Side by Side (13 page)

27

Dixie Smoot opened her mouth and snapped it closed to click her porcelain teeth loudly—something she did out of habit when she was really pissed off.

Buck said he’d left the twins to take a turn digging, and that he had just been gone for a “few” minutes to go and check on something. She couldn’t imagine what he had to check on out in the plumb middle of nowhere. Now Buck was gone off to the Utzes’ store down the road to use the pay phone to call Peanut about the twins. Her daddy would be fit to be tied if things weren’t going smoothly. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time he had needed to punch out Buck. When it came to discipline, her daddy didn’t spare a rod.

Dixie figured she’d find the twins before Buck got back and joined her, because whenever he could get by with it, he’d get back too late to do any work. Buck was worse things than lazy, but what he did to others was between him and whoever he did it to. It was mostly the lazy part of Buck that complicated Dixie’s life.

Dixie’s four-wheeler was one of several that Peanut’s people had found inadequately attended and had brought out to the house for hunting and chores. You could do a lot more with the 400cc Honda four-wheel-drive ATVs than use them for getting yourself and your gun into the woods, and bringing deer back out when you killed one. The roads on the thousand-acre property were really just trails and a challenge for the most rugged four-wheel-drive vehicles.

There was only one real road onto the land, and it was hardly more than a dirt path with some gravel scattered on it so you could get vehicles to the barn. You could get around the land on a tractor, and they had one in the shed, but the ATVs were a lot faster. The tractor had a winch on it, and if you wanted to get around on the land to work with it you spent more time pulling it up out of the steep and eroded creek banks than working.

The rain was an annoyance, stinging her face. She wished she had remembered goggles so she could open her eyes fully.

If Dixie didn’t miss the turnoff and have to double back, Buck’s clearing was about a mile and a half away.

As she sped along, the ATV would go airborne when she hit a mogul or a rut, and rain in her eyes or not, she couldn’t help but smile. If the snotty little bitch stayed put, like Dixie warned her to, she’d be all right till Monday. Dixie doubted she’d try anything, because she was a soft little nothing. If women like that didn’t put it out, there’d be a bounty on them.

Anyway, if she didn’t stay put, she had her a real nice surprise coming that wouldn’t be nobody’s fault but her own.

By following Buck’s directions, Dixie found the spot where the twins had started digging the hole. She drove the ATV around the field and soon picked up the tracks of the twins’ four-wheelers. Soon she spotted their Hondas and stopped beside them.

She found them seated in an inch of rainwater with their broad backs against opposing ends of the hole. Burt and Curt Smoot looked like a pair of fat baby birds in a shoebox. They stared angrily up at Dixie, who stood in the loose dirt at the grave’s edge with her hands on her hips, shaking her head.

The ground was torn up where they had tried to claw their way out of the steep-sided grave. A section of aluminum ladder lay five feet away. The hole was deeper than it needed to be by two feet, but her father had said that the hole should be deep enough to prevent anything from digging up the Dockerys, and it certainly was that.

Since Burt and Curt weighed about three hundred pounds each, and the grass was wet and covered with the dirt from digging, there was no way they could get out without the ladder, or by one holding his hands for the other to climb out and get the ladder for the other. She didn’t have to be told that neither had been willing to depend on the other to get the ladder for them.

“You’re dumb as sacks of barn owl poop,” she said.

“It was him,” Burt said, pointing at Curt.

Curt said, “You started it.”

“You pulled me in!”

“You pushed me and I just grabbed hold of you and we both fell in. I
said
I didn’t do it on purpose, you dumb mule.”

Dixie spat into the standing water between them. “I swear, if the good Lord swapped possums’ brains with yours, the friggin possums would get the short end of the stick.”

“Please put the ladder down, Dixie?” Curt pleaded. “It’s cold in here.”

“I ought to leave you in there,” she said. “Buck told me y’all was left to dig, but he came back and found you hadn’t dug anything. I saw back yonder where you started the hole. How’d you end up way the hell over here? If you hadn’t left the four-wheelers in plain sight, I never would have found you.”

“It wasn’t a good place to dig where he said to,” Burt said. “Where he said to dig was rooty as hell, and we didn’t have a pickax.”

“We’d a needed a damned backhoe,” Curt said.

“Dirt’s better here,” Burt said.

“Daddy’s gonna be pissed,” she said.

“You gonna tell him?” Curt chimed in, fear coloring his voice.

“It could have happened to anybody,” Burt said.

“It happened to a pair of idiot fools.” Dixie got the ladder and jammed it down in the grave between them.

“You don’t have to tell Daddy,” Curt said, standing.

“I sure don’t.”

“Thank you for not telling Daddy.” Curt climbed out and stood up, offering a meaty hand to his brother.

“Don’t thank me,” Dixie said, walking to her Honda and climbing on. “Buck went to call him.”

When the engine caught, she sped across the clover field like she was late for something.

28

Lucy Dockery had been certain for hours that she could sense rain in the air, but she had yet to hear it hitting the trailer’s roof. Maybe her mind was playing tricks on her.

She wondered if this going off and leaving her was a ruse on the woman’s part to see if Lucy did try to escape. She doubted the woman would stay gone long, or leave her totally unguarded. If the woman believed that Lucy was a frightened and helpless dilettante who would do as she was told, it still didn’t explain why she would allow her to try to escape. Could she be that crazy or that dumb?
Well,
thought Lucy,
this might be the only break I get. People do escape from their captors.

With Elijah clinging to her, she hurried through the trailer, looking for anything she could use.

The main room—open kitchen and den—was decorated with stuffed deer heads. A layer of red dust seemed to cover every flat surface.

It was immediately apparent that anything with an edge she could use as a tool had been removed. The spoons, knives, and forks in the kitchen were all plastic. Cast-iron pots and pans were stacked under an island with a granite top with stools on the ends and along one side. Next to the gas range a potbelly stove sat on a bed of bricks. There was not even a steel poker or shovel for the stove.

Patterns made by the soles of boots and shoes covered practically every square foot of the filthy floor. In the den area a single couch with a wool blanket draped over it was shoved against a wall. Aside from that there was a playpen, and a new TV set perched on a coffee table.

A door opened into a room on the end of the trailer with two bunk beds and a stench reminiscent of high school locker rooms. Hunting clothes, pairs of mud-encrusted boots, grimy underwear and socks were in piles over the floor. There were no guns in evidence, and that was just as well since Lucy knew she could never use one. The idea of killing horrified her to the core. She had always been anti–capital punishment, antiwar; she didn’t even believe abortion was all right.

Maybe this was the sort of hunting camp Walter and his friends had sometimes stayed in. Walter had been a hunter and she’d been bored to tears when he and his hunting friends talked about it.

Lucy had never gone camping or even to the woods with her husband. Now she desperately wished she had become involved in that part of his life.

Lucy picked up a huge camouflage jacket with a hood and put it on to protect Eli and herself from the cool weather. She found an olive-colored compact flashlight that worked, which was good because it was dark outside. She put her bare feet into a pair of absurdly large leather boots and quickly wrapped the long laces around and cinched them at the ankles so they wouldn’t fall off. Anything was better than going outside in her bare feet.

Cautiously Lucy opened the outside door to the trailer and discovered that it wasn’t dark because it was night; it was dark because the trailer was parked inside an enormous building. It looked to be a warehouse with walls of fabricated steel. There were industrial fixtures connected to the beams, but all were unlit. Daylight illuminated narrow seams where some of the sheet metal panels joined.

The roof was supported by the kind of steel girders you would see in one of those warehouse stores.

Rain!
Muted by layers of tar, rain beat down on the building’s flat roof. The floor was coated with the flour-fine red dust that had found its way inside the trailer. The trailer itself, standing on piles of cinder blocks, its flattened tires gone crocodilian with dry rot, had been backed into the building. There were two matching steel-frame doors, each at least sixteen feet tall and twelve wide. The steel hinges, three per door, were each a foot tall. The doors were diagonally across from each other on two connected walls. If the trailer wasn’t there, a large vehicle could drive in through one door, turn around the storage room that took up exactly one quarter of the space, and go out through the other one without stopping. The giant door facing the trailer’s door had a normal-sized door built into its corner so people could come and go without having to open the giant ones. This accounted for the sound she had taken for a shed door opening and closing.

Using the light, she quickly looked around. The end of the trailer, where her cell was located, was maybe three feet from a warehouse wall. The other end, where the bunks were, was ten feet from the door that the trailer entered through.

What she figured was a storage room had corrugated walls and a large rusted steel door with crudely made hinges. A run of wood steps led up to the storage room’s flat roof, where bales of hay, some ratty-looking furniture, and wooden crates were stacked. On the ground level, rolls of rusted barbed wire hung like Christmas wreaths on the walls.

The large door was before her; to her right several fifty-gallon drums—two of which had pumps in the tops with hoses ending in nozzles—lined the wall. Several plastic gas cans stood beside those drums. Between the drums and the trailer was a stack of firewood piled in a small trailer made from a truck bed.

She carried Eli down the trailer’s steps, her free hand gripping the flashlight. Lucy took a few steps out into the space toward the inset door, heard a loud squeak, and spun back toward the storage room. Her heart lurched, imagining Scaly-hands or the woman about to jump out into the warehouse. She played the light beam over the door. As she watched, the hinges squeaked and what looked like a gloved hand waved at her through the slowly opening door.

Lucy ran to the outside inset door and tried to open it, but to her horror she saw a massive padlock hanging there. The lock secured two rings that held a steel bolt to the iron frame so it could be opened either from inside or outside the warehouse. The woman hadn’t locked the trailer, or tied Lucy up, because she’d known Lucy could only escape from the trailer into a larger trap. And this was a trap where she and her son were not alone.

Panic rising, Lucy clutched Eli to her and backed toward the trailer. The flashlight’s beam told her that what had appeared to be a hand was a blunt muzzle. The heavy door had moved due to steady pressure of powerful shoulders.

First one, then several block-bodied dogs poured into the larger space. Soundlessly, they spread out as a pack and formed a low wall before her of hungry red eyes, sculpted muscle, and bared teeth.

29

Winter Massey parked in the shopping center’s lot in sight of Alexa’s sedan. He saw Click Smoot spring from the sports car and run, coat over his head, through the rain into one of those coliseum-sized media stores, where both the music department and the computer department had shelves upon shelves filled with television sets. Winter couldn’t imagine how any of these monster stores did enough business to keep the lights on and employ as many people as they did—which seemed to be about one for every five thousand square feet of retail space. He called Alexa on the cell phone.

“I need to grab a disguise or two,” he told Alexa. “If he moves, I’ll catch up.”

“Grab me a hat,” she said. “I’ll reimburse you.”

“Halloween’s on me this year,” he said.

Winter jumped from the pickup and sprinted into a sporting store. For himself, he selected three jackets in various designs and colors, two sweatshirts, half a dozen assorted baseball caps, and three pairs of sunglasses in different styles. For Alexa, he picked a tan jacket, a blue ball cap, and a pair of sunglasses with light yellow lenses. He paid cash for everything and drove back to Alexa’s car, then got out of the truck, opened Alexa’s passenger door, and climbed inside.

Eyes on the media store Click had gone into, Alexa said, “North Carolina combat shopping champion. According to my watch, that was a shade under two minutes.”

“I hope the items meet your approval. I wasn’t sure which ball teams you follow.”

“That’s easy. None of them.”

“So, aside from the job, what the hell do you do with your time, Lex?”

“Think about how to do the job better,” Alexa said.

“Sounds exciting,” Winter said.

“It sure can be.”

“Last time we talked, you said you had run into a brick wall career-wise. Something about the Bureau putting you out to pasture teaching at the academy.”

“I’ve made some enemies over the years, Massey, but I’m not teaching yet.”

“Okay, so when the string does run out, what are you going to do with your life?”

“Watch a lot of football,” she replied, putting a Panther’s cap on her head. “I might open up a security firm like the one that pays you a fortune to come in for a few days every week to teach failed cops and ex–football players to protect Texaco executives. Only I’ll have the kind of operation that gets back the employees they fail to protect from abductors.” She smiled. “Big office in D.C. Precious and I will . . .” The smile started to evaporate from her face, but she salvaged it.

“Your sister,” Winter mused. “She’d be a solid partner. Hard as nails. Blind ambition. She’s a captain now, isn’t she?”

“A major.”

“That’s like a step away from colonel, isn’t it?”

“Antonia’s doing all right,” Alexa said.

“She’s an MP?”

Alexa nodded.

“Both Keen girls in federal law enforcement. Mama Jack must be proud.” Mama Jack had been the woman who had rescued Alexa and Antonia from the foster home shuffle.

Alexa turned her eyes to Winter and her expression softened. “Mama Jack died, Massey. Last year.”

“I didn’t know. I’m terribly sorry.” Winter had liked Mama Jack Prior, had admired that the fearless woman had opened her loving home to something like twenty-six children over the years. All children nobody else wanted.

“She was ninety-six. Went peacefully in her sleep,” Alexa said. “We all got to go out sometime.”

“I’m going to take a quick look inside,” Winter said.

“Go for it,” Alexa said.

Winter knew that, while Click might not remember him from the Westin’s lobby, the kid’s subconscious mind had a record of the stranger and his brain might send a subliminal danger message that would draw his conscious scrutiny, and then he probably would recall seeing Winter. To lessen the risk, Winter had not only changed clothes but also changed his height and posture. Slumping slightly, he altered his natural stride. He sauntered into the media store like a man with a reason to be there, and went directly to the CDs. He spotted Click standing at the computer counter looking at something in the salesman’s hands. The clerk was animated in his pitch about whatever the item happened to be.

Winter tilted his head down, acting like someone glancing idly through the stacks of CDs, and watched Ferny Ernest Smoot until he was sure the transaction was a normal one. Convinced, he walked out of the store and climbed into the car with Alexa.

“He meeting with anyone?”

“Seems to be buying something computer-related,” Winter reported.

“He see you?”

Winter looked at her.

“I can’t believe I asked you that,” Alexa said, smiling. “Sorry. I’m getting senile.”

“I wish we had another car and a couple of good people,” Winter told her. “This kid is shopping like he doesn’t have anything at all pressing to do. What about Clayton? Maybe he can come give us some assistance?”

She shrugged. “If we have to, I’ll ask him, but he’s not exactly a field person. Anyway, he’s far more valuable in his hotel room. He’s got traces running on Smoot credit cards, has nets waiting on voice-pattern matches.”

“I hope he keeps furnishing the same quality intelligence,” Winter said.

“I can just about guarantee that,” Alexa said.

Winter yawned and sat back to wait out Ferny Ernest.