Authors: Blush
The car door slammed shut with a resounding crack as he let himself out and went around to the hatch for his duffel bag.
Moments later as he trekked through the desert toward the shack, he forced his thoughts back to the mental grid on which he had always mapped his strategies. At least where the Feds were concerned, he knew what he was up against. His background gave him that advantage. Specialized units would be mobilized like the LAPD Art Bunco Squad and the U. S. Customs & Excise Investigative Unit. A manhunt would be organized and an APB issued, which meant his mug shot, rap sheet, and other vital information would be flashed coast-to-coast on the television news, as well as the vast computer network of law enforcement agencies.
But none of that was the reason he'd headed for the desert. He was playing out a hunch by going to the miner's shack. It was a hellishly risky one, but he had to follow his instincts. They'd failed him five years ago, probably because he'd been in such a rage to catch the killers, he'd nearly annihilated the decoy they'd thrown his way. The game was bloodsport, and he'd made too many errors. He couldn't afford to make any now, and even if he played it expertly,
perfectly,
he could still come out the loser because he'd been forced into a counterplot that was fraught with pitfalls. Normally he would have gone into hiding, but he couldn't do that now. He had to hide in plain sight. This time he had to
be
the decoy.
A chill floated up Jack's arm, prickling the skin. He grew instantly still, aware of another presence in the mining shack. He'd repositioned the cot against the far wall, and he was lying there now, waiting. The door had fallen open, though he hadn't heard a sound, and a silent white form was standing on the threshold. It seemed to have materialized out of the phosphorescence, and Jack couldn't tell if it was human or moonlight. He touched the gun at his side as the brightness slowly skated toward him.
Moonlight could move, but it didn't bleed.
The gun's safety was off, and his trigger finger was poised and ready to fire. The greatest challenge was knowing exactly when. If he miscalculated, it was all over. His plan went up. In the meantime he couldn't do anything to signal the apparition that he was awake and watching. He couldn't even allow the rhythm of his breathing to change. If the thing got suspicious, if it stopped to investigate, he might as well shoot himself.
Come on,
he urged silently as the silvery form approached.
Five more feet and we'll see whether you're a ghost or not.
Jack had been holed up in the shack for three days, seventy-two hours of waiting for this moment. It was all he could do to keep breathing as the thing hesitated near the tarp that lay on the floor. To avoid the tarp it had to move left, which would be the last step it took.
Wood crackled and split. Jack sprang up, gun in hand, as the phantom broke through the loose boards and vanished from sight. The fleshy swish and thump of muscle and bone told him it had hit the bottom of the pit. A snarled obscenity told him it was human.
Jack had stashed a wall lantern and some matches under the cot. Once he had the lantern lit, he left it near the cot and approached the pit from another angle, weapon ready, in case the intruder was armed.
"Christ," he breathed as he saw who it was. Webb Calderon was brushing the loose dirt from his long dun-colored coat, and when he looked up the barrel of Jack's cocked gun, the ice crystals in his winter-gray eyes glittered and froze.
"A deadfall?" he said with a cold smile. "Interesting idea, Jack. I was expecting some kind of ambush, but not this. "
"And I was expecting someone to come after me, but not you. How'd you find me, Calderon?
Why
did you find me?"
"Your wife told me you might be here."
"My wife?"
Rage.
It flared so violently Jack felt as if he were lunging forward, though he hadn't moved. He knew men like Calderon. They baited and switched until they'd tricked you into something stupid. "What the fuck does that mean?"
"I spoke with her, Culhane. I didn't sleep with her... and if I had, I wouldn't have been so careless as to get her pregnant. "
The gun jerked in Jack's grip. He yanked his hand still and took deadly aim, imagining the blood that would gush from Calderon's shattered skull, relishing it.
"I'm not the enemy." Webb stepped back as if to prove that. "I had something your wife wanted, so she gave me something I wanted. Information. It was all very civilized. "
"Killing you quickly is about as civilized as I'm going to get tonight. " Jack imagined squeezing one off and feeling the wild satisfaction of the gun's kick in the back of his neck. He vividly imagined it. And then he did it. He pulled the trigger.
To Calderon's credit he never moved, not even when the bullet dug into the mud wall behind him with a liquid
whommp.
The soft, profane word he uttered sounded more like a prayer of thanks than a curse. "What's the rush, Jack?" he wanted to know. "I came here with news about Gus. You may want to hear it. "
Jack moved in, gripping the gun in both hands. He wanted to be sure he was close enough to blow the bastard's head off if he said the wrong thing. "What about her?"
"She's in trouble."
"What kind of trouble?"
"You're not going to like this, Jack."
The rage was still simmering, and Jack knew it would take very little to push it to flashpoint. For five years it had been the demon driving him, but more often than not, he'd managed to keep it leashed. Now it was going to snap the rein. He could feel it.
He wanted it to.
He wanted the violence. He wanted the blood. He wanted the justice.
"You better hope I like it, Calderon," he warned.
They stared at each other, the two of them, deadlocked.
Jack remained silent and finally Calderon spoke. "She lost the baby... and she's taking it badly."
Jack felt a cold fist in his gut. He nearly dropped to his knees, and then he was swept with a sense of disbelief. "Lost the baby? She just found out she was pregnant. "
"A woman can lose a baby at any time. That's not the point. Apparently Gus wanted this baby badly. She's devastated by the loss. She hasn't been out of her room. She won't see a doctor."
If Jack had had any doubt how much Gus meant to him, he didn't now. His other losses had cut him to ribbons. He'd thought there was nothing left of him alive, but some tiny spark of hope was still there, a starving ember in need of oxygen. The agony he felt told him that.
Calderon kept talking, his voice oddly soothing, yet at the same time, disturbing. "She's not going to make it without you, Jack, " he said. "She's in danger, both she and Bridget are, but they don't know it. "
The scars on Jack's body burned, as if he'd just been shot, just that second, as if the wounds were bleeding. "What kind of danger?"
The art dealer lifted his head. "I've said all I can."
"You sick bastard!"
"Pull the trigger if you think that will help anything. Go ahead, all you can do is kill me." The cold smile surfaced again, turning Calderon's eyes to icy pools. "It wouldn't be anything new. "
Jack had no idea what the man was talking about. He could hardly believe the pain that had gripped him.
She'd lost the baby? Christ, he wanted to tear the place apart. He wanted to drop to his knees and sob.
The impulse that shook through him was as powerful as anything he'd ever felt. He had to get the hell out of the shack and go to her. He had to help her get through this.
He could take Calderon's car. Leave the bastard in the pit for snake food, and
go.
But something was holding him back. It wasn't that easy, he realized. Beneath the pain, he sensed the desperation again, felt it rising up like a flood. This could be a trap and Gus could be the bait. Calderon might be setting him up for whoever was waiting for him back at the Featherstone mansion.
"Why are you telling me this?" he asked the art dealer. "What's in it for you?"
"Let's just say I have a stake in the outcome and leave it at that."
Jack hesitated, wanting to voice the questions he'd been waiting five years to ask.
Were you the one behind the theft of the Van Gogh? Did you have my child kidnapped and brutally murdered? Were you the monster, Calderon? Are you still?
Rage flared, a cauterizing white laser. Jack could feel it burning through his heart and out his eyes, etching the questions in flames on the other man's soul.
Calderon went quiet, but his eyes were piercingly focused.
There was a moment, a connection, and though Jack didn't believe in such things, had ceased to believe in anything years ago, his breath stung in his nostrils. He felt as if he knew Webb Calderon from somewhere, as if they'd shared something. Christ, he did know this man. He
was
this man. He also knew that Calderon had given him an answer, but the meaning wasn't available to him.
"We humans do what we have to," Calderon said. "The rest we leave to the gods. Go do what you have to do, Jack, " he urged. "It will eat you alive if you don't. "
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
"I'm talking about you, a man who lost everything. Energy lives only to destroy itself. That's its sole purpose, and you're overflowing with it.
Virtu spirituale.
Use the energy. Don't let it destroy you. "
Jack found it painful to breathe. "What do you know about the theft of the Van Gogh still life? The one that was stolen from the warehouse vault in El Segundo five years ago?
What do you know about it, Calderon?"
Webb shook his head. "Nothing that will help you now. You couldn't save Maggie, but you can save Gus. Go to her. Save your wife, Jack. Save yourself."
"Calderon!"
"You'll have to kill me. I've told you everything I can."
"You fucking bastard!"
"Pull the trigger," he challenged. "Blow my head off. Do it! I'd welcome it." Jack stepped away from the pit. "If you're lying—" The art dealer cut him off. "If I'm sending you into a trap, the odds are you won't come out alive. And even if you beat the odds, don't bother making the trip back. I won't be here. "
Jack took Webb Calderon's car and sped south on highway 395, heading back to Los Angeles, barely aware of what he was doing or where he was going until he hit the sinuous curves of the 14 freeway and began to ascend into the hills of the Angeles National Forest. His emotions had been locked up in solitary for so long there were times when he couldn't remember what it was like to feel anything but a kind of deadened self-hatred, and even that barely felt real. He was the man without a heart who carved hearts on trees.
Only now he was a man with so much pain he couldn't breathe without feeling it. Emotion made you sloppy? He wanted to laugh. The thundering claw-hammer in his chest had taken over his will. It was ripping his heart from its bearings. It was taking him home and to hell with the consequences, to hell with anything but getting to Gus.
Calderon's black Jaguar XJS clung to the road as Jack roared through the eerie hills, blue with moonlight. The curves rushed at him at ninety miles an hour, and the image that exploded in his mind was an incendiary car crash, a woman dead, and a baby murdered.
He began to shake and his hands closed on the wheel.
Emotion made you sloppy. Emotion killed.
He couldn't do this. He had to stop. He had to think it through.
He had no idea how long he sat parked on the shoulder of an isolated access road, contemplating his next step, the one that would plunge him off the cliff. It felt like hours. It felt like days he was so cold. Something had locked off inside him, some instinct that was so fundamentally indoctrinated in guerrilla survival, nothing could block it. The risk in going after Gus was incalculable. He'd already realized that, but it wasn't a question of his own safety. It wasn't about redemption, either. There was so little left of him to save it was laughable.
This was about lost hope and shattered lives. It was his chance to give meaning to mindless destruction and make the tragedies count for something. He'd been waiting five long years, his whole life it seemed, and now he was about to forfeit everything on a reckless attempt to rescue a woman who'd wanted him dead from the first moment she saw him and a little girl he barely knew. The fact that the rescue attempt was almost surely a setup didn't concern him nearly as much as the possibility that Gus was in on it. Enveloped in the strange blue glow of the moon, he had even begun to question her claim of pregnancy. What a perfect way to ensnare him. What a sublime trap.
He glanced into the rearview mirror, saw the cold heat burning in his eyes. Was she capable of betraying him that way? He didn't know. He didn't want to know, but he wasn't sure he had a choice. Gus was his wife, Bridget the child of her heart. They were virtual strangers to him compared to the memories he carried, but both had become a part of his life, and undeniably, his heart....
The first golden light of dawn was coming over the hills when he made his decision. He keyed the XJS to life, pulled it around, and floored the gas pedal, leaving a flying wake of sand and dirt behind him. It took him another forty minutes to get back to the Featherstone estate, and when he did, he spotted the stakeout car immediately.
He had to assume the back driveway that led to the guest cottages was under surveillance as well, so he put the luxury car to the test on a rugged horse trail that took him behind the property. He abandoned the Jaguar in a dry creek bed, hoping it wasn't one of the riding paths Lily normally took, and headed for the house on foot. He'd already accessed and disabled the external security with his software, and he'd assembled the equipment he would need once he got inside the mansion. The one trick that was beyond even The Magician was invisibility. Somehow he had to get into the house unseen. Fortunately, he had a distraction planned.
Chapter 27
The back stairway took him up to the third floor and Gus's bedroom. He'd half expected someone to be watching her room, but the hallway was deserted, and what he saw when he eased the door open was a magnificently flounced canopy bed and a silent, supine form, covered only by a sheet.