Pawnbroker: A Thriller (27 page)

Chapter 124

A
s the showdown drew near, a surprising but welcome calm spread over me. One moment at a time; that’s how I would approach this battle. To do otherwise, to start thinking about how it might turn out in the end, could only tear down my strength. Although I felt no particular right to expect an answer, I bowed my head and said an earnest prayer.

In books and movies, heroes regularly take on the forces of evil and confidently fight their way to victory. I’m no hero. I spend my days making loans against VCRs and chainsaws. Those heroes often have the CIA, or the FBI, or some other alphabet agency behind them. I had a lady who spent her time doing background checks. They had satellites in space, missiles, rooms full of computers. I had a beat-up computer nerd in his Arkansas living room. This was no movie, no book. My fate, along with the fate of those I loved, would be determined right here, on the very real waters of the Tennessee River.

“Everything still going according to plan?” I asked.

“Yo,” Jimmy said through the cabin speakers. I was still getting used to this guy and his vocabulary. “Almost ready for a test.”

“Just say when. “

“
Comprendo, muchacho.”

I could hear him over the speakers, typing, muttering to himself. I looked at Penny. She paced the pilothouse, back and forth, back and forth.

“Here we go,” Jimmy said.

“What?”

“Check the left screen.”

I looked. Penny looked over my shoulder. The screen changed from an instrument cluster to what looked like a radar readout.

“See that blip?” Jimmy said.

“Yup,” Penny said.

“What is it?” I said.

“Boat.”

“I figured as much, Jimmy. What else?”

“Three miles in front of you, far side of the lock. Good-sized, probably another yacht. Coming your way.”

Chapter 125

ARLINGTON RESIDENCE

WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS

No doubt about it, this was one of the greatest hacks of all time. It was almost worth being beat up for. No, it was worth being beat up for. He’d make a visit to the ER when this was over, get some drugs to ease the pain. He had a digital video camera set up behind him on a tripod, recording the whole affair. Tomorrow, he’d watch it, write a kick-ass account of the whole affair, and post it to his blog for the world to see.

He couldn’t swim and was petrified of water, so he didn’t have much experience with boats, but that
Lady of Justice was one sweet ride. His rightmost computer monitor was dedicated to her video feeds, forward-looking on the top half of the screen, and rear-, no, make that aft-looking, on the bottom. What the Lady saw, he saw. At the touch of a button, he could see inside the pilothouse, where Penny Lane and the Bolton dude were. He started humming the tune to “Penny Lane.” She was hotter than hot.

He had wheeled in The Chair, normally reserved for the most intense gaming sessions, but definitely appropriate for this op. It was an Aeron Highly Adjustable, customized to his needs. Half the custom split keyboard was built into the left armrest, half into the right. Secured on a platform on the right, the best joystick in existence. All wireless. Geek utopia, baby.

They had gone touchy-feely on him. Time to rein them back in. “Can we move past the mush fest you two are having and get back to the test?”

“Proceed when ready,” Bolton said.

Jimmy raised his hands to his face, looked at his fingertips the way a gunslinger might examine his gun, lowered them into place, and said, “Let us go forth.”

Chapter 126

Penny crawled over the gunwale and into the john-boat that still hung suspended at the Lady’s stern. I worked the winch and lowered it into the water. Penny released the harness latches. I wound the apparatus back onto the Lady, then dropped a duffel down to her. She pulled the starter rope on the outboard. Nothing. It sputtered on the second pull, and caught on the third. The scent of gas and oil floated up as Penny gently throttled up the twenty-horse motor and pulled away on the black water. She looked back and gave me a raised thumb. I returned it and headed back to the Lady’s pilothouse.

“Okay, boys and girls,” Jimmy said, “the enemy draweth nigh.”

“Are they through the lock?” I said.

“Just came out.”

I shoved the throttles all the way forward and felt the smooth thrum of the big diesels as she picked up speed. A few minutes later, I saw another yacht a half-mile ahead. When we were a hundred yards apart I eased back. A few minutes later we were side by side, my starboard to their starboard. I switched on dynamic positioning, drew a deep breath and said, “Here I go.”

“Gray?” Penny said over the radio headset in my ear.

“Yeah.”

“Be careful.”

It struck me right then that I loved the sound of her voice. Loved the thought of her. In just a few days, I had developed deep feelings for this woman.

“Penny,” I said, “I want you to know that...well...I...” I sighed. “You be careful too, okay?” Then I opened the door at the rear of the pilothouse and stepped out onto the deck. Docker was standing at their starboard rail, roughly midway down the length of the boat, which was a little smaller than the
Lady. He had a gun pointed at me, a red light glowing beneath its muzzle. I glanced down and saw the brilliant red dot on my chest, then looked into Docker’s eyes.

“My kids. My father. I want to see them,” I said.

“Where’s the merchandise?” Docker said.

I shook my head. “Not until I see them.”

I heard a brief electronic squeal, then a voice blared from the PA speakers on the other boat: RoboVoice. Which didn’t surprise me. This had gone above Ballard and the real boss wasn’t taking chances. “Mr. Bolton, my patience with you has expired. I want my property and I want it now.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Then we have a real problem.”

“Don’t worry, it’s nearby. When I get my kids and my dad, you’ll get it.”

A pause.

“They’re not here.”

My gut tightened and my heart raced.

“Don’t worry,” RoboVoice said with an evil-sounding electro-chuckle. “They’re nearby.”

We hadn’t prepared for this. Our meeting place, in the middle of a river, was designed specifically to prevent it. I felt like an idiot. We had a plan to protect our position in the swap. Did I think we were the only ones smart enough to think of that?

“What do you propose?” I said.

When RoboVoice spoke again, I could hear the malice in his voice even through the disguise.

“I don’t propose anything. Instead, I’ll tell you exactly what to do, and if you ever want to see your family again, you will do exactly what I say. Do you understand?”

I didn’t answer.

“I will chop your brats into pieces and scatter them up and down this river for one hundred fucking miles. Do—you—understand?”

I nodded.

“Good.”

Since he saw the nod, he had to be in a position to see me. I quickly scanned the windows but saw nothing.

Docker motioned for me to board their boat, then stepped back as I made the short jump. He raised a finger to his ear and stood still for a moment, obviously getting instructions through an earpiece. A few seconds later, he said, “Hands on the wall and spread your legs.”

I did it. He kept his gun on me with one hand and patted me down with the other. He took my Sig and the two extra magazines, a knife I had tucked in my rear waistband, and worst of all, he pulled the earpiece from my ear and the radio from my belt. He motioned toward the stern with his pistol.

“Let’s go for a ride,” he said.

Chapter 127

U
sing a small head-mounted flashlight—it was fitted with a red lens to preserve her night vision—Penny checked the chart in her lap, then looked at a handheld GPS unit. Up ahead, the channel took a forty-five degree curve to the right. The GPS, which they had programmed with the aid of charts and satellite imagery from the internet, marked her distance from the old building at 1,236 yards, just around the bend. She killed the outboard and moved to the front of the boat, then used a wooden paddle to scull into a small cove on the right.

She stepped out of the boat and her foot sank into mud above the ankle. When she pointed the light at the ground, her heart jumped. Footprints. Fresh ones. She pushed the transmit button on the radio pack.

“Gray, come in,” she said, just above a whisper. No answer. “Gray, you there?” Still nothing. Her heart beat faster. She stood still, listening for sounds that didn’t belong but hearing only the “music of the night,” to borrow an old phrase from her father. Crickets. Cicadas. A bullfrog croaked and another answered.

She looked closer at the footprints and saw that they led into the woods, toward the building. She retrieved the duffel from the boat, slung it over her shoulder. After checking the GPS one last time, she too headed into the woods, but not along the existing trail. If someone was ahead of her, and she was sure that was the case, she didn’t want to walk into an ambush.

In the woods, the air was heavy and thick, filled with the pungent scent of vegetation that sprang from the rich, moist ground, then rotted in the absence of sunlight. Every few minutes Penny checked in with Jimmy and tried to reach Gray. No luck on the latter. That worried her, but she had no choice. She could only work the plan and hope he was all right.

Chapter 128

Rocky had picked up Ray Earl’s bicycle tracks before sundown, but he was having a hard time catching him on foot. He had studied an old county map that had been passed down from his daddy, the kind of map you couldn’t buy at the gas station. It was a hunter’s map, filled with markings of game trails and other tells that came in mighty handy to a year-round hunter.

The map showed two ways into the spot where the building stood. The first was by an old government channel that left the river, passed right in front of the building, then looped back out to the river about three miles downstream. Ray Earl had taken the other route, the same one they’d been on the night they found the building. It was an old road, bad grown up and hadn’t been tended to in probably fifty years, but it was still plenty wide enough for Ray Earl to make good time on his bike.

Rocky had grown up walking the woods and riding the river. He knew the sounds of the country the way a guitar player knew his chords. Something was going on. In the past hour he’d heard three different boats, all running outboards, put into the channel on the upstream end of the loop. The first two had gone quiet a while back, probably parked near the building. The third one sounded like it was about halfway between the river and the building. Then, just a few minutes ago, he heard something else. Not a boat, though. A jet ski. It was headed toward the building too, but it came in on the downstream end of the channel.

He didn’t know just what was up, but he knew what he’d seen in that building that night—couldn’t forget it, truth be told—and he didn’t want a damn thing more to do with it. He wanted to find Ray Earl’s goofy ass and get them the hell out. He still didn’t know what he was gonna do about the sheriff being after him, but he’d jump that ditch when he found it. He suddenly stopped, listening hard. Something was moving about a hundred yards in front of him. He listened for a few seconds more, then broke into a jog.

Chapter 129

P
enny approached from the rear, where the woods came within twenty-five yards of the building. Still in the cover of the trees, she moved slowly, testing each step before she put her weight down, determined not to step on something that would snap and give her position away. When she made it to the edge of the woods, she lay down and studied the building. It was long, over a hundred feet, built of clapboard that had long since shed its paint and turned the lifeless gray of old wood. Six windows were spaced out along its length, but she couldn’t see anything inside. She retrieved a pair of binoculars from the duffel and saw that the windows were covered from the inside with something black. Garbage bags? She could also now see a whitish light inside the building, visible at a couple of places where the black didn’t completely cover a window.

After ten minutes of scanning the area, she saw no one. Penny stowed the binoculars and prepared to cross the open area between the woods and the building. She stayed on her belly in a commando crawl, moving slowly, patiently. Every three feet or so, she reached back and carefully pulled the duffel up beside her. The short trip seemed to take forever. When she was within ten yards of the building, the ground turned from hard dirt to gravel, the remnants of an old unpaved parking lot, she guessed. Many of the rocks had sharp edges, and the crawl became not just uncomfortable, but painful. She forced herself to go forward, fighting the urge to stand and run the rest of the way.

Finally, she reached the building and rose to a crouch. She looked at her hands and saw that they were bleeding from a dozen small cuts. Staying low, she moved left to the nearest window, then stood. She had been right: The windows were covered from the inside with garbage bags. This one had a two-inch gap at the bottom, which was about eye level.

She was looking in on a large room, lit only by a pair of Coleman lanterns. Straight ahead, she saw nothing but the lanterns. She looked left. Also nothing, just empty space, but when she looked to the right side of the room, she saw movement. That part of the room was dim, at the edge of the right lantern’s arc of light. It took a moment for her eyes to focus and her brain to interpret. When they did, she couldn’t stop a small gasp from escaping her mouth. She had to do something.

She thought for a moment, then dropped back to a crouch and duck-walked to the left end of the building. She needed to hurry, but she also couldn’t get stupid. Not now. Staying low, she turned the corner. And found herself staring into the muzzle of a gun.