Her face turned crimson and she lowered her gaze. But soon she raised it again and smiled. “Alright.”
“Of course it’s alright, I’m The Wizard. Any one of six hundred women on this farm would splay her legs for me in an instant. All I have to do is ask.”
She frowned. “You’re not making me feel very special.”
“You’re not special, Sister Amanda, not yet. At the moment, you’re just another subservient groupie.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps you will shortly.”
He preferred to take women against their will. And the only way to rape one of his exceedingly willing cult followers was by using his unique power, what he called his
remote
control
.
He used it now on Amanda. Without touching her physically, he caused her sharp and instant fear. Her eyes bulged, her neck trembled, and her bottom lip tried in vain to run below her chin.
“Nooo!” she cried. “Nooo! Help!”
“Cry and shout all you want, we won’t be disturbed.”
He punched Amanda in the gut, crumpling her. As she sat dazed on the floor, he kicked her in the face with his bare heel.
By the time he’d ripped her tank top off, she’d begun flooding her jeans with urine. He gripped her throat to hold her head steady and to peer—to peer once again, it never got old—into the eyes of abject terror.
With his free hand, he peeled off her wet jeans, punching her in the kidneys until she stopped resisting. Then he bent her over the mahogany coffee table, face down, and opened his robe.
Through her night-vision binoculars, Marilyn spotted a guard with a rifle fast approaching the farmhouse. She speed-dialed the deputy on her cell phone.
“Yeah?” Fry answered.
“Hit it,” she said.
Not a moment later, the blare of a car horn distressed the night. The steady, resounding noise came from Fry’s car, parked a hundred yards down the road.
Marilyn put away her phone and aimed her binoculars on the rear edge of the farmhouse. Soon the man with the rifle bolted away from the back door in the direction of the noise.
She speed-dialed John’s cell phone. The vibration against his side would alert him that the security guard had taken the bait, allowing a chance to escape.
Fry continued to lean on his horn, tearing the countryside peace asunder. Marilyn saw the guard with the rifle meet up in the parking lot with a second rifle-toting figure. Together, the pair jumped into a sport utility vehicle.
Marilyn speed-dialed Fry a second time. The riflemen’s vehicle engine roared to life. Fry picked up.
“They’ve got an SUV,” she said, “and they’re coming after you through the main gate. Better get the hell out of there.”
“I’m gone,” Fry said. “See you next time.”
Marilyn hung up. The wheels of Fry’s car pealed out. The cult’s electronically controlled main gate groaned as it slowly slid open. The SUV idled impatiently in front of it until there was enough space to zip through.
When the SUV had roared off in pursuit of Fry, Marilyn lowered her binoculars and turned her gaze to the darkened farmhouse. Nothing happened for too long.
Suddenly, an object flew out through the opening where the attic vent had been, landing with a thud on the ground. It was John’s backpack. John appeared next, squeezing himself through the vent opening, scrambling back onto the rooftop. He lay flat on his stomach while banging the wooden vent back in place with his bare hand, then sped down the ladder to the ground.
Marilyn fell out of her tree climbing down too fast. Her head took a good jolt, and she lay on her back stunned until John helped her to her feet.
“You alright?” he said. “Can you move?”
“I think so.” They each gripped one end of the ladder and carried it horizontally as they jogged away from the farmhouse.
“So now you understand?” said L. Rob Piper. He stood at his front door, having whisked Amanda outside, onto the stoop. She was topless, holding the tattered remains of her tank top in one hand, wearing her soiled and smelly blue jeans. Her upper lip was hugely swollen, her left eye already purpling. The smile she gave him ran with blood.
“Yes,” Amanda said. “Thank you! Oh, thank you!”
“Goodnight,” he said and closed the door on her.
He could tell them anything afterwards. It really didn’t matter how he explained himself. He was, after all, The Wizard!
Tom Mahorn parked his rented black Mercedes-Benz sedan on the shoulder of the busy MacArthur Causeway, the main link between the city of Miami and Miami Beach. He swung a pair of binoculars up to the driver’s side window, his back turned to a mammoth cruise ship moving slower than the white-haired passengers on its deck, and monitored the vehicle traffic going in and out of Star Island’s security checkpoint.
The island was a wealthy enclave boasting world-famous movie actors, singers, and sports players. It was also home to the infamous Doctor Lipset, who was out on bond, pending sentencing, following his conviction three days earlier in a U.S. District Court.
Doctor Lipset had been found guilty on sixty-nine counts of fraud and perjury in connection with his fertility practice. He’d told scores of wealthy patients that they were pregnant when, in fact, they were not. He’d lied to these patients to keep them in treatment and collect extra fees. He’d pointed to meaningless, murky images on sonograms and told his patients they were fetal limbs. He’d injected his patients with a hormone to simulate the nausea and bloating of pregnancy.
As each duped woman had turned suspicious, usually many months into treatment, when her belly had not grown as expected, Doctor Lipset would announce a miscarriage and claim that the baby’s remains had been reabsorbed into the walls of the uterus.
His downfall had begun when one of his patients suffered a minor injury in a car crash and told the doctors who examined her at the hospital that she was three months pregnant. When no evidence of a fetus could be found, the police and medical authorities had been alerted.
For the past three weeks, Tom had assigned two of his best men to tail the doctor, twenty-four seven. They’d discovered their target’s Sunday habit of venturing from home alone to buy take-out lunch from one of the nearby restaurants in Miami Beach.
Within minutes of Tom’s arrival, the doctor appeared, driving off the island in his gold Lexus sedan. Tom trailed the Lexus east for a few miles to Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant in South Miami Beach. Tom caught up with him coming out of Joe’s, take-out order in hand, presumably some stone crab claws, which Tom knew were an expensive delicacy found in the area’s waters, best eaten cold with mustard.
The Panama hat, angled on the doctor’s dome like he was Jose Cuervo, had shown up in many surveillance photos. He was also wearing a pair of gray suit pants and a white pinstriped shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Huge sweat stains ringed his armpits. Today’s heat and humidity were punishing. It felt as though Miami had been left parked in the sunshine with the windows rolled up tight.
“Doctor Lipset?” Tom said. “Doctor Martin Lipset?”
“Yes?” The doctor halted on the stoop outside the front door of the take-out restaurant. He gave Tom, dressed in faded old jeans and an untucked black Harley-Davidson Tee shirt, a haughty stare, which turned curious when he noticed the luxury automobile Tom leaned against. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“Who I am isn’t important,” Tom said. “What I want is five minutes of your time, starting right now.”
“Why?”
“I want to discuss your future. How would you like to avoid going to prison?”
“What did you say?”
“I said I have a get-out-of-jail-free card in my pocket. You interested or not?”
Doctor Lipset came down from the stoop and approached Tom. “If you can’t tell me who you are, then who do you represent?”
“My employer is a private businessman. He wishes to remain anonymous at this time. Please get in the car, Doctor Lipset.” Tom opened the passenger door of his Mercedes.
“You won’t tell me who you work for, you won’t even tell me your name. How do I know you won’t rob me? Or kidnap me and hold me for ransom?”
Tom laughed. “Because you’re broke, Doctor. Your million dollar practice folded two years ago when you first got arrested. All your dough’s gone to your defense lawyers. Your wife’s inheritance money too. You’re months behind on your mortgage payments. Your sailboat was just repossessed. Should I go on?”
“It was a yacht,” Doctor Lipset said. “I guess I’ve got five minutes.” He climbed into the car, his stone crabs in tow.
Tom shut the door for him, hopped behind the wheel, and headed north. The air conditioning soothed like vaporized mercy.
“My employer,” Tom said, “first became aware of you watching truTV. He watched both of your trials religiously.”
“Nice to have fans.”
“He thinks the only reason you were able to get a hung jury during the first trial was because you took the stand. He thinks you have unique talents in the art of persuasion.”
“I’m flattered. But whatever my talents, they couldn’t save me in the second trial.”
“Still,” Tom said, “the jury deliberated for a week, which was amazing, considering the evidence piled against you.”
Tom turned left onto Ocean Drive. White sand beach stretched endlessly to their right. To their left, restaurant diners sat beneath striped awnings in front of Art Deco hotels with bold exteriors of peach and turquoise and lavender and gold and black. The restaurants weren’t crowded. Along the sidewalk next to the beach, a photo shoot was in progress. Tom eyed the model, a leggy blonde in a short silk skirt, her panties playing peek-a-boo with the hot breeze.
“So,” Doctor Lipset said, “what does your employer want with me? Whoever he is, and whoever you are.”
“He’s starting a new venture. Wants to hire you. Make use of your powers of persuasion.”
“You’re kidding. What kind of venture?”
“Can’t say right now.”
“What a surprise.”
“The sentencing phase of your trial begins on Monday,” Tom said. “You could be behind bars as early as Wednesday, no later than Friday. And who knows for how long? You’re facing up to three hundred and seventy years in prison.”
“Technically, yes, but I’m still a doctor, and I have no previous criminal record. In addition, I have some very good lawyers—albeit greedy, bloodsucking lawyers—who assure me I won’t receive more than five or six years. With good time served, I could be out in three.”
“For guys like you, Doc, three years in prison will seem like twenty. Even in a cushy Federal prison. They don’t serve stone crabs, for one thing.”
“Something tells me you speak from experience.”
“Prison’s not your biggest problem anyway,” Tom said. “What happens when you get out? By that time, your civil trial will be over, and all those irate, rich women you fooled into thinking they were pregnant will own your ass. They’ll have won a colossal judgement against you. Several million dollars for sure. They’ll garner most of your future income, even if you do manage to start up another practice somewhere, somewhere far, far away from here, where they’ve never heard of you before.”
The doctor sighed. “Thanks for the pep talk. Now, about this get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“The moment you give me the word, Doc, I can arrange to have you disappear. Without a chance of being found. First, you’d be taken to a topnotch plastic surgeon and given a new face. After your face healed, we’d move you to, uh, an undisclosed location in the southwestern United States. There you’d receive several weeks of, uh, training. Finally, you’d be moved to rural Mexico, where you’d work under my employer’s direct supervision for a minimum of five years.
“Your salary would be—and this is not negotiable—half a million dollars per year. Tax free. You’d also be provided with a new identity. Social security number. Passport. The works. At the end of the five years, your contract would be discontinued or renegotiated, depending on the wishes of both parties.”
A long silence passed. Meanwhile, Tom turned the Mercedes around and headed back toward Joe’s Stone Crab.
The doctor let out a huge breath of air—as if he’d been holding it in for a solid minute. “How do I know this isn’t a set-up? How do I know you’re not a Fed? Huh? This could all be a clever plot to tag a fugitive conviction on me. That would add several more years to my prison time, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes it would, but I’m not a Fed, Doctor Lipset.”
The doctor sat in silence, except for the huffing and puffing he did while mulling things over. He turned to Tom. “Let’s assume I believe you. What if the Feds catch me running away? One of them told me they’d be keeping an eye on me.”
“That’s a lie. They tell everybody that. The only people watching you have been my guys. The Feds don’t consider you a serious flight risk. You have a wife of twenty-three years. Two kids in high school.”
“That’s right, I do,” Doctor Lipset said. “I certainly do.”
“That reminds me. No contact with anyone in your former life. Clean break. Forever and ever, amen.”