The Guardian (30 page)

“Looks guilty as hell, doesn’t she?” Jeffers stepped out of the kitchen with the machine gun in his hands.

 
* * *

He kept Ross covered and snatched away the tire iron. “Thought I saw you following back there. Made some pretty good time, didn’t I?”

“We can still get out of this,” Geiler said quietly.

“Shut up,” Jeffers said. He walked over to Janine and took a switchblade from his pocket. “Easy, Uncle Ross.” He sliced the line binding her hands. For a second the irrational idea that Jeffers was letting her go washed over Ross.

But the way Jeffers handled her, the way he hauled her onto her feet, showed he regarded her simply as his hostage.

“Come on, the both of you. Let’s go get my money.” He waved the gun toward the doorway, the knife in his left hand at Janine’s neck.

Once they were outside, Jeffers yelled out into the night, “I know you’re out there, lady! If you’ve got the money, you can come down and get your girl. You don’t, then you just sit there while I count to ten, and you’ll see me shoot her.”

Beth brought the truck down as he reached eight.

She took the case from front seat and strode up to Jeffers and dropped it at his feet. She barely looked at him—her eyes were on Janine—and she said only, “Let go of her.”

Janine threw herself into her mother’s arms. Beth closed her eyes, and Ross heard her quietly exhale, and he knew that at that moment Beth and Janine were out of the situation, lost within each other.

But the moment didn’t last long. Jeffers jabbed at Ross with the gun barrel. “Pick that money up, and take it inside.” He told Beth to go into the house and then said to Ross, “And I’m going to give you one chance. You tell me the truth. Do the cops know my name? Do they?”

Ross took a close look at the man. His eyes were even more deeply shadowed than before. He had several days’ stubble on his chin, and his eyes glittered in the faint light. He stank of old sweat and he snuffled slightly, his nose running as if he had a summer cold. “Coke?” Ross asked, lifting the case. “Is that what this has been about?”

“Never mind that shit now.” Jeffers shoved Ross into the doorway. He strode across the room, pulled out the switchblade, and cut his wife’s ropes and pulled the tape from her mouth. “You’ve got to make a decision, right now. You with me or no?”

She nodded uncertainly and rubbed her wrists. She stepped vaguely toward Beth and Janine, and then stopped short.

Jeffers raised his voice to include Beth as well as Ross. “You two answer me or people start to die. What’s my name? Do the cops know who I am?”

“Get it over with.” Allie spoke urgently to Jeffers. “Shoot them, and let us out of here. That case has a transmitter in it and the FBI will be homing in on the signal right now.”

“Do it,” Geiler said. A trickle of sweat ran down his jaw. “You’ve gone this far. Just finish it.”

“Let Janine go,” Beth said. “Please, she’s just a little girl! She doesn’t know anything.”

“She really doesn’t know our names,” Natalie said. “I’ve asked her again and again. Please, let her go.”

Allie ignored all of them. She said to Jeffers, “Come on. Pull it together one more time, and take these people out of the picture. You can leave a rich man.
We’ll
never give you up. We’d face the electric chair!”

Jeffers grinned crookedly at Ross. “How about you, man? You got any last-minute things you’ve just got to tell me?”

“Just what you wanted to know, Lee,” Ross said evenly. “Lee Jeffers.”

“No!” Allie cried.

The gunman blanched. Then his grin returned slowly, and he said to Ross, “Your lawyer there told me all sorts of things after I picked her up at her apartment. She told me about the number of cars the FBI had in place, the way they had agents trained to sound like you and Mommy … but this is the first I heard about a transmitter in the case … and they promised me no one had a clue on the name … You know what that means?”

“Sure,” Ross said.

“… means the two of them have been feeding me just what they thought I should know, even when I had them tied up and put a gun in their faces.”

He shot Geiler.

Jeffers used a short burst that ripped the man’s chest open before he turned the gun onto Allie. Her scream was abruptly cut off, and then the gun was swinging Ross’s way.

He wouldn’t have survived if not for Natalie. He was almost on top of Jeffers, but the gun was in his face, and then the gun chattered, and he was still alive.

Nat had grabbed her husband’s arm.

Jeffers elbowed her aside, but it gave Ross the split second he needed, and he grasped the gun with his left hand and kneed Jeffers in the groin. Again and again, he threw short, hard rights into Jeffers’s belly and ribs, digging in with all his strength. Getting in close with his head and shoulders. Trying desperately to keep Jeffers from getting his legs back underneath himself or getting both hands on the gun.

Knowing from past experience just how much punishment Jeffers could take.

As they staggered onto the deck, the machine gun erupted briefly. There was a sharp tug along Ross’s left thigh, but still he kept throwing those solid right hooks. Told himself to keep breathing, to keep working it. Told himself to ignore that some of Jeffers’s blows had landed as well. Blood trickled into Ross’s left eye, and still Jeffers showed no sign of collapsing under Ross’s assault. Ross was aware of Beth beside him and he shouted for her to get back, to get away from Jeffers’s gun. Ross’s breathing was ragged and his arms were shaking, but Jeffers hadn’t broken yet.

So when Ross saw a chance to end the fight, he took it.

Jeffers was backing close to the rails, the lightly tacked boards Ross had been putting up when Greg had first called.

Light finishing nails, tapped in only a half-inch or so, for placement.

Ross opened his hand against Jeffers’s chest and shoved with all his strength.

The tacked boards gave way.

But Jeffers grabbed at the post with his left hand and regained his balance.

He raised the gun barrel to Ross’s face.

“Jeffers!”

It was Beth.

She threw the open case of money at him. A gust of wind caught the cash, sending swirling bills in front of Jeffers’ face. “Christ!” He tried to catch the case as it slid over the edge of the deck.
 

Ross hit him in the face, a solid punch that sent Jeffers reeling. And then he did it again.
 

Even as he fell, Jeffers fired the gun. Several rounds bit into the side of the house just a few feet from Ross’s head. But he didn’t move away from the edge until he saw Jeffers hit the rocks, fifty feet below.

Epilogue

Turner will see that I get fried if we don’t make it to the press conference on time,” Byrne said. “He wants you right beside him at the podium explaining why it’s going to be a tougher commute than usual to the airport.”

“You’ve survived worse.” Ross closed his eyes as they waited at a red light. It was good to have Byrne alive and reasonably well beside him. The fire that had overcome Byrne’s car in the tunnel had been intense enough to send two of the agents in the backseat to the hospital. But Byrne had ducked down in the seat and kept his foot to the floor while the flames had brushed past.

Byrne had been among the first to arrive at the Sands by following the transmitter. The past few hours had been a blur, as the house had filled with police and FBI asking too many questions too fast. Ross was so tired he felt as if he were wearing lead weights. But his mind was still racing.

The adrenaline, the doctor had said.

They’d just left Beth and Janine at the hospital. The doctor who had examined Janine had given her an essentially clean bill of health but said she wanted to hold onto her for a day or two for observation. Janine had fallen asleep with Beth and Ross watching over her. A single tear slid down Beth’s cheek, and she’d wiped it away and said simply, “I wish he were here to see this.”

Ross had taken her in his arms and lost himself in her for a time, seeking not to take his brother’s place, but to take comfort himself. “Greg’s awfully proud of you,” she’d said, breaking away finally. “I know he is.”

“You, too.”

“Better be.” She looked steadily at Ross. “I want to thank you. And I’ll be selfish and tell you that I hope you don’t leave anytime soon. Janine’s going to need her uncle, and I’m going to need you, too.”

“I’m not sailing away,” he’d said, without regret.

Ross opened his eyes and realized that Byrne had been repeating himself. “I’m sorry. I fazed out.”

Byrne said, “Tell me about Natalie. Or did you just faze out on her, too?”

“I guess she saw how things were heading and got away.”

Byrne looked at him skeptically. “She’s an accessory to murder and she kidnapped your niece.”

“She also saved Janine more than once, and she saved my life.”

“That’s something for the judge and jury to take into account.”

“Which they’d do right before they sent her to jail. Look, Jeffers pulled her into all of this, and she did the best she could, screwed up as she is.” Ross thought about Nat, desperate and fleeing for the Canadian border in the car Jeffers had hidden deep in the brush. The decision to let her go didn’t feel good. But after he and Beth had a quiet conversation with Janine, and with Natalie herself, they’d agreed that sending her to prison would be worse.

She’d told them what she knew. “That Geiler told us it’d be a simple job. Snatch the girl, hold onto her a night, and then turn her in. Take the cash. Talk around her like it was a random thing, you know, so when the police interviewed her later it’d sound like something random, like we just snatched her in the middle of a car-jacking. That’s what they wanted Lee to do, a car-jacking. Three of those in Boston so far this year.” She’d looked at Beth. “They figured you’d have bought that. Lee didn’t. He said that if you were stuck out there without a car, and with no proof we’d hurt the girl, you’d have gone to the cops. He told me he’d figured something better. We followed you, and then he told me just to go into that store with him and do what he said. I never expected him to shoot that store owner. But I guess I should’ve.”

Tears had slipped down Natalie’s face and she began to explain to Beth directly. “It went wrong from the beginning. I only got into it because I thought maybe I could get your daughter through it … do what I couldn’t do for my own little girl. I knew Lee was going to do the job, with or without me. We do so much drugs and shit that we needed a score like this. This was a huge score for us. And Lee had worked for Geiler before; the guy owns a shipping company where Lee does some welding. He’d had Lee do some stuff, mess somebody up or burn something, and it’d always turned out all right. This time, Geiler was screaming on the phone after Lee killed the store owner … and Geiler was real upset that Lee shot your husband. Said that it would bring the cops in on the whole thing.”

“Why was Lee doing the robberies?” Ross had asked.

“Geiler treated Lee like he was a flunky. Told him that he wouldn’t advance us any money for coke. That if Lee wanted money, then return Janine and collect the cash. And then after Lee shot that
cop …
well, you saw what happened. Geiler hired Teague to hit Lee. Geiler must’ve figured Jeffers was going to bring them all down. But before that, Teague caught up with me near the shipyard… .” She had looked down, ashamed. “I was hooking. He got hold of me and kept hitting me, and working on me all night to tell where I thought Janine would go.… I wouldn’t have told him about her asking about the Children’s Museum, but I figured by then she would’ve been picked up by somebody and at home with all of you … but I guess she’d hidden… .”

“What about Allie?” Ross asked.

Natalie had shaken her head. “What about her? She had all of you jumping, what I could see. Geiler, too. I bet he promised her he could handle Lee.”

Here Natalie had lifted her head with a peculiar kind of pride and said, “And that’s where both of them screwed up. They figured they could handle him. I could’ve told them. I sure could’ve.”

To Byrne, Ross said, “Did you talk to Turner when I was in with the doctor?”

“Yeah. He was close to hysterical. This may be a career buster for him. You know how the FBI dropped the ball on Geiler. They had done a cursory check on him but didn’t make the connection because he’s got at least a couple of dummy corporations between his shipping, construction, and real estate interests. And the agents that I left behind to look for Geiler in Boston took hours to find out that he’d been last seen leaving a restaurant in Chinatown. I’d guess Jeffers or T.S. put a gun on him and kidnapped him. Either way, Turner didn’t get around to checking out the Sands until we saw that’s where the signal was going. Way too late by Bureau twenty-twenty hindsight.”

“Did they learn anything more about Geiler?”

“Yeah, they got his lawyer out of bed, and so far they’ve learned only that Geiler had his hands into a
lot
of businesses, including several sanitation companies.”