Hot Start (28 page)

He stood, towering over me, an intimidating presence. “All you have to do,” he said, “is tell me where the originals of those pictures are. Once they’re in my possession, I blindfold you, you get dropped off, and you never lay eyes on me again. That’s Plan A.”

“What’s Plan B?”

“From a health standpoint, I really can’t advise Plan B.”

“I see. So in other words, I go with Plan A and I don’t end up swimming with the fishes.”

“Something like that.”

“Well,” I said, “all things considered, I’ll have to go with Plan A.”

“An excellent choice. Where are the pictures?”

“In my truck, under the driver’s seat.”

“Where’s the truck?”

“Parked outside Walton’s field office.”

The giant Samoan-looking guy said he was glad he didn’t have to hurt me. I told him that made two of us and asked where my clothes were. He nodded toward the freestanding locker. I’d get them back, along with my phone and revolver, after he fetched the pictures.

Not for a second did I believe him. No way did I expect to get out of there alive. He would go to my truck and discover that the pictures weren’t there. Then he would come back and make me pay.

“Sit tight,” he said, checking my restraints and tightening the loose one around my right wrist. “I’ll be back shortly.”

After fishing my car keys out of my jeans, he climbed the stairs two at a time and opened the door. Light filtered down, along with the sound of a television, before the door closed and he was gone.

I yanked on my wrist straps, cursing silently for not having tried to take him down while I had the chance. Now I was stuck.

Or was I?

If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, then I needed to do some inventing, pronto. I quickly discovered that even with straps restricting both ankles, I could curl my right foot over the edge of the adjustable hospital mattress and almost touch the buttons of the bed’s electronic control panel with the tips of my toes. I strained as hard as I could, gritting my teeth, feeling blindly for the buttons, my head pounding, my surgically repaired knee aching, wishing like hell I’d been born double-jointed.

C’mon, Buddha, cut me some slack. Literally.

Suddenly the bed began to move—but in the wrong direction. Instead of folding inward, which would’ve brought my torso and hands closer to the straps binding my lower legs, the mattress started flattening out, pulling the straps even tighter. In pain, I groped desperately with my toes, almost losing contact with the controls, before the bed began moving in the opposite direction, bending in on itself like a horseshoe.

As the mattress moved, the Velcro restraints slowly began to slide closer together along the bedrails. I grabbed the tip of the left strap with my outstretched fingers and pulled for all I was worth. Just like that, my leg was free. I could now shift my hip and stretch my right hand closer to my left ankle. In seconds, both legs were unbound.

I’m no gymnast, but I’d like to think I’m still pretty limber for a relic. I can still bend over and touch my toes. As I discovered in that adjustable hospital bed, I can also touch my wrists with my feet. Curled on my back, I used my toes as fingers to pry apart the Velcro and free my right hand. The left hand quickly followed.

I was in business.

My gun was gone along with my wallet and keys, but my shoes, clothes, and phone were heaped in the locker. I dressed quickly, then went searching for a weapon, any weapon. My options were hardly vast. I hefted one of the oxygen canisters. It felt light but it was solid metal. An impromptu club. It would have to do.

I climbed the stairs as silently as I could, the canister in my right hand, grimacing with each creak and groan of the wood. Pressing my ear to the door, I could hear people talking before I realized that the voices were coming from the television I’d heard earlier. I turned the doorknob, which wasn’t locked, and looked out.

Not ten feet away, between the front door and me, another giant Samoan-looking guy was kicked back on a sofa, watching
The Price is Right.
Only this one was armed with a hunting rifle.

TWENTY-FOUR

S
pecial operators learn quickly what guns function more effectively than others when fighting in tight quarters. Hunting rifles are far down the list. With their long barrels, they’re harder to maneuver around corners and can generally fire only a single round at a time. Had big Samoan-looking dude number two been armed with a short-barrel Heckler & Koch or an M-4 with a collapsible stock like those I once carried, both capable of fully automatic fire, I might have thought twice about attacking him, but the guy had a hunting rifle, and it was leaning against the couch where he was watching TV. He’d have to turn and shift his weight to reach for it, which definitely tilted the prospects of a fight in my favor.

I would’ve preferred stealth. Surprise was my only option. I hoped he was alone. One on one, I had a fighting chance. Two-on-one, I was toast.

I kicked open the door and charged.

His eyes went wide as he saw me and he stood, trying for the rifle, but his stance was ungainly and unbalanced, and when I clocked him in the side of his face with the oxygen tank, the way Mickey Mantle once did baseballs, down he went. A smaller man might’ve stayed down, but this dude was as strong as he was large. As he staggered to his knees, I swung the canister and tattooed him once more. His jaw made a noise like a breadstick snapping in half. This time, he didn’t get up.

The house in which I found myself was small and dilapidated. Worn carpet. Cottage-cheese ceilings. Thrift-store decor. The palm trees I observed upon parting the filthy, water-stained curtains covering the front window suggested I was still in Rancho Bonita, but I really didn’t know. Under less urgent circumstances, I might’ve checked the guy on the floor for positive identification and scoured the place for any bits of in-tel, but I didn’t know when Moby Dick was coming back after realizing I’d deceived him. What I did know was that he’d be angry when he did. I needed to get out of there, pronto.

I paused long enough to eject the cartridge seated in the rifle’s firing chamber. The caliber was engraved on the receiver, as was the rifle’s manufacturer—a .270 Winchester. Different rounds and a different gun had been used to kill the Hollisters. I thought for a split-second about taking the rifle with me, but had I gone running down the street armed in such fashion, I would’ve been deemed fair game by any cop who happened to spot me. To most police officers, a man brandishing a gun on a public street isn’t innocent until proven guilty. He’s target practice.

I was about halfway down the block when a mud-splattered Ford F-250 pickup with oversized off-road tires came roaring up behind me and screeched on the brakes. Out stepped one livid Moby Dick. Of course, I did what anybody with a half a thimbleful of smarts would’ve done.

I bolted.

The guy was built like a fire hydrant. No way was he going to beat me in a foot race. He knew that. He didn’t try. He got back in his truck, burned a one-eighty, and came roaring after me.

Sidewalks didn’t stop him. He bore down on me, his truck jumping the curb, crashing into recycling receptacles lining the street. It must’ve looked like one of those B-movie car-chase scenes, where chickens go squawking and push-cart fruit vendors leap for their lives, melons flying, but this pursuit wasn’t choreographed. The gap between his front grill and my rear end was closing rapidly. Moby Dick was doing everything he could to run me over.

A teenage hottie in denim short shorts and a mauve tank top was bent over on her porch, painting her toenails bright red. She looked up nonchalantly as I cut across her front lawn at full speed.

“Call the police!”

She didn’t move.

I one-hopped a chain-link fence and vaulted into the backyard next door as Moby Dick’s truck skidded to a stop on the street behind me. He jumped out and started to give chase on foot, then realized the futility of his effort and ran back to his truck. Glancing back to see where he was, I didn’t see the dog taking a sunbath directly in my path and tripped over it.

“Sorry, buddy.”

The pooch, an unneutered pit bull mix, was as startled as I was and started barking as I rolled to my feet. I vaulted over the back gate, into an alley, before he could sink his chompers into me. The alley led to perpendicular cross-streets on either end of the block. I recognized the neighborhood—the same working-class enclave north of downtown Rancho Bonita where, a day earlier and about six blocks away, I’d encountered pilot Pete McManus’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Peyton, in her nausea-inducing garage butcher shop. Which direction to run in hopes of escaping Moby Dick was a toss-up. I decided to go south.

I should have gone north.

Having rounded the block, Moby Dick’s truck suddenly veered at high speed into the alley and cut me off. I reversed course, frantically trying to force open a couple of side gates, but they were both latched from the inside. The fences themselves were eight feet high—too tall for a winded, middle-aged guy with one bad knee to scale. I’d have to make a stand.

I pressed myself flat against a dented aluminum garage door as Moby Dick zoomed past. The front end of his truck missed me by inches. The mirror on the truck’s right side didn’t, launching me down the alley. How far, I couldn’t tell you, but it was definitely a personal best. I landed hard. The next thing I remember, I was on my back and Moby Dick was straddling me, clutching the front of my shirt and beating my face like he was kneading raw dough.

Why didn’t he simply run over me and be done with it? You’d have to ask him, though wailing on the object of your ire with clenched fists does have its appeal, I’m here to attest. The downside of trying to punch somebody’s lights out is that they’ll punch your lights out first, before you can finish the job.

With my strength waning but not my resolve, I rammed my left thigh up and into Moby Dick’s crotch as savagely as I could. An odd little grunt escaped his throat, the kind people make in the loo when they could use a little more fiber in their diet. He grabbed his groin with both hands, fell to his knees, then pitched over, whimpering like a third-grader.

I was intending to get in his truck and drive over to the office of the honorable Pierce Walton, member of the US House of Representatives, when the first police cruiser showed up.

“T
HE
LAST
time I checked,” Detective Kopecky said, “members of Congress don’t typically go around spiking people’s coffee.”

“Well, I’d have to say it was definitely a first for me, that’s for sure.”

I was sitting in an interrogation room at RBPD headquarters. Kopecky brought me a hand towel for the cut under my left eye and asked me for the third time if I needed a paramedic. For the third time, I said no. Aside from that meddlesome cut, a few new bumps and lacerations, and my latest broken nose, I’d survive.

“Let’s go over it one more time if you don’t mind,” Kopecky said, “just to make sure I got everything straight.”

“That’s not why you want to go over it again, Detective. You’re looking for discrepancies in my story, because you don’t think I’m telling you the truth.”

“No, actually, I don’t.” He tossed his pen on the table where his notepad was and leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head. “You’re talking about a four-term congressman with a spotless record of public service, Mr. Logan, a guy who’s never had so much as a speeding ticket, and you expect me to believe that he spiked your coffee? That he was doing business with a Czechoslovakian pimp? That he had sex parties on a jet with hookers?”

“You know what’s hard to believe? That the average chocolate bar contains eight insect parts, but that’s proven by science. You can Google it.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Proof,” I said.

“You have proof of these allegations?”

“Not me, Detective. The hookers.”

“. . . The hookers?”

“The ones Walton frequents, if that’s the right word.”

“What kind of proof?”

“Photos.”

“Lots of people have photos, Mr. Logan, of all kinds of things. My nine-year-old photoshopped one of me the other day. You should see it. My head on Captain America’s body.”

“I have reason to believe Congressman Walton may be complicit in the murders of Roy and Toni Hollister.”

“Complicit?” Kopecky gave me a condescending smile. “Pretty big word for a flight instructor. What’re you now, J. Edgar Hoover?”

I drummed my fingers impatiently on the table, doing my best to keep a cork on my rising anger. “Have you talked to Walton directly?”

“The congressman’s on a plane back to Washington,” Kopecky said. “I did speak a short while ago to one of his aides. She said you were never in their office today.”

“Was it Amy?”

The detective seemed surprised I would know her name. “She’s lying,” I said. “Look, Walton undoubtedly has security cameras inside his office. Go check those out.”

“I’d need probable cause and a subpoena for something like that,” Kopecky said. “No judge is going to issue that subpoena without good reason, and you haven’t given me any.”

Kopecky told me that Moby Dick, whose actual name was Eugene Toleafoa, was a bouncer at a local nightclub. He had adamantly denied my allegations of having been kidnapped, and claimed that our little dust-up in the alley stemmed from an altercation that
I
had initiated. According to Toleafoa’s version of events, I had been walking across the street when I falsely accused him and his little brother, Tiny, of not yielding the right of way in their truck. I’d called them names, insulted their Pacific Islander roots, and hit Tiny in the head with a rock. Poor Tiny, who’d had to go to the hospital to get stitches, would be willing to testify that I’d started the whole thing. The house where I’d clobbered Tiny with the oxygen canister and from which I’d freed myself, apparently belonged to the brothers.

“What about the hospital bed in the basement, the Velcro restraints? This guy stole my wallet, my keys. He’s probably still got them. Go search the house. Go search his truck.”