JOE WENT DOWN as if poleaxed. I would have to Google “poleaxe” someday, find out what that is, exactly, but the concept has always been clear enough.
For a moment Lucy watched Joe with the tomahawk in her hand, ready to deliver another blow if needed. She decided it wasn’t so she ran behind Harper and pulled the quick-release knot at the wall and yanked the rope through the hook. Harper jumped off the stool, safe. She bent over to shake the noose from around her neck then hurried over to me. I cut the flex-cuff off both her wrists, then she used the scissors to cut the two flex-ties holding my wrists to the chain around my waist.
Lucy had Joe’s .22 in one hand, flex-cuff still attached to her left wrist, watching the stairs through the open door, listening for Jake. Once Harper and I had our hands free, Lucy gave me the gun.
I checked the stairs. No sign of Jake, but if he came down the first thing he would see through the door would be Joe on the floor, dead. Not good.
I cut the remains of the flex-cuff off Lucy’s wrist, then nodded at Joe who was leaking blood on the concrete. “Get him out of sight. Then see if he has a key for this padlock.” I couldn’t get free and Jake was a beast. I didn’t think the girls could handle him alone with a gun and an American-made tomahawk. A .22 isn’t a man-stopper; the automatic Jake had taken upstairs with him probably was.
The girls each grabbed an arm and dragged Joe to a far corner where he couldn’t be seen from the other room. Lucy went through his pockets. She came up with a wallet, tossed it on the floor. Finally, she shook her head at me and stood up. No keys. Harper had gone through Jake’s utility bag and pulled out an assortment of tools, wire, duct tape, eyehooks, rope, trash bags, more flex-cuffs, but no phone, no keys.
Therefore, Jake had the key. He probably didn’t trust Joe; I wouldn’t. So I wasn’t going anywhere soon.
“Quiet,” I said. For a moment the three of us listened to the house, didn’t hear Jake moving around up there.
“You two get out of here,” I said. “Get to a phone, call the police.”
Lucy shook her head. “No way. I’m not leaving you alone with that psycho.”
“Me either,” Harper said.
“And …” Lucy said, then she looked away.
“And what?”
She glared at me. “I want to kill him. I have to, Mort. You don’t know what it was like. I felt like I was drowning, dying.” Her voice was ragged. Her eyes glistened. “I don’t want the police to get him. I want him.”
“No. That’s crazy. Scram. Get out now,” I said. “I can hold Jake off with this.” I held up Joe’s pistol.
“No,” Lucy snarled. “That’s a popgun. Psycho’s got a real gun and you’re stuck there. You’re a sitting target. And he said some guy is coming. His brother. We don’t know for sure when. We’ve got a gun and this tomahawk thing. Let’s take that asshole down now.”
She was tough, furious to the point of being deranged, not about to leave me here with a popgun.
“Get out of here,” I said, one last time. I didn’t raise my voice, but I put a lifetime’s worth of feeling into it. I wanted her out of here. I wanted her safe.
“Not happening, Mort.”
Shit. “Then you better have a damn good plan, Luce.”
“Thinkin’ about that,” she replied.
All three of us thought about it. Finally, I said, “What you need is a half-second delay as he comes through the door, like with Joe here. Once Jake is down the stairs, the first thing he’ll see is me, stuck to the wall. That’ll make him relax a little. Harper needs to be back on the stool with a rope around her neck, hands behind her. As he gets close to the door, he’ll see her first because of the angle. He’ll come through thinking nothing is seriously wrong.”
“We can’t wait around for him to wake up,” Lucy said. “Not if his brother is on the way.”
So I laid out the rest of it.
She thought about it, lower lip caught between her teeth. “Okay, that oughta work.”
“What would work,” I said harshly, “is if you two get the hell out of here, now, and call the cops like I said.”
“Maybe not,” Harper said. “He’s up there somewhere. What if he hears us? Also, we’re topless, Mort.”
“Topless won’t matter to the police, Harp. That’s not a consideration. You might even get faster service.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Okay,” Lucy said. “Mort’s plan. Let’s go over it one more time then get goin’.” She looked at Harper. “Are you okay with a gun?”
“I pulled a nine-millimeter on Mort when we first met, remember? And I have a concealed carry permit.”
Lucy smiled. “Okay, then. Don’t miss.”
I unscrewed the silencer and gave the .22 to Harper. A silencer would slow the bullet a little and I wanted all the velocity we could get. A little noise didn’t matter. I would have taken a silencer off a howitzer.
Harper got back on the stool with the rope around her neck. Lucy doubled the end of the rope and put it through the eyehook in the wall like that. The slightest tug and the rope would pop out of the hook. It only had to look good for one second. Harper had the .22 behind her back, safety off. Lucy stood behind the half-open door, not immediately visible from the outer room, but far enough out of the way that if Jake slammed the door open when he came through it wouldn’t hit her.
We were ready. I hoped. We were betting the entire pot here, all or nothing. I nodded to Harper.
She took a breath and half screamed, half yelled, “Stop it!” She gave it two more seconds, then, “Stop it! What are you doing?” She shrieked again, fairly loud.
We listened.
Floor rumble from somewhere above.
My heart was pounding so hard I could barely hear Jake overhead. This had to work.
Jake charged down the stairs, which was Harper’s cue to yell again, but not too loud, “Get your hands off me!”
Jake ran inside, barefoot and shirtless. He banged the door open as he came in, missing Lucy by inches. He had his automatic in one hand, but it was aimed at the floor. Lucy swung the tomahawk into his chest, spike first. Jake lost the gun as he spun partway around, which ripped the tomahawk out of Lucy’s hand. Harper jumped off the stool as Jake staggered away from Lucy. She fired three rounds, putting one bullet in his hip, another in his right arm, and a third into the wall behind him. She ran closer and put a round in his neck, another one in the wall. She raised the barrel of the gun as Lucy leapt at Jake with the backup weapon in her hands—a claw hammer. She swung it at his head, didn’t get in a killing blow but clipped his skull hard enough to put him down.
Poleaxed.
Bleeding in four places, but still breathing.
Lucy raised the hammer high over her head, about to finish him off with the claw end to his temple.
“No!” I said sharply.
She paused, eyes blazing. “Why not?” She still held the hammer high, ready to put him down forever.
“We’ve got to interrogate him, Luce.”
“Interrogate him after I fucking kill him!”
“Lucy! Get some duct tape around his ankles. A lot of it. And around his knees. Around his wrists too, behind his back. Or flex-cuffs. Or both. Then search him for keys, not before. Do it now, fast!”
The girls went to work on him. In three minutes, Jake looked like a fly wrapped by a spider. At least he no longer posed a threat of any kind.
Blood leaked from his bullet wounds but nothing was pumping so no arteries had been hit. The neck wound was through-and-through, not much more than a furrow to one side. It had gone through muscle, hadn’t hit his carotid or jugular. Blood from the tomahawk wound ran off his chest and under his right armpit onto the floor. He looked as if he’d been through a war. Which he had. And lost.
Lucy searched his pockets, came up with several keys, a set for the Suburban outside, and a key to the padlocks, the one holding the cable to the wall and one for the chain around my waist. And a cell phone, a wallet, and a spare magazine for the Glock.
She hurried over and opened the lock, unwrapped the cable from around my neck, then cried as she gave me a long, hard hug. A few seconds later, Harper got in on that.
Two topless girls full of adrenaline after what they’d been through? I’ve had worse hugs.
I backed out of the group hug. “We need a cell phone,” I said. “A burner, not this guy’s phone.” I was still able to think, which surprised me.
I picked up Jake’s automatic, a Glock G20, which fired ten-millimeter rounds. Pretty serious gun. It felt good in my hands. I’ve always liked Glocks.
“What we need,” Lucy said, “is to kill this cretin and get out of here now.” She glared at Jake who had regained consciousness. He glared back at her, hurting, full of holes, but I didn’t think he would die on us anytime soon. “Better yet, let’s waterboard him ’til he’s gone. I want him to know how it feels.”
“No. We’ve got to call Ma, and I don’t want a record of Jake’s phone calling her.”
“Ma?” Harper asked. She’d forgotten who Ma was.
“Maude Clary, my partner.” I dragged Jake fifteen feet and sat him up, wrapped a double loop of rope around his neck and tied the ends to a sturdy leg of the workbench.
“Our partner,” Lucy said.
“Sorry, I misspoke. Our partner and employer. It’s her detective agency.”
“We can’t stay here,” Lucy said. “This guy’s brother is supposed to get here in a while.”
“Good point, but he said the guy won’t be here until around nine, and I want Ma’s help with this.”
Lucy thought about that. “Like that time with you and Holiday in her apartment after—you know?” I’d given her the entire story of what we had to do after Julia killed Jeri. No secrets from Lucy.
“Something like that. Ma saved us back then.”
I nudged Jake with a foot. He gave me a baleful look, then grimaced as a wave of pain rolled through him. The tomahawk wound looked worse than the bullet holes in his hip and arm. I wasn’t sure about the one in his neck.
“There’s a recording,” I said to the girls. “Of what, and where it is, we don’t know, so this isn’t over yet.”
I crouched near Jake. “But it’s over for you, chief. One way or another, you’re done.”
“Whatever,” he snarled. “I want a hospital, now.”
“If you think that’s happening anytime soon, you’re an idiot.” I turned my back on him and took in the room. “I want a cell phone. A burner. We also have to get this mess cleaned up. You two might get started on that.”
“Or not,” Lucy said, picking up the tomahawk. She gazed thoughtfully at the blood on the spike.
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Or not?”
“It’s not our mess,” she said. “No one knows we were here, except him.” She stared at Jake. “We get rid of him, then we get out of here.” She and Harper were still topless, but they didn’t seem to notice, or care.
“We don’t want the police to know we were here,” I agreed. “For several reasons. We can call it in later, if at all. I still want to see what Ma thinks about it.” I glanced at Joe in the corner. “He can stay, get the cops involved. I don’t know how far they’ll get since I have the feeling these two were hired by a third party to do this and one of them is dead, but the way this room is set up, it’ll connect Joe to those two dead girls. And Jake, and maybe his brother.”
Lucy stared at Jake. “I want to waterboard you for an hour on and off. I mean it. I want to drown you, make you die fifty times then send you straight to hell.”
Like I said, tough. And furious.
I checked the clock on the wall. 4:25 a.m. “We have a window of opportunity here if this guy Kyle isn’t supposed to get here ’til sometime around nine. Let’s use it wisely.”
Jake’s gaze swiveled from Harper to Lucy. “One of you got loose. How the hell did you do that?”
Lucy stared back. “Magic.” She thought for a moment, then said, “You’re big, but you have a midget-size brain. I’ll show you how stupid you were.”
She picked up the rope that had been around Harper’s neck, draped the noose around her own neck and put her hands behind her back. She raised her right leg, caught the noose with her big toe and lifted it off her neck. She stood on one leg and held her foot six inches above her head for five seconds, giving Jake an unblinking stare, then lowered her leg, in perfect control the entire time. “Easy,” she said.
“Fuck.” He looked away.
I noted that his bleeding had slowed, almost stopped. I didn’t think he was about to die, which, in a way was too bad. He was a problem. I didn’t want to think about it now, but as long as he was alive, it wasn’t going to go away.
“Let’s get goin’ here,” I said. “It’s probably still dark out but it won’t be for long. Our bags are in the Suburban. I’ll get clothes for you two, and a burner to call Ma.” I got Jake’s keys, waved a hand at the room. “Make yourselves useful, but don’t kill this dimwit.”
I left, taking the Glock with me in case I ran into Kyle. Jake might still be alive when I returned. If not, problem solved. I wouldn’t blame Lucy one bit. It was dark outside, quiet, almost no sound except for a distant thrum of traffic on I-580 and maybe Virginia Street. The Suburban and the Volvo were in the driveway. Lights were on in a few nearby houses but they looked dim, like night-lights. I didn’t see any signs of activity in the windows.
I found a burner in my travel bag and took Harper’s bag inside. She should have at least two shirts in there, and maybe her Beretta. The more firepower the better. I noted the street address on the front porch in black numerals. The lock on the side door was new, most likely installed by Jake or Kyle, which explained how Jake had a key.
Downstairs, Lucy had the contents of Jake’s wallet spread out on the workbench. Harper was going through Joe’s.
“Hospital,” Jake said. His voice was strong. He wasn’t going to be nice and kick off. Too bad. I ignored him.
“Jacob Michael Anza,” Lucy said to me. “That’s this guy’s real name, so maybe Kyle is Kyle Anza. And there’s an Arizona driver’s license in the name of William Burke with Jake’s mug shot on it. He also had twelve hundred dollars, mostly in big bills, hundreds and fifties.”
Harper held up a license. “Joe is Joseph Anza.”
“So they really were related,” I said. “Good to know. I have clothes for you two naked ladies, if you’re interested.”
They were, but they didn’t make it a mad scramble. They took their time sorting through the available shirts and pants while I called Ma.
“You got any freakin’ idea what time it is?” she said, sounding groggy and not in the mood.
“Got a situation, Ma. It’s bad.”
At the tone of my voice, she came awake fast. “Where are you?”
I gave her the address, told her to bring her .45, same gun she’d used a year ago to blow the brains out of Arlene Hicks, a crazy lady trying to kill me at the time with a .38. With Ma helping out we could really take Kyle down if he showed up. I also told her to bring another burner phone to make anonymous calls—like to 911.
“Jesus,” she said. “I’ll be there in five.” She hung up.
By then Lucy and Harper were dressed in slacks and shirts from Harper’s bag. The two of them were very nearly the same size. Jake was still sitting on the floor, tied to the workbench. I dragged the chair over to him and sat down. “Who hired you? What’s on the recording?”
He stared at me. “Christ. You really don’t know?”
“None of us knows anything about this, moron. Now who are you working for?”
“She’s not—” He stopped dead, then said, “The guy bankrolling this is connected, dude. You think you’re home free? You’re not. None of you are. You’re all walking dead.”
“She. You said she. I want a name.”
“It’s not a she. My head hurts like a son of a bitch. I need medical attention.”
“Uh-uh. Not buying it.” Though he had a lump rising on his skull where Lucy got him with the hammer. “You’re lucid enough. You said she. Who is she?”
His eyes wandered. “Screw you.”
“You waterboarded my wife. I want you dead. Think about that before you mouth off again, dimwit.”
“Your wife, shit. What is she, seventeen? What’d you do, raid a high school for the homecoming queen? Or did you buy yourself a sweet little trophy wife?”
“Not going to tell me who you’re working for?”
His eyes spit sparks. “Fuck you. I want a hospital and a lawyer.”
“Have it your way. I warned you about mouthing off. Think you’re tough, waterboarding girls? Let’s find out.” I had seen a spring-loaded clamp with plastic jaws on the pegboard on the wall above the workbench. It was similar to a clothespin but larger, used to hold small projects together while glue dried. I ripped off a length of duct tape and pressed it over Jake’s mouth then pinched his nostrils shut with the clamp.
“Really pissed,” I said, and walked away.
After twenty seconds he started to thrash. Distressed grunting, squealing sounds came from his throat. He tried to shake his head, but was only able to bang it against the leg of the workbench. I let that go on for another twenty seconds then removed the clamp about the time his eyes were frantic, bulging.
“You’re not that tough, bucko,” I said. “The price of air is a name. If I put the clamp back on, it’ll stay on for a full minute. If you can’t think of a name after that, we can try a minute fifteen. I’ll give you time to think about that. Call it waterboarding without water.” I looked down at him. “You tortured my wife. I can’t begin to tell you how furious I am about that, but I can show you.”
I left the duct tape over his mouth and walked away, not particularly proud of myself, but pissed.
No one does what he did to Lucy. No one.
Maude Clary lived five blocks north and two blocks east of the house on Monroe Street. She called my burner when she left her place. I went outside to have her park the Chariot of Fire a block west on Monroe.
The Chariot is Ma’s ’63 Cadillac Eldorado. Its top safe speed is fifty due to a combination of soft springs and good shocks. Above fifty, it has an eerie floating sensation and the steering feels loose enough to give you the willies.
As we walked to the house, I gave her a synopsis of the situation, short on detail, but I hit the highlights.
“The son of a bitch waterboarded Lucy?” she said.
“Yes. I will remember how she sounded for the rest of my life. She felt like she was dying.”
Ma’s eyes turned to stone.
As we went down to the basement, I told her about the duct tape and the clamp I’d used on Jake. She stopped dead when she saw him sitting on the floor. Her eyes were ferocious, feral. “Clamp him again,” she said curtly, then she turned to Lucy and gave her a hug.
Jake made muffled squealing sounds through the duct tape over his mouth, eyes wide and screaming as I picked up the clamp. “She’s the boss,” I said. “She’s also tougher than I am. You’re the one who thinks waterboarding is a kick, stud. You might reconsider. And think about giving us that name.”
I clamped his nose, then turned my back on him. I willed myself to hear Lucy’s shrieks again as she was being waterboarded, to feel her horror, lungs locked, unable to breathe as she felt her life slipping away. Behind me, Jake sounded much the same. Still wrapped in Ma’s arms, Lucy stared at him without expression.
After a minute I removed Jake’s clamp. By then, Lucy was introducing Harper to Ma.
“That’s what you did to my wife,” I said to Jake when he quit gasping for air. “You won’t get any sympathy here. This was your idea. Come up with a name or you’ll get the clamp again. Next time’ll be longer.”
I turned to Ma. “Powwow,” I said. “We’ve got a lot to do and not much time to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Not sure. That’s where you come in.”
We ended up calling RPD Detective Russell Fairchild. I had him in my pocket, so to speak, since I happened to know who killed Jo-X last year and he knew I knew. I told Russ to get his butt over to a house on Monroe Street, gave him the address, then Ma took the phone out of my hand and told him to bring the behemoth with him. I wasn’t sure that was a good idea, but I’d trusted Ma with my life in the past, so I trusted her now.
The behemoth was Officer Clifford Day, six-foot-six and now three hundred forty-five pounds, having gained a ham hock or two since I’d last seen him. Cliff was Russ’s brother-in-law so they were close. They were together in the Arlene and Buddie Hicks deal, all the way in, including evidence tampering and withholding evidence. They knew who’d really put the bullets in rapper Jo-X.
But Day knows how to keep his mouth shut and he’s proven useful in the past, especially when he kept me from bleeding to death during a hundred-mile drive to Vegas after Arlene put a bullet in my shoulder that hit a fair-sized blood vessel. Day and Ma were once an item, and I wasn’t sure they weren’t still.
Which was cool. It meant Day was in Maude’s pocket too, so the five of us, and Harper, were now a cabal.
Russell’s inclination after he and Day showed up and found a dead body and another body with severe puncture wounds was to get RPD involved, and the FBI, and maybe DHS. Ma nixed all of that so fast Russ’s eyes jittered. She and I were on the same page here.
I recapped the events of the past few days. I had to do it quickly so I left out details that didn’t matter much. But I hit the highlights, one of which was wrapped in duct tape, bleeding, hands flex-cuffed behind his back, neck held to a leg of the workbench with nylon rope. The other highlight was dead, leaking in a corner of the room.
“This is Jacob Anza,” I said, nudging Jake’s foot. “His brother, Kyle, is due to get here sometime around nine this morning. He might be our best shot at figuring out what’s going on since Jake here isn’t saying much.”
“You say he waterboarded Lucy?” Day’s voice sounded like thunder on the horizon. “And he had these two girls up on those stools with ropes around their necks? Bet I could get a word or two out of this shitworm.”
“We should probably hold off on that,” I said, though I thought “shitworm” was a winner.
I told them about the shaped charges on the radiator of Harper’s car and on my rental truck. “Which means, as this guy told me, he’s connected, or the person who hired him is. He’s got access to things the public doesn’t—he or his brother, Kyle, who might be an ex-SEAL, unless Jake was blowing smoke. The two of them were hired, probably by a woman, to retrieve some sort of a recording. Who the woman is and what’s on the recording, he isn’t saying.”
“Not yet,” Ma said. “But he will unless he’s willing to take it to the grave.” She gave Jake a glacial stare.
“He might,” I said. “He murdered those two girls who were found hung a few days ago in a basement, so that’s a place for us to start. Why capture and threaten a couple of high school kids?” I looked at Jake. “You thought they had the recording. Which means all of this started with them.”
He was silent for a moment. Then, “They sent a copy to … to someone who cared. A lot.”
His tongue was looser, now that he was facing death or imprisonment.
“Why?” Ma asked. “What did they want?”
“Half a mil each.”
“They thought some woman had that much and would pay up?”
“They did. And she would. If she had to.”
She again. No doubt, this time. We were starting to get somewhere. “Who is she?” I asked him again.
“Blow it out your ass, dude. I want a hospital and a lawyer, like I said. I’m hurt, especially my neck. My chest, too. I’m not saying another fucking word about any of this until that happens. I’m keeping that name to myself ’til I get a deal, and you can take that to the bank.”
“Cliché,” Lucy said. “Boring.”
His eyes swiveled to her.
“Let’s wind it up here,” Ma said. “We’ve got things to do if we’re going to sanitize this place so none of us were here. We can get together and figure out what to do about the Anzas, who hired them, and what’s in that recording later.” She snapped half a dozen photos of Jake’s face with her cell phone.
“I still think RPD needs to get involved,” Russ said.
“Here’s the problem,” I said. “And it’s a big one. This guy is connected to people with power. The minute RPD gets involved, he gets a hospital and a lawyer. He clams up and—”
“Clams up,” Lucy said. “Wow.”
“Quiet, sweetheart. He doesn’t tell us anything. All we get is his mouthpiece yammering at us, keeping us in the dark, trying to make a deal. We nail Jake, but his brother, Kyle, is still out there. Grab Kyle and he’ll lawyer up. His lawyer will claim Kyle was coming to the house here because his brother called but didn’t say why, Kyle doesn’t have a clue, doesn’t know anything about anything and we have no proof that he does, then Kyle goes free. That’s our problem. Kyle would still be out there and someone would still want that recording and they’re willing to kill to get it.”
“So what’re we gonna do with this guy?” Russ asked. “And that body over there?”
“The body stays here,” Ma said. “And I’ll handle Jake.”
“Handle him how?”
“Don’t worry about it, Russ. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ll take care of it.”
“Probably a good idea not to ask her,” Day said. “You might not want to know. In fact, I’d bet on it.”
Which meant Day knew Ma better than I thought.