John Miller - Inside Out

“Calm down before you hurt yourself,” Sam Manelli said from the seat just behind Sean. He leaned forward, his warm breath on her neck. “We jus' give the feds a little time to get after the car.”

Through the pain and darkness, she managed to say, “Migraine.”

She was aware that the guard beside her handed Sam the note she had failed to pass to the driver. As he read it, he squeezed her shoulder with his free hand. Behind her, a radio came to life. “Covered wagon is headed to the barn. Cowgirl is in the back. Signal track is ten-ten.”

“The FBI is all idiots,” Sam said with total conviction as he crushed the note into a ball.

Through the curtain of pain in her skull, Sean was aware of these things: that her neck was surrounded by Sam's thick arm, that if he chose he could crush the life out of her, and that she was helpless to do anything about it.

“Go by Merle's place,” Sam instructed the driver. The driver crossed Canal and parked in an alley off Baronne Street. Sam stepped out of the van and the man in the front passenger seat accompanied him to a door. Sean closed her eyes. After what seemed like a couple of minutes, Sam and his bodyguard returned. As he climbed in, Sam handed a paper bag to the man seated beside Sean. Sean had to squint to see what was happening. The man reached into the sack to remove a syringe already filled with a few CCs of liquid.

“Please,” Sean pleaded in a whisper.

“Doc said this will fix a migraine headache,” Sam said.

The man slipped the covering from the needle and held her arm stiffly in place. Sean resisted until she felt the sting of the needle.

Sam placed his hands on either side of her head and rubbed gently. “How's your headache now?”

“Don't hurt me, Sam. I didn't know…”

She was fully expecting Sam to increase the pressure until it hurt worse than the headache. “You sleep a little now, and when you wake up you're going to tell me what I need to know. Then you won't have nothing to worry about.”

One thought rang out in her clouded mind. Winter will come.

As the van headed away from New Orleans, she closed her eyes and slept.

When Sean awakened, the headache was a dull shadow of its former self. She was in a dimly lit room, lying on a wide bed. She sat up and looked around. When she realized exactly where she was, fear seized her. This was a room she had been in before. It was Sam Manelli's bedroom.

Winter concentrated. The photographs in Sam's den depicted the gangster with various other men in hunting outfits over the years. One man with prematurely silver hair appeared in several of the pictures-Winter figured it was Manelli's underboss, Johnny Russo. In one picture there was a green Ford van behind the men. An elderly black worker standing by the van wore a coat with INTERNATIONAL LIQUID STORAGE emblazoned on the back.

“Might be smart to get the hell out of here, Winter.”

“And go where, Hank?”

“Get with Chet. Run down Manelli's possible hideouts listed in the files. Warehouses, offices, those kind of-”

“No time. He'll find out about this soon or he'll finish his business with her and have an airtight alibi. We have to get to him fast.”

Winter was studying the items in the room like a tourist in a museum. He noted a lodge in the background of several pictures and a boathouse in others. “I'd bet when Sam got his hands on Sean he took her where he feels secure.”

Winter was thinking and trying to decompress, to ditch the frustration and anger he felt. He had to distance himself emotionally, to depersonalize Sean, but he kept seeing her in his mind-at the mercy of butchers and knowing that nobody was in any better position to help her than he was. If he was going to help her, he had to forget that this was anything but a riddle to solve.

“Manelli is a sadist. He went to a great deal of expense and effort to kill her and Dylan. He believes that Dylan and Sean were responsible for putting him in jail, and almost taking down his empire. Manelli will take his time with her. He'll need to find out what she told and to who. He'll want to show off his power over her, his reach, his cunning, his winning out in the end like he always has. I suspect he'll want to do everything to her he wasn't able to do to Dylan. Fact is, our only chance to save her is if he keeps her alive as long as he can to torture her. We need time and a lucky break.”

Hank crossed the room and joined Winter to stare at a large satellite picture in a heavy cypress frame. It was a remarkably crisp aerial photograph of rural, industrial acreage. The photo was centered around a storage tank farm.

“You used to be able to call NASA and order one of these on a whole city, or just your neighborhood. I saw a picture just like this in the offices of an oil exploration company of an operation in Alaska. You could see elk grazing in it, not a quarter mile from the derricks.” Hank touched the glass. “That's a towboat pushing a double line of barges. Mississippi River.”

Winter studied a tanker moored at a dock from which three large white pipes ran up and through the levee, then over the road before they dropped down on the other side of a fence and entered a building. Smaller pipes exited the control house and channeled liquids out to each of the thirty storage tanks, each capable of holding maybe millions of gallons. A black lid on a tank had the company's initials painted on it in white letters. When he spotted something at the edge of the marsh, outside and south of the farm's fences, he took the picture down from the wall. “I know where she is, Hank.” He twisted it-the glass breaking as the frame snapped apart. He pulled the picture out, folded it and slipped it into his jacket.

A SWAT team member standing in the hall ignored them as they passed. As soon as they reached asphalt, they ran back up the driveway and across the grass, toward the Jeep. As they crossed the road they saw the red lights of approaching ambulances.

Injured SWAT team members and dazed technicians were huddled near Archer's corpse. Through the drizzle, they looked like wet birds on a line, waiting for the sun.

The plane was parked on the tarmac east of the sixty-foot-tall Quonset-shaped hangar. The four cutouts in dark all-weather coats disembarked carrying equipment cases, which they loaded into the rear of an ebony Chevrolet Suburban 4x4 before driving off. The rain obscured their view of Lake Pontchartrain and the twin bridges that stretched twenty-five miles to the north shore, but they weren't on a sight-seeing mission.

Thirty minutes after leaving Lakefront Airport, Lewis turned off River Road onto the road marked only by a NO TRESPASSING sign. He was only a quarter-mile short of the tank farm but couldn't see the tanks through the wall of gray. The road he turned off on had been built to give access to the property when the owners had wanted to turn it into a business park. The oil bust in the late '80s had ended the developer's dream.

During the half-mile drive down the narrow road, the quartet passed two more signs warning illegal dumpers to void their truck beds elsewhere and one promising prosecution to the fullest extent for depositing waste.

Lewis glanced in the rearview at Apache, his eyes drinking in her features. She was beautiful and no more than five-five. She had sharply defined muscles, long flowing black hair, narrow lips, and high cheekbones. Her professional name was Apache because she was half Apache and half African-American, raised by a whiskey-blind grandfather. She had been discovered by talent scouts who spotted her in an FBI arrest report. She had been arrested for taking on four large white men who were imposing their will on her when she took a folding knife from one of them. She had sent three of them to the hospital and one to the morgue. Later, she had taken on three reservation cops-two of whom she disarmed and handcuffed together before the third clubbed her unconscious with a weighted nightstick.