Bait (19 page)

Maddie could feel his tension emanating through the phone.

“What kind of other stuff are we talking about here?”

Her heart was racing, and her stomach had tied itself in so many knots by this time that Houdini himself couldn't have straightened it out. But she didn't let so much as a hint of that come out in her voice. She knew these guys: They were jackals who preyed on the weak. The key to surviving was to convince them that she was strong. Strong enough to carry out her threats.

“Tapes, for one thing. He used to carry a little mini tape recorder in his pocket sometimes. When he went out on jobs. And, let's see ... oh, yeah, there was that stack of hundred-dollar bills Junior Rizzo gave him—I don't know what job it was from, but I'm sure the feds would find it interesting. And other things. Lots of other things. He liked keeping souvenirs.”

There was more silence.

Then, “Babe, let me give you some advice. The smart thing for you to do is to come on back here where you belong, and bring all this stuff you're talking about with you. Hand it over, and quit threatening people. Nobody wants to have to hurt you.”

Maddie snorted. “Don't give me that. Nobody gives a shit about hurting me. But I'm telling you: You hurt me, and you hurt yourselves. I have enough evidence here to put a lot of people away for a long time. And I've arranged it so that if anything happens to me, anything at all, if I have a heart attack or choke to death on a pretzel or whatever, you better believe the shit's going to hit the fan—for you and yours.”

“Potty mouth,” he said, sounding angry now. “In my book, there's nothing worse than a woman with a potty mouth. Just for the record, I don't know nothing about no hit man. Or no Fat Ted Cicero. Or Junior Rizzo.”

“What, are you afraid somebody's listening in? They're not, at least not from my side. Like you said, I don't want anything to do with the feds. Not unless you make me choose.”

“I don't know nothin' about anything you're talking about.”

Maddie made a sound of disgust. “You go tell whoever's in charge what I said,” she said. “And get back to me. Real soon. Like within the next couple of hours. Or I'm going to have to start making some moves to protect myself.”

With that, she hung up. Then, not sure how technologically advanced the goons might have become since she'd last had occasion to cross paths with them, she peeled rubber out of the QuikStop and headed back toward the city, where she drove aimlessly around the interstates because she was afraid to stop anywhere.

Call her paranoid, but she had hideous visions of hit men with global-positioning devices zeroing in on her cell phone. Maybe they had some twisted version of an On-Star service of their own now, an automatic locater, something like 1-800-Bang-Bang-You're-Dead.

By the time the phone rang again, she was a raw bundle of nerves, having scared herself to the point where she was on the verge of chucking the whole plan and hightailing it for as far away from St. Louis as she could get.

But then Bob had gotten back to her, telling her that while nobody had any knowledge concerning any of the stuff she'd been talking about earlier, they had a deal. Basically, live and let live.

Maddie knew that as well as anyone, although she thought she had succeeded in making them think that they had more to lose than to gain by killing her.

On the plus side, she was telling the absolute truth about the stash of evidence. Her father had always been convinced that someday he could use the things he had secretly squirreled away to free himself from the Mob's grip. He had called his accumulation of stuff his “insurance policy,” and had kept it in a locked strongbox, which he carefully hid. Unfortunately, the last time she had seen that strongbox had been about a week before she'd fled.

But since she was the only one who knew that, it didn't really matter. Having the evidence didn't help her at all. Having them
think
she had the evidence was what mattered.

And it just might be enough to keep her alive. It was a risk, a gamble. Up until this moment, she'd never thought she had a propensity for gambling. But it seemed that now that the chips were down, she was proving to be her father's daughter after all.

Everything she had ever wanted was suddenly within her grasp. During the last seven years, she had even managed to make herself over into the person she had always wanted to be. The wrong-side-of-the-tracks, lock-up-your-sons, her-father-is-a-criminal girl was respectable now. Looked up to, even. A pillar of the community. “An inspiration to others,” as the president of the Chamber of Commerce had described her at the dinner where she'd gotten her award.

She was not going to just close the book on that, or on the life that went with it. It had been too hard-won. Having done everything that it was in her power to do to make sure she kept safe, she was going to take a chance. She was going to stay.

Which is how she came to be walking wearily past rows of cars in the St. Louis airport's long-term parking lot as the sun pushed its first tentative feelers of color over the horizon. It was still dark, but not as dark as it had been. It was, rather, the deep, hazy charcoal of a newborn dawn. Beyond the yellow glow of the tall halogen lamps that illuminated the area, the airport was still and somnolent, not yet alive with the day's bustle. In the distance she could hear the
swoosh
of an airplane as it raced along the runway. Closer at hand, the only sound was the steady hum of traffic from the nearby interstate. The faintest tinge of motor oil hung in the air. Even at such an early hour, it was still hot and humid outside—it was always hot and humid in St. Louis in August—but as she headed toward her blue Camry, Maddie was shivering.

But not with the cold.

She was scared, there was no getting around that. And she probably would be for a long time to come, until she had determined to her own satisfaction that her threats had worked to stuff the bogeyman back under the bed. But she should be safe enough at the moment, she calculated. To begin with, she was almost certain that she had not been followed on her aborted run. And if she had not been followed, then logic dictated that the hit man—whom she had last encountered in New Orleans—would not be lurking in this particular parking lot at this particular ungodly hour, just waiting to pick her off. Her flight had landed almost eleven hours before. Even if he had followed her to St. Louis, even if he had found her car in the lot, what were the chances that he was still around?

Slim, she judged.
But not quite none.

Which left her as jittery as a caged bird in a roomful of cats. The nervous looks she could not help casting around were purely involuntary. So, too, was the quickening of her step as she neared the spot at the back of the lot where she had parked her car. When she had parked the car, on a bright, sunny Thursday afternoon, when the thought that her carefully constructed house of cards might be in imminent danger of collapse had never crossed her mind, it had seemed like as good a place as any, as well as a chance to work in a little aerobic exercise before she boarded her flight. Now, the closer she got to the space, the more isolated it seemed.

The misty pools of light thrown down by the overhead lamps were a fair distance apart, and her Camry, in the last row, was almost beyond the reach of all of them. The farther she got from the last streetlight, the darker it got. The darker it got, the antsier she got. Her eyes darted hither and yon like bees drunk on picnic beer. Behind the line of cars, a tall, grassy bank rose just high enough to block a view of the road that veered off from the central artery to the terminal to feed the long-term lot. To her right, across another vast, mostly empty expanse of asphalt, clustered a group of large metal buildings, probably airplane hangars. To her left, even farther away, was the blocky concrete box that was the terminal.

The good news was, there was not another human being in sight.

That was also the bad news.

What she wouldn't have given, just at that moment, for a patrolling cop.

She was close enough to her car now so that she could almost read the license plate. The weariness that had caused her steps to drag just moments before had been wiped out by a burst of fear-fueled adrenaline. Walking faster, probing shadows for possible danger, she cursed the rattle her suitcase wheels made because she could not hear anything much over them and because they gave her presence away. Maybe she was being paranoid, but they seemed about as loud as a marching band. So loud that no one within earshot could be ignorant of her approach.

But then, no one was within earshot—were they?

Her nerves were getting the better of her, she knew. But she couldn't help it. Her imagination went into overdrive, seeing danger in every swooping moth and hearing it with every random sound. She was alone. She was sure she was alone. But her body refused to be convinced. Independent of logic, her pulse raced and her stomach fluttered and her mouth went dry.

As she drew even with the Camry's back fender, her heart was pounding so hard that she could barely even hear the clatter the suitcase was making over the drumming in her ears. The sense of being isolated and vulnerable was so strong as she turned into the cramped space between her car and the Town Car beside it that she had to fight the urge to just abandon her suitcase on the spot and jump inside her car and zoom out of there as fast as she could go. But she couldn't leave Fudgie—or her other things, either. Stowing them in the backseat would take just a few seconds more.

Anyway, she was being totally paranoid. She couldn't see anyone. She couldn't hear anyone. And the reason for that was
—ta-dah!—
there was no one else in the parking lot.

Punching the button on her key ring that unlocked the car, she hurried to grab the door handle at the same time as the interior lit up.

Her breath stopped. Her eyes widened. She recoiled.

There was a man in her car. In the driver's seat. Bent over, as though he was hiding. Waiting.

For her.

In the split second it took her brain to register what her eyes saw, he moved, straightening, his head twisting as he looked around at her.

Maddie screamed, dropped the handle of her suitcase as if it had suddenly gone red-hot, and turned to run.

And smacked full-tilt into a warm, solid body that grabbed her arms and held on.

Reacting instinctively, screeching so loudly that she wouldn't have been surprised to learn that windows were shattering in Kansas City, she shoved him away as hard as she could and jammed a knee up into his groin.

“Oomph!” He let go and doubled over. She whirled to run.

Strong male arms clamped around her waist, dragging her back into a bear hug that imprisoned her elbows. Heart racing like a NASCAR engine, terror tying her stomach into a cold, hard knot, she screamed and fought like a wild thing as she was swung up off her feet. He staggered sideways with her, his grip all but crushing her rib cage, and her feet found the side of her car. Pushing off with all her might, she nearly succeeded in knocking both of them over. But he held on grimly, somehow managing to stay on his feet while he carted her backward over about a yard of concrete. In a single petrified glance around, she caught just a glimpse of a white panel van, the rear doors of which were being swung open to receive her. Another set of hands reached out to help subdue her....

“Help!” she screeched, even as she was being bundled inside. “Somebody, help!”

The man doing most of the bundling said something, but she couldn't hear him over her screams, which were cut off abruptly as she was dropped on her stomach in the carpeted cargo area of the van and all the air
wooshed
out of her lungs.

“I don't fucking believe this,” a man in the front passenger seat said. Invisible except as a shape because of the darkness, he had twisted around to watch as she was shoved inside the van. He was too far away to reach her, and so she forgot about him as, strengthened by panic, she rebounded onto her knees. Her blood pounded in her ears; her lungs expanded as she sucked in air. Having recovered her ability to scream, she shrieked like a banshee as she tried to dive past her captor to freedom. But he blocked her, shoving her down onto her stomach on the carpet a second time and then yanking her right arm behind her back. He was in the process of fastening something cold and metallic around her wrist as the other man bellowed, in the tone of someone who had said it more than once, “Gomez!
Let her go!
”

Something about the voice, about the shape of the head and shoulders silhouetted against the windshield, rang a bell of recognition in her head. She stopped struggling, and her head snapped up so fast she nearly sprained her neck.

“But you saw her!” the man holding her protested. “She kneed Hendricks! She ...”

“I said let her go.” His voice was quieter now, probably because he no longer had to make himself heard over her screams. “This is Miz Fitzgerald.”

That drawled
Miz
was what did it.

“You,”
she gasped, staring at him in total disbelief. “What are you doing here?”

But if Mr. Special Agent from New Orleans heard, he didn't reply. Instead, he swung out of the van and came around toward the back, as the man holding her arm reluctantly released it. Maddie whipped around, rising to her knees. Then, as it became obvious that she was no longer in danger and, in fact, had not been since she'd spotted the man—almost certainly an FBI agent—in her car, all the adrenaline drained out of her like water out of an unplugged bathtub. Her body accordioned and she sat abruptly on her folded legs. Glaring at the wiry guy with the brown brush cut and navy sport coat who had thrown her into the van—he was backlit by a halogen glow that made it impossible for her to see enough of his face to form an impression of it—she transferred that glare to Mr. Special Agent as he joined the party.