The Book of 21 (18 page)

The second thought stemmed from remembering Janice; he had totally forgotten about her email. Here he was, fighting for his professional life, and instead of checking a lead that might tell him who was on the inside, he was reading silly little fairy tales.

John took a deep breath and calmed himself. He turned the cell phone off, stood, and took a step toward the computer.

The ring of the hotel phone next to the bed broke the silence of the room. John let it ring for a few seconds, and wondered if it was a response to his cell phone being turned off, or just a coincidence. He moved over and slowly picked it up.

“Hello.”

“I’m sorry to disturb you this late, Mr. McDonough,” the clerk, Sam, said, “but a few seconds ago, a call came in for you. It was a woman named Sophia Mezzalura. She was quite insistent that she needed to talk to you. I told her that I would check to see if anyone was registered under your name. It’s our policy not to connect the call unless a room number is given, but, given her urgent tone, I thought it may be important, and I didn’t want you to miss an important call due to some old policy. If you’d like, I can tell her that I couldn’t find your name listed.”

John liked this kid, but he did not like the idea that Mezzalura knew where to find him.

“Thanks Sam. Tell her I’m not here.” He began to wonder whether he should change hotels.

“Sure thing,” Sam replied. “We get a lot of callers that over-dramatize things to get through, but I do want you to know that she said it was very urgent—life-or-death. As long as you are sure, though, I’ll tell her you’re not registered here.”

John weighed the situation, and wondered how she knew he was at the Ritz. He realized there was dead silence on the line, and figured he really should give the kid an answer as to whether Mezzalura should be put through.

John took a deep breath and said, “OK, put her through.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sam’s voice was replaced with elevator music. After a few seconds, the music ended with a click.

“Hello?” said the feminine voice John heard at the bus stop a few hours ago.

“Now I know your first name is Sophia,” John sighed. “How did you find me here?”

“I told you I would watch you. Listen, we don’t have much time; your little girl friend is gone.”

John wondered whom she meant, and then said, “Amy?”

“Yes, the person I had watching her said she seemed to be going to your apartment a couple of hours ago. He saw two men stuff her into a car and drive off with her. Luckily, he was able to follow them. Don’t ask how he did that, you’ll see in a few minutes. Go downstairs and hail a cab. Hurry, I don’t think she has much time.”

John squinted. This sounded like a great way to set him up. “Give me a few minutes and call me back on my cell,” he said. He hung up the room phone, then lifted the receiver again and dialed Amy’s home number.

After a few rings, a sleepy female voice said, “Hello.”

“Amy?”

“No, this is Sheila. Who is this?”

“This is John McDonough. I’m a homicide detective in the Philly PD. I need to speak to Amy right away.”

“Uh, she’s asleep.”

“Could you wake her and put her on the phone? It’s important.”

There was a long pause.

“You’re that cop right? The one she met at Eligio’s?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, but she’s not here.”

The word “fuck” ripped through John’s skull.

He hung up the phone, jammed Hallman’s papers back into his coat, and made for the door. As he descended the stairs, he watched his cell phone slowly pick up a signal. By the time he broke into the lobby, the indicator showed a full set of bars. When the cell phone finally rang, the display listed the caller as “Unknown,” but John knew who it was.

“All right, where do I go?” he snapped into the phone.

“Hail a cab; the one that picks you up will be driven be a man called Asif Abdullah. He was the man I had watching you. He will bring you to me.”

“I will. In the meantime, call nine one one and get someone out there.”

“If I call nine one one, who do you think will come? Think of your
new
lieutenant. All we will do is tip them off. There are two of us here, but we need your help.”

The situation stank of trouble, but he did not have much of a choice. Amy was the only one that seemed to know anything about what Hallman was working on, and that was more valuable to him than anything right now; he had to hold on to the bar and ride this one out.

He descended the stairs outside the Ritz-Stefan and hailed a cab. Two green
Quaker Taxi
cabs screeched to the curb. John knew it was never easy to get one cab in Philadelphia, but now he was looking at two from the same company fighting over his fare.

He looked back and forth at the two cabbies, and relayed the picture to Mezzalura. “I have two cabs. Both of the drivers look middle eastern.” Continuing to pan between them, he looked for anything that might distinguish one from the other. The most obvious was apparel: one wore a red turban, and the other did not wear anything on his head, but did wear a gaudy baby-blue Member’s Only jacket. He asked, “What color turban does Asif wear?”

“Asif does not wear a turban,” Mezzalura responded.

John dove for the front cab. As he got in, he checked the operator’s license. It had the right name: Asif Abdullah. Asif hit the gas, and they accelerated away from the curb.

He kept the cell phone glued to his ear, and asked, “OK, what now?”

“Asif knows where to go. I’ll see you soon.”

John heard Mezzalura hang up. He turned off the cell and looked at Asif.

Asif looked back at John, winced, and asked, “Everything OK?”

“You tell me,” John replied with a smile.

John took out his Beretta and made sure he had a round chambered. He noticed Asif watching him in the rear-view mirror. The cabbie had started going south on Broad Street, but then turned left, and then left again, looping back around to the north.

After a few seconds of silence, Asif said, “I don’t think everything is OK.”

“I’m just making sure I’m ready,” John chuckled, assuming the gun was making Asif nervous.

The cabbie shook his head, and motioned toward the rear-view mirror. “No, behind us, it is not OK.”

John turned around and saw that the other cab was still behind them. When they pulled up to a stoplight, Asif’s trunk shielded the headlights of the following cab. John saw the red turban.

“You are right Asif; it’s not OK.”

Asif nodded and looked at the traffic on Market Street. It was busy, even for this time of night. He waited for a few seconds.

Suddenly, with a screech of tires, the cab lurched forward into the intersection.

The other cab followed them through the red light. John and Asif shot each other a glance via the rear-view mirror; they both knew this was bad. Asif continued to accelerate as they moved north. At the next red light, Asif barreled through the intersection at full speed.

John knew they were essentially playing automotive Russian roulette. Looking back, he saw the cab following them had ripped through the intersection as well and was gaining on them. John turned to the front and saw that Asif had caught a green light and was still accelerating. Even so, the cab behind them was only a few feet away from Asif’s rear bumper.

By now, the cab was approaching eighty miles-per-hour, and a string of cars sat ahead at a red light. John held his breath as Asif swerved left into the lane for oncoming traffic, and ripped around the stopped vehicles. In the intersection, he watched a car approach them on the right. It swerved to avoid a crash with their cab, but in doing so, it veered directly into the cab behind them with a thundering smash.

Asif eased up on the gas and exhaled. He looked in the rearview mirror at John and laughed, “Now, it is OK.”

“Wonderful,” John groaned. He exhaled heavily, and wondered whether he would survive Mezzalura’s next offer of help.

Chapter 21:
The Altar

The cab rolled north on the Schuylkill Expressway, exited at Conshohocken, and then began snaking its way north along the Schuylkill River. Looking out the left window, John could see gleams of moonlight reflecting off the ripples on the water. The night seemed to grow darker as the light pollution faded.

After a few more minutes of winding along the dark road, they saw a parked yellow cab come into view. Mezzalura’s cloaked figure then stepped out of the woods. Her alabaster complexion seemed to glow in the moonlight. Asif killed the headlights and slowly pulled up to the parked taxi.

The little cabbie looked at him in the rear-view mirror, nodded, and said, “OK.”

John and Asif left the cab and walked toward Mezzalura’s glowing face. As they proceeded, Asif produced a massive, nickel-plated .44-magnum revolver from within his baby-blue Member’s Only jacket. The combination of the gun and the jacket confirmed that the cabbie had a taste for the gaudy things in life.

Another figure emerged from the moon-shadow of the wood. As the figure approached them, it was gradually revealed to be an Asian male wearing a black t-shirt, dark blue jeans, and sneakers that looked like they were fresh off the rack. The overall appearance of the man reminded John of a kid who was starting a new school year with a fresh outfit.

Mezzalura thrust forward a purse and said, “It’s hers. I wanted you to see it so you knew I was telling you the truth.” She nodded toward the Asian man. “Otorru saw her drop it in the struggle and picked it up off the sidewalk.”

John looked at her and squinted. This sounded fishy. “So he took the time to pick it up before he started tailing a speeding car?”

“They were hardly speeding away,” Otorru chuckled. “People like that don’t want to get stopped for speeding by any old cop. The cop might not be someone they had paid off, and they might not be able to talk their way out of an arrest so easily.” He folded his arms and smiled. “They were easy to find at the next light.”

John thought it was possible that Otorru was, perhaps, a little full of shit. He dug into the purse and opened the wallet he found there. In the moonlight, the driver’s license displayed Amy’s face and name.

He replaced the wallet and tossed the bag onto the hood of Asif’s cab.

“There isn’t much time,” Mezzalura whispered. “They are just over the ridge. I phoned some others, but it may be a while before they get here. Do you want to wait for help?”

John looked at her and thought a moment. If these people were going to screw him over, he did not want to give them time to assemble more troops. He kept his poker face and uttered, “No, let’s go now.”

“Follow me,” Mezzalura whispered. She turned toward the woods and pulled a small revolver from her cloak.

John liked to avoid having armed strangers behind him in the woods. “I’ll go last,” he grunted. He held up a hand to stop Asif, looked the little cabbie in the eye, and said, “I’ll need your keys.”

Asif shot Mezzalura a puzzled look.

“We don’t have time for this,” she growled.

“Earn my trust, and I’ll help you. You know I can,” John said with a blank face. There was no way he was going to fall for one this obvious. She would have to let him know it was not a trap.

She looked at him a second, then turned to Asif and whispered, “Give him the keys.” She turned and walked into the woods.

John held out his open left hand for Asif’s car keys. The cabbie grudgingly slapped a ring of ten keys, accented with a rabbit’s foot, into John’s hand.

John found only one of the keys was labeled, “Ford.” That was the one he would need in a pinch. He rubbed the rabbit’s foot for luck, and started into the woods after his three guides. Eventually, he gave up on getting the huge ring of keys into his pants pocket and slipped them into his jacket.

The four of them quietly made their way through the underbrush. John crept along slowly behind Asif. As the cabbie slowed, John slowed. He maintained a distance of a good ten feet between himself and the rest of the group.

As he climbed the slope of the ridge, Asif’s pace became increasingly sluggish. John wondered whether the little Arab was having problem with the underbrush or was just out of shape. He began to consider whether there was some motive behind the dawdling pace. When they crested the hill, however, the little cabbie began to pick up speed.

Through the leaves of the trees, he could see two torches in a large clearing below. Eventually, they reached the bottom of the slope and spread out into a line with each of them about twenty feet apart. Asif stood to his left, and Mezzalura, to his right. They stayed behind the tree line to give themselves some cover while they examined what was happening.

About a hundred feet away, between the two torches he saw earlier, sat a stone slab. Six men gathered around it. Each of the men wore a white cloak. Behind the slab, one of the men was set apart from the others by a large red cross that marked his cloak. Just in case that might not be special enough to anoint him as the priest of the twisted ceremony, this man was also wearing a mask that looked like a goat’s head. The priest chanted something while towering above a pink form that lay on the stone; it was Amy.

She was tied to the stone slab—naked except for a white gag. As the priest continued his chant, he produced a golden cup and held it aloft. The men in the crowd grunted something in unison. The priest dipped his finger in the cup, and then lifted his finger into the air. The digit seemed to drip red paint. The priest chanted something and proceeded to run the finger down Amy’s body from her chin to her pubic mound.

Amy squealed in protest at the finger-painting.

John was trying to calculate what to do next. His group was outnumbered six to four, but those were not bad odds. He might gain an advantage if his group seemed to have greater numbers than it really did.

The priest raised the cup again. This time, he brought the paint-laden finger down on Amy’s left nipple, making her repeat the squeal. He then began slowly moving his finger over to her right nipple.

John murmured, “I hope you are getting a good feel, asshole. You’re going to pay for it.”