Ridley Pearson - Cut and Run

“That’s a lie, and you know it.”

She buttoned the blouse and tucked in the tail, her hand stuffed low into the crotch of her riding pants, and despite himself he wanted to take her right there and then-no better than Ricardo. She’d driven Ricardo half-mad with her open contempt of him. He wondered how he would have fared under such reproach.

“So go,” he said, the words tasting foul in his mouth.

Her face brightened beneath the gloom of the tree. “I was thinking the back gate.”

“Were you?” He realized she wouldn’t have left him like this if she hadn’t seen their hostage. “Life is not without its irony.” He climbed back onto the horse, already feeling a soreness in his ass. His efforts to wrestle-some would say steal-control of “the company” from Ricardo had largely been based on his fantasy of one day winning this woman back for himself. Now, all for naught. She was leaving, with barely a good-bye. If she hadn’t needed something from him would she have lured him out here like this?

As he rode away, he imagined her calling out to him, imagined her laying herself down beneath that tree and opening herself to him, that same wet, warm pleasure he’d tasted. Once. He imagined her begging him to come away with her.

But in fact that sound was nothing but a bird or some other wild thing out there alone in the forest, hungry for company, contemplative, mistrustful of all things foreign and new.

The late-afternoon sky darkened with the threat of storm, leaving ghosts and false images on the small black-and-white television screen.

The tall wrought-iron fence, supported every thirty feet by a column of rock and mortar, contained the rolling swales of fairways, the out-of-bounds populated with towering cedar, white pine, and hemlock. The bleached sand traps surrounded the greens like neck pillows. The black pavement of a road rolled out like a tongue through the columns that supported a heavy gate over which hung a swirl of metal fashioned in twisted curls forming an M over a solid line with a W reflected beneath it.

Larson took his eyes off the television monitor. He had parked a rental a half mile down the road from the Puget Sound Energy truck they now occupied. Hampton had done his best to call ahead and find a federal strike force capable of immediate surveillance, but in the end had settled for the Seattle Police. Larson checked his watch. Hampton and Rotem would be landing at Sea-Tac any minute.

“Wireless cameras?” Hope asked.

The Seattle sergeant was dressed in pressed jeans and outrageous cowboy boots. “Exactly. Used to be you wanted to watch a place, you parked across the street. Now we’re three-quarters of a mile away, watching the tube.”

The cop wore his long curly brown hair almost to his shoulders, looking more like an icon from the ’70s than one of Seattle ’s finest. A brown mustache overpowered his mouth, and he had Mediterranean eyes that looked deceptively sleepy.

He said, “Of course, they’ve probably got cameras, too. Watching that fence, the fairways, the various roads. So what you’ve got yourself right here is a real Kodak moment: cameras watching cameras.”

Headlights from a passing car illuminated the far left of the four screens, and then moved one to the next. The compound’s gate was seen in the third monitor, where the vehicle passed.

The sign out front read: MERIDEN MANOR.

“It looks like a country club,” she said. “But that sign makes it sound like something from the Cotswolds.”

Larson didn’t appreciate how these two hit it off so quickly. To him it looked more like a fortress and sounded like something made up.

“If the Romeros are in there, it’s news to us,” the sergeant told Larson.

“Sorry, I’ve already forgotten your name,” Larson said, maybe a little too intentionally.

“LaMoia,” the sergeant said. “This is Billy and Duke,” he added, reintroducing the technician and the van’s driver, who sat behind Larson facing out toward the road. “This Meriden Manor is a corporation. If the Romeros are in there, maybe they’ve changed their names or had a couple of Mexican face-lifts, maybe they’ve paid some people off to look the other way, because we should have been all over that, otherwise.”

“Penny’s in there,” Hope stated. LaMoia looked over at her. “My daughter,” she explained.

Larson cringed, seeing clearly in LaMoia’s surprised reaction that this was more information than he’d been supplied.

“Is that so?” He gave Larson a look.

“It’s entirely speculative,” Larson was quick to point out. Technically, Seattle Police were here at the request of the Justice Department. But those lines could get real fuzzy with a young girl captive and the smell of headlines in the air.

Hope hit Larson with a stinger of a look, intended to hurt him, but he knew what he was doing and looked right back at her, condemning her for her honesty while begging her to let him handle the sergeant.

He didn’t have any sense of the future beyond that he wanted to spend it with Hope and Penny, if they would have him. He hadn’t given any thought to what shape that would take, only its importance, the connection with his daughter intense in spite of the fact they’d never met. He’d not even seen a photograph, as Hope never carried one in case she were ever caught or killed by the Romeros.

“It’s down as an assisted-care facility,” LaMoia told them. “Health care corporation. We’ve got no record of ever having set foot in there-SPD I’m talking about. We got a request in to King County, but I’ll bet it comes back the same. Whoever they are, whatever goes on in there, it’s all theirs. And they’ve kept it nice and private.”

“That fits for the Romeros.”

“Yes, it does.”

“And if we need your guys in there?”

“You give us probable cause, and we can put ERT inside.”

“Does my daughter count as probable cause?” Hope asked.

“No,” Larson answered, pained to do so. “Not until I get inside and confirm she’s there.”

LaMoia explained to her, “He’s federal. Right now there’s some AUSA working up papers to justify his snooping around. For us it’s a different story.”

“There are bound to be people coming and going,” Larson said, thinking of the meeting. “I’d like to get her”-he indicated Hope-“closer to the gate. She was an eyewitness several years ago. It may help us with probable cause if she can make a face.”

Hope’s look of total confusion nearly wrecked things. Larson tried to quell her expression with one of his own: a scornful drop of the brow and a hardening of the eyes. Yes, it was a gross exaggeration-a lie-but he needed them out of this truck and closer to the estate. Thankfully she caught this, and stopped herself from saying whatever it was she’d had on the tip of her tongue.

LaMoia instructed Billy to reposition the camera that covered the gate. The image moved as the camera-mounted temporarily atop a telephone pole, it appeared-panned to the left. LaMoia pointed out an area on the screen. “You should be able to make your way up into this ground cover by crossing the road right where we are and going it on foot. Through the woods maybe a quarter mile this direction. Just make sure you stop well short of where you might be seen.” He pointed again. “About here. You know the drill.”

“Yes, I do.” Larson knew LaMoia might offer advice but would not try to stop him. If a federal agent wanted to take a damn fool position, LaMoia was ready to allow him that mistake.

But not without a word of caution, as it turned out. “If you decide to go in there without a call from the U.S. Attorney’s Office-well, it’s clearly posted as private property. Without some kind of warrant, that makes you the criminal, not those assholes. We get a call, and we gotta come bust you, not them. So think about that.”