“It’s called a Dr. Pepper,” Andi said as she stuffed the three one-dollar bills from Jack’s wallet into the hip pocket of her jeans. “Wouldn’t you think there’d be a Doctor Pepper in a hospital?”
Andi, Jack and Becca had spent the day with Theresa, at least as much of it as the hospital staff would allow. Jeff Kendrick had arrived later that afternoon to join them. Now, they sat together in the hospital cafeteria, where they’d been banished so Theresa could “eat her dinner in peace” by a nurse who bore more than a passing resemblance to Jabba the Hutt.
Jack smiled at Andi’s reasoning, turned back to the others and saw Jeff watching Andi leave the room, studying her with a look on his face Jack couldn’t read. Jeff caught his stare and covered smoothly.
“Tell Theresa I’ll be back in to see her tomorrow,” he said and got to his feet. “I’m closing in on a hot date tonight.” He paused. “I scared up a rabbit.”
“You managed to find a rodent pretty fast,” Jack said. “Can you prove—?”
“Don’t be tossing around the p-word. I can’t prove anything—yet.”
“But you found out something.”
Jeff nodded.
“After I graduated from law school, I spent five years earning my chops as a public defender. Among the legion of smarmy characters I represented was a con artist charged with extorting protection money from the owner of Barduchi’s Liquor Store. He swore he didn’t do it.”
“I’ve never arrested a guilty man.”
“Yeah, but this guy might actually have been telling the truth—good for a dozen other crimes but not that particular one. The first time I met with him, he told me, ‘Why would I waste my time shaking down a two-bit liquor store? If I was gonna blackmail somebody, I’d start higher up the food chain—like with a federal prosecutor.’ He said he had stuff on Chapman Whitworth the man would pay big bucks to keep quiet.”
“So you went looking for this guy.”
“I have people who can find anybody. A few phone calls, some cash to grease the skids and badda boom, badda bing… Mitchell ‘Doughboy’ Douglas and I spent some quality time together right after lunch, turned out to be an aeronautical conversation.”
Jack was lost.
“Actually, we only talked about one specific airplane—US Air Flight 734 from Cincinnati to Los Angeles on March 4, 2003.”
Jack’s heart leapt into a gallop. “That wouldn’t be the flight where—?”
“A doting grandmother just happened to be lugging a video camera around with her and just happened to have the camera trained on one Chapman Wainwright Whitworth—”
“When Whitworth stopped a knife-wielding lunatic outside the cockpit with the words, ‘You’ll have to go through me?’”
“Yup. One and the same.”
“It was a setup?”
Jeff nodded.
“I knew it! Nobody says crap like that when they’re facing a nut job with a knife.”
The line had become Whitworth’s slogan after he killed the terrorist. But had the man really been a terrorist at all? Maybe. Maybe not. He’d been a mental patient and, given the climate in the country at the time, carrying a weapon onto an airplane was all the proof anybody needed. Just like with the Twin Oaks fire, Chapman Whitworth was an instant hero—add water and stir.
“Why didn’t you tell us about this guy when we were fighting to keep Whitworth off the supreme court?” Jack asked. “Maybe he could have given us something to use against him!”
“For starters, I didn’t know what he had on Whitworth—if he had anything at all. And besides, everything he’d told me was sealed by attorney-client privilege.”
“And now it’s unsealed? The tape come loose?”
“No. But after what’s happened”—he glanced toward the hallway that led to Theresa’s hospital room—“I flat out don’t give a rip anymore. My guys have tracked down a certain doting grandmother, too, and I’m on my way to have a little chat with her.”
Jeff started for the door as Jack’s cell phone rang, and when he heard the urgent tone in Jack’s response, he stopped.
“What do you mean ‘he’s gone’?”
At first, Crock’s words didn’t register.
“How many things can ‘he’s gone’ mean?” Crock said. Jack could hear him crunching down on a toothpick. “Daniel’s missing. I went to talk to the good folks at the Bradford’s Ridge Banner and he said he was going to take a walk in the park. But when I got back to the motel, he wasn’t there. I went to the park. He wasn’t there either…but I found his shoe.”
“You found his shoe?”
“You sound like a parrot, Jack,” Crock said. “I’m pretty sure it’s his shoe. I remember he was wearing idiot loafers—the ones with tassels on them.”
“Where did you find the shoe?”
“On the ground beside the walking trail in the park. I don’t know if it’s raining in Cincinnati, but it’s been pouring for the last couple of hours here—so if there was any other evidence besides Daniel’s shoe at the scene, it’s gone now.”
“Are you sure he didn’t just—?”
“Just what? Chuck one shoe and then wander off through a monsoon to have a beer with all the grade school friends he doesn’t remember? The sheriff and city police have been looking all afternoon. Nothing.”
“He’s really gone, then,” Jack said. It wasn’t a question.
“And wherever he went, he didn’t go willingly.” He heard Crock’s voice soft in his ear. “Jack…you’re going to have to tell Andi.”
Jack held the phone to his ear, listening to the nothing for a long moment before he told Becca and Jeff the news. The expression on Becca’s face so broke his heart he had to look away. That was when he caught the images on the muted television screen on the far wall. A bomb had exploded in a crowded restaurant in Phoenix. The body count stood at forty-six injured and nineteen dead. It never stopped; it went on and on and—
Chapman Whitworth’s face filled the screen, straight-out-of-the-tap evil on track to become the president of the United States.
Jack went to the television, picked up a remote on a tray table and flicked on the volume. Then he stood before it, watching, mesmerized in spite of himself by the words Whitworth spoke in a voice like honey poured over shards of glass.
“Men in black hoods on the other side of the planet are not as great a threat to our homeland, our wives and children, as the domestic terrorists who seek to make us afraid to go to a mall…or out to dinner. Those in positions of authority must ensure that our families are protected—we must make America secure without and within.”
Whoa, Bessie!
Jack stopped breathing. The face blinked away, but Jack didn’t hear the news anchor continue the report.
Two horrific acts of terrorism in four days. Whitworth was hanging his hat on opposition to domestic terrorism—right? Sooooo…if you wanted people to vote for you to keep them safe, wouldn’t you first have to make them feel threatened? You don’t suppose…?
Jack was so deep in thought he didn’t even realize Andi had come to stand beside him until she spoke.
“Found it,” she said and held up a red soft drink can in triumph. “Boo-ya!” She was grinning, the dimples in her cheeks deep enough to eat pudding out of. She stretched out her fist to bump with Jack’s, but he took her hand in his instead.
“Andi, honey,” he said, and felt a lump in his throat the size of a bowling ball, “I have something to tell you.”
Jeff Kendrick arrived at the diner half an hour before closing time. He turned off the purring engine of his Mercedes and tried to order his thoughts. He’d been operating on a couple of hours’ sleep for days, was up all night helping Becca with Theresa and had been too busy today to grab a nap. The lack of sleep was catching up with him. But you only needed a couple of synapses firing to figure out that Daniel Burke had been kidnapped—right about the time he’d been talking with Doughboy.
They’d met at Waterfront Park at the railing on the little stone bridge spanning the nameless creek that meandered through the park to make its small contribution to the mighty Ohio River. Doughboy had juked and jived, hadn’t wanted to tell him anything, but Jeff had been too tired to play games.
“You still dealing? A little coke, crack maybe?”
Doughboy had looked uncomfortable.
“Still got a meth lab in the basement of that warehouse by the river?” Jeff had leaned close and continued. “One phone call, and I can shut you down and get you an all-expenses-paid trip to the iron house.”
“Hey, you can’t say nothing about that!” Doughboy had protested. “You’re my lawyer. You can’t rat me out.”
“Try me!”
Mitchell had told Jeff then, all in a rush, about his cellmate in the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Danforth whose girlfriend, a woman named Corrine Talbot, had posed as a doting grandmother videoing her two-year-old grandson’s first airplane ride on the US Air flight from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. And who, oh by the way, just happened to capture Chapman Whitworth’s singular act of heroism for all the world to see.
“My buddy said Whitworth paid her twenty-five thousand dollars,” Doughboy had said. “That money’s long gone now. I seen her the other day waiting tables at Shaky’s Diner. Better get there quick, though. Waitresses never last more’n a week at Shaky’s.”
Jeff leaned back in the plush leather seat as the diner’s neon sign alternately filled the interior of the car with pink, then blue light. He couldn’t threaten Corrine Talbot as he had Mitchell Douglas. If he wanted her to tell him about Whitworth, he’d have to use some method of persuasion other than blackmail or intimidation. He glanced at his Pierce Brosnan doppelganger reflection in the rearview mirror and straightened his tie.
Two hours, three bars and untold numbers of strawberry daiquiris later, Jeff fit his apartment key into the lock. It took him two tries. He’d left his car in the parking garage of their last stop and they’d taken a cab to his place because he hadn’t been fit to drive. Hammered as he was by exhaustion, he never should have taken a single drink. He hadn’t planned to, but his mission had proved to be harder than he’d thought. Oh, not the getting-Corrine-Talbot-to-talk part. He was certain she’d sing him any song he wanted to hear before the evening was done. But acting believably smitten with an overweight, late-fifties waitress with chipped fingernail polish, bad breath and a maddening nasal giggle—dressed in a too-tight pink uniform with the picture of a hamburger on the back had required frequent fortification of an alcoholic variety.
He stepped into the entry hall but didn’t turn on the light. Why get a harsh-reality view of the woman if he could help it? The dark bars had been bad enough.
Jeff lived on the fifth floor of one of the most expensive luxury condo complexes in the city. It was ten stories high, built around a central atrium with pools—outdoor and indoor—restaurants and an amphitheater stage at one end of the marble-columned ground floor. The condos on the inside opened with large balconies looking down into the atrium; the ones on the outside afforded views of downtown Cincinnati. Jeff intended to have an outside condo someday, on the top floor—though he did enjoy the block-party atmosphere of crowded balconies watching concerts or light shows in the amphitheater. There was a show going on tonight, in fact, a Battle of the Bands. Jeff sincerely hoped his neighbors had turned out en masse to watch the local talent so maybe he wouldn’t run into anybody he knew before he could spirit his “date” out of sight.
Corrine heard the music when she stepped into his apartment. She saw the strobe lights and hurried to the balcony doors. When she threw them open, the music that had been only a muted beat boomed into the room.
“‘Hotel California’—it’s the Eagles!” she squealed. He decided not to point out how unlikely it was that Don Henley had shown up in Cincinnati tonight just to serenade her.
Snagging a bottle of wine off a rack in the kitchen, Jeff called out to the woman on the balcony.
“I promised you a Jacuzzi…and wine—remember?” He gestured down the dim hallway and held up the bottle. She came unsteadily back into the living room, giggling.
“It’s not red wine, is it?” she asked, kicking off first one shoe and then the other. “Red wine makes my face swell up and I break out in a rash.”
He assured her it was white wine and propelled her down the hallway in front of him.
“Oops, forgot the glasses.”
As she went into the bedroom, he turned and headed back to the kitchen. He was almost there when he heard her scream.
What in the world…?
Jeff raced down the hallway to the bedroom. He heard the sound before he reached in to turn on the light. In the background behind Corrine’s screams was an odd, raspy, scuttling sound. Like corn husks rubbing together. What could possibly make a sound like that? When he stepped into the room, something crunched under his feet like he’d stepped on a bag of potato chips.
He flipped on the light, gasped and staggered backward. Dropping the wine bottle, he cried out in horror, too.
The room was alive with cockroaches!
A lake of them, a sea of them, covering every surface like a swarm of locusts—on the bed, the nightstands, the dresser, crawling up the walls and the curtains—and the woman, whose screams ratcheted into wailing shrieks when the light revealed what she had felt in the darkness.
They were all over her, crawling up her arms onto her face. Batting at them, hopping around, she tried to knock them off, then shoved Jeff out of the way and fled screaming from the room. Jeff’s reflexes were slower. He felt the creatures on his legs, looked down and saw them crawling over his shoes and up under the fabric of his suit pants. He kicked at them, leaping from foot to foot in horror. They dropped into his hair from the ceiling and began to crawl around on his head.
With an otherworldly howl of horror, Jeff backed out of the room, slammed the door behind him and staggered backward down the hallway, batting at the bugs that had crawled up his torso onto his chest. The strip of light beneath the bedroom door was instantly blotted out by the tide of bugs that slid under it and scuttled toward him. Corrine’s screaming stopped abruptly, like someone had flipped off a switch, but Jeff was too involved in his own battle to be of any help to her.
He turned and ran, but the roaches were so fast they got to the front door before he did. He flung it open, yelling an inarticulate cry and tearing at his clothes, and staggered out into the hallway, where the light revealed the unbroken sea of roaches that had flowed out the door with him. He slapped at the bugs and felt them crunch beneath his feet as he stumbled toward the stairs door, threw it open and started down the steps. Then a huge cockroach that had been in his hair crawled out and down his forehead. He slapped at it furiously, lost his balance, grabbed for the stairs railing and missed. He fell then and tumbled head over heels down the concrete steps to the fourth-floor landing below, where he lay still, blood oozing out his nose and down his face.
The roaches flowed in a wave across the hallway from Jeff’s apartment to the exit door and cascaded in a tide down the stairs to his limp body. They surged over him, covering him until Jeff Kendrick was no longer visible beneath a writhing blanket of bugs.
Daniel opened his eyes, grateful to finally shake off the terrible nightmare of finding a pretty little girl in the rain who’d attacked him like some kind of wild animal. He’d awakened with a headache and a searing pain in his right hand. His headache hammered in heartbeat bursts centered in the middle of his forehead, hurt so bad it made him nauseous. The motel room tilted and swam drunkenly, didn’t look right, so he closed his eyes again. He wasn’t in the motel room. Then where…? On the floor somewhere. A metal floor. And he couldn’t move his hands or feet. It was like they were tied…
“You done with your beauty sleep, are you?” said a voice from above and behind him. “You been out for a good long time.”
Daniel opened his eyes again and could see nothing but a wall. The place smelled damp.
He tried to move and discovered that he’d been right. His hands and feet were tied with something.
Then a shadow fell over him and a boot shoved him off his side over onto his back. Hanging above him was a face. It was Billy Ray Hawkins!
“I’s beginning to think you might not come around at all,” Billy Ray said. “That young’un beat up on you somethin’ fierce.”
How in the world did Billy Ray Hawkins—?
“You’re trying to puzzle out where you’re at, but where you’re at don’t exist,” Billy Ray said. “Least nobody believes it exists, which amounts to the same thing. All them tales you heard ’bout a boxcar buried in the woods. Well, you’re in it.”
Daniel looked out past Billy Ray into the shadowy interior of what must really have been a boxcar. He couldn’t tell much about what he saw because his eyes wouldn’t focus and the light was dim. There appeared to be shelves all around loaded with bricks. The room swam again for a moment, so he closed his eyes. When he opened them, the world had steadied itself. There were, indeed, shelves all around, a few containing a single brick in the center.
A gold-colored…?
Gold!
His eyes opened wide and Billy Ray began to laugh.
“Figured out what it is, didja? When I got out of the iron house and come in here for the first time in more’n twenty years, it was just like I’d left it. You b’lieve that! Nothing touched. Two hundred and fifty bars, five hundred pounds, of solid gold! Them bars was worth about twelve thousand dollars each when they sent me away. The lot of them was worth twelve million dollars the day I got out.”
Daniel closed his eyes again and struggled to calm the sudden machine-gun hammering of his heart. He was in a boxcar buried in the ground with Billy Ray Hawkins’s treasure. And since Billy Ray had allowed him to see it, the man had no intention of letting Daniel leave the boxcar alive.
His head began to spin, thoughts flitting across the surface of his mind like water spiders. He opened his eyes and tried to focus on something—anything—to anchor his mind to reality. The dirty metal floor…on to the shelves made of boards on concrete blocks. There was enough space for two hundred fifty bars of gold on those shelves, alright—for more than that even. But there was only a handful of bricks—two dozen or so. Most of the shelf space was empty. He gestured toward the shelves with his chin.
“Two hundred fifty bars—what happened to the rest of it?”
The smile on Billy Ray’s face drained away. “Ain’t none of your business what I done with it.”
The process of trying to understand what he saw ordered Daniel’s thoughts.
“That’s what—maybe ten million dollars?” The absurdity firmly fastened his mind to the real world again. “You’ve been out of prison a month—how could you possibly spend ten million—?”
“I didn’t spend it.”
“If you didn’t, who—”
Billy Ray went off like a bottle rocket. “I ain’t gonna talk about him, you hear me.” He shrieked the words, his voice almost hysterical. “It ain’t none of your business! Ain’t gonna say a word about him, not a word.”
Daniel was stunned by the sudden ferocity, the out-of-proportion response. What could Billy Ray have done with ten million dollars, and who was he so afraid—?
His hammering heart seemed to freeze solid in his chest.
It couldn’t possibly be…
But as soon as Daniel thought it, he knew that it was true. It was the only thing that made any sense at all.
“You didn’t spend it—” he spoke in wonder as dawning understanding came to him “—Chapman Whitworth did! You’re working for him, aren’t you, Billy Ray? That’s why I’m here and that’s where the rest of your gold went. He’s got it.”
“No!” The little man squealed. “I don’t deal with…him. Just his flunkies. I ain’t gonna have no truck with The Man.”
The mystery of how Billy Ray Hawkins could possibly have gotten connected to Chapman Whitworth was shoved aside by the realization that Billy Ray knew. He knew that Chapman Whitworth was possessed—well, maybe not that, but he knew there was some force and power in the man that was not from this world—and not from any good neighborhoods in any other world.
“Appears you’ve seen the real Chapman Whitworth,” Daniel said, watching Billy Ray’s face. Shock registered there first, then something like relief.
“You seen it too, then?”
“Oh, he’s real, alright, worse than anything you could possibly dream up. Didn’t your old granny ever tell you stories about people who sold their souls to the Devil?”
Billy Ray’s eyes opened so wide there was nothing but white all around. He began to breathe hard, to pant.
“That ain’t the way of it! You don’t know everything. Fact is, you don’t know nothin’.” Billy Ray grabbed a roll of duct tape that he’d obviously used to bind Daniel’s hands and feet and tore off a large piece of it.
“I know that you’re screwed,” Daniel said. “A deal’s a deal and Billy Ray Hawkins always keeps his word.”
Billy Ray leaned over and smashed the tape down across Daniel’s mouth. “You shut up about devils and such, you hear me! I ain’t gonna hear none of that nonsense. You think you’re so smart, Mr. Reverend Daniel Burke. Well, you don’t know nothin’. Not nothin’!”
His eyes darted from one corner of the boxcar to the other. Wary. Watchful.