A Perilous Pursuit

by Diane Gilmore

  “Conditions?” Craig asked bitterly. “What about what I want out of all this?”

  “What I want is the only thing that counts.” Cabrera said. “If you cooperate on this assignment, perhaps we can arrive at a compromise that will satisfy both of us, seeing as you should be dead by now for the shit you tried to pull by ditching me.”

  “I can’t wait to hear your idea of a compromise.”

  “You don’t want to fail because of what I will do, first to you, then to your family,” Cabrera reasoned complacently, as if the entire situation made complete sense to him. “I don’t want to fail because I may not get another chance to get this close to Fairchild. So, you take my way out of your dilemma, I get what I want, and everybody wins.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I wouldn’t want to contemplate that if I were you.”

  Craig felt pinned to the chair with fear. He knew that besides killing everyone he ever cared about, Cabrera could eliminate him very easily. Right now as a matter of fact. But should he somehow manage to get away from him, Cabrera could, in a moment, have a price put on Craig so high he’d never be able to hide from it.

  Craig’s resistance began to falter. “Please, just let Shaun and me go. I won’t say a word about this conversation to anyone. You can get someone else to pull off this job a lot better than I could. Would you trust someone who doesn’t want to do a job to get it done right?”

  “Oh you’ll do it right. And I’m doing you a favor, Phillips,” Cabrera said in mock offense. “You were my best drop man, and that is the only reason why your brother is still alive. After all, I could’ve been real shitty about the whole thing and just fed him to the mountain lions as soon as he got here. No, you’ll do the job, and you’ll do it quite well.”

  His eyes burned into Craig like fire in his soul. “Your future lies with me now. If you follow orders, you may live to enjoy it immensely. When you pull this job off, your beloved manager will be long gone, his business will crumble under the scandal, and your little musical group will disband. As I see it, you’ll have nothing left, no choice, but to return to me.”

  He paused momentarily, his expression even colder than his voice. “You belong to me, Phillips. You signed your life away to me and the drug trade when you took my money that first night in Soho.”

  “You can’t do this—” Craig began, his voice quivering.

  “And you can’t stop me.” Cabrera’s eyes danced with a mocking, triumphant elation that sent a tingle of fear shooting once again down Craig’s spine. “And anyway, would you really want to try?”

  “Why not come back to us?” Pierre spoke up. “You made plenty of fast cash. You can have money and built-in protection, and all the women you could ever want.”

  “Let our guest think about the job he is going to do for us, shall we?” Cabrera said calmly. “I’m sure he’ll have a change of heart by tomorrow.”

  “I bloody well won’t!” Craig protested.

  “Yes, you will,” Cabrera reiterated. “You see, I know all about you and the ones you love. Like that lovely lady, or even your little shit brother.”

  Shaun’s image raced back into Craig’s mind. Then the awful truth hit him with frightful clarity. He would do what was asked of him, or else Shaun and Taylor—

  “Blackmail is a disgusting way to do business,” Craig said bitterly.

  “But a very profitable way, nonetheless,” Cabrera replied. “It always guarantees me success.”

  Cabrera said something in Spanish to the two men who brought Craig to the house. Their guns came out as they approached him.

  “Take him down to spend some time with his brother,” he said in English. “Montagne, go along with them and make sure everything is in order.”

  He then turned his back on the group, putting an end to any further conversation.

  Chapter 13

  Following Pierre, the two men took Craig through the kitchen and down a steep flight of steps to a dark, stone walled, dungeon-like cellar under the foundation of the house. The room was nearly empty except for a few old trunks and boxes and lit by three bare, low-wattage lights mounted on the walls. The air was cold and damp and thick with the stale smell of mildew. They walked to a heavy wooden door on the far side of the room, and Pierre reached into his pocket for the key to unlock it. The door swung open, and they roughly pushed Craig inside.

  He squinted, peering around the dirty, empty room while his eyes adjusted to the faint light given off by a dim, bare bulb that illuminating it. It couldn’t have been more than ten feet square.

  Then Craig saw him.

  Shaun was crouched in the corner, huddled there like a frightened animal. His right wrist was handcuffed to a copper water pipe that trailed up the side of the wall and disappeared through the ceiling.

  Once an energetic, happy-go-lucky young man, Shaun was reduced to a panic-stricken child. His complexion was deathly pale, and his hair, which he always prided on being a lustrous, full-bodied mane, now hung limp and dull, matted with dirt and other debris from the floor. His clothes, the same ones Craig had seen him in before he disappeared days ago, were now torn and tattered, and his face was cruelly marked with ugly cuts and bruises from repeated beatings.

  “Shaun!” Craig ran to his brother.

  Shaun reached out and clutched Craig with his free hand.

  “Craig!” he said, beginning to tremble. “What’s happening to us?”

  “It’s all right,” Craig said, “I’m here now.”

  “No,” he answered in a small, frightened voice. He took a shaky breath. “They’ve—” He raised his arm and pointed at Pierre. “He’s been giving me stuff since they grabbed me. Pure shit! He gave me so much of it that now I can’t stop. It feels so . . . so good, for a little bit, and then . . . when I come down . . .” He closed his eyes. His body began to tremble.

  Craig’s gaze flew to Pierre, then instinctively moved to examine Shaun’s arms. The evidence was unmistakable. Ugly needle marks peppered the insides of his forearms.

  Craig looked at Pierre in shocked disbelief. Then his eyes filled with icy anger. “You bastard! You’ve turned my brother into a fucking junkie!”

  Pierre grinned and shrugged. “Don’t feel sorry for him. He’s been flying for days on the highest grade of uncut Mexican heroin we produce.” He gave a dark chuckle. “Besides, you have only yourself to blame for his condition. I seem to recall telling you that Monsieur Cabrera didn’t take negative responses to his requests very well.”

  Craig went back to Shaun, putting his arm around him protectively. He could feel his brother’s body quivering involuntarily again.

  “Please, let Shaun go,” he pleaded with Pierre. “It was me you wanted all along, not him.”

  “True,” Pierre agreed, “but your brother is insurance for us, at least until we’re sure you can be trusted. In the meantime, since you’ve missed him so much, we’ve arranged for you two to spend the night together.”

  He reached into his pocket for his key ring. Then he walked over to them and turned one of the keys into the lock of Shaun’s handcuffs. They snapped free and Shaun’s arm fell weakly to his side.

  “Perhaps you will be in a better mood to discuss business in the morning, Phillips,” Pierre said.

  He turned to leave, when Shaun suddenly struggled to get up. “Wait,” he said nervously to Pierre. “You can’t go yet. It’s been too long already, and I’ve been going bloody mad waiting for you!”

  Pierre smiled patiently at Shaun. “No, kid. Your brother needs time to think about our business proposition to him. You get nothing until our dealings are settled.”

  “He’s going to go into withdrawal,” Craig snapped angrily. “You’ve got to do something for him. Keep Shaun out of this, Montagne!”

  Pierre laughed.
“You are going to do some fast learning about shooting smack, Phillips. In the junk business, delay is the first rule of order.”

  “You can’t just leave me!” Shaun cried in a rush of terror. “Please, don’t go. I’ve been losing it since this afternoon. God, give me another fix, please!”

  He rose to his feet, but his gait was so unsteady, his legs so weak, that he collapsed like a broken marionette onto the cement floor.

  Pierre’s response was to simply pull the heavy door closed. Craig heard the bolt lock slide into place with a haunting echo. Then there was silence.

  With all his strength, Shaun hurled himself against the door, banging with his fists weakly on the heavy, knotted wood. “No!” he screamed. “Come back, please!”

  “Shaun, stop it,” Craig said firmly, pulling him away from the door, but Shaun struggled in his arms like a crazed animal. His blue eyes turned wild.

  “Get your hands off me!” he seethed pointing a shaky finger at him. “I know what you did, and I hate your bloody guts for it! I’m a wreck now, and it’s all because of you! I’ve been on this garbage since they grabbed me on the street, and it’s all your fault, just because you’re a greedy bastard!”

  “No, Shaun, it wasn’t like that,” Craig tried to explain, but Shaun continued to fight him.

  “Yes, it bloody well is!” he screamed back. “No one knew what you were up to back in London. Now look what you’ve done to us all! You—oh, shit, I feel sick again . . .”

  Shaun clutched his abdomen, the stomach cramps causing him to cry out and double over with pain.

  The night was the longest and most unbearable of Craig’s life as he witnessed Shaun’s hell of withdrawal from the heroin. As the hours wore on, he watched helplessly as Shaun became literally insane without the mind-bending drug. He became violently ill and nauseous, doubling over with dry heaves. Whenever he could speak rationally, he hurled countless, hateful accusations at Craig, each one more barbed and hurtful than the last. One moment he was attacking Craig physically like a wild jungle cat, then he would just as quickly turn around and cling to Craig in a cold sweat like a sobbing, frightened child, convinced his skin was crawling. His body twisted in arthritic-like pain, and his screams of agony from the paralyzing leg and stomach cramps plunged through Craig like a thousand knives.

  Finally, physically spent and soaked with perspiration, Shaun collapsed into Craig’s arms. In his ensuing delirium, Craig put the pieces of Shaun’s abduction together as his brother relived the horrifying days of his captivity.

  Cabrera’s men had apparently run Shaun’s car off the road after he left Bruce’s that fateful night. When he got out, Shaun was forced into the sleek, black sedan that hit him. The driver of the car radioed a garage somewhere in the city, and Shaun’s car, a brand-new Miata, was subsequently taken away by the Organization’s contacts. No doubt they stripped it of all of its identifiable parts and disposed of what was left in record time. It was probably a shell by now, Craig figured, sitting in a junkyard somewhere in town, if not at the bottom of a lake.

  Once out of the city limits, Shaun was given his first injection of heroin. Secured in the trunk of the car, he nodded in a euphoric twilight world of the drug high while the car sped toward the Mexican border. Several hours and two injections later, he felt the car come to a stop and heard distant babbling in Spanish. They probably bought off the Border Patrol, Craig thought bitterly.

  The car hastily proceeded to a nearby airfield, keeping Shaun in a state of oblivion. The group was flown to their final destination in Culiacan. Shaun was placed in the cellar the moment he arrived, dazed, confused, and assaulted again and again at the whim of his captors. He was also given injection after injection of the powerful drug, each bigger and more potent than the last. It didn’t take his lightweight body long to get hooked.

  Finally, in the early hours, Shaun’s incoherent chatter subsided, and he fell into a deep, silent sleep.

  As the remainder of the night progressed, Craig held his brother while he thought about his captors and his situation. So Cabrera had now picked up the heroin market, he mused. A wise move, he had to admit, as junk was the ultimate merchandise. And the demand for both cocaine and heroin, especially in the States, was at an all-time high lately. He knew that addicts, all personal dignity and values lost by the drug, would crawl through a sewer to make a buy. Cabrera wouldn’t even have to push the product to find a market. Moreover, he knew that opium kept like fine wine, enabling the leftovers from one harvest to be retained for long periods of time before being produced into additional tons of heroin. What a way to do business, Craig thought bitterly.

  He hated Robert Cabrera. He hated all of them. They could intimidate and frighten him all they wanted to, but there was no way in hell he’d work for them again, let alone hurt Bruce Fairchild. Never.

  Then his eyes wandered down to his brother, who lay pale and exhausted in his lap. He marveled at the power the drug held over its victims, absorbing one’s life like a cancer that quickly grew and consumed one’s body. Heroin had the ability to literally steal the mind from the user. There was no other drug like it.

  No, he would return to the Organization. He had no choice if he wanted to see Shaun freed of the monstrous demon that had now taken possession of his body.

  Except for the intermittent moan or toss of Shaun’s head, the last few hours of the night went quietly for them. Craig was weakening from hunger, his mind taut with fear.

  He thought about Taylor and wondered if she even realized that something was wrong. He would probably never see her again. Her image floated into his mind, and his heart became heavy as he thought about the future. He would never go back to her, and he didn’t even want to imagine the problems his and Shaun’s disappearance would create for the company. She would think he just used her and her business contacts all along for his own gain. If she ever did eventually learn the truth, she would think of him as nothing but a low-life dope dealer.

  Well, lad, you deserve it, he chastised himself. Because of his ambition to make the band succeed at any cost, the walls were now crumbling down around him, lives destroyed, even ending completely.

  It was well into the morning when Craig heard movement outside the door.

  The bolt lock moved with a swift thud. The door swung open, and in the dim cellar light, Pierre Montagne loomed in the doorway like a black shadow. He leaned against the heavy doorframe and gazed at Craig and Shaun with hard, mocking eyes.

  “So, you had a nice visit, no?” he said.

  Craig gave him a hostile glare. “I’ll see you dead for what you’ve put him through. You’re dog shit, bastard!”

  Shaun’s eyes fluttered open, and although he stayed silent when he saw Pierre, Craig saw his body begin to shake.

  Pierre ignored the insults and got down to business. “What is your decision, Phillips? Are you back with us or not?”

  Although it hurt him deeply, Craig had known what the answer was for hours. The last of his resistance had vanished. He couldn’t let his brother suffer any longer at the hands of these deranged criminals. Despite his loyalty to Bruce and his love for Taylor, the hard lesson he had come to realize during the long night was that blood was, indeed, thicker than water.

  He closed his eyes, his heart aching with pain. “I’m in,” he said defeatedly.

  Pierre grinned like a shark. “I knew you were capable of making the right decision.”

  He strode over and pulled Craig firmly to his feet, leaving Shaun to lie on the cellar floor. While Craig watched, Pierre reached into his pocket and pulled out a hypodermic syringe filled with an ominous brown liquid. It was pure, dark Mexican heroin.

  Shaun weakly held his arm out to him, and Pierre tightened the fabric around his upper arm, exposing a rich, blue vein. He expertly punched the needle into Shaun’s arm and eased the plunger back. T
he blood surged through the plunger like bright, red dye. It was a good hit.

  Shaun winced for a moment. Then relief was immediate. His body instantly relaxed as the intense, heady glow began to surge like a fire, racing through his nerves and organs, and up to the pleasure centers of his brain. He was soaring as the drug raced through his body, chasing the nightmares away, overtaking him with the pleasurable, orgasmic rush of the heroin burst.

  Craig called to Shaun, but his brother didn’t answer. He was still relishing the high of the long-awaited euphoria that took him back to contented oblivion.

  Pierre rose and pushed Craig toward the door. “Go with them,” he said, gesturing to the guards. “Cabrera is waiting for you.”

  “Wait,” Craig said. “I said I was back. Can’t you at least let Shaun go?”

  “That’s not for me to decide,” Pierre said firmly. “We’re not finished here yet. Go now. What happens here no longer concerns you.”

  Suddenly Shaun attempted to get up.

  “Craig, don’t go,” he pleaded in a weak slur, his voice stricken with fear even his drugged state. “Don’t leave me here with them!”

  One of the guards walked over to Shaun and angrily kicked him. “Cállate! Shut up, kid,” he ordered harshly.

  Craig started toward them but was roughly pulled back by the other guard.

  “Take a step and he’ll get it again,” he warned Craig tersely. “Vamos. Let’s go.”

  Craig glanced once more at his brother before he was roughly pushed out the door. A brief spark of naked terror shone in Shaun’s eyes as Pierre and the one guard who remained behind walked slowly toward him. Then Shaun’s eyes glazed over in defeat. The door closed on the three.

  Shaken and trembling, Craig slowly trudged up the stairs with the others, silently vowing to stay alert and strong. Never would he forget Pierre’s leering smile or Shaun’s frightened expression.