72 Hours (A Thriller) (6 page)

Lindsay kept the pedal to the floor.
 
She glanced briefly over her shoulder, saw the van and the police cruiser.
 
There was no avoiding them.
 
She chose the angle of least resistance and braced for impact.

“HOLD ON!”

They clipped the front end of the van, the Escalade spinning, broadsiding the black and white, the front passenger side door of the SUV sheered from its hinges by the force of the collision.
 
She shifted the transmission into drive and plowed forward, tires squealing on the gritty asphalt.

The Escalade traded paint with the police cruiser all the way down one side. Wife-beater was sprinting, closing the distance to the top of the driveway.
 
He discarded the shotgun and lunged at the moving vehicle, hanging from the open driver side door, his legs dragging the ground.
 
The big V8 roared as the SUV surged forward. Lindsay veered into the iron fence, crushing wife-beater.
 
He relinquished his grip, falling aside and out of sight.
 
The Escalade drove for a hundred feet with two wheels up on the sidewalk.
 
Ten seconds later, they passed two incoming black and whites, lights blazing, sirens wailing.

Lindsay did not glance back.
 

CHAPTER 16

Phone lines had been strung into a room allocated by the prison administrators for use by the FBI as a temporary base of operations.
 
They were two hours into the fiasco, and already Lindsay Hammond and her children had gone missing.
 
The FBI was screaming at the LAPD, and the governor’s office was screaming at
everyone
.
 
Things were happening quickly.
 

Between conference calls, Kline bummed a cigarette off Sperry and smoked it outside the front doors, staring past the protestors and razor wire to the dark water of the bay, where gulls circled and swooped in pursuit of dinner.

He squashed out the cigarette under the sole of his shoe and went back inside.

Kline had tracked down Lindsay’s ex-husband.
 
James Hammond was a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills.
 
Kline caught him at home.
 
Hammond told him that Lindsay wasn’t answering her cell.
 
Neither was Ramey.
 
Last time he’d spoken to his ex-wife she was heading to find the kids.
 

The shootout at her home had produced three bodies, those of one intruder and two LAPD officers.
 
The dead intruder found inside the house was named Poncho Turo, a smalltime thug with a short but violent list of priors.
 
A second thug, Rico Merez, was hooked to life-support and wasn’t expected to make it through the night.
 
The third known assailant, Hector Suarez, was in custody.
 
He’d already done a stint for armed robbery and another for possession with intent to sell.
 
The LAPD had him in a cell downtown.
 
He knew he was going away for a long time and was thus more than willing to talk.
 
He told them that him and Merez and Turo had spent the afternoon hanging out at the LA River, drinking cheap whiskey, sitting in the shade of the van.
 
They were bored and itching for a little action.
 
They were listening to Johnny Smackdown and got all charged up when he started talking about Dunbar’s money.
 
They lost interest in the whiskey and drove the van to Brentwood.
 
There was not an ounce of impulse control between them.
 
Now, Turo was dead, Merez well on his way, and Suarez looked to pay a heavy price for the murders of two of LA’s finest.
 

Thanks to the media attention and the attack on the Hammond home, the situation was gaining momentum.
 
Word was starting to spread like wildfire.
 
Dunbar’s big offer was slowly working its way from one end of the city to the other.
 
Within hours it had taken on a life of its own.
 
Dunbar had planned it perfectly.
 
Five hundred million dollars was an attention grabber
 
in any language, on any continent.
 
The potential for that kind of money would persuade a lot of borderline personalities to do crazy things.
 
Dunbar had presented the world with a once in a lifetime opportunity.
 

Leonard Monroe and his team of legal eagles were in the room with their legal pads and cell phones.
 
Monroe remained cool and reassuring.
 
He swore he’d been totally in the dark about his client’s true intentions and was shocked by his behavior.
 
He assured Special Agent Kline and the rest of the law enforcement community and governing bodies involved in the case that he would work tirelessly to persuade his client to hold true to his word and reveal the locations of the missing bodies of his wife and daughter.

Kline glanced at his watch for the hundredth time in an hour.
 
The clock was ticking.
 
Dunbar had successfully created chaos while locked away deep inside San Quentin.
 
Simply amazing.
 
He knew they had to find Lindsay Hammond before the rest of the world did.

CHAPTER 17

The only sound in the garage was the ticking of the engine.
 
The Escalade had pulled straight in.
 
They stared out through the windshield at the silhouette of a workbench with tools hanging from pegboard.
 

They had sat totally without movement for an entire hour.
 
They had escaped the horror of intruders inside their home and wanted now to only take solace in the fact that they had survived, unscathed, and were still together as a family.
 

When at last it felt safe to even breathe, Lindsay put her face in her hands and trembled.
 
Ramey and Wyatt hugged their arms around her.

“Can I get out?” Wyatt asked.

Lindsay was silent a moment.
 
“Stay in the garage.
 
And be quiet.”

The SUV’s interior light winked on as he opened the back door.
 
The other rear door had been crushed shut in the collision with the police cruiser.
 
He gingerly lowered his feet to the concrete floor and eased away from the Escalade.

“Dad again,” Ramey said, gesturing with her cell.

Lindsay sighed, shook her head.
 
“Don’t answer.”

“Why?
 
Maybe he can help.”

“I need time to think.”

The garage was attached to a house in Malibu owned by close family friends currently vacationing in Austria.
 
Lindsay knew the security code and the house had everything they’d need to survive for a few days if necessary.
 
They could hide out, take their time, get some sleep.
 
She planned to simply stay put until Dunbar was executed, and then all the craziness would be over.
 
She was just thankful that no one on the planet knew where to find them.
 

*
   
*
   
*

Soji had followed at a distance.
 
They’d seen his yellow car, so he’d been forced to hang back and struggle to keep them in view.
 
He’d trailed them to Malibu.
 
He saw the street they’d turned down but lost sight of them after that.
 
Thankfully the street ended at a cul-de-sac.
 
So he knew they were nearby.
 
All he had to do was be patient.

CHAPTER 18

Santa Cruz, California

The Land Cruiser was an old model manufactured in the 1970s and looked like a Jeep.
 
The top was had disappeared years before Ryan Archer bought it from one of the old hippies who liked to hang out and trade folklore at the surf shop where Archer worked part-time.
 

The sun was red and low on the horizon.
 
The Pacific looked like an oil painting come to life.
 
The muscles of his upper body rippled beneath his bronze skin as he lifted his surf board out of the Land Cruiser.
 
He tucked the fiberglass board under his arm and headed down the beach.
   

He paddled out, gliding effortlessly away from shore on a rippled surface that passed beneath him like layers of silk.
 
He stroked the water with both arms, his ropey biceps shimmering.
 
Mild swells gently lifted him.
 
The beach and the bluffs receded in the distance as he pressed further out into open water.
   

There was not another surfer in sight.
 
The horizon was a banner of blazing colors.
 
He stared out to sea.
 
He was content.
 
Time spent on the long board was time when the weight of the world simply fell away.
 
For a moment he envisioned unseen predators in the cool blackness of the deep.
 
They were down there.
 
Razor-like teeth capable of pulling a man apart.
 
Archer was not concerned.
 
Predators were everywhere at all times.
 
The trick was being aware.
 
Maintaining full awareness of his environment was his religion.
 
Awareness equaled survival.

The sea began to roll.
 
The waves were coming.
 
Archer was ready.
 
When the swells began to grow, and he saw his wave, he angled his board toward the shore and paddled hard.
 
The wave lifted him.
 
He could feel its weight and mass and density rising.
 
Archer rose to his knees, and in a second fluid motion had his feet beneath him on the glossy fiberglass plank.
 

Suddenly he was standing.
 
The wind in his face, he steered the board across the shoulder to the inside of the pipeline.
 
The wave swept him forward, carrying him back near the shallows, where it finally collapsed, breaking over upon itself, consuming Archer in the soup with a single lush swallow.
 
For a long moment his world became silent and dark.
 
Then his board popped to the surface and he followed it to daylight.
 
He sucked air, muscles burning.
 
He clung to the board and caught his breath.

The sea was losing color and clarity, altered by the shifting textures of the sky that signaled the arrival of dusk.
 
He felt like a warrior.
 
That was a title he had earned in more than one way, on more battlefields than he cared to remember.
 
He loved the sea because of its grandeur and savage beauty, and perhaps most of all for its truth.
 
He respected it because it would never betray him.
 
It might kill him, but it would never betray him.
 

CHAPTER 19

Johnny Smackdown lit a cigarette and glanced up at the clock on the wall.
 
His show was over but he refused to give up the microphone.
 
He planned to sleep at the studio if necessary.
 
The airwaves of 99.1 FM were his until further notice.
 

It would be dark soon.
 
Lindsay Hammond had momentarily fallen off the grid, but the heat was still on.
 
Sooner or later she would turn up.
 
He intended to blow the doors off this thing.
 
It had the potential of turning into a ratings bonanza.
 
He was jazzed at the notion of turning the city into a mad house.
 
The shootout with the three hombres was great stuff, but he wanted more.
 
He wanted a shootout on every street corner.
 
He wanted total chaos.
 

Don’t Fear the Reaper
was playing when the phone rang in the studio.
 
The call was coming from an outside line.
 
Probably a crazed fan, or a teenage girl requesting some putrid love song.

“This is Smackdown,” he answered.

“Yo, Smackdown,” a male voice said.

“What can I do for you, my man?”

“I’m calling from Malibu.”

“Good for you.
 
What’s on your mind?”

“I’ve got Lindsay Hammond cornered.”

Johnny Smackdown sat bolt upright and grabbed his smoldering Marlboro from the ashtray.
 
He took a quick hit, then started jotting notes on a scrap of paper on the table
 
– HAMMOND/MALIBU.

“Well,” he said, “you’ve got my attention, bro.
 
What’s the scoop?”

“I was at her house in Brentwood when the fireworks went down with the LAPD.
 
Saw everything.
 
Had a front row seat.
 
When she bailed with her brats, I stuck on her tail, man.
 
Followed her.
 
Now I’ve got them pinned down in the hills above Malibu.”