He should leave tonight. That’s what kept running through Bronco’s head after he left the room where the girl was tied up. Leave tonight and I can get out of here clean, he thought. The problem was, the bulk of his “earnings” from the last ten months was sitting in a safe deposit box at the bank and he couldn’t get at that until 9 a.m. He was kicking himself for using a safe deposit box, but he knew he had to. Keeping that much money around the house was risky. Nothing worse than a criminal getting criminalized.
He grabbed the police scanner out of his backpack, his bug-out bag. It was stuffed with the critical items he would need in case he had to make a quick escape. He switched on the scanner and set it on the kitchen table. He slid out his laptop and put it on the table, along with his cell phone, and he plugged them both into their chargers. Then he put on some coffee. It was 2 a.m. He wasn’t going to get any sleep, and he had a lot of planning to do. He wanted his equipment charged and ready to go and he wanted to be charged and ready to go.
There was no activity on the scanner, at least not yet. He expected the night cruiser to do a check-in with the dispatcher periodically, and once he heard that, he would know that no one had called in a missing person.
He considered the situation carefully. He recognized this girl. It was a girl he had seen at the park when he was getting Jack started with the dope trade. She was notable because she was a loner—carried a book bag, sat by herself, and did a lot of reading. He had looked for identification on her when she was still half-conscious, but all he found was a name written with a permanent marker on her shirt tag: O’Day. That should be enough for him to find some information on her. If she was from a well-connected family, he would have to consider leaving his safe deposit box behind. He wasn’t going to stick around if somebody pulled out all the stops looking for this kid. It wasn’t worth it.
On the other hand, the fact that she was a loner kid with a high-tech camera, and that no one had reported her missing yet, meant that she probably “borrowed” the camera and snuck out without telling anyone. This wasn’t an activity any parent would sanction, so she was probably on her own. Pretty gutsy kid, but pretty stupid also. On the other hand, he had to give her credit. She had nearly nailed him. The video and the stills she had captured on that night vision camera were good. Good enough to put him in jail. If he hadn’t dropped his lighter, that’s where he’d be headed. That bugged him. He had nearly gotten caught down in the city a couple of times, but that was by cops, and that was their job. That was why he was up here and why he was being way more careful. But this came out of nowhere. Who in hell would suspect a little kid in a park of being some sort of mini-vigilante, and why would this kid be after him? And most importantly, how did she get the information she had? And who else knew about it?
The wild card was just that. When would the police get the call, and how much had this girl left behind that they could use to catch him? And how the hell did she find out about the rendezvous the previous night? And where the hell did she get that night vision camera? That was not just a consumer night vision camera, this was the kind people bought for jacking deer or spying.
As for the rendezvous, Jack was about the only person who would know, besides his customers. He and Jack had talked it over more than once in public. Could she have overheard when they were in the park? Not likely. Bronco was way too cautious for that. He was sure no one could possibly have heard them, unless they had Superman-like hearing or could read lips. He considered that for a moment. It seemed daft, reading lips—too much like a movie script. It didn’t happen in real life. There were lip readers out there, of course, but they were usually deaf and had to focus carefully to understand a person. They’d have to be right in front of you, and this girl had never been even close. And she certainly wasn’t deaf.
Maybe one of his customers gave it away, but why would they do that? They would put themselves at risk, too, and why would they tell a kid? Maybe she was a stoner. Maybe Jack had sold her some weed. Maybe she had asked for something more. Jack could have told her about how to get heroin, but even Jack didn’t know any details about when or where a deal happened. For any new potential customer, Jack would give Bronco a phone number and some background info. Bronco would call the customer and set up a place and a time, but he would only give them an exact time after he had confirmed that the night police cruiser had passed or was out of range.
It kept coming down to the same thing—it didn’t make sense that anyone would give information like that to a kid. And it was clear that no one had talked to the police already. If the police knew, he would be hearing a lot more activity on the scanner. That was the one sure thing. The police did not know about the drug deal. They would never know about the drug deal. His customers did not know his identity. This girl was the one person that could nail him, and the police did not know where she was. He was going to make sure it stayed that way until he was a long way away. He just needed to find out who she was and where she lived. Once he had that information he would have better control of the situation.
He typed “O’Day Westbury Vermont” into Google, and the results relaxed him a little. The whole first page was full of good hits. It looked like there was only one O’Day family in town, and it was a foster family. It looks like his girl might be a foster kid, and that was a good sign. Their first thought would be “runaway” and that was a whole lot better than “abducted.” Better for him, anyway.
He made up his mind, he was going to stick around and get his money. That would also give him more time to erase as many of his tracks as possible. This was better. Be smart, take your time, don’t look like you’re in a hurry, don’t look like anything is out of the ordinary. That’s how you stay out of jail. Hide in plain sight like what his father had taught him. His father may have been a bastard, but he was damn good at staying out of jail.
Then he had to decide what to do with the girl. His preference was to just leave her behind and then maybe call in an anonymous tip in a couple of days with information on where they could find her alive once he was safely gone. If they found her alive and had no trail to follow, they would give up. It wasn’t worth the search, not for a two-bit drug dealer. They would just be happy he disappeared and that they got the girl back safely.
His second choice was to kill her and dump the body. This was not a problem either. He’d helped his dad dump plenty of bodies. It just involved a good location and a lot of digging, which he was not fond of. It would also require the cover of darkness, which meant he would have to wait around until after dark to leave. He had no real reason to kill her yet, except the certainty that anything in that head of hers that could get him nailed would be erased, unequivocally. He doubted a great deal if she knew anything that would help the police to follow him once he had split. But he was going to find out when she woke up.
For now, he had a lot of other things to do in the time before the bank opened. First thing was to find out more about this O’Day family. Bronco poured a cup of coffee and got to work.