The Greenwood sheriff’s deputies arrive—one cruiser with lights spinning—before the ambulance does. My gun has been holstered for several minutes, while Walter immediately identifies himself as the shooter and surrenders his weapon before he’s handcuffed. As that’s happening, he adds with considerable pride, “I’m a cooperating witness for the FBI.”
“Better be, for your sake,” the senior of the two Greenwood deputies answers. She’s around my height and solidly built like me, with sergeant’s stripes over her delts. “Their agents are about one minute away.”
The little airport has come to a total standstill. The field personnel, the luggage handlers and the runway workers, have crept closer, and almost everyone inside the terminal is surrounding the open door to the runway to watch, including Yolanda Green, who is weeping. I don’t know whether she’s mourning dear old Uncle Ritz, or is simply reacting to the speed and drama of the way things unfolded, or if she’s realized her life has just taken a very dark turn.
As everyone in law enforcement is trained to do, Walter aimed for the thorax—the biggest target—and I can now see signs of the exit wound, as blood wells from the center of the back of Ritz’s blazer. Every couple minutes, I take a step or two away, trying to avoid two thick lines of Ritz’s blood that are running down toward my boots.
I beckon Wronka, who finally eased outside through the doorway after the other Greenwood officers arrived. Lowering my voice, and without pointing at Yolanda, I tell him, “You better detain the lady who was giving us all that back talk. The FBI will be taking her into custody for aiding and abetting unlawful flight, and somebody will blame you if she disappears.”
Wronka nods gratefully and heads inside with his left hand on the cuffs on his belt. Even with all of this going on, I am stifling an urge to scream and beg everybody to stop so we can all concentrate on the Chief.
In the meantime, Walter is explaining what happened with Ritz to the sergeant.
“He was reaching for his weapon,” Walter tells her. “I know this guy, I know him too well. He was going to kill that girl there,” Walter says, apparently referring to me. He delivers a lingering glance in my direction, clearly beseeching me to support him. The sergeant also turns my way.
Whether or not I should be, I’m grateful to Walter. He didn’t save me the way he thinks. I’d have squeezed the trigger at the first sight of Ritz’s gun, but I had no idea what to do if he didn’t draw, if he just kept giving me a line about the Chief and headed up the stairway to the plane. Walter probably thought a ‘girl’ would never have the guts to fire, so maybe he believed he had to shoot to save me.
“I definitely thought Vojczek was going for his weapon,” I say. “And Walter knows a lot more about the man than I do. So yeah,” I add.
The three FBI agents from the field office, all in their dark suits, have finally appeared. I tell them about Yolanda, and two of them head in to take over with her, their creds already in their hands. When Wronka returns, the second deputy takes him aside to get his version about the shooting.
“What about the Chief?” I ask the third agent, a woman, Latina from the look of her. We know one another by sight from the occasional meetings with the Chief I’ve attended at their field office. The Greenwood sergeant is beside us, and I try to make sure I’m talking to her, too. “Ritz said he was going to give me some information about her, the Chief. I thought he meant a bullet, frankly, but maybe he was reaching for something else, instead of his gun.”
The sergeant nods and double-times to their cruiser. It’s parked very close to the spot at the fence where Walter shot from, and no one has bothered to turn off the car’s spinning lights. She returns with blue rubber gloves and hands a pair to the male officer she arrived with. Everybody, inside and out, gets a little closer as the deputies turn the Ritz slightly to his side and roll up his sport coat with extreme care to avoid disturbing anything else. They find the back holster and the weapon he was carrying, which looks like a .32 Beretta, like the Chief’s.
Walter is nodding the whole time.
“I told you I know this guy,” he says to the deputies, then he turns to the FBI agent and me, about ten feet from him. “Once I was at Jewell’s, I knew just where that fuck would be heading. He always talked about how great it was, flying private, even though he’d done it maybe twice. And it suddenly hit me, you know, while I was driving out here. My insides have been in a knot for weeks about diming him out, and this motherfucker was going somewhere to live off the zillions he’s got in crypto, while he let the whole weight for Blanco fall on me. Loyal, my aching ass.”
He smiles again, but he’s the same dumb Walter who’s just said more than he should have. He made it sound like maybe he raced out here intent on smoking Ritz the second he saw him. The prosecutors can figure it out.
The ambulance, siren blaring, finally comes to a screeching stop before the terminal doors. I can hear a second siren getting closer. It has the pitch they use in Highland Isle. The EMTs sprint over to the small group encircling Ritz. Gowned and gloved, the two medical technicians do a quick exam. Ritz has no pulse, and I guess his pupils aren’t responsive either. They put an oxygen mask on him but one of the EMTs just shakes her head. The other one dashes back to the ambulance and returns, pushing the rolling stretcher. While the EMTs are scraping up the Ritz, Tonya arrives.
She looks at Ritz’s pale body strapped to the stretcher and says, “Holy fuck. Did you have to shoot him?”
“Walter,” I say.
“No shit,” says Tonya.
The Greenwood sergeant, who clearly knows Tonya, walks up with something in her gloved hand.
“You think this might be what he was reaching for?” she asks me. “They were in his back pocket.”
It’s two brass keys on a ring. I fill in Tonya quickly on what Ritz said about the Chief.
“You think he has her tied up in some apartment?” Tonya asks. It will take forever to search every Vojczek property in Highland Isle.
I ask the sergeant to step closer so I can get a better look at the keys without touching them. They’re shorter than house keys but somehow familiar. Then the nodes connect—I saw keys just like this when I was trying to figure how to get into Koob’s cage in the basement at the Archer.
“They’re for a padlock,” I say. “I think the brand is called Superlock.”
“A padlock?” Toy asks. “So she’s in like a storage locker?”
“He said we didn’t have much time,” I tell Tonya.
“Because of the drugs, I bet,” she says.
I didn’t completely believe Ritz when he said the Chief was alive. But once Tonya says that, I see his plan. He gave the Chief a dose, probably of carfentanil, as a Fuck You farewell note to all of us. I’m guessing it was enough to kill her, but not at once. He wanted her alive for a while, but not because he felt any sympathy for the Chief. If he got nabbed before his plane took off, he was going to swap Lucy for his freedom, which is exactly what he was trying to do with me.
As I am thinking this through, I suddenly register what I was seeing but not really taking in while the EMTs were attending to Vojczek. The movement was strange, because all the other activities at the airfield have paused. Even though the Greens are still inside—watching from a distance while two agents continue interrogating Yolanda—what must be their luggage was wheeled out on a handcart and then raised on a mechanical lift into the hold of the G-IV. There was a big brown steamer trunk—Louis Vuitton, I’m pretty sure—and searching my immediate memory, I want to believe I saw a padlock on it. But the plane now is in the initial stages of taxiing, having been pushed back from the terminal area by one of those power carts with the long white arm.
As the jet begins slowly turning toward the runway under its own power, I scream, “Stop it. Stop it!” and draw my gun again as I dash toward the aircraft.
Nobody seems to pay any attention, except Tonya, who’s a step or two behind as I sprint straight at the plane.
“Shoot his tires,” I tell her, looking back.
“Why?”
“Shoot,” I tell her again.
“You shoot. You’re twice as good as me.”
And I do. Six tires, two on each landing gear. I don’t miss, although the smaller tires under the nose gear seem to be losing air only slowly. The four under the wings go flat almost at once.
Don Ingram and his team from Center City have appeared—I have no idea when they got here—but with Tonya shouting suggestions, Don and two others surround the plane, weapons in hand, while Don stands below the front window showing his credentials. A minute later, the hatch stairs come down again and the pilot appears in the doorway with his hands raised. He looks thin in his mock uniform—a short-sleeve white shirt and navy trousers with silver piping—and what little hair he has on the sides stands straight up in the jet exhaust. Stammering, he descends, his arms still in the air. Ingram asks him directly if he was trying to escape, but the pilot insists he was simply following the customer’s written instructions to the charter company, which were to board all the baggage and take off on time, even if there were no passengers. Amid the pilot’s babbling, he says that their flight plan’s ultimate destination was Taiwan. Ingram tells me that that’s another country without an extradition treaty with the US.
“But one where the Ritz speaks the language,” I answer. Don nods.
My brain goes back to the padlock I believe I saw before, and I suddenly get the point of Ritz’s instructions to fly, even if there was only baggage aboard.
“The Chief’s in that luggage,” I yell to Don. That way, the Ritz would ensure Lucy died even if he was taken into custody.
I tear off toward the restricted area behind the terminal, but Tonya is already racing out with two of the baggage handlers. I get the attention of the Greenwood sergeant and yell at her to bring the keys she was holding.
By then, all the luggage is on the lift and halfway down. The brown trunk, close to four feet long, is there, and even while it’s still aloft, I recognize the Superlock on it.
With the baggage inching down, there is too much time to think. Life or death. It’s the fundamental binary code. Then I rush forward as soon as the bags reach the ground, screaming at the handlers not to take the time to remove the trunk from the lift.
It’s so strange, I think. It’s just like at Blanco’s. Even from first sight, you know the difference between living and dead. As soon as I lift the trunk lid, I process the tiny signs that Lucy is alive, especially her color. The Chief has been folded into the padded interior, with her legs, still in her short heels, bent demurely beneath her. But she is also in trouble, completely unconscious, eyes shut and breathing shallowly. She’s unresponsive when one of the EMTs shakes her arm. The phony insulin pen Ritz used to deliver the carfentanil has been tossed inside beside her.
The EMTs complete a hasty exam and then inject naloxone, to reverse the opioid overdose, into the Chief’s thigh. It’s only seconds before she stirs a bit, but she seems trapped behind an invisible wall, and after two minutes, they give her a second shot. This time all her limbs begin to move more freely, and her lids rise slightly over her dark eyes, which remain unfocused. The EMTs and Tonya and I help pull her out of the trunk and lay her on a second folding stretcher the EMTs have produced. Now she’ll really like me, I think.
Without much discussion, the two medical technicians run the Chief to the ambulance and take off for the hospital with the siren wailing. Ritz’s body, still strapped to the first gurney, waits forlornly in the traffic circle in front of the terminal. His shirt and coat and pants are painted in blood, and the stain reaches down to the top of his cowboy boots. For the ten minutes it takes for the second ambulance to arrive, no one goes near him.