Runner (17 page)

"I don't know. Yeah, I guess so. The fall, anyway."

"Then you'd better make it work. If I don't have a grandchild by the end of this year, I give up on you."

"What?"

"You heard me."

"What does it mean? That if I don't hand you this baby by New Year's Day, I don't inherit anything when you die?"

"That's part of it. You'll also be out of the company on January 2. I'll pick somebody else to run it for me. You can go off on your own and work with what you've got, and maybe grow up and make something of yourself, or maybe not. Either way, you will have blown the opportunity you got by being born."

"You didn't say this before. It's June. If Christine doesn't work out, I don't have time to father another baby by the end of December. This is completely unfair."

"You think I got what I have by being fair to the guy on the other side of the table?"

"But this is one twenty-year-old girl. Sometimes relationships don't last. Maybe she doesn't want to marry me. Maybe she'll abort the baby."

"If she was going to, she would have. She's almost six months."

Richard was feeling worse. He couldn't meet the old man's eyes, but when he looked out the window to the side of the bridge, all he
saw was the sea, then the sky, then the sea again. How did the old man know the exact moment of conception? "Then she might give it up for adoption. She always said she wants to go to college."

"Have her give the baby to you then—to us. I'll settle for a second chance to raise an heir with some sense of duty. I'll give the girl the cost of four-years' tuition and living expenses in exchange for the baby. More, even. You can keep screwing around and playing with cars, and keep being caretaker of the business until the kid is ready to take over."

"Why are you suddenly in such a rush? This doesn't have to be the only chance for a grandchild. There are millions of other girls out there who might work out."

"This is the only one you knocked up."

Richard, in his nauseated state, almost protested that it wasn't, but caught the words before he ruined himself. "What I'm trying to tell you is that I want to do what's expected, but this isn't a situation where I have absolute control."

"Then take control, for Christ's sake. Be a man. As you just said, she's a twenty-year-old kid who's pregnant. She liked you well enough to let you get her that way. She's young, she's alone, she's probably broke. How hard can it be to persuade her to marry you?"

"Hard."

"Christ. You want me to talk to her? Or your mother? She's another woman, and if she tells the girl how welcome she would be, that ought to do it."

"In this case it wouldn't. Let me handle this myself."

Andy Beale's sharp eyes stayed on Richard's for a moment. "All right. Do it."

"Are we done?"

"Yeah. You can go down and puke now. I'll head back to the
harbor and let you off so your mother and I can get back out here in time to fish a little."

Richard Beale walked off the dock, stood in the parking lot, and watched as the
Ruby B.
slowly turned its fat stern toward him and began chugging back out of the harbor. He could see his father was feathering the throttle, trying to bring it up beyond the speed limit of the harbor without getting caught by the patrol. The boat sent waves spreading from its wake to rock the rows of boats tied in their berths, and make them buck and strain against their lines and shoulder into the bumpers, trying to break loose.

He stood on solid, unmoving asphalt and watched for ten minutes, long after the
Ruby B.
was out of his sight. He took deep, regular breaths to settle his stomach and get rid of the smothered, choking feeling. When he felt like less of an emergency case, he took out his phone and punched in Steve Demming's number, then changed his mind and deleted it.

Richard dialed Sybil Landreau instead. He knew that calling one of the women instead of Steve Demming and Pete Tilton wasn't terribly subtle, but he didn't want to be subtle. He hoped the bastards were shocked enough to begin worrying about their reputations. That was what people like them lived on. They couldn't put an ad on Channel 10.

"Yes?" said Sybil's voice.

"It's me," he said. "I'm calling to find out what's going on."

"Hold on. I'll give you to Steve."

"No!" He realized too late that he was shouting. He looked around to see if anyone in the parking lot was near enough to have noticed. "Don't hand me to anybody. I want to talk to you. Are you still there?"

She said, "Yes."

"Then you tell me. Do you have her?"

"Not yet."

"That means no."

"It means we're working on it, and that we will have her, but it takes more time than this. We're doing all the right things. It just hasn't happened yet."

"Wow," he said. "Wow. You're a bigger bullshit artist than Demming."

"I'm a woman. I'm verbal. You want to talk to him now, or do you want to flirt some more?"

"Talk to him. But I want all four of you individually to know that I'm not a happy client. This should have been done the first night, when she was in Buffalo, which is—what?—three weeks ago?"

"I'll give you to Steve."

He heard Steve Demming's voice, and he could detect the irritation in it. "Yes?"

"It's me. I'm calling to find out what's the matter. I expected to see her back here three weeks ago."

"Richard. You know we're on this, and we're doing the best job possible. This isn't a time to start losing faith and insulting each other."

"There were six of you to one of her. I gave you her phone's Global Positioning locator so you knew exactly where she was at every second."

"It's not six to one. You know this. She met up with a pro the very first night we were on this. They managed to slip her phone into the back of a truck on the New York State Thruway. We caught up with the truck when it was almost to New Jersey. If you want her phone back, I can give it to you. I just don't have the girl yet."

"Tell me about this pro. Who is she?"

"We don't know a lot about her yet. She's probably a private detective working as a bodyguard. A lot of women don't want a man protecting them. They want somebody who can go into the ladies' room with them. We think that Christine flew all the way to New York just to hook up with her. She took over that night at the hospital, and we haven't been able to catch up with them yet. We will."

"Come on. I don't believe this. How could Christine know anybody like that?"

"You wouldn't be the first one to think he's the only guy some chick knows, and be wrong. Somebody sent this woman to pick Christine up at the hospital. When we tried to keep her from driving her off in a car, she broke Ronnie Sebrot's knee. We had to drive him to a hospital seventy miles away in case the police knew somebody got hurt that way. He was in such pain he was screaming half the time."

"Jesus, that's awful."

"But we didn't give up. All the time we were still tracking her cell phone's signal. Late that night we blocked a road ahead of them, had two cars coming up behind them. What does this woman do? She clips Carl McGinnis with her car and takes off. We couldn't leave him lying out there by the road waiting for the state troopers to find him, could we?"

"I guess not. But did you have to shoot him?"

"That again? Yes. We had to shoot him."

"Why?"

"The woman ran him down. He was hurt bad. We couldn't leave him there to suffer, and we couldn't take him in. He was in and out of consciousness and might have said just about anything on painkillers."

"It's unbelievable."

"We're not animals, Richard. The girls held his hand and talked to him, and never let on that we were even thinking about doing it. Claudia just waited until he lost consciousness for a second and shot him in the head. He never knew."

"I still can't believe this," said Richard. "It's awful." He was breathing hard through his open mouth. There didn't seem to be enough air. He felt as though he were falling—dizzy and faint.

"You're the one who wanted us to do this. Sometimes this is what it takes."

Richard lowered his voice to a raspy whisper, so he wouldn't be overheard. "But you killed somebody. It doesn't matter if it was your friend or not. If they connect us with this, we'll all go to jail for the rest of our lives."

"Richard. You hired us to kidnap a pregnant girl and bring her back to you, remember? What do you think the penalty is for that? Or for setting off a bomb in a hospital so she'd be evacuated and left in the open? Whatever we've done since then is just extra stuff they add on beyond your life sentence to make themselves look like hard-asses for the next election. The point is to not let them catch you and give you
any
sentence."

Richard Beale didn't answer. He was light-headed, but his stomach felt as though it contained a rock that was somehow expanding. He looked out across the parking lot at the boats bobbing beside their docks in the marina, but they only made him feel that the ground under him was moving, so he stared far past them at the line of the horizon.

"Are you still there?"

"I'm here."

"You have any other questions?"

"Not a question," Richard said. "I called you because this is getting critical. I need to have Christine back. She needs to be alive and not too beat up. Do you hear that?"

"Yes. Alive. That's what we've been doing. If we hadn't been trying to take her alive, we wouldn't have lost Ronnie and Carl. We're doing it."

"It matters a hell of a lot more than I thought. I need that baby. Christine has to be alive and healthy long enough to deliver that baby. You don't know the kind of pressure I'm under. It's got to happen as soon as possible."

"We're doing our best, but if I've got to be on the phone all day, well, what can I say?"

"Nothing. Go do it." Richard Beale slipped the phone into his pocket and took his eyes off the ocean, but it didn't help. His fate had been settled on his father's boat. Staring and heavy breathing had only made him dizzy. He walked with purposeful determination to a trash barrel at the side of the parking lot, grasped its rim where the plastic bag was fitted over it, bent at the waist, and succumbed.

Jane drove from Minneapolis to O'Hare International Airport to return the rental car. There was little chance the four hunters could know that the car existed, let alone trace it from the Buffalo airport to O'Hare. If they managed to trace it, they would only conclude that she and Christine had driven to Chicago and gotten on a plane.

She was at the airport before dawn, took the car rental agency shuttle to the terminal, and arrived at five-thirty
A.M.
when the crowds were thin for her flight to Austin, Texas. She had not been to Austin in several years, but she remembered it as the right kind of place for a few months from now, the time when Christine had the baby and stopped being Linda Welles. Austin was warm most of the time, and it had a lively atmosphere. Austin was the state capital and the home of the University of Texas. Big universities created whole communities around them like ripples spreading outward from a splash. There were large groups of unattached, interesting people, lots of nightlife, music. There was no better place for providing cover for a woman of college age, particularly one who would arrive in the early fall, like thousands of others.

The airport required caution. O'Hare held dangers for Jane that had nothing to do with Christine Monahan. It was one of the biggest airline hubs in the country, placed right in the center, and so it had always attracted lots of hunters—cops and bounty hunters watching for fugitives, criminals watching for victims, an array of professional searchers trying to spot particular travelers. There might be men in the terminal who would remember her face if they saw it. As Jane moved through the lines waiting to get through security, she kept scanning the places where people could stand and watch the passengers. When Jane was through the security checks, she walked past her gate, sat in the waiting area two gates farther down the concourse with her back to the big window overlooking the flight line so the morning glare would be behind her, and studied the faces that came near enough to see. She saw nobody who struck her as a threat, so when her flight began boarding she walked slowly to her gate and stepped through the door into the short tunnel to the plane.

When the plane landed in Austin, she rented a car, checked into a hotel near the airport, and went out apartment hunting. This was a good time for doing it, when much of the campus population had left for the summer, and not all of the apartments had been rented for the fall. Jane's story was that she was planning to enter a graduate program at the university in the fall, but would be in Europe for most of the summer. She wanted to rent an apartment right away for herself and a roommate with a baby. She was willing to pay the rent for the rest of June, July, August, and September in advance so she could store her books and furniture until university classes began. The simplest arrangement, she said, was to put the apartment only in the name Cecilia Randazzo—her name—and she would sign the lease and be responsible for the cost.

Cecilia Randazzo didn't want to live in the sort of building that housed a lot of undergraduate students. They would be too noisy,
stay up too late, have too many parties. She wanted an apartment in a complex that catered to married students in their late twenties and thirties, or families, if they were quiet and well behaved.

She found a very desirable three-bedroom apartment not far from the university. The manager was a native-born Texan in her fifties with perfect silver hair named Mrs. McGowan. She said, "Of course we'll try to be sure you're happy, dear. But every single one of our tenants is an imperfect, living human being, so once in a while they do make a peep or two." But Jane's feigned fussiness made her appear to be the ideal tenant, so Mrs. McGowan was eager to get her to sign a lease. The building was occupied, Mrs. McGowan assured her, almost entirely by junior faculty members, joined by a few very quiet graduate students. As Mrs. McGowan showed her the crown molding along the ceilings and the tiles in the bathrooms, Jane was looking at other features that mattered more—the thickness and solidity of the doors, the quality of the locks, the view of the front door from above, the line of sight that would allow a tenant to see who was in a car parked on the street in front of the building. There was a garage under the building with a steel grate that closed after a tenant's car entered, so nobody ever had to walk from a lot to the door in the dark. Jane was pleased, so she said she would consider the apartment.