore her.

  In his hand he held a small camera, which he lifted to his face as if planning to snap a photo of something located directly over Janie Tolliver’s shoulder. He began walking slowly in her direction.

  She was getting concerned. He watched her through the viewfinder and could see her expression changing, morphing from carefree little girl to savvy twenty-first century child beginning to consider the Stranger Danger she’d been warned so much about but never really expected to encounter.

  Still, she didn’t run or scream or cross the road. Mike knew it was because he still hadn’t paid any attention to her. She didn’t think he even knew she was there. As far as she could see he was absorbed in taking his all-important photo of…whatever the hell was so fascinating behind her.

  She was almost past him, walking more slowly but being brave and focusing on her driveway, which was less than fifty feet away.

  Mike pretended to fumble with the lens. Just another second.

  Now. Janie Tolliver was crossing his path.

  He lowered the camera to the pocket of his trench coat and dropped it inside, then deftly removed a small zip-locked plastic bag. He unzipped the bag as she passed a couple of feet off his right, removing a rag soaked in chloroform.

  He reached out and clamped the rag over the girl’s mouth and nose with his right hand as his left arm encircled her waist. He pulled her tightly against him, the exact motion he would use to hug one of his kids.

  She kicked and struggled and tried to scream. It was a perfectly natural reaction but exactly the wrong thing to do because it caused her to inhale deeply of the chloroform.

  Within seconds she sagged limply in his arms, unconscious. Mike lifted her and carried her easily to the car. She was valuable cargo and he supported her head carefully.

  The urge to look around, to see whether he was being observed, was almost overwhelming. But doing so would be pointless and cost valuable time, so he ignored it and kept going, working quickly but staying under control.

  He placed her gently in the front passenger seat. Lifted a pair of handcuffs off the floor and secured her wrists behind her back, and used a second set on her ankles. Finally he clicked the seat belt into place, unsure whether it would make a damned bit of difference on an unconscious child in the event of an accident but doing so anyway.

  The whole operation, from stepping out of the car to securing the girl, took less than a minute. When the girl regained consciousness—which would be fairly quickly—she would be frightened but unharmed, save for a monster of a headache.

  Mike slammed the door closed and hurried around the car to the driver’s side. The neighborhood seemed empty and deserted, but it was impossible to tell for sure. A frightened housewife could behind any one of those picture windows, even now dialing 911.

  He dropped into the driver’s seat and jammed the still-idling car into gear. Accelerated down the road and within seconds had exited the neighborhood. He turned in the direction of the second stolen car.

  Five minutes later, Mike Hargus was safely lost among the speeding traffic on Interstate 93.

  The snatch had gone well.

  He was home free.

  8

  Jack was washing dishes when the call came in.

  He’d been attempting to replicate the Western Omelets he ate several mornings a week at the Three Squares Diner, but despite several tries had been unable to come close to matching the flavor. Edie swore she’d given him her precise recipe, right down to the seasoning, but his efforts had thus far yielded disappointing—and often inedible—results.

  “She’s gotta be holding out on me,” he muttered, tossing his frying pan into the sink in disappointment. It went against his sense of self-discipline not to wash the dirty dishes immediately, but he couldn’t bring himself to face the evidence of his ongoing culinary failure.

  The pan taunted him from the sink and he glared at it. “You’re lucky you don’t end up face-down in the dump, disloyal bastard.”

  When the phone rang he raised his eyebrows in surprise. He guarded his home number zealously.

  Mr. Stanton, Jack’s contact at The Organization, had it, of course. But as Jack had just completed the job in New York, he wasn’t expecting to hear from the man for several days at least.

  Besides a couple of old friends from his operator days, men to whom a telephone call on a public line was a foreign concept, the only other person he could think of who knew his number was Edie.

  And it was too early for her to be out of work.

  Alarm bells jangled in his head. There was no reason to feel uneasy—yet—but Jack had survived a long time in a dangerous occupation by paying close attention to a finely tuned sense of intuition. And his intuition was telling him something was…off.

  He pursed his lips and dried his hands on a towel before peering at the caller ID screen. To his surprise, it was the number of the Three Squares Diner.

  Edie.

  He picked up the phone and kept his tone light despite the growing sensation that something must be wrong for her to call in the middle of the afternoon.

  “I know there’s something you’re not telling me,” he said. “I followed your recipe to the letter and my omelet still tasted like dirty socks. Not that I know what dirty socks taste like, mind you.”

  He tilted his head at the sound of a choked-off sob. The caller tried to talk and couldn’t get any words out.

  She tried again and failed again.

  “Edie? What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “She’s gone. M-My baby’s gone.”

  Jack spoke softly. “Who’s gone? What are you talking about?”

  “Somebody took Janie. They took my little girl, Jack. Oh my God, they have my baby and—”

  “Slow down, Edie, okay? Who took Janie? Tell me everything you know.”

  Through the line he heard a deep, shuddering breath as the woman he’d begun to fall in love with tried to get herself under control. When she resumed speaking she sounded marginally less panicked.

  But only marginally.

  “I’ve told Janie to always call me at the diner the minute she gets home from school. She does it every day, Jack. Every day. She never forgets to call.”

  “But today she didn’t call.”

  “No, she didn’t call. When she should have been home for ten minutes and I still hadn’t heard from her, I tried calling our home phone.”

  “And there was no answer.”

  “No.” Edie’s voice broke and she sobbed abruptly.

  “Maybe she stopped at a friend’s house, or maybe she stayed after school to work on a project or something.”

  “No. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s nothing like that.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because before I could even get out of the diner and drive home to check on her, someone called me here. It was a man, and he said they’ve kidnapped Janie.”

  Her voice broke again but she continued. “He said not to call the police or they’d kill her. Jack, they told me to call you instead.”

  He shook his head, trying to comprehend what he was hearing. It wasn’t adding up.

  “Call me? Why would they want you to call me? Edie, you’ve got to call the police. Hang up and do it right now. Every minute’s worth of delay is another mile farther away the kidnappers can be. The police can get out an Amber Alert, they can—”

  “NO!” Edie screamed into the phone but got herself back under control before continuing. She was already beginning to grow hoarse from crying. “No, Jack. Haven’t you been listening to me? They said they’d kill her if I called the police. They said they’d know if I did it and the
y would kill her.”

  “But—”

  “They told me to call you, Jack. They said I should call you and tell you to check your email, and that you would know what to do.”

  Silence as Jack tried to absorb her words.

  “What does that mean, Jack?”

  “I don’t know yet.” The sick feeling grew inside his stomach. He began to suspect he did know, at least in a very general way, and that suspicion did nothing to ease his concern.

  He cleared his throat. Edie’s breathing sounded heavy and anguished through the telephone receiver but she remained silent, allowing him to work through everything she’d said.

  “Can you get someone to watch the diner for you?”

  “I’m way ahead of you. There’s no way I could continue to work right now. Mark’s going to keep an eye on things.” Mark was Edie’s cook and had been with her since the day the diner opened, right after its purchase by Edie and her husband.

  “Okay. Get in your car and come to my house, can you do that?”

  “Of course. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” She already sounded considerably more under control now that she had a purpose. It was obvious she viewed driving to Jack’s as the first step toward getting her child back, and she was instantly ready to do it.

  “Listen to me,” Jack said. “I know how upset you are. Be careful driving. Janie’s counting on you, and you’ll be no good to her if you wrap your car around a tree or a telephone pole.”

  “I’ll be careful,” she said. “But I’m not going to waste any time getting there, either.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said, but she had already hung up.

  Jack replaced the phone on its cradle, omelet forgotten, dirty dishes forgotten. The sensation of dread crawled through his gut like an advancing army. He walked distractedly into his living room and took a seat in front of his computer.

  9

  Something under the car was squeaking.