Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 1 - Combust the Sun (23 page)

I
bolted out of the car and raced to the double doors of the front lobby, getting
caught in a jumble of elevators and staircases as I tried the quickest route to
get to Callie's condo. I hit the fire-escape doors on the twelfth floor, panic
stricken and out of breath, as I raced to 1201. My mind kept up a frantic
dialogue.
Why did you let her go upstairs by herself? That s why she said
she loved you, because she had a premonition that she 'd never see you again.
Why didn't she tell me that? Because she tells you things and you ignore them
or make fun of them.
The door was ajar. I pulled my gun and burst inside.
There was no one there. I moved quickly through the rooms calling Callie's
name, the stark white living room, once sensual elegance, now cold, white clouds
of nothingness.

As I
came back to the front room, I saw the blood on the white carpet, and on the
wall and the doorknob, where she had held on while someone pulled her away. My
heart sank. I checked the parking lot, visible from Callie's front window,
while I called Wade. He responded immediately, putting out a call to all units
in the surrounding area. I'd searched the parking garage and storage areas by
the time Wade arrived. There was no sign of Callie or her kidnapper. I
panicked, realizing how easy it was for someone to be sucked off the planet,
never to be heard from again.

Wade
tried to calm me down by reminding me that whoever had Callie was merely
holding her to trade for the stone, since Raider had failed to do the job. Wade
ordered a phone trace, and in forty-five minutes we had a man in Callie's
living room with a recorder and listening device waiting for the call. Wade
radioed officers and made suggestions for the search while I paced.
This is
completely unlike me,
I thought,
immobile and trusting someone else to
figure things out.
It was just that I was immersed in Callie, so much so,
that I could not have felt weaker if someone had simply pulled my heart out
with his bare hands. I was frantic to the point of being physically ill that
the kidnapper would kill her. Wade came over and put his big bear paw around
me. "We'll find her," he said, and I didn't trust my voice to answer.

The
phone rang. I picked up the receiver at the same moment the tracer was set in
motion, and now, like some bad movie, it was my job to get the caller to talk
until we had located him.

"Teague?"
It was Callie's slightly shaky voice.

"Callie,
where are you?" I begged.

Wade
looked down at the caller ID but it read Anonymous.

I
could hear scuffling over the phone, and the receiver was obviously yanked out
of her hand. "You have the real stone. Bring it to us. Two minutes late
and we cut her up."

"Put
her on the phone." I tried to sound calm and hard.

"This
evening at 8:50, you will park your car across the street from the Memory Park
Cemetery, walk through the gate, and stand in the shadow of the bell tower. At
nine o'clock the groundskeeper will lock the gates, locking you inside. When
the cemetery is clear of all visitors and it's dark, someone will approach you
at the tower, and you will hand over the rock. After that, you'll walk east
down the slope, then south to a marker that says Elliston. You'll find your
friend waiting for you there. If anything goes awry, you'll still find her
there, but in pieces."

"Let
me talk to her again or there's no deal."

"I
can cut her up now." He laughed, but he put Callie on.

"Teague,
the Moon's in Aries at two degrees, thirty-two minutes. So pick up the pace.
They mean business. The—" Her kidnapper pulled the phone away as Callie
screamed in the background. The line went dead.

"Did
you get it?" I nearly shouted at the cop manning the trace.

"No,
not long enough."

"We
can send men to the moon, but we can't do a simple trace in thirty
seconds!"

Wade
tried to calm me down. "What was she saying about the moon?"

"I
don't know. It's astrology. She knows I can't understand it..." Even as I
was saying it, I realized that she was trying to tell me something in code.

"You
know any good astrologers?" I asked Wade. "I need someone to tell me
what she means." Wade replayed the tape, and we both jotted down the
message, "The Moon's in Aries at two degrees, thirty-two minutes. So pick
up the pace. They mean business." Wade promised to track down a lady he
knew and get her to decipher it. I began scrounging through Callie's
bookshelves, which looked like the library on the Starship
Enterprise:
UFO
books, celestial navigation, paranormal experiences, channeling, interstellar
communication, and dozens of books on astrology. I opened several and put them
on a reading table. This was an amazing and complicated science: charts,
graphs, tables of celestial data. There was no way I would be able to decipher
the message in time.
Callie knows that,
I thought in frustration, as I
sat at near attention with her message in front of me.
What in the world is
she thinking of, rattling off this stuff to me at a time like this?
I
closed my eyes and meditated, no I prayed, "Dear God, dear guides, dear
whoever you are.. .help me understand this now." I opened my eyes but
still had no answer.

After
about an hour, the two officers conducting the building search left for the
station, and the guy manning the trace went to the bathroom, leaving me
instructions on what to do if the phone rang in his absence. Seconds later,
Wade came back, proudly waving a piece of paper with notes he'd taken from his
astrologer friend.

"Okay,
Teague. Got it! It means quick happenings with men." He read aloud from
his notes. "She said Aries, being the first house of the zodiac, is ruled
by Mars, which is action. Aries is aggressive and hard-charging."

"That's
it?"

"That's
it," he sighed.

"Say
it again." I demanded. Wade read the note again and a third time.

Nothing.
I was blank. "Aries. It's a sign, right? Like you're an Aries and I'm a
Pisces, right? So what does it mean when it's a certain number of degrees
Aries?" I asked, desperate now. Wade looked at me like I'd lost my mind
for asking him an astrological question.

"Call
your friend," I demanded. "Ask her more about Aries or Mars or
something. Never mind, let me ask her!"

Wade
gladly forked over the woman's phone number, and I dialed. A pleasant-sounding
lady answered, and I did a quick introduction telling her how important it was
for her to help with the astrology part of Callie's message. She talked to me
in what seemed like a haze of mystic mumbo jumbo, which only frustrated me
more.

"You
said Aries is a time period, and we all experience it in general. Is that
right? I'm so confused."

The
woman tried again, talking for about two minutes straight. I finally stopped
listening, and started praying. In the middle of all of her strange words, I
heard Aries is the ram.

"Ram!"
I said the first word I really understood. "Ram. Like Dodge Ram. Pick up
the pace.. .Ram pickup!"

"Well,
I guess," the woman stammered. I'd forgotten she was still on the line. I
shouted for Wade. "Callie's giving me astrological clues for the
cosmically impaired!" I joked for the first time. "Two minutes thirty-two
seconds. That's obviously an important number like 2:32 in the afternoon or
232..."

"Partial
license plate number, maybe. I'll check on a Dodge Ram pickup with plates
ending in 232." Wade was on it, while I muttered about the Moon and what
it meant. Maybe just nighttime. Maybe she was saying that's what they'd be
driving tonight.

An
hour later, two possible Dodge Ram pickups with different prefixes, but both
ending in 232, were tracked to two separate owners.

"One's
a 1996 canary yellow and one's a 1994 silver color," Wade said. "Any
hunches?"

"The
Moon is yellow, but people sometimes say a silver moon," I replied.
"Wait a minute! She said 'they mean business.' Is one of the trucks
registered to a business?"

Wade
checked his notes, "Yeah, silver one. A lawn service."

"That's
the one! It probably has a name or side plates or something that says it's a
lawn service vehicle, so they could easily leave it parked on the cemetery
grounds."

"Okay,
but we'll put a tail on both of them just in case," Wade said in the
middle of mapping out his strategy. "At 8:50 you'll be inside the gate.
We'll be on the far southeast corner of the cemetery. That's where they'll
probably come with Callie to stay off the main intersection." He looked at
me intently for just a second, reading the anguish, sizing up my relationship
with Callie in an instant, understanding what hung in the balance for me.

"We'll
get her first, in case anything goes wrong," he said, "then come up
to where you are. That way they can't use her to leverage the situation. I'll
have a couple of guys staked out just south of you. Just stall. They'll be
there when you need them."

"My
parents!" I said, remembering they could be easy hostage targets.

"Already
got somebody out there with them. They're fine. You got the stone these guys
want?"

I
nodded.

"You
ready?" he asked.

"Ready."
We headed out the door.

At
8:45 p.m., I parked in a strip mall lot across the street on the north side of
the cemetery and walked nervously across the busy thoroughfare. I entered
through the large Spanish mission-style arch that marked Memory Park Cemetery,
a huge expanse of rolling hills, maple trees, and headstones for as far as the
eye could see. I scaled a small hill to the bell tower which, up until now, had
always been a peaceful centerpiece to the park. I reached the tower and stepped
back into the shadows, leaning against its cold stone wall, and tilted my watch
skyward to pick up the fading light.

Eight
fifty-two p.m.
Eight more minutes. Maybe they have Callie right now, safe.
God, please. Will they send more than one guy to meet me here? Are they going
to trade the stone for Callie or just kill her and then kill me?
My
thoughts were frantic. I had to settle down. I said a prayer with my eyes open.

Nine
o'clock, nine fifteen, nine thirty. It was dark. I was beginning to shiver from
nerves, not the temperature.
Are they on to us? Are they phoning Callie's
condo right now to say they're doing something horrible to her, or perhaps,
already have?

A
voice on my left startled me. "The stone. Hand it over. I have a
walkie-talkie." He poked me in the side with its thick antenna. "I radio
and she's dead."

My
hand went to my coat pocket for one of the real stones this time—the stone left
at Orca's for Barrett. He shoved my hand away and reached into my pocket for
me, extracting the small slab that had turned my life upside down. Stepping
back into the light for a moment, Raider examined it and then me.

"Last
stone cramped me up, bitch. So if you don't mind, I'll just put this one in my
pocket." He pocketed the stone with one hand and pulled a knife from under
his shirt with the other. My stomach knotted. "You hurt me real good in
that airplane John. I'm gonna need to leave here feelin' like you understand my
pain."

Wade,
where the hell are you? I need back up!
I
thought.

Raider
jabbed the knife at me. I jumped to one side, avoiding it.
Go with the force
and create inertia,
a long-ago instructor's voice rang in my head. Raider
lunged forward again, the knife blade picking up ambient light and looking
almost beautiful if its mission had not been to embed itself in my gut. I took
a step back with the exact timing of his jab and grabbed the wrist of his
knife-wielding hand, using his own momentum to pull him forward and facedown on
the ground. I dropped to the ground beside him, put my knee in his back, slid
my arm under his neck, and pulled up and back on his esophagus, squeezing the breath
out of him. Hearing him gasp for air made me feel better than I had in weeks. I
scrambled to my feet and gave him a huge second-half kickoff to the head,
ebullient when the blow knocked him out. That's when I spotted a man with a
Rastafarian hairdo catapulting, capoeria style, over the hill, his dreadlocks
splaying out in all directions. This was not Spider Eye, who was safely in a
hospital in L.A. with a bullet in his back, so this must be Spider Eye's
version of a temp: a death-dancer replacement, who was now five feet from me,
putting his body into a spin that sent him into a high-speed, one-armed
handstand, legs scissor-kicking into the air, headed for my head.

"Holy
shit!" I yelled and rolled out of his way, banging my back on a headstone
as I went. Bullets zinged into the dirt near me. I quickly rolled farther
downhill to escape being hit, gritting my teeth until I couldn't roll any
further from the pain. Shots rang out from the hilltop above me where I'd left
Raider. He was conscious now and had staggered to his feet, blood coming from
his chest and mouth. Another shot rang out, and he toppled over again. The man
who had followed me to hell and gone would be trailing me no more. Raider was
dead. I spotted Wade's profile a hundred yards from me, gun drawn. He was obviously
the shooter and taking no prisoners.