Madman on a Drum (4 page)

“I thought you had left,” she said. Her voice didn't sound much different than Bobby's. Her fist was clenched, and for a moment I wondered what I would do if she punched me. Nothing, I decided.

“How's Kate?” Bobby asked. Shelby turned her head as he approached. “How's Katie holding up?” He wrapped his arm around Shelby's shoulder.

“Katie—she's asleep. She fell asleep.”

“That's good.”

“Yes.”

“How are you?”

“Me?”

“How are you holding up?”

“I'm not.”

Shelby rested her head against Bobby's chest, and he wrapped both of his arms around her and pulled her close.

“Bobby, what if—what if…”

“Shhhhh.” He stroked her short blond hair. “It'll be all right, you'll see.”

I turned away. I would have liked to do that, too, comfort Shelby. Only it wasn't my place. It never would be.

I returned to the dining room table and sat down. A few moments later Shelby and Bobby joined me, Bobby's arm still around her shoulder. Shelby set the books on the table. They were Bobby's—and my— high school and college yearbooks.

“You said before that you might know this—this person,” she said. “Maybe these will help.”

“Very good thinking,” Bobby said and kissed her hair just above the ear.

“I'm going to get some coffee and go back upstairs. I want to be there if Katie wakes up. I don't want her to be frightened.”

“Good idea,” Bobby said. He kissed Shelby again, this time on the cheek.

Before she left, Shelby rested her hand oh so briefly on the point of my shoulder and gave me a gentle squeeze. I turned to look at her, but she was already walking away. I caught Honsa's eye as she passed him on her way to the kitchen. He was smiling the same reassuring smile he always smiled.

 

It was 6:05 by my watch when the phone rang. “Wait, wait,” Honsa said, and we waited until the tech agent started his tape recorder and contacted the phone company. “All right,” the agent said. Bobby answered the phone.

The disguised voice said, “Did you talk to McKenzie?”

“I spoke to him.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“You stallin' me, Bobby? You got the Feds there? You tryin' to get a fix on my phone?”

“You said I couldn't trace your phone even if I wanted to.”

“That's right. And guess what? I got a new phone, new car, new freeway.”

“You're very clever.”

“Cleverer than you know, Bobby. Ain't gonna fuck with me this time.”

This time,
my inner voice repeated.

Harry was standing next to me. He whispered in my ear. “This asshole sure talks a lot.”

“He's overconfident,” I said.

Harry shook his head. “Just the opposite.”

“You got the money?” the kidnapper asked.

“Not yet,” Bobby said into the speaker.

“Not yet?”

“It'll take some time.”

“Fuckin' McKenzie came through, though, didn't he? Didn't he?”

“Yes.”

The kidnapper seemed relieved. “Knew he would,” he said. “Knew he would cough it up, McKenzie, fuck. Bet you didn't have to ask 'im twice, neither. Man do anything for a friend. Is he there? Bet he's there. Let me talk to him.”

“You're talking to me.”

“I talk to who I want. I'm makin' the rules here. You want me to prove it, Bobby? Huh? You want me to do somethin' to prove it?”

“No.”

Honsa caught Bobby's eye and gestured with his head toward me. Bobby nodded and gave me the receiver.

“Who's calling, please?” I asked.

A laugh.

“Who's callin', please. Fuck, McKenzie, you are such a comedian.”

“A joke a minute,” I said.

“Yeah, you're a joke, all right.”

“Okay, now you're just being mean.”

“You wanna see mean? I'll show you mean on that little girl.”

I didn't respond.

“You still there, McKenzie?”

“I'm here.”

“Not so funny, now, are ya?”

“No.”

“Ain't havin' no fun at all, are ya? You were a big one for havin' fun, too. Used to say it all the time. ‘Let's have some fun, guys.' ”

Bobby's eyes grew wide and an expression of complete astonishment transfixed his face.
He knows,
my inner voice told me.
He knows!

“Times have changed,” I said.

“Yes, they have. You got the money ready?”

Honsa held up a piece of notepaper on which he had written a single word:
Time.

“It'll take a while,” I said. “I have to wait until the markets open in the morning before I can liquidate my investments and transfer the proceeds into a money market account…”

“Liquidate some investments, transfer proceeds—you changed, man.”

“Have I?”

“I remember when… Ahh, never mind.”

“Maybe later,” I said.

“Maybe never. I ain't your friend no more, McKenzie. You or Bobby.”

“I was thinking that myself,” I said aloud, even as my inner voice asked,
Is he daring us to guess who he is?

“I want the money in cash,” the kidnapper said. “Old bills. Nonsequential serial numbers. Twenty-five thousand twenties, ten thousand fifties. Got it?”

“It's going to take—”

“I don't care how long it takes. Only you gotta know, the longer it takes, the longer we keep the girl. Got it?”

“We” again.

“Got it.”

He hung up.

I looked at the tech agent. He was holding both hands over the headphones covering his ears.

“We couldn't get a fix this time,” he said. He squinted, opened his eyes, and removed the headphones. “He could have been using a Trac-Fone or some other prepaid cell phone that's not traceable.”

“No, no, no.” Bobby had the Central High School yearbook open and was furiously turning pages until he found the one he wanted in the seniors' gallery. “Yes.”

He stabbed a photo hard with his finger.

I looked over his shoulder. First photo from the right, third from the top.

“You got him?” asked Honsa. “You know who he is?”

“Scottie Thomforde,” Bobby said. “First we get Victoria back…”

“Later, we'll kill him,” I said. “Later, we'll kill them all.”

Agent Honsa pretended he didn't hear the threat. Instead, he propped his forearms on the back of a chair and leaned toward us, studying first me and then Bobby with cool professionalism. I guessed that he had heard threats like mine before and was deciding how seriously to take it.

“Who is Thomforde?” he said. “What is your relationship?”

“Scottie Thomforde is from the neighborhood,” Bobby said. “He grew up six, seven blocks from here. Near Aldine. His mother still lives there.”

“Aldine is a city park,” I said. “Sometimes we had ball games up there. Scottie played with us.”

“That's how I connected the dots,” Bobby said. “When he said, ‘Let's have some fun, guys.' We used to say that just before we went out onto the field. ‘Let's have some fun out there.' ”

“I used to say it,” I said.

“What happened to him?” Honsa asked.

“He quit,” I said.

“We were pretty tight for a while,” said Bobby. “Except he quit playing sports in high school to take up music.”

“He was a madman on the drums,” I said. “Used to carry sticks with him and beat out a riff on anything, sidewalk, hood of a car, the tables at Burger Chef—drove the manager crazy. We used to call him ‘Sticks' for a while. Scottie got a kick out of that, but the nickname never took.”

“After a while, he just drifted away,” Bobby said. “Without the game, we had nothing to keep us together, nothing to share, nothing to keep the friendship alive. We'd see him around; we were still friendly, only Scottie began spending most of his time with his musician friends. Some of them formed a band and played small gigs. High school dances. Played across the street once at Merriam Park. They were pretty good. Covered the Stones, Bob Seger, Journey, Elvis Costello.”

“Drugs?” Honsa asked. I nearly laughed. Despite everything, he was still the Man. 'Course, I had been the Man once, too.

“Some grass, some hash, plenty of beer,” I said. “No more than the rest of us.”

“Hey, hey,” said Bobby. “Watch it with that ‘rest of us' stuff. I have a reputation to protect.”

“If you can call it that,” I said, and we both smiled.

For a moment he had forgotten about Victoria. For a moment he was the old Bobby. Only for a moment. His heart wrenched him back into the present, and he turned away from us, a pained expression on his face. The family photograph I had nudged off the wall earlier was still resting against the baseboard. He bent to retrieve it. “Tell him the rest,” he said and returned the photograph to its hook, making sure it was perfectly straight.

I told Honsa and the other agents that we used to hang out at the Burger Chef on Marshall and Cleveland when we were kids. After we all started driving, it became less of a hangout than a gathering place. One day, during the summer before we started college, Bobby walked to Burger Chef to meet me—it was only a few blocks from here. Along the way he met Scottie and an older guy that Scottie played music with named Dale Fulbright. They were sitting on the curb on Marshall Avenue directly across the street from a mom-and-pop convenience store—it's not even there anymore. Bobby said, “Hi, guys. What's going on?” Scottie said, “Nothing.” Fulbright said, “Leave us alone.” So Bobby continued on to Burger Chef, bought a cherry cola, and sat in a corner booth waiting for me. I drove up a few minutes later in my father's car. “What do you want to do?” “I don't know, what do you want to do?” That was pretty much how we began all of our conversations back then. I saw Scottie and Fulbright on the curb, and I asked what that was all about. Bobby said, “Who knows?” We drove off. I don't remember where we went. It must not have been much fun, though, because we returned about an hour later to find cops all over the place, especially in front of the store. We wandered over, asked what was going on. We were told that a couple of guys armed with a .45 just robbed the place. A plainclothes cop asked, “Did you see anyone hanging around the store?” Bobby answered, “I saw Scottie Thomforde and Dale Fulbright sitting on the curb about an hour ago.” The cops drove to Scottie's house and knocked on the door. Mrs. Thomforde answered. The cops said, “We would like to speak with your son.” That was all it took. Scottie broke down, started crying, said he was sorry, said he had never done anything like that before, said it was all Fulbright's fault and asked to be forgiven. Fulbright, on the other hand—no one ever confused him with a scholar—answered his door with the .45 in his hand. He shot a cop. The cops shot him. They killed him. The cop he shot had only a flesh wound, but now everyone was angry and they couldn't take it out on Fulbright. So even though Scottie was two months shy of his eighteenth birthday, had no previous record, and had nothing to do with the shooting, the county attorney went for the max, aggravated robbery in the first, forty-eight months. Scottie served thirty-two. Ruined his life. Scottie blamed—

“Lieutenant Dunston,” Honsa said.

“It never occurred to me that I was ratting out a friend,” Bobby said. “Never entered my mind.”

“It's what got us thinking about becoming cops,” I said.

“You said Thomforde served thirty-two months,” Honsa reminded me. “Yes. Except that was just the beginning. He's been in and out of prison ever since.”

“Why now? Why wait all these years to get revenge on Lieutenant Dunston?”

“I don't know.”

“Why is he angry at you?”

“Up until now, I didn't know he was.”

“McKenzie did him a favor once,” Bobby said. “Before that first jolt in Stillwater, Scottie got into trouble and McKenzie helped him out.”

“Something changed,” Honsa said.

“Something,” I said.

“I have his record,” the tech agent said. All this time he had been working his laptop and I hadn't noticed.

Honsa peered at the computer screen. “Last crime—he did a short stretch in Stillwater for check forgery, been out for about six months, released to a halfway house…” Honsa's head came up from the laptop and fixed me with his eyes. His reassuring smile had been replaced with something hard. “It's in the Badlands.”

“Let's go get him,” Bobby said. He had his Glock out of its holster, and he was checking the load.

“Go where?” Harry said. “I doubt he's calling from the halfway house—”

“Let's go,” Bobby insisted.

“Don't even think about it,” Honsa said.

“I'm going to get my daughter back.”

“You're not leaving this house.”

“Don't try to stop me.”

Honsa put himself between Bobby and the front door. “Think, Lieutenant Dunston, about what you're going to do,” he said.

“I'm thinking about my daughter.”

“So am I.”

“Boys, boys, boys,” chanted Harry.

“Shut the hell up, Wilson,” Bobby said. He waved the Glock at him.
Bobby doesn't wave guns,
I told myself. Only this was a different Bobby than the one I knew. I wondered what I was going to do about it when Bobby reached for the doorknob and Honsa moved to intercept him.

Shelby called from the staircase. “Bobby.” She was sitting on the steps and peering through the posts that supported the banister, holding one in each hand like the bars of a prison.

Bobby turned toward her.

“Listen to what he has to say,” she said.

Honsa took his cue. “Scottie Thomforde isn't holding all the cards anymore,” he said, “but he still holds the most important one. He has Victoria. That's what we have to think about now.”

“I am thinking about her,” Bobby said.

“No, you're not, Lieutenant Dunston. You're thinking about what you want to do to Thomforde.”

Bobby stared hard at Honsa for a few beats, then dropped his eyes to the Glock in his hand. He slowly holstered it.

“Victoria comes first,” Honsa said. “Thomforde, now that we know who he is, we can pick him up anytime. He's not going anywhere. Until we get Victoria back safe and sound, we want to give him the illusion of space. We want him to think that he's in control, that he has options. The last thing we want—the very last thing—is for him to panic, and if he sees us coming, he might do just that. Lieutenant Dunston, if Thomforde feels trapped, if he feels that his plans are shit and that everything is going against him, he's not going to blame us. Or himself. He's going to blame the girl.”

“I understand,” Bobby said.

“Do you?”

“Yes. But…”

“But what?”

“So many things can go wrong. You know that. My fault, your fault, his fault, nobody's fault—so many things can go wrong that we can't allow this opportunity to go by. If we can find him…”

“What about his partner?” Honsa asked. “We know Thomforde has at least one. He keeps saying ‘we' and ‘we're,' and then there's Katie's story. She said a man grabbed your daughter and carried her back to the van. Who was driving the van?”

“So Scottie has a partner—”

“What is he going to do if we arrest Thomforde?”

“We don't have to arrest him. We can surveil Scottie until he leads us to Victoria.”

“How do we find him without tipping our hand?”

We all took a few moments to think about it. Harry supplied the answer. “Thomforde's parole officer.”