Persuader (43 page)

Drove it up to the gate and slid out and waited out of sight. The Taurus stopped outside the gate and I saw Villanueva at the wheel with Duffy next to him and Eliot in the back. I stepped out of hiding and took the chain off the gate and swung it open. Villanueva eased through and stopped nose to nose with the Cadillac. Then three doors opened and they all climbed out into the cold and stared at me.

“What the hell happened to you?” Villanueva said.

I touched my mouth. It felt swollen and tender.

“Walked into a door,” I said.

Villanueva glanced at the gatehouse.

“Or a door man,” he said. “Am I right?”

“You OK?” Duffy asked.

“I’m in better shape than the doorman,” I said.

“Why are we here?”

“Plan B,” I said. “We’re going to Portland, but if we don’t find what we need up there we’re going to have to come back here and wait. So two of you are coming out with me right now and the other one is staying here to hold the fort.” I turned around and pointed at the house. “The center second-floor window has got a big machine gun mounted in it to cover the approach. I need one of you in there manning it.”

Nobody volunteered. I looked straight at Villanueva. He was old enough to have been drafted, way back. He might have spent time around big machine guns.

“You do it, Terry,” I said.

“Not me,” he said. “I’m coming out with you to find Teresa.”

He said it like there was going to be no way to argue with him.

“OK, I’ll do it,” Eliot said.

“Thanks,” I said. “You ever seen a Vietnam movie? Seen the door gunner on a Huey?

That’s you. If they come, they won’t try to get through the gate. They’ll go in the front window of the gatehouse and out the back door or the back window. So you be ready to hose them down as they come out.”

“What if it’s dark?”

“We’ll be back before dark.”

“OK. Who’s in the house?”

“Beck’s family. And the cook. They’re noncombatants, but they won’t leave.”

“What about Beck himself?”

“He’ll come back with the others. If he got away again in the confusion it wouldn’t break my heart. But if he got hit in the confusion it wouldn’t break my heart either.”

“OK.”

“They probably won’t show up,” I said. “They’re busy. This all is just a precaution.”

“OK,” he said again.

“You keep the Cadillac,” I said. “We’ll take the Taurus.”

Villanueva got back in the Ford and reversed it out through the gate again. I walked out with Duffy and closed the gate from the outside and chained it and locked it and tossed the padlock key over to Eliot.

“See you later,” I said.

He turned the Cadillac around and I watched him drive it down toward the house. Then I got in the Taurus with Duffy and Villanueva. She took the front seat. I took the back. I got her Glock and her spare magazines out of my pocket and passed them forward to her, like a little ceremony.

“Thanks for the loan,” I said.

She put the Glock in her shoulder holster and the magazines in her purse.

“You’re very welcome,” she said.

“Teresa first,” Villanueva said. “Quinn second. OK?”

“Agreed,” I said.

He K-turned on the road and took off west.

“So where do we look?” he said.

“Choice of three locations,” I said. “There’s the warehouse, there’s a city-center office, and there’s a business park near the airport. Can’t keep a prisoner in a city-center office building over the weekend. And the warehouse is too busy. They just had a big shipment.

So my vote goes with the business park.”

“I-95 or Route One?”

“Route One,” I said.

We drove in silence, fifteen miles inland, and turned north on Route One toward Portland.

CHAPTER 13

It was early afternoon on a Saturday, so the business park was quiet. It was rinsed clean by rain and it looked fresh and new. The metal buildings glowed like dull pewter under the gray of the sky. We cruised through the network of streets at maybe twenty miles an hour. Saw nobody. Quinn’s building looked locked up tight. I turned my head as we drove by and studied the sign again: Xavier eXport Company. The words were professionally etched on thick stainless steel, but the oversized X s looked like an amateur’s idea of graphic design.

“Why does it say export?” Duffy asked. “He’s importing stuff, surely.”

“How do we get in?” Villanueva asked.

“We break in,” I said. “Through the rear, I guess.”

The buildings were laid out back-to-back, with neat parking lots in front of each of them.

Everything else in the park was either a road or new lawn bounded by neat pouredconcrete curbs. There were no fences anywhere. The building directly behind Quinn’s was labeled Paul Keast & Chris Maden Professional Catering Services. It was closed up and deserted. I could see past it all the way to Quinn’s back door, which was a plain metal rectangle painted dull red.

“Nobody around,” Duffy said.

There was a window on Quinn’s back wall near the red door. It was made from pebbled glass. Probably a bathroom window. It had iron bars over it.

“Security system?” Villanueva said.

“On a new place like this?” I said. “Almost certainly.”

“Wired direct to the cops?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “That wouldn’t be smart, for a guy like Quinn. He doesn’t want the cops snooping around every time some kid busts his windows.”

“Private company?”

“That’s my guess. Or his own people.”

“So how do we do it?”

“We do it real fast. Get in and out before anybody reacts. We can risk five or ten minutes, probably.”

“One at the front and two at the back?”

“You got it,” I said. “You take the front.”

I told him to pop the trunk and then Duffy and I slid out of the car. The air was cold and damp and the wind was blowing. I took the tire iron out from under the spare wheel and closed the trunk lid and watched the car drive away. Duffy and I walked down the side of the catering place and across the dividing lawn to Quinn’s bathroom window. I put my ear against the cold metal siding and listened. Heard nothing. Then I looked at the window bars. They were made up from a shallow one-piece rectangular iron basket that was secured by eight machine screws, two on each of the four sides of the rectangle. The screws went through welded flanges the size of quarters. The screw heads themselves were the size of nickels. Duffy pulled the Glock out of her shoulder holster. I heard it scrape on the leather. I checked the Beretta in my coat pocket. Held the tire iron twohanded. Put my ear back on the siding. Heard Villanueva’s car pull up at the front of the building. I could hear the beat of the engine coming through the metal. I heard his door open and close. He left the engine running. I heard his feet on the front walkway.

“Stand by,” I said.

I felt Duffy move behind me. Heard Villanueva knocking loudly on the front door. I stabbed the tire iron end-on into the siding next to one of the screws. Made a shallow dent in the metal. Shoved the iron sideways into it and under the bars and hauled on it. The screw held. Clearly it went through the siding all the way into the steel framing. So I reseated the iron and jerked harder, once, twice. The screw head broke off and the bars moved a little.

I had to break six screw heads in total. Took me nearly thirty seconds. Villanueva was still knocking. Nobody was answering. When the sixth screw broke I grabbed the bars themselves and hauled them open ninety degrees like a door. The two remaining screws screeched in protest. I picked up the tire iron again and smashed the pebbled glass.

Reached in with my hand and found the catch and pulled the window open. Took out the Beretta and went headfirst into the bathroom.

It was a small cubicle, maybe six-by-four. There was a toilet and a sink with a small frameless mirror. A trash can and a shelf with spare toilet rolls and paper towels on it. A bucket and a mop propped in a corner. Clean linoleum on the floor. A strong smell of disinfectant. I turned around and checked the window. There was a small alarm pad screwed to the sill. But the building was still quiet. No siren. A silent alarm. Now a phone would be ringing somewhere. Or an alert would be flashing on a computer screen.

I stepped out of the bathroom into a back hallway. Nobody there. It was dark. I faced front and backed away to the rear door. Fumbled behind me without looking and unlocked it. Pulled it open. Heard Duffy step inside.

She had probably done six weeks at Quantico during her basic training and she still remembered the moves. She held the Glock two-handed and slid past me and took up station by a door that was going to lead out of the hallway into the rest of the building.

She leaned her shoulder on the jamb and crooked her elbows to pull the gun up out of my way. I stepped forward and kicked the door and went through it and dodged left and she spun after me and went to the right. We were in another hallway. It was narrow. It ran the whole length of the building, all the way to the front. There were rooms off it, left and right. Six rooms, three on either side. Six doors, all of them closed.

“Front,” I whispered. “Villanueva.”

We crabbed our way along, back-to-back, covering each door in turn. They stayed closed.

We made it to the front door and I unlocked it and opened it up. Villanueva stepped through and closed it again behind him. He had a Glock 17 in his gnarled old hand. It looked right at home there.

“Alarm?” he whispered.

“Silent,” I whispered back.

“So let’s be quick.”

“Room by room,” I whispered.

It wasn’t a good feeling. We had made so much noise that nobody in the building could have any doubt we were there. And the fact that they hadn’t blundered out to confront us meant they were smart enough to sit tight with their hammers back and their sights trained chest-high at the inside of their doors. And the center hallway was only about three feet wide. It didn’t give us much room to maneuver. Not a good feeling. The doors were all hinged on the left, so I put Duffy on my left facing out to cover the doors opposite. I didn’t want us all facing the same way. I didn’t want to get shot in the back.

Then I put Villanueva on my right. His job was to kick in the doors, one by one. I took the center. My job was to go in first, room by room.

We started with the front room on the left. Villanueva kicked the door, hard. The lock broke and the frame splintered and the door crashed open. I went straight in. The room was empty. It was a ten-by-ten square with a window and a desk and a wall of file cabinets. I came straight out and we all spun around and hit the room opposite, immediately. Duffy covered our backs and Villanueva kicked the door and I went in. It was empty, too. But it was a bonus. The partition wall between it and the next room had been removed. It was ten-by-twenty. It had two doors to the hallway. There were three desks in the room. There were computers and phones. There was a coat rack in the corner with a woman’s raincoat hanging on it.

We crossed the hallway to the fourth door. The third room. Villanueva kicked the door and I rolled around the jamb. Empty. Another ten-by-ten square. No window. A desk, with a big cork notice board behind it. Lists pinned to the cork. An Oriental carpet covering most of the linoleum.

Four down. Two to go. We chose the back room on the right. Villanueva hit the door. I went in. It was empty. Ten-by-ten, white paint, gray linoleum. Completely bare. Nothing in it at all. Except bloodstains. They had been cleaned up, but not well. There were brown swirls on the floor, where an overloaded mop had pushed them around. There was splatter on the walls. Some of it had been wiped. Some of it had been missed altogether.

There were lacy trails up to waist height. The angles between the baseboards and the linoleum were rimed with brown and black.

“The maid,” I said.

Nobody replied. We stood still for a long silent moment. Then we backed out and turned around and hit the last door, hard. I went in, gun-first. And stopped dead.

It was a prison. And it was empty.

It was ten-by-ten. It had white walls and a low ceiling. No windows. Gray linoleum on the floor. A mattress on the linoleum. Wrinkled sheets on the mattress. Dozens of Chinese food cartons all over the place. Empty plastic bottles that had held spring water.

“She was here,” Duffy said.

I nodded. “Just like in the basement up at the house.”

I stepped all the way inside and lifted up the mattress. The word justice was smeared on the floor, big and obvious, painted with a finger. Underneath it was today’s date, six numbers, month, day, year, fading and then strengthening as she had reloaded her fingertip with something black and brown.

“She’s hoping we’ll track her,” Villanueva said. “Day by day, place by place. Smart kid.”

“Is that written in blood?” Duffy said.

I could smell stale food and stale breath, all through the room. I could smell fear and desperation. She had heard the maid die. Two thin doors wouldn’t have blocked much sound.

“Hoisin sauce,” I said. “I hope.”

“How long since they moved her?”

I looked inside the closest cartons. “Two hours, maybe.”

“Shit.”

“So let’s go,” Villanueva said. “Let’s go find her.”

“Five minutes,” Duffy said. “I need to get something I can give to ATF. To make this whole thing right.”

“We haven’t got five minutes,” Villanueva said.

“Two minutes,” I said. “Grab what you can and look at it later.”

We backed out of the cell. Nobody looked at the charnel house opposite. Duffy led us back to the room with the Oriental carpet. Smart choice, I thought. It was probably Quinn’s office. He was the kind of guy who would give himself a rug. She took a thick file marked Pending from a desk drawer and pulled all the lists off the cork board.

“Let’s go,” Villanueva said again.

We came out through the front door exactly four minutes after I had gone in through the bathroom window. It felt more like four hours. We piled into the gray Taurus and were back on Route One a minute after that.

“Stay north,” I said. “Head for the city center.”

We were quiet at first. Nobody looked at anybody. Nobody spoke. We were thinking about the maid. I was in the back and Duffy was in the front with Quinn’s paperwork spread over her knees. Traffic across the bridge was slow. There were shoppers heading into the city. The roadway was slick with rain and salt spray. Duffy shuffled papers, glancing at one after another. Then she broke the silence. It was a relief.

“This all is pretty cryptic,” she said. “We’ve got an XX and a BB. ”

“Xavier Export Company and Bizarre Bazaar,” I said.

“BB is importing,” she said. “XX is exporting. But they’re obviously linked. They’re like two halves of the same operation.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I just want Quinn.”

“And Teresa,” Villanueva said.

“First-quarter spreadsheet,” Duffy said. “They’re on track to turn over twenty-two million dollars this year. That’s a lot of guns, I guess.”

“Quarter-million Saturday Night Specials,” I said. “Or four Abrams tanks.”

“Mossberg,” Duffy said. “You heard that name?”

“Why?” I said.

“XX just received a shipment from them.”

“O.F. Mossberg and Sons,” I said. “From New Haven, Connecticut. Shotgun manufacturer.”

“What’s a Persuader?”

“A shotgun,” I said. “The Mossberg M500 Persuader. It’s a paramilitary weapon.”

“XX is sending Persuaders someplace. Two hundred of them. Total invoice value sixty thousand dollars. Basically in exchange for something BB is receiving.”

“Import-export,” I said. “That’s how it works.”

“But the prices don’t add up,” she said. “BB’s incoming shipment is invoiced at seventy thousand. So XX is coming out ten thousand dollars ahead.”

“The magic of capitalism,” I said.

“No, wait, there’s another item. Now it balances. Two hundred Mossberg Persuaders plus a ten-thousand-dollar bonus item to make the values match.”