Saving Jason (14 page)

A
imee was staring down at me. She was alive. So was I.

“How’re you doing?” she asked.

“My head hurts.”

“Welcome to my world.”

“Where are we?” I said.

“No idea. I was starting to think you weren’t going to wake up.”

I rolled up to a sitting position. The room started spinning and my headache got a lot worse.

“Please don’t vomit,” she said.

We were in a room. The walls and ceiling were covered in sheet metal. The floor was linoleum. Aimee was sitting on a folding chair. On the floor beside her was a battery-powered camp lantern that seemed to be already halfway through its cycle, the light adequate to see our surroundings—and each other—but not enough to read by.

“I’m not going to throw up,” I said, though there was more hope than faith in the statement.

“Glad to hear it.”

I held my watch up to the lantern. “Is that right? I’ve been out for hours.”

“I don’t know. What time is it? They took my phone.”

“It’s after three.” I checked my pocket. “Mine, too.” Heather and the Kid would be at the neurologist’s for the Kid’s monthly checkup.

“So who are those guys?” she said.

“Give me a minute.”

There was only one chair and she was sitting in it. I crawled over and sat with my back propped up against the wall. The room returned
to a more stable condition. It was then that I noticed the balled-up wad of duct tape in the corner.

“They left us untied?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head in both negation and amusement. “I took your tape off after I got rid of mine. I was worried about your circulation. Your hands were turning blue.”

I looked at them in the dim light. They both appeared to be fine. “Thank you.” I felt my brow and around my eyes. Still tacky, but no other residual issues. “How’d you get untied?”

Instead of answering, she stood up and clasped her hands behind her back. Then, slowly sitting, she folded her body back through her arms and brought her wrists up to her mouth. She mouthed biting.

“I’m impressed.”

“Lots of yoga,” she said.

“I was also impressed by your moves when they surrounded us. That’s not yoga.”

“No. Muay Thai
.
Twelve years. But I’m not so proud of myself. It didn’t work, and it could have gotten us killed.”

I had a feeling that getting killed was still a strong possibility, but I kept it to myself. “Still. One against six.”

“I reacted. If I’d been smart, I would have just turned and ran. My training got in the way. Are you going to tell me who those guys are?”

The claustrophobia that had first descended upon me during my two years’ stay as a guest of the federal government began to kick in. The walls were closer. Every time I blinked, the room got darker and smaller.

“Just give me a goddamn minute,” I said, though it came out in a low growl that spoke more than the words.

“I liked you better unconscious.”

There wasn’t much to say to that. I pushed upright, using the wall for support, and forced myself to look at our surroundings. The walls were no longer advancing. They were behaving just like walls—only covered in metal.

“Have you noticed? Our voices echo, but there’s no outside noise. It’s like a recording studio in here.”

“You don’t cover the walls of a recording studio in metal sheets.”

“No. And usually the door has a knob.” I had worked my way around to the far end of the room, where there was a door in the middle of the wall. Where a knob would have been, there was just a hole. I bent over and looked in. Or out. It didn’t matter, there was nothing to see. No light. Nothing.

An idea began to take shape. “Hey,” I said. “Look under that chair. Is there a plug? Or a drain of some kind?”

She stood up and moved the chair. Mounted in the floor was something that looked very much like a shower drain.

“How’d you know?”

“I think I’ve figured it out.” The words
L.I. ICE
and a logo of a giant ice cube bracketed by two smiling penguins came to mind. “This isn’t a room. We’re in the back of an ice delivery truck. And I’m willing to bet I know where it’s parked.”

She looked around the space. “An ice truck? All right, I’ll buy that. But how do you know where it’s parked?”

“Are you wearing heels?”

She looked at me as though I had spoken in Farsi, but she turned her leg so that the lantern light fell more directly on her shoe. She was wearing black pumps with a solid, sensible two-inch heel.

“Damn,” I said.

“What?”

“Sorry. I need a six-inch spike. If this is an ice truck, the door release is through that hole. You run a screwdriver or an ice pick through there and it opens the door from the outside.”

“And me without my ice pick,” she said.

“Or even a hatpin.”

“You’re about three generations too late for that, I’m afraid.”

I tried pushing the door. It was as unyielding as the wall around it.

“Don’t you carry a pen?” she asked.

I laughed. “A pen? I’m not as old as I look.” I walked the perimeter, banging my forearm against the wall at random points, hoping for a hollow response. All I got were sharp echoes.

Aimee waited until I got back to my starting point by the door. “So when are you going to tell me who these guys are and what they want with us?”

I tried the door one more time.

“They left us a light,” I said.

“And two water bottles.” She pointed to the far corner where two twenty-ounce bottles of Dasani rested against the wall. “Which means they’re coming back. But I don’t know whether that’s good news or bad. What do you think?”

“Why were you following me?” I said.

“You don’t believe in coincidence, do you?”

“Not since about second grade.”

“Who the hell are those guys?” She was close to yelling.

I turned to her reluctantly. I still had a ton of questions, but it was time to share with her the few answers I had stumbled upon. “This may take a while.”

I told her about the microstocks, the one-hundred-year leases on the trucks and the garage, the chop shop, and even the bison. I told her everything. Well, not everything. At least not right away. I put off the part about the financial advisor getting killed until I couldn’t avoid it any longer. I’d like to think that I was protecting her from the worst news, but I knew better. I was having trouble facing it myself.

T
here’s too much of it that I just don’t buy into, Stafford. Why kill the FA when there’s nothing for the feds to hang on Becker?”

“Parking,” I said. “That’s conspiracy. RICO. Right?”

“Let me list the problems. First, who murders over a reporting violation? That’s nuts. Next. Intent. It’s not parking if the financial advisor believed that his clients were taking legitimate risk. You’d have to prove that there was a prearranged timing and price where the clients were ‘guaranteed’ a profit.
And
, you’d have to prove that our broker knew about the arrangement before it would impact the firm.”

“They killed a man. He was set to testify and they murdered him.”

“You don’t know that. We know he was killed. You have no idea why, though. Maybe his wife hired the hit man. Or the daughter did. What you have is an ugly coincidence. That’s all.”

“Blackmore believes he’s on to something. He must have more information that he’s not showing.”

“I told you when you first came to me with this, I looked into it. There is no case.”

“So why is Virgil in jail?”

“Because Blackmore is a grandstanding politician, not a prosecutor. Virgil will be out on bail by tomorrow morning. He might already be out. Blackmore doesn’t need to actually convict him of anything. He’s already got what he wanted. His name in lights as being tough on Wall Street crime.”

“And next year he can run for mayor on that,” I said.

“Eventually, Virgil’s lawyer will get the case thrown out and he can go back and pick up the pieces of whatever’s left.”

“There won’t be much. If he hasn’t lost the firm already, he will have in six months. The press will make sure he never comes back.”

“And what happens to us?” I said.

She shrugged. “We’re back to my original question. Who are these guys? And what have they got against you?”

I picked up the water bottles and handed her one. “If they wanted to kill us, they’d have done it already. They gave us water and light. You have to think they want us alive, if not comfortable.”

“I think you’re whistling past the cemetery. We’ve been abducted, Stafford. Kidnapped.”

There wasn’t much to say.

We turned out the light before the battery went dead. Sitting in the dark kept my claustrophobia in check. It also meant we didn’t have to stare at the despair in each other’s faces.

Aimee stayed on the chair and I laid down, blocking the door. If our captors returned, I’d be the first to know. Time passed. Hours, but we disagreed as to how many. It would have been simple enough to turn the lantern back on, but we both felt it was better to preserve what few resources we had. The dark seemed less oppressive knowing that we could dispel it at any time with the flick of a switch.

My head still hurt and I felt drowsy. Concussion or depression? Either way, the brain was shutting down, refusing to examine my predicament because there were no happy endings. No lucky breaks. When the door opened behind me, we were going to be killed.

Only, when the door opened, I rolled out and down a flight of steps, banging into two or three sets of legs on the way down. Three male voices were all yelling at me and at one another. I rolled down the last step and up onto my feet. I ran.

I ran right into the arms of a fourth man. It was the big man with the sap. He took me by one arm and began to reach into his pocket.

“Oh, no,” I yelled. “I’m sorry. It was an accident.” I dropped to my knees. “Please don’t hit me again.”

“Get up.” He helped by pulling straight up on the arm in his grip. I got up.

“Get him in here,” someone said, and I found myself propelled on windmilling feet up the steps and back inside the truck. My few seconds of freedom had cost me a severe pain in my shoulder, but I had learned that my deduction had been correct. The lights were dim in the huge garage—the big banks of fluorescents had not been turned on—but I had seen enough anyway. And we were being held captive in an L.I. Ice truck with the two stupidly grinning penguins on the side. The faint smell of long-gone horse closed the deal.

The inside of the truck felt uncomfortably crowded. My claustrophobia began to creep back, with the walls developing a liquid look as though they had morphed from solid planes to mere surfaces through which I could fall, and like Alice, fall forever. I sank down and sat on the floor. It helped a little.

Aimee had not moved from the chair. The lantern had been tossed in a corner. The light coming in through the door was all we had. It wasn’t much, but I could see the four men, who now stood over us. There was the little nasty guy who had identified me from the
Post
; his big friend from the Stone Age with the big
S
on his chest; a slightly older man—mid-thirties, I guessed—with flat, expressionless eyes, wearing a suit and tie and sporting the kind of pompadour you might see in a road company revival of
Grease
; and the impeccably dressed, good-looking man whom I had first seen with Jim Nealis—and last saw arguing with the Mouse.

W
hat is she doing here?” The little man was no longer in charge. The speaker was the guy I’d seen with Nealis. His accent made it come out “doon he-ah” and the way he said “she” made it sound like a slur.

“She was with him,” the weasel said in an aggrieved whine. “What were we supposed to do?”

The young boss turned to the man with the pompadour and rolled his eyes. They were surrounded by screwups.

He turned to Aimee. “What were you doing with him?”

“How are you, Mr. Scott? Jason, I want you to meet Joseph Scott of the C-3 branch. I think you were looking for him earlier today.”

“I asked you something. What were you doing with him?”

She looked up at him with half-closed eyes. It was a languid and satiated look. “None of your business. It’s personal.”

“Get out. You expect me to believe you were on your way to a nooner with this old guy? Not a chance.”

If there was any chance that Aimee could pull this off, we might just get out alive.

“What do you know about it? Your idea of a hot affair is a tube of KY warming gel and your laptop.” She turned to me. “He’s been warned about watching porn at his workstation.”

Stone Age man thought this to be very funny. So did the little weasel. Scott smiled, but he wasn’t amused. The other guy could have been a monument to Stoicism.

“No more BS, lady. You two are working together. What’s he been telling you?”

“Usually he just tells me he likes to do me from behind, but I like
being on top—so we compromise. And, like I said, it’s really none of your business. Can I go home now?”

“I assume you two have met before,” I said.

“Shut up, Stafford. I’ll get to you.”

“I told you we looked at his trades,” Aimee said to me. “He was clean.”

“How can he be clean?” I asked. “I told you what this place is. There’s got to be forty or fifty trucks hidden here.”

That got a reaction, but not the one I expected. Scott laughed. “‘Hidden’? What’s hidden? It’s a garage.” Then it hit him. “And how the hell do you know what’s outside?” He turned on the three musclemen to see who had screwed up. They looked as surprised as he was.

“And the chop shop,” I said.

They looked even more bewildered.

“I saw it all a week ago.”

The weasel spoke. “That was you? You was the asshole who got chased over the fence?”

The hard-eyed man looked at him. “
What’s
this?”

“Last week. Like he said. We were out here feeding the herd when out of nowhere some idiot in a suit goes running off across the field and got the animals all stirred up. That’s when that young bull got the fence burn.”

Scott broke in. “What the hell were you doing out here?”

“Investigating penny stock trading. I found this place by searching documents. I saw the chop shop.”

“Chop shop? What chop shop? It’s a garage. They park trucks here. When the trucks break down, they fix them.”

“I don’t know how it fits in, but it’s part of your scam.”

“What scam? Don’t you get it? There is no scam!” He was screaming. “And you!” He poked a finger in the weasel’s face. “You had to drag her into this? What am I supposed to do with her? This is kidnapping. Unlawful imprisonment. Those are federal charges, numbnuts.”

“You told us—”

“I told you I had to talk to this rat. I didn’t tell you to assault the goddamn chief of compliance. Did I tell you to do that? Gino, did I tell you to do that?”

The stoic looked at him with the smallest sneer. “Maybe we should be having this conversation somewhere else?” He made it a question, but it sounded like an admonishment.

It was finally dawning on me that, while I still firmly believed these four fools were involved in some dangerous conspiracy, it had little to do with penny stock trading or stolen trucks. In a flash, I understood everything and nothing.

I felt sick. I wanted to laugh maniacally at the cast of four stooges, but the reality was that I’d been caught looking the wrong way—playing Blackmore’s game rather than taking care of business. I was the stooge. I had let Virgil hang. And now, looking at the man who Scott had just called Gino, I knew that I might pay for that mistake with my life. Killing me was the only way to cover their tracks. They’d have to kill Aimee, too. Another noncombatant. Another innocent. Another mistake on my part and another death due to my incompetence and arrogance.

In my cowardice, I hoped that they would kill me first so I wouldn’t have to watch her die.

Scott heard Gino’s words, but chose to ignore them. “I’ve got a couple more questions for you, old man. And take it to heart, you will tell me what you know, or I will have Gino gut you like a fish. Then I will sit here watching you hold your intestines in your hands while you bleed out.”

I believed him. He wasn’t funny at all anymore. But he was making threats. That meant he was scared, and that fact terrified me. He was afraid of what I knew and who I might have told. If I’d had any inkling of what that secret might be, I could have used that power to take charge and possibly save both our lives. But I had wasted my efforts on a chimera and I was clueless. Clueless, and soon to die because of it.

Aimee shifted her position in the chair, pulling her long legs back underneath her. She could read our future as well as I, and she was about to make a move to forestall it. But the risk was too great. I was flat on my ass and would never be able to get up in time to be of any use. And while no one was yet waving guns around, I would not have been at all surprised if either Gino or Scott was strapped. Even a knife would have immeasurably tipped the odds in that enclosed space.

“Let her walk away and I’ll talk,” I said.

“Did you think we were negotiating?!” Scott screamed in my face. “We’re not
trading
. This is how it works: I ask questions and you answer them. Simple enough? Now, what did you tell the goddamn feds?”

The most direct method of prolonging our lives was to just keep talking. “They wanted to know about the penny stocks. McFee Plumbing. The whole pump-and-dump scheme.”

He started screaming again. “I don’t care about that small-time crap. Or those idiots in Jersey.” He turned to Gino. “Fahchristsake, you do a favor and you never hear the end of it, you know what I mean?” And, more reasonably, to me again: “Don’t give me that, okay? I want to know what you told them about me.”

“I don’t know. What should I have told them? They had your name.” I was dancing as fast as I could, but I couldn’t keep up. If we weren’t talking about penny stocks, I was lost. I had no idea what to say.

“They had
my
name?” He spoke to Gino again. “Fucking Barstow again. The guy didn’t know how to just keep his mouth shut. The only thing that guy was good for was drinking my cousin’s scotch.” He turned back to me. “So what else did that
finocchio
tell the feds?”

“How do I know? I wasn’t there. What? You think I’m their little buddy? They don’t
tell
me things. They
ask
me things.”

Gino pulled a long, thin-bladed gravity knife from an inside pocket. With a well-practiced flick of his wrist, he opened it.

“Wait!” I yelled. “They told me he had something big. Something that involved Virgil. That’s all I know. I swear.”

“Something big?” Gino had taken over. He was waving the knife in
front of my eyes as though he might decide to stab me there first. “Something big? Like what, asshole?” He jabbed a feint at my left eye and I jerked my head away. “Talk to me!”

Scott backed away nervously. He had just lost control of the situation and that scared him. It scared me, too.

Aimee made her move. She exploded off the chair, her legs like powerful springs shooting her up and forward. Her right arm was straight out and aimed for the throat of the throwback in the Syracuse shirt. If she had connected, she would have crushed his larynx and shifted the odds more in our favor. I was still more liability than asset, but it didn’t matter. The weasel stepped in.

He had been suckered by her once and was not going to let it happen again. He reacted on the instant, grabbing her wrist and pulling, cutting off her attack and tipping her weight. He ducked and let her own momentum send her flying over his shoulder. She landed with a crash.

But she wasn’t done. Her hands hit the floor first, breaking her fall, giving her the chance to leap back to her feet, ready for a second attack.

The big man was ready for her this time. He had been slow to respond, but once moving, he was a blur. He stepped inside her punch and hooked her ankles with a sweep of his leg. She went down hard. She did not spring back up. She moaned and stayed down.

Gino had moved quickly, too, and he now stood over Aimee with the knife. “Enough with the floor show,” he said. “Let me finish this bullshit right now.”

“No,” Scott said. “There’s been too many mistakes made.”

Gino spoke in a grating hiss, his anger barely checked. “This guy knows nothing. Look at him. Right now he’ll tell you anything just to go on living another few minutes. But it’s bullshit. He doesn’t have any idea what your cousin is working on, Joey. You want to talk about mistakes? You. You’re the mistake. There was no need to grab him. You panicked and screwed up.”

Scott surprised me by responding with a cool head. He didn’t react
to Gino’s tone or his words. He spoke calmly. “You were right, Gino. This conversation should take place somewhere else.” He turned and walked to the door. “All of you. Come with me.”

The weasel and the big caveman went out on his heels. But before Gino followed, he took a minute to stare into my face. He flicked the knife closed and took a short-barreled gun from behind his back. He put the barrel to my temple and spoke quietly. “I promise you this. I’ll make it quick.”