Fangs Out (32 page)

I was being held captive in a self-storage unit.

In walked Castle Robotics’ security chief Frank Jervis, followed by Ray Sheen, the company’s self-assured second-in-command. Sheen was toting a baseball bat.

Jervis muscled the rolling door back down as Sheen yanked on a pull chain. A naked light bulb flickered on overhead, bathing the storage unit in a harsh, white glare. Then Sheen nodded to Jervis who knelt down and ripped the tape off my mouth. The security chief’s eye was as purple as an eggplant where it had met my fist. He was dripping sweat.

Sheen squatted beside me.

“How’re we doing, Mr. Logan?”

“Can’t complain.” I nodded toward the bat in his hand. “That’s not Tony Gwynn’s autograph, by any chance, is it?”

“It is. You know why Gwynn was such a great hitter?”

“Tell me.”

“Because he followed through on every swing. Which is why I stroked you as hard as I did. Didn’t mean to. I was just trying to be like Tony.”

“Imitation is the highest form of flattery.”

Sheen smiled, but there was no warmth behind it.

“We had to make sure you weren’t spying on us,” he said. “You can’t imagine how many of our competitors are constantly probing us, trying to gain proprietary information. Some try to pass themselves off as innocent vendors and private subcontractors. Others as friends of friends.”

“How long have I been in here?”

“A few hours. Hope it hasn’t been too much of an inconvenience for you.”

“Being clubbed in the head, hog-tied, then locked in a self-storage unit isn’t inconvenient, Ray. It’s felony battery and kidnapping.”

Sheen offered another soulless smile. “So, I understand you’re looking for a Castle Robotics employee named C.W. Lazarus.”

“Know him?”

“Can’t say I do. I don’t recall anyone by that name ever having worked for the company.”

He was almost certainly lying. Liars commonly try to avoid appearing dishonest by implying—“Can’t say I do”—instead of making direct statements—“I
don’t
know anyone by that name.”

“So who is this guy Lazarus, anyway?” Sheen said.

“He’s the guy who made my airplane crash. He was also involved in the murder of Janet Bollinger, but I’m still working out that part.”

Sheen signed and stood. He looked over at Jervis, who was rubbing his left shoulder and wincing in obvious pain, his head shiny with perspiration.

“You told me you just wanted to scare him a little,” Jervis said.

“It’s too late for that.”

“I didn’t sign up for this, Ray. Cut him a check. Just pay him off, for crissake.”

“He already knows too much,” Sheen said. “Don’t you, Mr. Logan?”

“First of all, whatever it is you
think
I know, I can guarantee you it’s not as much as you’re assuming. Secondly, I recently met a very attractive San Diego County sheriff’s detective. I’m sure she’d be pleased to sit down with the three of us and sort this mess out—unless, of course, you just want to pay me big bucks to keep my mouth shut.”

“You seem incapable of keeping your mouth shut,” Sheen said.

He had a point.

Jervis clutched his chest, his face twisted, and he made a sort of repetitive grunting sound, like a pig rooting.

“I t-think . . . I t-think I’m having a h-heart attack.”

And then, apparently, he did.

Knees shimmying like a newborn colt, he staggered, then fell, crashing into the Plymouth’s rear bumper and shattering the glass of the left taillight with his head while Sheen just stood there and watched.

“Frank, you OK?”

“You need to get him to a hospital.”

“Christ.”

Sheen quickly re-taped my mouth, rolled the door back up and looked outside to make sure the coast was clear. Then, with considerable effort, he dragged Jervis to the yellow MINI Cooper convertible I’d seen parked outside Castle Robotics, muscling him into the passenger seat and hustling back to the storage unit.

“I’ll be back.”

Take your time, Terminator.

He pulled on the chain, turning off the overhead light, then rolled the door back down as he exited, bathing me once more in blackness. I heard the padlock latch outside, followed by the high-compression whine of the MINI’s engine, racing away.

Soldiers and Marines are taught to “adapt and overcome” in combat. More elite warriors learn that prevailing on the battlefield often takes more than mere resourcefulness. It requires complete situational awareness—the ability to instantly assess one’s tactical environment, to inventory any and all available resources that might be used to crush his enemy. To hone this skill at Alpha, we played a game called “Remember or Die.” The course instructor was a fiery little Army private turned Delta Force operator with chronic bad breath named Oren Ernstmueller who’d once escaped a Viet Cong jungle camp after slitting two of his captors’ throats with nothing more than a sharpened lens from his eyeglasses. One at a time, over and over, Ernstmueller would lead us into rooms cluttered with incongruous objects. Cleaning supplies. Ammo boxes. A chess set missing two pieces. A dead crow. Photos of naked women. He’d pull off our blindfolds, give us five seconds to memorize everything in the room and the placement of each item, then slap the blindfold back on. Woe unto any go-to guy who missed the details of a single object, or got its specific location wrong.

“When your ass is on the line,” he’d bark, his halitosis melting your face, “all you got to go on is knowing who’s who and what’s what and where’s where. The more you see and remember, the easier it’ll be for y’all to make it through any shit storm and come out smelling like a rose.”

Nobody ever accused Oren Ernstmueller of being a poet, but he was one outstanding self-defense instructor. Thanks to him, though enveloped in blackness, I could still see in my mind what was what and where was where. My memory was all I had to work with if I hoped to live—that and the shattered taillight of a vintage Plymouth coupe. As fast as my bindings would permit, I rolled and inch-wormed my way toward the car.

Broken glass littered the floor below its left rear fender. I groped around blindly for a shard from the shattered taillight, accidentally stabbing myself in the palm of my right hand.

“Son of a . . .”

I grasped it as best I could, the glass slick with blood, and began working blindly at the duct tape binding the wrists behind my back. I lost all track of time as I poked and pulled, struggling to free my hands. Every other jab seemed to produce a painful new wound, but it was either that or die.

I still had a long way to go when I heard the MINI Cooper coming back.

Twenty

M
y wrists came free just as Ray Sheen’s car pulled up outside the storage unit. Like a man possessed, I tore through the tape binding my ankles, flung open the Plymouth’s passenger door, and, groping in darkness, found an ignition key on the floorboard. Amazingly, the seventy-year-old engine fired up like new. Then I smashed down on the accelerator, blasted through the metal roll-up door, and made good my escape.

Actually, that’s not what happened. That’s what I
wished
had happened.

My mouth, wrists and ankles remained taped as Sheen rolled up the door of the storage unit and strode in, leaving his car engine idling. Clearly, he was planning to stay only long enough to haul me off and do to me whatever he was planning to do. Everyone says a highlight reel of your life is supposed to flash before your eyes when death comes calling. But there were no highlights in my case, only lament.
Who would take care of Kiddiot? Who would fly the
Ruptured Duck?
Who would make love to Savannah?

Sheen grabbed me by the shoulders and began dragging me toward his car as the glass shard from the broken taillight slipped from my grasp. Without seeming to notice my bloody wrists, he stuffed me into the Cooper’s tiny backseat. I had to bend at the knees to fit. Then he ran back, rolled down the door to the storage unit, locking it, and jumped in.

After a series of sharp turns, we accelerated onto a freeway. The car crossed under a sign that told me we were eastbound on Interstate 8. He turned the radio on and dialed in a news station. The top story detailed a Predator drone strike on Al Qaeda’s latest second-in-command.

“That number two guy gets blown up all the time,” Sheen said.

I wanted to say, “If I was the number three guy, I’d definitely turn down the promotion,” but it’s hard to say anything when your lips are literally sealed.

The digital clock on the car’s dashboard read 11:23
P
.
M
. I strained to free my wrists, twisting and pulling at the tape binding them. By the time I looked up again at the clock, it was nearly midnight.

Sheen’s phone rang with the opening bars to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” He glanced down at the number displayed on the phone as he drove, then put the call on speaker.

“Hello?”

“Where are you right now?”

“You don’t need to know that,” Sheen said.

“Look, I just got a frantic call from Frank Jervis’s wife. He’s at Scripps Memorial. They think he had a heart attack.”

I recognized the voice on the other end of the phone. It was Sheen’s boss, Greg Castle.

“I dropped him off there,” Sheen said. “I was with him when it happened.”

“You should’ve called me, Ray.”

“I’m trying to minimize your exposure in all of this. I’m trying to protect you, Greg. Plausible deniability. The less you know, the better.”

“You’re right. I certainly appreciate your efforts, Ray.”

Castle indicated that his own wife was out of town with their children, visiting his in-laws outside Salt Lake City. He’d called Sheen, he said, hoping to get a lift to the hospital, to be with Jervis and his family.

“Take a cab.”

“I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do,” Castle said. “I just wish I could see well enough to drive myself at night.”

Greg Castle couldn’t see at night.

Someone else I’d recently met couldn’t see at night, I realized as I lay contorted in the backseat of Sheen’s clown-tiny car: Hub Walker’s granddaughter, Ryder.
Congenital stationary night blindness.
Isn’t that what Crissy Walker said Ryder had? I’m no geneticist, but I certainly knew what “congenital” meant—that the little girl had likely inherited the exceedingly rare condition genetically. If Greg Castle couldn’t see well enough to drive after dark, and Ryder Walker could barely see in the dark, what were the odds that the two could be anything other than related by blood?

In the final moments of his life Dorian Munz claimed that Castle had murdered Ruth Walker, or arranged to have her killed, after she’d refused to terminate her pregnancy, and before she could spill the beans about what she supposedly knew of Castle Robotics’ alleged financial improprieties. But hadn’t Castle voluntarily taken, and passed, a paternity test? And why, if his company was dirty, would he have agreed to open Castle Robotics’ books to an independent audit? My head pounded trying to figure it all out as Sheen continued driving east, toward that great dumping ground for dead bodies that is the Anza-Borrego Desert.

“I’ll call you,” he told Castle, “as soon as I’m done taking out the trash. Keep me posted on how Frank’s doing.”

“Just be careful, Ray.”

“Oh, it’s way past that,” Sheen said, and hung up.

At first I thought it was my imagination, but it wasn’t: the tape around my wrists was starting to loosen a little. I fought off the pain and kept twisting.

Sheen reached back and ripped the tape off my mouth.

“Tell me about the truck.”

“What truck?”

“You know what truck, Logan. The one registered to Lazarus. How did you find out?”

I bluffed.

“Actually, the cops did. They’re looking for you, Ray. You’re just making things worse for yourself. Turn yourself in and let’s call it a day.”

“You’re lying,” Sheen said. “If the cops knew about the truck, they would’ve already tried to contact me.”

I bluffed some more.

“They also know that C.W. Lazarus is an alias for Ray Sheen.”

Sheen smiled up at me in the mirror.

“Now I definitely know you’re lying.”

“Then who is he?”

Sheen said nothing, staring straight ahead as he drove, his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching. I kept twisting and pulling at the tape.

“How much is Hub Walker involved in all of this?”

“Hub Walker is a has-been who has no idea how lucky he is to be with the lady he’s with. Crissy deserves better. She always wanted kids, but he didn’t. Said one for him was enough.”

“You got any bambinos, Ray?”

Sheen said nothing.

“Your boss has a passel of ’em.”

Stony silence. A few more tugs and my hands would be free.

“OK, maybe you can answer this one for me: how is it that Greg Castle and Ruth Walker’s daughter can’t see at night, but the paternity test showed Greg wasn’t her father?”

Maybe it was the way Sheen looked back at me in the rear-view mirror and smiled smugly, but that’s when I knew.

“You took the test for him. You passed yourself off as Castle.”

Sheen cut the wheel and exited the freeway. We turned south onto a two-lane highway, wending past an Indian gambling casino and, within minutes, through dark, desolate hills.

“The least you could do is tell me where you’re taking me to die.”

“I don’t owe you any explanations, Logan.”

The duct tape binding my wrists tore apart. I was good to go.

“OK, Ray, be that way.”

I sat up and rammed my elbow into his right ear, then nailed him with a knife-edged left to the right side of his neck—your basic judo chop.

The tiny car veered sideways, careened off the road and flipped over, coming to rest on its right side in a concrete drainage culvert. Only I was no longer occupying the backseat. I was sitting in a daze on the side of the road, about seventy-five feet behind the wreck, having been ejected through the MINI’s now-mangled convertible roof. That I was uninjured beyond some scrapes, a pain in my lower left leg, and a throbbing left thumb, was not what amazed me. It was the fact that my ankles were no longer bound. The force of the crash had apparently ripped the duct tape clean away, along with my left shoe.