James Patterson - Gone

Vida turned up the music as Lillian shook and screamed and howled in pain. When the white noise of Lillian’s excruciation notched slightly back, Haydn was still playing merrily.

Vida lifted the sledge again.

“We’re going to try this one more time. With the ax part this time. Where is Bennett?” she said.

“In Northern California … near Susanville,” Lillian found herself saying between the sobs and the throbbing, center-of-the-sun agony that had become her left elbow. “I’m not … sure exactly where … I’d tell you his address if I could … but they wouldn’t tell me … in a million years.”

“How do you know this?” Vida said.

“An agent from the LA office,” Lillian continued in her pain-induced, haiku-like rhythm, “was sent up there … to pick his brain … about capturing Perrine … I do the books for the office … I saw the destination on the manifest.”

“An agent from the task force?”

“Yes.”

“What was the agent’s name?”

“Parker. Emily Parker,” Lillian said without hesitation. She hated herself. She knew she was putting others in jeopardy. But she was in so much pain. And afraid. God, was she afraid.

Vida dropped the splitting maul and consulted a binder in the corner of the room. She flipped a page, then flipped it back. Then she lifted a phone.

“Bring the van around,” she said into it.

Vida stepped back around to the rear of the office chair and pulled the gun from the waistband of her yoga pants.

“Just one more thing, Agent, and we’ll get you right out of here,” Vida said, raising the suppressed black-steel Smith amp; Wesson.22.

A wagon train of fire trucks, ambulances, and cop cars was on the scene when we got to Venice.

There were beach cops everywhere, on four-wheelers and in 4x4s and pickups. Most of them were sporting M-16s. Crime-scene tape fluttered as aviation whipped past low overhead in a buzz of bright, shaking light.

There were dozens upon dozens of citizens pressed up against the crime tape. Most were shirtless. One interested observer seemed to be clad in nothing save a hotel towel. Coming out of the Vic, I looked over my shoulder as I heard a suspicious click-clack. But it was just some bushy-haired thirty-year-old skateboarder attracted to the bright, shiny flashing lights.

Getting out of the G-car, Emily and I stepped around someone’s little dog, hitched to a public water fountain, and went under the crime-scene tape. Behind us, a squad-car siren was going off and going off and going off like a broken alarm clock.

There was reason to be alarmed, all right. We’d been scouring the city all day, chasing leads to try to find the fifteen-year-veteran agent who’d been snatched in broad daylight. Her husband, who was FaceTiming with her at the moment of abduction, had called it in from Brazil, of all places, where he was on a business trip. I didn’t envy the man.

Especially now that we’d finally found his wife.

The crooked smile of a quarter moon shining above black water was the first thing to greet us as we walked down to the sand. There was the soft, distant boom-and-shush of waves crashing, the sound of the palm fronds rasping in the wind. We stepped under a second strip of crime tape and across a deserted bike path.

Beside the path, just in the sand and facing the water, Agent Mara sat in a wheelchair with two bullet holes in her head. A dirty blanket covered her loosely. There was blood on the right corner of her mouth. In her lap was a plain brown bag that, we had already heard from the first responders, contained her cut-out tongue.

She’d been strapped to a wheelchair with tie wraps, obviously killed somewhere else. This was just a dump site. Her left elbow had been demolished, I noticed in the glare of the five-hundred-watt halogen work light the crime-scene people had set up. It looked like it had almost been severed with some blunt-force trauma. She’d been tortured, no doubt.

We turned as Detective Bassman stepped out of the shadows, straight up to us.

“Hey,” he said. “We looked for video in the stores along Ocean Front Walk, but it’s not looking good. There’s no evidence here. No prints anywhere. No witnesses. No nothing. I got the coroner to red-ball the autopsy so we can get her back to her family as soon as possible. Did the husband get here yet?”

“Still in the air,” Emily said.

“Probably for the best. He shouldn’t see this. Unbelievable. I know I’ve given you feds some heat, and I’m sorry for that. I know how hard you guys work. I know how bad it feels when one of your family gets taken from you.”

He quickly handed Emily a stack of bills.

“Passed the hat around. Get her poor kids some ice cream or something from us, OK? Tell them the LAPD isn’t going to stop until we drop every last one of the people who hurt their mother.”

“Thanks,” Emily said. “I will.”

“Hey, Bassman,” I said as the big guy walked away.

“What is it, Bennett?”

“Maybe you’re not such an asshole after all,” I said.

He smiled, shrugged.

“Just don’t let it get around,” he said.

It was hot when they woke that morning, and even hotter now at eleven as they went across the scrubby, grass-filled field under the pitiless sun.

Brian Bennett slapped at a monster horsefly that stung at his sweating neck. Man, he was starting to hate the country. The biggest lie in the world was how nature was supposed to be so invigorating and healthy. If there was one thing that he had learned out here, it was that nature was nothing but hot, dirty, smelly, and boring beyond the realm of human tolerance.

“Shit!” Brian yelled as the horsefly stung him again.

“Cursin’ now, Brian? Saints preserve us!” Eddie said, mimicking Seamus’s Irish accent to a tee.

Brian turned around to catch Eddie smiling, a napkin sticking out of his nose from a nosebleed he’d gotten about a quarter mile from the house.

Brian laughed despite himself. You had to hand it to the kid. He just kept at it 24-7. Jabbering, doing funny voices, making fun of things-himself, mostly-like some clown or court jester or something. A fool , Brian thought. That’s what he is. My brother Eddie, the fool. And he meant it in the best way possible.

“Quick question,” Ricky said from behind Eddie. “Why are we wandering the earth like a band of postapocalyptic nomads again? I hate to say this, big bro, but this Bataan death trek is quickly starting to teeter into the suck category.”

“You can go back any time you want, wimp,” Brian said angrily. “That goes for you, too, Eddie. I never asked you to follow me around. I couldn’t care less what you guys do.”

“Pardon me, but wasn’t it you who woke us up at the crack of dawn, Brian?” Ricky said. “I distinctly remember someone who looked a heck of a lot like you saying, ‘Get up, you idiot. It’s time to go.’ ”

“It’s OK,” Brian heard Eddie say to Ricky. “Brian’s just having one of his Brian moments. In other words, our big brother is going completely nuts.”

You can say that again , Brian thought as he trudged across the not-so-fruited California plain. What fifteen-year-old wouldn’t go nuts being exiled out here in the desert, like someone from the Bible?

And, just like a nut, he had woken that morning inspired to accomplish an important mission. He was going to walk until he found the river that Mr. Cody had driven them to a few weeks before. Not for any real reason. Because it’s there , Brian thought as he paced over the seemingly endless plain of dry land.

He thought he knew the general direction, but they were three hours into the hike, with no water anywhere. Has to be around here somewhere , he thought, sheepishly squinting up at the sky.