Worth the Trip

by Penny McCall

  Both men turned to stare at her.

  “Explain away,” she said. “I can’t wait to hear how you’re going to justify kidnapping. Consider it practice for your criminal trial.”

  She could see Bill struggling, and for a minute she feared she’d pushed him too far. In the end, though, he was so proud of himself he couldn’t resist showering her with his brilliance. Then there was the part where he figured she wouldn’t be around later to make trouble for him. It was now that mattered, though, and the best way to find an opening was to distract him. And what better distraction could there be than to let him pump himself up on ego?

  “It was me following you,” he began. “I made a deal with a loan shark. Yeah, I can see you think I’m nuts, but look at this place.”

  Norah didn’t waste her time. Where her house was all polished woodwork and bright charm, his was dingy and depressing.

  “This house has been in my family just as long as yours has been in your family,” Bill was saying, “but I ain’t no fancy college professor making six figures.”

  The truth was she probably made less than he did. She’d just been left in a better position financially because her mother had taken out mortgage insurance, and left her enough to make sure the taxes were paid until she could finish college and start bringing in a decent income. And saying that would only piss him off more. She wanted Bill to relax, not give him a reason to take his anger out on her.

  “I was one of the guys in the car that buzzed you after your talk-show gig, and I was working with them on the way out of Chicago. If not for that bitch, Hollie, we’d have had you but I gotta thank her, too, since her interference kept them from going all Godfather on me. As it is, they made it clear I put you into their hands this time or they break my—”

  “Here’s a preview,” Norah said, jumping to her feet and kicking him in the kneecap. He went down like a redwood, howling and holding his leg. Bobby froze, his eyes shifting between her and Bill, not sure what to do, but since Bill was already hobbling to his feet, she barged into Bobby and bolted for the door, hearing the air whoosh out of Bill’s lungs as the kid fell on top of him. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Bill kick Bobby aside and lunge to his feet, a pistol in his hand.

  Norah was at the front door, but her hands were tied behind her. Bill’s first shot splintered the woodwork beside her head. She had no choice but to turn around, fumbling for the doorknob behind her then struggling to turn it as Bill brought his gun to bear on her legs, taking his time so he could wring as much satisfaction as possible out of wounding her.

  She abandoned the doorknob, deciding to race down the hall when Bobby dove for Bill, shoving him off balance just as the door burst open and sent her sprawling. She twisted—it was that or do a face-plant into the worn wooden floor. She landed on her side, saw her father on the stoop and her heart fell. Until she saw Trip behind him. Armed. And his gun was bigger than Bill’s.

  Trip shoved by her father and headed for Bill, no hesitation, no concern for his own safety. Norah took one look at his expression and knew without looking that Bill had surrendered. And probably wet himself.

  And then Trip looked at her and she felt the blood drain out of her face, too. “I was abducted,” she said in her own defense. “Why are you mad at me?”

  “I let you out of my sight for five minutes and you do something stupid.”

  “Stupid?” she said, her voice rising into a shriek. “Are you kidding me? What did I do that was stupid?”

  “You went outside.”

  “How was I supposed to know someone was going to kidnap me?”

  “Because someone has been trying to kidnap you from day one.”

  “Yeah, well, where were you?”

  “Busy listening to the Lord of the Lies dance around the truth. Why aren’t you yelling at him for having you kidnapped?”

  She shot her father a look. He scrambled over to help her up. “Let me explain, darlin’,” he whispered behind her back under the guise of untying her hands.

  Norah ignored him. “I am angry,” she snapped at Trip, “but I understand why he did what he did.”

  “For the money.”

  “And you chose your job over me.”

  “Do you hear yourself? You’re not making any sense.”

  “I don’t have to make sense. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

  “If it wasn’t for your old man robbing a bank, neither of us would be here.”

  “And that would make you happy, wouldn’t it?”

  Trip held her gaze for a second or two, the air all but crackling between them before he turned away to deal with Bill, tying his hands with a curtain cord so old the drapes it held back fell to the floor in a cloud of dust. But the curtain cord held. Then he looked at Bobby.

  “Don’t hurt the boy,” Lucius said, abandoning her to head for Trip.

  Norah was still bound, but the ties were loose enough for her to wiggle one hand free. She rubbed her wrists absently, watching from the entryway as Lucius ranged himself next to the kid, the two of them squaring off against Trip in the stream of afternoon sunlight pouring in through the filthy, curtainless front window. They were talking loud, arguing. The words failed to make an impression on Norah because pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, and not just about the loot.

  Lucius looked over at her, their eyes met, and he went sheet white.

  “Time for explanations,” she said, even though she had a pretty good idea what was going on, if not the exact details.

  “Let me deal with these two,” Trip said, meaning, of course, Bill and Bobby.

  “Do whatever you want with him,” Norah said, pointing to Bill, “but the kid is coming with us.”

  Trip frowned at her, but he checked the ties on Bill’s wrists then shoved him into the hall closet and braced a chair under the knob. Bill didn’t object. Bill was probably thinking about the potential wear and tear on his kneecaps.

  Trip caught Bobby Newcastle by the back of the shirt and quick-stepped him to Norah’s house, and by the time they got there, he’d called his handler and arranged for Bill to be taken into federal custody.

  “Talk,” Trip said as soon as Norah’s front door closed behind them all.

  The silence was deafening.

  “Who are you?” Trip said, pointing at the kid.

  Bobby tried to sidle back into the shadows. Norah was behind him, so she shoved him back into the light.

  “Take a closer look at him,” she said to Trip.

  He did, his frown of confusion fading away as his gaze switched between Bobby’s face, Lucius’s face, and hers.

  “Well, I’ll be a sonuvabitch,” he said, his gaze finally landing on Norah. “That answers a question or two.”

  “Yeah, like why my mother finally divorced him after staying married to a man who’d proved himself untrustworthy for so many years.”

  “That’s uncharitable, darlin’.”

  “Don’t play the guilt card with me, Lucius. Not when you’ve got enough hanging over your head to keep the Vatican in business for the next decade.”

  Lucius opened his mouth, but she shot him down again, not in the mood for his games. “Tell me what Myra has to do with this,” she said, needing the explanation, but needing the time more, to decide how she was going to handle the situation.

  “Wait,” Trip said, “why do you think your agent is involved?”

  Norah gestured to the kid, still standing partly in front of her quaking in his shoes. “Meet Bobby Newcastle, Myra’s son and, apparently, my half brother.”

  “And Puff’s co-conspirator, I take it.”

  “He’s the one who grabbed me,” Norah said to Trip by way of confirmation, “after my—our father sent me outside looking for you.”

  “Kidnapping isn’t his only skill,” Trip said.

  Norah shot Bobby a sidelong look. “Robin, I presume?”

  He gave her a wobbly half smile and edged away from her.

  “You’re s
caring the boy,” Lucius said.

  “He won’t know fear until he spends a night in a cell with a lifer named Bruiser who thinks orange is his color.”

  Bobby let out a little squeak and dropped toward the nearest chair. He missed, thunking onto the floor. He stayed there.

  “What I’d like to know is where’s Batman?” Trip said, adding, “The guy who tried to run us over outside the TV studio,” when they all looked confused.

  Norah filled him in on Bill’s exploits. “And since Bill’s going into custody, and he’s a big, fat coward, I imagine he’ll rat out the loan shark first chance he gets. Your friends will pick the guy up, and we won’t have to worry about him.”

  “Maybe that problem is solved,” Trip said, turning to Lucius, “but there’ll just be someone else coming after you if we don’t find the loot.”

  Lucius wasn’t talking.

  Bobby was too scared of everyone to talk, not to mention he probably didn’t know anything. Puppets weren’t known for their brain power.

  Trip looked at Norah and crossed his arms.

  She did a hands up. “I don’t know where the loot is hidden.”

  They all turned to Lucius again. Lucius looked like the next ice age would come sooner than any information from him.

  “Let me start the ball rolling,” Trip said, filling Norah in on the conclusions he’d already drawn, about Lucius overplaying the severity of his injuries so he could slip out of the safe house.

  Norah just sat there as he talked, reeling at the idea that her father had taken one look at her, after fifteen years, and out of all the reactions he might have had, he’d chosen to see an opportunity. It hurt, so much she was beyond tears, beyond anything but frozen, emotionless shock. And then she caught Trip’s eyes on her. Her father was watching her, too, the two of them standing on opposite sides of her chair, shooting glances at one another over her head when they weren’t staring at her. Shock, it turned out, wasn’t the only thing she felt. It wasn’t even the strongest. But her anger was just as cold and emotionless, at least outwardly.

  “Puff has been trying to get us out of the house since day one,” Trip finished.

  “Because the key, maybe literally, is here,” Norah finished. “I already came to the same conclusion.” And her bet would be the master bedroom since her father had spent so much time trying to get in there, and not just since they’d gotten home. “You sent Bobby here to try to steal whatever is hidden in the house. And when he failed you sent us on a wild-goose chase so you could escape the safe house and break in here while we were occupied three states away. And when that didn’t work you had Bobby break in again, expecting Trip to chase him and me to be easily manipulated. Which was bound to fail, since I’m your daughter, but wasn’t a total loss because you discovered that Trip and I were involved. So you had me kidnapped, figuring Trip would go after me and you’d be left alone to retrieve your clue or key, whatever is in this house that you’re so desperate to get your hands on.”

  “First that fed figures it out,” Lucius grumbled, “now you.” He sat in his favorite armchair, looking crestfallen. “I’m losing my edge.”

  Norah would have laughed if the situation hadn’t been so heartbreaking. “It’s just that we know we’re being conned, so we’re looking for it.”

  “Then what do you need me for?”

  “To fill in the blanks,” Trip said. “Start from the beginning.”

  “The robbery.” Lucius smiled a little, smugly, thrilled to let them in on the brilliance of his game now that they’d already figured out most of it. “I won’t bore you with the planning of it, or the execution, as I’m sure you already know those details.

  “It was child’s play to get my so-called partners to pass off the loot to me. In case they got caught, I reasoned. I’d be safe since I wasn’t actually there when the crime took place. There’d be no witnesses who could identify me, and the teller who’d let us into the bank couldn’t rat me out without getting some federal heat for herself.

  “But I miscalculated with the cops. Or maybe I should say we set our sights too high. We chose a bank in the high-rent district, patronized by the rich, so there’d be lots of expensive baubles and unreported goodies in the safe-deposit boxes. We didn’t count on there being secrets in there, but the rich are also the powerful and the well-connected, and the secrets they stashed away had the entire Chicago PD mobilizing, not to mention the state police and the feds. We had no hope of escaping with that loot, especially after Noel Black and the Hanes brothers proved themselves to be morons.”

  “Money does that to people,” Norah observed.

  “Money is just a way to keep track,” Lucius said. “Those boys were so stupid they all wound up dead, and they got me arrested. Myra was the only one I could trust.”

  Trip said what Norah was still too raw to put into words. “Because you were having an affair with her.”

  “Had.” Lucius looked over at his son. Bobby pushed himself up from the floor and went to stand behind his father’s chair. “That episode was over.”

  “Then it was because of Bobby.”

  “Aye.” He passed a hand over his face. “I still feel the fool for what I did, Norah, hurting your mother, hurting you, although you didn’t know about it yet. But your ma, bless her beautiful heart, decided we shouldn’t tell you. She didn’t see why I should lose you, too.”

  “And you would have,” Norah said. “I’d have taken her side.” And although a part of her understood that knowing of Lucius’s infidelity then would have taken the confusion out of that time of her life, it probably would have destroyed her relationship with her father. She wasn’t too happy about it now, but she wasn’t under the same illusions about his character as she’d been in her childhood. In fact, she was banking on it.

  “You were barely eighteen at the time of the robbery, and your mother was ill. I didn’t want to burden you,” Lucius continued, getting back to his narrative, “so when Myra came to see me in jail, I came up with this . . .”

  “Scheme,” Norah supplied.

  “Myra had hopes,” Lucius said, seeming a little embarrassed.

  For the life of her Norah couldn’t understand why he should give a damn about playing her when he’d broken her mother’s heart and used both his own children. “So you strung her along, made noises about being a family,” she said, her voice sharp with hurt and anger, sharp enough that Lucius narrowed his eyes on her face. She drew in a breath and got her temper under control, schooling her expression and modulating her voice. She even managed to sound almost admiring when she said, “You got her to leave the clues, not the teller.”

  “And when you were out on bail, awaiting trial,” Trip said, picking up the thread of the scam, “you hid the main cache of loot. Why didn’t you just run?”

  “He thought he could talk his way out of it,” Norah said. “And then he got fifteen years.”

  “Who’s tellin’ this?” Lucius snapped, his accent thickening with his anger. “I figured I’d be out sooner, but those bloody federal agents kept after me for the loot.” His gaze jumped to Trip. “And when I wouldn’t tell the blackguards, they blocked my parole.”

  “I’m surprised they let you out now,” Norah said. “No one knew where you were.”

  “My boy knew.”

  “He was only three when you went to jail,” Norah said.

  Trip only leaned back against the mantel, not surprised at all. “I was wondering how you got in touch with Myra and the kid when you were allowed no visitors, sent no mail, and made no phone calls.”

  “No access to the outside world,” Lucius sneered. “It was absurdly simple to get information in and out of that place.”

  “You bribed another inmate?”

  “That’s thinking small, Norah darlin’.”

  “A guard,” Trip said. “Maybe more than one. And then he had himself beaten up, knowing the FBI would move him to a safe house.”

  “And you sent us on a wild-goose c
hase to keep us busy and out of your hair,” Norah finished, having no trouble when she understood that, having created the opportunity to contact someone, Lucius hadn’t chosen her. Yet again. There’d been so much pain already, this new injury barely made a ripple.

  “Did you find lovely things?” Lucius asked her.

  “Yes,” she said, not just talking about the items from the robbery.

  “Then it was worth the trip.”

  Her father would probably never know how much. She couldn’t help but look at Trip, meeting his gaze and knowing he was reliving those moments, too. But not for the same reason. “And it gave you a chance to slip the guards.”

  “Guards, hah. Babysitters more like. A little blood and bruising, a bit of limping, and a groan now and again,” he shrugged, “it doesn’t take much to fool men so unimaginative that they all wear the same suits and stupid sunglasses.

  “The thing is,” he continued, “being there provided me a perfect alibi. I contacted the boy, here, figuring to send him in to get the key, but when he told me about the new security system, I knew I had to come myself, and then I couldn’t get in, even with instruction, because you let this—”

  “FBI agent.”

  “—install that bloody alarm system. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Norah, why would you be letting him talk you into that contraption?”

  “Because someone”—she looked at Bobby—“broke in here. And since he did it on your instructions, you have no room to complain.”

  “Never stopped me before.”

  “Why didn’t you just come to me?”

  “Because he”—Lucius pointed to Trip—“was already here. I never doubted the feds would use you, Norah, but I didn’t count on you cooperating with them.”

  “That’s the problem with the Long Con,” Trip said. “Since the key to the loot is hidden here, it all hinged on Norah, and she wasn’t under your thumb.”

  “And you think she’s under yours?”

  “I don’t think she’s under anyone’s,” Trip said.

  But they were both expecting her to make a choice, the two of them staring at her, Lucius trying to hide his hope, Trip apparently not feeling any. Trip looked downright confident, in fact, arms crossed across his chest, a slight, expectant smile on his face. She could almost see the beginnings of his smug grin when she announced to her father that she had to do what was right, be a law-abiding citizen. Side with the man she loved.