Cut and Run (37 page)

Shifting his weight, Larson swung his elbow and connected with the nail board, hammering it more deeply into the man's temple. The white of the one good eye rolled into the back of the man's head with each blow of Larson's elbow against the board.

He went still, but Larson didn't trust it. An animal like this could feign unconsciousness. Larson pinned the two wrists, both limp and lifeless. He came higher and dropped a knee into the man's chest, but saw nothing on his face.

The razor came loose and fell.

Larson wanted the gun—the useless gun—wanted to kill the guy once and for all. But then he saw two terrified kids staring at him, one his own daughter, and he knew he couldn't do this in front of them. His vision darkened momentarily, no doubt owing to blood loss. He saw the boy's terry-cloth robe and belt on the dirt floor.

“Your belt,” Larson said.

He heard footsteps above them.

One, or two?

Larson tied up the unconscious man's hands behind his back. The knot wasn't much, due to the thickness of the cloth tie. He doubled it, then crawled over to the boy and retrieved the gun from where he had dropped it. He quickly tried inserting the magazine, but it wouldn't stay. The gun's slide was jammed open as well.

“Cairo?” Penny whispered. “Mommy?”

“She's waiting,” he said. Then he held his finger to his lips and shushed them.

He moved to screen them from the rectangular hole in the crawl space's ceiling—the closet floor. Each of his multiple wounds rang out in sharp, hot pain.

The overhead footsteps hurried toward them.

Larson raised his open palm, indicating the kids should stay put. He moved to just below the opening, reversing the gun in his hand, its butt held like a blunt, metal club.

The footsteps stopped, immediately above.

Larson motioned for the kids to crouch down, and they did.

He waited.

And waited . . .

Movement from the other side of the hole. Larson imagined a man going down onto his knees, preparing to either jump or peer down inside. He drew the gun back over his shoulder.

As the man's head lowered through, and he took a look, Larson waited for him to turn to face him. The head slowly pivoted, and as it did, Larson delivered the butt of the handgun squarely into the bridge of the man's nose, centered between his eyes. The body slipped through the hole like a sea lion into water. Larson reached for the limp arm and took hold of the man's fallen weapon as the first of two shots came through the floor from above.

Both shots sprayed into the dirt.

More footfalls above, as the man up there took off for reinforcements.

Larson beaded down the barrel. He picked up the parallel rows of nails sticking down through the overhead chipboard. The hallway. His aim tracked the footfalls fluidly, first catching those sounds, then leading them slightly.

He popped off two quick rounds. They sounded like loud handclaps. The third round caused a sharp yelp of pain, a collision, and then silence. Neither the kids nor Larson made a sound. No one was breathing.

From above, a groan.

Larson led with the weapon and poked his head out the trapdoor. His first chance at standing, his legs throbbed with cramps.

“Come on,” he ordered the kids.

“You stay in the closet,” he told the boy as he pushed him up through.

And then he bent to pick up Penny. His hands touched her little waist. He felt it like an electrical charge. She placed hers on his shoulders.

“You're bleeding,” she said as Larson clutched her and lifted her through.

“Never better,” he said, following her up through a moment later.

He checked the hallway. The man he shot writhed in pain. He'd taken one in the leg and one in the lower back. Larson tied him up with a lamp cord and left him.

The boy had peed his pajama bottoms.

“Shoes?”

Neither child answered, looking up at him with blank faces. It was mostly fairway. They'd go it barefoot.

He led them past the two downed guards in the front room, peered outside, and they made a run for it. With shots fired, although far from the manor house, he expected others.

The three of them running now across the dark fairway, the kids keeping pace, Larson felt sweat reach his wounds. He steered them for the unseen barn.

He pulled out his phone as they ran. He slowed, allowing the kids to run a ways in front of him. But at that instant the phone's face lit up—neon blue—and announced the arrival of a text message.

Hope!

The sound of a stream grew close. They were nearing the barn.

Desperate for word from her, he read only a number on the small screen:

911

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

“Shots fired,” LaMoia reported into his headset.
He told those in the van, “The spiders report hearing six to eight shots fired.”

There was no longer any need to await the AUSA's warrant.

“Hampton and Stubblefield. Over the wall!” Rotem ordered. “NOW!”

All those in the back of the police van had spent the last ten minutes preparing for the raid. Hampton and Stubblefield, already having donned Kevlar vests and radio headsets, were handed white-phosphorus grenades and stun grenades by members of SPD's elite ERT squad.

LaMoia said to Rotem, “Say the word and you've got twelve of our best special ops on the field with them and two sharpshooters with positions on the lodge.”

“How long?”

“Give me seven to ten minutes.”

“Okay, go, but I want no mistake. Your two spiders and three of my guys are going to be on the ground. No friendly fire. Positive makes or no shots.”

“Understood.”

Rotem also directed LaMoia to call up cruisers or patrol personnel and to seal every gate. Anyone attempting to flee was to be detained as a material witness.

Hampton and Stubblefield took off toward ladders set against the wall. Rotem's phone rang, and he stuck it to his ear, too excited to hear at first, then stunned by the voice he heard on the other end. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” he shouted, too loud for the small confines of the back of the truck. The men went immediately silent.

“It's Larson,” he told the group. They'd heard the name bandied about, but probably did not understand the significance of the call.

“Go ahead,” Rotem barked into the phone, a trickle of sweat rolling down his cheek.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

Philippe suspended the auction at seventeen million five hundred thousand,
two families having formed a quick alliance across the table and pooling their money to win the witness protection list away from a Reno hotelier unwilling to bid higher. The hotelier's father, brother, and two first cousins had all died of mob hits, and he believed the names of their killers were on that list.

Philippe called a ten-minute break, encouraging everyone to try the catered food. He'd done so not out of greed, but because this time one of his own men had interrupted, calling him from the meeting. First Ricardo, now him: embarrassing as all hell. But a few words whispered into his ear convinced him he'd had no choice.

“We've got the Stevens woman upstairs.”

For a moment he was dumbstruck, the news nearly unfathomable. He had men out sweeping the grounds while the Stevens woman had infiltrated the manor house?

He rounded the landing on the first floor in time to see outside: Ricardo climbing into the back of a black Navigator. Philippe hurried to get a better look. Katrina was propped up in back wrapped in blankets, her face smeared with blood, her eyes blinking but unseeing. The door shut and the car motored off, Ricardo calling out, “Back gate!”

“What the fuck?” Philippe asked his nearest soldier.

“Thrown from a horse,” the man reported.

More likely Ricardo had been pulled from the meeting because Katrina had been caught leaving him, and this was how he'd punished her.

“How bad is she?” Philippe knew it then: He'd kill Ricardo.

“Stab wound right below the tit,” the man said. “Like a fuckin' machete got her, is what I heard.”

Philippe climbed the next flight of stairs heavy with concern over Katie's condition, asking his guy to keep her situation monitored
by the minute
. He arrived into the empty suite of rooms on the third floor to see Hope Stevens sitting in a comfortable chair. She jammed her hand down into a crack in the chair and Philippe signaled his man over to inspect. He came up with the blue BlackBerry.

“You let her keep that?”

“Keep what?” the young kid said. “I never saw it.”

“You patted her down?”

“Of course I patted her down.”

“But not her crotch, did you?”

“What?” The man mistook the question, believing himself accused. “Listen, Mr. Romero, I did not in no way touch her in that kind of way.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” Philippe ordered him, disgusted.

Just before the man left the room, Philippe stopped him and asked for his gun. Alone with her now, he stepped closer.

“You have been one major pain in the ass, Ms. Stevens.”

She held her head down, her hands gripped firmly, pressed between her legs. “Let my daughter go.”

“Shut up.”

“Do what you want with me, but let her go.”

“Shut up.”

“She's a
child
.” She looked up at him then, her eyes glassy but not tearful. “What's the point in killing a child? What can it possibly gain you?”

“There's nothing to discuss with you. You've wasted far too much of my time and resources as it is.” He came around the back of the chair.

Hope no longer could control herself. Her entire body shook. Her teeth chattered, and she heard herself whimpering. She so wished she could have been stronger at this moment, could have found the words to defend herself and put him in his place, this human monster who was behind her daughter's abduction, her years of running, her loss of life despite her living. She managed to say, “You took away my life once already.” Then she added the words that were the most difficult of all to say; words she had practiced reciting from the moment she'd been discovered down the hall.

“God forgive you,” she said.

At first she thought he'd fired the shot and blown a hole in her head, that somehow she'd transformed herself at that moment, feeling no pain, rising above her own body to hear the gun's discharge more distant and disconnected, more like a round of fireworks than the last sound she would ever hear.

But then a flash of light entered the room and she realized she could
see
that light. More fireworks went off. Only to realize he'd not pulled the trigger. He'd spun around to face the window frozen at the spectacle outside.

The younger man who'd found her burst through the door, a look of panic in his eyes. “Boss?”

Now she heard gunfire as well—short handclaps and staccato pops through the window that sounded nothing like she thought they should.

Philippe was frozen, picturing his guests on the first floor panicking at the sound of small weapons fire and fleeing for their cars.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

“Hang on, guys,” Larson told the two children,
the first bursts of light bouncing off the low clouds up by the manor house. It reminded him of the Fourth of July, of festive holidays and drinking too much. Weak and faint from the loss of blood, his every wound stinging unmercifully from the salt of his sweat, Larson looked and felt far worse off than he was. Most of the cuts were shallow, none life-threatening, and yet he felt himself fading fast.

Penny rode bareback in front, gripping the mane. The boy—Adam, he'd finally told Larson his name—held fast around Penny's waist, a stranger to horses. Larson led the quarter horse by the halter, first at a walk, then a trot, following a westbound trail. He'd discovered a laminated map of the compound's trail system posted outside the tack room and followed it now in his head. There were three major forks he would face—two rights and a left—in order to reach the estate's western boundary. It was there he was to rendezvous with SPD, although he wasn't ruling out seeing Rotem himself. Hamp and Stubby would be sights for sore eyes. But being with Hope and Penny together was all that mattered now.

With the detonation of the ordnance, he believed Hope's chances greatly diminished. With the compound now under attack, any extra baggage would be dealt with quickly. He might have believed her already dead had it not been for the second message from the BlackBerry:

MM, 3rd Fl.

Meriden Manor, Third Floor.
It had arrived just before the first explosions. It at least gave him faint hope that she'd escaped or had bought herself time.

“Firefly!” he heard from behind him.

Two black-clad SWAT operatives converged on Larson from behind. One took the horse's reins from him. The other, wielding a semiautomatic rifle, continued sweeping the surroundings, forward and back in constant motion.

“As far away as possible,” Larson instructed, “as quickly as you can.”

“Copy that.”

He reached up and touched Penny's small hand. “You're doing great,” he said.

“But where's Mommy?” she said. The two kids had held up amazingly well, Penny a leader throughout.

“I'm gonna go get her,” Larson said.

The SWAT guy took off at a jog, leading the horse. The kids hung on.

Larson turned back down the trail, and started to run.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

LaMoia waited at the estate's back gate, waited for the driver
of the Navigator to climb out and unlock it. He waited for the exact moment the man inserted the key into the padlock and twisted. Waited for the lock to pop open and the man to remove it and the chain from the gate.