Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

I stood in the rain a few hundred feet from the terminal building and watched the glass doors.

I looked at the plane and noticed the tail number and memorized it: N483C.

After about five minutes my phone rang.

“It’s them. They’re heading out to the tarmac.”

“Okay.”

I saw three people approach the glass doors from inside and then emerge into the rain. Two large male figures, both in black rain ponchos with hoods up, flanking one smaller figure, a woman. One of the men was holding an umbrella over the woman’s head. They were being considerate, which surprised me. Was she their hostage or not? Was she being taken against her will or going voluntarily?

The man who wasn’t holding the umbrella was walking in front of the other two, moving more briskly than the others. He half-walked, half-ran. Then he clambered up the short flight of steps and into the plane.

I took out the Maglite, grasped it backhanded, pulsed it with my right thumb a few times to get their attention. Both of them turned to look at me, squinting in the darkness to make out my face.

Then I angled the beam slightly to one side and pulsed it on, then off. Pointing it directly at them would blind them — five hundred lumens would do that; a beam that bright was downright dangerous to the cornea — but I only wanted to see their faces. A cone of brilliant light flashed on for a brief moment and then faded away, but it was enough for me to confirm that the woman was Kayla.

And her escort was the bald man.

Curtis Schmidt.

Had he recognized me?

“Excuse me,” I said to Schmidt. “We’re gonna need a CRM for your flight plan.”

Schmidt said, “Huh?”

“Your CRM, sir. We never got the filing.”

I was talking officious nonsense.

“You’re not cleared for takeoff,” I said. “We need you to hold short of Bravo.”

With a swift sudden movement, I grabbed Kayla’s free hand and yanked her toward me. I was counting on her recognizing me up close — she’d texted me, after all — or at least going along compliantly.

“That way,” I said to her, pointing. “Run.”

“Heller, you goddamn son of a bitch,” Schmidt said in his high choked voice, lunging at me.

I backhanded the flashlight to the right side of Schmidt’s head, aiming for the temple and a quick knockout. But he had jerked his head around to his left, and I hit his cheekbone instead. I felt something crunch.

He winced, yelled, but he kept on coming at me, swinging his right fist at my head. Which was stupid: He should have tried to wrest the flashlight out of my hand. I had a weapon, and he didn’t, at least so far as I knew. I had the advantage, and he should have removed it from me.

So I pressed the advantage as best I could. He shouted something at me, something obscene, and I swung again, hard, whipping it up from waist level, scything through the air, slamming into his chin from beneath his open mouth, cracking his teeth together hard.

Schmidt shook his head like an enraged bull and took up a boxer’s stance. His left fist shot out and clipped me on the chin. My head rocked back. I saw stars.

“Watch out!” But I knew he was readying the right-handed knockout blow. Boxers are dangerous, but they’re also predictable, and they rarely think about anything below the belt. So just as he stepped forward to get the range he wanted, I stomp-kicked him in his left knee with my right foot.

It connected. His knee hyperextended, the pain immense, he leaned over at the waist.

A woman’s cry: Kayla’s.

I glanced up in time to see the second guy charging out of the plane and down the steps. He fumbled under his poncho for something. Not good. It had to be a weapon.

I grabbed Schmidt, who was screaming in agony and staggering around. I got hold of the hood of his poncho and yanked, hard, pulling him in toward me, a human shield.

I could make out the second guy’s silhouette in the darkness. I could see a gun in his hand. He was maneuvering to take a shot without hitting Schmidt.

I intended to make it hard for him.

The second guy moved in closer, now ten feet away, his gun extended, angling the weapon around to miss Schmidt.

That was when I hit the Maglite’s power button with my right thumb, aiming it at his eyes, hitting him in the cornea with five hundred lumens, dazzling him. His hands flew to his eyes and the gun went off, a wild shot, the round pitting the asphalt five or six feet to my left.

Now I shoved Schmidt to the ground and reached out to grab the barrel of the second man’s gun. It was blisteringly hot. I yanked and twisted it out of his hand and immediately dropped it, too hot to handle.

I drop-kicked the second man in the groin. It wasn’t original, but it worked.

He bellowed in pain and tumbled to the ground near Curtis Schmidt.

I leaned over and scooped up the gun in my burned hand, this time by the grip, and ran toward where Kayla was standing, a few hundred feet away.

She was crying. “Come on,” I said, taking her by the elbow and leading her toward the Suburban. “I need you to run.”

But she stood still, weeping. I couldn’t make out what she was saying except for “Oh my God.”

“Come on,” I said, gently this time, taking her hand. “Hurry. You’re safe now.”

By the time we were on the main road outside the airport, Kayla Pitts had stopped crying. She seemed embarrassed about it. She sniffed a few times, said, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.” Her blond hair hung down in straggly tendrils and dark wet clumps.

Dorothy, sitting in the row behind the front seat, watched her warily. She seemed not to know what to make of our passenger.

“Where are you taking me?” Kayla said in a weak, quavering voice.

“Not back to your apartment,” I said.

“Okay.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her right hand. “Good. So where?”

“A hotel.”

To Dorothy I said, “Do me a favor and call the hotel and reserve another room. See if we can get one of the rooms that adjoin my suite.”

“How did you find me?” Kayla asked.

The rain had slowed to a light spattering. I signaled left and merged into traffic, which was considerably lighter now, the worst of rush hour over.

When I didn’t reply right away, she asked, “Did you trace my phone or something?”

“Something like that,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her I’d slipped a GPS tracker into her laptop bag, which would have necessitated telling her I’d broken into her apartment. That would only introduce an element of distrust and paranoia I wanted to avoid. “Tell me what happened.”

“These two guys showed up at my apartment and told me to pack my things. They gave me fifteen minutes. They told me they were taking me out of town.”

“Did they break in?”

“I let them in.”

“Did you know them?”

She shook her head. “I recognized one of them, the big bald guy. He was supposed to keep watch over me.”

I had a tremendous number of questions I wanted to ask, but I wanted to keep her on track as much as possible. “They didn’t tell you where you were going?”

“Just out of town. They put me in the back of a van.”

“What made you think they were going to kill you?”

“I was in the back, but when I put my ear to the front compartment I could hear them talking about me. One of them said something about ‘without a trace.’ The other guy said something like, ‘look like she was running’ and something about ‘before a body turns up.’ And I saw when they were taking me to the van that one of them had a gun. I was scared out of my mind. I didn’t know what to do, who to call. I don’t trust the cops. So I called that reporter at Slander Sheet, but I got a message saying the phone was disconnected. So... I called you.”