Alice in Jeopardy: A Novel (11 page)

“Where are the kids?”

This from Eddie.

Alice looks up.

“Where are the kids?” he asks again. “Do you see them?”

She looks up the beach. She cannot see them anywhere. She is on her feet at once. So is Eddie.

“Did they come back this way?” he asks.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Did we miss them?”

Alice’s heart is racing now.

“They didn’t go in the water, did they?” she asks.

“You go that way!” he says, and points, and she immediately begins running up the beach. Eddie is off in the opposite direction.

“Ashley!” she yells. “Jamie!”

Running. Her eyes scanning the water. She does not see them anywhere in the water. Nor does she see them anywhere on the beach. What…? Where…?

“Excuse me, did you see a little boy pretending to be a television reporter?”

Coming toward this end of the beach, the bathers and baskers thinning out now, still no sign of the children, oh dear God, please say they haven’t gone in the water, please say they haven’t been carried out to sea! She turns, comes running back down the beach, her eyes darting from sand to sea, and suddenly…

There.

Coming out of the tan brick building near the parking lot.

“Ashley!” she yells.

She rushes to the children, hugs them close.

“You scared me to death!” she says.

“Jamie had to pee,” Ashley says.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Jamie asks, grinning, and holds out the shovel to Alice.

The woman calls again
at a few minutes before ten. “Listen to me carefully,” she says. “All you have to remember is that we have your children. If you don’t come to that gas station alone, your children will die. If you don’t have the money with you, your children will die. If anyone tries to detain me, your children will die. If I’m not back where I’m supposed to be in half an hour, your children will die. That’s all you have to know. See you tomorrow at ten.”

She hangs up.

“Twenty-three seconds,” Sally says.

The grandfather clock strikes ten
P
.
M
.

In exactly twelve hours, Alice will be delivering the ransom money. But the woman’s words keep echoing in her head.
Your children will die, your children will die, your children will die.

The Tamiami Trail may
once have been a dirt road hacked out through the palmettos and palms, but that was long before Alice moved down here.

Today, U.S. 41 is a four- (and sometimes six-) lane concrete thoroughfare lined for miles and miles with fast food emporiums, gift shops, car washes, gasoline stations, pizzerias, furniture stores, nurseries, carpet salesrooms, automobile dealers, shopping malls, movie theater complexes, and a variety of one-story cinder-block shops selling plaster figurines, citrus fruit, discount clothing, rattan pool and garden furniture, cigarettes and beer (free ice if you buy a case), stereo equipment, lamps, vacuum cleaners, typewriters, burglar alarms, swimming pools, and (the only such shop in all Cape October) adult marital aids, games, and related reading material.

Alice is familiar with the Shell station on Lewiston Point Road because the road itself dead-ends at the ferry landing where you catch the boat to Crescent Island, not a thousand yards off the southern end of Tall Grass. Crescent is the least developed of the Cape’s offshore keys. Accessible only by water, the island has on it a small, eccentric boater’s paradise known as Marina Blue, some thirty minutes away and 10,000 miles distant from U.S. 41. Some four or five years ago, the family spent a long, cherished weekend on Crescent, and the memories of that happy time are still with her.

She parks the black Mercedes truck in a space for about five or six cars, near the air hoses, gets out—and hesitates.

For a fleeting instant, she wishes she’d taken with her the snubnosed .32-caliber pistol Eddie gave her as a birthday present the year they moved down here. Instead, it is resting under her lingerie in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser back home.

But they have the children,
she thinks.

The children will die,
she thinks.

She shakes her head, pulls back her shoulders, walks briskly into the convenience area. The guy behind the counter there gives her a look as she limps past toward the rear of the building, following the sign that indicates
RESTROOMS
. He does not appreciate cripples limping in here to use the toilets without buying either gas or food. Alice is carrying the small Louis Vuitton bag, decorated with its repeated LV monogram, and stuffed at the moment with 2,500 fake hundred-dollar bills “so good nobody can tell them from the real thing”—she hopes.

A black woman is at the coffee machine, filling a cardboard container. She is some five feet seven inches tall, Alice guesses, as tall and as slim as a proud Masai woman. Wearing a very short green mini and a white T-shirt. Good firm thighs and shapely calves tapering to slender ankles in strappy flat sandals. Oversized sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat that hides half her face. Wide gold bracelet on the biceps of one dark, rounded arm. Alice wonders if this is the woman she’s been talking to on the phone.

“Morning,” the woman says, and smiles.

Alice does not recognize the voice.

“Morning,” she answers, and goes to the door marked
WOMEN
, and tries the knob.

“Occupied,” the woman says.

Alice still does not recognize the voice.

“Are you waiting?” she asks.

“Nope,” the woman says.

The door to the ladies’ room opens. A fat woman in a flowered dress comes out, smiles at both of them, and then goes toward the front of the building. The black woman is now putting sugar into her coffee. Alice goes into the ladies’ room.

The room is an entirely gray entity. Gray tile floors, gray Formica countertop, gray porcelain sink, gray door on the single stall in the room.

She throws the bolt on the entrance door. The click sounds like a minor explosion in the small confines of the room.

She approaches the gray door. She enters the stall—the fat woman has forgotten to flush—puts the bag down alongside the toilet bowl.

For a moment, she stands alone and silent in the small cubicle. Then she leaves the stall, and leaves the ladies’ room. The black woman is still there at the coffee machines, sipping from the cardboard container.

Alice walks over to her.

“Are you the one?” she asks.

The woman appears startled.

“Are you the one who has my children?”

The woman says nothing.

“If you are, then listen to me,” Alice says. “If you don’t let my kids go, I’ll find you and kill you.”

“Gee,” the black woman says, and goes immediately to the ladies’ room door. She grabs the doorknob, turns to face Alice, looks her dead in the eye. “Be gone when I come out,” she says. “Do anything foolish, and they die. We’ll call you.” She nods. “You understand what I’m saying?” she says, and stares at Alice a moment longer before opening the door and entering the ladies’ room.

Alice hears the click of the bolt.

“I hope
you
understood me!” she shouts to the closed door.

But her threat is an empty one.

They have the children.

There is nothing she can do.

Nothing at all.

The three detectives have
positioned themselves outside the Shell station in a classic triangular surveillance pattern, ready to pick up on the perp the moment she comes out of the convenience area, if indeed she’s in there. They have to assume she’s in there. They haven’t spotted a blue Impala in the station area itself or parked on any of the surrounding side streets, so they can only think she walked from wherever she parked the car, if in fact she drove the blue Impala and not some other vehicle here to the station. But she has to be inside there. Nobody in her right mind would leave a satchelful of hundred-dollar bills in a public ladies’ room for longer than five minutes.

The detectives know they are not quite as Mickey Mouse as Alice Glendenning believes. They have already ordered backup from Captain Steele, and four unmarked CID cars are waiting to pick up the perp’s trail the minute she steps into a car, if she steps into a car. One of them is parked facing the distant Gulf, its nose pointed toward the Crescent Island ferry, in case she decides to head out that way. The other is parked facing east on Lewiston, in case she decides to go for I-75. The other cars are facing north and south, on either side of 41, should she decide to go either north to downtown Cape October, or south to Fort Myers. All four cars are within reach of easy radiophone contact if/when Sloate, Di Luca, or Cooper, on foot, have any information to relay.

From all three vantage points, they each and separately see Alice Glendenning come out of the convenience area and walk rapidly to her black Mercedes. She is no longer carrying the Louis Vuitton bag. Good. That means the perp now has the evidence money in her possession, which further means they can arrest her without a warrant. Arresting her is not what they wish to do, however. What they wish to do is follow her to wherever she and her blond accomplice are holding the kids. That is their hope and their plan.

Mrs. Glendenning is in the car now.

The Mercedes engine kicks into life.

Sloate figures she will now be heading home.

Good, he thinks. Just stay out of our hair.

We’ve got the situation under control here.

From where Christine is
crouched beside the small window in the ladies’ room, she can see the black Mercedes backing out of its space, and then circling past the gas pumps, and making a left turn on the corner, heading north on 41, toward downtown Cape October.

She looks into the Louis Vuitton bag.

All that money in there looks so sweet and beautiful.

She comes out of the ladies’ room, walks past the coffee machines and the counters bearing fast food junk food, and then stops at the counter to pay for her coffee. In a moment, she is out the front door, walking across the asphalt pavement past the gas pumps.

Almost jauntily, she steps out into the balmy morning.

The three detectives are right behind her.

The girl is very definitely
black.

Some five-seven or -eight, Sloate imagines, sporting a short green skirt and a busty white T-shirt. Good-looking girl. Splendid legs, sweet ass. Gold bracelet on her right arm, the one carrying the Louis Vuitton bag.

She struts off 41 and begins walking west toward Citrus, a cell phone to her ear now, supremely sure of herself, the bag full of bogus bills bouncing on her right hip. She knows that as long as she’s got those two kids tucked away someplace, no one’s going to touch her.

Sloate is on point.

Cooper is across the street from him, and several yards behind, in case she decides to turn right.

Marcia Di Luca is on the other side of the street, should the girl decide to hang a Louie.

She is approaching Citrus now, will she go right or left? Cooper wins. She makes the right turn, and he assumes point at the A position, picking up at once, allowing Sloate and Di Luca to fall back into new locations at the B and C corners of the triangle. They have done this sort of surveillance many times before, but never when the lives of two children were at stake.

They are far enough back from the girl to avoid suspicion. Moreover, Di Luca is wearing rayon tailored slacks and a floral-patterned, short-sleeved blouse, whereas Cooper is wearing jeans and a striped T-shirt, and Sloate is wearing a wrinkled linen suit with an open throat sports shirt. They hardly look related by class, status, or profession. They are merely three disparate citizens out for a morning stroll, nothing more on their minds than enjoying the brisk breezes that suddenly sweep the streets, presaging rain.

The girl seems to be enjoying her stroll as well. Her step is brisk. Sloate cannot see her face, but he’s willing to bet she’s smiling. He’d be smiling, too, a bag full of hundred-dollars bills in the kip, he’d be laughing all the way to the bank. They are quite some distance from the Shell station now, still heading north on Citrus, and still no Impala or any other kind of pickup vehicle. By radiophone, Sloate has already informed the unmarked mobile units of the detectives’ present location, and has advised two of the cars to move into position at the eastern end of Citrus, where it rejoins 41. He has asked the remaining two cars to stay far behind the ABC team on Citrus, ready to move in to pick them up should the blue Impala surface. He is hoping that will be soon.

It is Di Luca who first spots the car.

It is parked in a side street a block ahead of where the girl now steps out with a longer stride. She knows she’s almost home free, Di Luca thinks, and quickens her own step. “Suspect vehicle on Citrus and Graham,” she says into her radiophone. “Nose pointing east.”

“Adam and Boy, stand by to pick up,” Sloate says into his radio.

The girl has almost reached the corner now.

Sloate looks over his shoulder to see one of the unmarked cars approaching, either Adam or Boy, he can’t tell which just yet. The other car is just behind it. In less than a minute, the black girl will enter the Impala, and the following detectives will split up into the two cars, one maroon, one green, hoping she’ll lead them straight to where the kids are stashed.

She is turning the corner now.

A flash of lightning illuminates the western sky.

Big one coming in off the Gulf.

In that instant, an orange-colored garbage truck makes a left turn onto Graham, braking when the driver spots the Impala. Sloate can no longer see the girl as she gets into the car. A maroon Buick pulls up to the curb alongside him. Through the windshield, Sloate recognizes Danny Ryan at the wheel. Adam car then. He pops open the front door, climbs in.

“Don’t lose her,” he warns. “She’s just ahead of that garbage truck.”

Behind him, Di Luca and Cooper climb into Boy car, the green Olds. The Cape October PD favors GM products.

The blue Impala is moving away from the curb.

As Ryan makes his right turn from Citrus onto Graham, Sloate catches a quick glimpse of the slender woman driving the car, long blond hair trailing almost to her shoulders.

The garbage truck is in motion again.

It blocks the street completely, parked cars on either side of it.

Ryan leans on the horn.

But by the time they pull around the truck, the street ahead is empty.

The blue Impala has vanished from sight.

And so have the black girl and the blonde who picked her up.

Reginald Webster is sitting
on the front-stoop steps when Alice gets back to the house at eleven-thirty. He is wearing white slacks and white leather loafers without socks. A blue blazer with brass buttons is open over a white linen shirt. The house behind him is still and dark. Rafe’s rig is nowhere in sight. Webb’s own rented Mercury convertible is parked out front, the top down. The hasty rain has come and gone. The late morning is still. She pulls the Mercedes truck into the driveway, and gets out. Webb rises the moment he sees her.

“Thought I’d missed you,” he says.

She merely nods.