Target (35 page)

A
urelie lay down across the backseat in the Honda.

A parking ticket, flapping behind a windshield wiper, was too much action for her aching head.

She squinted at her cell phone, her thumb hovering over the keypad. If she made the call she wanted to make, she might solve the most dangerous situation she had ever faced. Or she might regret what she'd done for the rest of her life.

Aurelie placed the call.

A
urelie took a last quick look at the paper on which she'd written the address on Haight Street and crushed it into her palm. With the strap of her shoulder bag crisscrossing her body, zipped open to allow easy access to the gun, Aurelie lifted her inconvenient red skirt and rushed up the brick front steps.

Double front doors with stained-glass insets stood slightly open. She stopped and gave one door a slight push.

Yelling voices came from somewhere deep in the house.

Aurelie pulled out the gun and stiffened her wrist against shakiness that attacked her all over.

Following the noise was easy. The place felt empty, like a museum after closing, with exhibits waiting for the next crowd to arrive. The shouting sounded obscene.

She found a ramp leading to the basement. That's where the voices were. Stepping carefully—her sandals weren't ideal stalking shoes—she took deep breaths that didn't calm her down and jammed her right elbow to her side. She could do this. She had to, for Nick. He'd walked right in here, right into what must have become an ambush. Who could know how many people were down there? He'd told her he was following Vic. There was one man with a gun for a start. And unless the bang on her head had knocked her senseless, she had to expect more armed people down there.

And she must take them on—no, that should be take them out, all by herself.

Nick's voice snapped, “Keep your hand out of that bag.”

“Where's your respect?” another man asked. “What would your dear mother say?”

Aurelie gritted her teeth and moved quickly, reached the bottom of the ramp and turned in to a corridor. All the ruckus came from a room at the end. She could see the door was open.

She wiped the gun grip on her skirt, then her palm, and stood tall.

“Put your hands up,” she said loudly, stepping into the doorway and sweeping the gun from side to side. “Not you, Nick. Get over here by me.”

Nick, his gun drawn, stood behind a wheelchair where a gnarled man sat, staring at her—and smiling. His emaciated body looked fragile in the chair, his back grotesquely curved over. Vic, to the right of the man, held out a hand with a big lump of ugly red glass balanced there like a genie's lamp.

“We've got them,” she told Nick. “It's exactly what they deserve. If he—” she nodded at Vic “—had tied me up, I couldn't have gotten out of that truck when I came around. Now look at him. If he wasn't holding that dumb thing, he could have a gun, too. Or did you lose your gun, Vic? Did you call the police, Nick?”

Nick didn't look at all well. And she thought he was really angry.

“Which one are you?” the man in the chair said. “Muriel or Ena?”

She gaped at him, got close enough to see his face clearly and recoiled. “It is him,” she whispered. The face seemed strangely young in comparison with the withered body, and Colin's eyes were still the color of faded green glass.

“Hi, there,” he said. “Sarah or Aurelie, of course. I forgot the new names for a moment.”

“Old people do that sometimes,” she said, barely able to move her mouth.

“Aurelie,” Nick said, “I want you to leave this room and go outside as fast as you can.”

“Why?”

“Because I don't want you here right now.”

Her stomach turned. “You don't want me to watch you kill them?”

“Aurelie.” He piled warning into her name.

“If they put him on trial, he'll suffer more,” she pointed out. “It'll be really ugly for him, take it from me. And Vic's going somewhere not quite lonely enough, too. They don't like his kind of murderer inside.”

“How do you know he killed someone and how did you get here?” Colin asked, not smiling anymore. “Who else knows?”

“Shut up,” she told him. “I've already called the police. I just wanted to see if Nick had, too. Nick, I'll take Colin, you watch Vic.”

Someone very large grabbed her from behind. He held her with an arm around her waist and one hand entirely encircling her neck. “You over there, you will drop the gun,” he said and gave a shake that rattled the ache back into Aurelie's head.

“He's Nick,” Vic said helpfully. “He's trying to kill the boss and me.”

“I thought that might be so,” the rumbling voice behind Aurelie said. “My name is Vasilly. I look after Mr. Cooper. I don't want you to have that gun,
Nick
. If you don't do what I've asked—politely—I will break your friend's neck.”

“Don't listen,” Aurelie said. “He'd need two hands for that.”

Vasilly tightened his hand ever so slightly.

“Let her go,” Nick said. He hovered. She could see him trying to decide what to do. And she could feel the hand, like a band of steel, around her neck.

“This is very good,” Colin said. “I should like them both to suffocate. It'll be appropriate since they missed their first opportunity. Vic, let Vasilly see the ruby. The two of us have talked about it so often.”

“Drop the gun,” Vasilly said, and the steel band grew tighter. He looked at the ruby. “The biggest I have ever seen. Hold it to the light—as best you can, please.”

Vic held up the red lump. Aurelie supposed uncut rubies always looked like that.

She caught Nick's eye, looked at his gun, then remembered what she had in her own hand, the one wrapped tightly around her waist. Everyone seemed to have forgotten or never to have noticed she had a gun.

Without having to move more than her finger, she pulled the trigger. The report vibrated through her body, blasted her ears, and Vasilly released her.

On her knees—she couldn't keep her footing—she stared, horrified, at the big block of a man who lay bleeding. He grasped a fleshy handful at his left side. Blood rushed through his fingers.

Aurelie heard approaching sirens, heard them get louder and louder until they screeched in the street outside.

Vasilly gasped, “I knew I should have gone myself. That is no ruby. That is a fake.”

I
had it good. I had it better than anything's ever been for me. But I've blown it. Even if I get out of here alive, the cops will have done a background check and when they fill her in, Sabine won't forgive me for being a liar.

If I'd told her everything and let her make up her mind, she would have said we could put the past behind us. “Where it belongs,” she'd say. I can hear her voice now.

Help me out here. Don't let me blubber or beg. You don't get anything that way. I should know.

If I puke I'll be living with it inside this bag. I'll choke on it.

Let me out. Please let me out. I've gone straight for years now. I'll never go back. I'll never slip up again. Just don't let him kill me.

 

Ed's guts twisted tight, and if he weren't tied in a chair he'd double up to ease the pain. He needed to distract his thinking, put himself somewhere else.

How long had he been there?

Two days?

When they arrived early in the morning, the day before yesterday, the rain had been falling like it did all the previous night. Yesterday, another day of fighting his bladder between supervised trips to a dirty bathroom, the temperature had gone up. But the night cooled off, like the first one had. Now he felt the sun warming up on the back of his neck again.

When he'd been brought here, and from a distance against a still-dark sky, Ed had thought he was looking at a smokestack and decided the structure they were headed for must be a mill of some kind, but once they got a bit closer he recognized his mistake. The building had been a detention center. It said so on a bleached-out placard hanging from a single anchor on heavy chain-link fencing that still had barbed wire along the top. They drove on parking lights but the old letters showed just the same. The gates sagged open and the tower overlooked the yard and dilapidated prison buildings.

That's where he had been taken, to the tower's upper platform, and where he'd been knocked down and kept down with a foot in the middle of his back while the bearded man secured the bag at Ed's neck. That was before he got taped in the chair.

The view should be something if he didn't have a scratchy hemp bag over his head, and if the sides of the lookout platform weren't so high with him sitting down. The stranger, the swarthy one who dropped him when he was getting into the truck at Buzzard's Wet Bar, had driven him out of town, to the north, to the long building with a lookout tower at one end.

He clung to the hope that a man, who stopped his car the night he went to Buzzard's to check on him after he pulled off the road not far from Place Lafource, would hear Ed was missing and decide to go to the police. The man, who stopped because he thought Ed was dead over the wheel, had talked him into going to Buzzard's for a drink. He had left the tavern at about the same time as Ed, and might have seen him get punched out and stuffed into an old gray Impala with no shine left on the paint. Did the man know Ed's name? He thought about it. Sure he did. He'd given Ed the bearer bond he'd hoped to surprise Sabine with, but Ed couldn't recall the guy saying anything personal. He couldn't even remember what the guy looked like. There had been more, many more drinks than Ed was used to. He couldn't even recall exactly why he'd told the man about the ruby.

Rum and Cokes with tequila shots. Darn it, he'd drunk too much that night. And that man had the ruby. He wouldn't be calling anyone about Ed.

Sweat broke out all over him, soaked his T-shirt and turned the waist of his jeans cold and damp. More than anything, he wished Sabine didn't have to deal with what he was doing. She didn't deserve this. Tears prickled in his eyes. Even if the bond hadn't been taken from him, he wouldn't keep it—if he got a chance to decide.

The guy with the beard had left again hours ago, saying, “I need some tools.”

What kind of tools did he need and why?

Another spasm gripped Ed's belly.

The pain faded and he caught his breath. Then he heard footsteps climbing from the stripped control room at the bottom of the tower, toward the top and Ed.

As the person climbed, he hit the metal steps with something that clanged.

Ed felt the moment when he wasn't alone anymore. The guy brought odors with him, sweat, and oil.

Was he going to set fire to the place? A deep breath didn't slow Ed's heart down. If fire was what the man had decided on, he could set it at the base of the watchtower and the whole thing would go up.

A punch to the side of the head knocked Ed and his chair over. His elbow and forearm, his bony wrist, smacked into the floor. He cried out. With the whole weight of his body, and the chair, pressed on the arm, a sickening snap sounded and he figured the bone in his elbow was wasted.

“Up you come,” the anonymous voice said, and he was swung up until the chair legs connected with a hard base again and Ed screwed up his face against the torment in his elbow.

He sweated harder, barely held back the need to throw up.

A laugh from the guy hurt Ed's brain.

“Just wanted to make sure you're wide awake,” the man said. “You gotta be able to think clearly.”

Ed grimaced and let his eyes close.

“You've been jerking me around,” he was told. “That stone isn't in any gnome-covered radio or tape recorder. There's gotta be a dozen of those things at Lafource. It's taken me two days to get through 'em all, and come up empty. You think that's funny? You think it's funny to send me to a place where there's a bodyguard hanging around so I have to take risks I don't want to take?” He cuffed Ed.

“I don't know,” Ed said, terrified.

“I'm going to be patient and start over at the beginning,” he was told. “It's all about a ruby. Do you like being told stories? I don't care if you do or don't. You've heard it once, now you can hear it again. It's about a big, beautiful, Burmese pigeon's blood ruby. According to what I've been told, it could be the biggest flawless examples of its kind. You know the one I mean?”

Ed shook his head once and a hot ache seared the backs of his eyes.

“Sure you do.”

Ed shook his head again and a fist landed on his breastbone, winded him so bad he couldn't drag in any air. The feeling must be like having a heart attack. He almost laughed. That would be justice if he just up and died on this piece of shit.

“You laughing, sucker?” the man asked. “Why's that? You find it hilarious when you get hurt?”

“No,” Ed managed to say.

“I'm bored with this.” The man dragged something that sounded like nylon across the floor. A zip opened. “Time we finished up and moved on. A little bird told me you know all about the ruby with the dumb name. Yama Dharma, the Vulture Ruby, or some fool thing. The little bird reckoned you took it out of Delia's office and hid it somewhere so you could fence it later. That makes you one stupid man. What were you going to do, walk into a pawnbroker's with it? Yeah, that's what you must have had in mind. Mr. Pawnbroker, see this perfect ruby? Just give me two or three million and it's yours.”

The laugh that followed got higher until it sounded like it belonged to a teenage boy whose voice just broke.

Ed kept quiet.

“Maybe you know all about fencing a beauty like that to the right people. You know what I mean? Collectors. Collectors' agents. It's a complicated world, but a few know all about it and maybe you're one of them.”

“I don't know anything about anything,” Ed said. “I only said the thing about the gnomes 'cause you wouldn't let up. I'm sorry I made it up. I never saw your ruby and I wouldn't know what to do with one if I had it. If you let me go home, I'll stay where I am till you're away and I won't send anyone after you. I can just go back and say I got drunk and lost my way for a couple of days.”

Again the laugh skated up the scale.

“Honest. That's what I'll do.” Ed's eyes hurt, and they stung. He couldn't cry. “If I knew where your ruby was, I'd tell you that, too.”

“So tell me.”

“I told you I don't know,” Ed said, raising his voice. “You gotta know I'd tell you if I did.”

A big fist drove into his belly, right below his ribs, and his throat closed. He began to choke.

“Just you think about where that ruby is while you get your wind back.”

This wasn't a random bad guy. He'd worked people over before and he enjoyed it. Ed could feel the other man's excitement.

“Coming to you, is it? What have you done with that stone, Ed?”

“Nothing.” He hated the thin sound of his voice. “I haven't done anything with it. I never had it.”

“You don't want to try that, Eddie boy. You want to help me so you can go home. Just tell me where you hid it—for real—and you'll be a free man.”

Ed couldn't hold his head up. It lolled forward. “No. I don't know. Why do you think I do?”

“You told someone you did. You were seen with it.”

“That was you?” Ed said, choking down saliva. “At Lafource. You hit me on the head, but you didn't see me with the stone.” He had already slid the ruby inside on the window ledge in the breakfast room, ready to put it back in the safe, when the guy dropped him. Afterward, when Ed went back for the stone, he could hardly believe it was still there. And he'd changed his mind about putting it back where it came from. That was too dangerous.

The man had turned quiet, and still.

“It was you, wasn't it?” Ed asked. “You pushed me around and hung me in the pool.”

“Nah. You already admitted you made that story up.”

“But—”

“Maybe you should save your brain. You may need it.”

“Okay, I give up,” Ed said. “Take this thing off my head and I'll tell you. You gotta give me a guarantee you're gonna let me go.”

“You've got it,” the voice almost sang out.

Steady fingers dragged at the string around his neck, burned his skin with the stiff twine and jerked the bag off his head.

Ed looked up and his heart lightened. A stocking, with eye and mouth holes, covered the man's head. You couldn't tell what he looked like, but the beard was still obvious. He did intend to let Ed go—and he knew he wouldn't remember his face from the darkness outside Buzzard's, not when Ed had been scared shitless, or from the drive, despite the gradual lightening of the sky.

Sunlight hit his eyes, then faded with the shadow of a cloud.

The man turned his hand palm up and beckoned with all of the fingers. “Give me what I want,” he said. “Where is it?”

“It's gonna be hard for you to get it,” Ed said.

Eyes stared at him through the mask. Ed looked away, and on the floor he saw a dark blue duffel bag, its open zipper gaping. A drill poked out, a long, thin bit in place.

Ed turned icy. His wet clothes stuck to his skin. He didn't think his companion planned any woodworking jobs.

“Where did you put it?” The voice came at Ed in a harsh whisper. “Really, this time.”

“I…I'm afraid to say. You're going to kill me anyway.” Maybe there would be a chance to call Sabine and get her to have the police arrest this guy when he showed up.

“I said I wouldn't kill you. Are you calling me a liar?”

“No,” Ed said. “No, I'm not. You're gonna let me go, right?” He couldn't think anymore.

“Yeah.”

He didn't believe it but there weren't any choices. “It's out back of Nick Board's place.” He didn't want this guy anywhere near homes, his own, the Boards' or anyone else's, but he didn't see any way to avoid it. “There's a flamingo there, in a new flower bed. The ruby's inside.”

He got another unflinching stare. “Why there?”

“I planted the bed. It wouldn't surprise anyone to see me messin'around out there. You can't miss the flamingo.”

Once more the scaling laugh burst into silent air. “Good,” the man said. “Really good. It's too bad I can't just have you go get it for me.”

“I'd do that,” Ed said. “I surely would. And I'd do it without givin' a thing away. That's a good idea. You wouldn't have to worry about someone seeing you.”

The drill thumped the floor, sent an echo into the space below.

Ed said, “What's that for?”

“I like to play around with tools. It's creative.” He emptied the bag and hauled a small chain saw from the bottom. “This is my favorite. I might go into business making those wooden animals you can sell along the road.”

When Ed swallowed he made a clicking sound, and coughed. He kept his mouth open and took short breaths. “Don't do it,” he said when he could speak. “God, don't do it.”