Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 01 - Last Call (27 page)

Interesting.

I left the weapon cache, cut through the bathroom, then found the door leading to the basement. Kelly had locked this door with a padlock and hasp. I debated how badly I wanted to check out the basement. Getting in would mean dismantling the hasp—in this case,
dismantling
was my fancy word for
break
. Damaging the door meant disrupting a crime scene further than I already had.

“You already wrecked a doorknob,” I said to myself. “What will one more thing hurt?”

Three kicks ripped the door from the hasp, the hasp dangling from the doorjamb with the padlock still in the loop. I used a knuckle to flip on a light switch at the top of the stairs. Fluorescent lights flickered to life downstairs, chasing away the basement’s shadows.

I descended.

One corner of the dank, unfinished space held a collection of boxes, what appeared to be simple storage. To my right, another corner was arranged as a laundry area with a washer and dryer and a pile of dirty clothes on the floor. I thought it strange someone would padlock their laundry room until I rounded the staircase and found the workbench.

A pegboard hung on the wall above the bench with a standard collection of tools. A variety of more exotic devices littered the bench itself—a mortar and pestle, an alcohol burner, some beakers, a thermometer. Glass and plastic bottles of various sizes crowded the inside of an open milk crate sitting on a shelf installed underneath the workbench. I crouched down to read some labels. Among the more unusual products, like acetone, were mundane ones like aspirin and distilled water.

Seemed Kelly had another hobby besides the martial arts, and something told me this chemistry set did more than bubble and fizz.

I stood and stared at the bench. I didn’t know how it all went together, but the
High Note’s
destruction had been built here. I was sure of it.

I went back upstairs to the weapon room, took a closer look. Kelly was meticulous about how she stored her weapons, each glass case arranged like a museum display. Every weapon had its place. I was looking for a place that didn’t have its weapon. I found such a place in a case filled with scary-looking swords. Something from the bottom shelf, probably not one of her favorites, easily replaceable, and no hard feelings tossing it into a drain or a trash bin somewhere after she used it to cut open Eliza’s throat.

I returned to the kitchen for one last look at the woman responsible for blowing up my parents’ pride and joy, who had killed Tom when she meant to kill me, who had mistaken Eliza for Dixie/Sam. I stared hard at the dead woman and tried to feel sorry for, but even with the blood dotting the kitchen cabinets, I couldn’t muster so much as a sigh.

Her murder meant only one thing to me—there was someone else responsible. Kelly Simple was, as the woman at the clinic put it, simply a pack mule. Her position at the clinic, her skill with a deadly weapon, and her knack for building bombs made her a handy helper, but she was not in charge. The person in charge killed her to silence the only link between him and the black market adoption ring Doug threatened to expose.

Call me stubborn, but I couldn’t help thinking that person was Lincoln Rice.

I sprinted around the corner of the free clinic, my envelope clutched in one hand, and found the toll keeper where I had left him. He must have saw something in my eyes, and backed away as I approached, his hands up.

“I surrender. Don’t hurt me.”

Before he ran off, I slowed my pace, tried to relax. “Just some more questions.”

“I collect the tolls. I can’t answer any more questions. I’m fried.” He forked two fingers and pointed at his yellow eyes. “Can’t you see it?”

He was fried all right.

“You answer my questions, I’ll pay you a toll big enough to retire on.”

“You seem to miss the point of a toll. I stand here, y—”

I grabbed the collar of his dirty coat with one hand and shook him. Then I smacked him on top of the head with my envelope.

He ducked. “Hey, okay, it’s cool.”

I whipped out Lincoln’s photo and held it right in his face. “You no longer work a toll booth. You’re an information booth now.”

“That’s right, sure, info booth. That’s me.”

“Tell me again about seeing him come in here.”

He pulled his face away from the picture to get a better look, chewed on his lip. “I say I saw him come in here? Naw. He never came here.”

I dropped my hand holding the photo. “You told me you saw him come in here.”

“I was mistaken.”

“So you’ve never seen him.”

“Of course I’ve seen him. He gives me a dollar to wash his windows.”

I opened my mouth to ask for more, stopped. I looked across the street at the gas station where I’d first seen the toll keeper.

“You mean across the street? You washed his windows when he went to the gas station?”

He scratched his chin, thinking it over, and I left him to it. I ran across the street, heedless of oncoming traffic. Traffic wasn’t really an issue in this part of the city anyway.

The tone that sounded when I opened the door seemed to echo for an age while I stared at the man behind the counter pointing his Magnum at me… again. The pink spots on his dark head looked extra pink today.

“Hello, my friend.”

“If we’re such good friends, why are you aiming that at me?”

“I saw you coming from across the street. I thought I would surprise welcome you.”

“Your surprise isn’t very welcoming.”

“What can I say? Our friendship has been strained since you took bullets.”

“I assume you got more.”

He smiled.

“I need to talk,” I said.

“You are talking. You talk a lot, I think. You talk but you don’t buy. Not a very good customer.”

“It’s important. Could you put the piece away?”

“Maybe you give bullets back first.”

“Put it away!” I took three steps toward him.

“Come no closer.”

I took three more steps.

“I will shoot you.”

At the counter, I slapped Lincoln’s picture down, grabbed the Magnum, and jerked it out of his hand. He watched me wide-eyed while I emptied the bullets, put them in one pocket, tucked the gun in my belt, then retrieved the photo and held it up.

“This guy look familiar to you?”

He didn’t bother looking. “Give me my gun!”

“Not until you answer me. Have you seen him?”

He slapped his hands over his eyes. “I’m not looking at anything until you give gun back.”

“Open your eyes or the last thing you’ll ever see is your gun.”

He lowered his hands, brow furrowed. “That does not make sense, what you said. I would not see gun if you shot me when my eyes are still closed.”

“Haven’t you ever heard not to point a gun at somebody unless you mean to use it? No wonder I never see anyone in here. You’re nuts.”

“I have many customers.”

I pointed at the photo. “Is he one of them?”

“You are very rude. Can’t you take joke?”

I counted back from three, since I didn’t have time for ten. Not much help, but I did restrain myself from throttling him.

“Is… he… a customer?”

Finally, his eyes shifted toward the picture. His eyebrows lifted, followed by one corner of his mouth. “That is him.”

A rock rattled through my intestinal track. “You know him?”

“That is my faithful white customer I tell you about. Very generous. Always pay cash.”

“He comes in here?”

“Why you sound so surprised? I told you I have white customers. I have many customers.”

“You already said that.” I set the photo down, trying to see the larger picture. “How often does he come?”

“Sometimes he come three times in a month, sometimes I not see him for many weeks. Depends. But he has come here for as long as I own place.”

“How long is that?”

He looked toward the ceiling and ticked it off in his head. “Almost ten years now.”

So Lincoln comes downtown, but doesn’t go into the clinic. Like the woman at the window had said, if someone like Lincoln Rice went in there he’d be remembered. Instead, Kelly Simple comes out, maybe has one of the girls with her. They make arrangements for the girl to sell her child instead of getting an abortion. Lincoln then turns around and sells the baby for a profit. Maybe the girl gets shipped up north to that doctor Autumn mentioned. Kelly Simple gets a finder’s fee. Everyone’s happy.

The idea seemed so unreal, treating children like merchandise—stolen merchandise at that. Who knew what kind of “parents” the kid ended up with? I couldn’t stand to wonder. But the theory filled a gap in the larger story. Lincoln wasn’t a client of the adoption ring, he helped run it. When Autumn became pregnant, and Daddy didn’t approve, he decided to earn a little something extra for the inconvenience.

My stomach felt so twisted I could barely stand up straight. I staggered toward the door.

“Please do not take my gun.”

I returned to the counter, set the gun down, dropped the bullets next to it. Some of the bullets rolled off the counter’s edge. He caught the bullets as they fell.

“Are you all right, my friend?”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“I didn’t expect to see you again.”

Autumn stood at the iron railing of the balcony to her hotel suite at the Rabson. She had a cigarette pinched between her fingers, and she stared at the burning end as if she didn’t know what to do with it. I wasn’t sure she did. I’d never seen her smoke.

I sat in a plastic chair, shifting this way and that, trying to get comfortable, but the chair must have been designed for torture, not for sitting.

Autumn raised the cigarette to an inch from her lips. “Daddy would pitch a fit if he saw me doing this.”

We had the hotel suite to ourselves, Lincoln off “handling business” according to Autumn. We took to the balcony because Autumn didn’t want her father to smell the smoke. The gesture reminded me how far under Lincoln’s thumb she was.

Autumn put the cigarette between her lips and inhaled, the end blazing in the night.

My coming to Autumn while her father was gone was no coincidence. I had waited a long time in the parking lot, watching his car. I did have the sense to buy a sub at a nearby deli before settling in for my stakeout, determined to avoid another frozen mini pizza binge.

Autumn coughed, shook her head, and tossed the cigarette away. I glimpsed it, a tiny baton with a fiery end, tumble out of sight. She rested both hands on the railing and stared out at the patchwork of lights in the windows of buildings across the street. An illuminated man in shirt and tie made late night photocopies in one window of an office building.

I wasn’t the only one working late.

“I’ve thought about what you told me,” I said, studying Autumn, taking note of the slightest reactions in her body.

Her chin lifted half an inch, and her shoulder rose as she took a deep breath. “And?”

I wasn’t sure how to play this, feeling my way through instinct, hoping the right response would come when I needed it. Autumn was my last chance at getting to Lincoln. I refused to let myself see her as the mother of my daughter, which proved easier than I thought. Autumn had become another crooked cog in the broken down machine that had stolen from me a daughter I’d gone fifteen years not knowing I had. Just a cog. A piece of the puzzle. A pawn. Whatever you wanted to call her. A means to an end.

“There’s some things I think you ought to know,” I said.

Her head tilted slightly, as if cocking an ear to hear me better.

“I think I know what happened to our daughter.”

Her back went straight. She almost turned toward me, but something stopped her. Her hands gripped the railing hard enough to raise the tendons in her arms.

“How would you know that?”

“That’s an odd question.”

She finally turned, looking through the darkness at me sitting in the corner. “Is this another game? Some trick?”

Was it? I didn’t quite know myself. I had an agenda, but that didn’t necessarily mean I was trying to trick her. “It’s no game.”

She fumbled out the soft pack of cigarettes from her pocket and went about lighting one with a match. This time, when she inhaled, she didn’t cough, though her grimace told me the smoke burned her lungs.