James Patterson - Gone

I finally found the LAPD detective John Diaz and pressed Dial.

“Emily, call the airport and tell them to get that plane ready to go,” I said to her as Diaz’s phone rang. “We need to get back to LA and pay Tomás Neves another visit, and he’s going to tell me where Perrine is or he’s going to die.”

The plan I sketched out with Diaz over the phone was hazy at first. But as Emily and I raced back to the airfield and the waiting air force jet, refinements were made and remade.

When we touched back down at Southern Cal Logistics Airport, Diaz texted to let me know that our course of action was irretrievably under way, for good or for ill. I no longer had the time or energy to care.

Following Diaz’s directions, Emily and I drove thirty miles southwest, straight from the base to Wrightwood, California, a pine-covered valley north of LA in the San Gabriel Mountains. About a mile north of a ski resort shuttered for the summer, we pulled onto a narrow, winding road called Lone Pine Canyon Road. We followed it to its end and then turned onto a long and steep, thickly wooded driveway.

It was about ten in the morning as we pulled the car into the pine-needle-covered front yard of an old, faded forest-green cabin. Diaz’s Mustang was already there, under a corrugated carport, along with a blue Jeep.

I rolled down the Crown Vic’s window to a low hum of chittering crickets. You could see some hogbacked hills in the distance behind the cabin, but there wasn’t another house to be seen. There weren’t even any power lines. It was like we’d driven back in time.

For a few moments, I stared at the faded cabin, mulling things over. I wondered what I would find once I went in there. Nothing good in the slightest, I knew. But we were past that. Way past that.

“Stay here,” I told Emily as I finally opened the passenger door.

“No. I’m going in,” Emily said, opening her door. “I’m in this as deep as you, Mike. I don’t care what happens next. I’m responsible.”

“No, you’re not,” I said, reaching across her and slamming her door shut again. “I’m the one with nothing to lose, Emily. If you want to help me, I need you to stay and just sit here.”

“But, Mike — ” she was saying as I got out and shut the door.

Diaz had already told me that they were set up downstairs. Around back, I pulled open a rusty sliding door and entered a musty-smelling, pine-paneled room with a stone fireplace. Diaz looked up from where he was sitting on a folding chair in front of the fireplace, smoking a cigarette. He was dressed head to toe in black. Beside him, propped up against the hearth’s river stone, were two AR-15s.

“What’s the story?” I said, shaking his hand.

“He’s in there,” Diaz said, pointing his cigarette at the closed door behind him. “We Tasered the shit out of him as he was coming out his front door. Talk about not knowing what hit you.”

“What does he know so far?”

Diaz blew a smoke ring up at the yellow water stains on the drop ceiling.

“We told him we work for Perrine’s rival, the Ortega cartel, and I think he’s fallen for it. He also thinks we have his family. He came on pretty hard at first, but right before you arrived, I got creative and convinced him that if he didn’t start being helpful, I was going to make a call and turn his wife HIV positive. He started with the waterworks then, boy. Broke like a glass hammer. Funny, the things that can hit a nerve.”

Diaz was putting the cigarette out on the sole of his boot when the door behind him opened and a large man wearing a ski mask stepped out. I stood there with a very puzzled look on my face as the man peeled off the mask. It was Detective Bassman.

“Wow! You’re in on this, too?” I said as I shook his massive hand. “Risking your ass for me? I’m never going to be able to pay you back for what you’re doing for me. Either of you.”

“No problem, brother,” Bassman said, flashing a smile. “My pleasure, believe me. I think he’s ready to talk to us now.”

Diaz handed me a ski mask.

“Let’s do this,” he said.

Neves was in his underwear, lying on his back at the bottom of an empty, dated six-person hot tub. He had a puffy black eye and was gagged with tape. He was also handcuffed at the ankles and the wrists, and he was wearing a forty-pound weight vest that pinned him down flat onto the floor of the tub.

When I saw Neves lying there, scared and helpless in his underwear, I felt my resolve waver for a second. Gangbanger or not, Neves was a man. A man we’d kidnapped. A man we were about to extract information from by force, if necessary. Staring down at him where he lay shaking, I felt wrong, sick inside.

Then I remembered that somewhere right now, Perrine had my family, my kids, and I steeled myself with a long, deep breath.

Diaz lifted another vest from a corner and stepped into the tub. There was a ripping sound as he tightened up the Velcro straps of the second vest around Neves’s lower legs.

Diaz plugged the drain before he stepped out of the tub and sat on its edge. Bassman flicked open a butterfly knife and slid the blade in between the tape and the man’s mouth. When he cut the tape away, a thin string of blood flowed from a slit in Neves’s lip.

“Dang. Nicked you there, Tomás. My bad,” Bassman said as he violently tore the rest of the tape off Neves’s face.

Neves’s chest heaved as fresh tears sprouted in his light-brown eyes.

“Please,” he said between hacked-off sobs. “Please. My wife, man. Please. She’s pregnant, man. Two months. Don’t hurt her like that. Don’t give her the monster. The baby get it, too.”

When I heard the amount of genuine pain and fear in Neves’s voice for the second time, I felt something sway unsteadily inside me. I squeezed my hands into fists, willing myself to ignore him. I had no other choice.

“Hey, don’t worry so much,” Bassman said, pinching the gangbanger’s raw, red cheek from the other side of the tub. “I hear they’re doing amazing things on the AIDS front these days. Making some real medical break-throughs.”

Neves closed his eyes, his bloody lip quivering as he cried.

“OK, OK, OK!” he suddenly yelled. “You win! What do you want? Get me a cell phone. I’ll give you everything I have. I got eighteen kilos at a safe house right now. Eighteen. You can have everything.”

“We don’t want everything. We want Perrine. Where is he?” I said.

Neves did some more flopping around and moaning.

“Shit, shit,” he said.

“You in the shit, all right, Tomás,” Bassman said, loudly palming Neves’s head. He banged it back loudly against the floor of the hot tub. “You heard of quicksand? Well, you just stepped in quickshit.”

“He’s in Mexico, OK? He was here in LA. We set up some houses for him, but he’s gone now. I swear to God. Perrine went back to Mexico early this morning. One of my guys got him over the border.”

“To where?!” I said. “Where did he go?!”

“I don’t know. You think he’d tell me? I don’t know.”

“Wrong answer,” Diaz said, squealing open the tub’s tap full blast.

“No! It’s true! It’s true!” Neves yelled out over the water splattering loudly off the side of his face.

We stood there as Neves screamed, lying flat on his back, and the water rose. In thirty seconds, it was up to his earlobes. After a minute, the water had reached his cheeks. He strained his neck, trying to raise himself up. Covered in the segmented weight vests, he looked like an overturned turtle trying to pull himself unsuccessfully out of his shell.

“He went to his summer place near Mexico City,” Neves finally said, sputtering, the water now at his lips. “I’ll tell you exactly where on the map. Just turn it off! Turn it — ”