Дэвид Балдаччи - Mercy

And the feds had destroyed his father for it, for merely standing up for what he believed in. Not nice, thought Peter Buckley. But then there were many not nice people in the world.

After his father’s death and his mother’s abandoning them, he, as the oldest sibling but still a child himself, had taken over the leadership role with respect to his remaining family. When he reached adulthood he had spent all his time expanding on his father’s ambitions in a far more sophisticated way, choosing to learn from his father’s mistakes rather than repeating them.

Over the years, he had created a far greater empire, and hidden the criminal elements of it behind a complex web of entities. At the same time, he had inserted himself into the fabric of mainstream society behind a consortium of perfectly normal businesses, while also building a reputation as a philanthropist. He supported myriad candidates for political office and had many friends who held both high and more mundane offices. He had found that only the latter could actually accomplish the things he needed done. Power at the national level was hopelessly gridlocked. But if you needed a residential development approved, or wanted the contract for garbage pickup, or required rezoning for a commercial project, the locals were far more powerful than even the president of the United States.

Several years before, he had bought back the land on which his family’s compound had been situated, and he had rebuilt some of the facilities. He had put in a private airstrip and would fly in there from time to time, and stay there all alone for a few days. He would walk the site, sleep in the facsimile of the house in which he had been raised, and imagine how life could have been had the law not destroyed the Buckleys. That was his therapy, his respite from a world that he had learned to dominate on his terms but also would never truly belong to.

He had tried in vain to teach his brothers that real change meant playing the game until you got to the point where you controlled the game. Outsiders did not make real change. You had to become an insider, and you did so through a series of steps: ingratiate, annex, dominate, and then consolidate. Let the changes be so incremental that they would never see what really was coming until it was far too late.

However, his ill-educated brothers had not listened to their older sibling’s advice. Since his teens Ken had been in prison. He had only been recently released from his last stint for another stupid and meaningless crime. Ken was particularly unteachable, his skin tatted with crap he probably didn’t even understand. He was a loser and not really worth worrying about.

His sisters, like their mother, had abandoned the family when they reached adulthood. Buckley had never forgiven them. He had also never married or had a serious relationship with a woman, because he knew them to be totally untrustworthy. When he required sex, he paid for it. The night passed and the lady was not there in the morning. And that suited him just fine.

But Ken was still family, so Buckley did worry about him. When he got the call about what had happened from a police officer who had found his phone number among Ken’s personal belongings, he had flown in on his jet two hours later. He had sat through Ken’s first surgery. And he had gone to the motel to find out what had happened, and had also spoken to the local police.

A woman, of course, had done this to his brother. A tall, strong woman who had given no name and paid for her room in cash. She had told the woman at the motel that she was an undercover cop. Yet the police had no knowledge of her; Buckley, in his friendly, nonthreatening way, had asked for details about this, and the police had been very accommodating because Buckley was Ken’s brother and looked and acted eminently respectable. So the woman had lied. And she had nearly killed Ken. Buckley had also confirmed that the woman had done all this to Ken with her bare hands. A formidable woman, physically, because Ken was no lightweight when it came to a brawl.

The surgeon had said that they would have to run more tests and do more imaging to make certain there would be no lasting damage to his body or his brain.

Buckley would take care of his little brother, even if it meant hiring people to change his diaper and feed him through a straw. And the woman needed to be found and punished appropriately. In Buckley’s mind, there was no other possible outcome.

He left the hospital, climbed into a rented Mercedes, and drove back over to the motel. He was a man who was usually driven places, but he had come here alone. This was family business. When others needed to be called in, he would call them in. First, he had to do some more digging.

And a thought had occurred to him.

Beth, the woman at the motel’s front desk, seemed pleased to see him again.

“Have they caught her yet? I gave a description.”

“Unfortunately, no. But when I was here last time I noted the camera out front. Is it functioning?”

“Oh, damn, I forgot about that. Yes, it is. The cops didn’t even ask about that.”

“May I see the film?”

She showed him to a back room and had him sit in front of a computer. A few moments later scenes appeared on the screen, and Beth sped up the video until she got to a certain point. However, there were numerous blurry and totally blacked-out segments.

“That’s her car,” she said in a triumphant tone, hitting a key to return the video to normal speed. “The gray Civic.”

Buckley took out his phone and keyed in the license plate number and then took several photos of the car. “But where is the woman? If you have the car, you should have her as well on the security footage.”

“It’s this lousy system,” whined Beth. “It jumps around and doesn’t film everything. And the camera is really old and half the time doesn’t even work.” She ran it back and then played it forward again. “You see there, and there? Where it’s all blurry and gray? That was probably when she came and went to the office. This is the only good shot of the car. But at least we got that.”

He thanked the woman with a hundred-dollar bill.

“I hope you get her,” said Beth, eagerly taking the money. “She’s a real bitch.”

“And the woman with Ken whom you mentioned earlier?”

“Rosa? Yeah, the bitch drove her out of here. Said she was taking her somewhere safe.”

“Do you have a picture of Rosa? I hope we don’t have to rely on security footage again.”

“We don’t. I have it on my phone.”

Buckley looked intrigued. “And why is that, I wonder?”

Beth looked embarrassed. “One day she... she had on a dress I liked. I was thinking of getting one, so I... I took her picture.”

He looked over her frumpy clothes and pudgy frame. “I see.”

She showed him the photo, and he took a picture of it with his phone.

“Very lovely woman,” said Buckley. “Thank you.”

“Are you going to try to find her?”

“Yes, I want to let her know about Ken’s condition.”

“I doubt she cares.”

“I will do so anyway. Any ideas where she might be?”

“Like I said, the big gal mentioned she was taking her someplace safe. Now, there’s a women’s shelter in town. You might want to try there. It’s on Everson near Fuller Street.”

“Thank you again.”

He got back into the car, and texted the images of the license plate to an associate and asked him to run down information on it. Then Buckley drove off to look for Rosa.

He had a great many other things of importance on his plate right now. But he had set all of them aside for this. His family, granted, wasn’t much. Yet it was still his family. And in Buckley’s world, family could not remain unavenged. After his father’s death, his whole life philosophy had revolved around one concept: You can never turn the other cheek. So Ken’s attacker had to be found and beaten badly enough to be hospitalized.