Lou Mason Mystery 03-Cold Truth (33 page)

"In the front yard of Sanctuary. I came out here to talk to Terry Nix. All the kids are gone. The place is shut down."

"My people followed Centurion to a house in Sunset Hills that belongs to Kelsey Bond, one of his big contributors. He made Bond smuggle him out in the back of his car and drive to Sanctuary, but Bond jumped out when they got off I-70, made it to a gas station, and called us."

Mason looked at his watch. It was 7:05. "How long since Bond jumped out of the car?"

Samantha said, "An hour, give or take."

"What kind of car?" Mason asked, walking toward the garage.

"A Lexus sedan. Lou, I'm on the way. Get out of there," Samantha said.

Mason opened the side door to the four-car garage. A Lexus, its hood still warm, was parked next to Abby's BMW. "Can't do it, Sam. Abby is inside," he said, hanging up.

Mason searched the garage for a weapon, finding a box cutter hidden under a pile of oily rags. Slipping it into the pocket of his suit jacket, he circled the grounds, looking for signs of life. He crossed a brick patio with a liquid-propane barbecue grill next to the barn, which smelled of hay and machine oil. Hoping to find a better weapon, he was disappointed when there was nothing there except for a tractor, three ATVs, an assortment of tools, and a heater already in service used to warm the barn during cold weather.

Back outside, he jogged along the perimeter of the house, the first and second floors silent and dark. Lights were on in a third-floor room on the back where, from Jordan's description, Centurion had his apartment. Mason moved on, skirting the evergreen hedge that hugged the house, coming to a break in the hedge for a pair of daylight windows cut into Terry Nix's basement office.

Though the night air was cool, Mason was sweating, his breathing accelerating when he saw Centurion, Nix, and Abby in Nix's office. Abby was strapped into a chair, duct tape holding her arms and legs in place, a small swatch over her mouth, her eyes stretched wide with fear. A syringe lay on Nix's desk next to two open gym bags partially stuffed with cash, another tall stack of currency on Nix's desk. A third bag lay open, its cargo neatly piled plastic bags of white powder.

Though he couldn't hear what they were saying, Mason could tell that Centurion and Nix were arguing. Nix's face was red and he was gesturing wildly, clutching the baby ledger, while Centurion listened, his hands planted at his sides, his head down. Judging from the body language, Nix was chewing out Centurion, an indulgence Mason expected Centurion would soon end with his fist. The argument had to be about how to divide the cash and the drugs, a dispute complicated by Abby, though Mason was worried that they were in agreement about her.

Centurion had raced back to Sanctuary to pick up the money and drugs before Nix could skip out with them. Nix was obviously on the same schedule, though Mason doubted that they were using the same travel agent. Neither one could have been happy that Abby showed up, and both were desperate enough not to leave her as a loose end.

Mason didn't like the odds of getting Abby out by tapping on the window and asking if she could come out and play any better than he liked the odds of walking in and telling Centurion and Nix that he'd dropped by to pick Abby up for dinner. Samantha was at least half an hour away, and the arrival of an army of cops would, at best, make Abby a hostage of two men with nothing to lose. More bad odds, Mason decided. He needed to get Centurion and Nix out of the office without giving them a reason to kill Abby before they left.

Mason retraced his steps, not risking being seen passing the windows, running to the patio next to the barn, almost tripping over the barbecue grill. He disconnected the twenty-pound propane tank from the grill and carried it inside the barn, setting it down about thirty feet from the heater. Pulling off the front panel of the heater, he found the pilot light, an orange and blue finger of flame barely illuminating the inside of the heater, but powerful enough for what he had in mind.

From a case he'd once handled, Mason knew propane gas escaping from a tank would pool along the ground because it was heavier than air, eventually exploding if it mixed with the right amount of oxygen and found an ignition source. Mason opened the barn door, letting cool air pour in from the outside, feeding the furnace that was designed to suck it in, warming and recirculating it. The combination, Mason hoped, would draw the propane to the pilot light, generating a rich enough mixture of propane and oxygen to turn the barn into a one-shot Roman candle. The one variable Mason couldn't account for was how long it would take before the propane ignited. When it did, he hoped Centurion and Nix would take it as a sign from God to hit the road.

Mason opened the valve on the propane tank and ran without looking back. He slipped into the garage, following the covered walkway that connected it to the house. The door into the house was unlocked and the security alarm was off. Centurion and Nix were obviously more concerned about getting out than about who might get in.

Mason walked quickly through a room lined with empty coat hooks and built-in boot baskets, then a laundry room with three washers and dryers, and a pantry stocked with food for a small army. The barn exploded as he entered the kitchen, the shock wave shattering windows, shards of glass rifling the air as he dove for cover, sliding across the hardwood floor into the dining room, its walls bathed in the incandescent glow of the fireball that poured out of the barn.

Mason flattened himself against the wall as Centurion and Nix pounded up the stairs cursing, bolted through the entry hall, past the dining room, and out the front door. Not waiting to see if they would come back, he sprinted down the stairs, stumbling on the last step, bracing himself with one hand as he regained his footing, shouting for Abby as he wheeled into Nix's office.

He pulled the tape from her mouth, covering her lips with his for an instant. "Are you okay?" he asked her as he sliced her duct tape bonds with the box cutter.

"I think so," she said. "Hurry, before they come back."

He started to say that they wouldn't be back when he saw the bags of cash and drugs strewn on the floor, mixed with broken glass from more windows shattered by the blast. Looking closer, he saw bloody fingerprints on the desk and a trail of blood out into the hallway. "What happened?"

"They were fighting over the drugs and the money when the explosion broke the windows. A piece of glass cut Centurion. Nix was already bleeding from the beating Centurion was giving him. They'll be back if they don't kill each other first."

"We're not that lucky," Mason said. "Come on. In a place this big, there's got to be another way out of here besides going back up those stairs."

Taking Abby by the hand, Mason peeked into the hallway, leading away from the stairs. A series of smaller explosions rocked the night, lacing Abby with fresh tremors.

"What did you do? Call in air strikes?" she asked, forcing humor to calm herself, stuttering the punch line.

"I blew up the barn," he said with a shrug like it was no big deal. "Those last explosions were probably the gas tanks on a tractor and some ATVs that were stored there. The fire must have caused them to blow."

The wall above Mason's head erupted in a shower of sheet rock splinters, the crack of a gunshot lost in yet another explosion in the barn. Mason spun Abby around, shoving her toward the next turn in the hall past a trophy case, glancing over his shoulder as Centurion took aim again, his next shot slamming into the trophies, raining more shrapnel on them as they ran.

They were in a corridor with doors on either side marked as locker rooms, one for each sex, and another door at the end of the hall. Crashing through that door into an exercise room, Mason tipped a rack of hand weights against the door, buying a few seconds, knowing that Centurion could power-lift him, the door, and the weights. He knocked over benches to trip Centurion, grabbed a pair of eight-pound hand weights, pointed Abby to an exit on the far side and hit the light switch, blanketing the room in darkness. Centurion collided with the door, firing three shots that knifed through its hollow interior, bullets pinging off exercise machines as Mason and Abby escaped, relieved to find a lock on the door they closed behind them, Mason jamming it down with his thumb.

"Here," he said, pressing one of the weights into Abby's hand, "hit him like you mean it."

They looked around, finding themselves in an indoor basketball court, illuminated only by the neon news on the scoreboard hanging from the ceiling that read "time expired."

"You wanted another stairway," Abby said, her breath coming in gulps. "There it is."

She pointed to a platform built high into the wall in one corner of the court, a ladder hinged on one end and folded beneath the platform. A trapdoor was built into the ceiling above the platform. Mason found a control panel on the wall with a bank of switches, cycling through them, lights turning on and off, until an electric motor engaged and the ladder began unfolding, its pace excruciatingly slow.

The ladder stopped six feet off the floor. Abby leapt for the bottom rung, Mason bracing her legs as she pulled herself up, then following her as Centurion pounded on the locked door, using bullets instead of a key. There was a power switch for the ladder on the wall above the platform. Abby punched the switch starting the ladder's labored ascent as Mason skimmed his hands across the trapdoor, finding the inlaid handle that was concealed in the dim light. Swinging the door up and in, Mason pushed Abby through the opening, taking back the hand weight he had given her as Centurion kicked the door to the basketball court off its hinges.

Crouched on one knee, Mason launched the two eight-pound weights in rapid fire succession, the first catching Centurion on the arm, the second in the neck as he turned to fire, the shot going wide. Mason scrambled through the trapdoor, flinging it shut, blinking his eyes in the pitch black of a low-ceilinged utility tunnel, barely large enough for them to crawl.

"Abby," he whispered hoarsely, "where are you?"

"Here," she answered, reaching out, finding his face with her hand.

Mason extended his arms, remembering how Jordan had measured her cell, figuring out they were at one end of the passageway. "There's only way to go," Mason said. "Take the lead."

The crawl space was made of concrete, the walls lined with pipes and electric cables. The air was dry and dusty, tasting of metal. Abby, unable to see, moved slowly, using one hand as her guide to avoid using her head as a bumper.

"Hold on," she said. "I found a shaft I can almost stand up in." She eased herself upright. "There's another trapdoor. It's propped part way open and there's light on the other side."

Mason's initial relief that they'd found their way out vanished at Abby's description. "Get back!" Mason snapped, too late as Abby screamed and a gunshot rang out, echoing in the crawl space, the bullet ricocheting as Mason covered himself. "Abby!" he shouted.

"She all right, cockroach," Centurion said. "That's what you are, Mason. A cockroach, crawling around inside the walls of my house. You go back to crawling. Your lady and I got business elsewhere."

"Lou!" Abby cried. "Help me!"

"Shut up, bitch!" Centurion told her. Mason heard the smack of Centurion's hand and Abby's muffled cry. "So long, cockroach."

The trapdoor slammed tight, the sounds of something heavy being dragged across the floor, landing with a permanent thud above his head.

Mason crawled to the mouth of the vertical shaft, rising in a half-crouch, hands and shoulders hard against the immovable ceiling, slumping back to the bottom, knees to his chest. The passageway thinned, though he knew the sensation was more panic than real, the darkness tightening around him, the concrete scraping through his pants as he slithered back to the other end of the tunnel. Unable to see his watch, he guessed at the time, calculating the odds that Samantha would arrive before Centurion got away, measuring Abby's chances in minutes and seconds.

He scratched and pawed the trapdoor, searching for the handle, disoriented by the claustrophobic blackness, choking on the dust and his fear of being too late, finding it at last, a steel ring frozen from lack of use. Mason slipped the blade of the box cutter beneath the ring, popping it free. Pulling the door up, he poured out of the shaft onto the platform above the basketball court, pounding on the switch to lower the ladder, leaning over the side when nothing happened. The ladder lay on the floor, fifteen feet below, ripped from the platform.

Mason eased himself over the edge of the platform, dangling by his fingertips, swinging his body away from the ladder, dropping and rolling, grunting as he absorbed the hardwood impact. Racing back through the weight room, he glanced in Nix's office. The money and drugs were gone. Nix wasn't.

He was sprawled on his stomach across the width of his desk facing the door, feet just off the floor, arms hanging over the sides in an embrace, blood oozing onto the desk blotter, eyes open, lips moving soundlessly. Mason helped him onto the floor, propping him up to ease his labored breathing.

"Hang on, Terry," Mason told him. "Help is on the way."

"Too late, man," Nix whispered, fingering the gunshot wound in his chest, Mason could hear Nix's death rattle.

"Is there another way out of here besides the main road?" Mason asked, leaning close to Nix's mouth.

"Path into the woods, behind the barn," Nix managed.

Mason said, "You knew Gina and Robert Davenport when you lived in St. Louis. You sold dope to Robert and a baby to Gina."

Nix nodded, wincing.

Mason asked, "What about Emily's birth certificate? How did you manage that?"

"Wasn't my part of the deal," Nix said through clenched teeth. "Gina said she had that covered."

"When you came to Kansas City, you picked up where you left off with Robert and blackmailed Gina about Emily. Is that how it went down?"