Hellbox (Nameless Detective) (15 page)

“So okay then. My advice is to stop trying to make something sinister out of a simple disappearance and join one of the search teams … two now, by the way, working separate sections east and west of Ridge Hill Road. But if you insist on conducting a private investigation, I won’t try to stop you, only keep it quiet and don’t make waves. Are we clear on that?”

I said, “We’re clear,” and he nodded and waved us out.

The midmorning heat and sun glare smacked me a little as we came outside. That, and my elevated blood pressure brought on a touch of vertigo. I took a couple of faltering steps on the way to the car, had to lean against an old-fashioned lamppost to steady myself.

“You okay?” Runyon asked.

“Just a little woozy. Give me half a minute.”

He knew better than to try to help me. The dizziness passed, and I walked ahead to the car. When we were both inside with the windows rolled down, I said, “The sheriff ’s department isn’t going to be any help, and you know there’s not enough kidnap evidence to bring the FBI into it. It’s up to us.”

“Looks that way.”

“Thirty hours, Jake.”

He knew what I meant. Anybody who has ever worked in law enforcement knows that if an abduction victim isn’t found within seventy-two hours, the odds jump against the person ever being found alive. And Kerry had been missing more than forty hours now.

“More than that, maybe,” he said.

“But not a lot more.”

“Where do you want to start?”

“With Fechaya,” I said. “Where else?”

15

PETE BALFOUR

He had plans now. Oh, baby, did he have plans
now
!

Felt real fine when he got up Wednesday morning, no hangover even though he’d put away pretty near a fifth of Jack Daniel’s yesterday and last night. Slept like a baby. Rarin’ to go, full of piss and vinegar, blood and fire.

Fed Bruno, thought about feeding the woman again, but why bother, just be a waste of time now that he knew what he was gonna do with her, and left the house at seven. Stopped off at the Green Valley Café for a quick breakfast and just grinned and shrugged when fat-ass Jolene threw her mayor look at him. Nothing and nobody could get his goat today or ever again. Then he drove straight to the fairgrounds, got there just as Eladio was opening up the storage unit. The Mex seemed surprised to see him, but he knew better than to say anything. Thing was, meeting the deadline was important now—keep Tarboe and Donaldson off his back. Ought to be able to get all the major repairs done on time if he worked Eladio and the half-wit and himself bitch-hard for ten or eleven hours today and part of tomorrow, until it was time to run his errand in Stockton, then promise them double overtime pay to finish up.

He’d be tired as hell the next couple of days, but not too tired to take care of business. No siree, not with what he had brewing.

Luke Penny’d helped give him the first plan yesterday afternoon. He’d pulled into the Shell station for gas on his way back from Freedom Lanes, and Penny come out of the garage and wandered over, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. Pete Balfour wasn’t the only ugly dude in the valley—Luke was no prize, either, and the slather of grease across his chin hadn’t helped his looks none.

“Hell of a thing about Alice Verriker.”

“Yeah. Hell of a thing.”

“Guess you ain’t the sorriest person around, though. Huh, Pete?”

As mean as he’d felt then, he’d of liked to punch the greasy bastard’s lights out. Or tell him to go fuck himself, like he had that faggot Tarboe. But going off on Tarboe had been a mistake—he’d realized it sitting there in the Freedom bar with Verriker’s voice pounding away inside his head. He couldn’t afford to call any more attention to himself, not if he didn’t want people getting suspicious of him when he finally fixed Verriker.

So he’d swallowed his rage and said, “Me and Ned had our differences, but that don’t mean I’m not sorry for his losses. I feel real sorry for him, you want to know the truth. Real sorry.”

“Sure you do.”

“The truth, Luke. Some of the guys in the Buckhorn last night, they started a collection to help pay for Alice’s funeral and I kicked in more’n my share. Plenty more’n my share.”

Penny didn’t look like he believed it. But then he shrugged and said, “Well, Ned can use the help, that’s for sure.”

“Might want to kick in a few bucks yourself.”

“I’ll do that. Tonight, after work.”

“What I heard, Ned spent the night with the Ramseys, but they don’t have enough room to let him stay on there. Jolene, over at the café, said Jim Jensen might fix him up at his place.”

“That’s old news,” Penny said. “Jensen offered, but Ned said no thanks.”

“That right? How come?”

“Don’t care to be a burden to anybody. He’s pretty tore up, just wants to be alone for a while. So Frank’s brother’s letting him stay in his cabin up at Eagle Rock Lake until he pulls himself together.”

Oh, man, he’d near whooped when he heard that. “Might be best at that. When’s he moving up there?”

“Later today sometime. Joe Ramsey’s going up with him, get him settled.”

Once Balfour was out of the station, he’d smacked the steering wheel and let out the whoop he’d been holding back. That cabin up on the lake … fishing cabin, sat by its lonesome on the east shore. He’d never been there, never been invited, oh hell no not him, but he knew where it was and how to get to it. Verriker and Stivic and Ramsey and some of the others had batted their gums often enough about what a perfect getaway place it was.

Yeah, perfect. They’d never know how perfect.

By the time he got home, he knew just what he was gonna do. Thinking about it made him feel real good for a while. Good enough to let the woman out there in the shed have some food and water. The look on her face when he’d plunked the dog dishes down in front of her and told her to slurp it up the way Bruno did … worth a chuckle all the way back to the house.

But then Mayor Donaldson called up, and for a while he wasn’t feeling good anymore. Just for a while.

Where had he been all day? Why had his cell phone been out of service? Then the miserable old fart started in on him for insulting Tarboe and walking off the job. Said his behavior was inexcusable, said he had a foul mouth and a poor work ethic and no community spirit, whatever the fuck that meant. Said if he didn’t have the fairgrounds work completed by midnight on the third, he wouldn’t be paid the rest of the money due him on the county contract, and he might well have his construction license revoked for malfeasance, besides. Malfeasance. Jesus! Threatened him and ragged on him for three or four minutes until he was furious enough to slam the phone down, hard enough to bust the bugger’s eardrum.

Ramsey and Stivic and the rest of them wanted an asshole mayor, well, they already had one. You couldn’t find a bigger asshole politician in the county than Fred Donaldson. Matter of fact, they didn’t have to go looking for another valley to collect assholes in, because they had this one right here. Donaldson, Tarboe, every one of ’em who got a kick out of making Pete Balfour’s life miserable, they were the real assholes, not him, and they’d taken over and turned the whole valley and everybody else in it brown. Green Valley wasn’t Green Valley anymore, it was Asshole Valley.

Pretty soon the poison had started eating away at him again, and his hate was as big and hot as ever. He’d poured himself a double Jack and followed it quick with another, trying to take himself down from a boil to a simmer. But what the whiskey did, it made everything real clear in his mind, and he’d seen what he should of seen a lot sooner. Seen it clear as looking through a pane of new glass.

Killing Verriker would be sweet, but it wouldn’t change anything. Not one damn thing. The rest would go right on calling him mayor, pretending he was the one with “A for Asshole” tattooed on his forehead. Making a fool out of him, persecuting him, never giving him a minute’s peace.

Well, he wasn’t gonna let that happen. Wouldn’t let them drive him out, neither, with his tail between his legs like a whipped dog. He’d had as much as he could take. It was payback time again.

And that was when the second plan come to him.

Real quick, too, as if it’d been percolating in the back of his mind all along. Well, maybe it had been. Maybe it was what he’d been heading toward from that first night in the Buckhorn, when Verriker and the rest of them turned his life into a living hell.

Seemed pretty far out at first. And scared him some because it was Payback with a capital P, the kind that’d have every cop in the country after him. If he went ahead with it, how was he gonna save his ass afterward? But then the answer to that part of it come to him, too, how he could get away clean, and just where he’d go. The more he thought about it, the less scared and the more excited he got. They hadn’t shown him any mercy, why should he show them any? And the timing … oh, man, the timing couldn’t be more perfect.

So then he’d put in a call to Rosnikov’s legit business number in Stockton. The Russian was there, late as it was, and when Balfour told him what he wanted, not in so many words because you had to be careful on the phone, Rosnikov said he could supply the package by Thursday night, and quoted a whorehouse price. Real cool, that Russian, like they were talking about apples and oranges. Didn’t even ask what he wanted it for. Not that that was any surprise. Rosnikov didn’t care what you did with the black market stuff he sold.

That cemented it for Balfour. He had the cash, with plenty enough left over. He had the time and the place all worked out. He was gonna do it, and no backing out at the last minute. Once his mind was made up, it stayed made up.

Oh, he was gonna raise some hell, all right.

Pure, sweet hell.

16

KERRY

Enough daylight filtered in to let her know it was morning. She’d been awake for some time, lying in the darkness, thinking about Bill out there somewhere, doing everything humanly possible to find her. Faith in him was all she had to hold onto now. There just didn’t seem to be any way for her to get out of here on her own, not that she wasn’t going to keep looking for one. Never give up, never give in. She kept repeating the words to herself, a kind of self-hynoptic chant to maintain calm.

For a long time she waited, expecting Balfour to show up again, praying he wouldn’t. And he didn’t. Outside, the dog barked a couple of times, but they were meaningless sounds. Then she heard the distant noise of an automobile engine starting up. Balfour’s pickup truck? Must be: the engine noise increased once, twice, the way it did when you goosed the throttle.

Kerry waited a while longer, then threw off the filthy canvas and crawled over to the door, used the knob to lift her cramped body upright so she could switch on the lights. The first things she saw when her eyes adjusted were the two dog dishes next to the bench. Disgust tightened her throat again; the memory of the greasy stew made her stomach churn. What an inhuman piece of garbage Pete Balfour was.
Stick your face in the bowls and slurp it right up.
She’d have done that, too, if she’d still been bound, just like a dog. Humiliating enough scooping up the stew with her fingers, all but wiping the dirty dish clean. It had taken an effort of will not to drink all the water, to save about a third. She’d need it today to stave off the dehydrating effects of the heat.

If she lived through today. If Bill didn’t find her, or she didn’t find a way out of here herself before Balfour came back and did whatever he was planning to do to her …

Fear thoughts again. Don’t!

She paced her prison for a time, working some of the painful stiffness out of her legs. Did a series of aerobic exercises to loosen the cramped muscles in the rest of her body. All the while, listening and hearing nothing from outside. Then she went back to the door, bent to peer at the lock.

Bill had taught her some things about locks, even showed her once how to use a set of lock picks. Could this lock be picked? It looked to be a simple deadbolt, not new, with no interior locking lever; you’d need a key to open it from either side. The key slot was small, too small to see through, but if you had the right tools—slender pieces of metal a few inches long—you might be able to manipulate the tumblers and spring the bolt.

Metal. Nails, a coat hanger, even a couple of large paper clips. Was there anything like that in here?

The handles on the gallon cans of paint … they were fairly thin, one of them might work. But that hope died quickly. The handles were firmly attached, and she didn’t have the strength to twist off even one end, nor any kind of tool to pry it loose.

She investigated the cartons next. Emptied each one, shuffling through the contents. Nothing.

The TV set. She moved over to examine it both front and back. Plastic case, inset controls, its electrical cord taped to the back panel. She had no idea what was inside one of these older models other than a picture tube. Dump it on the floor, break it open on the chance there might be some piece she could use? Not until she’d looked everywhere else, and maybe not even then. If she couldn’t get the door open, couldn’t get away, Balfour would see the wreckage when he came back and know she had gotten loose and she’d have lost her one last desperate chance.

She pulled the spread canvas into the middle of the floor and folded it together, then got down on all fours and crawled along the walls and the row of storage lockers, felt along the locked cabinets beneath the bench. No loose nails that had been dropped and forgotten; there wasn’t even a driven nail anywhere that hadn’t been hammered flush to the wood.

On her feet again. The ice chest? The latch handles and plates were tightly fitted. The door opened easily enough, but all it revealed was a smooth-walled emptiness.

The armchair? She felt the brass studs, found one that wiggled a little; she managed to work it free. Damn! Too short. What about the underside, the springs? She tilted the chair up from the back, over onto its arms. Torn cloth covered the inner parts. She ripped it all the way off, coughing from the dust that plumed into her face. Springs, yes, but they were thick, coiled together … useless.