James Patterson - Gone

He’d become involved in the marijuana-growing business about a year after getting back to his hometown, Susanville, from an ’05 stint in Iraq with the army. He’d traded in the M1 Abrams tank he’d been driving for a beer truck and had applied to the huge state prison nearby, like every other sucker in town, when he bumped into some old buddies who had a grow house going. He’d helped them expand and organize it, ramp up production and sales until they were the biggest outfit around. Heck, he hadn’t even had to kill anyone. Just put a few guns to a few people’s heads.

But now, squatting there in the dark like some Peeping Tom, he actually felt a little bad. He had a few rug rats of his own, and it was doubtful that the cartel wanted to find these people in order to deliver a Publishers Clearing House prize. But the problem was, half his crop had been seized by the state park rangers a month before. He owed a lot of dangerous people a lot of money he didn’t have.

Here’s an opportunity to make everybody happy and then some , the man in black thought. Expand or, even better, quit altogether. Get out while he was young and rich, with his head still connected to his neck.

It wasn’t his idea, the man in black finally decided with a sigh as he sat there, listening and recording the family’s laughter on his iPhone.

It wasn’t his fault that God made the world so dog-eat-dog.

Six hundred miles to the south, Vida Gomez was lighting a bath candle in the guest powder room when her cell rang.

She stepped out and opened a sliding door to take it on the balcony. They were in the Hollywood Hills now, the lights of Los Angeles spread out below in the huge bowl of the valley, white on black, like cocaine on black velvet. The new safe house was pretty much bereft of furniture, but it actually suited the place. It was nothing but sterile stone and glass, clean and cold, just the way she liked it.

“Vida, I have news,” Estefan said excitedly. “I just received a call. We have a lead.”

Vida blinked. She had sent Estefan up to Susanville to see what he could see immediately after they’d dumped the agent at Venice Beach two days before. Already he had made progress. This was good news.

“OK, slow down,” she said. “Is it credible?”

“It can’t be confirmed, but I’ve been speaking to our people up here, getting them to put out the word about the reward, just like you said. One of the locals just called me directly. He claims to know the exact location of the Bennetts. There’s a problem, though.”

“What is it?”

“The informant wants more money. He wants a million, and he wants half up front. What should I do?”

“Sit by the phone. I’ll call you back,” she said, hanging up.

She went back inside as Manuel came out of the bedroom in a short silk robe. Most crime lords got fat when they got rich, but not the Sun King. He worked out like a madman with weights for an hour every day and ran for another on the treadmill. He was a health-food nut. Though he was in his mid-forties, he could easily pass for thirty-five.

She couldn’t help but stare at his broad shoulders as he went into the kitchen and took some pomegranate juice out of the fridge. Not for the first time, she felt herself get aroused. When he’d asked her to be his special personal assistant for the duration of his stay in Los Angeles, she thought he might make a move, but so far, unfortunately, he’d been the perfect gentleman.

He’d even informed her that he was having a guest over a little bit later. She knew what that meant. The two whores he’d had over the night before hadn’t left until three a.m.

Then she remembered herself.

“I have news, Manuel. The FBI agent was right. The Bennetts seem to be in Susanville. We just heard from an informant who claims to know their exact location. But he wants a million, and he wants half up front.”

“A million?” Perrine said, affronted. “That’s thievery.”

“Perhaps we could set up the informant? Force him to tell us?” Vida said, lifting her phone.

“No,” said Manuel as he poured himself some juice. “I have another idea. Send that other one up there. The one who found the last two stinking rats for us. What’s his name?”

“The Tailor?” Vida said.

“Yes, yes. The Tailor. He can easily find the Bennetts and eliminate them, especially now that we know we’re in the ballpark.”

Perrine drank some juice and smiled, raising an eyebrow.

“And you know what happens when we get in the ballpark, Vida.”

She had just forwarded Manuel’s wishes when the front doorbell rang. She looked at the security camera. There was a tall, blond woman wearing a tube top and leather miniskirt and a raincoat. Just one hooker tonight.

Terrific , Vida thought, rolling her eyes. Perhaps I’ll get to sleep before two.

Vida opened the door. The woman who stepped inside was even taller than she looked on the video screen, and very heavily made-up. Like a TSA agent, Vida put on blue rubber gloves before she went through the prostitute’s bag. All cell phones and recording devices would be left in the living room, of course. The already-agreed-upon procedure was that the sex workers would be blindfolded throughout, so as to hide Manuel’s identity. A detail the whores had no problem with, LA being a town where discretion was valued almost as much as debauchery.

As Vida was frisking the whore, she suddenly stopped and excused herself.

“Um, Manuel? A word, sir?” Vida said, knocking and entering his bedroom.

“Yes, Vida? Has my guest arrived?” Perrine said from where he lay back on the bed, smoking a cigar as he channel-surfed the seventy-inch flat screen.

“It’s about your guest, sir,” Vida said delicately. “I … I think she’s an impostor.”

“What do you mean? An impostor?”

“They sent a transvestite, Manuel,” she said. “I just frisked her, him, whatever. She is a definite he .”

The cartel king laughed as he shut off the TV. He shook his head at Vida affectionately as he stood and squeezed her cheek.

“Thank you, Vida, my innocent little country girl, but everything is completely in order,” he said as he spanked her playfully on the rump. “Now, be a love and go blindfold that vision of loveliness and send her in with the champagne.”

In the aftermath of the horrific attack on Agent Mara, the entire task force began to work fourteen-hour days.

We interviewed every witness at the pool where she’d been grabbed that morning-the lifeguards, the parents of the other kids. We had spoken to her soul-broken husband, who simply told us that he had been talking to his wife when there was a loud machine sound and the screen blurred. Emily even interviewed her poor little son Ian, who was overwrought with grief.

But there was nothing. We hadn’t even found her stolen truck yet. One second, the agent had been watching her kid in the SUV, and the next, the SUV was gone, with only a pile of broken glass in its place.

The following day, another two dozen new FBI agents were flown in to bolster our ranks. Also, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s LA office, John Downey, was put at the helm of the task force.

It was obvious that the female agent’s mutilation and murder had rung every bell and whistle at FBI HQ. As well it should have. Some were saying that the stakes for the bureau hadn’t been this enormous since the unparalleled spree of bank robberies that had plagued the country during the Great Depression.

Put simply, Perrine was calling into question law enforcement’s ability to deal with him. That could not be allowed to stand, especially on our own soil.