Riptide by Catherine Coulter
“I’ll have it run through,” Savich said. “It’ll be quicker, more complete. I don’t want to know how you got that information so quickly.”
“I’ll just say that she loves my mustache,” Hatch said. “Please do call the Bureau, Agent Savich. I didn’t have the chance to check back with Thomas and have him do it. Oh yeah, a guy was driving. No clue if it was an old guy or a young guy or in between, really dark windows, like windows on a limo. Fairly unusual for a regular commercial car, and that’s probably why he stole that particular car.”
Savich was on his cell phone in the next ten seconds, nodded and hung up in three more minutes. “Done. We’ll have a list of possibles in about five minutes.”
Tommy the Pipe knocked lightly on the front door and came in. “We got a guy buying Exxon supreme at a gas station just eight miles west of Riptide. The attendant, a young boy about eighteen, said when the guy paid for his gas, he saw dirt and blood on the cuff of his shirt. He wouldn’t have thought a thing about it except Rollo was canvassing all the gas stations, asking questions about strangers. It’s him.”
“Oh, yeah,” Adam said and jumped to his feet. “Please say it, Tommy. Please tell us that this kid remembers what the guy looks like, that he remembers the kind of car he was driving.”
“The guy had on a green hunting hat with flaps, something like mine but with no style. He also wore very dark glasses. He doesn’t know if the guy was young or old, sorry, Adam. Hell, anyone over twenty-five would be old to that kid. But he does remember clearly that the guy spoke well, a real educated voice, all smooth and deep. The car—he thought it was a BMW, dark blue or black. Sorry, no idea about the plate. But you know what? The windows were dark-tinted. How about that?”
“Surely he wouldn’t have driven the same car up here that he used to kill Dick McCallum in Albany,” Sherlock said.
“Why not?” Savich said. “If it isn’t dented, if there isn’t blood all over it, then why not?”
Savich’s cell phone rang. He stood and walked over to the doorway. They heard him talking, saw him nodding as he listened. He hung up and said, “No go. He stole the license plates. No surprise there. He’d have been an idiot to leave on the original plates. However, those heavily tinted windows, I have everyone checking on New York cars stolen within the past two weeks with those sorts of windows.”
Savich’s cell phone rang again in eight minutes. He listened and wrote rapidly. When he hung up the phone, he said, “This is something. Like Hatch said, few commercial cars—domestic or foreign—are built with dark-tinted windows. Three have been stolen. The people are all over the state, two men and one woman.”
Becca said with no hesitation, “It’s the woman. He stole her car.”
“Possible,” Sherlock said. “Let’s find out right now.”
She called information for Ithaca, New York, and got the phone number for Mrs. Irene Bailey, 112 Huntley Avenue. The phone rang once, twice, three times, then, “Hello?”
“Mrs. Bailey? Mrs. Irene Bailey?”
Silence.
“Are you there? Mrs. Bailey?”
“That’s my mother,” a woman said. “I’m sorry, but it took me by surprise.”
“May I please speak to your mother?”
“You don’t know? No, I guess not. My mother was killed two weeks ago.”
Sherlock didn’t drop the phone, but she felt a great roiling pain through her stomach, up to her throat, and she swallowed convulsively. “Can you give me any details, please?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Gladys Martin with the Social Security Administration in Washington.”
“I know my husband called Social Security. What do you want?”
“We’re required to fill out papers, ma’am. Are you her daughter?”
“Yes, I am. What kind of papers?”
“Statistics, nothing more. Is there someone else I can speak to about this? I don’t want to upset you.”
There was a moment of silence, then, “No, it’s all right. Ask the questions. We don’t want the government to go away mad.”
“Thank you, ma’am. You said your mother was killed? Was this an auto accident?”
“No, someone hit her on the head when she was going out to her car at the shopping mall. He stole her car.”
“Oh, dear, I’m so very sorry. Please tell me that the man who did this has been caught?”
The woman’s voice hardened up immediately. “No, he wasn’t. The cops put out a description of her car, but no one has reported back with anything as yet. They think he painted the car a different color and changed the license plates. He’s gone. Even the New York City cops don’t know where he is. She was an old woman, too, so who cares?” The bitterness in the daughter’s voice was bone-deep, her pain, disbelief, anger still raw.
“Was there anything distinctive about the car the man stole?”
“Yes, the windows were tinted dark because my mother had very sensitive eyes. Too much sunlight really hurt her.”
“I see. What was the color of the car?”
“White with gray interior. There was a small dent above the left rear tire.”
“I see. Did you say that there were other than just the local cops there?”
“Oh, yes. Of all things, they were from New York City. They should have caught this guy. We don’t know why the New York City police are involved. Do you? Is that really why you’re calling? You want to pump me for information?”
“No, of course not. This is simply statistical information that we need.”
“Are there any more questions, Ms. Martin? I’m sorting through my mother’s things and I have to be down at St. Paul’s charities in a half hour.”
“No, ma’am. I’m very sorry for your loss. I’ll take care of everything here.” Sherlock turned to see all eyes focused on her. “The killer painted a white car black and stole another license plate. The New York City cops were there. They know. Oh, yeah, the windows are tinted dark because Mrs. Bailey had sensitive eyes.”
“Son of a bitch,” Hatch said and groped in his pocket for his cigarettes. “How come nobody told me that the cops knew about that damned car?”
Adam just gave him a look and said, “They’ve got a real lid on that one. My guess is they’re keeping it from the Feds, don’t want to get aced out. And the victim loses. What the New York cops don’t know is that our killer is here in Maine. Shall we tell them?”
Savich said, “Not the New York cops, but I can call Tellie Hawley, the SAC of the office in New York City. He’ll see that it gets to where it needs to go.”
“Yeah,” Adam said, “why not? Anyone think of a good reason why not?”
“How specific should we be?” Becca asked. She was wringing her hands, and Adam frowned.
Savich rolled it around in his brain and said, “Let’s just tell him the guy’s been seen on the coast. How’s that? It’s the truth.”
“We’ve got to get him,” Becca said. “If we don’t, then we have to call this Thomas person who seems to know everyone and direct everything, and tell him to bring in the Marines.”
***
“He hasn’t called,” Becca said, and took a bite of her hot dog. “Why hasn’t hecalled?”
Adam said as he chewed a potato chip, “I think he’s going to lie low for a while. He’s not stupid. He’s going to dig in somewhere else, give you some time to chew your fingernails, make all of us jumpy as hell, then jump back into the game—his game.”
They were all eating hot dogs with relish and mustard, the team of guys outside coming in one at a time. Special Agent Rollo Dempsey said to Adam, “I knew your name but I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it. Now I do. You saved Senator Dashworth’s life last year when that crazy tried to stick a knife in his ribs.”
Adam didn’t say a word.
“Yeah, it was you. You saved Senator Dashworth’s life. Pretty impressive.”
“You shouldn’t know about that,” Adam said finally, frowning
“Yeah, well, I’m an insider, I can’t help it if people tell me everything.”
“I never heard anything about that,” Becca said, her antennae up. “What are you talking about?”
Rollo just grinned at her and said, “Did you find out who tried to off him?”
“You don’t know about that, too?”
“Hey, I’m an insider, but the spigot was off when it came to the particulars.”
Adam shrugged. “Well, who cares now? The guy who wanted the senator dead was his son-in-law. Irving—that’s the guy’s name—had sent him threats, all the usual anonymous bullshit. The senator called me. It turned out that Irving had become a heroin addict, didn’t have any more money, and wanted the senator’s inheritance. The senator managed to keep it from the media, to protect his daughter, and so we got the guy into a sanatorium, where he belonged, where he’s still at. I guess there are only a few insiders who know anything at all about it.”
“You run some sort of a bodyguard business?” Becca said, frowning at Adam over a spoonful of baked beans. “I thought you did security consulting.”
“I like to keep my hand in a lot of different things,” Adam said.
“What I’d like to know,” Sherlock said, handing Rollo another hot dog with lots of down-home yellow mustard slathered on it, “is why you didn’t find out who it was right away. The guy was an addict? That kind of thing isn’t easy to hide.”
Adam actually flushed. He played with his fork, didn’t meet her eyes. He cleared his throat. “Well, the thing is that the son-in-law wasn’t around for those three days I was checking things out. His wife was protecting him, said he had the flu, that he was really contagious, et cetera. She swore to me and to her father that Irving wouldn’t even consider doing something like that, no, it had to be a crazy, or a left-wing conspiracy. She was so—well—damned believable.”
“Good thing you were there to deflect the guy’s knife,” Rollo said.
“That’s the truth,” Adam said.
Rollo sat down at the kitchen table, squeezing in between Savich and Becca. Adam said on a deep sigh, “I just heard that the wife is trying to get the husband out of there. It could start all over again.”
“Well, shit,” Rollo said. “Not much justice around, is there?”
Then Chuck came in and Rollo, still half a hot dog left, saluted and went back outside.
“It won’t be long now,” Savich said. “I feel it. Things will happen.” He took a last bite of a tofu hot dog, sighed with pleasure, and hugged his wife.
Things didn’t happen until later.
They were all in the living room drinking coffee, planning, arguing, brainstorming. There was no activity outside. Everything was buttoned down tight, until at exactly ten o’clock a bullet shattered one of the front windows, glass exploded inward, carrying shreds of curtain with it.
“Down!” Savich yelled.
But it wasn’t a simple bullet that came through the window to strike the floor molding on the far side of the living room, it was a tear gas bullet. Thick gray smoke gushed out even before it struck the molding.
“Oh, damn,” Adam said. “Back into the kitchen. Now!”
Another tear gas bullet exploded through the window. They were coughing, covering their faces, running toward the back of the house.
They heard men’s shouts, sporadic gunfire, sharp and loud in the night. The front door burst open and Tommy the Pipe ran in, his face covered with his jacket. “Out, guys, quick. Through the front door, the back’s not covered well enough.”
“He shot tear gas bullets,” Adam said between choking coughs.
“He’s probably using a CAR-15, behind our perimeter. Come on out.”
They coughed their heads off, tears streaming down their faces. Savich found himself with Becca’s nose pressed into his armpit.
“We’ve got to get him,” Adam shouted, coughing, choking, his eyes streaming tears. “Just another minute to get over this and we’ll start scouring.”
It took another seven minutes before they headed out in the general direction of where the tear gas bullets must have been shot toward the front windows.
They found tire tracks, nothing else, until Adam called out, “Look here.”
Everyone gathered around Adam, who was on his haunches. He held up a shell casing that was four inches long and about an inch and a half in diameter. “Tommy the Pipe was right. He used a CAR-15—that’s a compact M16,” he added to Becca, “stands for carbine automatic rifle.”
Savich found the other shell casing and was tossing it back and forth.
“But how can tear gas come from a gun?” Becca said. “I thought they were canisters or something like that. That’s what I’ve always seen in movies and on TV.”
“That’s real old-hat now,” Adam said. “This smaller M16 is real portable, you could carry it under your trench coat. It’s got this telescoping collapsible barrel. The SEALs use this stuff. What you do is simply mount an under-barrel tubular grenade launcher and fire away with your tear gas projectiles. It’s wicked.”
Sherlock said, “He’s obviously connected and very well trained. Got all the latest goodies. And just where would he get all this stuff?”
And Adam thought: Krimakov.
No one said anything.
They got back to the house forty-five minutes later. It was late, and everyone was hyped. Adam said, as he shrugged into his jacket, rechecked his pistol, “I’m going to take one of the first watches.”
“Get me up at three o’clock,” Savich said.
“I’m outta here,” Adam said. He looked over at Becca, saw that she was white-faced and couldn’t help himself. He walked to her and pulled her tight against him. He said against her hair, “Sleep well and don’t worry. We’re going to get him.”
Becca didn’t think she’d be able to slow her heart down enough even to consider sleeping, but she did, deeply and dreamlessly, until she felt a strange jab in her left arm, just above her elbow, like a mosquito bite. She jerked awake, her heart pounding wildly, and she couldn’t breathe, just pant and jerk. She was blind, no, it was just dark, very dark, the blinds drawn because nobody wanted him to be able to see into the house. She saw a shadowy figure standing over her, gray, indistinct, and she whispered, “What is this? Is it you, Adam? What did you do—?” But he said nothing, merely leaned closer and finally, when her heart was slowing just a bit, he whispered right against her face, “I came for you, Rebecca, just like I said I would,” and he licked her cheek.
“No,” she said. “No.” Then she fell back, wondering what the silver light was shining just over her face. It seemed to arc toward her, a skinny silver flash, but then it just wasn’t important. A small flashlight, she thought as she breathed in very deeply, more deeply than usual for her, and eased into a soft warm blackness that relaxed her mind and body, and she didn’t know anything more.
19
Her heart beat slow, regular strokes, one after the other, easy, steady, no fright registering in her body. She felt calm, relaxed. She opened her eyes. It was black, no shadows, no hint of movement, just relentless, motionless black. She was swamped with the black, but she forced herself to draw in a deep breath. Her heart wasn’t pumping out of her chest now. She still felt relaxed, too relaxed, with no fear grinding through her, at least not yet, but she knew she should be afraid. She was in darkness and he was close by. She knew it, but still she breathed steadily, evenly, waiting, but not afraid. Well, perhaps there was just a tincture of fear, indistinct, nibbling at the edges of her mind. She frowned, and it slipped away.
Odd how she remembered perfectly everything that had happened: the jab in her left arm, the instant terror, she remembered all of it—him licking her cheek—with no mental fuzz cloaking the memories.
The nibblings of fear became more focused now, she could nearly grasp it. Her heart speeded up. She blinked, willing herself to know fear, then to control it.
There was suddenly a wispy light, the smell of smoke. He’d lit a candle. He was here, just inches from her. She calmed the building fear. It was hard, probably the hardest thing she’d ever had to do, but she knew she had to. She remembered, very suddenly, her mother telling her once that fear was what hurt you because it froze you. “Don’t ever give up,” her mother had told her. “Never give up.” Then her mother had gripped her shoulders and said it one more time: “Never give up.”
It was so clear in her mind in that moment, her mother standing over her telling her this. She could even feel her mother’s fingers hard on her shoulders. Odd that she couldn’t remember what had happened to make her mother tell her this.
“Where are we?”
Was that her voice, all calm and indifferent? Yes, she’d managed it.
“Hello, Rebecca. I came for you, just like I said I would.”
“Please,” she said, and then she laughed, choked, “please don’t lick my cheek again. That was really creepy.”
He was dead silent, affronted, even pissed, she realized, because she was laughing at him.
“You gave me a shot of something. What was it?”
She heard his deep breathing. “Just something I picked up in Turkey. I was told that a side effect is a temporary sense of euphoria. You won’t feel like laughing for much longer, Rebecca. The effects will fade, and then you’ll be heaving with fear, you’ll be so scared of me.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
He slapped her. She didn’t see his hand, it was just there, connecting sharply against her cheek. She tried to leap at him, but she realized she was tied down, her hands over her head, her wrists tied to the slats of the headboard. So she was lying on a bed. Her legs were free. She was still wearing her nightgown, a white cotton nightgown that came up to her chin and went down to her ankles. He’d smoothed it over her legs.