Fire Point (21 page)

PART THREE

73

Alfonso Fry figured that this just might be his lucky day. Hell, going by his usual luck with women, this might just be the event of a lifetime for him. It was turning out like one of those made-up stories in the back of a dirty magazine, or a scene from a goddamn porno movie. Except it was real and it was actually happening to him.

It had gone down like this. He had pulled into the truck stop just outside Encino to get something to eat and drink enough coffee to keep him going for another six hours on the road. He guessed he’d noticed the little lady with the long red hair and the Daisy Duke denim shorts that hugged her ass hanging around outside the gas station, a huge backpack at her feet. She was kind of hard to miss standing out there, sucking on a lollipop like it was . . . well, never mind what it was like . . . and staring at all the people putting gas in their car.

Alfonso had given her a second look, and he was damned if she hadn’t actually winked at him and licked at that lollipop. He’d figured she was making fun and that her boyfriend would appear any second so he’d put his head down and made for the diner.

The waitress had come over with a menu. He’d ordered coffee and a cheeseburger plate. Next thing he knew the same little redhead had slipped into the seat across from him, grabbed the menu from the table, and said to him, ‘I’m Cherry. I saw you looking at me out there. Thought I’d come say hi.’

He’d looked at her, blinking, like this couldn’t actually be real. He could see that the red hair was some kind of a wig, but that didn’t bother him.

‘Well,’ she’d said, ‘are you going to tell me what’s on the menu, or not?’

He must have opened his mouth without saying anything because she had reached over and pushed his chin back up. ‘You’re drooling,’ she’d said. ‘It’s not a good look.’

‘I don’t have any cash,’ he’d said. She had to be a professional. Just had to be. You found hookers hanging at truck stops and gas stations. But they usually weren’t quite so brazen.

Now the waitress came back with his coffee and shot daggers at the girl. The girl just smiled sweetly and said, ‘I’ll take some coffee too. Separate checks, though. He’s broke.’

The waitress disappeared. Alfonso was slowly regaining his composure. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ he said. ‘It’s just I assumed . . .’

‘Well,’ the redhead said, ‘you assumed wrong. I need a lift, and I figured with that big load of wood you’re hauling you might be just the man to give me one.’

Alfonso spat out the sip of coffee he’d taken and began to cough. Cherry grabbed some paper napkins and handed them to him. It was the way she’d said it. With the emphasis on the word ‘wood’. Goddamn, thought Alfonso, this was just plain crazy. Pure porn movie.

‘So?’ said Cherry. ‘Can you give me a ride, or not?’ She made a big show of looking around for another prospect before batting her eyelids at him one more time. ‘I’ll make it worth your while.’

‘How old are you anyway?’ he said, feeling better about himself now that he’d actually regained his composure sufficiently to ask a question.

‘Old enough,’ she’d said. ‘Now, is it a yes? Or should I find myself a real gentleman?’

He grabbed another menu from the stack in the metal holder and handed it to her. ‘Pick anything you like. On me.’

She smiled at him, and it suddenly seemed real.

She rubbed at his crotch as he settled back into the cab. He rolled a kink out of his neck. He’d decided to go with it, whatever it was. Maybe he wasn’t the fifty-something slob that he saw in the mirror. Perhaps other people saw a different man.

‘So where we headed?’ said Cherry.

‘Baja, California. That work for you?’

‘Sure,’ she said, leaning over to dig inside that huge backpack she was toting. ‘But maybe we can take a slight detour first?’ she said, coming up with a handgun.

He felt the cold metal press against his temple and he froze. With her free hand she lifted off the wig to reveal close-cropped hair. The cute sing-song voice was gone.

‘Do exactly what I say when I say it, and you’ll live. Do anything that I haven’t asked you to do, and I’ll kill you. Do you understand me?’

Alfonso’s brain scrambled frantically.
What was that saying? If something looked too good to be true, it probably was. Goddamn right. Goddamn right.

74

Krank twisted the throttle and the red Honda Rancher quad bike bucked up the slope toward the line of sycamores. He edged it through the trees and stopped. He climbed off and dumped his pack on the ground. A little further back there were half a dozen eucalyptus trees he’d scouted previously. They would burn fast and intensely. The scrub and duff between them and the sycamores would take care of the rest. The ground was dry as a bone. Conditions could not have been better.

Opening the top of his pack, he set to work. He had just finished laying out what he needed when he heard the snap of a branch. He looked round to see a man in hiking boots, shorts and a T-shirt walking toward him. He was in his late sixties with a shock of white hair and glasses.

‘Hey!’ the hiker shouted. ‘Are you crazy? You can’t set a campfire here.’

Hunkered down with the Rancher quad bike between him and the man, Krank slipped his left hand back into the pack, feeling for his gun.

The hiker kept on coming. Krank waited until he was within ten yards before standing up.

The hiker saw the gun and stopped where he was. ‘Take it easy there,’ he said.

Krank saw the flicker of recognition flit across the man’s face. He didn’t say anything, but his body tensed, and Krank knew that he’d recognized him. The next few minutes would decide the man’s fate.

‘What’s your name?’ Krank asked.

‘Look, son, take it easy.’

‘Your name? I won’t ask you a third time,’ said Krank.

‘Ben. Ben Miles,’ the hiker said.

‘You live round here?’
‘The Palisades.’

‘You live alone, or with family?’ Krank asked.

Krank knew this would go one of two ways now. Either Ben, like a true beta male, would try to establish a connection, and build rapport, or he’d realize what Krank was really asking him. If he did the latter, and he lived alone, he would lie. Krank wasn’t asking the hiker if he lived alone, he was asking him if anyone would miss him.

Ben Miles smiled. ‘My wife passed a few years ago. I live alone.’

‘That’s too bad,’ said Krank, walking toward him, and shooting him once in the chest from less than a yard away. He stepped aside and the hiker fell forward.

Krank left him where he lay for the coyotes to deal with and went back to the task in hand.

75

Something had been gnawing away at Bob Dersh ever since his visit from the private security consultant. More specifically he’d been thinking about the pile of firecrackers that had been placed in one of the bathroom stalls not that long ago.

It was just – off. Not that the student body didn’t pull the odd prank. They did. They were like any bunch of college kids. A little more laid back, perhaps, but a few of them could make life difficult for the faculty when they wanted, especially if alcohol was involved. This had been different, though. During the day. Intended to disrupt. But without there being any obvious pay-off. It had just seemed dumb and pointless.

The date and time had been logged. They still had the footage from all the security cameras on their system. Dersh pulled it up. He and his boss had already reviewed it. This time he went back a little further.

For obvious reasons the college wouldn’t allow cameras in the bathrooms so the closest he could get was the corridor outside. Unfortunately the way the camera was mounted there didn’t actually cover the bathroom door so he had to assume that anyone walking down the corridor was a possible suspect. He started reviewing the footage an hour before the incident.

To say it was mind-numbing was an understatement. Although the college kids liked to present themselves as individuals, they all pretty much dressed alike. It would have been easy enough for someone to blend. He got to the point where the firecrackers went off and people began running down the corridor. He hadn’t picked out a single person from the crowd.

There was a camera positioned at the entrance to that particular building. He repeated the process with the footage uploaded from that position. Forty minutes in, he stopped. He pulled the footage back. She was shortish, slim build, white, wearing a cap and keeping her head down so that her face was obscured by the brim. But just before she passed beyond the gaze of the camera, she looked around.

Dersh pulled the sheet of pictures Lock had given him from the in-tray on his desk and smoothed them out flat on his desk. He clicked the mouse, pulling the footage back one more time, and hit play. As the young woman turned he clicked again, freezing the image. His eyes swept between the screen and the pictures.

He couldn’t be a hundred percent certain, but it looked like it was Gretchen. But why? If she wanted to get her own back against Professor Cristopher, why go for such a lame prank? It made no sense. She had gained nothing from it. No one had been hurt. Professor Cristopher hadn’t even known about it.

76

Lock drove. Ty rode shotgun up front while Tarian sat in back. She had showered, dressed, put on make-up and, thanks to Lock’s persistence, had had something to eat before they’d left the apartment. At this stage, Lock knew, the key to having some chance of recovery from this type of sudden trauma was to stick to the basics. It was easy to go days without bathing or changing clothes or eating. The hours folded in on themselves, and a person could slowly sink into a hole it became impossible to climb out of.

They were heading downtown for a briefing from the LAPD. Not that Lock expected anything new. Everyone was doing their best but already the media’s focus had begun to shift incrementally away from the manhunt. It hadn’t taken much. The world’s attention span was increasingly brief.

There were still multiple sightings each day of Krank, Gretchen and the other suspect, but none of them had checked out. The only thing that would ratchet interest back up was freshly spilled blood, and that hadn’t been any. Already there was speculation that California’s most wanted had left the country, slipping across the border into Mexico. It was a nice thought, which was precisely why Lock didn’t believe it for a second.

His cell phone rang. He hit the answer button. ‘Ryan Lock.’

‘Mr Lock, it’s Bob Dersh here from Barnes College. I found something you might want to take a look at. I don’t know what it means, if anything, but I thought I’d let you know in any case.’

77

Alfonso Fry was alone in the cab of his truck, but he was more frightened now than he had been with a gun pointed at him. A gunshot would have been clean. Done right, it might have been quick too. He wouldn’t have known much about it. But this was different.

A trickle of sweat ran down his back into the crack of his ass. He wanted more than anything to reach back and scratch but he couldn’t move his right hand. It had been duct-taped to the steering wheel. He didn’t dare move his left hand either. He had been warned about what would happen if he did. The list of what he could and couldn’t do was a long one.

And to make sure that he complied, the collar was around his neck. It was grey and padded and looked like a cross between the squishy travel pillows they sold at airports and the kind of collar a vet fitted around a dog’s neck to stop it worrying at a wound and tearing out stitches.

Attached to the dash were two other devices. The first was a satellite navigation system. It showed a pre-programmed route, which, as of right now, was taking him down Pacific Coast Highway toward Santa Monica. The second was a smartphone running a Skype-type phone and video application. It relayed a live feed of Alfonso as he drove. From time to time someone would come on the line to check on him, and relay additional instructions.

There was one other piece of equipment. A clear plastic tube attached to a catheter dangled from his zipper, dead-ending in a plastic jug on the floor of his cab.

The voice came back. It was the male this time.

‘How are you, Alfonso?’ it said.

What a question, he thought. He was terrified. He was convinced he was going to die, one way or another.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. What else could he say?

‘That’s good,’ said the voice. ‘Now, I need you to slow up a little. Take your speed down to thirty-five until told otherwise. We don’t want you getting you there too early.’

‘Where am I going?’ Alfonso asked.

He got no answer. They were already gone. He looked at the phone as it blinked red, capturing his every move. The collar seemed to tighten, a noose ready to choke him to death.

78

Wearing a blonde wig, Gretchen stared wide-eyed at the two-hundred-pound truck driver, his gut spilling over his belt as he waddled back toward his rig.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked. He sipped at a Big Gulp soda. She could tell that she might have better luck if she was dressed as a hot dog. He seemed skeptical.

Her cell phone rang. She struggled to contain her anger. She picked up her pack and moved off to one side as the trucker started to get back into his cab.

At the other end of the line, Krank said: ‘What’s going on? You done yet?’

‘Last one,’ she said.

‘We’re on the clock with this,’ he said.

‘I know. So quit bugging me.’

She killed the call and hopped up next to the cab. ‘Could you give me a ride?’

The driver burped loudly. She could smell the stink of bologna and mustard on his breath wafting toward her. ‘What’s in it for me, sweet cheeks?’ he asked, staring at her breasts.

‘An experience you’ll never forget,’ said Gretchen.