James Patterson - Gone

“You know, Mike, now that I think about it,” Diaz said with a wink, “perchance I did.”

It was noon when he left San Francisco and going on three by the time the Tailor saw the first sign for Susanville on 395.

He passed a thin cow, a dilapidated barn, some rusting machinery. The land beyond the open window, the washed-out sand and scrub grass, had a lunar quality to it, the awesome mountains in the distance like something from the cover of a cheap sci-fi paperback. The wind whistled in through the window as the sun glinted off the gold wire of his aviator sunglasses. He drove at a steady five miles over the limit and left the radio off.

The Tailor was average-sized, average-looking, a non-descript bald white man in his early thirties wearing a dark polo shirt and sharply creased stone-colored khakis. He’d been an FBI agent once back east, an army Ranger before that. Now he did things that had bought him a town house in San Fran, a marina apartment in San Diego, and almost a dozen bank accounts stuffed, at his latest tally, with nearly six million dollars in cash.

No one knew his real name. Among those who hired him, he was referred to simply as the Tailor because he dressed nicely and he always sewed everything up.

He got off 395 and passed the Walmart and drove into the town. He cruised past gas stations, beat-up pickup trucks in dirt driveways, some equally beat-up-looking folks on the sidewalks. There was supposed to be a prison, but he didn’t see it. He checked his notes and parked on Main Street, across from a saloon. He dialed the number of the contact the cartel had set up.

“This Joe?” the Tailor said when the line was answered.

“Yep.”

“I’m across the street, the white Chevy Cruze.”

After a minute, a young bearded guy came out. He was broad shouldered and wearing cutoff denim shorts and a Nike T-shirt, the swoosh on it about as faded and washed out as the surrounding prison town. Not even noon, and beer on his breath , the Tailor noted as Joe climbed into the passenger seat.

“Could you put on your seat belt, please?” was the first thing the Tailor said.

“Come again?” Joe Six-Pack said.

“Your seat belt. Could you please put it on?”

The Tailor waited patiently for the contact to secure the belt before pulling out. California was click-it-or-ticket, and getting pulled over was not on the agenda. Not with what he had in the trunk.

“Where we headed?” Joe wanted to know.

“For a spin,” the Tailor said. “Do you know this town?”

“I should. I’ve lived here all my unfortunate life. Can I smoke?”

“No,” the Tailor said. “You work at the school?”

“Sorta. I’m the assistant football coach, and you can save the Sandusky jokes, thank you.”

The Tailor handed him the file with the photos in it.

“You recognize any of these kids? They would have arrived within the last eight or nine months.”

“Nope. Not even a little,” Joe said after flicking through them. “An Asian kid around here? That, I would have remembered.”

The Tailor nodded to himself. They were homeschooling them. Witness Protection 101. The Tailor had expected that.

“Go through the pictures again, Joe, and think again slowly. You might have bumped into them at the Walmart, the local pizza place, on the sidewalk, church?”

“Wait,” Joe said, holding up a finger. He fished through the folder again and took out the photo of the priest.

“This guy ain’t Irish, is he? Has, like, an Irish accent?”

The Tailor was pretty sure he did, but he glanced at his notes anyway.

“Yes,” he confirmed.

“My mom told me an Irish priest subbed for the local pastor a couple of weeks back.”

The Tailor felt it then. A primordial tingling down his spine as warmth spread in his belly. He always thought of the sensation as how a shark must feel on detecting the first traces of blood in the water. Fresh meat this way. The happy foreshadowing of victory.

The Bennett contract was a whale, all right. Three million. He knew what he was going to buy with it, too. A flat in Paris. Travel was one of his few passions.

“That right?” the Tailor said as he lawfully put on his clicker and made a perfect K-turn.

Joe nodded, pulling on his beard.

“The old biddies couldn’t get over it. Imagine, that’s what passes for news here in Susanville, USA.”

“Where’s the Catholic church?” the Tailor asked.

“Where’s my money?” Joe said.

“In the glove box.”

Joe took it out and gazed on it, smiling. The Great Recession really must be hurting these hicks out here , the Tailor thought. He’d never actually seen someone happy to be setting up a hit on a family for five hundred bucks in twenty-dollar bills.

“Make a left up ahead,” Joe said. “The church is there on your right.”

Mary Catherine’s bedroom was on the third floor, in the quaint, rickety Victorian farmhouse’s converted attic. It was little bigger than a closet, but its dormer window, with its clear, unbroken view of the flat grasslands and the grand Sierra Nevada beyond, actually made it her favorite spot in the entire house.

A bright moon was hanging just above the awe-inspiring peaks when Mary Catherine suddenly came awake a little after one a.m. She flipped her pillow over and lay there staring out the window, listening intently, wondering what had woken her.

After another minute, she decided that it was nothing, probably just the two glasses of the wine that Leo had brought over for dinner. She hardly drank at all these days, but Leo had seemed concerned about whether the wine he’d brought matched up properly with the roast chicken she’d served. Indulging in a couple of glasses of pinot grigio seemed the least she could do to assuage his fears.

Dinner with Leo is swiftly becoming part of the regular routine now, isn’t it? she thought, smiling. Even the boys who had given her so much trouble had decided to stop the silent treatment when Leo quietly started talking baseball with them. Leo had that effect on people. There was something still inside him, an openness, a … gentleness. You couldn’t help but like him.

She didn’t know how Leo would fit into the picture once Mike came back, but she’d decided to cross that bridge when she came to it. She wasn’t one for making people jealous, but she was actually looking forward to Mike’s reaction. At least a little. It would be quite interesting to see how much Mike liked watching another man pay her some attention for a change.

She was looking out at the dark land, the mountains glowing in the starlight, and groggily thinking about Leo and Mike when she thought she heard something downstairs. Then she heard it again. A soft thumping, followed by the creak of weight on wood.

How now, brown cow? she thought, frowning, as she put her bare feet to the rough floorboards and found her slippers. Out her door and down the stairs, she stopped and looked over the banister of the second-floor landing. A suspicious, flickering glow of blue light was coming from what seemed to be the main level’s family room.

She padded down the stairs and quietly around the corner of the kitchen. Just as she suspected, here they were. The things that go bump in the night, in the living flesh.

In the family room, with their backs to her, Eddie and Ricky were splayed out on the couch, thumbs and fingers clicking madly as they played the NBA Street Homecourt PlayStation game that Leo had brought them that evening.

“And one! Woop, woop! That’s right. I’m good,” Eddie said, raising his controller over his head as he did a little dance. “I’m gonna dunk on you like that all day long.”