Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 1 - Combust the Sun Page 16

  "Sorry, my boss is driving me crazy. I'm on a couple of big cases, and there's just not enough of me to go around. Listen, I won't be at the station tomorrow. I'm on a stakeout, so why don't you give me twenty-four hours and I'll call you."

  "Great." I hung up and told Callie he'd aborted our meeting after talking to someone on the other line.

  "But he called you before we left and wanted you to come down to the police station and ID a guy. Why would he risk your driving down to the station when you would obviously discover he's not a cop?" Callie asked.

  "Because he wants me to trust him, and because he believes he can lie his way out of anything—just like he did tonight."

  An hour later I'd almost dozed off when the phone rang. I picked it up. A voice with an accent said menacingly, "You will forfeit the stone at 12:01." The line went dead. Callie asked who called. "Just more threats saying they're coming after the stone at noon. Has to be whoever Curtis called. As far as I'm concerned, they've been coming after us at every hour of the day."

  "I don't like this," she said.

  Callie fell asleep immediately, exhausted. I was awake and staring at the ceiling, thinking we had pretty much pieced the mystery together. Caruthers was head of the whole operation, and like my dear old daddy was fond of saying, "Shit rolls downhill," from Caruthers to Isaacs to Barrett and somehow to the squad of goons doing the actual tracking and killing. Since the attempt on Barrett's life and Rita's murder had both taken place in L.A., we needed to get the district attorney in Los Angeles to listen to our story just as soon as we returned. I was sure Wade would call the DA's office on our behalf to lend a little clout.

  At dawn, I told my parents what was going on. Wade had been alerted and had assigned someone to keep an eye on them. I wrote his personal pager number on a piece of paper and propped it up by their phone. I then tried to tell them everything I could without frightening them.

  My father said firmly that there was no need to worry. Any stranger who came through the front door would be shot first and questioned later. Mother listened intently to every detail, as if we'd brought a real-life soap opera into the living room, and she was delighted to be involved. We gave them explicit instructions for protecting themselves and told them the police cruiser would be coming by the house all night. Dad went to the dresser and pulled out a loaded .38. "Should have kept my .357," he said solemnly. He pulled two 12-gauge shotguns out of the closet and began rummaging through his bottom dresser drawer looking for shells.

  "Where in the goddamned, mother-lovin', fanny-fuckin' hell is my—"

  "Ben!" Mother called a halt to the swearing he'd managed, over the years, to elevate to an art form. To Callie, she added, "This is just a good excuse for him to do what he loves to do most, brandish firearms."

  "Dad, just make sure it's not Mother prowling around in the night when you pull those guns out, all right?" I said.

  "Who the hell do you think taught you firearm safety?" he growled. "Now how in the Sam Hill do you two propose to protect yourselves?"

  "Wade," I lied, knowing the mere mention of a male cop would put his mind at ease.

  "Wade's a good man," Dad said. "You just do what he says and you'll be fine."

  Callie wanted to stop back by her condo before leaving town, so I borrowed Dad's car to take her over to the high-rise, leaving my parents to sort out who to shoot and when.

  It was a shock to leave the tidy rental car for Dad's eclectic Oldsmobile. Every time I stepped on the brake, something different rolled out from under the seat and then disappeared again when I stepped on the gas: Turns, a Bic lighter, a Dixie cup. After the broken hearing aid rolled out, I told Callie to brace herself, because I fully expected to see my dad come tumbling out at the next stoplight. Callie laughed and squeezed my hand.

  It was a beautiful, cool summer's day. I didn't want to leave Tulsa, and I wished I'd taken up a career as an engineer or accountant or med-tech, so I could find a job here.

  I pulled the car up in front of the impressive structure and kept the motor running. Callie climbed out and headed for the gates, then paused and turned back, coming up to the car window. She seemed nervous suddenly.

  "I won't be longer than five minutes, okay?" She paused and then said quickly, "I love you, Teague." She kissed me full on the mouth and gave me a big smile before disappearing. She finally said it. She loves me. Why now? I wondered, inexplicably happy as I watched her disappear into the building. I turned the radio up and leaned back in the seat as the DJ announced it was 10:00 a.m. Hearing the time reminded me of the phone call. "I'll see you at 12:01." Why the hell would the guy announce his intentions? And which 12:01? Noon, midnight, tonight, tomorrow, next year? I looked up at the towering condos beside me.

  "Jesus God, 1201! The number on Callie's condo!"

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I bolted out of the car and raced to the double doors of the front lobby, getting caught in a jumble of elevators and staircases as I tried the quickest route to get to Callie's condo. I hit the fire-escape doors on the twelfth floor, panic stricken and out of breath, as I raced to 1201. My mind kept up a frantic dialogue. Why did you let her go upstairs by herself? That s why she said she loved you, because she had a premonition that she 'd never see you again. Why didn't she tell me that? Because she tells you things and you ignore them or make fun of them. The door was ajar. I pulled my gun and burst inside. There was no one there. I moved quickly through the rooms calling Callie's name, the stark white living room, once sensual elegance, now cold, white clouds of nothingness.

  As I came back to the front room, I saw the blood on the white carpet, and on the wall and the doorknob, where she had held on while someone pulled her away. My heart sank. I checked the parking lot, visible from Callie's front window, while I called Wade. He responded immediately, putting out a call to all units in the surrounding area. I'd searched the parking garage and storage areas by the time Wade arrived. There was no sign of Callie or her kidnapper. I panicked, realizing how easy it was for someone to be sucked off the planet, never to be heard from again.

  Wade tried to calm me down by reminding me that whoever had Callie was merely holding her to trade for the stone, since Raider had failed to do the job. Wade ordered a phone trace, and in forty-five minutes we had a man in Callie's living room with a recorder and listening device waiting for the call. Wade radioed officers and made suggestions for the search while I paced. This is completely unlike me, I thought, immobile and trusting someone else to figure things out. It was just that I was immersed in Callie, so much so, that I could not have felt weaker if someone had simply pulled my heart out with his bare hands. I was frantic to the point of being physically ill that the kidnapper would kill her. Wade came over and put his big bear paw around me. "We'll find her," he said, and I didn't trust my voice to answer.

  The phone rang. I picked up the receiver at the same moment the tracer was set in motion, and now, like some bad movie, it was my job to get the caller to talk until we had located him.

  "Teague?" It was Callie's slightly shaky voice.

  "Callie, where are you?" I begged.

  Wade looked down at the caller ID but it read Anonymous.

  I could hear scuffling over the phone, and the receiver was obviously yanked out of her hand. "You have the real stone. Bring it to us. Two minutes late and we cut her up."

  "Put her on the phone." I tried to sound calm and hard.

  "This evening at 8:50, you will park your car across the street from the Memory Park Cemetery, walk through the gate, and stand in the shadow of the bell tower. At nine o'clock the groundskeeper will lock the gates, locking you inside. When the cemetery is clear of all visitors and it's dark, someone will approach you at the tower, and you will hand over the rock. After that, you'll walk east down the slope, then south to a marker that says Elliston. You'll find your friend waiting for you there. If anything goes awry, you'll still find her there, but in pieces."

  "Let me talk to her again or
there's no deal."

  "I can cut her up now." He laughed, but he put Callie on.

  "Teague, the Moon's in Aries at two degrees, thirty-two minutes. So pick up the pace. They mean business. The—" Her kidnapper pulled the phone away as Callie screamed in the background. The line went dead.

  "Did you get it?" I nearly shouted at the cop manning the trace.

  "No, not long enough."

  "We can send men to the moon, but we can't do a simple trace in thirty seconds!"

  Wade tried to calm me down. "What was she saying about the moon?"

  "I don't know. It's astrology. She knows I can't understand it..." Even as I was saying it, I realized that she was trying to tell me something in code.

  "You know any good astrologers?" I asked Wade. "I need someone to tell me what she means." Wade replayed the tape, and we both jotted down the message, "The Moon's in Aries at two degrees, thirty-two minutes. So pick up the pace. They mean business." Wade promised to track down a lady he knew and get her to decipher it. I began scrounging through Callie's bookshelves, which looked like the library on the Starship Enterprise: UFO books, celestial navigation, paranormal experiences, channeling, interstellar communication, and dozens of books on astrology. I opened several and put them on a reading table. This was an amazing and complicated science: charts, graphs, tables of celestial data. There was no way I would be able to decipher the message in time. Callie knows that, I thought in frustration, as I sat at near attention with her message in front of me. What in the world is she thinking of, rattling off this stuff to me at a time like this? I closed my eyes and meditated, no I prayed, "Dear God, dear guides, dear whoever you are.. .help me understand this now." I opened my eyes but still had no answer.

  After about an hour, the two officers conducting the building search left for the station, and the guy manning the trace went to the bathroom, leaving me instructions on what to do if the phone rang in his absence. Seconds later, Wade came back, proudly waving a piece of paper with notes he'd taken from his astrologer friend.

  "Okay, Teague. Got it! It means quick happenings with men." He read aloud from his notes. "She said Aries, being the first house of the zodiac, is ruled by Mars, which is action. Aries is aggressive and hard-charging."

  "That's it?"

  "That's it," he sighed.

  "Say it again." I demanded. Wade read the note again and a third time.

  Nothing. I was blank. "Aries. It's a sign, right? Like you're an Aries and I'm a Pisces, right? So what does it mean when it's a certain number of degrees Aries?" I asked, desperate now. Wade looked at me like I'd lost my mind for asking him an astrological question.

  "Call your friend," I demanded. "Ask her more about Aries or Mars or something. Never mind, let me ask her!"

  Wade gladly forked over the woman's phone number, and I dialed. A pleasant-sounding lady answered, and I did a quick introduction telling her how important it was for her to help with the astrology part of Callie's message. She talked to me in what seemed like a haze of mystic mumbo jumbo, which only frustrated me more.

  "You said Aries is a time period, and we all experience it in general. Is that right? I'm so confused."

  The woman tried again, talking for about two minutes straight. I finally stopped listening, and started praying. In the middle of all of her strange words, I heard Aries is the ram.

  "Ram!" I said the first word I really understood. "Ram. Like Dodge Ram. Pick up the pace.. .Ram pickup!"

  "Well, I guess," the woman stammered. I'd forgotten she was still on the line. I shouted for Wade. "Callie's giving me astrological clues for the cosmically impaired!" I joked for the first time. "Two minutes thirty-two seconds. That's obviously an important number like 2:32 in the afternoon or 232..."

  "Partial license plate number, maybe. I'll check on a Dodge Ram pickup with plates ending in 232." Wade was on it, while I muttered about the Moon and what it meant. Maybe just nighttime. Maybe she was saying that's what they'd be driving tonight.

  An hour later, two possible Dodge Ram pickups with different prefixes, but both ending in 232, were tracked to two separate owners.

  "One's a 1996 canary yellow and one's a 1994 silver color," Wade said. "Any hunches?"

  "The Moon is yellow, but people sometimes say a silver moon," I replied. "Wait a minute! She said 'they mean business.' Is one of the trucks registered to a business?"

  Wade checked his notes, "Yeah, silver one. A lawn service."

  "That's the one! It probably has a name or side plates or something that says it's a lawn service vehicle, so they could easily leave it parked on the cemetery grounds."

  "Okay, but we'll put a tail on both of them just in case," Wade said in the middle of mapping out his strategy. "At 8:50 you'll be inside the gate. We'll be on the far southeast corner of the cemetery. That's where they'll probably come with Callie to stay off the main intersection." He looked at me intently for just a second, reading the anguish, sizing up my relationship with Callie in an instant, understanding what hung in the balance for me.

  "We'll get her first, in case anything goes wrong," he said, "then come up to where you are. That way they can't use her to leverage the situation. I'll have a couple of guys staked out just south of you. Just stall. They'll be there when you need them."

  "My parents!" I said, remembering they could be easy hostage targets.

  "Already got somebody out there with them. They're fine. You got the stone these guys want?"

  I nodded.

  "You ready?" he asked.

  "Ready." We headed out the door.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  At 8:45 p.m., I parked in a strip mall lot across the street on the north side of the cemetery and walked nervously across the busy thoroughfare. I entered through the large Spanish mission-style arch that marked Memory Park Cemetery, a huge expanse of rolling hills, maple trees, and headstones for as far as the eye could see. I scaled a small hill to the bell tower which, up until now, had always been a peaceful centerpiece to the park. I reached the tower and stepped back into the shadows, leaning against its cold stone wall, and tilted my watch skyward to pick up the fading light.

  Eight fifty-two p.m. Eight more minutes. Maybe they have Callie right now, safe. God, please. Will they send more than one guy to meet me here? Are they going to trade the stone for Callie or just kill her and then kill me? My thoughts were frantic. I had to settle down. I said a prayer with my eyes open.

  Nine o'clock, nine fifteen, nine thirty. It was dark. I was beginning to shiver from nerves, not the temperature. Are they on to us? Are they phoning Callie's condo right now to say they're doing something horrible to her, or perhaps, already have?

  A voice on my left startled me. "The stone. Hand it over. I have a walkie-talkie." He poked me in the side with its thick antenna. "I radio and she's dead."

  My hand went to my coat pocket for one of the real stones this time—the stone left at Orca's for Barrett. He shoved my hand away and reached into my pocket for me, extracting the small slab that had turned my life upside down. Stepping back into the light for a moment, Raider examined it and then me.

  "Last stone cramped me up, bitch. So if you don't mind, I'll just put this one in my pocket." He pocketed the stone with one hand and pulled a knife from under his shirt with the other. My stomach knotted. "You hurt me real good in that airplane John. I'm gonna need to leave here feelin' like you understand my pain."

  Wade, where the hell are you? I need back up! I thought.

  Raider jabbed the knife at me. I jumped to one side, avoiding it. Go with the force and create inertia, a long-ago instructor's voice rang in my head. Raider lunged forward again, the knife blade picking up ambient light and looking almost beautiful if its mission had not been to embed itself in my gut. I took a step back with the exact timing of his jab and grabbed the wrist of his knife-wielding hand, using his own momentum to pull him forward and facedown on the ground. I dropped to the ground beside him, put my knee in his back, slid my arm under h
is neck, and pulled up and back on his esophagus, squeezing the breath out of him. Hearing him gasp for air made me feel better than I had in weeks. I scrambled to my feet and gave him a huge second-half kickoff to the head, ebullient when the blow knocked him out. That's when I spotted a man with a Rastafarian hairdo catapulting, capoeria style, over the hill, his dreadlocks splaying out in all directions. This was not Spider Eye, who was safely in a hospital in L.A. with a bullet in his back, so this must be Spider Eye's version of a temp: a death-dancer replacement, who was now five feet from me, putting his body into a spin that sent him into a high-speed, one-armed handstand, legs scissor-kicking into the air, headed for my head.

  "Holy shit!" I yelled and rolled out of his way, banging my back on a headstone as I went. Bullets zinged into the dirt near me. I quickly rolled farther downhill to escape being hit, gritting my teeth until I couldn't roll any further from the pain. Shots rang out from the hilltop above me where I'd left Raider. He was conscious now and had staggered to his feet, blood coming from his chest and mouth. Another shot rang out, and he toppled over again. The man who had followed me to hell and gone would be trailing me no more. Raider was dead. I spotted Wade's profile a hundred yards from me, gun drawn. He was obviously the shooter and taking no prisoners.

  One of Wade's officers shouted to get his attention as the capoeria temp went airborne, making a dramatic leap toward Wade. The attacker's legs sliced through the darkness like knives and came dangerously close to Wade's face, and Wade pulled the trigger again. The man came down like a punctured balloon, collapsing in a heap. Then, as if his body were rubber, he catapulted up again, wounded and bleeding, and headed for the parking lot. Wade shouted for his men to cut him off.

  A younger officer appeared, just to the south of where Wade was standing, his arm supporting a small woman who looked like she might collapse. The sunlight gone and the distance great, I could only see them in silhouette, but I was certain he had Callie with him. The younger officer shouted to Wade as he carefully walked Callie up the hill. "There's only one more besides this guy, Sergeant, and we ambushed him down at the grave marker. Got him cuffed in the cruiser."