Ridley Pearson - Cut and Run

For Larson, it was a matter of getting free ahead of Rotem’s arrival, of establishing that Penny was captive and getting a firsthand look at the setup.

He, Stubblefield, and Hampton were going in there, and he wanted a firsthand look, not Spectravision.

The woods were dense. Slow going. Deadfall and thornbushes caused them several detours as Larson fought to maintain his sense of direction. After ten minutes they arrived at a spot with a distant view of the gate. Larson hunkered down.

“How are we going to get in there?” she whispered, echoing his present thoughts. The two of them were on their haunches with a view of the gate now.

He wished he’d come alone, that he’d left her safely behind in the step van.

From within his coat pocket, he removed her original cell phone and its battery.

“Hey,” she said, recognizing it. “What are you doing?”

“I’m putting the battery back into it.”

“I can see that.”

“We have to consider another possibility.”

“The first possibility being?”

“Maybe we weren’t as smart as we thought,” he told her, clearly frustrating her with his obliqueness. “I’m thinking now we may have been suckered into that mess in Florida. That it all went horribly wrong for them but that Markowitz not using a firewall was no mistake.”

“They wanted us to find him?”

“They wanted you to find them. To lure you there. What have they ever wanted? You dead, right? Listen,” he said, answering her doubting expression, “it’s just conjecture. But they were so quick to get over to the hotel, and they only sent the one man. I’m just saying there are a lot of things that don’t add up perfectly.”

“So they’ve lured us here.” She made it a statement.

“I’m just saying they wouldn’t mind if you walked through that gate.”

“Penny’s not in there,” she moaned. “Is that what you’re saying? It’s all a trick to get to me?”

“I hope not, but I can’t rule it out.”

Indicating the Siemens phone, he said, “The point is, in terms of psychology with guys like this, you work their blind spots as much as possible. You exploit their weaknesses. You feed them what they want, but not when or how they expect it.”

“You’re losing me.”

“We’ve kept your phone off, meaning they had no way to locate you,” he said, clicking the battery in place. “And we’ll keep it off until we want them knowing you’re here. At that point, I’m convinced they’ll try to track you down and kill you.”

She laughed at that. “Whose side are you on?”

He placed the phone into the pocket of his black windbreaker, waiting to activate it.

“Once it’s on, it shouldn’t take them long to know where you are. At that point, if Penny’s in there, they’ll want to reinforce her position, or even attempt to move her.”

She speculated, “And by doing so, they reveal her to us.” She nodded, understanding his thinking now. “And if they don’t react as you want them to, aren’t we seriously outnumbered? I count five of us, one of whom’s a video technician and another a driver.”

“There’re more than that,” Larson assured her. “The radio tech had a list in front of him with seven call signs-handles-written out. He keeps LaMoia in radio contact with his teams.”

“I didn’t catch that.”

“That could mean seven to fifteen or twenty of their guys around here someplace,” he speculated. “There are only two ways to do something like this. You go in small and quiet or big and noisy. If you go big, you have to go very big.”

“And you obviously don’t like that.”

“My squad is small, but we work very fast.”

“Hampton and Stubblefield.”

“That’s right.”

“So we wait for them?” Her voice returned to anguish.

Headlights.

Larson reached out and placed a hand on her forearm. She was unusually warm, the shirt damp from the thick air.

The headlights were from a car on the inside of the compound. It slowed as it approached. The gate opened-perhaps automatically, perhaps not-and a sedan pulled through, turning out onto the road. A high-end Mercedes four-door. It stopped at a stop sign twenty yards to the right and then continued on.

When it was well out of earshot, he tugged on her and whispered, “Okay, let’s go.”

She shook off his grip. “Go where?”

“Back to the van.”

“I want to stay here!” she protested. “This is the closest I’ve been to her. I’m not leaving.”

“You’re cold.”

“We stay here until your friends arrive. I’m not going back to that van.”

He stripped off his windbreaker and made her accept it. It was heavy on the side with the phone.

“When do we turn on the phone?”

“Soon.”

In a sudden burst of light, the gatehouse and entrance were illuminated as a pair of overhead lights came on.

For the second time he noticed the ornate ironwork above the gate. But this time it wasn’t on a small TV monitor in the back of a stuffy van that smelled like a locker room.

His breath caught in a gasp as he picked up the significance of the M and the W encircled in an oval of twisted wrought iron.

He mumbled, thinking aloud. “That’s not a W . It’s an inverted M . Meriden Manor.”

Hope followed his line of sight and turned her attention to the logo as well. “Yeah?”

“ M ,” he said, “and M .” Sounding foolish. “ Meriden Manor.” He made the fingers of both hands into W s and connected them.

“Yeah? So?” She didn’t see it.

He spread his fingers, making what vaguely looked like a diamond. Like a bowtie.

“The scar on the cutter’s forearm.”

Then she saw it.

A gleaming razor’s edge sparked across Larson’s memory. He felt it like a clean cut down his spine.

“I think we’ve got the right place.”

Philippe Romero steered the sleek Mercedes sedan onto the I-5 southbound ramp and located the abandoned truck stop along a dark, winding road that aimed west toward a seaside town that had once been a lumber port. The truck stop’s back lot consisted of a pale, claylike mud and deep potholes that looked to him like open wounds in the moonlit surface. Derelict gas pumps, now nothing but sawed-off pipes protruding from the ground into hulks of rusting sheet metal, rose like headstones from the ooze.

Philippe pulled around back of the boarded-up restaurant and mini-mart, per instructions, facing a rusted-out Dodge pickup truck and an eighteen-wheeler with Iowa plates. He carried a Beretta semiauto in the door’s leather pouch, a round chambered and ready to fire. He had another weapon, a.22 meant for target practice, tucked into the small of his back inside the black leather jacket. A hunting knife warmed in his right sock.

He pulled alongside the tractor-trailer and a moment later a male figure stepped out of the broken-down Dodge. Paolo came toward him in the headlights. He opened the door and climbed inside. His face glowed blue in the light of the dashboard. He smelled foul. His face looked like he’d bobbed for apples in a deep fat fryer.

“You were smart to call,” Philippe said. “We don’t need a stolen eighteen-wheeler on the property.”

“You want her in the trunk?”

“No. Put her in the backseat with the kiddy lock on. We’re decent people.”

Paolo didn’t move.

“She’s okay, right?”

“Yeah, she’s fine.”

“You haven’t done anything to her, right?”

Paolo leveled his blister-encrusted eye at the driver. “I’m not going to hurt this kid. You understand me? You want that done, you’re going to have to ask someone else.”