The First 48 Read online

  CHAPTER 27

  Jane opened her eyes and saw nothing.

  She jerked herself upward, striking her nose. Pain exploded in her head but went almost unnoticed amid her panic. Her hands felt the smooth wood only inches from her face. A coffin? Had they buried her alive?

  A desperate sound escaped her, a muffled shriek that faded to a whine. She groped frantically to one side. More wood. She groped the other way, felt a blessed empty space, and threw herself toward it. She fell a good distance, thumping onto the wooden floor below, then scrambled to her feet. She bumped her head again, and this time the pain made her kneel down. She held her throbbing head tight, careful to avoid the swollen knot just above the hairline.

  In the darkness, she breathed deep, gathering her wits, trying to put the pieces of what happened back together. A dream within a dream.

  She remembered back to her story. Writer’s block. The rain. She’d gone for a jog. A car drove past. The man following her through the park. Running through the trees and then nothing until she awoke the first time with his face hovering over her. Him, Mark Allen.

  He had smiled at her. Her head had throbbed. There had been dried crust around the edges of her nostrils. Blood. She’d been on a low black leather couch. His couch.

  There was a coffee table with a single can of Sprite, a TV, and nothing else until the table and chairs in the dining area. The walls were bare. No magazines. No books. No rugs. Muddy footprints on the light-colored hardwood floor. A single globe of light on the ceiling. The smell of dry dust.

  “Where am I?” she had asked.

  “It’s okay,” he said. He sat on the edge of the couch at her knees. “You’re safe.”

  “Where the hell am I?”

  She swung her legs free and sprang to her feet. Her head swam. A flurry of comets streaked across her vision.

  “My apartment,” he said. “They’re trying to kill you.”

  “What?” she said, backing a step toward the door.

  “The man in the park. Gleason sent him. A professional. CIA. Bob Thorne. He’s called a cleaner.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Mark had looked away, then back at her, smiling. “Same way I got everything else. Gleason’s office . . . I tapped it.”

  He reached out and put his hand on her arm. She almost snatched it away. His grip was strong, and she could feel its warmth through the wet nylon shell. She was suddenly filled with an intuition so powerful that her face relaxed.

  “Shit,” she said, shrugging him off.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re safe.”

  The chiseled lines of his face softened.

  She accepted his clean dry T-shirt and a sweat jacket; her own had been spattered with blood from her nose. She changed in the bathroom, locking the door, then sat at his small round table in her damp running shorts, drank his tea, and listened to his explanation of how he’d listened to the wiretap and thought he might have been too late.

  “I record everything on a CD and listen when I can. I didn’t get to it until about ten. He called this guy Thorne and basically told him to kill you. I took off and got lucky, really. I was going toward your apartment and I saw you running into the park. Then I saw someone, Thorne I’m sure, get out of his car and follow you.

  “I don’t know how many others there are, but I got you out, and I’ve got help coming. He was an army officer. He works for my . . . my father.”

  Before she could ask anything, there was a heavy knock at the door. Mark got up to open it. The man waiting there was so large he had to duck his head to get through the doorway. A big brown beard hid his mouth. He turned his milky green eyes on her. They were empty.

  He gave her a nod and began talking to Mark in whispers. In the waist of his pants, Jane caught a glimpse of a shiny nickel-plated pistol with a pearl handle. It looked like the .45 George C. Scott carried in the movie Patton. Jane shifted in her seat and thought about getting up, sensing danger.

  But she didn’t.

  Mark sat back down and the next thing she knew, the big man was behind her. When she turned her head, he clamped a strange-smelling rag over her face.

  Then blackness again until now. Waking up in the coffinlike space and falling to the floor. She could still taste the nasty smell of that rag.

  A knot of pain lingered directly behind her eyeballs.

  She felt carefully around the confines of her prison, letting her senses confirm for her that she was in the here and now. The walls were curved and triangular. The floor was cool against her feet. She felt off balance, but realized it was the floor that was unsteady, not her.

  She was on a boat.

  Her hand explored a strange narrow window, lozenge-shaped and lying on its side. She tried it, but it was jammed shut and no light came in. She figured she must be in a cabin in the bow of the boat. She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious. It might have been days. She could be halfway across the world. Her heart began to hammer again.

  She groped with her hands over every available surface, swallowing fast to keep from getting sick. Her fingers found a metal ring. The handle to the cabin door. She yanked at it. Nothing. She threw her shoulder against it again and again, pounding it with all her might.

  Slivers of light appeared at the edges of the door’s frame as she hammered. The wood cracked.

  From somewhere outside she heard the muffled shouts of a man, maybe two. Then she heard the thuds of running, then the clump of steps on a nearby stair. They were coming for her.

  CHAPTER 28

  Tom was behind the wheel, signaling his lane changes as he drove through the traffic on 70. His throat was dusty. He needed a cool drink and a splash of Knob Creek. He pressed his lips together and swallowed down something unpleasant that had crawled up from the back of his throat.

  Above them, wispy brush strokes of white cloud did their best to cloak the burning sun. Tom’s eyes ached from squinting. He fished for sunglasses under the seat and came up with nothing more than a dusty old pair of wire-rimmed Ray*Bans. One-handed, he bent them to fit his face.

  A glance in the mirror confirmed that the glasses were ridiculously outdated. That didn’t bother him as much as the sagging jowls and the drooping lines of his forehead. It was all right for his body to be tired, as long as it didn’t infect his spirit. He picked up his tennis ball and began to squeeze as if he could manually pump some vitality into his system.

  “You think they’re looking for him yet?” Mike asked, his head flicking quickly toward the back of the truck.

  “He’s a U.S. senator,” Tom said. “I can’t imagine going too long without someone pushing the panic button, especially since the police paid him a visit yesterday.”

  “Maybe they’ll think he’s avoiding them,” Mike asked.

  “Maybe. Or maybe that someone grabbed him,” Tom said.

  “Us?”

  “After a while,” Tom said, “even a greenhorn like Peters is going to start putting things together, and we’ll be pretty high on his list.”

  “What if someone saw us?”

  “If that happened, then we’ll get to see our faces on the news at the top of the hour.”

  “Even if they didn’t see us. If someone saw this truck down that side street . . . ,” Mike said.

  “It’ll be a while before they get that far, though,” Tom said. “They’re not fools, but they are cops.”

  “You were a cop.”

  “But then I was a lawyer. Cops catch the bad guys, but it’s the lawyers who put them away. Besides, how logical is it that the father of a missing girl would grab a U.S. senator out of his own home and then drive around with him in the back of his truck?”

  “That would be totally insane,” Mike said with a smile.

  “I rest my case.”

  After a while, Mike began to shift in his seat. He cleared his throat a few times until Tom said, “What’s up?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What? You need to stop?�
��

  “If you do.”

  Tom pulled off the highway at the next exit. He needed fuel anyway, and there was a Burger King right next door. He parked in the back by a greasy Dumpster beneath a clump of choking willow trees. The grass under the trees was long and thin and sprinkled with garbage. Before the truck had even stopped shaking, Mike was out the door. Once the truck lay still, Tom got out too. There was some banging back in the camper, and he glanced around quickly before circling the truck and opening it.

  Gleason stared up at him with wide red eyes. Teardrops glistened on the duct tape. Tom puckered his lips, then said, “You better be quiet.”

  He shut the door, shaking his head. His words had sounded almost kind. He followed Mike inside, walking briskly. As he reached for the rest room door, Mike was coming out.

  “I’ll just grab something quick,” Mike said. “While you’re going. You want anything?”

  “A coffee,” Tom said. “Maybe get something for Gleason, too.”

  When Tom came out, Mike was already outside, walking toward the truck with a bag of food in one hand and a bag of drinks in the other.

  Tom had backed the F-350 into the lonely spot and when Mike got there, he disappeared behind the truck. By the time Tom got there, Mike had pulled Gleason’s tape gag loose. The ball was on the floor. Gleason was venting.

  “—to a U.S. senator? You’ll fry for this,” he said. “They’ll wear your asses out in jail, and it won’t be any federal prison for you two assholes—you’ll go to the state pen. I know every fucking judge between New York and Washington.”

  Mike stuffed a hunk of sausage sandwich into Gleason’s mouth.

  “Bon appétit, motherfucker,” Mike said. He strapped the tape back down over his mouth and slapped the top of his head, ruffling his hair.

  “Not in a very good mood, is he?” Tom said.

  “Probably just hungry,” Mike said.

  Despite his state, Gleason was gulping down the hunk of meat like a dog.

  “Might be a little low on oxygen, too,” Mike said. “You busted his nose up pretty good.”

  Mike took out a pocketknife and brought it toward Gleason’s mouth. The senator cringed and tried to squirm away. Mike got him by the back of the neck and punched a hole in the tape. Then he closed the rear door and jammed the rest of the torn sandwich into his own mouth.

  Through the food Mike said, “I figure when the jury finds out we fed him—you know, treated him nice—maybe they’ll take four or five years off our sentence.”

  Mike lifted his Burger King bags off the curb, and they got back into the big white truck.

  “Here’s your coffee,” Mike said, taking a sip from a giant-sized diet Coke.

  The food seemed to have lifted Mike’s spirits, and Tom wondered again about a drink, even a splash of Baileys in the coffee. A morning pick-me-up.

  “Thanks,” he said, adding cream to the coffee.

  He decided not to mention the Baileys. Instead, he took a sip of coffee and pulled up to the pump. The big truck had two gas tanks. Tom filled one and looked at his watch. 15:04:19. He hopped into the truck. When he hit the highway, he flattened the pedal.

  Down the street from Jane’s they found a parking garage that would take the oversized truck and keep Gleason from baking in the heat. There was no sign of a police car in front of Jane’s apartment, and the inside looked the same as when they’d left it.

  Mike disappeared immediately into the living room, saying he wanted to check Jane’s computer. Tom went to the bedroom. If Jane really had been gone before Bob Thorne arrived, maybe there’d be signs that she packed some things. Maybe there’d be a clue as to where she’d gone. Maybe she’d even left some kind of secret message. Tom dabbed at the fine beads of perspiration that had broken out on his forehead.

  He went into the bathroom. Her toothbrush was right there in the ceramic holder beneath the mirror. A leather travel bag loaded with makeup was under the sink. His hands trembled. He started for the closet, digging into his mind to recall a favorite suitcase or duffel bag that might not be there. Next, he’d check the kitchen. She might have a bottle somewhere. At least a beer.

  “Tom.”

  It was Mike from the other room. Tom felt a rush of adrenaline. He burst out into the hall and dashed into the living room. Mike was at his daughter’s desk.

  “You’ve got to see this.”

  CHAPTER 29

  When Carson returned to his office, Dave was already there, sitting in one of the crushed velvet chairs that faced his broad desk. Where there weren’t shelves of books, old black-and-white photos lined the wood-paneled wall. Grainy pictures from the past. Men and horses moving ice and timber. A hillside of sheep behind a man in a wool jacket with a dog. Tibernius Smith and the Union generals wearing walrus mustaches and standing beside a massive cannon.

  Dave had one of his long massive legs slung over the arm of the chair. With his checked flannel shirt and thick lumberjack’s beard, it would be hard to guess he had ever served as an officer in the army.

  “Well,” Dave said, his flat eyes staring at him without a blink, “I got her. Now what, Colonel?”

  “Don’t call me ‘Colonel,’ damn it,” Carson said. He had been a CEO now for over twenty years. The army was another life.

  “Sorry, I forget.”

  “You have a habit of forgetting certain things, don’t you? Like when I tell you to stop running your stolen weapons across the border. I thought you would have learned your lesson at Fort Drum.”

  Dave had been a supply captain.

  “I left the army on my own terms,” Dave said, swinging his leg off the arm of the chair.

  “Oh?” Carson said. “There wasn’t an issue of some ordnance disappearing underneath your command? My sources must have been off.”

  “I figured as an entrepreneur, you’d respect another man’s private ventures,” Dave said.

  “I don’t want to be called ‘Colonel,’” Carson said. “I just want you to act like I still am one.”

  “Like the boy?” Dave said.

  Carson sat down and peered at the big man, looking for the hint of sarcasm. But Dave’s face was blank. His thick hairy hands were clasped to the chair’s wooden arms.

  “Did you have to goad him?” Carson said, his words sounding more snappish than he’d intended. He picked up a small replica of a Civil War cannon off the top of his desk and spun the muzzle, stopping it with the click of his academy ring and starting over again. Click. Click. Click.

  Dave continued to look at him. He opened his mouth and rolled his tongue around.

  “He was supposed to stay behind,” Dave said. “But he wouldn’t listen. Again. So instead of slitting his pretty little throat, I had some fun. I told him there’s things I can teach that little girl and then give her your mind drugs to forget, then have fun teaching her all over again. It’s not a bad idea, really. . . .”

  Carson sighed and set the cannon down, looking at his hands. The knuckles were beginning to swell with arthritis.

  “I heard you lying to him out there about that pup,” Dave said, nodding toward the battlement. “Remember that? Me taking that thing out on the lake, bashing in its skull, and dumping it over. You all worried that he’d find out?”

  “I was worried for you,” he said, snapping his eyes up at Dave.

  “I could kill that boy just looking at him.”

  “That ‘boy’ is an officer,” Carson said, straightening his back. “Just like you. He’s got a master’s degree. He’s the executive vice president of a billion-dollar corporation, David. This isn’t boot camp, and it isn’t your gang of border pirates.”

  “You set him up with all that, Colonel. Not him.”

  Carson dismissed him with a wave. “Let’s talk about the girl.”

  “No one saw us,” Dave said. “I drove right out onto the tarmac and loaded her up myself. There wasn’t a soul when we landed in Watertown. No one at the docks, either. Clean. Just like you ordered.”<
br />
  “Well, get rid of her.”

  “Rid?”

  “When it’s dark. Out deep. I don’t want her found.”

  Dave’s long yellow teeth shone out of the heavy mass of beard.

  “There’s some time between now and dark,” he said.

  “I don’t want any of that,” Carson said. “Just do your job.”

  “Then . . . just like a pup,” he said, smacking the palms of his hands together. “Just like a little shih tzu.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Jane was suddenly aware of the stuffy air and the stale smell of moldy cushions. Her breath came in short desperate gasps. Somehow she sensed what was about to happen. They were going to hurt her.

  Statistics. A show on Lifetime. Victims and survivors. Abduction equals death. Ninety-five percent.

  Her father’s lessons in the basement. She could see him, his thick arms pushing the sleeves of his T-shirt up toward his big round shoulders. They stood facing each other on the mats. Above them were the old rough-hewn wooden beams. The tarnished pipes. The shiny ductwork. In the damp cobblestone corner, his own private racks of weights and bars silently enjoying a reprieve from their pounding.

  She could smell the sweaty mats, but it was a strain to remember the moves. There were so many. She never should have stopped.

  The lock rattled. Jane’s fingers curled until her hands were two twisted claws. That she remembered. The door opened. She sprang at his face, tearing, ripping, screeching.

  The man was small but well built. He tumbled backward. Jane sensed a gun dropping to the wooden deck with a thump. He flailed back at her, striking the side of her head. Pain shot through her brain, but still she clawed. She felt the nail of her middle finger digging into the soft flesh around his eyes. A howl shook the narrow space. The pounding stopped.

  Jane scrambled over him and up the metal stairs, falling in the process and banging her chin. On deck there was another man, taller, but not as muscular. His face dropped at the sight of her, and he fumbled for the knife on his belt. Jane went right at him, a fury now.