The Prophet (Ryan Archer #2) (18 page)

He took the coffee with him across the street and followed the sidewalk a few hundred feet to a turn-in at a wrought iron gate. He spotted several cameras and assumed he was being watched. That was fine with him. He personally had nothing to hide, but assumed the people inside probably did. Suddenly the gate began to open, and as it did he saw a black Mercedes waiting inside to drive out.
 

* * *

Ed Giricki was half asleep behind his desk when Archer walked in. Giricki’s desk was an exercise in pure chaos. It was a landslide of paperwork and a catchall for anything he didn’t have a place for. He was reclining in his roller chair, hands resting on his enormous gut, feet propped on an open desk drawer, eyelids fluttering.

“Fire!” Archer yelled, standing in the doorway.

Giricki launched to his feet and managed to send half the contents of his desk cascading to the floor. Then his eyes landed on Archer.

“Shit,” he said, twisting his face into a scowl. “Archer, you asshole.”

Archer winked. “Sorry, Ed. That was priceless.”

“You couldn’t have waited ten minutes?” Giricki complained. “That was an amazing dream you interrupted. I was this close to having that little Japanese gal’s panties off,” he said, indicating a tiny space between his thumb and index finger.

“I could have let you sleep all day, Ed, and you still wouldn’t have made it to first base. Take a walk outside. Need you to take a look at my truck.”

Giricki had opened the body shop a week after his final tour of Vietnam in 1971. Archer had served with his son and known Giricki for twenty years. John Giricki had stepped on a land mine in Iraq and lost everything below the waist. His remains had been cremated and then scattered at sea. Archer was thirty yards away when the land mine exploded, and was the last to hear John’s voice before he passed away.

Archer gestured at his windshield, then at the rear of the Land Cruiser.

“Damn, boy,” Giricki whistled. “I’d suggest you get a desk job, ASAP. Too many bullets flying around you.”

“How long would it take your crew to patch it up?” Archer asked.

Giricki had put on the bulk of the weight since his son’s death. He had taken comfort in food, and had needed all the comfort he could find. The gut was out of control to the tune of four hundred pounds, and the beard was a sprawling mess, as was his jungle of hair. He ran a thick hand over the bullet holes and frowned.

“Depends on availability of parts. I’ll jump on the computer and see what I can find. Could be days, could be weeks.”

Archer hitched his hands on his hips. “Weeks? I thought you were the boss around here.”

“Archer, don’t come around here just to bitch.”

“You are almost precisely no help at all.”

“That’s not fair.”

“At least give me a Jag as a loner.”

“Dream on, marine.”

“What’s this going to cost me?”

Giricki shrugged. “Won’t know until I ask the computer.”

“Better idea: let
me
go ask the computer.”

“Stay out of my office, Ryan. You aren’t welcome anymore.”

Archer grinned brightly and slapped his friend on the shoulder. Giricki gave him a bear hug that nearly crushed him.

“I miss that boy of yours,” Archer said.

“He was nothing but trouble from the day he was born,” Giricki said with a loving smirk.

Archer nodded. “The great ones always are.”

* * *

Tom Webb managed to take a shower and grab breakfast with his family between phones calls. His damn cell rarely stopped ringing, and he couldn’t afford to not answer it. The itch to open a New York office had created an entirely new set of headaches. There were bids rolling in from contractors every day and more questions to answer than he had time to answer.

He kissed both Sonny and Natalia on the forehead as they stormed past him like a couple of crazed escaped convicts, and Karla cornered him at the door for a real kiss. She was already dressed and fully put together. She put her hands inside his suit jacket and pressed her mouth to his.

Just then his cell rang. He glanced at it and made a face.

“I have to take this,” he said.

She slapped his ass. “Get out of here and bring home the bacon, baby.”

Webb fumbled for his Prius keys and punched the button on the wall for the garage door opener and was gone.

Karla went to the kitchen to clean up the breakfast mess. She glanced at her watch. The first stop of the day was to pick up Tom’s dry cleaning before running the kids to school. Then she had an appointment with her Ob/Gyn, and lunch with a friend who was flying into town on business. She had one other afternoon appointment before picking the kids up, and was only halfway confident she could successfully check off all the boxes on her list for the day.

She heard screams coming from down the hall and found Sonny sitting on the bathroom floor in tears. His shirt was missing.

“Natalia took my shirt!” he proclaimed as if he’d been robbed at gunpoint.

Karla saw no sign of her daughter. “Nat!” she called.

There was no response.

“What happened to your brother’s shirt?”
 

Karla stared down at her sobbing son, then sighed and marched down the hall in search of answers. It took another quarter hour to put things in order and herd the children out the door. She loaded them into her yellow Prius, made sure everyone was buckled in, and backed out of the garage. As she pulled out of the driveway, a black Mercedes cut her off and stayed in front of her down the hill. She was tempted to give them the horn or the finger, but decided she needed to be a proper example to the kids and exercise a modicum of forgiveness and patience. She adjusted the visor to block the glare from the sun and answered a text as she waited at a red light. She was stuck behind the jackass Mercedes at the light.

The light was still red and she was responding to a second text so she didn’t notice the back doors of the Mercedes open. Two men in ski masks emerged and both men approached her car. Sonny said something she didn’t quite catch because she’d been distracted by her phone, and she looked up an instant too late. One of the men smashed her window with a tire tool, reached in to unlock the door, and dragged Karla out of the Prius by her hair. She screamed until he slapped a gloved hand over her mouth. She flailed wildly, eyes searching for her children. But then a fist pounded her face and her world went black.

A second man went for the kids. He jerked open a back door and pulled Natalia out first. She kicked and screamed.

“Mommy!”

Sonny appeared frozen with fear as he watched the men in the black masks carry his mother and sister away and put them into a car he’d never seen before. He wanted to open his mouth to scream, but was too scared to move or make a sound. Then the man who had taken his sister returned to the Prius and looked in at him. The man put out his hand.

“I want my mommy,” Sonny said in a tiny whisper.

The man reached in and scooped him into his arms, carrying him to the car where his mother appeared to be asleep and Natalia had a strip of tape over her mouth.
 

One of the men said to Sonny, “If you won’t scream, I won’t use the tape.”

Sonny nodded.

“Go,” one of the men said to the driver. The tires squealed as the car lurched through the intersection and sped away.

Sonny Webb managed to turn his head enough to see his mother’s Prius get left behind unattended in the street, glass from the smashed window shimmering in the morning sunlight.

TWENTY-FIVE

A teen girl’s body had been found in a dumpster late the night before. Archer had gotten a call from a cop buddy and had a bad feeling in his gut about Danielle Robbins. He wanted to believe she was fine, to ignore his gut for once, but his instincts were finely tuned and he was rarely wrong about these types of things.

He had decided to keep his truck and wait to have Giricki patch up the holes. He was on his way to the scene where the girl had been found to sniff around and maybe take a look at the body, when his cell rang.

“Where are you?” Tom Webb asked.

“Heading across town to see about Danielle.”

“Pull off the road,” Webb said.

Archer ignored him and accelerated through a four-way.

“What’s up, chief?” he said.

“Shut the hell up and pull off the road, Ryan.”

Archer pursed his lips and squinted against the morning light. It had been a while since his best pal had taken that tone with him. So he glanced over his shoulder, changed lanes, downshifted, and glided onto the gravel shoulder.

“Make it good,” Archer said.

“Listen to me. Something has happened.”

“You have my full attention.”

“Right now, I need you to take a deep breath and count to ten.”

Something shifted deep inside and Archer felt a chill.

“Tell me what’s going on, Tom.”

“It’s Smith,” Webb said.

Archer felt his stomach sink.
 

“What about her?”

“She’s been taken to the hospital.”

“I left her less than an hour ago.”

“Someone broke into her house and assaulted her,” Webb said. “She managed to call 911 but was unconscious when the ambulance arrived. She’s alive, but apparently in pretty bad shape.”

At that moment, Archer went into the zone. It was a place only he knew of. It was a place deep inside him. Deep inside his primal core. It was a place he hadn’t activated in a long time. But suddenly the chains were removed and that door was thrown open wide.

“Did you hear me?” Webb said because of the beat of silence.

“Did they rape her?”

“I … don’t know.”

Traffic roared past on the surface street. Archer didn’t notice. He was too far gone. His upper lip curled as the rage boiled up from inside.

“Where’d they take her?” he asked.

Webb told him the name of the hospital, then said, “I’ll meet you there.”

* * *

The ambulance had already delivered her and she was surrounded by medical staff in the ER. Archer parked illegally and Webb met him at the door. Webb stopped his friend with a hand to his chest.

“You can’t see her right now, buddy,” Webb said, trying to calm him or at least prevent him from making a huge scene and hurting someone.

“Let go of me,” Archer said. It wasn’t a request, but a warning.

Webb stood square in front of him, unafraid of his friend’s challenge.

“Take a deep breath. Let them do their thing. She needs them more than she needs you right now.”

The fire in Archer’s chest was burning a hole through his shirt. Adrenaline was surging through him.

“What happened?” Archer asked. The tendons in his neck were taught, standing out like bowstrings. His eyes were glassy—a mixture of tears and rage. “I want to know what happened.”

Webb walked him outside. The fresh air would do them both good.

“The short answer is, I don’t know,” Webb said. “She dialed 911 but they found her unconscious. Apparently the house is tossed, so maybe it was a robbery and she surprised him and he freaked and got physical with her. But she was in the nude, so I’m assuming she was either in bed or hadn’t been out of bed long when this guy showed up.”

“Why do you think there was only one?”

“Just a guess.”

“I have to talk to her,” Archer said, turning back for the door.

Webb grabbed his shoulder. “Whoa, brother! It’s no good for you to be in there right now. You’ll be in the way.”

Archer stared in through the glass. His partial reflection stared back. Sirens wailed in the distance. His jaw was clenched. Sweat showed through his T-shirt, highlighting the muscles of his chest.
 

“It’s a message,” he said.

Webb was scrolling through e-mails on his cell. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a message to me from whoever sent those first two in the Mercedes. They want me to go away. Do you have any idea what I do when someone tells me to go away?”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Webb said.

The automatic door opened for a nurse stepping outside for a smoke break. Archer went inside. Smith was on a table, hooked to machines. Her face was black and blue and swollen. Her nose was broken and both eyes had swollen shut. She was surrounded by ER staff. Archer stood at her feet, both hands twisting into fists. A tear had formed but he fought with every ounce of internal strength to keep it from rolling out. He wanted to say something to her, but knew she wouldn’t hear him.

* * *

Jimmy Cloud sat behind dark lenses watching the world stream by, listening to his agent and ignoring the cappuccino in front of him. They were seated at an outdoor table. Jimmy hadn’t slept. His agent rarely stopped moving his mouth long enough to take a breath. He was a big shot with a huge ego, and Jimmy was sick of listening to him.

“It’s a franchise picture, Jimmy. The studio owns the rights to the novels and there are ten of them. The first one will be a monster hit, guaranteed! This thing will be a cash cow, a license to print money. And they want you to be the only name above the title. Can you imagine? They will have to invent a new tax bracket just for you!”

The lenses of Jimmy’s shades were blue. He was slumped in his chair, his brain buzzing from a shot of cocaine his agent, Mitch, had offered him in the car on the way over. He hadn’t touched that shit in a decade. But after the call from Tatum last night, he had found himself suddenly in need. At the moment he didn’t give a damn about the offer from the studio. Thirty million bucks, plus a healthy piece of the back end. He already had more money than he could spend. But not even that mattered as he sat with Mitch and the cappuccino, the buzz of traffic sizzling in his ears as the narcotics took hold of his mind and Tatum’s face spun in front of the blue lenses.

Jimmy’s cell phone chirped. He fished it from a pocket and saw Tatum’s face on the display. He took the call.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said.

Jimmy walked away from the table. “Where are you, baby?”

“I’m safe, Daddy. You don’t need to worry about me, I’m fine.”

“Tell me where you are so I can come get you,” Jimmy pleaded.