The Stranger Beside You (26 page)

Tom rummaged through the tools and found a pry bar.  He was going to have to do some damage.  He jammed the flat end of the bar into the seam between the door and the jamb and leveraged against it.  The wood around the frame crackled when he heaved against it again.  The boards began to pop and splinter as the doorjamb finally buckled.  The frame split to where the deadbolt fell away useless.

He dropped the pry bar to the packed dirt at his feet and sucked in his gut to squeeze through the gap in the door.  He stopped suddenly, surprised by what he saw.  There was no floor behind the door.  A ladder was built into the wall.  He leaned in.  It was dark below.  No light at all.  He glanced at his watch.  He was down to less than a minute.  He made the decision that he wasn’t going to stop now.  So he grabbed the top rung and swung his body out onto the ladder and lowered himself hand over hand down into the darkness.

•  •  •

Daphne was only half listening.  Her hand was cold and wet from holding the glass of tea.  She heard a sound coming from outside and thought it was Tom.  For a short instant she felt relief, then she realized that someone else had pulled into the drive.  A car door slammed.       

Mrs. Baptista heard it too and she smiled.

“Oh good,” she said.  “It sounds like my husband is home.”

49

Daphne spotted the green Toyota pickup parked under the carport.  Her chest tightened. 
Tom, where are you?

“Maybe Gordon will let your boyfriend have a quick tour of the barn.”

Daphne strained but hadn’t yet caught sight of the man from the truck.  When she heard heavy footsteps on the porch.  They were slow and deliberate.  The sun had shifted slightly and cast a glare across the window.  She no longer had a clear view of the barn.  Her mind raced.  The footsteps stopped at the top of the stairs.  She was certain that Tom had found a way into the barn, otherwise he wouldn’t be taking so long.  Mr. Baptista would not be happy about the trespass, so she had to figure out a way to stall him until Tom could get back to the house.  Then she heard Baptista turn and head back down the stairs to the drive.  Something had changed his mind.  He was heading for the barn.

50

Gordon Baptista opened the passenger side door of his Tundra and reached past the seat to the center console.  He opened the compartment and retrieved his Glock handgun.  He shut the pickup door and walked to the barn.  He rattled his key in the lock and swung the big door open.  He made a patient, methodical visual evaluation.  Nothing seemed to be disturbed, except for the open window.

•  •  •

Tom was standing in some kind of underground room.  He felt a cool draft on his arms and smelled chemicals.  It didn’t feel like a barn down there.  The floor was cement.  He felt along the wall for a light switch.  It was so dark he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.

Tom moved deeper inside.  Whatever Mr. Baptista does as a hobby, he thought, he keeps it locked away down here in the dark.

He crossed carefully to the opposite side of the room and patted his hands along the cool surface of the wall until he finally located the light switch.  He flipped it on and the room flooded with a fluorescent glow.  He gawked in disbelief at what he saw.  The room was filled with stacks of money.  There was tons of it.  There were several wooden pallets stacked five feet tall with hundreds of neat bricks of cash on each, all of it tightly wrapped in Cellophane.  It looked like a bank vault. 

A long metal table stood against one wall.  There was a laptop computer connected to a router and a LaserJet printer.  In one corner stood an imposing machine that resembled some kind of printing press.  There were also several tall fiberglass barrels labeled with MSDS government health regulations and documentation.  The phone line from the roof trailed from the ceiling, down the wall, to a no-frills touch-tone telephone on the table.

He took a single step forward and placed a hand flat on top of one of the bales of crisp, uncirculated bills.  He stared down at the money through the layers of Cellophane.  They were all one hundred dollar bills.  He did the math.  There had to be millions of dollars stacked on the pallets, millions of dollars hidden away in a farmer’s barn.

He almost laughed, but then he heard someone coming down the ladder.

•  •  •

“No one has ever been down here,” Gordon Baptista said, turning the gun on Tom.  “You are officially my first guest.  Congratulations.”  He was a small, leathery man with a forgettable face.  He had a deep tan, probably from hours in the sun riding the John Deere, and his long gray hair was fixed into a ponytail that trailed down past his shoulder blades.  He dressed like an aging hippy, with leather sandals and a Hawaiian flower-print button-up shirt.

Tom made some quick calculations and arrived at the unavoidable conclusion that he was trapped.  Baptista was blocking the only exit and would not be letting him out alive.

“You know the routine.  Please keep your hands where I can see them.”

Tom raised his hands in the classic hold-up pose. 

“Who are you?” Baptista asked.

“Why do care?  You’re going to kill me.”

He nodded.  “True, but I’m curious.”

“I’m just a guy.”

“Are you a cop?”

“No.”

“Interesting.”

“Tell me how it works.”

“All of this?”  Baptista waved the gun at the money.

Tom nodded.

“It would bore you,” Baptista said.

“Try me.”

“You must be very clever to have found me.”

“How much have you printed?”

“I lost count years ago.”

Tom gestured with his head at the array of sophisticated printing equipment on the table.  “The government taught you everything you needed to know.  They gave you the perfect job.”

“Call it on-the-job training.”

“How long have you been counterfeiting?” 

“At least thirty years.”

“Amazing.”

“At first the cash just seemed to pile up forever.  I was scared to spend a dime.  Terrified.  I lived with this fear that some punk minimum wage cashier would recognize one of the bogus bills.”

“Water everywhere but not a drop to drink.”

Baptista grinned devilishly.  “Something like that.”

“So you had tons of money but couldn’t spend it.  How did you solve the problem?”

“I had to think outside the box.”

“That’s quite a sophisticated attitude for a farmer.”

“Now you’re being a smartass.”

“You’ve ruined lives.”

“They are all quite happy to take the money.  Are you one of them?”

“I’m here to save my friend.”

“Too bad for you.”

“How did you partner up with Mr. Z?”

“That’s another boring story.”

“He’s a butcher.”

“Zachariah is a very useful tool.”

“How much do you pay him?”

“He takes a set percentage of whatever he recovers.”

“So you loan fake money to people and he forces them to repay with authentic currency.  And they have no idea they really owe you nothing, that they are victims of a scam.”

“It’s perfect.”

“Has anyone ever paid in full?”

“Almost never, and I would never have expected them to.  Though some of these people dig pretty deep and find a way, because they know what will happen otherwise.  Whatever they repay is pure profit.  We bring in more cash than you can imagine.”

“You’re sick.”

“Thank you for your opinion.” 

“It can’t last,” Tom insisted.

“It has lasted for decades.”

“Where do you hide the money?”

Baptista smiled.  “It’s hidden all over the world, and one day when my greed has finally been satisfied, I will walk away from here and go somewhere quiet where I can retire in luxury without the burden of having to explain the source of my wealth.” 

“It ends today, Gordon.  Right here, right now.”

Baptista stiffened.  The smile vanished.  His eyes darkened.  “I agree one hundred percent,” he said.  Then he pulled the trigger.

51

The roar of the gunshot was deafening.  The bullet hit Tom in the shoulder.  He had been caught by surprise and hadn’t reacted soon enough.  He staggered backward and cried out.

“I’ll bury you right here on my farm,” Baptista said, coming toward him, gun held steady.  “The seasons will come and go and I will plant and harvest my crops, and no one will suspect a thing.  All the while, there you’ll be, a few short feet beneath the soil.”

Tom was dazed.  He wheeled to one side, clutching his good hand to his wounded shoulder.  Blood was pumping from the hole.  The pain was blinding.  Baptista was coming at him.  He backpedaled away from the madman.  Before he knew it the wall had stopped him.  He was out of room and out of options.  There was nowhere else to go.

Baptista looked down the barrel of the Glock.  “This was too easy.”

At the last possible second, Tom reached out his good hand and slapped the light switch.  The room went totally dark.

52

Tom dove to the floor, away from Baptista.

Baptista fired again.  Again the roar was deafening.  Tom’s ears were ringing.  He hit the floor hard, a lightening bolt of pain ripping through his upper body.  He scrambled forward, clawing at the floor with his good arm.  He ran into one of the pallets of money and hid behind it.

The flash from the gun had lit the room for a fraction of a second, just long enough for Baptista to see him diving for cover.  He fired a third time, and then a fourth.  The bullets struck the stacks of money, blowing holes through the tightly wound Cellophane.  Shredded counterfeit cash exploded into the air like confetti and settled to the floor in the darkness. 

“You can’t run, boy!” Baptista bellowed, clambering around blindly.

Tom was seated on the floor with his back to one of the pallets.  He was trying to gauge the man’s precise location by the sound of his voice.  His only hope was to somehow make it to the ladder and climb up with his bad arm.  It seemed impossible.  It would take too much time.  Baptista would blow a dozen holes through him.

Baptista made his way to the wall and hit the light switch.  Suddenly the room was bright again.  Tom would only be able to hide for a few more seconds.  He was losing a lot of blood and growing weak.  He heard Baptista’s footsteps.  There was nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide.  Then he heard a sharp sound, like a board snapping, and then a grunt and a crash, and he glanced around the corner between stacks of money. 

Daphne Fleming had dropped through the door in the ceiling.  She landed in a semi-crouch position and fell backward, so that her shoulders were against the wall and her legs were raised in the air.  Her gun was clutched in both hands and she held it out away from her body.  The fall had knocked the wind out of her.

Baptista wheeled toward the commotion and leveled the gun at her and pulled the trigger without hesitation.  The bullet missed by inches and part of the ladder exploded into a cloud of splinters and dust.  Daphne fired blindly, the bullet going nowhere near her target and ricocheting from wall to wall.  She kept pulling the trigger without even aiming, still dazed from the fall.  One of the bullets caught Baptista in the thigh, and his legs buckled.  He squealed like an animal as he went down onto one knee.  She fired again and again, fueled by adrenaline, missing each time. 

Tom hunkered down behind the pallet of money, shielding his head and neck from the storm of flying bullets.

Baptista wailed in pain.  He righted himself and managed to aim the gun.  Daphne watched the gun swing back in her direction.  She had broken one of her legs in the fall and couldn’t move.  She raised her weapon with her finger on the trigger and both she and Baptista fired at the same instant.  The gunshots were perfectly synched. 

The bullet from Daphne’s gun entered Baptista’s head through his left eye and exited through the back of his skull.  The blast to his head filled the air with a cloud of red mist, brain matter and blood swirling and spinning and settling to the floor in slow motion.  His body spun a hundred and eighty degrees and teetered for a short moment before collapsing to the floor.

Tom waited a few seconds.  He was nearly deaf from the cacophony of gunplay.  He finally dared to lean out from his hiding place and saw Baptista’s body.  He picked up Baptista’s gun and kicked the body to make certain he was dead.  The man lay in a pool of pulpy gore.  Tom backed away and turned toward Daphne but he stopped dead in his tracks.  Her gun lay at her side.  Her head was thrown back and her eyes were closed, and she was sitting in a growing pool of her own blood.

53

She wasn’t breathing.  Tom adjusted her body so that she was lying flat, and he checked for a pulse.  It was weak and fading.  He glanced overhead and knew he didn’t have the strength to carry her up the ladder. 

“Hold on!” he told her.

Her body was limp.  He was losing her.  He attempted CPR but that would be useless if he didn’t stop the bleeding.  Baptista had shot her in the throat.  Blood was pouring out of her.  Tom removed his shirt and held it against her neck in an attempt to stop the blood loss.

“Fight!” he yelled.  “You’ve got to fight!”

He called out for help, praying that Mrs. Baptista already had an ambulance on the way.  But it didn’t matter.  She wasn’t responding.  He could no longer find a  pulse and she still wasn’t breathing.  He could see the color draining from her face.  He cradled her head in his lap and his rage began to flow.

He knew that she was gone.

54

Tom staggered to the long metal table in Baptista’s counterfeiting workshop. He fumbled for the telephone and picked up the handset.  He stared at the keypad and pressed the redial button.