Authors: Ridley Pearson
Cut and Run (31 page)
His breath caught in a gasp as he picked up the significance of the
M
and the
W
encircled in an oval of twisted wrought iron.
He mumbled, thinking aloud. “That's not a
W
. It's an inverted
M
. Meriden Manor.”
Hope followed his line of sight and turned her attention to the logo as well. “Yeah?”
“
M
,” he said, “and
M
.” Sounding foolish. “Meriden Manor.” He made the fingers of both hands into
W
s and connected them.
“Yeah? So?” She didn't see it.
He spread his fingers, making what vaguely looked like a diamond. Like a bowtie.
“The scar on the cutter's forearm.”
Then she saw it.
A gleaming razor's edge sparked across Larson's memory. He felt it like a clean cut down his spine.
“I think we've got the right place.”
Philippe Romero steered the sleek Mercedes sedan onto the I-5
southbound ramp and located the abandoned truck stop along a dark, winding road that aimed west toward a seaside town that had once been a lumber port. The truck stop's back lot consisted of a pale, claylike mud and deep potholes that looked to him like open wounds in the moonlit surface. Derelict gas pumps, now nothing but sawed-off pipes protruding from the ground into hulks of rusting sheet metal, rose like headstones from the ooze.
Philippe pulled around back of the boarded-up restaurant and mini-mart, per instructions, facing a rusted-out Dodge pickup truck and an eighteen-wheeler with Iowa plates. He carried a Beretta semiauto in the door's leather pouch, a round chambered and ready to fire. He had another weapon, a .22 meant for target practice, tucked into the small of his back inside the black leather jacket. A hunting knife warmed in his right sock.
He pulled alongside the tractor-trailer and a moment later a male figure stepped out of the broken-down Dodge. Paolo came toward him in the headlights. He opened the door and climbed inside. His face glowed blue in the light of the dashboard. He smelled foul. His face looked like he'd bobbed for apples in a deep fat fryer.
“You were smart to call,” Philippe said. “We don't need a stolen eighteen-wheeler on the property.”
“You want her in the trunk?”
“No. Put her in the backseat with the kiddy lock on. We're decent people.”
Paolo didn't move.
“She's okay, right?”
“Yeah, she's fine.”
“You haven't done anything to her, right?”
Paolo leveled his blister-encrusted eye at the driver. “I'm not going to hurt this kid. You understand me? You want that done, you're going to have to ask someone else.”
“Okay, okay. You can relax now. We'll get you fed and cleaned up, all right? You smell like low tide and your face looks like you're still doing Halloween.”
“I stay with the girl.”
“You do what I tell you to do.” Philippe felt his hand slip toward the leather pouch. It brushed the stock of the gun. “We've got a hell of a night ahead of us. Don't make trouble for me, Paolo. You've done good. Keep it that way. We'll get that face looked at. That's got to hurt.”
“I've got pills.”
“Get the girl.” Philippe reached down to the dash and switched off the car's interior light so it would not come on when a door was opened. “And no names when she's in the car. You got that?”
Paolo didn't answer. He climbed out of the car, shutting his door, but then opening the back door a moment later.
Philippe leaned over. He felt the .22 at his back. “Put her behind me, so you can keep an eye on her.”
Paolo shut that door and came around and opened the opposite door. He moved heavily, under the weight of great fatigue.
Philippe put all the windows down to air it out.
It stank in there.
Hope and Larson crouched in the bushes less than twenty yards
from Meriden Manor's front gate as the headlights approached.
“Sit absolutely still.” Larson hoped they were far enough back in the thicket not to be seen. White skin showed up easily at night, especially in a collage of green and black.
With their eyes now adjusted to the darkness, it took several seconds for Larson to establish it was the same black Mercedes they'd seen leaving the estate less than twenty minutes earlier. The car rolled toward the gate, the driver's side toward them. For a fleeting second, just a momentary flash, they saw a young girl's profile through the rear side window. Hope heaved forward and off-balance, and Larson caught her and clapped his hand to her mouth to hold back the sobs that began involuntarily. That profile had been Penny's.
The car window went down as driver consulted the gate guard and Larson committed the face behind the wheel to memory. Male. Late twenties. Short, perhaps. Dark coloring. Roman nose. The large black gates yawned open. Taillights quickly receding.
Larson had to think fast. He slapped his BlackBerry into her hand, while peeling his windbreaker from her shoulder and slipping it on. He zipped it, containing his upper body in its black fabric. In nearly the same motion, he retrieved her original cell phone from the windbreaker's pocket and switched it on. Hope's number had previously been call-forwarded to the untraceable Siemens he'd supplied her. He changed that now, call-forwarding that number to his own BlackBerry, now in Hope's possession.
He explained in a forced whisper, one eye tracking those receding taillights. “Can't wait for those guys. If Romero tries to call youâand he may, because I've just turned on your phoneâyou'll now get the call on my BlackBerry. I'm taking both yours and the Siemens.” He took the phone off her hip without asking. “With the BlackBerry, you can send me text messages.” He showed her quickly how to do this, though she cut off the demonstration. “I need to know what's going on out here. Make your way back to the van, and keep me up-to-the-minute. When I establish her location, I'll send for Hamp and Stubby.” He seized her by the shoulders, unclear if she'd heard anything he'd said. “We're going to do this,” he said strongly. “We both saw her in the car: She's okay. Right?”
He waited for her faint nod, said, “Okay,” and then he took off low and fast through the dense undergrowth.
Whether a nine- or eighteen-hole golf course, Meriden Manor covered far too much ground to be patrolled effectively. For this reason, Larson worked his way quietly through the woods for well over a hundred yards past where he'd seen the fence turn a sharp corner. Now he crossed the road and stayed low. He entered the woods and cut an angle to intercept the fence. He reached a chained gateâspiked wrought ironâused for dumping lawn and garden debris into the woods. The gate offered a good chance to get into the compound, but he was haunted by LaMoia's description of a “Kodak moment,” and feared a video camera watching the gate.
The fence was likely intended as much for keeping deer out as for blocking intruders. He continued down the wall until spotting an overhanging limb. He climbed the tree, worked his way out the limb precariously and dropped over the other side.
LaMoia had infected him with paranoia. He imagined night-vision video and infrared “trip wires” set at waist height to avoid raccoons and dogs but to catch intruders. He envisioned silent alarms and legions of security guards patrolling the grounds, though in fact he didn't see any such boxes or wires running up trees or any evidence indicating any such equipment or personnel. It was probably just fantasy. With the Romeros having called a meeting for some heavy hitters, they would concentrate their manpower around wherever that meeting was scheduled to take place.
He began crawling. Hands and knees into the center of a fairway, believing the wide-open, grassy expanses the most difficult to electronically survey. Fairways were sprinkled, even in rainy Seattle, and sprinklers would trip alarms as quickly as any person would. The smart money put security sensorsâif there were anyâacross the cart paths and at intersections between holes. He crawled on.
A hundred yards farther he arrived at what was marked as the eleventh tee. The course had been cut out of forest. Stands of tall, mature trees separated one fairway from the next.
Minutes later, he crested a small embankment, peering over at the clubhouse.
An enormous Tudor structure loomed close by. Built a hundred years earlier and standing amid a ring of towering pines, this was clearly the original Meriden Manorâperhaps imported from England beam by beam, brick by brick. He imagined it as a family home belonging to a lumber tycoon or shipping baron. Running away from it were more structures, some private homes, some looking more like companions to the manor house, though built more recently. It looked more like the campus of a private boarding school, now that he had a closer look. Places like this went through a dozen such uses, one owner to the next. The Romeros had bought themselves an enclave.
To his left, one road stayed on the level and appeared to service the private homes. Another fell down and away from the manor house, into the clutch of the dark woods. He could imagine barns and maintenance sheds, workshops and garages and buildings dedicated to equipment storage.
Not five minutes later, headlights appeared from the woods to his left. What appeared to be the same Mercedes he'd seen at the gate climbed into view and parked in the manor house's porte cochere. Larson couldn't make out details well enough at this distance, but two men climbed out.
No Penny.
Larson glanced quickly left down the hill. Penny had been dropped offâor
disposed of
.
He broke into a run. He would have to improvise.
One of Philippe's guys hurried over to him.
At first Philippe thought he intended to valet the Mercedes around back, but his face indicated otherwise.
“What is it?”
“Her phone's up. The markâthe Stevens woman. Her cell phone logged on to the PacWireless network a few minutes ago.”
Philippe's face tightened. It was too good to be true. The timing couldn't be coincidental. “Now? After what, three days?” He thought a second. “They know about the meeting. They're using this to try to distract us. They don't want this meeting taking place.” He looked for what else it might mean. “Do we have a fix?”
The guard lowered his voice and spoke quickly. “The phone is transmitting from here on the compound.”
Philippe felt it as a blow to his chest. Eyes darting, looking for an answer in all that darkness, he muttered, “Not possible.
Impossible.
Here?”
“Here,” the man answered, feeling obliged to say something.
Philippe's eyes landed on the tortured face of Paolo. The man's objections to the treatment of the girl rang loudly in his head. “Oh, shit,” he said, under his breath.
He carefully instructed the guard to show Paolo into the study and for him and one other to stand by once he had Paolo inside.
Philippe suppressed a rush of panic. The one-eyed dog had betrayed him, had carried her cell phone with him in order to lead the marshals to his doorstep. He composed himself, struck a solid, confident expression and pose, not wanting to reveal any of his suspicions. He glanced around one last time, peering into the darkness, and strode inside.
Crawling toward the fringe of woods that bordered the road
descending from the manor house, Larson witnessed part of the impromptu meeting between the driver of the Mercedes and a bodybuilder type. He wondered if it had anything to do with him. The brief flash of terror in the driver's eyes had felt good.
A moment later the driver spoke into his cell phone, and within a few seconds, two other men sped down this same hill at a run.
At great risk of being seen, Larson rose and cut through the woods and paralleled these two, now confident that they'd been ordered to beef up Penny's security. A trap for Hope and whomever she brought with her.
His shoes soaked through, wet from the ground cover. He caught a glint off the two black leather jackets as the road snaked gracefully down the long throat of the hill.
At the bottom of the decline, the paved road crossed a noisy creek before rising again. Larson stopped short as he came across a formidable obstacle courseâwooden walls with hanging ropes; car tires lashed together and suspended over a sand pit; a series of low stone walls; a shooting range with standing targets. It looked like something from an army boot camp.
He slipped through the course, using it as cover, keeping the two guards in sight. As they approached a double-wide trailer home, a floodlight came on, triggered by a motion sensor.
The guards arrived at the top of a set of raw-lumber steps and knocked.
Larson drew closer, careful now of each footfall.
The door was answered by a guy in a T-shirt and black jeans. Larson saw the blue flicker of television light. That, in turn, told him the windows were blacked out from the inside, just like the farmhouse. That alone told him he probably had found Penny.
A sense of triumph and fear mixed in him as a cocktail. He felt the first trickle of sweat catch up to him. His mouth was dry.
He glanced at the face of the Siemens, wondering if Hamp and Stubby were on their way.
Larson needed a look inside the double-wide. But he didn't want to walk into their trap. Instead, he needed to set one.
“Talk to me,” Philippe said, stepping through the study's
door, his back now covered by two men, unseen, behind him. The room smelled richly of oiled leather and bookbinder's gum. Three thousand volumes of rare books ran floor to ceiling, encased in imported library shelving complete with air-bubble glass-panel doors and brass fittings. A single Heriz covered the parquet flooring. An antique globe and an Englishman's partners desk faced a pair of worn leather chairs that dated back to American independence. Paolo occupied one of these chairs, looking completely out of place, a mutt among the pedigreed. The light fixture, four fogged-glass orbs, had been converted from gas to electricity at the turn of the twentieth century. A land baron, looking vaguely unhappy, loomed large in an oil portrait that hung over a wrought-iron grated fireplace.
