James Grippando - Blood Money

Jack steered into the driveway and killed the engine. The headlights remained on for a few moments, then blinked off. The house was dark, and the porch light was off. The narrow driveway was the only opening in a thick ficus hedge that extended like a castle wall across the front and along both sides of his smallish yard. It was great for privacy, but at ten feet it had grown way too tall, and it made the night seem even darker. He was glad Abuela had decided not to stay behind by herself.

Jack opened the car door, stepped out, and then froze. A man was sitting on his front doorstep. He rose slowly-not a threatening motion, but Jack proceeded with caution as he walked around the front of his car and started up the sidewalk. The man waited, and Jack soon recognized the face.

“Mr. Bennett?”

Sydney’s father answered in a low voice, his tone and body language conveying not so much reluctance, but resignation. “We should talk,” he said.

Merselus killed the lights. His one-room apartment on the Miami River went dark, save for the glow from the LCD of his laptop on the dresser. He closed the laptop and, in the darkness, slid it into his backpack. It fit nicely in the slim and padded pocket-safely separated from the fully loaded Glock 9-millimeter pistol, four extra clips of duty ammunition, and a nine-inch diving knife with a serrated blade. He took the knife, slipped on the backpack, and pressed the serrated blade to Sydney’s throat.

“Come on, come on, come on,” he said in rapid-fire delivery.

Sydney’s wrists were bound behind her waist with plastic handcuffs. A gray strip of duct tape covered her mouth. Her legs were free, which allowed her to walk, but she wasn’t moving fast enough. Merselus grabbed her by the hair and pushed her toward the door.

“I said come on .”

Sydney fell to the floor. Merselus unlocked the door, pulled Sydney to her feet, and spoke right into her face, eye to eye.

“Do what I tell you to do, and nothing else,” he said. He put the knife back to her throat, pressing hard enough this time to draw a drop of blood. “It’s that simple. Nod if you understand.”

It was a shaky nod, but she managed.

“Good girl,” he said. “Now I’m going to take the tape off your mouth, and when we walk out of this apartment, I want you to lean into me. If we pass anyone on the way to the car, you’re just a little drunk and I’m holding you up. You got it?”

She nodded again.

He pulled off the tape, which drew a whimper of pain but not another sound from her. Then she breathed deep, mouth open, as if gobbling up air. He grabbed a windbreaker from the closet, draped it over his hand with the knife, and put his arm around her waist. The windbreaker hid the plastic cuffs on her wrists as well as the knife at her spine. Then he pulled her closer and opened the door.

“Here we go,” he said.

The three-story complex was a converted motel, thirty years overdue for a makeover and a developer’s whim away from being razed for a new high-rise. Each apartment had just one door, which opened to the outdoors, and a single window with a noisy air-conditioning unit that faced the parking lot. Residents rented month to month, or in Merselus’ case, week to week. His apartment was on the second floor, and he guided Sydney toward the external stairwell. They were halfway down the stairs when Merselus spotted a Miami-Dade Police squad car cruising slowly through the parking lot. Just the sight of it confirmed his fears. Somehow he’d taken longer than eight seconds to send the Check the bench text to Swyteck. The cell had emitted not one but two electronic pulses, double the information he had been willing to release to cell towers in the area, just enough data for law enforcement to work with. Some tech agent had done the computations and triangulated Sydney’s iPhone. They had a bead on his location. A degree from MIT, six years in Silicon Valley, twenty-seven patented algorithms for M-rated video games that had allowed him to retire at age thirty-one and never think twice about a hundred-thousand-dollar bribe to one of Sydney’s jurors-and he slipped on triangulation.

Son of a bitch!

He pulled Sydney behind the wall of yellow-painted cinder block at the stairwell’s midlevel landing. The pungent odor of a homeless guy’s fresh urine hung in the air, but they stayed put, out of sight from the passing patrol car. Merselus gave the police a minute to go by. When the squad car reached the far end of the parking lot, he forced Sydney down the stairs toward apartment 102 on the ground floor. Merselus wasn’t friendly with any of his neighbors, but he’d made a point of studying the makeup of the entire complex. He knew that apartment 102 was occupied by a seventy-year-old man who lived alone.

The patrol car rounded the turn at the end of the parking lot and headed toward a block-long stretch of identical apartments in the west complex. Merselus knocked on the hollow metal door to apartment 102 and positioned Sydney so that anyone who peered out through the peephole would see only the face of a frightened young woman. There was no answer, but a light inside set the closed draperies aglow in the window. Merselus banged harder on the door, and he kept pounding until a sleepy and shirtless old man wearing only pajama bottoms opened it.

“Girl, what the hell are you-”

The old man choked on the rest of his words as Merselus whipped himself around the door frame. In a blur of motion, the knife pierced his skin, and the serrated blade tore a two-inch opening between his ribs. His mouth was agape in a futile effort to cry out in pain as the blade twisted and ripped an even bigger hole in his punctured heart.

Merselus pulled out the knife and let his victim drop to the floor-first to his knees, then onto his side. He lay motionless, the gray hairs on his chest awash in so much crimson. Sydney stood frozen and wide-eyed with fear. Merselus shoved her through the open doorway, dragged the old man farther inside the apartment, and shut the door. The blood-soaked carpeting squished beneath Merselus’ feet as he stepped around the lifeless body.

“Tough luck, old man,” said Merselus. “Already got all the hostages I need.”

The SWAT leader’s voice was in Andie’s ear, and he wasn’t happy.

“Henning,” he said via microphone, “tell Miami-Dade to stop patrolling the parking lot before they get my men killed!”

Andie was standing outside the communications van in a dimly lit parking lot behind a vacant warehouse. The black FBI SWAT van was parked beside the van. The chosen location was strategic: two buildings downriver from the apartment complex. The way the Miami River bent to the north, Andie actually had an unobstructed view from the parking lot behind the warehouse to the waterfront apartment units. It was the FBI’s makeshift command post-close, but not too close, to Merselus’ apartment. Andie was in constant communication with the SWAT leader in the field, in position and ready to begin negotiations if a hostage situation developed.

“Are the officers on foot or in vehicles?” asked Andie.

“I’ve seen two squad cars. Don’t know if there’s a foot patrol. But I’ve got four team members in stealth on a yellow-light site sweep. If MDPD officers in uniform start knocking on doors, it’ll be a disaster.”

A yellow-light sweep meant no busting down doors, no gunfire-just a pass through the area to collect information and assess the situation.

“I’ll shut it down right now,” said Andie.

Merselus switched on the TV. The television media’s obsession with breaking news could be his friend in a situation like this. Nothing quite like the local Action News chopper to reveal police positions and give the bad guy a bird’s-eye view of law enforcement strategy. As yet, none of the stations had jumped on the story. He kept the television on but muted the sound, just to stay alert to any noises in the parking lot.