Ridley Pearson - Cut and Run

Frustrated, Penny rocked and bucked, which only served to bang her head against the tub, and that hurt. She quieted again, remembering her mother’s lessons on patience, that everything took time, sometimes more time than we wanted, and there were “more ways than one to skin a cat.”

At that moment, at the height of her telling herself to be patient, her mother so fully in her mind that it felt to her as if she, her mom, were sitting on the toilet while Penny took a bath, her mom finger-combing her hair the way she did when she was tired and talking to herself, Penny heard her mother say, “Look for the obvious.” “Don’t fight the easy answer.” It was then, at that moment, that Penny finally did see the obvious, saw what had been facing her throughout her entire ordeal, facing her like a giant’s eye, and she thought that without Mommy she never would have seen it, and that made her sad and all the more desperate to be out of here.

The tub’s faucet, its single lever right before her eyes.

She wiggled, moving herself incrementally toward the drain, stiffened her elbows, and rocked her bottom like playing bucking bronco. Her feet jumped up, though she could not hold them there. She tried again. And again. The third time, the tape around her ankles snagged on the pull-up lever on the top of the spigot, a lever that started the shower. Her feet were held aloft.

One more heave, and her toes smacked the faucet.

Cold water trickled out.

Another try and the valve opened and the water gushed out.

Shivering, she wrestled her feet free of the spigot.

She felt the water collecting. When the maid had finished cleaning, she’d left the tub’s stopper down, plugging the drain.

The tub slowly filled with cold water.

A moment later she felt the first tingle of her body rising with the water. Floating toward the top of the tub.

She cried at the thought of seeing Mommy again; her freedom might now be within reach.

Paolo roughly broke through a glass window using the corner of a shipping pallet at the back side of the Mason Ridge Veterinary Clinic and Animal Hospital. The sounds of barking dogs erupted from within. Hearing a burglar alarm, he moved quickly. These kinds of suburban neighborhoods were well patrolled, especially along the commercial district. The cops were typically bored and appreciated a good break-in to pick up a slow night.

Stepping through, he found himself in a small bathroom. He grabbed a pair of latex gloves from an open box and donned them. The dogs continued to battle the alarm. Door by door, he worked his way past two examination rooms, an office, and the waiting room. The place smelled of dry dog food, medicines, disinfectant, cedarwood shavings, urine, and feces.

Having marked his watch at the moment of break-in, he estimated he had less than five minutes before the police arrived. In New York City or Los Angeles he might have had twenty to thirty minutes. Not here in Middle America.

He found the stockroom, located a pair of locked cabinets, and used a stainless-steel surgical device to pry it open. He trained his one good eye toward it in the dim light: The shelves were stacked with cloth-wrapped surgical gear. As he turned his talents to the second cabinet, he noticed he’d ripped open the surgical glove on his right hand. Fingerprints! He glanced behind him, attempting to quickly catalog all the surfaces he’d touched. When had it torn?

As it happened, the idiots used their sirens. He heard the mechanical cries growing louder, but they still sounded far off.

The second cabinet succumbed.

He searched the five shelves of prescription drugs, reading for the base compound instead of the brand name, as vets called their drugs by different names.

He pocketed some high-dose antibiotics and finally, mercifully, located a synthetic opiate- a painkiller .

He would have liked to search for a salve for the blistering on his face, but no. The wash of headlights on the windows signaled the arrival of a patrol car far sooner than he’d anticipated.

He hurried back through the building to the window through which he’d come, not trying for his car, eager to disappear up into the woods on the hill behind the small clinic.

Minutes later, he dry-swallowed two of the large pain pills and squirted saline solution onto his swollen face.

Never resting, he pushed up through the woods, reaching a clearing shared behind three large homes, all with garages.

Garages meant cars or bicycles.

From a distance, he could see down to the roof lights of the patrol car flashing red, white, and blue across the vet clinic.

The painkiller wouldn’t kick in for a half hour or so, and by that time he hoped to have ridden a bus back to the motel, hoped to be numb to the sensation of the razor’s edge, and the punishment he so craved.

He would still have to deal with the little girl.

He wondered how tough she was, how badly she wanted her freedom, and whether she possessed the courage to remove the melted contact lens from his swelling eye.

“What now?” Hope asked. She carried a small bundle of intimates and clothing cradled in her arms. “You want me to wash yours as well, you’re going to have to get out of them.”

“No thanks.”

“You could use it.”

“This is all I’ve got,” Larson informed her.

“That’s my point,” she said.

He’d risked a quick stop at Target to buy them both some clothes. She was laundering what she’d changed out of.

The condominium they occupied overlooked construction on a new baseball park for the Cardinals, and, beyond it, the tiny moving lights from Highway 40. From the corner of the living room, they had a view of a gambling casino on the Mississippi, an eyesore in Larson’s opinion.

Larson took a minute to don the sweatpants and sweatshirt. Their clothes joined in the washer. He thought this oddly significant. Wondered if this was but the first of such nights together.

He heard her setting the timer. She seemed more settled.

She returned to the kitchen, searched the refrigerator and the cabinets, but of course no food. “We’re going to have to order in.”

He wondered if this ease of hers had come with the shower or the attack on her. Or had she simply resigned herself to the fact that he now represented her daughter’s only real chance? Or, like him, did it run deeper than that?

She slid down into an IKEA chair and placed her elbows on the table. “Let’s say they never call me back,” she proposed from a distance. “How do we go about finding her?”

Larson took a chair facing her. “It’s a two-step process. Our best shot, our most likely prospect, remains Markowitz.”

On the way to the condo, he’d told her all he knew about Markowitz. Hope already had a better grasp of the computer and technology aspects of the case than he did.

“So you’re saying the Romeros got to Markowitz.”

“Or they didn’t have to because it could have been his idea in the first place. No one is saying Leopold Markowitz walks on water. He could be bent. He could be broke. He could have approached the Romeros for protection while he went about stealing the list. We won’t know until we get there.”

“Are you saying if we find Markowitz, we find Penny?”

“It’s a possibility, yes. If the Romeros are behind this-and I’m convinced they are-then finding Markowitz gives us the Romeros, and we’re that much closer to Penny.”

“And how do we find him?”

“WITSEC is convinced he’ll need a supercomputer to accomplish the decryption.”

“If it’s one-twenty-eight-bit or higher, then, yes,” she said, interrupting. “It would be painfully slow, even on the fastest PC.”