John Gilstrap - At all costs

Ticked off as she was about Nick’s being gone at the precise time she most needed his help-she’d received twelve more Christmas orders just this morning-she had to admit that it was kind of peaceful, just her and the kids. At one level, that’s all she ever really wanted out of a marriage, anyway. And if this job interview could somehow jump-start his dead career, then maybe it would be good for all of them. This whole business with the Donovans in the news made her nervous, though. If Nick were anyone but his spineless self, she might even have been worried.

The pot on her wheel was giving her fits. The Aztec Urn, as it was called in the catalog, had a long fluted neck that ordinarily would have been the simplest thing in the world to fashion, yet for some reason she couldn’t get the proportions right. And this was her third try.

“Darn it!” She stopped the wheel and hammered the misshapen pot back into a lump of red clay with the palm of her hand. What she needed was a break, but she knew better than to take one. Not just yet. Once this one was molded, she’d have a full load to stick in the kiln, and then she’d reward herself with a late lunch. She should have grabbed a bite when she fed Lauren at noon, but she hadn’t been hungry.

Come to think of it, Lauren hadn’t made a peep in a long time. Probably still watching her Lion King video. Melissa knew her daughter needed more stimulation, but she just didn’t have time to be a mommy anymore. Next year, though, her baby would start school, and everything would work out just fine.

Maybe I’m trying too hard, she thought as she started up the wheel again. That was often the root of her creativity problems. Sometimes she’d get so tense about doing it “right” that she’d lose the feel for the clay. She tried closing her eyes this time. The tiny foam earphones on her head filled her mind with the peace of Copeland’s Quiet City, and as the haunting sounds of the solo trumpet ebbed and flowed with the melody, the base of the pot magically formed in her hands.

A shadow fell across Melissa’s face, and her eyes snapped open. A man she’d never seen before was standing in the archway that separated her studio from the kitchen. He held a package of some sort in his arms. In the green-filtered light cast by the tinted jalousie windows, the package looked almost human. A doll maybe? And it was dressed in the same outfit Lauren had been wearing.

Melissa screamed.

Nick slid the telephone receiver back into its clamp and thrust a hand angrily through his hair. “Dammit!” He looked at his watch. “It’s after two, for Christ’s sake. I thought these planes were supposed to be fast!” Under the circumstances, the Gulfstream could have been rocketing through Mach 3 and it still wouldn’t have been enough.

“Stay off the phone,” Thorne growled for the thousandth time. “Every one of those calls is like a trail of bread crumbs for the feds.”

Nick responded with an angry glare. At that moment, reinforcements from the FBI didn’t sound like such a bad idea.

“She could just be out of the house, you know,” Jake offered.

Nick shook his head. “No chance. She’s buried in catalog orders. She wouldn’t leave the house if it was on fire.” He sat back down in the overstuffed captain’s chair and rested his forearms on his knees. “She does this all the time when she’s really busy. She just turns off the phones. We’ve got one of those answering services through the phone company, and she just checks the messages at the end of the day. Drives me nuts. Suppose one of the kids was sick at school or something, you know?”

“They have a place to go, though, right?” Jake asked. “I mean, once you get word to them, they can leave right away?”

Nick opened his mouth to answer but closed it. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I guess they’ll just stay in a hotel.”

“Make sure they pay with cash,” Thorne warned. “If we miss this guy, he’s gonna be pissed. The last thing you want is another electronic trail.”

Nick’s features sagged. “I don’t know that I have that kind of cash.”

“Don’t worry,” Jake said. He patted the ever-present gym bags. “I’ve got you covered there.”

A speaker popped overhead, and the pilot asked everyone to return to their seats and to fasten their seat belts. They’d be on the ground in about ten minutes. Their destination was the Manassas Regional Airport, a discreet commercial airstrip in the far-west Virginia suburbs of Washington; large enough to accept corporate jets yet small enough to allow passengers to remain anonymous.

Thorne crossed his legs comfortably and folded his fingers over his knee. “So, ace, what about you? Now that you’re fishing for sharks, what happens when you pull one in?” His lips bent back into the condescending smile Jake had come to hate so much.

“I’ll make him talk,” he said, simply enough. He tried to sound decisive, but they all knew he was in over his head.

“Uh-huh,” Thorne grunted. “And suppose he doesn’t want to cooperate?”

“He will. He has to.”

“But suppose he doesn’t?”

Jake looked at Thorne carefully, knowing exactly what he was driving at, but refusing to address it. “He’ll talk,” Jake said. “Most people’s tongues loosen when they have a gun pointed at their heads.”

Thorne smiled, stared out the window. “The question is, is our man ‘most people’?”

Melissa shot to her feet, sending both her potter’s wheel and the Aztec Urn crashing to the floor. “Oh, my God!” she yelled. “Lauren!”

The whole room shook as she bounded across the floor of her studio, the cord from her headphones dragging the CD player to its death off the edge of its little table. “Lauren, baby! Oh, God, honey, are you all right?”

The little girl didn’t move, her body so still and limp that the man seemed to have difficulty holding on to her. As he passed her on to her mother, they both tried to scoop up a dangling arm, but it seemed intent on staying free. Melissa was gone in an instant, hurrying past the stranger without so much as a thank-you.

The man followed without an invitation.

Melissa ran as best she could over to the high-ceilinged great room and laid her treasure gently on the sofa. “Lauren, honey, wake up. Wake up, sweetie…”

“She’ll be okay,” the stranger offered.

His voice startled Melissa, she’d forgotten about him. “How do you know? What happened to her?” The first thing she noticed as she looked up was the coldness of the man’s eyes. The second thing was his gun.

“She’s not good at following orders, is she?” he said.

It had been years since Jake was in an airport, and even this little one out in Virginia’s boonies had five times more people milling around than he was comfortable with. This kind of travel should have been done only at night, but Nick was such a basket case that they’d had to come back early. Thorne insisted it was the most foolish thing they could do, that professional killers only worked at night, but Nick was equally adamant that they had to warn his family. With the telephone unplugged, the only alternative was to fly in. It wasn’t like he could call the local sheriff’s office and have them deliver the message.

Jake tried his best to stay invisible, wearing his sunglasses and baseball cap. He stood outside as Thorne took care of the rental car details. If Nick paced any more frantically, people were going to start looking for the maternity ward.

Finally, Thorne emerged from the sliding glass doors, car keys in hand, and they followed him across the parking lot to the cluster of five rental cars: four Escorts and a Grand Marquis. Thorne treasured his comfort. “Put your gloves on, people,” he instructed as he thumbed the remote to unlock the Grand Marquis’s door.