Vicious Cycle (25 page)

The driver looked like a soccer mom on her way to carpool, and she gasped when she saw Jordan. “Honey, are you all right?”

“Yeah, my brother just dumped me out of his car. I need a ride somewhere.”

“Your face! What happened? Did he hit you?”

“It’s a long story.”

The woman looked stricken. “Should we call the police?”

Jordan’s mind raced. Would the police even listen to another kidnap accusation from her when she’d already admitted to lying about Lance? No, they’d blow her off as some messed-up meth addict. They wouldn’t even look for Grace.

Besides, they might think she’d hurt Grace herself when they heard how she’d taken her from the hospital.

“Honey?”

Jordan shook her head. “No … not the police.” She made up her mind. She would go to Lance’s house. He would think of something.

“But, sweetie, they need to know.”

“I’ll call them from my friend’s house. His mother’s friend is a cop. He’ll help me.”

“Okay, where is it?”

She told the woman the street. She didn’t know the number, but she’d seen it before—joyriding in the family Dodge, just cruising the good side of town to see how the other half lived.

On Lance’s street, she pointed out the house. “That one.” There wasn’t a car in the driveway. She hoped Lance was home.

“Do you want me to go in with you?”

“No, that’s okay.”

The woman couldn’t let go. “Honey, you might need medical attention. You look pretty bad.”

“I’ll get help. Thank you for the ride.” She got out, feeling suddenly dizzy and drained of all energy. She took a moment to steady herself, hand on the car door.

“Honey, how old are you?”

She shook the fog out of her head. “Eighteen.” She hoped the lie would keep her from slowing Jordan down with Child Protection Services. They had already been notified when her mother was arrested.

Jordan knew the woman wouldn’t leave until she got into the house. She walked unsteadily to the door and banged on it, praying Lance was there. The minivan idled out front, the woman watching her with a troubled look. Finally, she heard movement inside, and Lance’s voice.

“Who is it?”

“Lance, it’s Jordan,” she called through the door. “Let me in! It’s an emergency!”

The door flew open. “Where have you been?”

Jordan stumbled inside. “I need your help!”

T
he baby’s guttural cries were driving Zeke nuts. He wiped the sweat from his forehead on the sleeve of his army-green T-shirt and considered taking a quick detour to his supplier. It had been six hours since his last hit, and he was beginning to come down. Fatigue weighed on him like a lead jacket, and his eyelids were heavy. But he didn’t have any cash. If he could get to the ten grand his mother had deposited, he’d be fine. But the cops had put a freeze on her account, and now he couldn’t even scrape together twenty bucks for a quarter gram.

He glanced in his rearview mirror, certain the cars behind him were tailing him. What had he been thinking, kicking his sister out of the car? The little tramp would call the police for sure. What if they were on his tail now, letting him lead them to the buyers?

The baby’s screams made his head hurt. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and turned the radio loud, trying to drown her out. The heavy thrum of the bass guitar hit the off-beat as voices rapped about the upside of death.

He tapped his hand on the steering wheel and glanced in the mirror again. The car he’d been watching had turned off, and now a new one followed. A yellow VW Bug, with some blonde-haired chick whose window was open, her hair flapping in the wind. She didn’t look like a cop.

He amped the music up, feeling the vibration with every beat. It almost drowned out the sound of the kid. Swinging his head to the beat, he turned off the main road, taking the back way. The girl didn’t follow. He was good. Nobody was tailing him.

But there were those cameras. They were on the tops of buildings, on stoplights, in street lanterns, though you couldn’t always see them. They were watching all the time … mocking him in his hunger … in his highs …

Right in front of him, a plane descended as if coming in for a landing. It might be them—the buyers. They’d told him to look for a private jet sitting on a landing strip beside a hangar.

These people were made of money. He wondered where the plane had come from, where it would be going next. He hoped they’d brought the other thirty grand in cash.

The industrial buildings grew farther apart. He drove past a company with piles of lumber, then a lot with hundreds of old trailers lined up bumper to bumper. Then for a few minutes, only weeds and dirt … then, finally, what looked like a small airfield.

Adrenaline jolted him like a hit of crank, lifting his fatigue, delaying his pangs. This was going to be good. Thirty grand in his hands … would it be small or large bills? How would they pack it?

He would head right over to Belker’s after he got the money and buy a couple of eight-balls. Then he’d stash the money somewhere safe. He could postpone bailing his mother out for a while. He’d ride high, with no one to stop him. Maybe he could gamble with a couple thousand, and win even more.

He found the hangar, and just beyond it, the landing strip. A small jet was slowly making its way up the runway toward the building. As he put the car in Park, the door to the hangar opened.

Zeke cut off the radio, and once again, the baby’s high-pitched crying scratched through the air. “Calm down, kid,” he said. “You’re about to go on a airplane ride.”

He got out and walked toward the man who appeared in the doorway. “Hey, man,” he said. “I got the kid. You got the cash?”

The man went to the car, looked in at the baby. His face didn’t change. “Good job. Get it out and bring it in for me.”

Zeke wasn’t crazy about that. First, he didn’t want to touch the baby. He’d seen it when it was first born, all slimy and sticky, as his mother yelled at Jordan to tie off the cord. Second, he didn’t like the idea of going into the building without somebody backing him up.

But he supposed he’d have to if he wanted the cash. They weren’t going to count it out here in the open.

He unhooked the seat belt and, lifting the baby seat out by its handle, he followed the man into the building. The swinging motion of the seat seemed to quiet the baby. He stepped into the hangar. There were a couple of cars parked there, and the woman he’d seen at his house and another man across the room.

They crossed the building and peered into the car seat.
“What about the seizures?” the man who called himself Nelson said.

“She stopped having them,” Zeke said, not knowing whether that was the truth, and not really caring. “They sent some medicine. It’s in my car. You can have all the stuff they sent from the hospital.”

The woman took the baby out of the seat and inspected it like it was an antique vase. The kid kicked and squirmed, mouth open wide, letting out a scream.

“What about the girl?” the woman asked, setting the baby back in the seat. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “She got out of the car and I left her.”

The woman’s eyes flashed to Nelson.

“We told you to bring her with you,” he said.

Zeke shook his head. “Nah, then she would have known where you were. She would have told the police. And she never would have let you take the kid.”

“That was the deal,” Nelson said. “We told you to bring them both.”

Zeke was getting sick of this. Were they trying to renege? “No, man, you didn’t. You told me to get her out of the hospital and make her get the baby, but you didn’t say nothing about bringing her here too.”

The woman rolled her eyes as if she couldn’t believe how stupid he was. Her gaze shot to the other man. He had dark greasy hair and dark eyes and spoke with a heavy accent. “No, we have girl too. She worth more than
bambino.”

Zeke frowned. “Wait … you want Jordan to go
with
you?”

The woman stiffened. He noticed her eyes for the first time. They were blue, but too blue, like she wore contact lenses. Her face was stretched in a bad face-lift, but her neck
was wrinkled and droopy. “We need her to take care of the baby until we get it to the adoptive parents,” she said.

He shook his head. “No, she’s no help. She’s a raving lunatic right now. She screams louder than the kid. You’ll have to take care of it yourself.”

“Zeke,” Nelson said, “this is not negotiable. Your sister is part of the deal.”

“You never said that!” he bit out. “Not to me or to my mother. Now where’s my money?”

Nelson let out a long-suffering sigh, then he motioned for the others to follow him across the hangar.

Zeke should have brought his gun in, but he’d been so excited to make the exchange that he’d left it on his seat. He looked toward the door.

The three came back, and this time the stranger spoke. “You get girl to us, we give you twenty more.”

He frowned. “Twenty thousand
cash?”

“Yes. Total fifty thousand.”

This was a trick. They thought he was an idiot. “No way. I’m not leaving here without the thirty thousand you promised me. I have an appointment.” He wiped the sweat dripping into his eyes. “An important appointment, and I need the cash.”

“We’ll give you a thousand now, and the rest when you bring her back,” Nelson said in a cold, flat voice.

Zeke shook his head. “I’m not stupid, man! You said forty thousand. You gave my mother ten, and you owe me thirty. I want it now.”

Nelson gave the woman another look, then he nodded. The woman disappeared into one of the rooms inside the hangar and came out with a backpack. She tossed it to Zeke.

He caught it at his gut, then dropped to his knees, his hands shaking as he unzipped it and looked inside. There
were six stacks of hundred dollar bills. He pulled one out and fanned through it.

“Fifty to a stack, six stacks,” Nelson said.

Zeke’s mouth grew dry and his skin prickled as he counted out each stack. Thirty thousand. He zipped the backpack and got to his feet, unable to restrain his grin. “And if I come back with Jordan, twenty more, right?”

“That’s right,” the woman said. “But we need her now.”

“And you’re flying them out of the country? The feds aren’t gonna show up at my door?”

“We will be far from here,” the foreigner said.

How would he find Jordan? By now, she’d probably had time to get back home, and she might have called the police. But he doubted it. More likely, she’d gone to one of Belker’s spots.

In fact, since he had the cash, he would head over there himself and get high before he looked for Jordan. Everything would be easier if he did that first.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll bring her back as soon as I find her.”

“You have two hours,” Nelson said. “If you aren’t back by then, we leave. But we’ll come back for you later.”

Zeke knew the man didn’t mean they were coming back to pal around. “Don’t worry, guys,” he said. “I want that other twenty. I’ll be back in time.”

They followed him back out to his car and he handed them the baby supplies. Then he screeched out of the concrete lot and headed out to score.

T
he interview with Turk and the guys who were arrested with him didn’t turn up much. They swore they’d never told Lance anything about people wanting to buy babies. It was a clear case of kids not wanting to bring more trouble on themselves from someone who might not appreciate their loose tongues.

As he and Dathan drove back to the precinct, Kent tried to work it all out in his mind. “Who would have access to pregnant girls in these neighborhoods?”

“I’d say doctors, but poverty-stricken teens, especially the ones on drugs, aren’t big into prenatal care.”

“But is there any kind of free clinic in that area? Or an abortion clinic? Some place these girls might go?”

“No abortion clinic. But there is a church-run clinic there, where doctors volunteer their time. Could be
that somebody who works there gives the names to the traffickers.”

Kent’s phone rang, and he saw that it was Lance. He clicked it on. “Lance?”

“Kent, you’ve got to come!”

He frowned and looked at Dathan. “Come where? What’s wrong?”

“Jordan’s here. Zeke took the baby, and he’s selling her to those people.”

Dathan turned his siren and lights on, turned the car around, and headed to Barbara’s house to take Jordan’s statement.

She spilled out the story of Zeke’s appearance at the hospital, his insistence on her getting the baby and leaving in the family’s blue Dodge, his admission that he was selling the baby, and his dumping her in the street to get her out of the way. Unless they acted fast, they wouldn’t find the perpetrators before they got the baby out of the country. But they had no idea where Zeke had taken the baby.

The girl still looked sick and in pain, but she refused to go back to the hospital until her baby was found.

“Jordan, we need to get into your house,” Kent said. “Maybe Zeke or your mother wrote something down—an address or phone number or anything—that would tell us where they could be.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go now.”

Lance followed them to the door. “What about me? Want me to stay here?”

Kent thought about that for a moment. With Lance on the traffickers’ radar and Zeke on the loose, it didn’t seem wise to leave him here alone. “Why don’t you come with me and keep Jordan company while we search the house?”

“Okay,” Lance said as he grabbed his shoes.

Jordan and Lance rode with Kent, with Detective Dathan following in his car. Kent watched for Zeke’s car as they drove slowly past the decrepit houses on her street, then the woods that set the Rhodes house apart.

There was no car on the dirt driveway.

“Jordan, do you have a key?”

“No, not with me,” she said. “But I know how to get in.”

Kent pulled into the driveway, and Dathan pulled in behind him. Two cruisers parked on the street, and uniformed cops got out. One looked to be about forty. The other looked so young he couldn’t have been out of the Academy for more than a couple of months. The whole group followed Jordan to her open bedroom window. She shoved it further open. “I can climb in.”