All or Nothing (bad boy romantic suspense) (4 page)

“Which leaves the third option,” said Sally. “They snatched him and bundled him into the back of their car because they were taking him somewhere. If that’s the case then they’ve got him alive, wherever they went with him.”

“So what do we do?” said Cassie.

“Nine one one,” said Sally. “Give it to the professionals.”

Marshall snorted, then looked down at his feet when Sally glared at him.

“So we tell the cops someone’s kidnapped a guy who’s almost certainly on the wrong side of the law, and has got caught up in some kind of swindlers’ dispute,” said Cassie.

“He’s a missing person just like any other missing person,” said Sally. “Only in his case you saw him being taken. They got to treat it seriously. It’s the best thing. The cops will take care of it, isn’t that right, Marshall?”

The big guy shrugged, looking awkward. “I guess I have bad memories of dealin’ with the cops,” he said. “Back when I was young and wild. Guess they’re the best thing in this case, though, jus’ like Sally says.” He was doing his best, but Marshall wasn’t cut from the mold of people who handed their problems over like that.

But what else could she do?

“I’ll run you back to pick up the station wagon,” Cassie said.

“Don’t you be foolish,” said Sally. “You’ve had a shock and you’ve been hurt. I’ll run Marshall over there to pick it up when we’re good and ready, you hear? First we need to get you sorted and get the cops on this.”

Cassie was adamant. “No,” she said. “It was me abandoned it. Let me feel at least there’s
something
I can do, Sally. Okay?”

Sally wasn’t happy with it, but Marshall was already halfway out of the kitchen door and heading for where Cassie had parked the Lexus a few minutes earlier.

“I’ll go,” said Cassie. “I’ll be fine, Sally.”

“You take care,” said Sally, and with those words she made it clear she knew Cassie was up to something.

§

Back out along the Crawford Notch Road, Marshall and Cassie barely spoke a word. They didn’t need to. Marshall knew, too.

They came to the abandoned station wagon, and Cassie was relieved to see that nobody was there. It could have been reported already, for all she knew, but at least there weren’t cops sniffing around or a tow-truck to deal with.

Marshall climbed out and did a slow circuit around the vehicle, kicking at the tires and pulling at the dented bodywork. Then he leaned inside and poked around at the airbag, which had deflated like a used condom over the steering wheel.

Cassie waited in the Lexus, engine still running.

“I’m really sorry, Marshall,” she said. “I’ll cover repairs.” She still had Denny’s roll of hundred dollar bills back in her room, untouched.

“It’s nothin’,” he said. “Just a few scratches is all.”

“You think it’s still drivable?”

“No problem,” he said. “I’ll just unplug that airbag an’ it’ll be fine.”

“You sure?”

He nodded. “I am. Now you be on your way, Cassie. You’ve got business to deal with, haven’t you?”

“Thanks, Marshall. You take care of Sally, okay?”

S
he drove. Out through Conway and Bridgton and on until she hit the I95, and then she headed north and east up into coastal Maine. She’d never been a fast driver before but that Lexus had some speed in it. Just had to be careful she wasn’t pulled over.

She put the radio on loud in an effort to drown out her thoughts. She couldn’t bring herself to think any more about what had happened, or what she was going to have to do to put it right.

It was too much.

Way too much for her to deal with right now.

In not much over two hours she was back on the coast road, heading north. A mile before Pappy’s Lobster Bar she swung a left into a gap in the trees that was easy to miss if you didn’t know it was there. The gap became a rough track, not much wider than the Lexus and she had to slow right down to negotiate the ridges and potholes without grounding. The guy’s been kidnapped: last thing he wants is for her to trash his car, too.

She pulled up in front of her cabin and cut the engine. The place was little more than a shack, with wood-panel walls and a tin roof that sounded like a snare drum in even the slightest of rain.

Out in the open air she paused. Listened to the wind rippling through the trees, the cawing of some crows in the treetops. Nothing else.

The front door was shut, the windows either side of it intact. The ground was wet mud in front of the cabin, soft from the rain. No footprints or tire marks, and no other signs of disturbance.

Since when had her life become like this?

Checking her own home for danger before daring enter?

Since Denny McGowan had walked into her life is since when.

She went to the door, wincing at a stab of pain from her ribs. She fumbled with the lock, opened the door and stepped inside and everything was as she’d left it.

In the one bedroom there was a cabinet by the bed, and in that a small wooden box.

She took it out, put it on the bed, sat and opened it. A few photos of her mom. A sapphire ring that was something in the family, but Cassie had never paid attention to the story then and now it was way, way too late. A lock of her mother’s hair.

And the letter. The one Billy Ray had sent her just before he was released from jail.

She’d read that paragraph over and over, but she’d never allowed herself to believe it. She’d been let down far too many times, by Billy and by others. He’d had his chances, back when Mom had still been alive and before he’d been put in jail. She owed him nothing.

But Billy... Billy owed her big time.

Her cell phone was dead, but it came to life when she plugged it in to charge.

There was a number on that letter. Three years old now, but it was all she had.

She keyed that number now, then pressed ‘Call’.

§

He picked up on two, his voice unmistakable even after all these years.

“Yeah?” he said. “Who’s this?”

Nice.

“Cassandra.” Play it cool, keep things simple, keep on top of all the emotions, all the anger and resentment and
desperation
.

Silence. Then: “Cassandra? That really you? You called me. I–”

“I need your help.”

Another pause. She wondered what was in his head. Hopes raised when he realized she’d called, thinking he’d won her over; then dashed, or at least put on hold, as he detected the tightness in her voice, the abruptness of her tone.

“You got it,” he said. “What do you need? What’s the matter?”

“Call Brady Lowe off,” she said. “He’s taken Denny and I don’t know what he’s going to do, but you have to make him stop. You...” She forced herself to slow down. Those first words had been like water bursting from a fault in a dam. She couldn’t let it all out. Not right now.

“Cassandra,” he said. “What do you want me to do? Brady’s a lunatic. What kind of sway do you think I have over a madman like Brady?”

“You used him,” she said. “You used him to get to me. You turned him against Denny. You have to do something.”

“But what can I do?”

“That’s not Billy Ray Dane talking,” she said. “Billy Ray Dane would never ask what he could do. he could always do something. He could dance circles round anyone he wanted to. He was never afraid of a fight.”

“You say he has Denny McGowan? I never did like Denny. I think I told him that.”

“I never did like you or the way you were,” said Cassie, “but we have to move on from that, okay? I’m a grown woman. I make my choices. Denny’s in danger and we need to help him. You think this is easy for me?”

“Can we meet, sometime?”

“Are you really trying to extract a price from me?”

“No,” he said. “It’s just... This is the first time we’ve spoken in close to ten years. I have a lot of ground to make up. I’d like to meet you. I’d like to get to know you, Cassandra.”

“That’s not part of this conversation,” she said, her words tight. They had to stay focused. This was about Denny, not her and Billy.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You going to do something?”

“I know where Brady will have him,” he said. “Place called Little Maldon, up past Portland on the coast. Brady has a family place up there. It’s the only asset he has left, although he’ll be losing that soon, too. You leave it to me, you hear? I’ll take care of it.”

“I’m on my way already.” And she was. Outside again, the cabin door left swinging, and then she was in the Lexus and firing it up.

“Don’t do anything stupid, Cassandra. Brady’s a madman and the guys he’s with–”

“Al and Luis?”

Another slight pause, then: “Yeah. Al and Luis. They’re old school. They’re hired guns and they don’t mess around.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“I’m on my way,” he said. “I’ll deal with this, you hear me?”

S
he found the road to Little Maldon, following the signs down a single-track trail as darkness was falling, and wondering just how in Hell she was going to find Brady’s place. And what if Billy had been wrong? Brady could have Denny just about anywhere.

If Denny was still alive at all.

She shut that thought out. Remembered Marshall’s logic: if they’d wanted Denny dead then there was nothing anyone could do. All she could do was operate on the chance he was still alive somewhere. She couldn’t allow herself to think any other way.

For once, luck was running her way. Little Maldon lived up to its name, a small settlement of maybe half a dozen houses lined up around a small bay. Vacation homes for wealthy families from Boston, she guessed, and right now at the tail end of fall, only one of them had any lights showing.

She slowed to a crawl, and cut to parking lights only. Barely enough to light the way, but it seemed smarter than full headlights right now, in case anyone was looking. Less eyecatching.

The road ran along behind the row of houses, each enclosed with a high wall and iron gates. When she came to the one with lights showing, she paused, idling the engine. The houses were cut into the hill here, so they looked single-story from this side, although she’d seen from the approach that they were at least two-story from the bay. Out back of this house there were two automobiles, a sleek black Mercedes and a blue sedan that looked just like the blue sedan that had forced Denny off the road back in the White Mountains.

They were here!

She drove on past, keeping slow as the parking lights didn’t help much. Safely out of sight, she switched to headlights again and almost immediately spotted a track down to the bay. She pulled over and climbed out, stretching her aching body, sore after so much driving.

What was she going to do?

She really didn’t know. She had no idead what she was going to find. Best case, and Denny would have worked his slippery charm and the two old buddies would have cracked a beer or two over old times.

She knew, though, that best case was about as likely as Hell opening up for the ski season this year.

Please, Denny: be alive for me!

She’d reason with Brady. She’d plead. She’d tell him she had Billy Ray’s backing and they would find some way to work things out.

She’d do whatever it took...

She followed the track between two lines of high brick wall, and emerged at one end of the bay. Looking back along the curve of the beach, a couple of hundred yards away she could see Brady’s family house. There were a couple of lights on in upstairs rooms, but the brightest light came from a wide set of windows on the ground floor. That place must have one Hell of a view out over the water in daylight.

She walked along the beach, treading carefully on the pebbles and larger rocks. Somewhere out over the water a bird gave a ghostly, wailing cry, and she knew exactly how it felt.

Closer to, the family house was quite a place, designed to slot into the hillside with the beach and the bay as its focus. Brady’s family must have had some serious wealth before he’d blown it all. Before he and
Denny
had blown it all. She saw things from a fresh perspective then: Denny was a chancer, he’d built things up and lost them; but for Brady, wealth was a thing he was accustomed to, something that was his by right. To lose it all...

By the beach, the walls were lower, and it was easy to climb over, even with her bruises and aches from crashing the station wagon that morning. Inside the wall, a garden led up to the house. It had the air of somewhere carefully tended but now abandoned, pruned and sculpted trees and shrubs gone a bit shaggy, grass growing from cracks in the paving.

She climbed some steps to a paved area, and there she could stand in the shadows and look into that brightly-lit ground floor room.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the glare and then she wished for a moment that they hadn’t.

First thing she saw was Denny. He was sitting on a wooden chair facing out, as if he’d been arranged so he could appreciate the view when it had been daylight.

His blue shirt hung in tatters from that athletic frame. His chest was black, blue and red. They’d been beating him, bruising him and making him bleed. His head hung low, chin against his chest, and it was some time before he looked up and she saw blackness around his eyes and a thick, split lip.

He couldn’t move. He was bound around the ankles to the legs of the chair, and his arms were pulled back tight behind him, where they must be similarly secured.

He looked broken. Wrecked.

But alive.

Standing to one side of him, talking, was Brady Lowe. She’d only ever met him once before, but she would know him anywhere. Tall and thin, wire-framed glasses and the way he stood with his head to one side. He was talking now. Laughing even. And in his hands he had a baseball bat.

A short distance across the room, leaning in a doorway, she saw the tall, slightly Latino guy, Luis. Just standing there, one hand in his jacket pocket, the other dangling at his side, cradling a handgun.