Thirty-four

THE AMBULANCE PULLED away, red lights flashing. Just as Mary was preparing to follow in Gabe’s van, her cell phone rang.

“Damn!” she cried, slamming on the brakes. She grabbed for the phone, which she’d stashed in Gabe’s drink holder, and checked the screen. To her great relief, it was not an e-mail, but another call. Quickly she put the phone to her ear. “Mary Crow.” She answered in her brusque Deckard County voice.

For a second she heard nothing. Then, to her horror, she heard the sound of an infant, crying. Loud, inconsolable cries that connoted pain or hunger, or something worse.

“Lily?” she blurted before she could stop herself. “Is that you?”

Ruth, who was sitting beside her, jumped as if she’d been jolted with electricity. “Lily? What do you mean, Lily?”

Before Mary could answer, Ruth lunged for the phone. Mary tried to dodge her clawing fingers and listen to the call at the same time, but Ruth wrenched the phone from her grasp. It fell, bouncing off the dashboard, finally clattering somewhere underneath the gas pedal.

“Damn it, Ruth!” cried Mary. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I want to hear my baby!” Ruth screamed. Unbuckling her seat belt, Mary ducked under the steering wheel. She groped frantically for the phone, but it slipped through her fingers, sidling over beneath the clutch. As precious seconds passed, she finally grabbed it and held it to her ear. The baby’s crying had gone, replaced by a male voice with a thick mountain accent, already in mid sentence.

“...Photography studio. Cool Springs mall, at noon.”

“Wait!” Mary cried. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Sure you did,” the voice snarled.

“No, wait, we dropped—” Mary began, but the line went dead.

She sat back in the driver’s seat, gasping, feel­ing as if some lizard had touched her with its tongue. She’d guessed right—it really was Stump Logan. She’d recognize his voice anywhere.

“Give me the phone!” cried Ruth. “I want to hear Lily!”

“Here.” Mary tossed the phone in Ruth’s lap. “Be my guest.”

Wide-eyed, Ruth clutched the thing to her ear. “I don’t hear anything! Where did she go?”

“By the time I picked it back up, Logan was on the line. All I heard was photography studio, Cool Springs mall at noon.”

“Oh, my God!” Ruth clasped her hands to­gether, as if her prayers had been answered. “He must be taking Lily there! He must want to give her back!”

“He doesn’t want to give her back, Ruth. He’s trying to set a trap for me.”

“For you?” Ruth’s lips curled. “Mary, did you ever think that maybe just once something isn’t about you? That this might be about Lily? My child?”

“I did at first,” Mary answered patiently. “But I don’t anymore.” She looked for the ambulance, but it had disappeared from sight. She took the phone from Ruth and started to punch in 911.

“Why are you calling the cops?” asked Ruth.

Mary gaped at the woman, incredulous. “Because Stump Logan is a murderer who’s kidnapped your baby. When things like that happen, you call the cops.”

“No!” Again Ruth lunged for the phone. This time, as she grabbed it, her nails left three long scratches down Mary’s right cheek.

“Have you gone totally nuts?” Mary cried, her eyes tearing from the sudden biting pain.

“Just what makes you think the Nashville police will do any more than Dula? Or your precious FBI?” Saliva spewed from Ruth’s lips. “The cops haven’t given a shit about Lily since day one—what makes you think this time’s going to be any different?”

With one hand on her cheek, Mary stared at Jonathan’s wife. Though Ruth was currently spinning into and out of her mind like someone caught in a revolving door, her words held some truth. Dula had not acted fast enough, and the Feds had chosen not to act at all. Would the Nashville cops really roll out over an unidentified baby’s crying and a half-heard sentence? No.

Ruth scooped the Nashville map from the dashboard. “You do what you want, Mary. If there’s any chance at all that Lily’s going to be at that mall at noon, then I’m sure as hell going to be there, too.” She left the phone on the dashboard and scrambled out of the van, slamming the door behind her.

Mary listened to Ruth’s staccato footsteps as she strode to her truck. If Ruth went to that mall, anything could happen. Logan could lure her anywhere on the promise that Lily was there, waiting. Then both mother and child would be gone, and both would be her fault. Damn, she cursed, her hands tightening around the steering wheel. Logan had rigged his trap as cleverly as any spider; now she was fully ensnared, with no way out.

“Hang on, Ruth,” she called wearily. “I’m coming with you.”

The vast commercial sprawl of Cool Springs Galleria lay twenty minutes south of Nashville. It reminded Mary of Atlanta, where huge shopping malls spread like metastasizing cancers over rolling hills where cattle had once grazed and corn had been the major cash crop. Ruth had driven down I-65 like a madwoman, changing lanes to zoom past slower drivers, finally skidding to a stop in front of JCPenney.

“Come on,” she said, hustling out of the truck. “We’ve only got ten minutes.”

“Just a second, Ruth.” Before Mary had locked Gabe’s keys in his van, she’d found his pistol and a box of bullets in the cabinet over the sink. Unsurprisingly, Gabe kept the gun clean, oiled, and in perfect Marine Corps condition. Now she stuffed the old Glock in the waistband of her jeans and pulled her loose cotton sweater over it. It didn’t hide it much, but if she wore her shoulder bag slightly in front of her left hip, she looked a little less like Annie Oakley at a shooting match. “Okay,” she said, wondering offhand how many local laws she was breaking by going into a shopping mall with a loaded weapon. “Let’s go.”

Inside, the mall was crowded with people. A group called the “Tennessee Artisans” jammed the already cluttered concourse, selling handmade merchandise from portable displays while a country singer who looked like Clint Black serenaded the shoppers from a small stage. Mary scanned all the storefronts she could see—a photography studio was not among them.

“We need to find a directory,” she told Ruth, squeezing past two men dressed in blue Tennessee Titans football jerseys.

They hurried past a maze of quilt displays, an old hot rod that was the prize in a charity raffle, a man vending something called “Roasted German Nuts.” Mary checked her watch. Five minutes to noon. She looked around, frantic to find a directory, when she spotted a triangular backlit sign that read “Locate Your Favorite Merchant Here.”

They raced over. Every store was listed and located on a diagram. Mary’s heart sank when they found three entries under the photography category—Wolfe Camera, the Sears Portrait Studio, and something called KidShotz.

“Which one did he mean?” Ruth asked, twisting the front of her T-shirt.

“Wolfe Camera is just film and equipment,” said Mary, recognizing the store from her shopping trips in Atlanta. “That leaves either Sears or KidShotz. We’re going to have to split up. Which one do you want?”

“KidShotz” said Ruth. “Lily will be there. I just know it.”

“Then I’ll take Sears. I’ll wait there five minutes, then I’ll meet you at KidShotz.” She looked at the woman who so desperately wanted to find her child. “If you get there and someone says they know something about Lily, get inside the store and call a security guard.”

“What if somebody has Lily there?”

“Then grab her and make as much commotion as you can. Yell, scream, do anything to get someone to come help you. I’ll be doing the same thing at Sears.”

“Okay.”

They raced to their respective stores, Ruth hustling up a flight of stairs, Mary hauling to the far end of the mall. At 12:00 she stepped into Sears sportswear department; by 12:01 she stood breathless in front of the portrait studio. Just as she feared, no one was there. She knew then she’d picked the wrong horse; Logan and Lily must be at KidShotz. She turned and raced back out to the mall, fighting her way up an escalator crowded with toddlers dressed in Halloween costumes, ready to take part in some kind of mall activity. As she rode up the moving steps, snugged in between a six-year-old ballerina and a pint-sized G.I. Joe, she scanned the crowd of people gazing down on them from the upper level of the shopping center. She noticed no men with beards, no eyes staring into hers; no face with that singular hard look of hatred and disgust.

Damn, Mary thought as the escalator finally deposited her next to the food court. What the hell is he trying to do?

She turned the corner, almost running into an adult dressed as Spider-Man. In between the mothers and their wildly dressed children, she caught sight of the KidShotz storefront. She thought she saw a small crowd gathering in front of the store, then she realized it was a small crowd of people avoiding the front of the store. She pushed her way closer, then gasped. Ruth was on her knees in the entrance to the store, surrounded by security officers, clutching something to her chest and keening in a high, loud pitch that only meant despair.

Oh, my God, Mary thought, struggling to reach her friend. All at once she heard her cell phone, its silly ring issuing from her purse. As she ran toward Ruth, she fished it out and held it to her ear.

“You blew it, Mary.” The male Appalachian voice rumbled on. “You didn’t pay attention to my directions. Damned if you aren’t as dumb a fuck as your dad.”