Joseph Finder - Power Play

My hands clutched the sides of his head, the way you'd hold someone you were about to kiss, only I shoved his head against the corner of the cabinet again, and again, and again.

He bellowed low and deep, like a beast. Blood roared in my ears. Snot ran down my nose. His eyes bulged, looking shocked and disbelieving and-was it possible?-afraid.

I didn't stop. I was in that dark tunnel now, had to keep going. Kept smashing his head back against the sharp corner. Felt something in his skull go soft. I had a fleeting thought, in the red haze of my madness, that it was like a hard acorn squash that had suddenly turned into an overripe zucchini. The awful bellowing finally stopped, but his eyes bulged.

I finally heard my mom's voice shrilling: "Jakey, Jakey, Jakey, stop it!"

I stopped. Let go. Dad toppled, then slumped to the floor.

I stared.

"Jakey, oh my God, what have you done?"

My legs buckled. An icy coldness in my stomach, icy fingers clutching my bowels, my chest. And at the same time, something else, too.

Relief.

I stood in the cool breeze and the dusky moonlight for what felt like a whole minute. It might have been only a few seconds, though: Time had slowed.

Pablo was unarmed, no threat; he'd obeyed orders, had done what he'd been told to do.

He had put his hands up. He'd surrendered. There was no reason to kill him.

Wayne's gun had looked longer because it was longer: He'd screwed on a sound suppressor. Probably so as not to tip off Buck, who he thought was out here.

Grief hollowed me out, and into that hollow place rushed a far more familiar emotion. Loosing the bad wolf, giving in to the rage: There was something strangely comforting about it.

It fueled me, propelled me, focused my mind, sharpened my senses.

I knew now what I had to do.

Wayne lumbered down the dock steps to the beach. Maybe he wanted to make sure Pablo was dead. Maybe he wanted to move the body somewhere, hide it or dispose of it. Or maybe he simply wanted to check the Zodiac to see if it was okay.

The hiss of the pneumatic closer.

I peered around the corner of the building, saw Verne emerge from the side entrance. He took something out of his pocket that glinted. The flick of a butane lighter, a puff of smoke. He held the flame to the bulb end of a glass freebase pipe, sucked in the smoke, held it in his lungs until he coughed it out.

I dropped to my knees, crawled along the front of the lodge. The porch was as long as the building's faзade, raised about five feet above ground level. I moved quietly, staying close to the wooden skirting, struggling to maintain my balance. The slope down to the shore was steep.

It wasn't easy, given the sharp incline from the shore to the lodge. When I reached the wooden walkway that connected the porch to the steps that wound to the pier, I stopped.

Wayne wasn't looking up at the lodge, though I didn't think anyone inside had heard the silenced gunfire. The great room remained dark. The only light spilled from the windows of the enclosed porch at the northwest corner.

I resumed crawling, went under the walkway, which was elevated a few feet about the steep hillside, shimmied through the narrow gap between creosote-treated timber pilings, then back along the porch skirting until I was beneath the screened porch.

Once I reached the west side of the lodge, I figured I should be able to crawl the short span to the woods unseen. That was the only way to reach the shore, and the boat, without being seen, but getting through the dense forest, though-

Voices.

I sank as low to the ground as I could.

Russell was saying something, in a calm voice, that I couldn't make out. Then came a reply, and I recognized Travis: "…ain't what we were hired to do."

Their voices got softer, more conversational, and as much as I strained to hear, I couldn't.

I wondered how long it would take for Wayne to return to the lodge and report that he'd just killed a young Mexican, a member of the lodge staff-and a hostage. The first question would be how one of the hostages had escaped. There'd be a head count. They'd quickly realize I was missing, too.

Which would surely trigger further reprisals. More "lessons."

The ground was earthen and soft, but here and there were buried surprises, rocks and twigs that bruised my kneecaps. The narrow strip of lawn lay just ahead, and beyond it, the forest. The only way down to the water, the boats.

And then Travis's voice, whining, almost pleading: "-hundred million. Not five hundred million, man, come on, what are we doing here? Jesus, Russell, man, that's like a whole new level of, of-"

Russell murmured something lulling.

Travis spoke, but just a fragment floated through the air: "…your cellie from Lompoc."

Lompoc, I thought. That was a prison somewhere. A federal prison. Russell's cellmate from Lompoc prison, it had to be.

John Danziger: One of their employees got arrested in South America on a child recovery case he was working, charged with kidnapping under the international treaty agreements. Did a couple years in prison in the U.S.

Now Russell raised his voice. "No, Travis, you listen to me very carefully. All he cares about is getting the goddamned ninety-seven-point-five million dollars in his goddamned account in Liechtenstein by the close of business today. He gets that, he's cool, he's off the hook."

Who was "he"-Russell's prison cellmate?

Travis interrupted him, but I couldn't hear what he was saying.

My scalp prickled.

Ninety-seven-point-five million.

Off the hook.

Liechtenstein.

Close of business today.

So this wasn't just a clever heist dreamed up by a gang of ex-soldiers. They'd been hired.

I sat up, keeping my head just below the porch floor. I waited, listened harder, finally gave up. Then, my heart knocking, I rose slowly and raced toward the edge of the forest.

For a moment, hidden in a dense stand of pines, I looked back at the lodge.

A tall, lanky figure stared out the porch window: Russell.

Maybe he was simply impatient, wondering what was taking Wayne so long. He had a schedule to keep, after all.

I began scrambling down the steep hill toward the shore. Coniferous forest, especially virgin, primitive woods like this, could be like Amazonian jungle. I found myself climbing through hellish, thorny underbrush, thickets of ancient, moss-covered spruces and giant Douglas firs, tendrils of protruding tree roots. Twisted, gnarled pines with boughs so densely grown together I couldn't see more than a few feet in front of me. Branches whipped against my face. The forest canopy was so thick overhead that it blocked the stars.

As I stepped over a drift of leaves and pine needles, my foot struck something.

It swung forward and grasped my shin, and when I saw what it was, I had to stop myself from screaming.

A well-manicured hand. Through the blanket of leaves that had been strewn over Danziger's body I could make out the light blue sleeve of his alligator shirt.

Next to it was another drift of leaves: Alan Grogan.

And a third body concealed by leaves and twigs. With the toe of my shoe, I cleared away just enough to see a dark-skinned young man in jeans and sweatshirt. Josй, I knew at once. Pablo's friend. The first one they'd killed, when they first arrived: the gunshot we'd all heard at dinner. He'd probably seen them come ashore when he was cleaning out the boats.

Undone by what I'd just seen, I kicked free of the dead hand, lurched forward, and tripped on a root; tumbled headfirst, then cracked my forehead against a craggy rock outcropping.

For a few seconds I breathed hard, allowed the pain to suffuse my body. When that didn't work, I bit my lip, tried to will the pain away.