Taking Liberty (35 page)

___________________________

“Trenton Fillmore.”

His face was deadly serious. Made no sense to me.

“Trenton Fillmore made me do it. God knows I didn’t want to. Never come close to doing anything like that before. But he gave me no choice. You understand me, Quinn? I had to protect my son. Do what had to be done to save him.”

He pressed the muzzle hard against the chain. I stared down at him, water gushing along my pulsating arm.

“Do me a favor?” he said. “Tell my son I’m sorry for not being there when he needed me.”

Lightning cracked and thunder boomed around the quarry.

Separated from the chain, Jefferson dropped away and fell to his death on the jagged rocks below.

___________________________

I have danced with death a dozen times and yet the timing still takes me by surprise.

Stunned, I lay there for long painful moments as icy water snaked through my clothes, staring at Jefferson’s unmoving and broken body on the rocks below.

My mind was spinning. Thoughts crashing together like debris in a tornado. Most of them questioning everything I knew about Fillmore’s murder.

One-handed, I clawed my way back from the precipice until I was able to scramble to my feet. Waded through mud, away from the death-drop. Slumped against the trunk of a tree and massaged my throbbing shoulder. There was blood on my hand, leaking from my mashed wrist. Skin red-raw. The whole of my side wrenched and twisted. Everything askew.

But I was alive.

My left shoulder was dislocated, arm hanging limply. I pressed the elbow into my side, took the weight with my right hand, then rotated my arm back and to, pressed. The ball joint popped back in place and I bit down against the pain.

I couldn’t drag my eyes away from the drop.

Jefferson had known he was done. He could have taken me down with him. He hadn’t. Instead, he’d brought down Trenton Fillmore.

Distantly, I could hear the rhythmic
thwack-thwack
of an approaching helicopter. A bright light appeared from behind the trees farther along the curve of the quarry. A spotlight played over mounds of rubble and stretches of slushy water. A cone of light illuminating a steady shawl of sleet.

Woods had called for backup. Cops scrabbling toward me through the woods. I thought I heard dogs.

I wiped mud from my face.

My cell phone began to chime.

I wasn’t the only thing to survive the mudslide. At first I didn’t realize what it was. I listened to it warbling away. Then I dug it out and wiped droplets from the screen.

Rae’s name glowed brightly in the night.

Heart burning, I jammed it to my ear:

“Rae?”

“Gabe.”

Something like giddy milkshake frothed in my gut.

She sounded terrified: “They’re making me do this.”

“Who, Rae? Are you okay? Where are you?”

“I don’t know; I’m blindfolded. They took me to –”

I heard a dull slap, immediately followed by Rae yelping with pain. Someone had hit her.

“Rae!”

Her next words came out through a sob and busted lips: “Gabe, they know you’re in Missouri. They want you back here, in LA. They want a trade. Me for you. They say if you tell anyone . . . they’ll kill me. Listen, Cornsilk’s –”

I heard another slap, interrupting Rae’s words.

The connection died.

With fear wringing my gut, I gaped at the glowing screen as the police helicopter roared by overhead.

___________________________

That was it.

I’d had all I could stomach of Springfield.

Done.

Excruciating just to hang around, knowing that Rae’s life was in peril, her death an increased likelihood with every wasted minute passing me by.

From the back of a paramedic unit, I provided a quick-fire statement to the local cops, then recounted it again to Woods’ colleagues as they showed up and shook their heads. They didn’t approve of my clipped answers. I didn’t give a damn. My wrist was patched up and I got a shot for the pain. Take it up with Wilshire. Within the hour I was back onboard the Gulfstream jet, as its only passenger, heading west with the Rolls-Royce engines running flat out.

Even with a strong tailwind, it would take three hours or longer to reach LA airspace. I wasn’t sure if I’d have any nerves left by the time I got there.

Didn’t matter.

Rae was alive. In danger. But alive.

An exchange. My life for hers. I could buy that.

What bugged me was she’d said
they
several times. I figured on purpose. Not just Snakeskin, then. More than one kidnapper. She wanted me to know. But who? I’d already seen the result of someone helping Snakeskin: the firework display on Hollywood Boulevard. Knew that snakes weren’t social creatures.

Besides, Snakeskin had never struck me as the sociable type.

I couldn’t imagine him enlisting anyone’s help to bring his wrath raining down on me, nor on anyone else associated with his disfigurement. So who were
they
?

One hour down. Two to go.

Only so much pacing a man can do.

I used the hand dryer in the Gulfstream’s modest bathroom to blow dry my sneakers. My clothes were on the right side of damp. The sleet had rinsed away most of the mud and filth and body heat had done the rest. God bless Levis. No one would believe just by looking me over that I’d survived a mudslide.

My thoughts returned to the murder at the Imperial Motor Lodge and to Jefferson’s subsequent death.

The unit officer from the Fed Med had confessed to his involvement in murdering O‘Dell and staging it as a suicide. A deathbed confession – inadmissible in court, but good enough for me. Bridges was in that mix too. Not sure exactly how. But he’d been at that motel room, for sure – the keycard attested to that. He’d played a part in O’Dell’s murder, somehow, at some point.

Bridges and Jefferson working together.

But was that the only murder the pair were involved in?

Trenton Fillmore.

Jefferson’s last dying breath had implicated Fillmore in a threat to kill Jefferson’s son.

It seemed absurd. Out of character.

How did that song go?

That wasn’t the Trenton Fillmore I knew. Fillmore was a gentle soul. In touch with his inner peace. I’d seen Fillmore catch spiders in his cell, then release them in the yard. Spend hours studying a blade of grass and philosophizing about it being no less important in the grand scheme of things than him or me. Fillmore had been harmless. He’d relinquished a life of crushing others for one of crunching numbers. No way he was a killer.

But Jefferson had sworn Fillmore had threatened to kill his son unless he did his bidding.

Had Jefferson shanked Fillmore to save his boy?

As a parent I could understand part of that thought pattern. Protecting our children is paramount. I’d been all set to kill
The Maestro
in order to save my daughter, Grace, back in Florida. Not sure I had it in me to take an innocent life to save my son’s. Not after what he’d done. Then again, who knows how we’ll act once we’re in that play.

The real question was: why had Fillmore made the threat in the first place? To buy an easy life on the inside? The Fed Med wasn’t exactly a modern-day Alcatraz. Inmates broke tears, not rocks.

For the life of me I couldn’t see a motive.

Unless it was a lie.

A cover story to hide the real reason why Jefferson had shanked Fillmore:
to stop him from talking to me.

That was my first conclusion when talking it through with Stone on his hotel balcony: a mole inside Stone’s inner circle had tipped off Fillmore’s employers and they had acted to silence the accountant. They’d bought someone on the inside. Influenced them to take Fillmore’s life. The only good snitch is a dead one, right? That someone turned out to be two: Jefferson and Bridges. But now I was thinking they hadn’t been bought at all. Instead, Fillmore’s unknown employers had made deadly threats. Threatened to kill Jefferson’s son and maybe somebody close to Bridges.

Kill or be killed.

In Jefferson’s own words, they’d had no choice – or at least felt they hadn’t.

Ask me three days ago if both Jefferson and Bridges would have collaborated in a murder and then both ended up dead three days later and I would have sooner put odds on the Texas Rangers winning the World Series.

That’s how far outside the ballpark this thing was.

And what about Doctor O’Dell?

The only thing that came to mind was he’d discovered their sinister plot to shank Fillmore and then to make it look like the work of another inmate – namely, me. Maybe they’d tried convincing him they were doing the right thing. Maybe O’Dell had told them he was going to the warden with his information. Maybe they’d killed him to keep him quiet and get away with murder, twice.

What neither of them had bargained on was Cornsilk killing Bridges and leading me right back to the scene of the faked suicide.

And what none of my supposition even attempted to explain was why Snakeskin had targeted Bridges in the first place.

I went back to pacing, twiddling thumbs and spinning scenarios.

Two hours down. One to go.

My cell phone rang. I recognized the number:
Tim.

He had news about the Tussauds security footage.

“I’m about to send you four stills I think you’ll find interesting,” he said. “The first shows the human torch. The second reveals his accomplice. The third shows the human torch before he rigs his disguise. And the fourth is of their driver.”

“A third party?” I was conscious of Rae’s use of the word
they
. “How do you know it’s the driver?”

“He’s with their vehicle. These are stills from a video. The tape shows them arriving in it. Judge for yourself. Listen, last minute change of plans. Lucky old me has a date tonight. So if you arrive back before I do, don’t deadbolt me out.”

He hung up.

I dropped into one of the cream-leather seats and waited for the pictures to come in. Ten seconds later, they did: four photographs, as promised. I opened the first, full screen.

It was a color image looking toward Hollywood Boulevard from about ten foot off the ground. Taken from a camera attached to the wall outside Madame Tussauds. The street was busy with people. Tourists ogling the world-famous sights. Vehicles freeze-framed on the road. Bright winter sunshine, and Christmas street decorations scattered strategically about.

I peered closer.

In the middle of the shot, standing on the street corner, was a guy in a blood-red Santa suit. There was a large flat parcel covered in Christmas wrapping paper leaning against his leg. He had one hand raised in the air, frozen in the action of a wave.

The camera angle meant I was looking down from behind. Impossible to see his face.

I switched my focus to the top of the shot – to the area across the street. The guy in the Santa suit was waving at somebody. I wanted to know who that somebody was. I could see the big glass windows of a coffee shop on the corner of North Orange Drive. People milling about on the sidewalk. And somebody seemingly standing stock still, directly facing the guy in the Santa suit.

The detail was too small and too blurry to confirm an ID.

But I had a suspicion who it was.

I opened up the second photo.

It was a zoomed-in still of the guy standing across the street. The accomplice. I rotated the phone so that the figure grew to four inches tall. He was wearing a black fedora and a gunmetal-gray Tennessee State University sweatshirt over black jeans.

Scaly skin visible around a pair of designer sunglasses.

Snakeskin.

There was a sneer on his half eaten pizza face.

I felt my own lip buckle.

I stared at his ghoulish image for long seconds, thinking about all the devilish things I’d like to do to him. Cornsilk hadn’t just overstepped the mark, he’d rubbed it out as if it had never existed. He’d killed my son and gone on to kidnap Rae. No leniency from me when I caught up with him. I wanted to rub him out of existence, too.

I swept his picture aside and tapped on the third photo.

This was a close-up of the guy in the Santa suit, caught as he’d crossed the street toward the camera, moments before donning the Santa Claus disguise.

He was a blond-haired kid with a golden Californian tan. Lean and wiry. One of those Colgate kids you see surfing up and down the beaches, even in the wintertime.

I sat up with a jolt.

I’d seen this face before.