Disembodied Bones (43 page)

Leonie remembered exactly what it was that
had been bothering her. She knew exactly who the anonymous person
was.

Then he was standing in the open attic door
with an anticipatory smile on his face. She heard a slight noise
and turned her head, but she wasn’t surprised to find him there.
What did astonish her was that he held a gun in his hand. However,
it wasn’t a normal gun. It was the same kind of weapon that game
keepers used to tranquilize large animals. He pointed at her and
she heard a faint hissing noise and then there was pain in her
thigh. She looked down and there was a dart sticking into her leg
with a fuzzy red flight on its end.

“Oh,
merde
,” Leonie said, just before
the edges of her world began to darken beyond belief.

They can be harbored, but few hold water.

You can nurse them, but only by holding them against
someone else.

You can carry them, but not with your arms.

You can bury them, but not in the earth.

What are they?

They are grudges.

Sunday, July 28th

I cut through evil

Like a double-edged sword,

And chaos flees at my approach.

Balance I single-handed upraise,

Through battles fought with heart and mind,

Instead of with my gaze.

What am I?

Gideon Lily was sick of his jail cell.
Miserably sick didn’t even scratch the tip of the proverbial
iceberg. He almost would have rather been back in the cell with
Elliot of the tattooed body. At least a fight with another inmate
would have been preferable to repetitive and graphic mental images
of what was happening to Leonie and Keefe.

He needed to be out of this cell. Gideon
didn’t know if he could find Leonie, but he did know that he had a
better chance of it than law enforcement officers who didn’t even
believe that she was missing, much less kidnapped. After all, to
them Gideon was the bad guy.

Time was his enemy. Time was a bigger enemy
than the nameless man who had stolen Keefe and taken Leonie from
inside Gideon’s barn. The more time that passed meant that events
were slipping out of Gideon’s control.

This shadow man would eventually kill Leonie,
as well as Keefe. Keefe was merely an ends to a mean. It was Leonie
he desired. Leonie was who he hated with all of his being. Leonie
was the one he blamed from the deepest soulless pit that motivated
his actions.

But Gideon had a line on him. He had an
analyst’s mind and he went over what he knew with an analyst’s
precision.
What do I know about him? He’s ruthless. He wants
Leonie. He’s got Leonie. He wants both of us to suffer. The way he
suffered? Or worse than he suffered? But there’s more. He has
access to resources. He’s got bucks to pad his way. If he’s
responsible for getting me down here to begin with, then he either
bought the Craftsman house and waited for me to bite, or he was
behind suggesting the move to Buffalo Creek. The ambiguous
corporation or my email buddy. Or maybe both.

Gideon digested that with some bitterness. In
his line of business he knew many people over the United States and
even over the world. He had a hacker’s bible of people who could be
contacted on the black market. These were wizards, people at the
top of their games, the savviest of computer experts. They could
hack and crack programs as if they had been born doing it. And
there were dozens who knew Gideon. Perhaps they didn’t know him
personally, but through the game. Some of them he would never meet
face to face. They would remain intelligent individuals with
carefully chosen nicknames, whose meanings sometimes were only
clear to those in the biz. Kingpin X, Nolo Solo, Backdoor Fred,
Bagmaster, DV8, and SooddoNym were all on his list.

Fully fifty of them could have been capable
of it. Twenty of them could have effortlessly hacked his machines.
Maybe ten of them were susceptible to bribes. After all, they would
only know is that it was suggested that he move to this area. They
would only know that Gideon Lily was to be encouraged to come to
Buffalo Creek. They didn’t even have to know why and He wouldn’t
have told them because they wouldn’t help if they had known the
real reason, even for the big money. However, Buffalo Creek was
close to the Dallas industrial complex. A few other wizards had
settled in the area. It was true. But the metroplex was huge. They
could have a convention at Texas Stadium if they felt like it, and
they would make a dent in the seating.

But hacks, even susceptible ones, wouldn’t
roll over on a bud without a generous amount to grease the skids.
Mid-six figures wouldn’t be out of the question. If the word got
out, their world would be electronic toast. They’d be perceived
like squealers in prison. There was hacker heaven and for people
like that, hacker hell. Shunning and worse. Their equipment and
sites would be hit hard and hacks would do it for free. Such
humiliating attacks would be publicized in the hacking world and
the wizard would be a bloody spot on a lonely highway. They
wouldn’t be able to make a living and they would lose all position
and power. Real hacker hell.

That narrowed down the field to less than
five, five who would take the risk for some money. Possibly more
would know about the offer. It depended on exactly how frigid he
really was. If someone had been actively “phishing” for Gideon in
the past year or two, it would be old news. Phishing was a hacker
term for searching for information on the internet about someone.
Someone was always phishing for hackers, and especially security
consultants.

There would be electronic records and there
would be long memories from the hacks. Everyone knew that Gideon
played fair online. If he was smarter than the offender then that
was oh well, too bad. He’d get them and he’d burn them, but they
had a fair chance of getting away. However, his area of expertise
focused on prevention rather than apprehension. It was
business.

This wasn’t business. This was human lives.
This was going to be murder, cold-blooded murder in the name of
vengeance.

Leonie’s features appeared in his mind. Her
delicate cheekbones emphasized the heart shape of her face. Her
porcelain skin was as pale as bone china. Her lips were the color
of ripened berries. Her hair was as silky as deepest night, falling
gracefully over her shoulders so that he wanted to put his hands in
it and touch it.

Gideon’s face crumpled.
God, I’m a dork,
infatuated with a woman I barely know. I can hear her thoughts but
I don’t know shit about her
. He had to free himself. Soon.

He loudly called for the guard. This time the
guard meandered down to the disabled almost immediately. A tall
skinny man named Malone; he cast a skeptical glance at Gideon and
raised one eyebrow mockingly. “Now what?”

“I want to confess,” said Gideon positively.
“Right now.”

Malone’s face appeared dubious for a moment,
and then he brightened, having determined that Gideon was not being
facetious. “Well, great. I’ll call the prosecutor and the sheriff.
They can be down here in a jif.” He hesitated. “Tell you what. I’ll
just put you in the conference room so you can be waiting for
them.” He directed Gideon to put his hands through the specially
made slot for the hands. Then he handcuffed him on the outside of
the white grid. Then he went through the procedure of safely
transferring a prisoner. The waist shackles were put on as were the
ankle shackles.

Gideon didn’t protest. As a matter of fact,
he did exactly what Malone told him to do. The last step was to
release the front handcuffs and reattach the wrists to the waist
shackles. Then Malone held a hand on Gideon’s shoulder as he
shuffled his way down the hall into the main area where there were
interrogation rooms. It was a relatively small building with two
wings on each side. One wing was the jail. The other was offices.
In the middle were reception, a huge public conference room, and
several public offices. He was led by several empty offices and
since it was Sunday there weren’t very many people around.

Malone led him into one of the interrogation
rooms, connected the ankle shackles to a hook in the floor that
reminded Gideon of another hook in the floor and left without
comment.

Inside the small room was a two way mirror,
padded walls, a table that was bolted to the floor and two chairs
that weren’t bolted to the floor. In short, there was apparently
nothing someone could use to threaten another person or to hasten
an escape. Gideon looked around the room with all of the alacrity
of a child going to Disney World.

This is better than the cell
, he
thought. Lots better.
I can actually get out of here
.

When the prosecutor showed up a half hour
later, he was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt that said “Golf
Daddy.” Gideon studied the shirt with amusement. The prosecutor was
a man named Vic Miller. In his fifties, he had more than a passing
resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy. His face was red with
exposure to the sun and Gideon was certain the guy had forgotten to
apply his sunscreen. Miller smoothed his shirt over his protruding
belly and stared intently at Gideon.

“Sergeant Malone says that you want to talk
with us,” said Miller. There was a little smile on his face,
expectant and pleased to wrap up something of this magnitude. “You
haven’t gotten a lawyer yet, so I will have to advise you of your
rights again.” He ticked some items off on his hands. “We’ll wait
for the sheriff to come. We’ll need a video recorder. I’ll just pop
into the other room and get that going. Can I get you anything to
drink?”

Gideon smiled broadly. “Diet coke.”

An hour later, Gideon had finished the diet
coke and was telling an elaborate story about how he had dragged
Olga Rojas off the street in broad daylight. “It was behind the
Gingerbread House,” he said. “Wait, maybe it was over by the
courthouse. I think there was a group of Japanese tourists. Taking
pictures. One probably has digital of the whole thing. I was
wearing a purple shirt with Sponge Bob on it. Then again, I think
it was the Power Puff Girls shirt I had on. I had Scarface Al
watching on the corner and Jack the Ripper in the getaway car.”

Miller ran pudgy fingers over the table top.
“So what did you do then?”

“Duct taped her. Did her ankles, wrists. I
thought about leaving her in back of the store so they could find
her more quickly but I decided the park would be better. Ol’
Scarface wanted to trade her to the Mexicans for Tijuana Gold, but
I stood firm.”

This time Miller took it in and groaned
audibly. Initially, he had been taking notes on a yellow legal pad
with a plain Bic, but he had put it down almost thirty minutes
before. “And I don’t suppose you want to tell me about Keefe?”

“Keefe’s on a space ship with Elvis and Jim
Morrison,” Gideon said confidently. “It was the safest place for
him. But I think Elvis might give him too many peanut butter and
banana sandwiches.” His voice lowered conspiratorially. “The king
still has a big weight issue.”

The door opened and Scott Haskell entered,
all six foot five inches of him, with patches of red discoloring
his cheeks. Gideon guessed accurately that he had been listening
from the room behind the two way mirror and he was not happy. “Mr.
Lily,” Scott said. “Are you just amusing yourself at our
expense?”

“At my expense, too,” Gideon said, grinning.
“It would have taken all day with your attorney here,” he rattled
his waist shackles in Miller’s direction, “before he caught
on.”

“Did you hear that noise, Mr. Lily?” Scott
asked.

Gideon said, “Nope. Just the shackles.”

“That was the sound of my eyes rolling back
in my head,” Scott said frankly. “When they hit the back of my
skull they rebounded.”

Miller got up and his face was the color of a
fully ripened tomato. He announced in a prim voice, “I’m leaving.
Maybe you’ll give us a call when you’re more serious, Mr. Lily.
After all, as far as we know you haven’t committed murder in Texas
yet. You could deal for life in prison without parole. I hear death
row is getting a lot of empty slots lately. They’ve been putting
down a whole lot of murderers. Anyway, Louisiana is hankering to
get you over there for your nephew’s kidnapping. Unless of course
the feds want to come and stick their two cents in there, since you
probably brought the kid across state lines.”

“Well, what a mouthful,” Gideon said. “God
damn, I bet you say that to every single fella that passes through
here. And Mr. Miller?”

“Yes?” Miller said before he left the
room.

“Sun block, dude. Really man. Your skin is
the same color as a Radio Flyer wagon.”

Miller slammed the door on the way out.

Scott stared at Gideon. “Happy now?”

“My day has been made,” he said. “Bet you
didn’t even go to my place or Leonie’s.”

“Sure I did. Didn’t find shit.” Scott’s
shoulders shrugged.

Gideon took a deep breath. That was not what
he expected. But the guy was smart. He covered his ass, and he
hadn’t failed to do it after taking Leonie. He didn’t want anything
to lead right up to his doorstep.

“So you in touch with her now?” Scott asked
cheerfully. He rested one hand on the table and leaned over to look
at Gideon’s face.

“That bastard’s using something on her,”
Gideon said candidly. “Something that gives her headaches and
affects the ways she’s thinking. But she’s still alive. So is
Keefe.” His face became inanimate and Scott perked up as he watched
his prisoner. “Her fingers were cut, I think. She’s been shot in
the shoulder with something else. She seems so…far away.”

Scott stared at Gideon. For a moment the
older man could almost believe it. Gideon seemed so serious in that
space of time, as if something dreadful would happen if Scott
didn’t believe him. Almost. It was very weird. “Oh my God,” Scott
proclaimed loudly. “You’ll say anything. You lining up an insanity
plea, buddy-boy?”