Текст книги "January Justice"

Автор книги: Athol Dickson

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

48

Back outside, the air was filled with screaming sirens. It seemed police were coming from every direction. If I was still there when they arrived, Olivia had no hope at all.

I ran to the patrol car. The engine was idling, and the driver’s-side door was standing open. I leaned inside and found my duffel bag, which they had taken as evidence. I kept looking and found another plastic evidence bag with my wallet and my keys. Grabbing the plastic bag, I ran up the street to the Bentley, which was still parked at the curb. I was in it and rolling slowly up the street when a patrol car turned my way off Washington. The car sped past me, lights flashing and siren screaming. I went right onto Washington, heading for the 405. Another patrol car was approaching at high speed on the other side of the street. I made myself go slowly. The second squad car passed me too. Within fifteen seconds, a third squad car screamed by, doing at least sixty with its lights flashing.

I drove for several blocks trying to decide what to do. Far ahead I saw what seemed to be about a dozen patrol cars parked at every angle in the road. They had found the dead policemen.

I took the next right, drove a few blocks, then turned left again on Braddock. I thought about the Navigator. The mud. Red mud. I decided to gamble everything. I drove up onto the freeway heading south.

It wouldn’t take long for the police to broadcast the Bentley’s plates and description, and after that, every cop in California would be looking for it. Most of them would probably shoot on sight and later claim I had brandished a weapon. The last thing I needed to do was call additional attention to myself by the way I drove, so although my every instinct shouted hurry, I made myself keep pace with the other traffic.

Chances were, the men in the Navigator wouldn’t go to work on Olivia while they were in motion. They’d wait until they had her in a more controlled location. With luck I would be right behind them, so they wouldn’t have time to hurt her badly before I arrived. At least that’s what I told myself. But that logic assumed I knew where they were going. Because of the mud, I was pretty sure I knew where they had been, but even that was only a guess, and it certainly didn’t mean they planned to return to the same location. In a city of almost ten million people, with another three million just to the south in Orange County, the chances I had guessed correctly were slim. Still, I had to do something.

I had sat by uselessly while Haley died. I hadn’t even tried to save her. The fact that I had been in no condition to save her made no difference to me. I hadn’t tried; that was all that mattered. I wouldn’t let that happen again.

I drove south for forty minutes to San Juan Capistrano. I took the Ortega Highway exit and turned inland, toward the Santa Ana Mountains. It was far more than a long shot; it was an act of desperation. But I kept thinking about the mud on the Navigator, and the rain in the mountains, and telling myself it was the only shot I had.

The city fell away behind me as I rose into the hills, my headlights carving deep into the nighttime up ahead. As I rounded a hairpin turn, the high beams caught a coyote in the incandescent glare. It stared at me, twin eyes glowing yellow, and then it vanished like a ghost into the chaparral beside the road.

Soon a gentle mist began to coalesce on the windshield. I switched on the wipers. I was catching up with the weeping clouds that had drifted inland a few hours before. Rounding one particularly sharp turn, I felt the tires begin to lose their grip on the moist pavement. It was a bitter choice to make, but I had to cut my speed a little. Although there was a certain attractive symmetry in the thought of dying in the way that Haley had, it wouldn’t do to sail off into midair above the canyon far below. Not while there was still a chance Olivia might live.

I passed the ranger station, made a right turn onto the small road just beyond it, and continued climbing into the mountains. About a quarter-mile along the road, I hit a wall of rain. It pounded the top of the Bentley like the fists of an angry mob. Water rushed down the slope above me, concentrated by the gullies, and spewed across the road like little rapids. In the downpour and the dark, I couldn’t see the potholes or the places where the thin veneer of asphalt had been washed away. The Bentley scraped bottom, bounced, and then scraped bottom again. I had to slow down even more.

After another half an hour, I reached the place where Medallion and the other guy had nearly killed me. At least I thought it was the place. If I was right, the cattle guard should be about a quarter-mile farther along on the left. I drove at walking speed with the window down, rain soaking my left shoulder as I watched for the cattle guard in the brush beside the road. I had passed it by in broad daylight the first time. The odds of finding it at night in a storm were slim, but I persevered.

Then I saw the rows of pipe. I stopped and stared into the darkness beyond the cattle guard. In Haley’s Range Rover, I had barely been able to go on from that point when the ground was dry. The Bentley would get stuck for sure. Besides, if they were already up there, I didn’t want to announce my arrival with headlights or the sound of a car engine. I drove on another hundred yards and parked out of sight around the next bend in the road. I checked the safety on the M11 again, verified there was a round in the chamber again, and got out of the car.

I returned along the road at a trot, crossed the cattle guard, and set out along the rough path up the hillside. The rain was falling in huge drops, completely soaking through my clothes. It was January, and I was nearly half a mile above sea level, so the water felt like ice cubes slipping down my back.

Soon I came upon the Navigator. They had stopped by the old rock slide at the same place where I had been forced to leave the Range Rover on my first visit to that place. I approached with my sidearm leveled and ready to fire, but the vehicle was empty.

There was a deafening crack and a flash of lightning, very close. In the sudden glare, I saw their footprints in the mud. Then it was pitch-black again. I thought about what I had just seen. Four sets of footprints. One small, three a little larger. I remembered the small person who had been the first to emerge from the Navigator when the police stopped it, and the two men who had gotten out next. Two men and a woman, just as Doña Elena Montes had described Castro’s partners in crime after the home invasion. Maybe they were only three. If so, then the four sets of footprints meant Olivia had still been walking when they had arrived. It gave me a little hope. I moved past the rock slide.

A few yards farther on, a set of footprints branched off to the right, toward the uphill side of the path. It was one of the men, probably, standing guard above the trail ahead in case they had been followed.

I climbed after him. The rain was turning into hail, little balls of ice slamming into the brush and rocks around me with subtle pops like the sound of rifles in a distant battle. It was a lucky break, covering the sound I made as I climbed. I followed a steep path that was covered by a sheet of water streaming downhill underneath my feet. I kept a good grip on the M11 and used my other hand to grasp at trunks and branches, hauling myself up the trail.

At a small level place, I paused. It was a rocky outcrop, a ledge, that seemed to extend to the left along the hillside. It was where I would have stationed myself if I had been detailed to guard the path below.

Ice from the January sky bounced like ping-pong balls on the rock around me. They hurt, but they weren’t big enough to be a danger. I rubbed my free hand against my trousers to clean away the mud. I grasped the M9 in both hands, extending it in the firing position as I followed the outcrop along the hillside. The ledge ahead seemed to run around a little ridge. I eased up to the edge and peeked beyond it. He stood about six feet away, his back to me, looking downhill toward the path. I drew in one deep breath and let it out. With my next breath, I attacked.

He made it easy, standing clear of the hillside instead of closer to it with his back protected. In two strides I was on him. I slammed the barrel of the M9 hard against the base of his skull. He dropped like the hailstones.

I crouched beside him to remove his sidearm from its holster. I slipped it into my belt. I kept searching and found a combat knife in a sheath around his ankle. I threw the knife into the bushes. I removed his belt and used it to lash his forearms together behind his back. There was another flash of lightning, farther away this time, but still close enough to illuminate the scene. I got a good look at his face. He wasn’t Medallion. He was the Other One. As he lay on his side, I removed a wallet from one of his hip pockets, and a cell phone from the other. Using the glow of the phone’s screen I searched the wallet. I found an ID card for Ricardo Nuñez, special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

I had no time to sit and think about the fact that he was DEA. I stood and retraced my steps along the ledge, and then I went clambering and sliding down the water-soaked trail. Back on the main path, I slipped Special Agent Nuñez’s firearm into a small recess in a boulder. I stared hard at my surroundings, making mental notes of the way a branch hung strangely from a sycamore tree nearby, and the shape of three large stones that seemed almost as if they had been stacked atop each other by human hands. If I survived the next few minutes, it would be important to find that spot later.

With the hiding place firmly in mind, I continued up the path. The hail had mostly abated, but the rain continued pouring down. Gripping the pistol with both hands, I aimed it ahead and quick-walked up the path. Because of the loudly pounding rain, the shack’s glowing window was already in sight above me before I heard Olivia’s screams.

At the sound of her agony, an emotionless, methodical state of mind settled in, the product of a dozen years of training and firefights. I willed myself to think only of the objective. I assessed the situation. There were most likely two enemy combatants in or near the building. The only question was whether one of them was watching the approach, or whether they were both inside the shack. With the heavy rain as cover, I could possibly get halfway up the slope between the path and the building before a guard observed me. That would still leave ten yards of open-fire zone before I reached their position. Climbing the trail to the shack would be suicide if they were keeping watch.

Olivia screamed again, and a vision overwhelmed my thoughts. Suddenly, instead of the shack with its glowing window, I saw Haley’s face contorted with terror in the darkness up above, Haley screaming at a mirror on the wall in her trailer, Haley screaming that she saw Satan, Haley screaming out for Jesus as she slammed her fists against the mirror, breaking it, bloodying her hands and yet slamming on and on. I heard the screams and saw Haley in her final moments and knew that what I saw wasn’t a madman’s fantasy but was instead my true and final memory of our last moments together.

I shook my head. I wiped rain from my eyes. I told myself to think of what was noble, good, and true. The vision faded, but the screams remained. I had to stop the screams this time. I started up the trail, and with my first step out into the open, a strange sense of peace descended. This was what I had been created to do. This was who I was and who I would continue to be in whatever time was left to me without Haley. It wasn’t about a death wish. On the contrary, life at last had regained meaning, even if the end of life was imminent. Climbing that path, knowing bullets might slam into me at any instant, I was happy for the first time since I lost my wife. I still had a purpose, after all. I was useful. It felt like I was going home.

49

I reached the cabin. I assumed a position with my back to the wall beside the door. Since nobody had killed me, they must have assumed Nuñez would intercept anyone who came along the path. They must have felt safe devoting their attention exclusively to Olivia. Rain sheeting off the overhanging roof cascaded down before me. Just inside I heard her begging for mercy. I heard two voices, one male and one female. The female laughed and said something. When Olivia screamed again, I went through the door.

Medallion was very fast. He had his weapon out of its holster within half a second and was already raising it when I reached him, my M9 about a foot away and aimed between his eyes. I said, “Stop.”

He froze, his sidearm pointed toward my knees.

I said, “Raise it even slightly, and you’re dead. Just open your fingers and let it fall.”

His eyes were focused on the small hole at the end of my M9’s barrel as he did exactly what I said. I stepped back out of his reach and said, “Kick it toward me.”

As his foot sent the weapon sliding across the plywood floor, I heard a woman cursing his stupidity. Looking past him, I saw Olivia. She had been strapped in a standing position to a folding ladder with masking tape at her ankles, waist, and chest. The legs of the ladder had been bolted to the floor. Her head was bowed, and her long black hair hung loosely down, obscuring her face. Her arms hung loosely at her sides, and both of her hands were covered with blood. It dripped freely from her fingers into twin pools on the floor beside her feet.

Standing beside Olivia, holding a bloody knife, was her torturer. With my M9 leveled at Medallion, I said, “Move away from her, Doña Elena.”

Instead of moving away, Doña Elena Montes stepped behind the ladder where she had bound Olivia and laid the knife’s edge against the carotid artery in Olivia’s neck.

I pointed the M9 toward her. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “If I fire from here, there’s no way I could miss.”

“Maybe,” said the movie star. “Or maybe you’ll hit your girlfriend by accident. And even if you hit me, there’s no way I won’t cut her on my way down.”

It was probably true. I glanced around the room. A pair of cots with sleeping bags had been moved into the shack, and along one wall stood a large ice chest and some cardboard boxes filled with groceries. A butane camping lantern on a folding table cast the only light across the room. They must have visited the shack earlier to prepare it, bringing up camping gear and food. It explained the muddy Navigator.

I said, “Are you planning on a long stay?”

“As long as it takes. Drop your gun, or I’ll slice her pretty neck.”

“Do that and there won’t be anything to stop me from firing.”

Medallion lunged toward me. I spun and shot him in the gut. He fell to the floor with a groan.

When I turned back toward Doña Elena, she was smiling at me beautifully. There was a small splatter of Olivia’s blood on her forehead. She tucked herself more carefully behind Olivia and said, “It seems we have a stalemate.”

With Medallion on the floor, I lowered my weapon, hoping it would make Doña Elena careless.

She said, “I thought the police arrested you.”

“They did.”

She glanced between the ladder rungs toward Medallion, then back up at me.

I said, “If you’re hoping Special Agent Nuñez will come to the rescue, forget it. I took him out on my way up here.”

Lowering my weapon had worked. She exposed more of her face to me, peering over Olivia’s shoulder and thrusting out her lower lip to pout while she still held the knife at Olivia’s throat.

Her voice changed, became younger, like a little girl’s. “I need someone to help me, Malcolm. Someone who can take care of me. Finish that one off and go kill the other one. I’ll kill her. We can go away together. Rio. Buenos Aires. Paris. Anywhere you want. I have a lot of money, Malcolm. Millions and millions. I’ll share it all with you. I just need somebody big and strong and smart to tell me what to do.”

“You kill too many people. Those two cops were walking away. You could have let them live.”

“But they recognized me, silly. Everybody recognizes me.”

“Olivia,” I said, “can you hear me?”

Olivia’s head hung loosely, but she nodded just a little.

“Did you tell her where the money is?”

She shook her head, and a wave of relief passed over me.

I said, “Way to go.”

“That’s enough!” screamed Doña Elena. “Shut up or I’ll slice her!”

“You won’t do that,” I said. “She’s the only link you have to the money.”

She screamed at the top of her lungs. “You think I can’t get my money back without her? You think I’m too stupid to do that?”

She was slipping into some kind of psychosis. I recognized the symptoms well, having seen them in my own mirror. It meant Olivia wasn’t safe, even though killing her would mean Doña Elena wouldn’t get her money. I had to distract the woman.

I said, “Of course I don’t think you’re stupid. You fooled everyone. Arturo, Alejandra, the police, the congressman, the press. I think you play the sex-symbol airhead role so well, people almost always underestimate you. But I also think Olivia is smart enough to hide that money where you’d never find it.”

Doña Elena went back to her little girl voice. “I’ll bet you know where it is. I’ll bet you could help me. If you did, I’d be very grateful.”

“Maybe we can work something out. Why don’t you tell me how you got the money in the first place?”

“Oh, that’s such an old, boring story. Let’s not dwell on the past.”

“When Arturo told you he had hired Alejandra from the travel agency to be his personal assistant, you suspected something. You were smarter than he was. That’s why you looked into her background.”

Doña Elena said, “You don’t know anything about it.”

“I think I do,” I said. “I think you did what Arturo should have done. You were so much smarter than he was. You had Alejandra checked out. You found out she was from Cobán, and her father was one of the disappeared.”

“You think you understand me? You’re pathetic, just like every other man.”

“Are you saying you didn’t run a background check on her?”

“Of course I did.”

“And then what happened?”

“You’re so smart. You tell me.”

“Okay. I figure Arturo never admitted he had left Guatemala with a fortune, not even to you. All those millions, and he wouldn’t even tell you, his own wife, that he really had the money. I think you had a right to that money. Or at least half of it. I think that’s all you really wanted. Just your fair share, right? But he wouldn’t give it to you, even though half of it was really yours. Isn’t that how it was?”

“It wasn’t right,” said the actress.

“Of course not. Anyone could see that. So you had to do something. But you were too smart to make a move without a solid alibi. Then along came Alejandra. When you learned about her father, and you realized she was really there to get proof against Arturo, you decided you had the perfect patsy. After all, she had every reason to hate him.”

Doña Elena smiled at that. It was a wicked thing to see, easily as evil as any atrocity I had seen in war, precisely because it was so beautiful.

I said, “You became Alejandra’s friend. You’re irresistible, after all. You probably told her that your husband was abusive. It would fit her preconceptions of Arturo’s nature and inspire sympathy for you. Or maybe you did it some other way. But somehow you gained her confidence, got her to tell you about her father’s disappearance and admit she was there to try to find proof that Arturo stole money from the disappeared. You said you sympathized. You wanted to help her prove the truth about Arturo’s role in the genocide. You said you would help her get justice for the disappeared of Guatemala. Am I right?”

“Not completely,” said the woman. “But you’re not a bad guesser.”

I stood with my weapon hanging at my side, hoping she might forget about it. I said, “Thank you. I’m just trying to think what an intelligent person would do in your position. I know how smart you are. I even think you managed it so Alejandra believed she was helping you come up with the plan. Maybe you even made it seem like the plan was all hers. One way or another, after you and Alejandra became partners against your husband, you came up with the fake kidnapping idea. How am I doing?”

“It’s a good story,” said Doña Elena from her hiding place behind Olivia. “But shouldn’t we get back to what a big strong man like you can do with a lonely girl like me and all that lovely money?”

“What about your husband?”

“He’s not here, silly. But you are.”

“Yes I am, and I want to hear all about how you tricked everyone.”

“Oh, that was easy,” she said. “I told that stupid Alejandra how we could make Arturo admit he had the money. I told her he would give it up for me. Alejandra was always talking about her husband, how he loved her and would do anything for her, so it wasn’t hard to make her believe Arturo would give up everything for me.”

Strapped to the ladder with her head still hanging down, Olivia rolled her eyes up to look at me through the tangled black curtain of her hair. There was more than pain in her eyes. There was something fierce and merciless.

Doña Elena said, “I told her all we had to do was tape some scenes and pretend I had been kidnapped, and Arturo would agree to pay the millions, and then we could expose him for the animal he was. So we came up here one morning and made a little set. It was like a play, with me as the helpless victim and Alejandra as the nasty terrorist. We giggled a lot when we were off camera. She said it was an honor to work with such a talented star, and I told her she should get an Oscar.”

“But you changed the script,” I said. “When it came time to make your ransom demands at the end of the last video, you dropped the amount and insisted your husband had to deliver it himself.”

“Of course,” said Doña Elena, adjusting her hold on the knife at Olivia’s throat. “To get that silly woman up here, I had to tell her we would force Arturo to try to wire ten million to a fake account, just so the authorities would see he had all that money. But I knew Arturo would never admit he had that much, not even for me, so I went off script in the last video and only asked for two hundred thousand.”

I said, “In that final video, Alejandra says, ‘You weren’t supposed—’ Then she’s cut off. She was saying you weren’t supposed to tell Arturo to bring the money, right? And you weren’t supposed to ask for just two hundred thousand?”

“Of course. She said two hundred thousand wasn’t nearly enough to make Arturo out to be the monster she thought he was. Oh, that stupid little woman. She actually thought all I ever planned to do was get Arturo to admit he had the money.” Doña Elena’s laughter had all the humor of a swarm of locusts.

The knife had drawn more blood from Olivia neck. Just another fraction of an inch, and the jugular would be severed. I had to say something to distract Doña Elena. All I could think of was the awful truth.

I said, “How did it go after that? Did you let Alejandra watch you torture Arturo until he told you where the money was? Did you let her see you kill him? Did you tell her you were going to put the blame on her while you marched her out, shot her in the head and rolled her into some deep hole up there in the rocks?”

Olivia let out a moan. It wasn’t a sound driven by pain. It was the first rumblings of volcanic rage.

Doña Elena didn’t understand. She said, “Shut up, or I’ll cut your hands some more.”

Olivia only moaned louder. She pressed her neck forward against the knife, forcing the blade to dig deeper. Blood began to trickle down. Doña Elena pulled back a fraction. “Oh, no, you don’t. Not until I know where you put the money.”

But Olivia didn’t stop. She pressed her head and neck forward and then pulled back and then pressed forward again, forcing Doña Elena to move with her to keep the knife pressed against her neck without slitting through her artery. Olivia cursed Doña Elena in Spanish, flinging filthy words at her, daring her to cut. Then Olivia screamed, “What are you waiting for! Shoot her! SHOOT HER!”

Doña Elena’s nostrils flared. I saw her lift her elbow to get leverage and knew what she was about to do. Although she was behind Olivia, and although I had only an inch or so for error, I knew I had to take the shot.

The bullet drove the madwoman back against the wall. The knife dropped harmlessly into the pool of blood at Olivia’s feet. Later I would learn from the police that Doña Elena fell in exactly the same place where they had found Toledo’s body seven years before.