Big Money (Austin Carr Mystery) (11 page)

TWENTY-NINE

My heart skips. It’s Gianni’s brother Tomas and a Vin Diesel wannabe, the bald guy and Tomas both wearing tight black jeans and black T-shirts, a dark blockade on the basement stairway above. The angry expression on their faces gives me pause; their assault rifles give me weak knees. My Smith & Wesson feels like a squirt gun.

“I’m on
your
side,” I say, trying to keep an eye on Creeper.

“For the moment,”
Tomas says. “So do your new pals a favor. Put that revolver down.”

Both assault rifles stay focused on my chest. I
see no alternative but to comply, stooping slowly, the basement floor chilling my knuckles as I set down the Smith & Wesson beside Gianni’s wounded frame. The cold on my fingers travels up my arm and touches every nerve inside me. The basement air tastes of Gianni’s burnt flesh.

Under the artful direction of
Tomas, his shaved-head sidekick and their U.S. Army-issue assault rifles, Creeper and I load Gianni into the back of the same white Escalade I rode in last night. The closeness of Creeper’s mountainous body keeps my nerves running on a blade. Standing next to the guy, I feel like I’m beside a rope leashed grizzly bear. Everything is safe and calm as long as the bear chooses.

Tomas
motions with the muzzle of his rifle for Creeper to walk away from the Caddy, toward the pine building. Creeper obeys, at least in part I’m sure, because his mother raised him to be polite. Also perhaps because Tomas’ M-16 can deliver bullets in three-round bursts, up to ninety per minute.

I figure I’m
looking good. Tomas didn’t send
me
over to the steps. But when I reach for the Caddy’s door handle, Tomas’s bald friend stiff-arms me away.

“You’re not coming
with us,” Tomas says.

“You’re leaving me
with Creeper?”

“
Ha. Good name for him. And yeah, you’re staying because
we’ve
had enough of this fight. We want Max to know it. We want him to tell Bluefish.”

My stomach
, which was finally returning to normal, flips upside down again. Wonder if that bug-out bag has any seltzer tablets?

“You hear that
, Max?” Tomas says. “I’m taking my brother Gianni back, that’s all. I don’t care what you did to him. This battle is over. You can have Carr as a peace offering.”

My head does a slow but full-boat swivel, a
deliberate search for escape routes. Everywhere the view is the same—scrub pine forest. Too bad I can’t fly. Looks like this stockbroker’s going for a run in the yellow-green woods.

“
I was kidding,” Tomas whispers. “Here’s your gun back. You can take Max’s Town Car.”

Whew.

Does knowing someone’s planning to kill you give you license to kill that person first? Aiming the Smith & Wesson at Creeper’s garage door of a chest, I decide yes, it probably does. But I’m still not going to shoot him.

Not yet, anyway.

“Give me the keys to the Lincoln,” I say.

Tomas
and his bald friend left fifteen seconds ago. I can still hear the car’s engine. The film of dust the tires kicked up now floats in the space between me and Creeper. The fog of war. Maybe I’m being a little dramatic.

Or not.
I walk closer, within eight feet of Creeper, then aim the gun at the big goon’s twisted nose. Hey, this worked before. I like precedent. “Only one more time I say this, Max. Give me the keys.”

Creeper grins. His teeth look like a recently burned forest. Lots of dark empty spaces and broken, snapped-off tree-trunks.

I pressure the trigger.

Creeper digs into his pocket, eases out a baseball-size gob of brass and chrome
and rusty keys. His huge fingers work on the tiny pieces of metal like a silversmith, quickly separating a silver car key.

Creeper knows I’m not bluffing.

The big man shows me the key he’s removed, that it’s for a Ford product, then stuffs the puppy in his mouth and swallows.

Bastard’s not as dumb as those teeth make him look. No one
could
be. What I mean, Creeper can tell by looking at me I won’t shoot him unless I absolutely have to. But how does a guy learn to trust instincts like that? Bigger than ballsy, if you ask me. Like a guy who’d wrestle two bears at the same time.

I a
m out of options. Waiting around for Creeper to pass the key is not what I’d call a viable option.

“Okay, smart ass,” I say. “I’m going to disappear into these woods. If I hear you following me, I’ll stop, hide and shoot you on sight.”

Creeper’s grin stretches into a wicked smile. It’s an ugly thing. Like the winner of a frightening jack-o-lantern contest on Halloween. Eyes and teeth from hell.

Sucks my breath away. Makes me wonder if a bullet to the brain would even kill him.

THIRTY

I stumble on an embedded pine cone, knock my shoulder against the gray, denuded limb of an otherwise-yellowish evergreen. Must be two
hundred billion bad ass ugly trees in New Jersey’s pine barrens. And half of them are staring back at me, blocking my course. I feel like a tick, fighting his way across a dog’s hairy back.

My progres
s is slow and increasingly unsteady. Through, around and under these nasty scrub pine trees is a trail I carve myself, each step a road builder. Adding to my immobility, Gianni’s bug-out bag hangs on my back like a dead horse.

Although there
is
a lot of good stuff in there.

Checking the
compass, for instance, I know I’m hiking due east. This is strategically important because I can’t negotiate two steps without tripping over a cone, make two yards without ducking under a snapped, sharp limb. I’ve suffered equally tough terrain getting to a bathroom stall at Giant Stadium, true, but keeping my direction would be impossible for this backwoods tenderfoot were it not for Gianni’s unusual compass.

Inside a hexagon-shaped,
black plastic frame, the bubble lens magnifies a tightly-bunched field, the N, S, E and W part of a luridly 1960s psychedelic nude woman with large breasts. I like holding it.

I’m not stopping to listen for Creeper anymore. I figure he either came right after me, in contempt, or he decided to make a call for backup. If he came after me, he’d be here by n
ow. At the very least, I would hear trees falling.

No, a Bluefish-sponsored posse of sweat
suit clad gunman and young bikers probably now hunts me, not just Creeper. I’d guess no more than fifteen, twenty minutes behind me, too. I try to think of that when my leg muscles tell me to rest. If I could accomplish the task without getting wet, I wouldn’t stop to pee.

Twice I catch sight of the paved road I traveled with Mama Bones and the Trim/Fit Brothers
—Gianni and Tomas—last night. Glimpses only, but enough to tell me I’m definitely on the right course. Eventually I have to hit The Garden State Parkway. Five miles. Ten miles. I don’t know how far it was, nor how fast I can negotiate this scrub pine and bright green poison oak.

I decide against using
the prepaid cell phone in Gianni’s bug-out bag, at least for now. I’m not much of a multi-tasker, and moving quickly, efficiently and quietly through the pine barrens deserves no less than one hundred percent of my attention. My life depends on it.

I’d equate my current
situation with an old fashioned parachute jump. Throw yourself out of an airplane, and it’s important to focus on pulling that rip cord.

Around noon, with a wind-driven
cloudy sky announcing the arrival of darker weather, I realize my body has to rest. My heart and lungs can’t distribute enough oxygen to counteract the exhaustion or the cramping in my legs and back. Plus, I just noticed I’m already lying down.

Taking the first of an intended parade of slow, deep breaths, I notice bloody scra
tches now mark the back of my hands. Reminds me of the last time I tried to touch Susan’s breasts. I think it was our honeymoon.

I hear people whisp
ering. Two, maybe three voices, Creeper’s not among them. Very close. Why didn’t I hear their footsteps? Should I run for it? Or hide? Or piss my pants and die?

The wind picks up again. The sky turned
charcoal over the last fifteen minutes, and now the garbage truck rumble of thunder barrels this way, up from Baltimore and the Carolinas. Lightning flashes all over the southern sky.

Should I r
un or hide?

A
cloudburst makes the decision for me. I reach inside the bug-out bag.

It’s midnight under Giann
i’s black plastic tarp. I have a watch, and I’m fairly dry. But the undiluted darkness makes me dizzy, like all my senses are shutting down. I am generally and ominously uncertain of my status.

The wind pushes rain through the pi
nes in a steady, unsettling hiss. Water splashes hard against the tarp. I smell pine resin and a sticky, fearful odor I finally connect to my own perspiration. I’m sweating like it’s the last day of the month and my sales commissions don’t match my bar tab.

Two sets of soft feet creep toward me across the wet, needle-covered forest floor. My heart beat quickens, and the thumping
inside my chest is so intense, I worry the noise will give me away. Like Poe’s
Tell-Tale Heart
.

The gentle footsteps glide past, the searchers apparently seeing only black shadow beneath fallen pine trees, one stubby trunk leaning atop the other. I’d rather be in my apartment, sure, my b
ed in particular, but I am proud of this hiding spot. Like when I was ten and built a cool fort.

Lightning cracks
close. Very close. I can hear tree wood split before the giant
ka-boom
flattens the plastic tarp against my body.

When my ears stop ringing, the footsteps are gone.

An hour later, the rain comes only in gusts, peaking when the wind surges, beating like a hundred tom-toms against the dead wood and plastic over my head. The air inside my makeshift tent smells only of pine resin now, not my stinky sweat.

I think my glands are empty.

My fingers grip another of Gianni’s gifts, that prepaid cell phone. I’m going to take a calculated risk and make one call. The calculation being, if I don’t make this call, I’m most likely going to die today or tomorrow among these sap-oozing pine trees. I give the hospital operator Luis’s room number.

He answers,
“Hola.”

“Luis. How’s your head?”

“Austin? It is difficult to understand you. Is this a bad connection?”

“I’m whispering. I asked about the condition of your
cabeza
.”

“Oh.
Si
. Well...still attached to my neck, I am told. In fact I am being discharged as we speak. It is fortunate that you have called. Perhaps you could drive to the hospital and pick me up?”

I cough. “
Uh...actually, Luis, I need you to pick
me
up.”

THIRTY-ONE

At first, the steady growl feels like part of the passing storm, a base ingredient of the distant thunder. Wind and rain against the pine needles, even my heartbeat, help mask the low pitched snarl.

Farther
east, slipping stealthily from tree to bush—think Elmer Fudd stumbling hopelessly after Bugs Bunny—the rain eventually diminishes, and a steady, background hum becomes loud and distinctively rhythmic. It’s a familiar noise, one that quickly eases the tension in my neck and shoulders. Car and bus tires race across cement.

I’ve found the Garden State Parkway.

Hiding under that tarp as long as I did—I look at it as more of a strategic retreat—I’m hoping Bluefish’s posse thinks their prey escaped. Or at least that I headed in another direction. If they play the percentages, they should have split into smaller hunting parties by now, shifted to multiple locations.

And if I’m full-boat Carr lucky, Bluefish’s
Team of Terror has given up searching for me on this direct route to the Parkway. Of course, luck hasn’t exactly been my long suit lately.

Emotionally, these last fifty yards are going to be the toughest. Do I break for the fence or not? I’m to
rn between fear and greed. Kind of like being a day trader. I can see the Parkway traffic passing south, see the bordering fence has no barbed wire, even that the grass apron is wide and long enough for Luis to pick me up here. But if I were Bluefish, this spot due east of his log manor is
exactly
where I would station one of my armed search details.

I check the tim
e on my cell phone. Everything’s mine now, not Gianni’s. That’s because I lugged this bag and its contents through an insurgent held neighborhood. I’ve
earned
this stuff.

The digital phone clock reads four-fifty-four. Good. I still have over an hour before Luis said he’d be here.

My fingers grip the chain link fence. I throw my right leg atop the five-foot barrier, use toes, knees and arms to hoist myself over.

That wasn’t so bad. Hell, I had more
trouble mounting Susan after the kids were born.

I stumble when I land,
capsizing onto wet grass. My thick jacket cushions the blow, but a sharp rock stabs my shoulder as I roll away from the landing. Those military TV shows make this physical special ops stuff look so simple and easy. Who knew you could get hurt hopping a fence?

A single star shines between drizzling clouds. And then, through the same hole in the fading storm, the moon grins at me from an eerie angle, a twisted curve reminiscen
t of Creeper as jack-o-lantern.