The Stolen (22 page)

C
urt had seen the Reeds approaching from the other end of the hallway. The family looked happy. Curt recognized Robert from his driver’s license photo. And when he saw that Robert was with a woman and two children, he knew for sure that this was the family we’d been searching for.

I confirmed with the hotel restaurant that the Reeds had finished a late supper just a few minutes earlier. Then they’d gone upstairs. They must have seen Curt lying outside their room, blood everywhere. That’s when they’d run.

On the way to the hospital, Curt said they’d likely seen the body at the other end of the hall, as well. If so, they probably recognized the dead man. If they knew Raymond Benjamin, chances were they’d met his flunky. And with all that death and blood, they must have known Ray Benjamin had come for them.

We followed Curt to the Harrisburg hospital, the primary hub for all the medical centers in the Harrisburg area. They’d taken Curt right into surgery. Amanda and I sat in the waiting room as a doctor explained that the bullet had nicked his femoral artery. Luckily the bullet had missed severing the vessel by half a centimeter, otherwise, he said, we’d be having an entirely different conversation.

I’d given the license plate number to the Harrisburg chief of police, a burly man named Hawley who had a look on his face that said as soon as they found Benjamin, the three of us would have hell to pay. An APB was put out on a dark BMW with New York plates, but an hour later the license plate was found abandoned in a gas station in Bethlehem. Raymond Benjamin was gone.

Curt would be laid up for several days. Amanda and I slept in the hospital that night, occasionally shifted positions in the waiting room. Amanda waking up on top of me, then moving; me waking up leaning on her shoulder, not wanting to move.

When morning came and the doctors confirmed that Curt was out of danger, we went in to see him.

Our friend was heavily sedated. His leg was swathed in bandages. We approached his bed, cautious, unsure if he could hear us or understand what happened.

As I got closer, I heard Curt whisper, “Henry.”

“I’m here, buddy.” I took Curt’s hand in mine. Amanda stood beside me. I noticed her absently rubbing her hands on her jeans.

“The Reeds,” he said. Curt swallowed, with some difficulty. Then he licked his lips. “The Reeds, man. They recognized Benjamin. They were scared.”

I nodded, squeezed his hand.

“Find them,” he said. “Now, get out of here before somebody else shoots me instead of you.”

Amanda and I walked out of the hospital like two zombies who hadn’t slept in weeks. Her eyes were bloodshot, her tank top caked with sweat and dirt. Her blouse was in some medical waste bin. Now she wore a gray sweatshirt, two sizes too large. The only thing that had survived the night physically and emotionally intact was our car.

We began the drive back to New York in silence. Amanda turned on the radio. Found some talk station that neither of us listened to, but it at least punctured the quiet. When we saw a rest stop, we pulled in and got a few fast-food burgers for the road. We ate without talking, arrived in New York three hours later barely having said a word.

When we pulled onto the Harlem River Drive in Manhattan, I turned to Amanda.

“Where does Darcy live again?” I asked.

Amanda shook her head. “Just take me home.”

“Where do you mean…” I began to say, but when Amanda looked at me I realized what she meant.

I parked the car on the street, then walked back to my apartment, finding Amanda’s arm intertwined with mine. I found an old pair of shorts that were too small for me, and a Cornell T-shirt. Amanda put both on. The T-shirt fit like a nightgown, drooping down to her knees. I turned off all the lights and climbed into bed.

Amanda lay down next to me. I could hear her breathing, could feel my heart beating next to hers.

She turned onto her side, nuzzling her head into the nook between my head and shoulder. Her arm wrapped around my waist. And there she lay, soon drifting into sleep. I watched Amanda for as long as I could, staring at that face, knowing how hard it would be to spend one more minute without it next to mine at night. I thought about Curt and prayed he’d recover completely, thanked whoever it was that watched over us that we’d escaped with his life.

I prayed that Caroline Twomey was still alive and healthy, and that we would find her soon. I thought about all of that, and then my muscles quit on me and I drifted to sleep.

I
woke at seven-fifteen, like I did most mornings. My alarm was set every day to go off at seven-thirty on the dot, but my internal alarm had a wicked sense of humor, always screwing me out of fifteen minutes of shut-eye a day.

Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I leaned over to see Amanda rolled up in my comforter like a pig in a blanket, only if the pig were a beautiful woman and…I decided to just stop that train of thought before I accidentally said it to Amanda and wound up with my head shoved up my ass. She was still wrapped in my clothes, her eyes shut, snoring lightly. I leaned over and shut off the alarm clock, then rolled out of bed, picked some clean clothes out of my dresser, went into the living room and got dressed there so as not to wake her.

I left the apartment, picked up two Egg McMuffins and two large cups of coffee, and was setting up breakfast on my meager dining room table when Amanda appeared in the doorway.

“Morning,” she said, rubbing her eyes. She looked at her finger—likely identifying a smudge of eye gunk—then flicked it away. She offered a goofy smile and noticed the setup. “You got breakfast?”

“Straight from the kitchen at Mickey D’s.”

“Yum. Just like Mom used to make.”

“Your mom worked the fry-o-lator.”

“All right, enough out of you, smart guy. What do you have?”

I unwrapped the sandwiches, opened the coffees. I had ketchup waiting for her, knowing she liked to slather her eggs with the stuff. She took a seat, her eyes still red, and began to pick at the food.

“How’d you sleep?” I asked.

“Better than you’d think after a day like yesterday,” she said. “Guess your brain trumps all, tells you you’re too tired to stay up all night thinking about things. Like Curt lying on the floor bleeding everywhere.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“That’s all you can say?” Amanda said, looking at me as if I’d just committed to invading Iran by myself.

“Don’t know what else to say. It’s just overwhelming. You know, seeing Curt injured like that. Seeing Jack in the hospital the other day. Two of my best friends have nearly died over the past week. I’m sorry if I’m not as articulate as usual.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest you didn’t care,” Amanda said. “But…do you wonder, ever, if it’s worth it? I mean I’m not a reporter, I haven’t spent a lot of time in the ‘field’…but unless you’re in Afghanistan, I’ve never heard of any journalist being subjected to this much violence in such a short period of time. So either you happen to chase down these stories that inevitably lead to ruin, or…”

“Or what?” I said.

“Or you go looking for them on purpose.”

“You know that’s not true. Wallace assigned me to this story. He set me up to interview Daniel Linwood.”

“And so you interviewed him. You wrote a terrific story about it. Then what?”

“That wasn’t the end of it,” I said. “Once I knew something was being hidden, I had to go deeper. It’s what I do. If it leads to this, it leads to this, but I never want anybody to get hurt. Fact of the matter is, I don’t want you coming along with me. I didn’t want you to come last night.”

Amanda looked hurt, confused. “So why did you let me come, then?”

“Because the last time I made a decision for you, it was the worst decision of my life.”

Amanda took the bottle of ketchup, unscrewed the lid and peered inside.

“What are you doing?”

“Just making sure I’m comfortable with the amount of congealed tomato paste in here.” She screwed it back on, squirted a dollop onto her sandwich. “Doesn’t look too bad.”

She took a bite, munched, then put it down. Looked me in the eye.

“So, what, you’ve grown over the past few months? All of a sudden things are clear?”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. I felt my feelings for her were clearer than they’d ever been, and I’d been worse at hiding it than a silverback gorilla playing hide-and-seek. “Yes. Sort of. I mean, personally things are clear.”

“Really,” she said, in a manner that stated she didn’t believe me.

“We were good together,” I said.

Amanda chewed. “So that’s your great introspection? As far as I know, we didn’t break up because things were going badly. We broke up for other reasons. Do those not matter now?”

“They matter, but I know that this…thing…it’s a two-person thing.”

“Eloquent.”

“What I’m saying is, I shouldn’t have made the decision for you. And I understand how it would put you in a position where you’d be afraid to get hurt again.”

“Hurt?” she said incredulously. “You’re worried about me? Henry, you’ve cornered the market on that front. I’m not saying this to be funny, but when things happen like yesterday, I worry that you’re not going to live to thirty. So you can worry about me being hurt emotionally, while I’m going to be the one at night wondering if you’ll be coming home. Or if I’m going to get a call from Curt one day, and I’ll hang up before he can say a word because I’ll just know.”

“I’m trying,” I said. “I swear. But this Linwood story, I have to see it through. Especially now. One of my friends could have died yesterday. I have to find out what Ray Benjamin, Petrovsky and the Reed family are involved in. I need to know what Benjamin is going through all this trouble for. He strikes me as a career thug. The kind of guy you hire for muscle. Not the kind of guy who orchestrates a series of kidnappings spanning a decade.”

“What’s he been doing since he got out of prison?” Amanda asked.

“That’s a good question.”

“Ya think?” she said, taking another bite.

“I mean, he’s had a massive house in his name, a minivan in his name. Where’s his income coming from?” I looked at her sandwich. She had one or two bites left.

“What, you want me to leave because you have work to do?”

“No. I was just wondering if you were going to finish that.”

She mocked throwing the last piece at me, then shoved it all in her mouth and swallowed.

“I’ll walk out with you,” she said. “You heading to the office?”

“Yeah. But I need to make a few calls and see if I can track down Raymond Benjamin’s employment records. If the Reeds knew what was good for them, they’d be in Arizona by now.”

“What about Benjamin?”

“If yesterday was any indication, he’ll follow them into hell if he needs to. He was there to kill the Reed family. His gun was already drawn when he came into the hall at the hotel. If we don’t find out what’s going on, it won’t just be another kidnapping to investigate, or having to deal with at least two people who have already been killed, but we’d have to live with the murder of an entire family.”

R
aymond Benjamin sat in the black Ford Escape and finished his third pack of the day. He rolled down the window and flicked the butt into the wind, where it landed among a pile of a dozen other butts that had come from the same vehicle.

Ray’s heart had been racing for nearly twenty-four hours straight. Vince was dead. And though he had no love lost for the bumbling idiot, there was a huge difference between thinking someone a dolt and wishing them dead. He still couldn’t figure out how Parker, the girl and the black guy with the gun had found the Reed family. It should have been quick, easy and relatively painless. At least for him and Vince. They’d both loaded their guns with dumdum rounds—hollow-point bullets. There were four targets: Robert Reed, Elaine Reed, Patrick Reed and the girl. Caroline Twomey. They didn’t want to take any chances that one or more of them might have gotten away or fought back. He’d met Robert Reed before, and the man had some athletic genes.

The dumdum rounds were specially designed to expand upon impact, the bullets deforming when they entered the skin, causing a maximum of trauma. That way even if they didn’t get off a kill shot, the wound would have been devastating enough to keep the target down. With four targets, you couldn’t take chances.

Now Vince was dead. He’d worked with the man for going on seven years, and while Raymond never would have asked him to be on his team for Trivial Pursuit, he had developed an odd affection for him, like an owner with a three-legged dog.

When Parker began to investigate Petrovsky, Ray knew the plan had encountered serious problems. Reporters didn’t just go away. If anything, resistance made them dig deeper. And especially after he looked into Parker, he realized that this guy would never quit, wouldn’t back down, even when facing down the barrel of a gun. And to compound that, Bob and Elaine clearly left the house on Huntley in an effort to disappear, or at least hide out until they could figure out how to untangle themselves from the mess. Raymond had never fully trusted Elaine Reed. It took too long. Too much effort. When they ran away in that tin can of a minivan, to Raymond that’s when the answer became clear. It wasn’t something Raymond wanted to do, but it was necessary.

He’d run it up the flagpole. Nothing happened without the say-so of his employer. And, like Ray, his employer wasn’t thrilled with the option but realized there was no choice. The Reeds had to disappear, along with Caroline Twomey.

As far as Ray knew, the Windstar was still in play. The Reeds were hardly versed in espionage. Hell, he’d be surprised if Elaine even knew how to use e-mail. Soon he’d have the car’s location, and if the Reeds were there he would correct everything that had gone wrong.

He raised the window and turned on the engine. He found a good jazz station with John Coltrane’s quartet playing “Pursuance.” He sat and listened to the entire song, felt the rhythm swim through his head. He reached into the glove compartment, closed his hand around the gun, and felt like everything would even out.

This time had been a mistake. It was unfortunate for Caroline Twomey. The next time, though, they would make things right.