Louis shook his head, the pain in his chest engulfing him. “Not me,” he coughed. “Outlaw. They wanted Outlaw.”
It took a long time to get the Mustang out of the mud and even longer to find their way out of the preserve. Jewell’s map was no help because every turn in the dark maze seemed to lead to another canal. Some of the roads were so overgrown with brush they had to back out, moving slowly to avoid the stands of dark swampy water on each side.
Jewell was driving now and with every dead end, Louis could feel the young cop’s frustration building, feel his sense of impotency. It was a full two hours before they found the scenic
drive, and another hour before they made it back to the gravel quarry and homes. Back on Tamiami Trail, there were no cop cars waiting for them. Miller Boulevard had turned out to be just another rutted path dead-ending in a gaping pool of black water.
At East Naples, Louis finally got a signal on the phone. He gave Wainwright the news of their failure. During the rest of the drive back, Louis remained quiet, the throbbing in his chest growing stronger with every mile.
It was after four A.M. when Susan and Joe met him inside the door. Louis paused, holding Susan’s teary gaze as long as he could.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
Susan wrapped her arms around him. It hurt, but he held her awkwardly in a half-embrace, fighting not to fall against her. When she finally pulled back, she wiped her face, trying to hold it together.
“Do you need anything? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said.
The next few minutes were a blur. He had a vague sense of Wainwright asking questions, of Joe’s pale face watching him. Susan was pacing, demanding to hear the tape. Austin was slumped on the sofa. He didn’t even look up at Louis.
Louis tried to peel off the suede coat without pulling at his chest muscles, but he couldn’t. Joe was there, reaching up to help him, her eyes dropping to the bullet hole in his T-shirt.
He started to lift the shirt over his head, but couldn’t do that either. His eyes swept the room, at Jewell and the two other cops standing at the door, at Joe watching him. And at Wainwright, sitting at the kitchen table with Susan. The tape was playing now, and Louis could hear his own voice, tinny and strained.
Suddenly, the Kevlar vest was too heavy on his aching chest. He went through the kitchen without stopping. Wainwright looked up but Susan didn’t, too intent on the tape. Louis pushed open the door to the Florida room just off the kitchen.
Louis looked for a light but couldn’t find a switch. He knew Susan didn’t use the room much; he had been out here only once to help Ben with a flat tire on his bike. It was just a catch
-all junk room filled with boxes and a few pieces of mismatched lawn furniture. Some of the glass slats in the jalousie windows were missing. There were puddles on the old tile floor.
Slowly, he crossed his arms and grabbed the bottom of the T-shirt. He tried to pull it up but the pain was unbearable and he had no strength. He gritted his teeth and tried again.
He heard the scrape of the door but didn’t turn around.
“Here, let me help.”
Joe was behind him. He didn’t try to stop her as she gently pulled the shirt up his back and over his head. She was careful as she peeled back the Velcro tabs and took the heavy vest off him, tossing it to the floor. She carefully removed the wire.
“You should go to the hospital,” she said.
He shook his head, fighting the dizziness.
“Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
He waited alone, feeling the cold air flow across his bare chest.
In another hour or two, it would be sunrise. Monday
morning. Three mornings ago he had awakened in his cottage, antsy to come to this house, eager to pick up where he and Susan had left off before Austin showed up. By sunset, he was in Miami, looking at corpses.
And now. He spotted Ben’s bike leaning against the far wall. Now he was feeling
like if he spent one more night in this house, he would go crazy.
Louis heard the door squeak and Joe returned, coming up behind him. He jumped at the gentle press of something icy against his shoulder blade.
“Easy, easy,” Joe whispered.
He stood perfectly still, letting her hold the Ziploc full of ice on his back. The cold breeze swirled around him and he could feel the faint tickle of her hair on his bare skin.
“Jewell said you took two shots,” she said.
“I got hit in
the chest first.”
She came around and looked at the bruise spreading over his chest. She pressed the Ziploc against his upper chest, her other hand holding his back. He could feel the tingle of the ice and the warmth of her hand all at once. He felt his nipple grow hard, saw her face so close, smelled the musk of rain, earth, and her.
She was standing inches away and he couldn’t bring himself to look into her eyes. When he finally did, he saw —- what?
Permission.
He held her eyes for a second longer. He reached up and covered her hand with his and gently pushed her hand away.
Joe stepped back. She reached down, picked up his shirt, and held it out to him. He took it and slowly worked it back over his head by himself.
Joe had gone to sit down in one of the lawn chairs. When he sat down in the other one, she reached over to a table and picked up a juice glass, holding it out to him.
“What’s that?” Louis asked.
“Brandy. I brought it out for you.”
“Susan doesn’t keep brandy in the house.”
“Wainwright mentioned you could use a drink and he sent someone to get some.”
Louis took a drink. Cheap stuff, but it would do.
Joe was looking at him. He half expected her to say something about him beating himself up over his failure to get Benjamin, but then he knew she wouldn’t.
Louis took another drink, staring out into the darkness of the small yard. He couldn’t see the palm trees, but he could hear the fronds rustling like taffeta.
“I watched a father shoot his own son once,” Joe said. Louis glanced at her. All he could see was her profile outlined by the light coming from the kitchen window.
“We were in a hostage standoff situation and we had managed to get the father out of the house and onto the lawn, but he was holding his five year old in his arm, a gun at the kid’s head. We couldn’t get a clean shot.”
“You got him to the lawn. You were almost there,” Louis said.
Joe shook her head. “He started to lay the gun down, but then he just pulled the trigger. Almost wasn’t good enough.”
Louis brought the glass to his lips and took a drink. After the burning in his throat subsided, he spoke. “How’d you deal with it?”
She sat back in the chair, the glass dangling in her hand. “Once I realized I couldn’t get rid of the memory, I decided to live with it. I keep a photo of the kid in my wallet. Whenever I need to, I take it out and look at it.”
“Can I see it?”
She put down her glass and reached into the back of her jeans for a thin billfold. She pulled a photo from behind her Miami PD identification card and handed it to him.
Louis held it up to the light of the kitchen window. He was a tiny child, looking closer to three years old than five. His shaggy light hair was in his eyes, and he wore a crooked grin.
Louis handed it back.
“I talk to him sometimes,” she said.
Louis didn’t want to tell her he’d talked to skulls and graves, so he said nothing.
She brought her legs up to her chest, wrapping them with her arms, curling into a ball, stretching her baggy gray sweater down over her knees, pulling the sleeves down to cover her hands. It was like she was trying to make herself safe and warm, but she was too tall and the chair was too small. She sat there in a tight ball, chin on knees, staring out into the dark yard.
Louis was looking again at her profile, sharply outlined in the stark kitchen light. The strands of hair unloosed from her ponyta
il did nothing to soften the angles of her face, the darkness did little to hide the fatigue in her eyes. He realized she probably hadn’t had any more sleep than he had in the last forty-eight hours. He wanted to reach over and brush the hair back from her face.
He wanted...
He wanted her to wrap herself around him, pulling him close. He wanted to hide, somewhere inside her. He wanted to feel safe and warm. He wanted to make her feel that way, too. He took another drink of brandy instead.
“I should go see how Susan’s doing,” he said.
“I heard her go into the shower. I think she’s still there.”
“Still?”
“Women do that.”
“Do what?”
“Cry in the shower. It’s easier that way. No one can hear you and the water feels good, like someone holding you.”
Louis rolled the glass between his hands.
“I better go,” she said, standing.
“Where?”
“I saw a motel up near the town center. I need some sleep.” She shook her head slightly as she looked to the kitchen. “I can’t sleep here.”
Louis
looked up at her. “Why don’t you go stay at my place? I’m staying here until this is over.”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Okay, thank you.”
He gave her quick directions to his cottage on Captiva.
“Do I need keys?” she asked.
“It should be open,” he said. “If not, try the front window. Just don’t let my cat out.”
“Ok, thanks.”
She started to leave, then turned back. “So where do we go from here?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Louis said.
She gave him a small smile.
“Get some sleep,” Louis said.
“You, too.” She turned and was gone.
Louis heard her speaking to
Wainwright. Then it was quiet. A little while later, the light went off in the kitchen.
Letting out a long breath, he finished off the last drop of brandy and set the glass down on the tile. He dropped his head back against
the wall. It was just before dawn and a heavy gray light was starting to take over the blackness. Gray like her sweater and eyes.
He ran his hand over his unshaven chin and it dropped heavily down to his T-shirt resting on the hole over his heart
.
Monday, January 18
It was morning but the kitchen was full of shadows, the overhead florescent light weak and flickering. They could hear the steady patter of another day’s rain against the windows, but all the bad jokes about it had stopped long ago.
Chief Wainwright sat at the small yellow table, an empty coffee mug and a plate of untouched toast in front of him. His white hair was wet, combed back away from his lined face. Bags of flesh hung under his eyes, seeming to pull down his face.
Austin was seated on Wainwright’s right. He wore the same clothes he had been in last night, the khakis and pink shirt. Louis knew he had slept in them, if he had slept at all.
Susan was standing at the sink, her back to the window. She wore a white chenille robe, her hair pulled back with a white
scrunchie. Her face was etched with a deep pain, but her eyes held a look of renewed determination.
Louis hadn’t spoken to her last night. By the time he had come in from the Florida room, she had been asleep. He had closed her door and stretched out on the sofa, but the pain in his chest had made sleep difficult.
“I wanted to talk to all of you before I left this morning,” Wainwright said. “I think I have a plan but before I put it in motion, I wanted to make sure we are all on the same page.”
The kitchen was quiet as they waited for Wainwright to go
on.
“I think we all know now that this was never about the money,” Wainwright said. “They were after Outlaw, plain and simple.” His eyes drifted to Austin. “I wish I knew why.”
Austin shifted in his chair and when no one spoke, he glanced around quickly then crossed his arms over his chest.
“I told you I don’t know,” he said tightly. “I borrowed the money from the business and the only person who might be pissed about that is Wallace Sorrell and he’s dead now, isn’t he?”
Susan glared at him. “You stole the money.”
Austin’s eyes slid to her. “Whatever.
But unless Wallace was into things I don’t know about and that money was owed to someone else, I got nothing for you guys. Nothing.”
“As usual,” Susan said.
“Mrs. Outlaw, please,” Wainwright said. “Just listen to me for a minute. So far, we’ve been waiting on them to communicate with us and after last night I don’t think they’re going to call us with another ransom demand since now they know that we know all they ever wanted was Outlaw.”
“Then let’s give him to them,” Susan said.
“Ma’am,” Wainwright said, a hint of impatience in his voice. “You know we can’t do that. We can’t trade your husband for your son.”
Susan’s mouth opened to respond, but she closed it quickly, biting back her words. Louis was pretty sure it was damn close to “Why not?"
Wainwright stood up. “All right. Here’s the plan.”
He took a breath, and stuck his hands in the pockets of his uniform pants. “We’re going to release the story to the media that we’ve had a kidnapping, a ransom demand, and that the victim’s father, one Austin Outlaw, was killed making the ransom drop.”
Susan’s head snapped up but Wainwright held her silent with an open hand.
“We need to draw a reaction here,” Wainwright said. “
Because if we don’t, there’s a good chance they’ll come after him again and in the process kill more innocent people. Or they’ll decide to wait until we call off all the dogs.”
“You’d call this whole thing off?” Susan asked.
“After a while, we’d have no choice,” Wainwright said. “With no contact, eventually the threat disappears. The police can’t protect your ex-husband forever.”
“Who cares about protecting him?” she asked, throwing her hand toward Austin. “What about finding Benjamin?”
“Let me finish,” Wainwright said. “When we announce that Outlaw is dead, the kidnappers will believe their mission has been completed. Then, one of two things will happen. They’ll either release their hostage or dispose of him.”
Susan let out a half-scream,
half-growl and tried to stand up, but her chair banged against the wall behind her, sandwiching her between the chair and the table.
“You’re crazy!” she said.
Wainwright put a hand up again, but Susan ignored it. “I say we do just the opposite,” she said. “We tell them Austin is alive, and if they want him bad enough they’ll try again. They’ll come to us and we...we can --”
“Do what, ma’am? Sit in your house for God knows how long and wait for these two guys to come bursting through the door?”
Susan leaned on the table. “No. If they think Austin is still alive, we buy time. Time to find them.”
She grabbed Byron Ellis’s file from the table. “We have a suspect. If you give him a reason to bail out, we’ll never find him or Ben.”
“We’ve got two different agencies crawling this side of the state for him right now. We’re out of time.”
“No we’re not!” Susan yelled. “Benjamin is alive. Louis saw him just hours ago!”
“That’s part of the point, damn it,” Wainwright said.
Susan was rigid, her eyes narrowed at Wainwright. “I don’t understand.”
“Looking back, I think these guys grabbed Ben at the park figuring that eventually your husband would think it was safe and return to get his kid.”
“But he didn
’t,” Susan said.
“No, so they took Ben with them. I think
the ransom-kidnapping thing was an afterthought, a way to make good use of their unexpected package. I’m not sure they ever really wanted to kill the boy. I think they intended to release him last night after they killed Outlaw.”
“They would have released Ben with me
lying there dead?” Austin asked.
Wainwright nodded. “I think so. They were betting we’d eventually find
the boy.”
“No, this won’t work,” Susan said, shaking her head. “It won’t matter if they think Austin is dead. They will kill Ben anyway. Ben can identify
them.”
“We’ll cover that,” Wainwright said. “We release Ellis’
s name and mug shot, announce he’s our suspect. Then the identification issue becomes moot. We take away their reason to kill Ben.”
Susan slowly sank back into her seat, her eyes locked on Wainwright
. She wanted desperately to believe him, believe that what he was proposing would work, believe that what he was saying was true —- that they wouldn’t kill Ben.
Louis’s eyes went to Wainwright
. A few days ago the chief had been sure Benjamin was dead. Had he really changed his mind, or was he grasping at something else, something closer to faith? That was an even stranger concept. Faith that a couple of psychos would stop short of killing a child when they had sliced up everyone else in their path. Faith that somehow this could still work out okay.
“That is the plan,” Wainwright said. “I need you all to go along with it
. Once it’s announced, you’ll get questions, phone calls. Promise me you won’t talk to the media. Especially you, Mrs. Outlaw.”
Susan looked up at Wainwright then turned to Louis, a question in her eyes.
She wanted to know what he thought. As a defense attorney she had a learned distrust of cops, but she had grown to respect Louis and he knew that if he told her this was the right way to play it then she would agree, even if reluctantly. And he knew that if Wainwright was wrong, he himself would also carry the blame.
He wasn’t sure if Wainwright’s plan was brilliant or stupid, but something about it made some kind of weird sense. Why had they even brought Benjamin to the drop if they hadn’t intended to let him go?
“Louis?” Susan asked.
He met her eyes.
“I think it’s better than just sitting here and waiting to see what they do,” he said. “At least this way, we’re in control.”
She dropped her head, h
er clasped hands resting on the table. “All right” she whispered.
Wainwright gathered up his things and left the kitchen. Susan watched him go then pulled Byron Ellis’s file to her and started reading. Austin got up and muttered something as he headed to the Florida room
. A moment later, Louis smelled the pungent odor of his cigar.
Louis rose and went to the living room. He pulled on a jacket and went outside, pausing on the front porch. Through the drizzle, he could see
the taillights of Wainwright’s car as it pulled away. A Sereno Key cruiser still sat at the curb, an officer inside. Half a block away, Louis watched a couple of Lee County Sheriff's Crime Scene investigators in yellow raincoats working the crime scene at the old people’s house. Another county car sat at the end of the street.
In Susan’s
driveway he saw another man, squatting next to the open passenger door of his Mustang. He wore a raincoat that had LEE COUNTY CSI stenciled on the back. Louis walked to the driver’s side, his eyes moving over the muddy car.
The side window was shattered, a few shards of glass still stuck in the rubber moldin
g. Small crystals of glass shimmered in the rain water that had puddled in the backseat.
There was
a rip in the cloth top where a bullet had passed, and he touched the frayed edge, seeing again how Jewell was positioned in the backseat, knowing how close this bullet must have come.
There were two more bullet holes in the door panel and one more
near the front of the car.
“Looks like a nine millimeter.”
The man’s voice startled him and Louis looked back over the roof of the car.
“What?” Louis said.
The crime scene investigator was holding a bullet in gloved fingers. “I said it looks like a nine millimeter. Same as the ones in the vest.”
Louis nodded absently
. “How long before you can release the car?”
“I don’t know. Maybe in the morning.”
Louis glanced down the street, anxious to get out of there. He had no idea what would happen when Wainwright’s announcement hit the news. But he sensed that time was running out one way or the other, and that Wainwright was right about one thing. They couldn’t wait for Ellis and his partner to make the next move.
It was time to go looking for them.
Louis’s eyes were drawn back to the Mustang’s shattered window. The tech was packing up and noticed him.
“You need a ride somewhere?”
Louis shook his head. “No thanks. I got someone I can call.”