Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 02 - The Hustle (2 page)

Nothing on the docket, I spent the morning on the computer, checking the various adoption forums I belonged to on the web. There were a lot more kids “adopted” through the black market than you’d like to believe. Enough that numerous groups had come together online, trying to reunite adoptees with their birth parents—a tough trick when the paperwork was faked to cover up the transaction.

Kids as commodity. Pretty sick shit.

I seldom get much more than company for my misery while participating in these forums. I keep hoping for some miracle like those I read about. But in most cases, the only way a sold child can connect with their birth parents is if they know they were sold in the first place. In other words, it’s a long shot.

I didn’t have any other leads, though. The one person who could have told me who had my daughter was dead. Still, haunting the forums made me feel like I was doing
something
. Which was a shitload better than doing nothing. Doing nothing isn’t really in my nature.

My faux research took my mind off of Eddie for a while. When his words crept back—
My dad would not do that
—I turned to doing my books. That took all of fifteen minutes, since the only business I had recently was for a local insurance company what wanted me to take pictures of some skid marks on the street. What they did with the photos, or if they helped at all, I have no idea.

My dad would not do that.

Of course Eddie thought that. Put me on his side of the goal line, I’d feel the same way, trying to block any doubt from getting in the net.

Then why did it keep poking at me? It didn’t amount to a case. There was no puzzle to solve, no questions of method, motive, or opportunity. Well, motive maybe. But these kinds of killings didn’t require motive. The dad snapped. Plain and simple.

Only, it wasn’t the facts of the killing that bothered me. It was Eddie. His unexpected arrival in my bar. His desire to investigate his tragedy over twenty years after the fact.

There was the crux. Why now, Eddie? You had all this time to get someone else to investigate your family’s death. Why me? Why now?

It didn’t matter. Not my issue. I kept telling myself that as I turned back to my computer and surfed a few porn sites. Not the best use of company time, but like I said, doing nothing doesn’t work for me. Surfing porn didn’t do much for me, either. I almost started twiddling my thumbs when the phone rang.

Never had that ring sounded so sweet.

When I picked up and said the customary, “Hello?” all I got back was jagged breathing. I could tell by the low tone, it was a man. Maybe someone who’d had better luck with porn from the sounds of him.

“This your first day as a telemarketer?” I asked. “If so, you need to work on your introduction.”

The breather didn’t take the bait. Just kept on breathing.

“You do know heavy breathing over the phone is a serious cliché. Call me back with something original.” I hung up.

So much for getting my mind off my troubles. Add a dash of new weirdness, stir, and pour. Story of my life.

The phone rang again before I could start to forget about the first call. I run a business, so I kept my greeting professional even while expecting Mr. Breather on the line.

Sure enough, more exaggerated exhalation. At the very least, this game had become mildly entertaining. Better than stewing about Eddie. Suppose I could have some fun.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re watching me right now.”

Huff and puff. Such a generic reply.

I looked out my window. The steel November sky stared back at me, daring me to complain about the weather. Wasn’t snowing, so I didn’t complain. “You keep breathing this hard, you’re going to get light-headed. Pass out maybe.”

An airy chortle came back. This dude couldn’t do anything without breathing all over it.

“You think that’s funny? I got a whole book of them. Call me when you’re done with your Lamaze.” I hung up again. Stared at the phone. Waited for it to ring.

Notta.

I swiveled in my office chair, doing a full three-sixty, then stopped with a foot against the leg of my desk. I wondered if the caller was Eddie. He’d left the bar pretty pissed. If enough glue had come off his edges, I could see him crumbling to pieces, getting a little crazy on. Just like his dad, right?

Again, the phone rang.

My heart took an extra beat.
Don’t let the son of a bitch get to you, Brone.
I gave it three rings before finally picking up.

“Hi,” the voice said, all full of air and a slight rattle as if he had phlegm caught in the back of his throat.

“Hello, stranger. Finally decided to talk?”

More breathing.

For crying in the night. This wasn’t any shred of amusing anymore. I could appreciate a goofy prank call as much as the next guy, but Jesus Christ. This time I checked the caller ID. I hadn’t bothered before because I had a feeling…yep…blocked caller. I remember a time when caller ID actually worked worth a damn. “You got three second before I hang up and unplug my phone, douche bag.”

“Douche…bag…” Another chortle. Then it hit me. It was either Bevis or Butthead on the line. Lucky me.

“You are a funny, guy,” he said.

“I’m a laugh fucking riot. But I think your three seconds are up.”

“Then you don’t want to know.”

I should have hung up. Fanning crazy flames never ended well. “Know what?”

“Where she is.”

“Where who is?”

A couple deep breaths. Deeper than any before. “Your daughter.”

The heat worked pretty well in my office. I could thumb my nose at winter through the window while wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt. But the fire crackling inside of me would have done the same with the thermostat down to thirty. I gripped the phone so tightly my knuckles ached. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Your daughter,” the man repeated. His breath had evened out. He didn’t sound like a masturbating perv anymore. But the creak in his voice didn’t make him sound any friendlier.

“What about my daughter?”

“I know where she is.”

“Bullshit. How?”

“How doesn’t matter. Ask me why.”

I’d be damned if I played his games. I didn’t ask him anything. But I bet he could hear my own hot breathing through the phone now.

“You don’t want to know why?”

I still didn’t answer. Fuck him. This was a load of shit. Some con. After all, it was no secret that I had inherited a fortune from my song-writing parents. Composing chart-toppers helped them support their true love—the
High Note
. Not too many people knew about my daughter, though. A local police detective named Palmer; my daughter’s mother, Autumn; and Sheila, an old friend of the family. But Autumn was in prison and Sheila had run off to parts unknown after I ousted her for stealing booze from the bar to support her secret drinking habit.

I couldn’t see Palmer letting something like that slip, or use it for his own scheme.

Which left one other possibility. This guy on the phone was somehow connected to the adoption ring my daughter was sold through.

“I can hear your wheels turning,” the caller said.

“Who are you?”

“Ask me why.”

“Fuck you. Tell me who you are or I’ll hang up and my next call goes to the cops.”

“Wow,” the guy said, drawing it out so he sounded stoned. “You are dumb.”

The caller had caught me in the middle of an empty threat. He held the dice in this game and he knew it. I had a choice. Play along and see if he really knew something. Or cut him short and spend the next week wondering if I’d made a mistake. I chewed up and spit out my pride. “Okay. Why?” I asked, though I couldn’t quite remember what I was asking about.

“Because,” the caller said and for a second I thought that was it. Then the creepy breathing started again. “I know where your daughter is because I’m the one who bought her.”

Chapter 3

“Are you listening?”

“I’m here,” I said through clenched teeth. I wanted to crawl through the phone line and strangle this bastard on the other end.
I’m the one who bought her.
Like she was an easy chair on sale at
Art Van
.

“I don’t want her anymore. She’s too…old…for me.”

My intestines tied themselves into knots. I stared at the ink blotter on my desk. A doodle I had drawn on the calendar of a cartoon detective in fedora and trench coat stared back at me. I thought I had drawn him with a goofy look of suspicion. Now he looked angry, accusatory. I picked up a pen and scribbled his face out. “What have you done to her?”

“Nothing but loved her.”

I kept scribbling with the pen until it tore through the paper, ripping apart the detective’s head. “You sick fuck. If I find you, I’m going to—”

“Cut my dick off? I’ve heard it before. My dick is still intact and works perfectly.”

“I won’t go anywhere near your dick.” My hands trembled. The pen shook loose from my fingers and rolled off the desk. The air smelled stale and tasted dry. “I’m going to shoot you in your sick fucking mouth.”

“Does that mean you’d like to meet?”

My throat closed. I didn’t know what this guy was aiming for. Did he want to torture me? Make me torture myself with the blanks he left for my imagination to fill about what he had done to her all these years? No. This was all just a means to a blatant end—money. “How much do you want?”

The caller chuckled. “How much is your daughter worth to you?”

“Quit playing and give me a number.”

“Well, she is damaged goods. So I guess that warrants a discount.”

Oh, man, I was going to kill him. And kill him. And kill him some more. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. All that would pour from my mouth were more empty threats. But if I did end up meeting this fucker, I planned on reloading every one of those threats and opening fire on his sorry ass.

Then I drew myself back. I had let my emotions get the better of me. Mr. Breather had pushed every right button to send me into the red zone, where instinct instead of intellect made the rules.

“This is a con,” I said.

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“Child molesters don’t make confessions over the phone before demanding a ransom.”

Another stupid chortle. “I never said I molested your daughter.”

“You implied it. To get a rise out of me, I’d guess.” I took a deep breath and tilted my chair back. “I’m not biting. You want money, get a fucking job.” Then I slammed the phone down and yanked the cord out of the back.

I splayed my hands flat on my desk to stop them from shaking. I saw the wreckage of my doodle and laughed. A laugh I didn’t believe, but needed at the moment like a breath of fresh air. The guy had played me like a six-string and a wa-wa pedal. I didn’t know how he knew about my daughter and what had happened to her. I did know, however, that he didn’t have her like he claimed.

I left my office and went downstairs to the bar. Helped myself to some straight gin. It tasted flat and bitter without the tonic, but the burn going down did the trick I expected. My nerves straightened a bit. I poured another two fingers, threw it back, and returned the bottle to the shelf.

I left the glass on the bar. Paul would bitch about that when he came in. I wasn’t in the mood to care.

I retrieved my coat and headed out to my car, the Beemer that came with my parents’ estate. I started driving without a conscious destination. My good old subconscious had this. I ended up at the Hawthorne Public Library. The internet is cool and all, but sometimes I like to roll old school. Besides, what I’d come to look for—now that my subconscious had shared his plan with my conscious—probably couldn’t be found online. I needed newspapers. Old newspapers.

I sat down at the microfiche machine, feeling like Indiana Jones before an ancient and powerful relic. Kids in school these days would probably laugh at the contraption. But when they hit college and had to do a serious research paper, they would leave their computer keyboards behind and come crying back to the microfiche. That is, if they could find one. I was lucky enough that Hawthorne’s library had one of the machines. Seemed most libraries had fazed them out, under the same delusion that all the world’s answers could be found on the World Wide Web.