Abduction (14 page)

Vince grunted and pulled away, only to be brought to a stop as the back of his head came into contact with the wall.

Blood gushed out of the deep cut, to further ruin what Logan supposed to be a very expensive shirt and pants.

“I’m sick of playing games with you second-rate gangsters,” Logan said.  “You’re ex-forces, Palmer, and you know my objective.  I want the girl back, alive and unharmed.  Tell me how we can make that happen today or you’re history.”

Vince didn’t know if Nick would deal.  He had never known the man back down to threats, and that was why he was a power to take notice of.  He had started up in legit business in Fort Myers, and then moved into drugs and prostitution.  The gang that ran the city at the time didn’t tolerate competition, and so torched Nick’s offices and told him to be on the next plane or train out of town.

Nick had struck back within twenty-four hours.  Chico Mandrake, the black guy that thought he was a twenty-first century Al Capone, but cooler, was driving home from the Reason2Live club in downtown, listening to Kendrick Lamar spit it out through eight speakers, when his canary yellow Ferrari 458 Spider went up like a fourth of July firework.  The amount of Semtex used had proved more than enough to do the job.  The block of yellow general purpose plastic explosive had been remotely detonated by cell phone.  One second the fast-moving Ferrari had been a sleek, beautiful car, and the next it was a fireball, expanding out as thousands of glowing pieces of shrapnel.  At the same time as the music died for Chico and the attractive woman he had been taking home across the river, a dozen more of his crew met their ends by various means.  Nick Cady had eradicated his only real opposition, and thought of himself as the King of the Fort.

“He’s more than a gangster,” Vince said to Logan and Tom.  “I’ve never seen him back down to any form of intimidation.  I’m like everyone else to him, expendable and replaceable.  He’s basically a homicidal psychopath.  If he didn’t run a big outfit he’d probably be a serial killer.”

“Everyone has a weakness,” Logan said.  “Tell me what
his
is.”

The
Silver Sands Motel was north of Vero Beach on the outskirts of Gifford, and was located next to Highway 1, well away from the beach at the end of an old strip mall that had the usual assortment of small businesses and fast food joints.

Gail drove into a parking lot shared with a nail salon, tattoo parlor and a CVS pharmacy.

Entering the small office, Gail and Debbie approached the counter and the young guy standing behind it whom they couldn’t help but notice had only one arm.

“I left it in Afghanistan,” Jay Cotton said, noticing the two women glance at his pinned-up shirt sleeve.  “You planning to check in?”

“Yes,” Gail said. “One night, and it’ll be cash.”

“I’ll need for you to register,” Jay said.  “This is a dump, but we do it by the book.”

“I’m Suzy,” Gail said.  “And this is my friend Sara.  Her ex-husband just got out of the joint in Homestead and is looking for her.  If he finds her he’ll beat the shit out of her, or maybe even kill her.  We need to keep on the move for a while, and we don’t want to leave a trail.”

Jay didn’t know if the woman was lying to him or not.  In his limited experience he’d found that they were far better at it than men.  He didn’t care, but they both seemed genuinely nervous and so he decided, what the hell.

“Okay, that’ll be fifty bucks,” Jay said, handing Gail the key to room four after she’d put two twenties and a ten on the counter.  He slid the bills into the register.  He didn’t skim, ever, because his father owned the place.

They were surprised.  The room was small but pleasant.  It looked and smelled clean.  Debbie switched on the TV, and then took the coffeemaker into the bathroom to wash it out.

“We should get some rest, then go and have a meal,” Gail said.  “No point staying cooped up here till tomorrow morning.”

“Do you think that Logan and Tom will be able to get Kelly back?” Debbie said.

“I think that if anybody can,
they
can,” Gail said.  “I’ve got nothing but positive vibes.  I really believe that it’s going to work out just fine.  Tomorrow it will all be over and you’ll have your daughter back.”

Debbie closed her eyes and pictured Logan, and reminded herself of just how much he had already done.  She had faith in him.

“Okay,” she said to Gail.  “Let’s have a cup of coffee, chill out for a while, then go and eat.  My treat.”  Before they had left the store, Logan had pressed a couple of hundred dollars into her hand and said, “Take this, you’ll need to pay your way.”

Vince didn’t want to talk.  Call it stubborn pride, but it wasn’t in his nature to give in to threats.

Logan didn’t take any pleasure in badly hurting a man who was taped to a chair and couldn’t defend himself, but the fact that he knew that Palmer was a cold-blooded killer ‒ who had without any doubt shown no mercy to countless other people ‒ made it easier.  He hit the man three times in the face with the butt of the Glock, increasing the force with each strike, resulting in breaking his jaw in two places and knocking four or five teeth out.

Vince spat out gobbets of blood, chuckled and with great difficulty said, “Your mother would really be proud of you, Logan.  Do you think that she would condone your torturing a helpless man?”

“My parents were both gentle folk,” Logan said.  “But if they were still alive they’d tell me to go ahead and do whatever was necessary to save a three-year-old girl from scum like you.”

It took another five minutes to break Vince.  Logan used the lock knife to cut off the index and then middle finger of the man’s right hand.  He would have to become a lefty to pull a trigger or give someone the bird again.

“Enough,” Vince finally said to Logan.  “You’ve convinced me that holding out any longer is seriously damaging my health.”

Logan wiped the blade of the knife on Vince’s pants.  “So talk,” he said.  “What do I have to do to make Cady give up the girl?”

Twenty minutes later they left the house and walked to where Tom had parked the Pathfinder near the corner of another quiet avenue.  The area seemed to be like a modern-day ghost town at this time of day.  The only movement they had seen was the solitary egret, which had fixed them with its beady eyes and angled away from them ‒ with the tail of the sixth lizard it had caught since they’d arrived protruding from its beak ‒ as they ambled along the sidewalk.

Vince was in a lot of pain, but was able to somehow put it in a separate part of his mind.  His injuries were not life-threatening.  Logan had made a big mistake by not killing him.  This wasn’t about Cady anymore. He wanted revenge for himself.  Losing a couple of fingers and having his jaw and nose broken had hurt.  But his pride had suffered as much as his body.  He had given up a lot of information about Cady, his operation, and his security setup at his home and the transport company.  He needed to personally deal with Logan and the other guy if he was to get back his dignity, which had been sorely depleted.  He would have to get his revenge.  Only the two men’s deaths would satisfy him.  Payback would allow him to put the incident behind him and move on.  The immediate problem was getting free, though.  He was lying in the bathtub with his wrists taped together behind his back.  His ankles were also bound together, and a washcloth had been stuffed in his mouth and taped in place.  A little blood went a long way.  There was a lot of it from his nose, mouth, partially missing ear, chin, and the stumps of his fingers on the sides and the bottom of the enameled interior of the bath. He was in a mess, but it was only an inconvenience.  He had been in worse situations. There had been a mission on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border that he had been fortunate to survive.  He and a troop of fourteen others had been approaching a large cave network that was a hideout for scores of Taliban.  It was during the hours of darkness as they got to within a hundred yards of the cave’s mouth all hell broke loose.

Unbeknown to Vince and his troop they had been spotted an hour earlier and had subsequently walked into a trap. Five of his men were cut down by bullets before they had time to take cover behind large boulders.  Under heavy fire, one officer managed to employ a grenade launcher into the mouth of the cave.  The ensuing skirmish lasted for almost thirty minutes, and only Vince and five others had made it to an extraction point, to be airlifted away at dawn by a Chinook.  They had considered the mission a failure, due to losing so many of the troop.  That they had eventually turned the Taliban stronghold into an inferno and killed a large but unknown number of ragheads was of little consolation.  Vince had taken one bullet in his left lung and one in his right thigh, but had felt lucky.  Living through the small but bloody battle had been a result. Surviving anything was a result.

Logan probably thought that he had put Vince out of the picture, but had only given him more incentive to keep coming at him.

Slowly but surely Vince worked his hands down his back, raised his legs and bent them at the knees as he slid his bloody arms over his ass and eventually managed to maneuver them over his ankles.  With his hands in front of him he ripped the tape from his face and pulled the washcloth from his mouth.  The hard part was biting through the tape that bound his wrists together.  His broken jawbones made a crunching noise and almost unbearable pain shot threw them as he bit through the tape and wrenched it apart.  Breathing hard, he suffered the throbbing discomfort, and then used his undamaged left hand to free his ankles.

There was no immediate rush.  He went through to the living room and poured himself a large Scotch, to sip it and swill it around his mouth, into the sockets from which he had lost teeth.  He then went back to the bathroom to shower before bandaging his right hand, the raw flesh of his ear, and the deep cut to his chin.

“I’m going to burn you alive, Logan, after I cut your balls off,” Vince said to the empty room.  And as if in answer he heard his cell phone ring in the kitchen, so padded through on bare feet.  Logan had just left the cell on the counter, next to his now much thinner wallet.

It was Nick.  “Why aren’t you here?” he asked.

“I got a surprise house call from Logan and the other guy,” Vince said in an almost indistinct voice.  “They got the drop on me.  He wanted to know how to get the girl back.  Decided that meeting Larry was a dumb idea.  He didn’t believe that there would be a handover.”

“What happened?  How come you’re still in one piece?”

“I’m not in one piece,” Vince said with his teeth gritted against the pain.  “There are some of my fucking teeth on the kitchen floor, along with two of my fingers.  And he gun whipped me.  My jaw’s broken.”

“What did you tell him?” Nick said.

“Just what he already knew.  I confirmed that the kid was being held at the company, and told him that you wouldn’t give her up to get me back.”

“And?”

“And nothing.  He trussed me up and dumped me in the bathtub.  I just got free before you phoned.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“Maybe an hour.”

“Did he say what he planned on doing next?”

“No, Nick.  Why would he?”

“So where do you think he’ll go next?”

“If I was him I’d probably come after you,” Vince lied.  “I’d batten down the hatches Nick, because he isn’t going to give up and go away.  There may be only two of them to worry about, but they’re like I was on active duty, totally committed to success.  Failure isn’t an option to Logan.”

“Or to me,” Nick said. “Are you going to get yourself patched up?”

“Yeah, I’ll give Manny Silver a bell.”

“Good.  Get back to me later.  Let me know how you’re doing,” Nick said before ending the call.

Manny Silver had been an MD with a penchant for cocaine.  He had assaulted several female patients at his private practice up in Orlando.  His license had been revoked and he had served six months in a correctional facility, during which time his wife had filed for divorce.  On release he had stayed in Orlando while on parole, then moved down to Fort Myers and found employment as a bartender at The Phoenix; a dive with topless dancers that Nick Cady owned.  It had been three months later when Dewey Stone ‒ one of the coolers that manned the door to keep undesirables out ‒ was badly beaten by three Latinos who didn’t take kindly to being refused entry.  Dewey had been slashed, and the radial artery in his right forearm was pumping blood all over the sidewalk  Manny had attended him, applied a tourniquet to the semiconscious man and put him in recovery position after ensuring that his airway was clear.  Nick had been there and seen how ably Manny had treated Dewey.

“You got know-how?”  Nick had said to Manny.

“Yes, I was an MD in Orlando for a long time.”

“So how come you’re down here tending bar in a place like this?”

“I lost my license.”

“Shame to let what you can do go to waste.  I’ll pay you double what you’re earning now and throw in a rent-free apartment.  For that you treat whoever I send to you.  All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.”

Manny hadn’t looked back.  He had treated illegals at the Bunker, and had sometimes had to dig bullets out of Cady’s employees and stitch up stab wounds.  And there had been perks.  Free sex with hookers, and a regular supply of high-grade coke.  If life could get any better, he didn’t know how.

Vince parked at the curb and walked over to the small apartment block.  Manny buzzed him in and met him outside his door on the second floor.

“Shit, Vince, you look as if you had an argument with a tiger at Naples Zoo,” Manny said as he saw blood seeping through the makeshift bandages.  “What the fuck happened to you?”

“You don’t need to know,” Vince said.  “And talking about it would just piss me off even more than I already am.”

Leading Vince into a bedroom that had been converted into a treatment room, complete with a gurney, Manny said, “Take a seat while I get gloved up.”

Vince was sitting with his back to the open door.  The last thing he ever looked at was a calendar hanging on the wall with a picture of a topless beach babe standing next to a palm tree.

Larry, followed by Stevie Delaine, a gangly young guy with a hook nose and receding chin, walked into the room.  Larry didn’t hesitate, just raised the small, nickel-plated .22 pistol and squeezed off two shots into the back of Vince’s head.  Both of the low velocity rounds tumbled through the brain tissue but didn’t exit the skull.  It was a clean kill with none of the mess that a larger caliber gun would have made with through and through shots.

Vince’s head was driven forward and down, and his face impacted with the top of the desk in front of him.  The brain contains no pain receptors.  He had experienced what seemed to be a silent, colorful explosion as the electrical activity within the tissue was scrambled.  He smelt something like burning rubber tires for a millisecond, before absolute unawareness transformed him from a sentient being to an inert carcass.

Larry searched what had been Vince Palmer.  Took his cell phone, wallet and car keys from his pockets, and the Rolex Oyster Sky-Dweller from his hairy left wrist.

“We’ll send someone by to take him away,” Larry said to Manny.  “Any problems with that?”

Manny shook his head.  “None whatsoever, Larry.  I’ll get him bagged up and ready to go.  He was never here.”