The Forgotten (13 page)

He unpacked the few clothes that he’d brought and checked his watch. He had some time before he was to meet Louise Timmins. Mason had not called back yet. Puller decided to do some more recon of the area and then meet Timmins. He did not like sitting in hotel rooms, whether they be a place like this or the Ritz—not that he would ever see the inside of a Ritz. Not on Uncle Sam’s pay.

He locked his door on the way out. He had left nothing behind that he could not afford to lose. He walked down the hall and reached the elevator, but he passed by this and walked to the stairwell. The building wasn’t in the best repair and he figured the elevator wouldn’t be either. Being trapped on one for several hours was not part of his plan.

He heard it before he could see anything. A man. A woman. And what sounded like a child.

He opened the door and stepped through. It was actually three grown men, a teenage girl about sixteen, and a boy who looked about five. One man was a Latino, one black, and the other had skin color the same as Puller’s. He appreciated diversity in prickish felons.

The girl—clearly against her will—was being held against the wall by the Latino. The black man had hold of the crying boy, restraining him. The kid was swinging his arms and trying to strike out. The white man was standing in front of the girl, a smile on his face. He had loosened his belt and was in the middle of unbuttoning his pants. His intent was as obvious as such intent had been for thousands of years.

Men forcing themselves on women.

When the door opened, the white guy, without even looking to see who it was, snarled, “Get the hell out of here. Now!”

Puller let the door shut behind him and noted the bulge in the back pocket of the white guy’s pants. Stupid place to keep your gun, but then White looked pretty dumb.

“Don’t think so. And you might as well cinch your belt back up. This is not going to go according to your plan.”

The three men turned to look at him. The girl shrank back and clutched at the boy.

White said, “You really want to do this, shithead?”

“Name’s Puller. First name John. And you are?”

White looked at his buddies and smiled. But there was nervousness behind the smile, Puller noted. The black man was the biggest, but Puller had him by four inches and forty pounds. White was five-nine and a pudgy one-ninety. The Latino was five-six, a buck fifty, and had no demonstrable muscle.

Puller towered over them all. The width of his shoulders nearly spanned the doorway. He edged forward, his gaze directly on White, but his peripheral radar keeping his buddies in view.

White buckled his belt.

“You looking to get your ass killed?” said the black guy.

“No. Same way I’m sure she wasn’t looking to get assaulted by three jerk-offs.”

White slightly turned his head, his right hand dipping to his back pocket in a move that was as obvious as it would prove to be futile.

Puller sighed. Not how he wanted it to go down, but he didn’t have much choice now. He struck before the gun was halfway out of the man’s back pocket. He slammed his elbow into White’s neck and followed that by whipping a knee into his left kidney. As White dropped screaming to the floor, Puller sent a crushing right cross to his jaw. White lay on the floor, blood coming from his mouth along with a few of his teeth.

Half of Puller wanted to give the other two guys a way out, but the looks on their faces indicated that their combined presence was puffing up each other’s courage beyond all reason. Two against one, they were thinking. Easy pickings.

Too bad for them.

He hooked Latino around the head and, using him as a weapon, swung him off his feet and into Black, knocking him down the flight of stairs. He came to rest at the bottom, both the fight and his consciousness gone from him.

Puller kept swinging Latino until the latter’s head met the wall with crunching impact. He slumped down, joining Black in the land of involuntary sleep.

Puller stood there for a moment, not even out of breath, and more than a little pissed off that all this had come to pass.

He looked at the girl. “You okay?”

She nodded. She was pretty, with soft curves and a large bosom. She looked older than she probably was. He doubted that this was the first time this kind of an assault had happened to her.

Puller eyed the little boy. “He your brother?”

She nodded again.

“What’re your names?”

“I’m Isabel. He’s Mateo,” she said in a tiny, scared voice.

“You want to call the cops?”

Puller thought he knew the answer to this, but felt compelled to
ask it anyway. She was shaking her head before he’d even finished the question.

“Do you want
me
to call the cops?”

“No. Please don’t do that.”

He looked at the fallen men. They had buzz cuts and tats all over. He didn’t think it was possible, but one never knew.

“They in the military?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “No.”

So no jurisdiction for me
, thought Puller. Other than as a concerned citizen.

He said, “They won’t stop. I just made them a lot madder, in fact. They might take it out on you.”

She grabbed her brother’s hand and they both ran off through the door. Puller could hear their footsteps for a few seconds and then they were gone.

He did a quick check of the three guys. All breathing. All pulses strong. He didn’t care if bones were broken or skulls fractured. That was the price one paid for being pieces of shit that preyed on others. Especially three grown men against a girl and her five-year-old brother.

When White moaned and moved a bit, Puller kicked him in the head, sending him back to sleep.

“Prick.”

He debated whether to call the cops or not, but without the girl’s statement he’d have nothing except his own account. And if she didn’t back him up, which she wouldn’t, Puller might be looking at being charged with assault, the lies of the three men stacked against him.

He decided just to keep on going. He’d have to deal with the fallout later. He went back to his room, grabbed his bag, and walked out to retrieve his car.

He still had a recon to do. He was here to find out what had happened to his aunt. Nothing was going to detour him from that.

He could not have been more wrong.

A
S
P
ULLER WALKED
out of the building another man was walking in. When they crossed paths Puller did something he almost never had to do to when meeting another person.

He looked up.

It was the same guy from the back of the truck he’d seen earlier while eating lunch on the waterfront.

Up close the man looked even larger and more intimidating. Puller had never before seen a more perfectly proportioned physique. He could have been a poster boy for a superhero recruiting ad. As the two men went by each other, they both did the up-down, side-side checkout of the other. Practiced, smooth, looking for things that would not be obvious to the uninformed, meaning just about every other person on the planet.

Puller came away impressed not just with the other man’s physique but also with the preciseness of the observation of those intense eyes. It was obvious to Puller that the man recognized him from earlier in the day, even though it had only been a seconds-long glance. You had to be trained to achieve that sort of recognition skill.

Puller again ran his eye up and down the man. He wore a landscaping company uniform. Dark green T-shirt soaked in sweat and dark blue pants. New-looking work shoes that must have been a size sixteen.

So the guy either had gotten a new pair of shoes, which seemed unlikely, or he had just started this job. The shirt was stretched too tight across his torso. Every muscle was revealed through the
flimsy fabric. He looked like the musculature chart one saw in a doctor’s office.

They probably didn’t have a shirt to fit him, reasoned Puller. The pants too were a little short. Most companies didn’t keep in stock uniforms to fit gents who topped six and a half feet in height. As they passed by one another Puller instinctively looked back; he wasn’t completely surprised when he found the other man doing the very same thing. The look was not threatening, just watchful, curious, appraising.

Puller walked to the garage, retrieved his car, and drove off.

He took Paradise grid by grid, memorizing as many details as he could. He finally pulled into a parking lot, shut the car off, sat back, and wondered about the contents of his aunt’s letter.

People not being what they seemed.

Mysterious happenings in the night.

Something just not being right.

As he drove he broke things down logically, something the military had spent years drilling into him. It was now how he approached everything in life, even the things to which logic didn’t necessarily pertain.

Like families.

Emotions.

Relationships.

Applying logic to any of them was a recipe for a lifetime of heartache.

Pretty much the story of his life.

He thought about the first of his aunt’s observations:

People not being what they seemed.

He didn’t know who his aunt’s friends were other than Cookie, who seemed innocuous and certainly exactly what he appeared to be. But that was based on only one interview, and thus to Puller the jury was still out on it.

There could be other neighbors to whom she was referring. Puller would have to check them all out. There was Jane Ryon, the caregiver. He would definitely check her out. Then the lawyer, Mason. Possibly others.

He moved on to the second observation in the letter:

Mysterious happenings in the night.

Happenings, plural. In the night. Did she mean mysterious happenings in her neighborhood? If so, did they involve one of her neighbors? To Puller the area had seemed like a normal suburb where mysterious happenings probably were at a minimum. But his aunt was dead and that obviously shined a new light on things.

Finally he considered his aunt’s third observation:

Something just not being right.

That was open to lots of interpretations. What Puller could fall back on was his experience with his aunt. One of the most no-nonsense people he’d ever known, if she said it or wrote it she believed it. She did not reach knee-jerk conclusions. There was the possibility that old age had changed those personality traits, but somehow Puller didn’t think so. They were too ingrained in his family’s genes.

He had to work from the assumption that everything in his aunt’s letter was true. And if she had stumbled onto something and the people involved in that something had found out, it was a prime motive to remove Betsy Simon from this earth. And if that had happened, Puller would welcome the opportunity to repay the folks who had done it. He would provide either a long prison sentence or their own early exit from the living.

Having exhausted the possibilities based on his limited investigation so far, he got out of the car, walked down a wooden boardwalk, and reached the beach. It was nearly six-thirty, and the café where he was meeting Timmins was close by. He decided to walk along the sand both to relax a bit and to think some more while the waves pounded the shore.

There were a number of people on the beach. Some were power walking with exaggerated motions of their legs and arms. Others strolled arm in arm. Still others had their dogs with them and were tossing tennis balls and Frisbees for their canine companions to run down.

Puller moved on, letting his gaze sweep from the ocean to the boardwalk and beyond. There were parts of Paradise that definitely
fit the name. However, having been here only a relatively short period of time, Puller had seen other parts that did not remotely belong.

An interesting place, he thought.

When he saw what was going on up ahead, he picked up his pace. He didn’t know if it would have anything to do with his aunt’s death, but right now anything in Paradise that seemed unusual interested him.

P
ULLER SAW
O
FFICER
L
ANDRY FIRST
, then Bullock. Hooper was nowhere to be seen.