Robert Crais - Taken

I felt my mouth dry as I took in what he told me.

“Nita received two calls from Krista and a male individual, the man demanding a fee for Krista’s return. Nita transferred the money, but Krista is still missing.”

Locano’s eyes grew darker.

“Nita said nothing of an abduction.”

“Nita believes it’s a joke or a scam. They only asked for five hundred dollars.”

Locano looked even more disturbed.

“This is small to you and a woman with a successful business, but it is a fortune to a family counting pennies. We are talking about poor people. A few hundred, a thousand, another five hundred. The bajadores know with whom they are dealing.”

“It still seems so little.”

“Multiply it times a thousand. Two thousand. The number of people abducted would astound you, but such abductions are rare on U.S. soil. Let’s hope Nita is right.”

Neither of us spoke for a moment, neither of us moved as I listened to the voices in his outer office, his wife speaking with one of the younger attorneys.

“Mr. Locano, you may not know this man, but you might know someone who does, or who can find out. Ask around. Please.”

He stared at me, and I could tell he was thinking. He tapped the arm of his chair, then called to his wife.

“Liz. Would you show Mr. Cole to the restroom, please?”

He stood, and I stood with him as his wife appeared in the door.

“Take your time. Wash thoroughly. It is important to be clean, don’t you agree?”

“It’s important to be clean.”

“Take your time.”

Elizabeth Locano graciously showed me to the restroom, where I took my time. It was a nice restroom, with large framed photographs of the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan in southern Mexico, what the Aztecs called the City of the Gods. It was and remains one of the most beautiful cities ever built, and one I have always wanted to see. I wondered if Mr. Locano or his wife had taken them.

I washed thoroughly, then washed a second time because cleanliness was a very good thing, and it was right to be good. Mr. Locano was on the other side of the door talking over my request with his wife, and maybe making the calls I had asked him to make. I hoped so.

I was staring at the Pyramid of the Sun when my phone buzzed.

Mary Sue Osborne said, “This is your future wife speaking.”

You see how they won’t quit?

“What’s up?”

“Okay, I went through her research. I didn’t see anything about anyone named Sanchez, coyote or otherwise. Sorry, dude.”

This meant I was down to Mr. Locano. If he couldn’t or wouldn’t come through, Q coy Sanchez would go nowhere.

I was thanking her when my phone buzzed with an incoming call, and this time I saw it was Pike.

“Gotta go, Mary Sue. Thanks.”

“No chitchat? No flirty repartee?”

I switched calls to Pike.

“Elvis Cole Detective Agency, the cleanest dick in the business.”

“It’s worse than you thought.”

I stared at the Avenue of the Dead while Pike told me.

Joe Pike: six days after they were taken

Joe Pike watched his friend Elvis Cole leave the Burger King parking lot, then entered the longitude and latitude into his GPS. Pike was not using a civilian GPS. He used a military handheld known as a Defense Advanced GPS Receiver, which was also known as a dagger. The DAGR was missile-guidance precise, could not be jammed, and contained the cryptography to use the Army and Air Force GPS satellite system. The DAGR was illegal for civilians to own, but Pike had used it in remote locations throughout Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Central and South America. These were military contract jobs for multinational corporations, mostly, but also the United States government. The government gave the DAGR to him even though it was a crime for him to own it. Governments do that.

Thirty-two minutes later, Pike slid from his Jeep onto a dirt road a hundred yards from the broken airplane and the overgrown landing strip behind it. Pike considered the airplane, then the surrounding land. The landing strip was obvious. The smugglers had smoothed a forty-foot-wide piece of desert for twenty-five hundred feet, pushing their rubble into a low berm along the runway’s length. Now, all these years later, though the creosote bushes and bunchgrass returned, the landing strip created an unnaturally flat table of land with an unnaturally straight edge.

Pike took a deep breath, and waited for the desert’s silence. The Jeep ticked and pinged, but the desert swallowed these sounds as deserts will do, muting them with its emptiness. Deserts held an emptiness that could not be filled, and as the metal cooled, the pops and knocks slowed like a clock running down until the desert was silent.

Pike took another breath, expanding his lungs ever farther, and slowed his heart. Forty-four beats per minute. Forty-two. Forty. Pike wanted to be as still and silent as the desert. The best hunters were one with the land.

Pike made his way through the cholla and creosote, and quickly located the remains of the fire Cole described and the tire print marked with an E. This would be Trehorn’s track, with his friend’s track next to it. Pike thought of these tracks as “friendlies,” and would ignore them if he saw them elsewhere in the area.

Once the two friendly tracks were identified, Pike searched for the oversized quad tracks Cole described. These signs were not easy to find, the way you could see tracks on a sandy beach. The desert hardpack was made of shale plates scattered with sand, rocks, and sun-baked dirt. Though an occasional puddle of sandy soil held a clear track, the signs Pike found were mostly a few inches of thin line on a rock or a shadow pressed into the sand.

Pike worked carefully, and did not hurry. He eased into a push-up position, lowered his head, then changed position and lowered himself again. During his contract years, he was often hired to protect African villages and farm collectives from raiders and poachers. These missions involved tracking dangerous men through vast tracts of mopane scrub or arid savannah. Pike hired Masai warriors to track them. These were lean, mystical men who would study the tilt of a reed for an hour or touch a tree as if they could feel the heat left by a passing Bantu. They claimed the trees and grass spoke to them, and tried to teach Pike what they saw- be one with these things, and you will see without looking. Pike never heard voices or saw what they saw, but he learned what to look for, and that a man needed patience to find it. Joe Pike was patient.

He found three nine-millimeter casings almost at once, glittering like small copper mirrors. He found clear prints left by two pickup-sized vehicles, fragments of three different shoe prints, and then found the quad. Cole was right-two big tires mounted side by side, each maybe ten inches wide. A large truck had been here in a place where large trucks did not belong. Pike studied the dual tracks, and noted they lined up with the centerline of the landing strip. He followed them, noting more fragments of smaller treads, some crushed by the quad tracks, others cutting across them. The smaller tracks didn’t follow a straight course, but swerved and curved into the brush. Some of these tracks showed a sideways skid as if the vehicles had been moving fast. Pike wondered why they had turned hard into the brush, but kept following the quad.

Twenty yards past the dead airplane, the quad tracks curved toward the road where his Jeep now waited. Pike thought this was probably how the truck left, so he reversed course, and followed the tracks in the opposite direction back past the airplane.

He was thirty yards beyond the crash when the clearing was suddenly crowded with shoe prints; mostly fragments-the crest of a heel, the edge of a shoe-but enough to see differences in their sizes and soles. The shoe prints overlapped as if many people had stood in a group. Pike lowered himself to study them more closely, and realized the shoe prints completely covered the quad prints. This meant the people were here after the truck.