Don't Lose Her (7 page)

Chapter 14

A
sunset smeared with soft reds and shades of purple was coloring the western sky when I left Attorney Milsap's office. I thought briefly about the view from my river shack out on the edge of the Everglades: someplace quiet and serene. Someplace where pregnant women weren't kidnapped and drug dealers didn't feast on addicts and capitalism didn't turn the world greasy and greedy.

But who are you kidding, Max? Out there in your one-room hideout, you listen to the night-hunting owls and herons and gators and fish gulping smaller fish every black evening. Is that the nature of all things? Does the world feed on itself until Darwin's biggest, smartest, and most adaptable become so fat yet so insatiable that they bring on their own demise?

“You are one cynical bastard, Max,” I said out loud.

I needed to see Sherry. I put my three phones on the passenger seat beside me—one for CQ, one for Milsap, and my regular cell, which Billy would call if anything changed—and headed for Victoria Park.

Sherry's house was in an old Fort Lauderdale neighborhood that had ridden the ups and downs of South Florida real estate with only minimal damage. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a post-WWII boom created a population surge in Florida headed by young soldiers and pilots and Navy men who'd come to train here and had fond memories of a place in the sun with fresh ocean breezes where cheap homes could be built or purchased for them and their young families. In places like the aptly named Victoria Park, single-story houses with barrel-tiled roofs and hardwood floors popped up on open acreage and even on created land, where entrepreneurial developers dredged out tons of swampy marl both to build up a solid foundation for home-building as well as to create canals to the sea. As the people moved in and then spread out to create lakefront suburbs in the same manner, “old” neighborhoods like Sherry's became quaint and “historic,” tucked under the shade of old live oaks, gumbo limbo, and silver palms.

After one of the inevitable real estate dips in the 1990s, Sherry bought a small bungalow on a cop's salary and it became her respite from the world around her. Since the loss of her leg, I'd spent as much time here as I had out in the Glades shack.

“Moving in, Max?” she'd tease, but with a certain edge. It was a part of our relationship we still hadn't quite sorted out.

When I turned the corner onto her street, I could see her little MG, newly outfitted with hand controls for the brakes and accelerator on the steering wheel, parked in the driveway next to my F-150 pickup truck. I pulled the Fury onto the swale in front of the house and called Billy on my regular cell.

It was a quick and morose conversation that ended with an agreement that I would meet him at the federal courthouse in the morning. My friend didn't sound like he would be sleeping soon, and I wasn't sure I would be, either. We'd both done what we could do for now. Bad people had the upper hand, and it was not where either of us liked to be.

I got out, locked the Fury, and walked between the cars to Sherry's gate, which opens to a walkway leading to the back of her house. Before I reached the patio deck, I could hear the familiar liquid plunking of one foot kicking and the soft, rhythmic splash of swimming strokes. Sherry had outfitted her backyard pool with a jet pump system that created a steady current against which she could swim. She had done this before the accident as a supplement to her distance-running workouts, and now it had become a sort of savior for her head and body.

The aqua glow from the submerged pool lights reflected up into the leaves of the oak whose boughs spread above her backyard and formed a canopy. The mixture of green leaves and shimmering blue gave the natural roof a calm but surreal feel. I stepped up onto the wooden deck and for a minute just watched her swim, the lithe body, skin whitened by underwater lights, moving with an effortless rhythm that belied the strength behind each stroke.

It took a second, more focused look to pick up on the unnatural movement of her hips. She had learned somehow to curve her single right leg in and perform a one-beat kick that resulted in an odd
kerplunk
, but still afforded her a straight and true course. The body adapts. Human beings adapt. It's what we do.

I sat down in a lounge chair, put the three cell phones down on the table next to me, and closed my eyes.

I felt droplets, first on my arms, then on my chest, and then on my face. In my half-consciousness, my mind went to blood. With an internal vision of red, an actual taste of metal gathered on my tongue.

“Max? Are you awake? Max—wake up, babe.”

Sherry's face was above me, her wet blonde hair tucked behind her ears. But the ends still dripped water on my cheeks.

“Jesus!” I said, startled.

“No, just me,” she said. Then she bent closer, putting her still-cool lips on mine. The taste of chlorine replaced the metallic hint of the blood that had somehow seemed so real a moment before. She pulled over another lounge chair and sat, using a towel to cover the stub of her missing leg.

“You OK?” she asked as she looked into my face. Her cold fingertips were now on my arm.

“Yeah, yeah, OK,” I said, shaking my head. “Wow, must have dozed off. What time is it?”

She looked back at the large-faced clock by the kitchen window that she used sometimes to time her workouts.

“Almost nine.”

“Shit.”

“Why? Got somewhere else to be?”

“Uh, no. No. I just …” I ran my hands over my face.

Sherry stared at me a few seconds longer. I must have passed her evaluation.

“You want a beer?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

She wrapped her towel around her waist and then hopped, one-legged, across the patio to the back kitchen door.

I hadn't gauged how draining my anger and anxiety over Diane's abduction had been. Sometimes you spend hours on surveillance or a stakeout, keeping your senses honed until your eyes burn, and your mind begins to play you. Sometimes you run hard and fight furiously until you think you can't take another step, and then you take that step.

But an emotional hurt, a constant internal push to do something that's just out of reach, a feeling of frustration and helplessness, will strain both body and soul. Soldiers know this state; so do prisoners of war. To fight against it takes even more energy. Only a few can do it. Others break.

“How's Billy?” Sherry asked, returning with an ice bucket filled with four bottles of beer and setting it on the small wicker patio table next to my three phones.

“Scared. Frustrated—and working every source he's got to find information,” I said. “I just talked to him. He's touched State Department contacts here and in Colombia. He's pulling favors from people in financial circles from Miami to Caracas, anyone anywhere with even the slightest connection with Escalante.”

“They're going with the drug lord angle,” Sherry said, less a question than a statement of fact. She'd been in law enforcement for a long time and was the daughter of a Florida highway patrolman. She knew that you go with the obvious first. Hit hard with what you have, especially when innocent lives are at stake; if you jumped the gun, tough.

“But no ransom demands?”

“Not a word,” I said. “They've got taps on Diane's office, the federal prosecutor's, Billy's penthouse, and the courthouse cellblock where Escalante is being held.”

“They didn't move him?”

“No. He was there for the hearing when Diane was grabbed so they took him to the internal lockup downstairs. For security's sake, he's being kept there under armed guard. Billy said he isn't going anywhere.”

“Is Billy going anywhere?”

“I'm going to pick him up in about, uh, eight hours,” I said. “He says he's done as much as possible from the courthouse and needs to get back to his own computers at home.

“He says the media hawks are outside the federal building, but he figures that early in the morning I can drive him out of the basement garage and get him to the penthouse without anyone seeing him.”

I took a long pull of the cold beer and wasn't sure I even tasted it.

“They'll be at the penthouse, too,” Sherry said.

“Yeah, well, you know Billy. He's already arranged for a limo to pull up in front of the building while we go around back in my pickup. You know the media cattle. They'll all go for the limo to get the shot of the devastated millionaire husband of a kidnapped judge, and we'll slip out the freight entrance.”

I leaned my head back again and stared up into the blue-green glow spackling the overhead leaves. Diane rolled out of her chair and hopped behind me and put her hands on my shoulders and started kneading the tightened muscles there. It was something I usually did for her, massaging her swimmer's shoulders and the calf of her good leg after the insane workouts she put herself through. The gesture almost made me feel guilty—almost. I let her continue.

“The circles are spreading out,” she said, working with both hands. “The TSA and U.S. Marshals are all over the airports in West Palm, Lauderdale, and Miami. Coast Guard's doing their thing, doubling up on the suspect boats they've already tagged as possible drug mules.”

“But Escalante's people aren't stupid enough to try and move an unwilling kidnap victim through obvious channels,” I said. “They've got hundreds of private and commercial docks they could use to float her out of here. Never mind the private airfields and corporate jets they might commandeer.”

As Sherry dug her strong fingers into my neck, trying to work the muscle fiber loose, we did the familiar dance we often did when she was on a sheriff's case or I was deep into some investigation for Billy. We were riffing off each other, stating the obvious but also posing the possibilities.

“They do these abductions all the damn time down in South America and over in the Middle East: multinational businessmen, judges, journalists, family members of the rich. It's usually about money, isn't it?” Sherry said.

“I remember the case in Colombia where they held that woman politician for eighteen months,” I bantered back. “They kept moving her, town to town, building to building, until they got the president to give the drug lord a cushy, non-extraditable term in a local prison. A country club deal.”

I let out a low groan when Sherry's fingers found a particularly hard knot and pried in between the strands of muscle, working them loose. The woman had a talent for finding a way in.

“The difference down there is that whole communities are dependent on the drug lords or scared shitless of them,” I said. “You're not going to find that kind of intimidation here. Somebody hears something, sees something, and thinks they can profit off the information, they're going to spill it.”

“The sheriff has already put out the word,” Sherry said. “Everywhere from drug task forces right down to patrol. My friend over at the state attorney's office was told the same: if you've got someone in a cell with info, squeeze him with a deal.”

I let my head drop, chin down near my chest, stretching the neck fibers, letting Sherry go deep.

“That takes time. Promises work too slowly. It's a recession: money talks and bullshit walks,” I said, thinking of Johnny Milsap.

“You're quoting soiled politicians, Max.”

“We've got to get Diane back.”

Chapter 15

S
he woke to the feeling of something touching her face. Her first reaction was to fight. But Diane was a fast learner. Coming out of her exhausted sleep, she recalled that the last time she'd cried out she'd been rewarded with a blow to the head. This time, she held back and let full consciousness come first. The grip she felt was pinching her lower jaw, shaking her awake, but in a less-than-forceful way.

The shroud was still over her head; the blackness that met her open eyes was becoming … not normal or acceptable, but expected. From under the drawstring, she felt something probing up from her neck, something small and sharp-edged; but again she stifled her panic.
Not a knife blade
, she thought,
or a razor
. Whoever was holding her jaw was also trying to work the object up to her mouth without creating an opening where light, or any view of the world, would be exposed.

When Diane moved her head and rolled to one side on the bed, her captor allowed it. Then she moved her mouth to accommodate the probe. Another straw, she discovered, letting her skin feel the object, the rounded edge now at the bottom of her lip, working its way into her mouth. Water? God, she was thirsty. And she'd been given the soda before, though clumsily. She hesitated, but gave in. If they wanted to poison her, they would have already done so. She took the end of the straw in deeper and drew on it.

What came onto her tongue was cool, the consistency of thick milk, but flavored with some kind of faux-fruit taste. She drew in more of the fluid, and the pincers at her jaw, obviously someone's fingers, loosened. She swallowed. She let her taste buds work and her mind take over. This wasn't some half-melted milk shake—not that sweet. But it was definitely something more than, say, strawberry-­flavored milk. She stopped drawing and took a breath, but kept the straw in her mouth. Could it be some kind of nutrition drink? Food in a bottle—Ensure or Boost or some other concoction? She sucked more into her mouth and swallowed. She didn't resist, because she knew instinctively that it was sustenance, something for her and for her baby.

The last time she'd met with her obstetrician, the doctor had said the baby would be gaining almost half a pound a week now. Was she starving her own child? It was hard to calculate how many hours she'd gone since last eating, but the anxiety and fear had drained her. She needed something to give her the energy to think, to assess, and to survive.

Her baby was everything now. It hadn't always been so. Only two years ago, she'd been already in her forties and single: career-oriented, too busy with her legal aspirations and following the family tradition. The lawyers and the society men of Palm Beach were just part of the game they all played. She'd never been serious about any of the men who'd dared to court her. She knew her family name was intimidating to them—all but Billy.

He was refreshingly different. Yeah, she'd heard of him—the
GQ
good looks and the quiet, unassuming demeanor of the black lawyer who never took on cases that would put him in open court. The gossips couldn't quite figure out his pleasant but curt style because they were ignorant of his severe stutter. She'd heard the stories of women who'd approached him and been mildly rebuffed with courteous but blunt thank-yous and curt nods before he'd suddenly turn away.

But then she'd met him at a fund-raiser for Women in Distress. She was there as a judge and symbol of the so-called vigilante justice system. Billy was there as the biggest benefactor to the program for the past eight years. They were introduced and, belying his reputation, he talked with her.

Yes, there was the stutter, but his eyes held hers, and he didn't look away. Her father had instilled the same attribute in her at an early age: look everyone in the eye, prove that you're listening, really listening to what they say, and that you value them and the time they are spending to talk with you. And when Billy told her she had the “most g-gorgeous gr-green eyes he'd ever s-seen,” she knew it wasn't a line a stuttering man would ever just use.

After that first meeting, they'd dated: quiet, personal dinners where she learned of his background in North Philadelphia, the barely present father who'd inflicted so much physical and emotional pain on Billy's mother. In those most intimate moments, he'd told her the manner in which his mother had ended that abuse: the poisoning, her premeditated killing of his father, her torturer.

The stories moved Diane, but it wasn't sympathy or compassion that convinced her that this was a man she could finally commit to. She simply fell for him, despite the social upheaval that would result from her marrying a black man. She just loved him. And this baby, their baby, was the result of that love.
Damn it, Billy, where are you?

Diane kept sucking at the straw until it came up dry at the bottom of the empty bottle or container. At the bubbling sound, the straw was abruptly pulled from her mouth and out through the bottom of the hood, which was again cinched tight. Diane heard, yes, she swore she actually heard, the air move as her captor must have withdrawn from the bedside.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much for caring. And my baby thanks you, also.”

Work that angle
,
Diane,
she thought. Everyone has a mother. It's limbic. No one can avoid that reality or that recollection. You've got to be inhuman, or a psychotic monster, to look at a baby and not feel something. But had she been taken by monsters? She rolled back onto the mattress, her eyes open against the black cloth. For some reason, she felt she could think better if her eyes were open, even though her view was of nothing. She lay there for a few minutes, formulating.

“Let me ask you something,” she finally said, keeping her voice as conversational as she could: not antagonistic but not condescending, either. It was her courtroom voice, the neutral one she used when addressing witnesses.

“It seems you are a compassionate person. Can you at least tell me your name? Or even something I can call you? We're here alone together in all of this. You can at least talk to me. You don't have to tell why you've done this, or what your plans are. Just talk to me. You've let me know you're here by giving me something to feed my baby. Can't you just say something?”

Silence.

Again, Diane heard the creak of wood. Is he sitting in a chair? A straight-backed wooden chair against the wall? Sitting there with a gun in his hand just waiting for the order to kill her? Or is he just staring at her? Or was that muted clicking sound she'd heard really a cell phone he's using to text someone? She tried to form a picture in her mind. Were the walls concrete? Was the door metal, like a cell? Were there windows? Were they glass, and thus breakable?

The silence was causing her imagination to run rampant. She'd never been good at silence. In her work, she was surrounded by people: attorneys asking questions, aides making requests, bailiffs giving reports, other judges discussing changes in rules. Outside of court, she was a sociable woman, attending conferences and fund-raisers and society dinners.

Billy was the quiet one, always listening, always taking in the conversations and sights and smells, and rarely speaking. Though his stutter put him in that situation, Diane knew there was an upside to it. He liked the fact that she could take over in a social situation. He was glad to be able to ignore a social function he considered a chore. Billy might be able to stand this silence and wait it out.

She didn't think she could. She needed to know. She needed to do something. She was blind, pregnant, and at the mercy of physically bigger and stronger captors. If she tried to get up, she'd be shoved back down. If she called out, she'd be slapped quiet. If the only way she could act was by talking quietly, she'd do it.

“Do you speak English?” she asked. If indeed her kidnappers were somehow aligned with Escalante, maybe they were South American. Or would they be locals who worked in his drug distribution enterprise?

She'd read the files on Escalante, knew of the ruthlessness of his multiheaded businesses in Colombia and the internecine battles with both the government there and other drug distributors vying for trafficking routes and supplies. The photos of village citizens, children, caught up in the crossfire of the drug wars had made her blanch. Even if Escalante hadn't done the deeds by his own hand, it was by his order that certain outcomes were achieved. If these were men of the same cloth, a dead American judge would mean nothing to them.

Stop, Diane
, she told herself.
No negatives now—don't go there. Your father always taught you optimism.

Her father had been a judge for forty years. As a child, she'd learned from watching him come home from court with the wear in his eyes and the tired, slumped shoulders of a man who had carried a burden all day and had not been able to leave it behind in the courthouse. When she was older, he would quietly discuss the day's deliberations and rulings and the inevitable moral and ethical dilemmas that could not be discussed on the bench or with attorneys.

Those burdens belonged to the judge. He'd told Diane the truth when she first donned a robe: “You stay optimistic, Diane, because you will see and hear so much of the evil in this world that if you don't, it is too easy to lose faith in all mankind.”

It had been her parents who guided her, through school, through college, and into law as she followed the family tradition. But she'd thought that she'd given up that inevitable link during her adulthood and had become her own person—which she'd achieved on her own. But now she questioned that independence. She wanted their help. She wanted Billy. She wanted someone to sweep in and rescue her, and the weakness was pissing her off. She had to gain back her strength and do something.

The silence continued from the other side of the room. Her captor was there; she could feel the air from his breath.
Use what you have,
she thought.

“Can I have some more?” she said. “I'm still very hungry.”

She heard the creak of wood and felt the shift in the density of the space around her. She sniffed, trying to discern from the odor of cologne or sweat or breath something that would help her gain an image, an internal picture, an advantage. But all she gained was the feeling of fingers tipping her chin up and the straw beginning to probe again up under the hood.