Side by Side (14 page)

30

Click Smoot spent $828.46 on memory, DVDs, and music CDs at the media store. Actually, some mark by the name of Edmund C. Kellogg had that amount charged to his AmEx Gold card. By the time the mark got his bill, Click would have put ten times that much on it. According to the supplier of the card, the real Edmund Kellogg was on a holy-roller church-sponsored eye-surgery mission trip so some born-again doctors could restore sight to a bunch of scabby villagers way up in the mountains of Peru. Kellogg wouldn’t be where he could use the card for three more weeks. Click had plans to help American Express give him about ten grand of its income.

He used the large plastic bag containing the merchandise for an umbrella, holding it over his head as he ran to his car, unlocking it with the key fob as he approached it. He didn’t pay any attention to the cars around him, or anything else, because as soon as he was inside the car he was busily rifling through the CDs trying to decide which one to put into the most expensive music player on the market. The player, new speakers, and professional installation had all been a gift from a stranger named Richard D. Lewis.

He had a few places to hit, then he was going to head to the house, open a beer or three, and watch some high-definition girls acting nasty.

31

His small arms around her neck, his legs around her waist, Elijah Dockery clung to his mother like a wet sheet. He was not afraid of strangers, but dogs terrified him. Lucy had grown up with dogs. Her parents had owned a succession of dogs for pets, but these dogs were not anybody’s pets. This pack was a collection of powerful, square-headed, no-nonsense canine gladiators bred to be aggressive. These were just the sort of pit bulls who had worked so relentlessly to earn the entire breed a reputation for the unprovoked violence that was focused on other mammals . . . including people.

These animals wore no collars, and but for their strong odor and the puffs of dust made by their paws as they circled the Dockerys, they might have been hallucinations. The pack’s alpha seemed to be a bull-necked male—an animal whose golden hide was crisscrossed with dark scars—whose short, pyramid-shaped ears looked like ancient, rough-hewn arrowheads. A black-and-white female, the smallest and thinnest, limped and looked to be blind in one eye. Beneath her sharply defined ribs hung twin rows of prunelike nipples. She raised her head and sniffed the still air as she followed the others around Lucy and Elijah.

Lucy used the flashlight’s beam to keep the dogs at bay the same way a lion tamer uses a chair and a whip. It was dark enough so that the light hurt their eyes.

There were eight dogs—seven more than it would take to kill a helpless woman and child. The heaviest dog weighed as much as Lucy did. She wondered if they had ever attacked people. They weren’t doing so at the moment. In fact, they seemed unsure, nervous.

Arms tight around Elijah, Lucy inched backward toward the trailer, anxiously watching the animals for any sign of an impending attack. Taking advantage of their hesitation, she moved faster toward the steel steps at the trailer’s front door. The female stopped abruptly, positioning herself between the Dockerys and the trailer. The dog watched Lucy come on, the flashlight’s beam setting a fire in her good eye. As she raised her head and sniffed, she suddenly whirled and skittered away as if her paws had touched a bare electric wire.

Lucy kept the light in the dogs’ eyes and kept backing up, finally putting a boot heel on the first step, using the light like a flame to keep the dogs blinded. One of the younger animals whirled and followed the old female into the storage room.

Elijah started crying. Buoyed by the sound of fear, the dogs moved closer, but then stopped suddenly and turned their heads toward the door. Lucy knew why they had stopped. The growl of an approaching motor filled the building and harsh light shone through the cracks around the warehouse doors. Lucy opened the trailer door and saw that the dogs were slinking back into their lair. They were more afraid of whoever was coming than they were interested in harming Lucy and Elijah.

She went inside, closing the door behind her. She put Elijah in the playpen and scrabbled frantically at her boots, trying to untie the laces. Elijah was crying louder, holding out his arms, begging to be picked up. “Soon, Eli. Soon.” Tears streamed down her cheeks.

The warehouse door creaked open, then was slammed closed.

One lace was knotted, and she fumbled to find a loose place in the leather straps, while Elijah cried and tried to get back in her arms. Lucy slipped out of the laced boot, leaving the knot in it. She tossed the boots into the bunkroom. Scooping Elijah up, she ran into the bedroom, set him on the bed, took off the camouflage jacket, and wedged it between two of the boxes stacked against the wall. She couldn’t remember if she had turned off the flashlight, which was in the pocket of the jacket.

She sat on the bed, pulled Elijah to her, and fought to control her trembling.

Whoever was approaching the trailer was whistling a tune that was so off-key that Lucy couldn’t identify it.

32

Click Smoot quit shopping around six o’clock because his car was as packed full of merchandise as it could get. He loved his Z car. It was absolutely him—sure-footed, fast as owl turds on a water slide, masculine, attractive, and hot. Really hot.

He lived in a quiet residential neighborhood ten blocks behind a vast Ford dealership on Independence Boulevard. His red-brick ranch looked pretty much like others in the area—single-family style with a couple thousand square feet of floor space on a neatly kept lot replete with shade trees, flower beds, and pruned shrubs. There was nothing to indicate that an unmarried twenty-one-year-old bachelor lived there. He parked the Z in the garage beside his old GMC panel van. The van wasn’t exactly a chick magnet, but it was a flying hoot to drive, and held lots of merchandise.

He was the only Smoot with a yard that had well-kept grass. One of his father’s cousins had a landscaping company that did Click’s yard in exchange for a favor here and there. They had started that company as a front, but to keep up the appearance of propriety, they employed about fifty Mexicans and made sure they had good equipment and that they all worked hard. They paid them the going salary plus Chinese overtime, which was an additional five bucks cash for every hour over forty. Plus, some of them made extra money playing crash-test dummies in auto-insurance scams. While the Mexicans did the sweating, the crew chiefs cased the homes of the wealthy clients for the family burglars.

Once Click had bought something, it lost its value to him and became mere inventory, which would become twenty cents on the dollar for a great deal of trouble and the risk of getting caught at it. So that had gotten him thinking, why lose eighty cents on the dollar? Why go to all that trouble for watered-down money when you could go straight into an account and get full value on every dollar you robbed? And you could steal from anywhere on earth from anywhere you were.

Click unpacked the Z, putting the purchases he would pass to the family pawnshops on the appropriate shelves, and taking the items he had bought for himself into his house. As he entered the mudroom, he noticed that one of the bulbs in one of the three night-light fixtures was blackened and he felt a wave of anxiety as he unscrewed it and took it into the house with him.

He entered the kitchen, hung his keys on the peg.

The Felix the Cat clock over the stove cut its eyes back and forth as its pendulum tail swung side to side.

He opened a cabinet and took down a packet of night-light bulbs and pried one loose. He threw out the old one and took the new one back to the mudroom and screwed it in, cutting the lights to make sure it worked.

Hurriedly he went through the entire house, checking each night-light and the batteries in each of the dozen flashlights.

As soon as he was sure his illumination requirements were covered, Click stood still and, as he listened to the clock, a soul-crushing dark pressure settled down on him.

He felt the enormous weight of being the only warm-blooded mammal in the place, and Ferny Ernest prayed that the DVD in his hand would lessen the emptiness.

33

In his hotel room, Clayton Able sat staring at the screen of his laptop computer. He was monitoring Winter Massey and Alexa Keen. The cellular phones Keen and Massey carried were marvels of modern design, feeding Clayton their geographic locations and performing as microphones that transmitted directly to his receivers, which were being monitored by people in the adjoining room. In addition, his people had wired Alexa’s car and her handbag.

The door to the room adjoining his was open, and he could see his technicians at work.

Clayton stood, turned toward the window, and yawned while stretching out his arms. Sitting at the keyboard made his back feel like someone had hit him high between the shoulders with a ball-peen hammer. It was dark out, and still raining. It had been two hours since Winter and Alexa had taken off to chase after Click.

“This Ferny Ernest thing is troubling,” the woman standing in the doorway said, scattering his thoughts.

“Ferny Ernest Smoot isn’t going to lead anyone to the Dockerys. I doubt the kid could even lead them to his father. Even so, Peanut wouldn’t be dumb enough to go near the Dockerys.”

“You didn’t know Click was trailing the judge,” the woman said accusatorily.

“If Massey hadn’t spotted Click in the lobby, I would have given them another trail to run to keep them busy until Monday. As it turns out, it may have been a godsend blind alley.”

“You didn’t need to include a picture of Click with the others,” the woman said.

“It was hopelessly outdated. Massey was—”

“Don’t you dare say lucky,” she chided.

“Click isn’t supposed to be connected to this. Dixie, Buck, and those twins are doing the actual work, and they’re out of circulation. Look, as long as we stay on top of Alexa and Massey, it will all work out and everybody wins.”

He studied his boss, someone he admired the way he would admire something pretty and dangerous to stand too close to. Clayton knew that if he was neck deep in quicksand, and if she didn’t need him alive, she’d watch him go under without altering her facial expression. She was also every bit as beautiful as she was conniving, and she was the most manipulative job of work he’d ever worked with. Clayton was glad he was on her side in this, because being on the other side was not an attractive alternative. You could ask anybody who’d ever gotten in this woman’s way—if you could find them. She’d come up the ranks from an MP grunt into a position of authority within Military Intelligence like she’d been shot there from a cannon.

This Bryce business had the potential to turn very ugly. Clayton hadn’t wanted Alexa to bring Winter Massey into this, but there hadn’t been any way he could stop her since the FBI agent was now the key to the thing smelling right after the dust settled.

“I always said Massey would be trouble,” Clayton told the woman.

“That need not concern you,” she said. “I made the decision, which was mine to make.”

“Massey’s reputation isn’t what it is because anyone can control him. You should never ever mix emotion—especially not revenge—with business. And this is very delicate business with a fortune at stake.”

“I know what’s at stake here,” she hissed. “I know Massey a lot better than you do.”

Clayton shrugged. He had no choice but to go with the flow, to follow orders. He knew that either he would make a fortune with this woman, or he would be a dead man.

He couldn’t help but wonder how anyone could have ever called her “Precious.” Major Antonia Keen was about as precious as an iceberg.