I called Becky’s house. The phone rang only once.
Becky’s husband answered it.
“Wayne. It’s Mike.”
“Mike …” He sounded surprised, like I was the last person he expected to be calling him.
“How are you guys doing?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Have you heard from Becky?”
I closed my eyes. It was true. “No,” I said.
“I’m getting worried here. She went out earlier to get some last-minute stuff for the storm. Extra batteries. A couple of DVDs to watch until we lose power. Some M&M’s for the movies. But she’s been gone a long time. She isn’t answering her cell. I even drove up to Blockbuster but it was closed and there was no sign of her car.”
“Wayne—”
“So I called the cops, but they told me there was nothing they could do until the storm passed, and besides, they couldn’t look for someone who’s only been missing for a few hours.” I heard the anxiety in his voice. “Is that true?”
“Yeah. Listen, Wayne—”
“I’m starting to freak out here, Mike. I don’t know where she is. There’s a hurricane out there.”
“What about Jennifer?”
“She’s here. She’s as worried as I am.”
“I haven’t seen her, Wayne.” I couldn’t tell him the truth. He was already freaking out, and there was no telling how he would react to the news that Becky had been kidnapped by a couple of homicidal blackmailers. If I had any hope of getting her back safely—assuming that was even possible—I needed Wayne and Jennifer to stay where they were. “I’ll make a few calls to some friends in the department. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks, Mike. Call me back, okay?”
“Yeah. As soon as I know something.”
“As soon as you can.”
“Right.”
I cringed as I disconnected. I sensed Wayne’s growing panic. He knew that something was very wrong. And, truth be told, I was not at all secure in my ability to pull off this hastily arranged rescue operation. I was worried that the whole thing would turn out badly.
Despite our antagonistic relationship, I did still love Becky. We had shared a lot of years together. We still shared Jennifer, the single best thing I’ve ever done in my life. I still felt a chauvinistic, spousal obligation to protect her. She was in that mess because of her relationship with me, and I needed to do everything in my power to get her out of it. If it all went bad, I couldn’t even imagine having to explain it to Jennifer.
I closed the phone and left the spare bedroom. I passed Richie’s room on my way downstairs and saw that no one was in there. I found him and Nate at the kitchen table, eating cookies and drinking milk. Through the kitchen window that overlooked the pool, I saw the trees bending in the wind, the rain slicing down in fat drops at a forty-five-degree angle. The pool looked like an apocalyptic naval battle in miniature, the surface erupting in watery explosions as the wind kicked up genuine waves. Hurricane Lorraine was introducing herself.
“Where’s Jimmy?” I asked.
“Garage,” Nate said, dunking a sugar cookie in his milk. Richie was beaming at him. It occurred to me that this might be the first time that Nate had ever interacted with Richie like that. I wondered if they had ever sat in the kitchen during a rainstorm before, dunking cookies.
I moved past them and pushed out into the garage. The light was on and I saw three vehicles parked in the four available spaces: a Lexus sedan, an Acura NSX, and a Hummer HI. The Mercedes sat under the porte cochere, which was inadequate protection from the storm. They needed to get that machine inside.
“Jimmy, you here?” I called.
“Dude.” I heard him before I saw him. He popped up from behind the Hummer, where he had been securing gear. I blinked at him. He was dressed in dark, almost completely black, urban camouflage. His face was entirely obscured by black greasepaint. A black knit commando cap was on his head. He had secured various pieces of equipment to himself: a sidearm, knives, a flashlight, a radio, ammo packs, and I don’t know what else. I’ll tell you this, he didn’t look like he was dressed up for Halloween. He was decked out for serious business and I was taken aback by the transformation. He lifted a Remington 700 sniper rifle with a long-range night-vision scope and slung it over his shoulder.
“You have what you need?” I asked him.
“Not sure. Depends on the terrain and the situation. But I’ll be ready.”
I nodded. “Thanks, Jimmy. I appreciate you coming along. I feel a lot better with you on my side.”
“Dude.” With that one word, Jimmy somehow communicated an entire range of feelings that not only acknowledged my gratitude but told me that he was totally committed. He adjusted a strap on his upper arm. “How many will there be?”
“At least two, plus the hostage, I hope. My guess is that the real blackmailer won’t be there, but I don’t know that for sure. The main priority is getting the hostage out alive. That’s all I care about.”
“Understood.”
I felt butterflies in my stomach. I always got nervous before a tactical operation, busting down a door or getting ready for a planned takedown. But what I felt then was more than nervous anticipation. It was a level of fear I wasn’t used to. Jimmy saw it on my face.
“Y’know,” he said. “I’ve done this before. Three times. The insurgents kidnap people all the time. Once we went in for a U.S. contractor and twice we went in for Iraqis who were on our payroll and important assets. These weren’t Jessica Lynch deals, although I knew some of those guys. These are the kind of operations you don’t see on TV.”
“So how did they turn out?”
“Two successful recoveries. One unsuccessful. We lost one of the Iraqis. Fourteen dead between the three strikes. No Americans lost, although we did have three guys get wounded.”
I nodded. I had no idea what to say to that. What response would be appropriate? I wasn’t sure if it made me feel better or not.
“So, dude,” Jimmy said. “When do you think they’ll call?”
And, of course, that was the moment I heard Nate’s cell phone ringing in the kitchen behind me.
The meeting was to be in an hour. The place was a public parking garage on Central Avenue downtown.
I checked the cartridges in the magazine of my Glock, chambered a round, and slipped it into the back of my jeans. I put the flash drive in my pocket. Jimmy suited me up and strapped a small .22-caliber pistol to my ankle.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
“Rock and roll, dude,” he said.
We bade good-bye to Richie and Nate, who finished their cookies and relocated to the living room, where a SpongeBob cartoon was just starting. I slipped into the driver’s seat of the Hummer and Jimmy got in the back. He lay down on the seat so that no one who might be watching could see him. I put the gym bag with the eight hundred grand on the passenger seat. I had never been so close to so much money in my life.
The garage door rumbled up and we pulled out onto the driveway, where the torrential rain and howling wind assaulted us. I felt the big car lean as a gust hit us.
“Damn …” I muttered, saying a silent prayer that we would actually make it through the roads in one piece. Every year, some joker over on the coast refuses to evacuate during a hurricane, claiming that he’ll be safe in his home. And every year those same jokers swear that they would never do it again, that it was the single most terrifying experience of their lives. And there we were, voluntarily going out into hundred-mile-an-hour winds.
Lorraine had come ashore a short time before, south of Cocoa Beach as a category-three storm, with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour. By the time it made its way across the Beachline Expressway to Orlando, the winds had dropped slightly to a category two. The readings at Orlando International Airport clocked Lorraine at 100 miles per hour. Propelled by the wind, the rain screamed out of the sky in a continual barrage.
Even in the Hummer, I didn’t feel at all safe. As I pulled out of the driveway and onto the street, a ten-foot-long branch from a big magnolia tree cartwheeled past. It brushed along the side of the car with a sickening scraping noise.
“Dude,” Jimmy said from the backseat. He was lying down and couldn’t see the armageddon we were driving into. “What was that?”
“That was part of the tree from the neighbor’s yard. Hold on. We’re in for a bumpy ride.”
Somehow, I made it out of the development. All the security gates were up, the guardhouse abandoned. There were no other cars on the road. I could barely see—the wipers, even on full speed, couldn’t hope to keep up with the deluge.
I remembered watching the news during a hurricane a few years earlier. The station had shown one of the cameras outside the parking lot of Universal Studios. At the height of the storm, with the camera image shaking violently from the wind buffeting the pole it was mounted to, I had seen a lone car speeding down the road. It wasn’t a police vehicle or an ambulance. It was just a car. I recalled thinking, What sort of idiot goes out driving in the middle of a hurricane? Apparently the type of idiot named Mike Garrity.
I pulled slowly up onto 1–4, ignoring the traffic lights, and eased into the center lane. Twin sheets of water sprayed along the sides of the Hummer as I drove. The water was coming down so fast that the roads were covered several inches deep. It couldn’t drain quickly enough to prevent what had become an interstate river. I suddenly remembered my pickup truck, sitting at the Burger King in Lake Mary, the back window shot out and the driver’s window rolled down from when I’d had to climb out. The cab was probably flooded.
I drove as quickly as I safely could, which was still slow. I think my top speed was maybe twenty-five miles per hour. As a bit of irony, when I approached the Thirty-third Street exit, a tremendous gust of wind kicked up and blew the Hummer over one lane, toward the exit and the looming prison beyond. I slammed on the brakes and the truck hydroplaned. I skidded across the far lane and onto the shoulder, the truck buzzing over the ridged safety bumps.
I’m not ready for prison yet, I thought, and regained control of the truck. I steered back out onto the interstate and continued heading northeast, toward downtown. As I drove, I tried to process the story that Nate had told. If his whole story was true, that meant the original blackmailer was still out there somewhere. But who was it? An ambitious staffer of the commissioner, perhaps, or some low-level assistant at the Lawrence Company.
I finally made it to the Anderson Street exit, which led me down off the highway. The old oak trees shook like twigs and the rain swirled in howling curtains between the tall downtown buildings. I saw the glass windows of one building buckling in and out with the wind and low pressure. It was a terrifying sight, made even more disturbing by the familiarity of the setting. I had driven those streets thousands of times. I knew every sidewalk crack and manhole cover. Yet I had never seen anything like that. It was like seeing a trusted old friend suddenly erupt into a fit of uncontrolled rage: the familiar cast in a grotesque and frightening role.
I saw a tree leaning and knew that it was going to topple. It was a live oak, one of many downtown, and had to be at least a hundred years old. Its thick, gnarled trunk tilted at an unnatural angle, the roots on one side popping up through the unstable mud. When Hurricane Charley had torn through Orlando a few years earlier, it was shocking to see the devastating loss of trees. Southwestern Florida had rightly received the majority of the attention in Charley’s aftermath, since the destruction in Lee County and its neighbors was devastating. But Charley had cut a swath of destruction right up the center of the state, pummeling sections of Orlando with winds in excess of 100 miles per hour, hopping onto 1–4 and cruising right up the road to Daytona Beach, where it retained its hurricane status and exited as a category-one storm. The tree I now saw leaning over Magnolia Avenue had survived that storm, as well as Frances and Jeanne. It seemed unfair to knock it over now, after all that struggle.
But, if there’s one thing you learn as a cop—and a cancer patient—it’s that Death is a tricky guy to predict. Sometimes he just sneaks up on you and punches you in the mouth with no good reason and with no warning. I stood on the Hummer’s brakes, fishtailing the big machine to a skidding stop in the center of the road.
“Dude?!” Jimmy called from his prone position in the backseat.
Then, with an earsplitting crack, the oak tree ripped from its moorings and crashed down onto the road, sending a swirling maelstrom of leaves and snapped branches into the raging sky. Mud splashed across the Hummer’s windshield and then was immediately obliterated by the driving rain.
“Jimmy,” I said, looking at the spot where we would have been flattened had I not slammed on the brakes. “Are you sure you want to get out early?”
“We don’t want them to see me slip out in the garage. They’ll probably be watching. And we don’t want to take a chance that they’ll search your vehicle. I can’t stay hiding here. Just let me know when we’re two or three blocks away.”
“We’re almost there now.”
I spun the wheel and bounced up onto the sidewalk, cutting across a corner near a closed coffee shop to avoid the downed tree. I pulled up next to an alley, hoping that it would not only provide Jimmy some cover but keep him from being blown to Miami.
Jimmy looked at me with a startling intensity, grabbed the sleeve of my shirt, and said, “Give ’em what they want. Keep ’em talking. The hostage is the objective. Nothing else matters. Don’t stay a second longer than necessary. Don’t be stupid. Don’t be a hero.”
Now I even had Jimmy telling me not to be stupid. I nodded. “Jesus, be careful. It’s really bad out there.”
Jimmy gave me a small grin, a mischievous smirk that, combined with his wild eyes and blackened face, gave me the distinct impression that he was in his natural element. He gripped the Remington, popped the lock on the back door, kicked it open, and leaped out into the alley. I soon saw him disappear into the swirling rain.
I turned back to the road, navigated the Hummer two more blocks, and arrived at· the entrance to the parking garage that Debbie had specified. All the gate arms were up and, naturally, the attendant’s booth was deserted. I pulled into the garage and headed up. I circled my ascent for three floors, as directed, and stopped. Then I saw them.
They were standing there waiting for me.