Deal Gone Bad - A Thriller (Frank Morrison Thriller Series Book 1) (24 page)

The stairs started to
creak. Someone was coming up.

Morrison hurried a few
words. “I can’t do anything right now,” he whispered, “but I will come back. I
promise you, Laura, I will come back.”

Morrison crossed paths
with Mike on his way down the creaking staircase.

“Checking out?” Mike said.

Morrison stopped one step
above and gazed at him. He felt like throwing a solid punch on his face. That’s
all the bastard would have deserved. But since that meant automatic retribution
on Laura, he kept his arms loose and gave no hint that he had just seen her in
her terrible condition.

“It’s better this way,” he
said. “I’m gonna stay over at Cowgirl’s. I’ll bring back the Navigator later
on.”

“No rush,” Mike said. “Nobody
needs it here. Just focus on recovering our money.”

Morrison went down to the
hall and pushed his way outside, cursing between his teeth. Harris’s car was
gone. Cowgirl was waiting in the white van’s passenger seat.

He climbed in the driver’s
seat and slammed the door hard. Then he gave two quick punches to the steering
wheel. “Son of a bitch!” he let out loud. “Son of a bitch!”

Cowgirl turned toward him,
completely taken by surprise.

“Morrison, what’s with you?”

He gave another hard punch
on the steering wheel and told her about Laura. What Mike had done to her. When
he was finished, Cowgirl shared his anger.

“Son of a bitch,” she said.
“He’s really become a mean bastard.”

He cocked his head to the
right and jammed the key in the ignition. Fired up the engine with a sharp
twist of the wrist that sent the V6 racing.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m
not going to let him get away with that.”

“What are you gonna do?”
she asked.

“I don’t know. But I’ll
get even with him. You can bet your life on that.”

He gunned the white van
along the steep path all the way down, raising an enormous dust cloud in the
process. When he reached the county road, he decided to calm down. He settled
into a quiet, even cruise.

“Now, why don’t you show
me where our dear sheriff lives,” he said.

Cowgirl gave him the
directions. It wasn’t very far from Mike’s place. They had to drive toward
Acton to get there but without entering the town. They stayed on the periphery,
eventually approaching the Perkins Electronics compound. At this hour, all was
quiet. There was no shift change at Perkins, so they were able to roll by the
massive facility without slowing down.

They turned on Sanford’s
country road and drove up for a few minutes. Then Morrison saw her house for
himself.

It was really big, just
like Cowgirl had said. Set on a huge tract of land with a long driveway lined up
with enormous maple trees. He whistled.

“That’s gotta be worth at least
a million or two,” he said.

“Yeah, easy,” Cowgirl said.

“No way can she afford
that on a sheriff’s paycheck,” he said. “No way.”

He saw Sanford’s patrol
car parked in front of the house alongside her gleaming Mercedes convertible. She
was still at home.

“Let’s keep an eye on her
for a little while,” Morrison said.

He drove on for a hundred
yards, then he made a U-turn and came back to park the van under the shade of a
giant oak. With a clear view of the mouth of Sanford’s driveway but not of the
house, so they wouldn’t draw any attention to themselves. Then he rolled down
the front windows and killed the engine. It was going to be another hot day.
They would need some breeze in that van.

Cowgirl drew a bottle of
water from her door’s side pocket and offered him some. He drank a big gulp. It
was fresh and tasted good. She had slipped some lemon wedges in there.

“You know, I don’t think
I’ve ever seen you as agitated as when you came out of Mike’s house,” she said,
a look of concern on her face. “Punching the steering wheel and cursing. That’s
not you. You’re always so calm and collected.”

He gave her back the
bottle. There was no judgment from her part, just a genuine surprise. And she
was right, of course. He had let himself slip. It hadn’t happened to him in a
long time. Certainly not during his prison stay. He knew how important it was
to keep it together in there. More than just about saving face, it was really a
matter of survival behind bars.

He looked at her. Clearly,
he had allowed himself to drop his guard because he trusted her.

“You’re right,” he said. “But
seeing Laura like that struck something so deep …” He hesitated for a moment.
She silently egged him on. He continued. “For a moment, I saw my mother. Battered.
Bruised. And scared.” He shook his head. “A real throwback to the misery of it
all.”

Cowgirl was all ears.
“Your father was a scumbag too?” she said.

He made a dismissive wave
of the hand. “There was no father around. He split when I was two, so I don’t
really know the guy. But the boyfriends …” He shook his head again. “My mother
was very young when she had me. And she was very pretty. That was her problem.
That and the fact that she was a party girl. She always had a lot of guys
around her, but somehow she always picked the wrong ones. Pathetic white trash
she served drinks to in the shitty little bars out in the Finger Lakes where
she worked. Whenever she brought them back to our trailer, there would be these
senseless, drunken arguments all the time. And physical violence too, of
course. I hated it but that’s how it was everywhere in that goddamn trailer
park. I didn’t know any better until I was nine or ten. Hated every minute of
it.”

“You never mentioned her
before,” she said.

He shrugged. “Those are
not very pleasant memories, you know.”

“How long since you last
saw her?”

He let out a long breath. “A
long time,” he said. “A very long time. Years before I was arrested. And that
wasn’t fun. Booze and cigarettes. Bad food. The occasional line of coke. They
all take their toll. She used to be really beautiful, but she went downhill
real fast. And as time went by, her boyfriends became worse and worse. Real
scum. Last time I saw her, she looked horrible. She was with this idiot who was
obviously beating her. I tried to shake her up but there was nothing left
inside. She just didn’t care anymore. She was wasted all the time.”

Cowgirl nodded gravely.

“That’s why I have no
patience for this kind of thing,” he said. “I can’t do anything for Laura right
now, but I swear I’m not gonna leave her alone at Mike’s mercy. No way that
bastard’s gonna have his way.”

“I’ll be happy to help you
if I can,” Cowgirl said.

He looked at her and
nodded a quiet thank you. Then they went silent and settled into their waiting position.

*

An hour went by before
Sanford gave a sign of life. She emerged from the mouth of the driveway in her
patrol car, all dressed up for the day in her sheriff’s uniform and drove all
the way to downtown Acton.

Morrison made sure to tail
her cautiously, keeping the unmarked white van out of her sight. At the
station, he watched her cover the distance between her car and the main glass
door in a few long, powerful strides. The natural vigorous athlete. Purposeful.
Ready to attack her day. “There you go. Back to work. Good little soldier,” he
said. “I bet you’re gonna work your ass off in there to try to pin me down.”

“Think so?” Cowgirl said.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “She
really needs me locked up. Big time. You should’ve seen her face last night.
She was so happy. I’m sure she was pissed as hell when they had to release me
this morning. Couldn’t stomach it. That’s why she stayed away at her place.
Otherwise, I bet she would’ve been here at the crack of dawn.”

And work she did. Sheriff
Sanford stayed in the station all morning, afternoon and early evening. During
that time, Morrison came to resent his immobility. Started to wonder if he
wasn’t wasting his time, holding fort like he did in that van with Cowgirl.

“I feel like I should do
more to try to nail her down,” he said, after the boredom borne by the long
wait had had time to settle in. “After all, she’s actively trying to nail
me
down while we’re sitting around in this bloody van.”

“No, no, we need to do
this,” Cowgirl said. “Don’t forget, Harris is working on her in the background.
In the meantime, somebody has to keep tabs on her. Might as well be us.”

“You think Harris is up to
the task?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about him,”
she said. “He knows what he’s doing.”

He cracked a smile. “That’s
right. You know him better than me. Way better.”

Cowgirl gave him a
sideways glance. She knew he was only ribbing her. “Get over it, Morrison. That
was three years ago,” she said.

“Hey, I didn’t mean
anything …”

At 10:30 p.m., Sanford finally
left the station.

Whatever she’d done there
during the day, it had taken its toll. She looked pale and tired. Morrison sat
up behind the wheel.

Now, at this hour on a
Sunday night, following her would be tricky. There weren’t a lot of cars moving
around. He would have to leave her a lot of space.

They watched her pull out
of the parking lot. Wherever she was going, Sanford was not going straight
home. Instead of making a right on Main Street as she would have had to do, she
turned left and slowly disappeared in the distance. Morrison and Cowgirl exchanged
a glance. Then when Sanford was barely visible, Morrison started the engine and
went after her.

Sanford moved at a steady
pace, heading out of downtown, past the once grand houses and the shopping
center, toward the outskirts of town.

“Wonder where she’s
going,” Cowgirl said.

Sanford offered a
telepathic response when she switched on her left turn signal. Morrison
squinted in that direction.

“Looks like she’s going to
the arena, no?” he said.

“I think you’re right,”
she said. “There’s not much else up there.”

He accelerated a bit to
catch up with her. As he came within a hundred feet of the arena parking, he
saw that Sanford had indeed nosed her patrol car in there. He killed his
headlights and pulled up to the curb in a dark spot away from the streetlights.

From their vantage point
they had a great view of the arena. Besides Sanford’s patrol car, there was
only one other car in the parking lot—a big Audi SUV. White or silver, he
couldn’t really say.

Sanford rode up to the
Audi and parked behind it diagonally, as if she wanted to block the way.

Morrison and Cowgirl
looked at each other, puzzled.

Then a wide arena door was
kicked open and a strange, massive hunchback figure emerged in a cone of feeble
light.

Morrison squinted, not
quite sure of what he was seeing.

At that precise moment,
the red and blue lights on top of the patrol car started blinking.

As if Sheriff Sanford was
going to make an arrest.

The hunchback figure stopped
and straightened up, promptly shedding its hump. A big hockey bag dropped to
the ground. Now unburdened by all this weight, the man seemed to gain an inch
or two.

Red and blue blotches kept
lighting up his face in a stroboscopic pulse. Morrison thought he looked
familiar. The man was calm. Stared straight ahead at the patrol car. Seemed to
accept his fate. As if to prove it, he spread his arms open and let go of the
two goalie sticks he held in his right hand.

Morrison expected the
patrol car door to open in a swift movement with Sheriff Sanford holding a gun
to the neutralized figure. Making a move for the arrest.

But that’s not what
happened.

First thing Sanford did
was to kill the red and blue lights. Then she opened her door, but in a casual
way. No rush there at all. No trace of aggression. And when she emerged from
the dark Charger, she was empty-handed.

The man stood about twenty
feet away from the car. It was difficult to see his face. The exterior lights
were too dim. But Morrison had seen that guy before, he was pretty sure.

Sheriff Sanford calmly walked
to the man.

When she came up to him,
she extended her arms to his sides, as if she were about to search him.

That’s when the man
started to move. Up to that moment, he had remained as still as a statue. In a
position that suggested he was ready to be taken into custody. But now, he leaned
forward to meet her and wrapped his arms around her body. Then he ran his hands
down her back. Over her ass. Sanford didn’t oppose him. Quite the opposite. For
all Morrison could see, she was doing the same to him.

Morrison and Cowgirl
exchanged a quick, incredulous, sideways glance.

Sanford and the man were
about the same height. Both tall and fit. Both attractive. They tilted their
heads and kissed, a long deep kiss. While they were locked in their passionate embrace,
they rocked gently, moving into a better light.

And that’s when Morrison
got it.

He finally understood what
had happened with their money.