Choke Point

by Ridley Pearson

  Grace’s body elevates off the floor two inches like someone lit her up with 220 volts.

  The jack clatters to the floor. It has torn a hole in the guy’s chest.

  His partner tries to stand, but tilts to his right on a numb leg and falls over. Starts crawling toward the back door while going for his own handgun. Knox has the punctured guy’s gun. He shoots the crawler twice—two taps, chest and head.

  Knox pistol-whips the coughing mess, dropping him. Then kneels next to Grace, his chest tighter than the fallen man’s. Feels for a pulse. Strong. Her face is a bloody mess, but wiping it off, it’s nothing more than a broken nose. He feels down her chest and abdomen for an entrance wound.

  “Pervert,” she gags.

  He hears himself exhale.

  “Left leg,” she says, her attempt at a smile wiped away before it materializes.

  “Another couple inches, you woulda been a nun,” Knox says.

  The wound is a through-and-through on the inner thigh of her left leg, four inches below her crotch. The bullet is flat on the concrete in an island of flesh and tissue. Not much blood: it missed the femoral artery, which is something of a miracle given how little there is of Grace. He tears open her pants. She tries for modesty, but he slaps her hand away.

  “Easy,” he says.

  The exit wound isn’t pretty. The size of a quarter, it’s taken a plug out of her.

  Dulwich comes through the street-side door, prepared to finish what Knox started. He has the entire picture with one look.

  “Can she be moved?”

  “Yes,” Knox answers.

  Dulwich drags the unconscious realtor to inside the darkened stairwell leading to the parking lot.

  “There’s a guy out back changing a tire,” Knox hollers. “Or he was.”

  “Got it.”

  Dulwich leaves the realtor in a pile. She’ll awaken soon and take off—won’t dare head back inside.

  Dulwich crosses back and hoists Grace into his arms. He stands.

  “Brower?” Knox says. “The shots could have been heard.”

  “Doubtful. I didn’t hear them,” Dulwich says. “A big no to Brower. Grace and I are wanted for questioning. Don’t worry about Grace. We have friends who can help her.” He turns Grace toward the door he came through. “Put the prints on this guy when you’re done with him. Wipe down the jack.” By not speaking what is on both their minds, Dulwich has given Knox carte blanche to interrogate the one who shot Grace.

  “Thanks,” Knox says.

  —

  “WHERE AM I?” She speaks Chinese. Corrects herself to English, repeating the question.

  Knox answers in Shanghainese. “You will heal.”

  “Smells like a dentist’s office,” Grace says.

  “She knows what she’s doing. Sarge arranged it. She’s a legitimate surgeon. And yes, it is a dentist’s office. Two to three weeks, you’re on your feet again.”

  “So long?”

  “You were very lucky. Could have been far worse.”

  “We do not have three weeks.”

  “Not your problem. You need to rest.”

  “You waited for me to awake,” she says. It just comes out of her; she attributes it to the medication.

  Knox says nothing at first. He looks at her and smiles. “Wanted to see if you’d cry.”

  “Sure,” she says.

  “You didn’t,” Knox says in the warmest voice he’s ever used with her.

  “You should go. With all that happened . . . They could pack up and move.”

  “It’s Fahiz.” He explains it to her. “They don’t know what happened. Not yet. At best they have a pair of men missing.”

  “What about Ms. Pangarkar?”

  Knox winces. She sees deadness in his eyes, a mixture of grief and regret. She wants to ask him to explain, but lacks the strength. “That’s a disconnect,” he says.

  “You must get me my computer. I can help you.”

  “You need to rest.”

  She repeats herself. “I am close. More information will be coming from Hong Kong. Between Kreiger and the attack on my laptop . . . You were told of the camera registration?”

  “Sarge caught me up.”

  “I can help. From the bed. As I am.”

  “We’ll move you to a houseboat.”

  “By now Marta—the street vendor—will have completed her list for me. One of the mothers on that list will take cash for information.”

  “Good to know.”

  Knox is not about to go door-to-door. She can hear it, see it. He shot a man. She doesn’t dare ask what happened to the man who shot her.

  “He was muscle,” Knox says. She feels a chill at the coincidence of thought. “The one I shot was a driver. The other guy mentioned a van. A white van. He rode in the back with the girls. They move the girls to a safe house each night. It’s on a canal. He didn’t know which canal. He was useless.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “No, not entirely. He was inside the shop daily. Gave me a decent description. That could help.”

  She doesn’t ask about the outcome of the man he interrogated. She doesn’t want to know. As much as she wants the fieldwork, there are places people like Dulwich and Knox will go that she will not. If that disqualifies her, then so be it.

  “Is it Pangarkar? What is troubling you?”

  He smirks. “What could possibly be troubling me?”

  “What is her status, John?”

  “AWOL,” he says.

  “You have every right to be worried.”

  She has upset him. Whether the drugs, the shock or exhaustion, she feels something she can’t decipher.

  “My computer,” she says.

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  “They will not kill a journalist,” she says, the devil’s ventriloquist. “We know them to be smart, John.” She adds, “She is also smart, eh? This is not to be overlooked.”

  Dulwich enters. He has been on the phone with Hong Kong continuously.

  “We’re done here,” Dulwich announces.

  Knox stands there, paralyzed.

  “How can they do that?” Grace asks like a defense attorney.

  “The client is satisfied with Brian’s decision to turn it over to the Dutch. Given all the data we’ve collected and our collateral losses,” he says, looking down at Grace, “it’s the right call.”

  “Bullshit,” Knox says, spittle flying off his lips.

  “Of course it’s bullshit,” Dulwich says, aiming at disarming Knox. “It’s the bullshit I’m paid to say, and the bullshit you’re paid to do. Happy clients mean more business. This is over. Brian wants us out of here before he has to explain your death to Tommy.”

  “And you?” Knox says. “What do you want?”

  “Don’t push it.”

  “Sonia’s in the wind.”

  “And no one saw that coming.”

  “Stop.” Grace can see the fight about to erupt. She manages to sit up, but the pain is excruciating. The two men face each other like wild boars, paws scraping the dirt. “Time line?”

  “Less than twenty-four,” Dulwich says, never taking his eyes off Knox. “They’re sending the jet. Coming up from Istanbul. Late afternoon. Early evening at the latest.”

  “We make use of this time,” Grace says, concentrating on Knox. “We do not waste it having such arguments.”

  Knox reminds Dulwich of the promise of backup teams if the case progressed.

  Dulwich responds, “What case? The client is satisfied.”

  “Will he be satisfied when the journalist who started all this is found floating in a canal?”

  “She’s smarter than that. She’ll attack with words.”

  “Which will require an interview.”

  “Which he won’t give,” Dulwich says. “Collaring a guy like this is going to take the Dutch . . . Interpol . . . who the hell knows?”

  “She will press this. She has a number he checks.”

  “We ha
ve most of a day,” Grace interjects. “We should be planning, not arguing! You two are idiots.”

  “You don’t know her,” Knox tells Dulwich, who can barely contain himself.

  “Not like you do.”

  “Will someone please get me my laptop?” Grace hesitates. “Now!”

  It breaks the mesmerism. The two men stop the staring contest.

  “Late afternoon, early evening,” Dulwich repeats.

  “We’ll see.”

  Well, that complicates things.”

  The two men have moved Grace from the surgery to a hostel west of downtown in the Audi. It’s a bare-bones backpack establishment with a kid in dreads behind the counter, ten minutes from the KLM Jet Center FBO used by corporate jets.

  They’ve taken a room with a set of bunk beds and an open-shelf dresser that holds a sink basin. The mirror is bolted to the wall. The room is registered under a Dulwich alias.

  Grace was carried up a back stairwell by Knox, the limping Dulwich trailing. That Dulwich curses his failure to heal completely goes unspoken. He’s boiling over on a daily basis, no more so than at times like this when Knox can do what he cannot.

  The door is closed and locked. At Grace’s request Knox has taken ten minutes to splice into a co-ax cable found in the hung ceiling. He seems impressed Grace would know such a cable would be found there, impressed that she understands it will provide them access to the hostel’s closed-circuit security cameras.

  Dulwich never takes his eyes off the parking area. Knox’s iPhone plays Jimi Hendrix from Museeka.com as loud as it will go. It isn’t much, but it covers their hushed voices.

  Grace has an e-mail from Kamat in Hong Kong. The Canon PowerShot used to photograph Berna and friend for their Internet posting was indeed under warranty, but to a man in Paris—stolen on a trip to Amsterdam six months earlier.

  “There is more,” she tells them.

  Dulwich continues to surreptitiously watch the parking lot. Knox scrapes off a fleck of bloodstain from his water-resistant jacket.

  “The model of camera carries geo-tagging.”

  Both men look over at her sharply. She’s propped up in the lower bunk, her laptop open. “The feature was functional at the time the photos were shot, with the coordinates embedded in the code.”

  Dulwich gasps. “Coordinates?”

  “The operator was likely unaware of the feature. Kamat is making every effort to log the chip’s usage for the past two months.”

  “We can follow a camera?” Knox asks. Technology is not his long suit.

  “We know the approximate location of the girls on the day they were photographed, six days ago.”

  “Approximate?” Knox asks.

  “Geo-tagging is not always perfect. We would be mistaken to kick a door based on these coordinates. That said, we should be within a radius of one hundred meters of where both photos were taken.” She spins the laptop toward them. “I have marked the geo-tag with the red star. Please notice it is well outside Demir’s mobile usage hole.”

  Knox marvels how she can sound like a robo-telephone operator.

  “One supports the other. The dormitory is nowhere near the knot shop. I believe we can trust the geo-tag,” she says.

  “It’s either the knot shop or the dormitory,” Dulwich says.

  “Still in a hurry to fasten your seat belt?” Knox asks.

  “Shut it,” Dulwich responds.

  “Boys . . .”

  —

  DULWICH DRIVES. The men don’t speak two words. Knox rechecks the handgun lifted from the corpse along with a box of self-loads found in the man’s front pocket. Dulwich glances at the weapon uncomfortably. Says nothing.

  Masts of a great ship appear dead ahead as Valkenburgerstraat nears the tunnel entrance to Noord. The merging of old and new. The car’s interior goes dark as they enter the tunnel; the overhead lights strobe against the dash. Still, not a word.

  As they emerge, the evening sky is the same endless pewter it has been for days. Knox catches himself grinding his teeth. Dulwich has previously complained about the sound. Not now. Not today. Knox tries Sonia’s mobile for the thousandth time. And for the thousandth time it’s out of service. Will she turn to the pen or the sword? Given the mood he last saw her in, he’s thinking the latter. He’d assumed she would cool off and reach out to him. He’s wrong.

  After a mile, they pass woods on the left. The suburbs are giving back to the farmland they were stolen from. Up ahead, low-rise apartment blocks loom like something from the Cold War, juxtaposed by all the vegetation. The Audi slows to a satisfied purr.

  “There won’t be a neon sign, you know.”

  Knox doesn’t speak.

  “Until we know exactly where it is, you could do more harm than good.”

  Knox connects a wire between his iPhone and the car’s stereo. “All the windows down. Play it loud.”

  “You’re dreaming.”

  “Someone has to.” Knox jacks a round into the handgun, clicks out of the seat belt and stuffs the weapon into his lower back.

  Dulwich conducts a drive-by. Dozens of four-story apartment complexes crowd Cleyndertweg, all nearly identical, all separated by landscaping screens.

  “It’s too upscale.”

  “Not for this city. It’s perfect,” Knox says. The look of the buildings and the parklike environment support Dulwich, but the apartment density and the older cars parked outside suggest a blue-collar bedroom community with residents who have too little time to pay much attention to the neighbors.

  “We’re talking ten to fifteen girls. Someone’s going to notice!”

  Knox says, “We have no idea how many they board. It could be a handful. They’re here. Somewhere.”

  “It lacks a double egress.”

  “The bike path to the west,” Knox says, “and through the trees, more surface streets. They covered themselves well.”

  Dulwich snorts.

  “Drop me at the first parking lot. Don’t hit the iPhone until you’re alongside the pin.” Knox has marked the geo-tagged location on the car’s navigation system.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “This will work,” Knox says.

  “You act on this, and it blows up in our face. If word gets back to the knot shop, it’s blown.”

  “Sixes.”

  “Keep it in your trousers.”

  “Keep the engine running.”

  “You can’t undo what’s done,” Dulwich says, throwing salt into the wound of the Sonia breakup.

  “Right here,” Knox says.

  Dulwich pulls over.

  —

  KNOX CHOOSES A LINE OF TREES with an unobstructed view down Cleyndertweg. He could stand here for a week and no one would notice him. Dulwich and the Audi roll one block. Two. The car windows open smoothly in unison.

  The downloaded singsongy catchy tune plays loudly, sounding like bells and trumpets. Ten or twelve notes that repeat in an obnoxious loop: a call from the most popular ice cream truck company in the city. Dulwich lets it repeat for the length of the block, then shuts it off and turns right at the next intersection.

  The geo-tag is tied to an apartment building in a west-running cul-de-sac on the north side of the street. Knox has a view of it and three other four-story monstrosities, all with a string of brightly painted garage doors at ground level. The call-to-arms draws two curtain views and causes another woman to step out onto a small balcony to look for the truck. From an adjacent structure, two more balcony visits. All of these are disqualified by a ripped man in his early thirties who emerges at ground level. He’s close to Knox’s size, and carries a don’t-mess-with-me air that’s as much a part of him as the neck tattoo that opens to engulf his left ear. It’s not his body-building or the tattoo that interests Knox, but the fact he’s come out of one of the many doors that are tied to a particular garage, and that a white van is backed up to the garage door. Dulwich has schooled him to challenge coincidence, that trusting a single piece of evidence can
get a man in serious trouble. But this is the trifecta: the geo-tag, the Gold’s Gym guy, the white van.

  The guy has come outside to buy ice cream for his captives, testimony to the monotony of routine, boredom and a human heart buried below all the muscle. His charity has exposed him.

  The man checks the street in both directions. Knox stands stock-still at a good distance. When the guy retreats into the garage, Knox reaches for the pick gun sequestered in an inside pocket and begins walking calmly, but inexorably, toward the door, Dulwich’s warnings ringing in his ears.

  —

  THE SENSATION IS THAT of a diving bird as Grace advances the satellite image toward a tiny circle within a triangle. She is invited lower by her innate curiosity. Click. Click.

  It’s the only sound, this click of her laptop’s touchpad. Something’s not right: the hostel is an active, noisy place.

  She swipes three fingers to reach the next screen: the matrix of eight black-and-white security cameras in use. Camera 7, lower right of her screen: a police car. She envisions herself in a similar black-and-white CCTV frame beating the snot out of the man in the playground.

  Yanking the wires from her laptop, she snaps its lid shut as she slides out of bed and onto the vinyl floor. The room is a bunker of painted concrete block with no place to hide. She drags her bad leg, the laptop balanced on her stomach. Crab-walks to the door. Snags the key. Stretches to get it open. Is outside in the hallway.

  One cop will ride the elevator; one will climb the stairs. They will converge on the room.

  She backpedals too fast. The laptop slips off, forcing her to stop and balance it for a second time. Her eyes tear up, involuntarily responding to the pain. Despite dragging her injured leg, the groin muscles contract in partnership with her active leg and it’s like someone is pinching and squeezing her stitched wound. There’s no finding a rhythm, no doing this well. She’s a three-legged stool trying to carry a laptop while moving blindly backward.

  The elevator dings: she’s not going to reach the toilet. She slides behind a cleaning cart, draws her wounded leg into a tuck, biting down on her lower lip to keep from screaming. The resulting noises tell her the elevator has arrived, the door to the stairs has come open. The swishing of the pressed uniforms implies running. A key turns. A door bangs open.