Authors: John D. Brown
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Kidnapping, #Organized Crime, #Vigilante Justice, #Military, #Spies & Politics, #Conspiracies, #Thrillers
Sam relayed the message.
The Cessna was high up over the area. High enough to get a mighty good view. There was no way Ed would be able to hide the pickup.
A few moments later Sam said, “Pinto says there are a couple of pickups, but none are yellow.”
“It’s got to be there,” Frank said. “He was just there ten minutes ago. Tell him to look farther north and west.”
Sam relayed the message.
Frank said, “Turn this thing around. We need to follow Ed. We want to go out along that road you passed about a half a mile back.”
Sam slowed to a stop and made a three point turn. Then they headed back the way he’d come. They traveled the half mile and came to the intersection where a road shot west of the one they were on.
“Turn here,” Frank said.
Sam turned onto the road and accelerated. “Where now?”
“Just keep going.”
They drove maybe another mile, and then Sam said, “They found a yellow pickup. Its windshield is all busted. It’s sitting in the shade of some trees. But there isn’t anybody inside.”
“What?”
“Pinto’s going to fly lower to get a better look, but he says there isn’t anybody in it.”
“Anyone on foot? Any houses nearby?”
Sam relayed the questions. A moment later he said, “No. Closest house is a few miles away and there isn’t anybody anywhere. Just some farmer moving some sprinkler pipe.”
Frank was pretty sure that farmer hadn’t walked out there. Ed must have taken his truck or car. Frank’s heart sank. They needed to cordon the place off. Set a perimeter. He dialed 9 then 1. He was about to dial the other 1 when the phone rang.
It was a number Frank didn’t recognize. He moved to press the cancel button, then stopped and pressed answer instead.
Ed’s voice came through, but it was in the background. He was yelling at someone. Someone else shouted in Spanish, but Ed talked over him.
What was this—a butt dial? Someone else in Ed’s car?
Then it hit him. It was Tony.
That was Jesus’s phone. Tony had hacked it. But why call Frank? He should have called 911. Then Frank remembered their conversation in the basement.
Tony had called Frank instead. And now Frank had that number in his phone.
What was he going to do with a number?
He could do everything with a number. Bring the authorities in, and they could locate that phone. Triangulate it. The phone company didn’t even need GPS.
Then Ed’s voice came in loud and clear. “What is that? What are you doing! You little—”
The call ended.
A moment later, Tony’s phone buzzed again and Ed’s number came up on the screen.
Frank thumbed the answer button. “You’re a dead man, Ed. This is your last warning.”
“Here’s the deal, Jockstrap.”
“The cops are going to find that pickup,” Frank said. “They going to trace it back to the Gorozas. Then they’re going to have a lot on their hands. And they’ll blame that on you.”
“The cops will trace it, all right,” Ed said. “And the registration will lead them to some old couple, or some kid that died five years ago somewhere in Arizona or Mississippi. Same with names on the house. The Gorozas aren’t stupid.”
Frank covered the microphone on the phone and said to Sam, “Tell them to look for any vehicles heading west from the pickup.”
Ed continued, “We caught your boy making a call. Now I wonder why he’d do that? You ready for another goose chase?”
So much for triangulation. Frank had to hand it to Tony; he was trying.
Ed said, “They want the girls. They want that whore we were bringing back to them. And they want you, Frank. You’ve suddenly become popular.”
“Geez, maybe I’ll run for mayor.”
“Give us the threefer, and we set Tony free.”
That lie was about as big as they came.
Frank thought about Carmen. He said, “Maybe I’ll just take the woman myself.”
“That would not be wise.”
“The Matanarcos; I bet she’s worth a pretty penny to the right people.”
A pause. “You do not want to jump my claim.”
Claim, like he’d found gold in a stream. But Carmen wasn’t a victim. Victims had nervous breakdowns and freaked out with fear. Carmen was all business. She was some kind of operator. Which meant this wasn’t a ransom. There was a bounty on Carmen’s head, and Ed was bringing her back to collect the money.
But upon what kind of person did a cartel put, not a hit, but a bounty?
Someone they wanted to torture before she died. Someone from whom they wanted to wring information. Or someone they wanted to rescue.
Was Ed going all noble on him?
Naw, you didn’t beat the people you rescued, zip-tie ‘em, and throw them into the trunk of your car.
Bottom line: Carmen, which Frank knew wasn’t her real name, was someone who had eluded those who sought her. She might be a sicaria herself. A hired killer. One that had perpetrated a few too many hits on the Gorozas or someone friendly to them.
“Looks to me like you need a new partner,” Frank said just to see what information he might shake loose. “Team up. And we can split the reward.”
“Right,” Ed said, but Frank knew his twisted brain was turning, trying to scheme a way to use this to his advantage. However, he must have come up with dead ends because he said, “The reward for you, Jockstrap, is a Tony that hasn’t been mutilated in some awful fashion. Don’t lose your focus.”
“You just bought your grave.”
“Keep your phone charged. You don’t want to miss the next call. And just so you know, this phone I’m using now, it’s going out the window. The next call will be coming from a different device.”
Frank listened in the background of Ed’s call for anything that might help him with his location, but Ed hung up.
Frank looked over at Sam. “They find anything?”
“Nothing.”
Frank closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. These people were ugly, tiny-eyed eels.
They wanted him, did they? They wanted to play tough?
They had no idea how tough Frank could play.
The only problem was they currently held all the cards. They had all the aces and kings. They had the deck stacked.
18
Sugar Beets
FRANK SAID, “I need Pinto to circle round to the burning house. He’ll see a track through the field going south. He’s looking for a bunch of children piled on a snowmobile like circus clowns.”
Sam relayed the message. A moment later the Cessna wheeled in the sky and headed south. Sam asked, “I assume we’re going to follow?”
“That’s right,” Frank said. “We need to turn Silver here around.” He also needed to make a call. He opened Tony’s phone and brought up his contacts. He found Nurse Ratchet and dialed the number. It rang and rang, and then Kim answered. “Hey, baby.”
Finally. “Don’t you ever answer your phone?” Frank asked.
“Frank?”
“You need to listen to me, Kim. You need to get out of L.A. You need to do it now. Do not go home. Do not go to your office. You just head out.”
A beat passed.
“Kim?”
“What’s going on, Frank?”
“I told you what was going on. You’re in danger. And now it’s worse. I’m tracking Ed right now, but I think he’s going to be sending someone your way.”
Her voice took an angry edge. “And Tony?”
“Tony’s okay.”
“Put him on.”
Frank took a breath. He could hear people talking in the background around her. “He’s not here right now.”
“Frank.”
“He’s fine, Kim. But you need to get out of Dodge.”
She sighed. “You’re a wrecking ball. Do you know that?”
He thought of Tony’s face in the back of that truck. “Oh, I’m well aware of the burdens I bring. Look, I’m going to take care of it. I’ll explain it all later. Right now you need to move.”
“I’ve got work.”
“Tell them you just got a goiter. No client’s going to want to see you with Voldemort’s head growing out of your neck.”
She sighed again in annoyance.
“Don’t you have a friend up in San Jose?”
“Yeah.”
“Then tonight’s girl’s night out. If you leave now, you just might be there in time for the late show.”
“You’re lying to me, Frank. I know when you lie. For example, I know you are in Colorado, not Rock Springs. At least, that’s where Tony’s phone is. What are you doing in Colorado?”
“Kim, you’re getting side-tracked. Ed has made a threat, which I will handle. But until I have him wrapped up, I need you in a safe place. The most important thing you can do for Tony right now is put yourself beyond Ed’s reach.”
Frank cringed at his last sentence.
“What does Tony have to do with this? Sweet Lord, something
has
happened to him. I knew it. Frank!”
He could see her in his mind’s eye. Worry, anger, alarm all rising up in her face.
“I’m not going to San Jose, brother. I’m coming to Rock Springs. And when I do, we’re going to sit down and have ourselves a come-to-Jesus.”
Rock Springs was actually . . . a perfect place. At least for now. “The spare key is under a rock in the back corner of the yard. Actually, I’m pretty sure the house is unlocked.”
“Frank.”
He could hear the worry in her voice. “Tony’s fine, Kim. But you cannot go to your place in L.A.” He slowed down, put as much everything’s-fine-we’re-having-a-picnic-with-strawberry-cake in his voice as he could muster. “Love you. You’re the best sister ever. We’ll have a big barbeque when you arrive. Maybe you can bite the head off a rattler.”
“Oh, I’m going to bite somebody’s head. That’s for sure.”
“Gotta run,” Frank said and ended the call.
Frank put the phone down. That had gone swimmingly. When this was all said and done, she would probably drive a steak knife through his heart. But, hey, what was family for?
He sat back and knocked his elbow. The pain shot up his arm. In fact, the pain in his arm, leg, and ribs pounded with each heart beat. “Do you have any Tylenol?” he asked Sam.
Sam fished around in his diaper bag and came up with a bottle of pink pain killer for kids. It was three-fourths full. “This is all kiddie potency,” Sam said. “I’d just chug the whole thing.”
Frank took the bottle from him, pressed down and screwed off the child protection lid, and drank the thick sickly-sweet medicine. “Bubble gum,” he said. “Yum.”
Sam turned the van around and headed back toward the Gorozas.
Frank punched up the maps app on Tony’s phone. Then he tapped and scrolled until he was looking at their current position and the lonely country roads that crisscrossed the area. “You’re going to take a right at the T.”
“You got it, Tonto.”
“I don’t know that I want to be Tonto. Wasn’t someone always beating the snot out of him?”
“It’s a hard job, but you’re our man, Frank.”
“Thor then.”
“Thor has lots of blond wavy hair. I’d say you are a little hair challenged at the moment.”
“Whatever,” Frank said and tried to swallow the last of the medicine. But it wasn’t going down. Sam had replaced his bottle of vitamin water. Frank pointed at it. “Do you mind?”
“Help yourself.”
Frank took the water and washed the medicine down. Then he put the bottle back.
He said, “How did you find me?”
“We saw your abduction,” Sam said. “Watched it through the field glasses. But we didn’t have a handy field for takeoff. There was no way Pinto was going to do that particular road again. Heber was still a ways out. About forty-five minutes later and a tense chat with some cops, we finally found a road. By then you were long gone. So we headed the way we’d seen you go. We picked you up again just this side of Cheyenne, but then night fell and we mixed you up with another truck. By the time we figured out our mistake, it was too dark. So we camped out. Pinto put it down at an airport nearby and then we all went to some cockroach motel. We got up this morning before dawn and went back to the point where we’d gotten confused and started looking around, Pinto and Heber up in the plane. We were just about to give up when that house exploded. Buddy, that was one heck of a beacon.”
“Hey, I figured we were out on the plains; it was perfect for Indian smoke signals.”
“What was that? Shawnee for ‘holy crap’?”
“Something like that.”
By this time Sam had turned the corner around the marsh and started heading for the spot where Frank first flew off the road. From this angle Frank realized that had been one fine piece of snowmobile flight. But it hadn’t been enough. He would have had very few options indeed if Sam hadn’t shown up.
“Why?” Frank asked.
“Why what?”
“You three spent the night. I’m just some white trash ex-con that moved into your neighborhood. You don’t know me from Adam.”
“I know enough.”
“No, you don’t.” Frank shook his head. It was the super-trusting people like Sam, who ended up being exploited. Or maybe it was Frank that was going to be exploited. Who knew what those Mormons were really up to?
Sam said, “I know that this is about Tony, whom I do not see in this van. Or out in the fields.”
“Tony thinks you’re involved in some kind of racket.”
“The bail-out-your-neighbor racket?”
“The schmoozing ex-cons racket. Like maybe you’re trying to make contacts. Like maybe you’ve got some plan.”
Sam still looked confused.
“Like you’re running a con, like the cookie man business is all a front.”
“A cookie con?” he asked. Half of his face turned up in one of those bemused oh-this-is-rich smiles.
“Hey,” Frank said, “you’d be surprised at the originality I met in prison.”
“A cookie con,” Sam said again. The hilarity was bubbling up in him. He scrunched up his eyes and started to shake with a dry laugh. A moment later the van filled with a full-bodied clean-cut chubby mirth.
“It’s not that funny.”
Sam wiped a tear from his eye. Then he started up again.
“Watch the road.” Frank shook his head. “What did you do? OD on vitamin B?”
They came to the turnoff where Frank had banked the inside of the corner, but instead of turning to go to the Goroza’s marshmallow roast, they’d keep going straight.
Sam pitched his voice low. “We’re taking over the sprinkles trade. Gonna clean house. You in or not, Homie?”
“Laugh it up. You’ve got to admit it’s odd.”
“Helping a friend isn’t odd.”
“I’m not a friend. I’m an acquaintance. And it
is
odd. Especially when considering my former status.”
Sam let the last bit of mirth run its course, then got control of himself. “Dude, you called me. I didn’t call you.”
“That’s the point.”
“Frank, you keep forgetting I’m a fraud dog. I talk to a lot of people. I hear a lot of truth. I hear a lot of lies. I don’t have a badge that says Special Agent Cartwright, but I’m getting pretty good at sniffing out the BS.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And my manure meter says you’re like a three on a scale of ten. A little bit of a mess, but an honest one.”
“So says the cookie man.”
“Many people fear the cookie man.”
Frank looked him up and down. Mr. chubby good-luck charm. “Right.”
“It’s true,” he shrugged. “I’m like the Dirty Harry of accounting. And now you’re going to tell me what’s going on. And you’re not going to feed me some line like you did your sister.”
“Oh?”
“Do not anger the cookie man,” Sam said.
Sam had saved his frying bacon twice now. And there really wasn’t any reason not to brief him, so Frank told him everything that had happened from the time he ran across the field to the truck stop to the moment Pinto buzzed by in the plane. By this time the Goroza’s house was a couple miles behind them. The blaze had been joined by the flashing lights of two cop cars. About a mile out, a fire truck was also making its way to the house.
When Frank finished, Sam shook his head. “You’ve gotten yourself involved with some real pieces of work.”
“I might use different adjectives.”
“That little girl is nine years old?”
“Best guess. She might be younger. Trauma like she’s going through tends to age you.”
“
Nine years old
,” Sam repeated and narrowed his eyes. “My oldest daughter is nine years old.” His face turned hard. It appeared the Cookie Man was now officially in the Dirty Harry mode.
They followed the road into a dale, the tires rumbling over the gravel. Then the blue light on Sam’s phone blinked, indicating he had a call. Sam said. “You find them?”
A beat passed.
“Roger that,” he said and turned to Frank. “We’re going to turn up here. The girls are hiding behind some shed at the corner of a field.”
Frank looked at Sam. He said, “Thanks for coming after me. I owe you.”
Sam took on a fake mafia Godfather accent. “One a deez a days, and that day may a never come, we’re gonna aska you to do a service. Until then, accept this as a gift.” Then his face turned hard again.
“Ha,” Frank said. “I knew it was a racket.”
Sam did not smile.
Frank thought, indebted to the Mormon mafia. It could be worse. What favor could they possibly ask?
* * *
Sam drove them down a long road between two fields of sugar beets. A shed stood in one field a little distance from the dirt road.
Frank said, “Don’t let them see us just yet.”
Sam slowed the van and stopped before they came alongside the shed. He said, “We’re not taking these kids anywhere.”
“No.”
“You’re not trying to capture the woman?”
“We’re just going to talk,” Frank said. “Right now I’m operating on low information. I might as well have none, and that is no way to conduct an operation. We need to figure out what’s going on.”
Sam nodded then the two of them got out and walked forward of the van. The leaves of sugar beets in the field and surrounding the shed were probably knee-high; the late morning wind had picked up and was blowing through the greens, rippling the whole field. Frank and Sam came parallel with the shed in the field and looked down its side.
In its shade, squatting among the beet leaves so their heads looked like so many cabbages, were the children.
They saw Frank, saw Sam. Their eyes were alert and full of apprehension. Frank waved at them. They did not wave back. They didn’t move. He looked around for Carmen and didn’t see her.
Beyond the children in the distance, the smoke from the burning house still rose in a black pillar into the sky. Down around the house, the lights of the emergency vehicles flashed.
“Slaves,” Sam said and shook his head. “This is unreal. Who does this?”
Frank climbed over the low barbed-wire fence, found a row, and limp-walked along it into the thick field of beets. He leg ached the whole way.
Sam came behind. “It’s okay,” he called out. “We’re going to help.”
When they were about twenty-five yards out, the oldest girl whispered something to the others, and they rose like they were going to bolt. The snow machine Carmen had been driving wasn’t anywhere to be seen. “We’re going to get you out of here,” Frank called to them.
“We’ve got our own people.”
Frank turned. Carmen stood just inside the fence. Where had she come from?
“You should leave,” she said.
“We’re not leaving you here,” Frank said.
Carmen shouted something in Spanish at the girls, and they began to move out into the field away from Frank.
“We don’t need your help,” Carmen said.
“I need yours,” he said. “They took Tony.”
She stopped. He saw her run the calculations in her mind. Saw her come to the wrong conclusion.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want you as a bargaining chip.”
“Corre!” she shouted. Run!
“Stop!” Frank said, but Carmen was already high-tailing it back to the road. The girls ran into the field, away from him and Sam.
Frank took off after Carmen through the beets in a lame lope, the leaves dragging on his boots, his gimpy leg hurting with every stride, his ribs burning.
“The woman or the children?” Sam asked.
“The woman,” Frank said.
Sam began to run after him.
Carmen was fast. She flew back down the little bit of row, climbed over the fence, then ran up onto the road.
Frank hustled down the row next to the one she’d been on. He finally reached the fence, climbed over, and took off after her. He poured on as much speed as he could, his feet crunching the grit on the road, but it wasn’t going to be enough. She turned, saw him, and put on some of her own speed and pulled ahead. “Holy smokes, woman,” he called. “I just need to talk.”