Forbidden (Southern Comfort) (35 page)

“
What?
Damn, that is not good news.”

“Tell me about it.”  Clay watched the computer die, Kim giving up CPR on a string of curses.  And Maureen, pacing a hole in the Oriental rug, stopped and gaped at him in horror.  “We’re dealing with a cool, experienced offender.  And since there’s been no demand for ransom, you know what’s left.”

“Oh God.”

“If you have His ear, you might want to bend it.  But otherwise, give me everything you have.  I don’t think I need to tell you that time is the enemy.”

“Okay.  The parking garage came up empty because their surveillance camera apparently malfunctioned this morning, and the slacker who was working the gate forgot to report it.  In the better news department, there’s a bank across the street, and we have a very
distant
and
grainy
photo of the suspected get-away vehicle, which, after our imaging guru did his hocus pocus, appears to be a dark-colored pickup truck.  Maybe blue, maybe green – it doesn’t look to be totally one solid color.  Like it has some rusted parts, or maybe some spots of primer.  Unfortunately that’s the best we can do with black and white.”

“Do I dare hope that any part of the license plate might have been visible?”

“The guru’s still working on it.  But at least the truck itself is pretty distinct.”

“In what way?”  Kim and Maureen were both watching him now.  Apparently the words
man
and
experienced offender
had caught their attention.  Yes ladies, this situation was even shittier than they’d previously imagined.

“Well, it’s one of those old-fashioned Ford pickups.  You know the kind that you see at classic car shows after people’ve restored them?”

Something inside Clay clicked.  And his mind began reeling.  “Kathleen, tell your guru we need that license plate number
now.”

JR
caught the movement out of the corner of his eye. 

He was in the process of changing the sheets because the girl had soiled them during the night, and it wouldn’t do to have his prize virgin delivered covered in her own vomit and urine.  Technically, he guessed he should be thankful that she hadn’t asphyxiated while she was drugged. But with Billy Wayne out of the picture it was simply a chance he’d been forced to take.

He’d taken a lot of chances lately, but look how they’d paid off.

The girl huddled near the window,
dressed in the clothes she’d been wearing when Billy Wayne abducted her, handcuffed to the old radiator. It was difficult to say whether her hollow, half-there look was due to the GHB or the situation.  He’d seen it before in the girls they’d taken, but usually not until after they made the video with Billy Wayne.

This one didn’t know how lucky she was to have avoided that particular fate.

Of course, there was no guarantee that she was headed to anything better.  In fact, it could very well be worse. 

Not that it really mattered.

He was just the broker.  What happened to the commodity after he’d provided it wasn’t up to him.

As he looked at the girl, and at the unconscious boy lying next to her, he saw the flash of tan outside of the window. 

Cautiously approaching from the side, he moved one slat of the blinds.

“What the hell?” Outside the house, about to go snooping in the barn, was that stupid, pretty-boy deputy.  The one who’d used his fancy art skills to draw the composite of Billy Wayne.  As if he hadn’t already been a big enough pain in the ass, he was about to discover the vehicles. 

JR leaned close to the girl.  “If you so much as breathe the wrong way, I’ll blow your pretty little head off.”  He tipped her chin with the barrel of the pistol.  “Understand?”

Her brown eyes, still hazy with the drug, widened into pools of terror.  No doubt she recalled, vividly, what had happened to Billy Wayne.

JR eased up and unlocked the window.  It was a little farther shot than he would have liked, but he really had no choice.  He had to take the deputy out before he could radio in to the station.  And since it was almost certain that others knew he was here, they’d come looking for him after a bit.

Which meant he would have to move quickly.

Releasing the safety on his nine mil, he aimed for the deputy’s chest.  One shot to take the man down and another to finish him off.

He’d have to hide the body.  And get rid of the car.

Then he remembered the old fishing hole down the road, and thought
two
birds
with
one
stone
.  Just lock the deputy’s body in his trunk, and let him and his cruiser commune with the fishes.

JR
smiled as he squeezed the trigger.

Laughed as the deputy went down.

And just because he was having so much fun, fired off two more rounds.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CLAY
couldn’t simply stand around with his head up his ass, waiting for something to happen.  Despite the fact that Kathleen’s computer guy couldn’t yet offer anything conclusive, he had a hunch that he’d seen that truck before. 

And that yet again, he’d been only a matter of feet from Max’s abductor.

Just let him near the guy once more.  The third time would definitely be a charm.

“Call Josh Harding,” he told Kim after he’d gotten off the phone with Kathleen.  “Tell him to drop what he’s doing, and go over to the UPS store on Main Street.  We need to know the identity of that man I almost hit yesterday morning, ASAP.  The vehicle used to abduct Max was a classic Ford pickup, circa 1940’s, with rust deterioration and two-tone paint.”

“Well crap,” Kim said, even as she flipped her phone open and dialed.  “You think this has something to do with that man? What are the chances?  I mean, that is either one hell of a weird coincidence, or this guy’s carried road rage to a whole new level.”

“No,” Clay said as she waited for Harding to answer.  “There’s a bigger picture here that we’re missing.  This is just one pine out of the forest, and I think we need to step back and try to bring the whole thing into view.”  But the hell of it was that he was too damn close to the case to do anything other than stare blankly at the tree in front of him.

“Harding’s not answering,” she told Clay after a moment, looking up from her position behind Tate’s desk.  “He was going out to canvass one of the quadrants near the Collier crime scene, and he might be tangled up in that.  I’ll try Sheriff Callahan and see if he can send someone else.”

From across the room, Maureen held up her cell phone and waggled it back and forth.  “Do you want me to see if I have any luck getting hold of
Aunt Maggie?  She’s bound to remember the woman’s name.”

“Sure.  That’d be great.”  Although he wasn’t sure how much it would help.  Obviously, the woman’s name was a pseudonym.  But at least it gave Tate’s cousin something positive to do, so that she didn’t just stand around feeling useless.

Like he was doing right now.

He walked over and looked out the window, finding it entirely too sunny and blue-sky gorgeous to suit how he felt inside.  The cheerful array of rainbow colors decorating the buildings across the street made him want to scream.

“Callahan’s down in Beaufort,” Kim informed him after she concluded her brief conversation. “Wrapping up some of the loose ends from the William Wayne murder.  Deputy Jones is busy tracking down some of the records for the offenders that came up as possible matches for that partial print, and the other deputies are otherwise engaged.  Apparently, even the dispatcher called in sick.  We want to talk to the lady at the UPS Store, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.  Did she strike you as the kind of woman who’d be willing to dole out that information over the phone?”

“As long as she can call ten friends and tell them all about it, she’ll tell us anything we want to know.”

“All hail the small town gossip.”

Clay got the store’s number from information, and tried to remember the woman’s name as it connected.  Something with a “J”, he thought.  Like Jenny or Jane or…

“Julie?” It rolled off his tongue when she answered, scoring, no doubt, big brownie points for him.  “This is Special Agent Clay Copeland, with the FBI.  I spoke with you the other day? That’s right.”  He rolled his eyes at Kim.  “The profiler.”

He went through the whole little chit-chat routine, sensing that this woman would respond better to honey than to vinegar, although he had to strain the meaningless pleasantries through his teeth.  Then he got around to the point of the conversation, asking about the
dark-haired man and his truck.

“Rob Johns, you say?”  He gestured for Kim to grab a piece of paper and write it down.  “No, he’s not in any trouble,” yet, “but we think he might have some information that we need.  I don’t guess you’d happen to have his address?”

He waited a beat while she answered.  “No, I understand all about your privacy policy regarding customers, and I certainly wouldn’t ask you to violate it.”  And he couldn’t demand it, without the proper court order.  “But listen, Julie, just in case Rob comes in, I need you to do me a favor.  Don’t say anything about our conversation to him, but give me a call at this number.”

He looked over at Kim, who was already on her own phone with the local RA.  Hopefully, within a few minutes they’d know everything there was to know about Rob Johns.  

Snapping his phone shut, he started to walk away from the window, but something under the desk caught his eye and stopped him cold.

He bent down, pulled it out, in all its ugly glory.

And very nearly wept over a stupid purple bear.

IT
was the vibrations on his hip that woke Josh up.

Actually, the vibrations were technically
under
his hip, as he was lying face down in the dirt.  The hard rectangle that was his phone dug deep into his flesh, and in reality should have been uncomfortable.  But given the fact that both his shoulder and thigh were on fire, he figured the cell phone problem was pretty minor.

And when he said
on fire,
he meant ON FIRE.  Like someone had gored him with a poker dipped in molten lead.

“
Ugh.”
  Even his eyelids hurt. 
Way
too much for him to attempt to pry them open.  But
shit,
something was very wrong with this picture, and he knew he had to check things out.

Mustering every bit of energy, Josh willed himself to ignore the pain, concentrating on the facial muscles involved in operating his eyelids.  He twitched and pulled and got the left one open a crack, but the right remained caked together. 

What exactly had he done?  Bathed in honey and fallen into a mound of fire ants?

No. 
Shit. 
This was far worse than that.  Maybe he’d crashed his car.

He tried, really tried, to remember where he was and what he was doing.  And to facilitate that goal, he needed to get his face out of the dirt.

He lifted his head – very slightly – and spat the dust away from his lips, but when he tried to turn it the right side nearly exploded.

“Ah,
hell.” 
He dropped his face again, because in the grand scheme of things he figured dirt-eating amnesia was better than exploding. Then stuck his tongue out, very tentatively, and tasted the stickiness on the right side of his face. 

Which tasted nothing at all like honey, but an awful lot like blood.

His head ached, his leg throbbed, his shoulder redefined pain. And he’d definitely just established that he was bleeding.  Profusely.  Like a stuck pig.

Or more specifically, like someone who’d just been shot.

Ah,
hell,
he thought again, because it hurt too much to say it.  And because he was now absolutely, positively certain that was what had happened.

Apparently, the saggy front porch had been the least of his worries.

The fact that he’d been shot meant he needed to be able to move his arm, so that he could both radio in for backup and reach his sidearm.

Of course the real
ah, hell
moment here was that his arm was attached to his shoulder, which was quickly progressing from hell’s seventh to eighth level. 
Damn,
it hurt.  His hot poker analogy hadn’t been far off, because he’d definitely been pumped full of molten lead.

Prying his right eyelid open through sheer force of will, he realized the sticky substance caking it was blood, and came to the equally unsettling conclusion that he’d been shot in the head.  Or rather,
grazed,
more than likely.  He’d been grazed by a damn bullet. 

After, of course, two others had torn through his shoulder and leg.

And because he was still bleeding profusely and was at serious risk of dying in the dirt, he knew that he had to make his arm work without help from his shoulder.