Fatal (12 page)

*****

Cassie’s first instinct when she saw Ronnie go down was to come out shooting. Ronnie hit the ground in the middle of the street. She hesitated, saw him get back up, and then go down again when the second man caught him. People on the street were yelling for the police. Cassie dropped the Polaris in gear and pulled out. Jumping into it, as much as she wanted to, would only get them both caught. She heard sirens as she took the left on to Esplanade. Cassie pounded the steering wheel in frustration at the traffic but managed to make the Interstate. Thirty minutes later she was back at the camp throwing clothes and everything she could into the car. Kohl would be looking for her next. He would be using Ronnie as a weapon to get her into the fold. She needed to get somewhere to think. She needed money. Most of all, she needed to find Ronnie and get him free. She cursed Kohl, and Archer, and Luke Francis. Most of all she cursed herself for trying to negotiate. She had made a mistake. They should have killed Luke Francis when they had the chance. She vowed not to make the same mistake twice.

*****

Ronnie woke up in bed. He tried to wipe his face and couldn’t make his right arm work. When he managed to get his eyes open enough to see, he found his wrist handcuffed to the bed frame. There was a man sitting in a chair next to a window. The door was open and Ronnie could hear a television in the next room. He tried to sit up and could just manage it if he kept his arm straight. The man at the window looked up when Ronnie moved, put down his newspaper, and went out into the front room. A few seconds later Luke Francis came in.

“Well, our young Mr. Gilmore is awake. How are you feeling?”

“Bad,” Ronnie said. “I’ve got a headache out of this world. What did you do to me?”

“Nothing you won’t shake off soon. A short acting sedative. Would you like something to eat or drink? You have a long drive ahead of you and you won’t be stopping. I’d suggest you eat now.”

The last thing Ronnie felt like doing was eating. He looked around. He was in the same hotel room in which he and Cassie had met Francis on his first trip to New Orleans, or one exactly like it. Outside, he could hear the traffic on Canal, and somewhere in the Quarter, a brass band was blowing. The sound drifted in through the window and mixed with the television.

“Where are you taking me?”

“I won’t answer that. It doesn’t matter for your purposes. You should know that your girlfriend abandoned you when she saw you’d been captured. Nothing like true love, right?”

Ronnie didn’t answer. Obviously Francis would use him to try and bring Cassie in. Just as obvious was the fact that Francis would play them against each other in an attempt to drive a wedge between them. What Ronnie didn’t know when he woke up was whether they already had Cassie. If Francis was working him, Cassie had managed to avoid capture.
Knowing she was still out there bolstered his spirit a little.

“I won’t help you. You’re wasting your time,” Ronnie said.

“Oh, you’ll help me,” Francis replied. He was already walking out the door. He stopped and looked at Ronnie. “Think about it. I have you locked down. Cassie is still out there, but so are your families. Eventually, either she’ll try to get to you or she’ll try to make a run for it. My guess is she’ll come after you. She’ll have to find you first, and we will definitely be waiting for her if she tries anything. She can’t hide forever. Both of your families are still here and vulnerable. I’ll give her some time but I’m holding all the cards, Ronnie. In the meantime, you cooperate or I guarantee you some very unpleasant experiences are in your future.”

Ronnie had no answer for that. He kept quiet during the meal Francis’ man brought him and remained silent as they bundled him into the back of a car in the parking garage underneath the hotel. The windows were tinted, but he could see well enough to know when they left the lights of downtown behind. After that, the miles passed in silence with one man beside him in the rear and two more up front. The car crossed Lake Ponchartrain and headed north and east. After a few hours, Ronnie slept and the car rolled on.

*****

As the year passed, Clayton Beuhl filled his notebook. Some nights he would spend looking through his notes. Others, he threw it aside in frustration, but he would always dig it out and put it back in its proper place on the porch. The pages filled and he started another one. There seemed to be no particular pattern. Sometimes a week went by and he saw nothing. Other weeks he saw a dozen cars. He had no idea what went on when he was sleeping or when he went off on a trip. Besides the black Lincolns, he noted a panel truck that came more or less on a weekly basis. Sometimes an eighteen-wheel truck showed up and headed out a few hours later. One afternoon, he found himself with a pair of binoculars in an upper room, watching and waiting. He saw nothing. When he finally went to put the binoculars away in the closet, he remembered the flash of light on the first day he’d gone to the fence. He wondered if someone had been watching him then.

That night found him on his own roof. The original builder of the house, his grandfather, had once traveled to the state of Maine on business. While there, he had been impressed by the houses along the coast, most of them built by sea captains. Those mariners built homes on land, but the sea was always on their minds. Many had what Clayton thought of as a porch on the very top of the roofline where the former voyager could look out over the water and follow the paths of the vessels on the ocean. He returned home and immediately added it to the plans for his own home. The “Walk,” as it was called, had been unused for years, but Clayton remembered it from his own childhood when he would sneak up, pass through the attic, and gain his perch by way of a trapdoor.

It took a bit of prying, but the old trapdoor opened easily enough, though the hinges protested. Tomorrow he would oil them up. He ducked low through the door and came out onto a square area eight feet by twelve feet.
A waist high railing, the paint faded and peeling in spots, surrounded the flat walkway. Apparently, the painters his father had hired every other season had never bothered to reach this high. For Clayton Beuhl it was like slipping back in time. He remembered the airy feeling of being above everything, like he was floating over the earth. In a burst of memory, he crawled into the northeast corner on his hands and knees. His extended his hand, running it across the wood lightly. Underneath his fingertips he could feel the ridges, worn now but still distinct enough to trace out: CB. He spent an entire afternoon here when he was eleven years old, armed with a pocketknife, etching immortality into the wood of the railing. Finding it now was almost like receiving a gift. His mother had been alive on that afternoon with no reason to think she wouldn’t live to see him graduate high school. She would have thrown a fit if she had found him on the roof.

Now he turned his attention due south, to the rear of his property and the razor wired fence behind. The moon was a crescent slice just over the trees. The razor wire caught beams in places and sent it back to him. Further across the field, the wall of the internal compound was barely visible, more a hole in the night than a solid object. He knew it was there because he could see nothing else. The second floor windows of the building were clearly visible from where he sat. A single light blazed in the front, probably over a door. The windows were dark from within, but gleamed dully in the moonlight. Clayton Beuhl reached into his top pocket, pulled out a cigarette and turned his back. He lit the cigarette with his hand cupping the flame of his lighter and hoped the flare wasn’t too visible in the night. But who would be watching?

“Never can tell, Clayton old boy, you just never can tell,” he said to himself, and shuddered. He sounded just like his father.

*****

The hotel in Biloxi was set directly across from the water of the Gulf of Mexico, a two-lane highway between the cracked concrete entrance and the slope that led to the beach. There was a diner next door and a payphone booth across the lot next to the highway. Grass grew up in the cracks of the parking lot. Cassie picked the place because it had not yet descended to the level of dump. The place looked like it was desperately hovering somewhere around below average, holding off on the indignity of renting by the hour or screaming cheap rates with hand-painted signs. There were a few cars in the parking lot when she pulled in driving a five-year old pickup she had borrowed from her father’s body shop business. The Polaris, she left parked in the rear of the shop. Neither her father nor anyone else knew she had been there. If worst came to worst, her father would assume the truck stolen.

The ride into New Orleans and then back out again had taken the better part of the day, following Highway 90 both in and out and on to Biloxi. While Cassie assumed Francis wouldn’t be issuing any general alerts to the local police, she wasn’t going to make it easy to find her and the Interstate and the Polaris were obvious targets. What she needed now was a place to relax, catch some sleep, and most importantly a quiet spot to try to seek out Ronnie. She had to get a fix on his location. Cassie had a thousand dollars stuffed into an envelope under the seat and another hundred or so in her pocket. She parked the truck under an overhang in front of the hotel, got out and pushed into the lobby through a glass door with a sticker that advertised the air conditioning with a picture of icicles formed into words. There was a chest-high desk directly across the room, a small sitting area with a worn out and faded green sofa on the right. Two armchairs matching the sofa braced a low wooden table with a bowl of plastic flowers on top. To the left was a wall, a door set in the middle with a black plate that said “ooms.” Cassie took a second look at the plate. The white ink had faded or been removed from the first part of the word, the part that said “restr.” Perfect, she thought. If I need to know where the ooms are, I’m in good shape.

Behind the desk was an older woman wearing a green sweater with a snowman on the front, and a pair of jeans. The sweater had cutoff sleeves and a small hole around the bottom just above the hemline. She saw Cassie coming and put down her book, pushing a pair of glasses atop her forehead into grey hair parted down the middle and then tied into a fuzzy ponytail in the back. Cassie could smell coffee brewing somewhere in the back.

“I need a room for tonight and maybe tomorrow, too,” Cassie said. “Something quiet. Can I get a room in the back?”

“You can if you have some ID,” the clerk said. “You look a little young to me.”

“Not a problem,” Cassie said, pulling out her driver’s license and handing it over. “I’d like to pay cash, too.”

“Cash is never a problem. But I don’t go for any foolishness. You’re not going to be having any parties or anything, right? No visitors?”

“No. I’m on my way to meet my dad in Pensacola, but he might get held up. If he does, I’ll stay another night.”

Five minutes and thirty-five dollars put her back in her car. She pulled into a slot in front of the last room on the east side of the hotel. The lock on the door was stubborn, the room itself old and worn, but clean. There was a bed, and a chair alongside a small table by the window, a peeling dresser against the left wall. Throwing her clothes on the bed, Cassie peeled off her shirt and jeans, tossing them aside. She started the shower. Pipes rattled and lukewarm water was the best she could get. It would have to do. When she was finished and her hair toweled dry, she stepped out and made her way next door to the diner.

*****

As Cassie Reynold was working her way through a soggy shrimp dinner, Ronnie was surveying his own room, a clinically clean ten by ten square with a bed, a barred window, and a table with a chair underneath. On the table was a pair of jeans and a shirt. The ride up had been long and he was tired, but not particularly worried. The agents who had driven him up said next to nothing. Watching the signs along the Interstate told Ronnie he was somewhere in Virginia. A small green sign on the side of the road, twenty minutes before they had pulled into a fenced gate and a walled compound, told him he was in Clark County. Where that was in Virginia he had no idea, and Ronnie didn’t think it mattered. What did matter was dealing with the here and now and getting through the next few days. There were a few stops along the way for gas and cheap food. Finally, they ended up on a country road, a dusty plume trailing the black Lincoln as gravel crunched underneath. The car slowed as they approached an intersection. Ronnie leaned over and looked out the window. As he watched, they passed a driveway. There was a man standing next to his mailbox. He was wearing a pair of jeans, sandals on his feet, no shirt. The Lincoln passed and the man watched it slow down. Ronnie turned to look through the back window. The man was still staring, his mail forgotten in his hand. He followed the path of the vehicle as it turned at the intersection and went on out of sight.

Now in his room, Ronnie kicked off his shoes and lay down on the bed. There was a camera bolted in the corner with a red dot glowing underneath the lens. He took off his shoes and lay back, resting his head on the pillow. Luke Francis would make the next move, or Cassie would. Whatever Francis might think, Ronnie knew Cassie wasn’t the type to run. He almost laughed at the thought. She would be coming, one way or another. There would be hell to pay. Francis didn’t know he was seriously underestimating his opponent, which gave Cassie an advantage. After a few minutes, he slipped into sleep.