Cash & Carry (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 4) (11 page)

CHAPTER 13

We bundled the cash into one of Clarice’s rolling suitcases. Walt and I decided to take his pickup since it was quieter—at least it emitted the level of mufflered rumble most common in the county, unlike my newly souped-up Lentil. I gave Lentil’s keys to Clarice, and she drove to the bunkhouse to assist Tarq and Loretta.

“They haven’t called yet,” Walt said.

We were sitting in his pickup cab with the suitcase in the bed, shoved up against the rear window.

“Let’s get as close as we can. I’m sure she’s at Ace Trailer Repair.” I chewed on my lip and thought through the scenario. Selma, or maybe Mindy, must have told Laney that Emmie was likely to start school with the boys. And Laney had told Chuck or somehow hinted at it while she was at work. How else could the kidnapper have known to go straight to the bunkhouse instead of searching the mansion? Maybe he’d seen Emmie outside during a play break.

And he’d blended right in with the carpenter crew and their vehicles that had been parked outside the mechanics’ garage across the clearing from the bunkhouse. Emmie—none of the children—would have been nervous about a workman since there’d been so many on the property in the past several weeks.

“I need to be close to her,” I murmured again. My hands were clenched in my lap in a tight, aching knot.

Walt leaned over and laid his hand on mine. “We’ll get her back.”

He put Bertha into reverse and slung his arm across the back of the seat to watch that he didn’t direct his old pickup into any unnecessary potholes.

I closed my eyes, rested my chin on my collarbone, and tried to think, tried to plan, but all I could remember was the day I named Walt’s pickup for him. She was a clunky old girl, but the springs in the bench seat were comforting. I knew their squeaks and groans. Her parts were tenuously strung together, but she’d get through this. Much like me, I hoped.

Emmie was a brave girl, a survivor in all of her six years. But this? I was sure she hadn’t encountered a situation like this before. I hoped her kidnappers treated her gently. They had to know that she didn’t know anything. This was about me. Somehow this was about me.

I hated that sense of egoism, but I also knew it was true. Because I’d married a criminal, and because I hadn’t sat idly by after I’d figured that part out.

Or maybe it was about something I should know. Clearly, Rod Kliever, and probably Shane Bigelow since I doubted Kliever did anything without Bigelow’s approval, thought I knew too much.

About their mostly illegal business? About their likely ties to organized crime? I’d put a lot of speculations together, but there had to be something more to justify a kidnapping in their minds.

I could feel that we were on the county road by the relative smoothness of the pavement under the tires when Walt touched me again. He prodded at my curled fists. “Ease up. You’ll cramp.”

I ripped my hands apart and gripped the edge of the seat on either side of me instead.

“No. Come here. Scoot over. Hold this.” He thumped me on the knee with his phone. “Come here.”

I slid over and clicked the middle seat belt around my hips. I cradled Walt’s phone on my lap, willing my palms to stay open.

Walt wrapped his right arm around me and pulled my head into his shoulder. “We will get her back.” His voice was rough, thick. “She’s mine too now, right? Isn’t that what guardians are for?”

I kept my face buried in the soft suede and shearling of his coat. “Thank you.”

“You don’t know this about me, but I have a lot in common with the boys at the camp. Rough upbringing, lots of trouble at school, some gang activity, left home before I was ready but long after my parents had given up on me.”

I peered up at the side of his face. His skin still had that pinched tautness, his nose in sharp relief, but he was staring straight out the windshield, his left hand wrapped around the steering wheel.

Walt sighed and the tiniest smile tickled the corner of his mouth. “What I’m telling you is that, while it’s certainly been a while, I can hold my own in a dirty fight. So I’m going in first.”

“I’m hoping there won’t be a fight,” I whispered. “That it will be a civil and orderly exchange.”

Walt’s brows shot up in an expression of knowing incredulity. “And you’re going to be demure? Polite? Obey their instructions?”

I hid my face in his shoulder again.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “You’re the bravest person I know. But kidnapping is a desperate act. No matter how the exchange plays out, it will be dangerous. We are not arguing about this.”

Walt’s phone rang. I flinched and stared at it in my lap.

Walt’s grip on my shoulder strengthened. “Go ahead. They want to talk to you.”

My entire body was quaking when I punched the receive call button and held the phone to my ear. I leaned into Walt even more and gripped the hem of his coat for stability.

“Yes?” I breathed into the phone.

“Got the money?” I recognized the voice even though it wasn’t nearly as schmoozy as the first time I’d heard it.

“Yes.”

“Good. Then we’ll meet. In an hour. At the turnout on Boyd Loop Road. Just you. Anything fishy and the girl’s dead. Got it?”

“Yes.” It was only one word, but my voice shook, and I knew he heard the tremor.

Bigelow clicked off.

“Where?” Walt asked.

I told him, and he frowned. “Secluded. It’s a viewpoint high on a cliff over the Columbia River. On a road that has very little traffic. But it’s also clear for a long way in each direction, so they’ll be able to see who’s coming.”

“What are the odds they’ll go out there and not take Emmie with them?” I whispered.

There was a clicking sound deep in Walt’s throat. “High.”

“I’m sure they’re holding her at Ace. Laney said they’d cleaned out a couple storerooms this week. The place is mostly a wide-open pole barn type of building with big garage doors. The only enclosed room that I saw inside was an office, but Laney said the two storerooms are on the back wall. And they won’t have witnesses since they fired Laney and rarely have other workers on site.”

“So we’ll go there.” Walt nodded. “Look around. We have time.”

“Crowd their turf,” I murmured.

Before the Woodland city limits, Walt turned off the county road onto an unmarked dirt track that cut into the trees.

“Where—” I started.

“They said you only, right? We can’t let them know you have backup. This road will get us close to the rear edge of their property, and we’ll be able to hide the truck.”

“What would I do without you?”

Walt removed his arm from around me because the rugged terrain required both his hands on the wheel. “How about I answer that question after this is all over?”

I bent to stuff my tote bag under the seat, taking a moment to adjust my accessories and retie my boot laces. I needed to be unencumbered for reconnaissance, and I sure didn’t want my phones to end up in Bigelow’s possession.

Walt pulled off the track and backed the pickup into a bank of mounded blackberry vines. “We’ll leave the truck unlocked.” He opened his door and I scooted out after him. Walt tucked his phone in his coat pocket, but he reached up and set his keys in the crotch of a nearby leafless tree. “There’s a chance we’ll get patted down,” he said.

The lump in my boot put uncomfortable pressure on my anklebone, and I nodded quickly. It was a risk I was willing to take.

“Wait,” I hissed. “The cash.”

“It’s heavy. It’ll slow us down.”

“If we encounter them now, I don’t want to give them a reason not to release Emmie.”

He nodded curtly and hefted the suitcase out of the pickup bed.

We morphed into two people with a suitcase dodging sparse hardwood trees and crashing through prolific masses of thorny underbrush. At some point, a lumber company must have logged the towering evergreens in this particular area and left the scraggly deciduous trees to fend for themselves. We were probably the second to last thing anyone would expect to encounter in these woods, just ahead of Big Foot. So I felt safe—for the moment. I checked over my shoulder and couldn’t see any of Bertha’s flaking white paint.

But we’d face exposure soon.

The trees petered out twenty yards from the closest dented decoy trailer in Ace’s lot. Semitrailers offer very little cover since they’re so high off the ground. We hunched behind the double set of rear wheels to catch our breaths.

“Not too many windows in this place,” Walt huffed. He was the one who’d been lugging half a million dollars through the scrub. This particular component of Clarice’s matched set of designer luggage was looking a little worse for wear. “That’s good.”

I hadn’t paid much attention to the architecture of the building before except to be impressed by the large open space inside. But it sure wasn’t built to be aesthetically pleasing or to facilitate an enjoyment of the surrounding nature. The long back wall of the pole barn was uninterrupted rusty corrugated metal except for the two huge garage doors at the far end. Talk about a blind side.

Our only risk was somebody driving by on the county road or through the parking lot seeing us as we crossed the gravel. So we ran and pressed ourselves up against the metal side. I hoped that from a distance we just looked like really big rust spots, but the truth was we couldn’t hang out here for long without being noticed.

We sidled along the building’s east side. The office door was just around the corner on the north side. The side that faced the main road.

I eased around Walt and popped a quick peek around the corner. An unmarked white cargo van and an innocuous, gold-colored Toyota Camry were parked near the terracotta planter full of dead weeds that was the sole decoration designating the official entrance to the building. But their drivers were nowhere in sight.

I eased back against the wall and shook my head to Walt. Then I hung farther out around the corner so I could see down the long front face of the building to the two garage doors on the end—the other halves of the huge pass-throughs for semitrucks. Closed.

Every door in the building was closed. And the one window, right next to the steel door to the office, was not only closed but also lined with reflective foil on the inside. No Peeping Toms need apply.

They—if anyone was in the building—couldn’t see out, and we couldn’t see in.

Which meant we could check the vehicles with impunity. I went to the Camry, and a quick glance told me the passenger compartment was empty. I tried the doors, but they were locked, so I thumped on the trunk hoping that if Emmie was inside she’d be able to return my knock. Nothing.

Walt was checking the van, including thumping on its rear, windowless doors. Nothing again. “It’s not looking good, Nora,” he muttered.

I stepped up to the office door and pressed my ear against it. Not that I expected to hear much through a steel door. But I only caught the sound of a distant semitruck using its air brakes—probably out on the interstate—and a few busybody chickadees in the treetops.

I was turning to tell Walt we needed to hurry to the turnout on Boyd Loop Road when my hand slipped on the door handle I’d been using for support, and I clumsily stumbled through as the door swung open.

Unlocked. The stupid thing had been unlocked.

A metal folding chair scraped on the concrete floor, and a man uttered a surprised, half-choked curse.

“Good afternoon,” I blurted—out of deeply ingrained habit, not because I meant it.

CHAPTER 14

I probably could have said, “Stick up your hands,” and Bigelow would have done it—he was that flabbergasted. He was standing behind the flimsy desk that had been Laney’s station, his fingertips resting lightly on the laminate surface, his face so translucent with shock that I could see blue veins under his eye sockets.

Rod Kliever was bug-eyed too, but his butt was still glued to the chair he’d been tipping back against the wall when I’d barged in. He wasn’t tipping anymore though, and he was about three feet farther away from me than he had been due to his involuntary leg-kick action.

I guessed I’d made quite an entrance—and an impression. I succumbed to stunned blinking myself, for a moment.

Walt nudged me aside. “Brought the money,” he announced on my behalf, wheeling the suitcase into the open spot in front of the desk.

Bigelow swallowed. “I see.”

“Now the girl.” Walt used a tone I’d never heard before. It was a command in a low register, a borderline threat. I wouldn’t have dared to argue with him, but I knew him and Bigelow didn’t.

Bigelow recovered quickly, his sleazy salesman persona rearing its ugly head. “Why don’t you close the door behind you—keep it cozy in here? And I’ll just have a look-see in the case. That’s right.” He slithered out from behind the desk and pointed at me. “Actually, you’ll unzip it.”

He was wearing jeans and a camouflage sweatshirt and white tennis shoes. I couldn’t tell if he was armed or not and decided it was a good time to present the appearance of compliance. Especially since I had completely disregarded all of his other instructions regarding the exchange.

I tipped the suitcase flat, squatted beside it, and yanked on the zipper tab. A draft, even colder than the air that lurked near the concrete floor, swept through the inner doorway that led to the rest of the cavernous warehouse and crept inside my jacket collar. I shivered, all my muscles constricting.

I couldn’t let Bigelow or Kliever see this—see the effect adrenaline was having on me. I craved fight or flight, a directed explosive energy. But I had to stand firm, be smooth and persuasive.

So I grabbed fistfuls of money packets and held them up. The perfect distraction. “Here you go.” I could totally turn on the fake charm too, including a wide, hypocritical smile. “Counted and banded.” I lurched forward and pressed one fistful into Bigelow’s chest so he had to take the money. Then I dumped the other fistful on Kliever’s lap.

Bigelow fanned through a packet. “They’re mixed.”

“Short notice,” I shot back. “Didn’t exactly have time to make a withdrawal from the bank.”

Kliever had been inspecting the bills too, but at my words, he flashed a narrow-eyed glance at Bigelow. “So there
is
more.”

“Nope,” I chipped in brightly. “You guys cleaned me out.” I bent and rezipped the suitcase. I really needed Bigelow and Kliever to put the sample money in their pockets. Better yet, in their wallets.

I lifted the suitcase back onto its wheels and pulled up the handle. “Get Emmie.”

“Not so fast,” Bigelow said. “There is more. A lot more. An associate of mine would like his money back.” The transformation was remarkable. His smarmy, unctuous manner had been replaced by a sort of slick, oppressive control, and he took a step closer.

Walt crowded in behind me, and the suitcase and I were quickly in the middle of a beefy sandwich.

“Whoa, big guy.” Bigelow held up a warning hand, but he did retreat to the edge of the desk and lift one hip to rest his weight on it. “She knew what this was about. Just doing our due diligence. Squeaky figures she owes him about nine mil. And she owes the big boss another seven or eight on top of that. Didn’t know your girlfriend was a crook, did you? This—” he extended a tennis shoe and stubbed the suitcase with his toe, “is a drop in the bucket.”

“And we’re collecting vig, you can be sure of that.” Kliever had risen to his feet and held his arms slightly away from his sides. It took me a second to realize his gorilla stance was out of necessity. His arms and chest were thick, as in muscle-bound. The sleeves of his flannel shirt strained around his biceps. He wasn’t tall—maybe an inch or two taller than me—but he was a threatening figure. He took up a lot of space, and he was flanking us.

I leaned backward until I just brushed Walt. I knew he knew—but I wanted to remind him. We were walking a very fine line. We had to appear cooperative until we got Emmie. And Bigelow’s quick answer of, “Not so fast,” had given me a surge of renewed hope that Emmie was in the building somewhere. We’d caught them before they’d loaded her up for the trip to the remote exchange site.

Walt slid his hand into the small of my back. The answer I needed.

“The big boss?” I said. “Do I know him? I’m open to negotiating.”

Kliever laughed—a nasty sound. “We’re holding all the cards.”

“Squeaky’s under pressure from the big boss, yeah? You don’t want to provoke me, not when what you need is in here.” I tapped my temple. Bluff, bluff, bluff. Without Walt propping me up, I’d be a trembling mess.

Kliever’s eyes slid sideways toward Bigelow. Ha. So he was on a short leash, and he knew it.

But then he said, “We got all kinds of tools here. Tin snips. I could clip your toes off. One at a time. Then you’ll talk.”

That’s when Walt hit him.

I wasn’t quite sure what had happened at first because Walt gave me a little shove and I stumbled over the suitcase and ended up on the floor. There was scraping and thumping, a sickening deep smack of flesh and bone and cartilage colliding, and a lot of grunting, and the flimsy Sheetrock walls of the little office seemed to shudder. When I righted myself and squinted upward, Walt had Kliever slammed up against the wall, the neck of his shirt bunched tight in his left fist while he flexed his right hand at his side.

Kliever’s nose was flatter and redder than it had been, and blood was dribbling out the side of his mouth. But his eyes were on fire, and his whole body was rigid as though he was winding up to throw punches of his own.

“Enough.” Bigelow’s voice was low and sinister, but it carried. And if his voice wasn’t sufficient to make us halt, the gun certainly was.

He leveled the pistol at the center of Walt’s chest. “We won’t resort to such drastic measures.” Then he swung the pistol in a smooth arc until it was pointed straight into my face. “Just yet. Get up.”

I did as I was told. The gun never left my face. I was getting cross-eyed from staring into the barrel.

I could hear Walt breathing heavily. Or maybe it was Kliever. Or both of them. Or maybe it was me.

“I don’t think Whelan will be as patient with you as we’ve been.” Bigelow jerked his chin toward Kliever.

Kliever slid out of Walt’s relaxed grasp with an evil, bloodied leer. He grabbed me by the arm, spun me around, and wrapped his arms around my torso like a lasso. He lifted me an inch or two—enough that I couldn’t get traction—and my feet skiffed across the floor as he carried me out into the warehouse.

Bigelow gestured Walt along with the gun, and they followed us.

There was no point in fighting Kliever. I didn’t want to prompt additional aggression. At least not right now when I didn’t have any bargaining power. But no matter what happened, I needed to keep their attention on me in order to give Emmie a shot at freedom.

So I went limp. Rag doll limp.

Kliever swore and hunched over me, grappling along my limbs. He slung me sideways and hoisted me up in an awkward carry. I kept my chin tucked and pressed into his center of gravity.  Might as well make him work for it.

But I was peeking through my lashes. In the back corner of the building, at the opposite end from the garage doors, there was a stubby build-out similar to the office. A walled-off section that had two doors. The storerooms Laney had told me about.

Bigelow spun the knob on the closest door and prodded Walt though the opening, the gun still level and steady. I had no doubt Bigelow knew how to use it.

Then Kliever tossed me in after Walt, and the door slammed behind me.

Another heavy steel door, just like the outside entrance to the office. A key fitted into a lock with a metallic grating sound two separate times on the other side. They weren’t taking chances with us.

But in Kliever’s groping and grabbing while he’d carted me to this prison of a room, I’d seen another clue—one that gave me some measure of hope and comfort. The open cuff of his flannel shirt had ridden up on his forearm, revealing a giant bruise engulfing a set of bite marks embedded in his muscle there. They were nearly pristine, but with a little gap where her recently lost tooth just right of bottom center was missing.

Emmie had been the first to draw Kliever’s blood. That’s my girl.

But I hated to think what he could have done to her.

In the pitch black, Walt scooped me up, helped me stand. I felt him shift, and he patted the wall beside the door until he found the light switch. Blinking in the sudden brightness, he inspected me with his eyes, and in some places with his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I lost my cool and got us trapped in here.”

“I was running out of impertinent things to say anyway,” I whispered back. “I got you into this, and for that I’m sorry. But thank you for being here.”

Walt’s arms slid around me and gently pulled me into his chest. He rested his chin on my head, so I felt his throat vibrate when he spoke. “Squeaky? Whelan? Do you know these guys? How much time do we have?”

“Probably only a phone call away.” My eyes were closed, and I inhaled Walt’s scent. Outdoorsy—like sawdust and, well, salty-smoky, like maybe bacon. I almost giggled.

Focus. I needed to focus. I pulled away. “My dad told me to find someone named Squeaky. But coming from my dad—” I shrugged, “I’m still not sure what it means. I think Squeaky’s real name is Simon Ramos. Whelan is the last name of my Numero Siete—one of Skip’s money laundering clients. Dirk Whelan. Which is why they want me to return his money.”

I wheeled around and started pacing. “Clarice did the initial research on Whelan. He’s a seedy mastermind of contraband, headquartered in Seattle but with representatives at all the major West Coast ports. It’d make sense he’s connected to an illegal scrap metal business, but much farther up the chain.” I reached the far wall and spun on my heel. The room was a small, windowless cube, maybe ten feet across.

“I almost can’t believe how much of this stuff is local. We’re supposed to be in the idyllic countryside. But organized crime has its tentacles everywhere. It might be why Skip visited the area several years ago—” I waved my hand toward Walt who was still a pillar in the middle of the room as I passed by him, “when he met you.” Then I stopped stock still, and my jaw dropped. “There are two storerooms.” How could I have forgotten about that?

The worry dent deepened between Walt’s brows. “Fill me in.”

I stared at him, wide-eyed. “They have the same type of heavy steel door.”

He nodded slowly. “Both doors were closed when we were forced in here. Bigelow had to open this one.”

“Both with second, keyed deadbolt locks—for valuable contents,” I breathed in a rush. “Where else would Emmie be?”

Walt took two quick strides and spread his hands across the Sheetrock of the wall separating us from the other storeroom. Then he started knocking, sounding for the studs.