F Paul Wilson - Novel 04 (9 page)

brain
dead.

You
must believe that what I am saying is true. I am not playing games with you.
You have my daughter. She is the most important thing in my life. I have no
idea how I can be of use to you or anyone else, but I will do exactly as you
say, do anything you want, but you must get her some of this medicine. I can
arrange to send you some, leave some somewhere, or call any pharmacy you choose
and have a supply waiting there. You must believe that THIS IS NOT A TRICK!!!
THIS IS A VERY SERIOUS MEDICAL PROBLEM !!!

John sat back and searched his
panic-scrambled memory for what he knew about the psychology of kidnapers. He
remembered reading that many of them tended to depersonalize their victims. He
tried to add something that would make Katie a person to this madman.

Katie’s
had it tough so far in her six short years. I know that sounds hard to believe.
How tough could a doctor’s daughter have it, right? Believe me, fate has
not been kind to Katie. Her epilepsy is only part of the story.

Please
don’t make it any tougher on her. Please don’t hurt her. Please.
I’ll do anything you want, just don’t hurt her.

He heard a noise… like a
sob… and realized it was his own voice.

He was crying.

Quickly he wiped his eyes, added
his name to the bottom, then hit the function key that would send the
message—queue it into the Internet, route it back to the remailer that
would forward it to Snake… whoever he was.

To the
U.K.
and back? How long would that take? Ten minutes? An hour? Two? He had no idea.
He didn’t know that much about the Internet. It was all so big, so anarchic.

One thing he did know: He
couldn’t stay here. He’d go crazy waiting around for his e-mail
icon to start blinking. He—

That reminded him. He had to keep
this secret. What if Phyllis knew his password and decided to help him out by
checking his e-mail? She’d find out about Katie. He returned to his desk
and changed his e-mail password from katie to… what? He couldn’t
think. He looked at the message still on the screen and could think of only one
word, one that would be almost impossible to forget.

He typed in snake.

Then he grabbed his coat and fled,
averting his face as he passed Phyllis.

“Dr. Vanduyne,” she
said. “Are you leaving?”

“Yes,” he said without
turning.

“Is something wrong?”

“I’ll be on the
beeper.” He hurried along the hall, avoiding eye contact with everyone.
When he saw a cluster of people waiting for the elevator he ducked into the
stairwell and galloped down.

Minutes later he was driving
through downtown D.C., heading for home… but not directly. He had to cook
up a cover story for his mother. Not only because of what the message had
said— no one must know that Katie is missing.
!!!NO ONE!!!
but also because he
didn’t know how she’d react. He had a vision of her clutching her
chest and keeling over.

But John wished he could tell
someone. Just one person, so he could share the burden, talk about it.

Never in his life, not even during
the darkest hours when Katie had been hospitalized in PICU three years ago and
it wasn’t yet clear she was going to live, had he felt so alone.

Why Katie? Because of me? What have
I got that anybody wants? What kind of “service” requires someone
holding my daughter captive?

He heard horns blaring behind him
and looked up. The light was green. He hit the gas but after a hundred yards
realized he couldn’t go any farther. He pulled onto the shoulder, leaned
his head against the steering wheel, and began to sob uncontrollably.

What if Katie was already dead?

Paulie had left the garage door
open, so now he just guided the panel truck into the narrow space, turned off
the engine, got out, and pulled the door down. Dark. Safe. Quiet.

But not for long. Not after Poppy
saw the kid.

He could get tough, of
course—tell her to shut up and live with it. But when Poppy wasn’t
happy, somehow neither was he. He’d never been like that with anyone
else. He didn’t get it.

But no sense in putting it off.
Sooner or later he was going to have to face the music. Might as well be sooner.

He opened the rear doors, lifted
the blanket-wrapped package in his arms, and headed through the door into the
house. Another one of Mac’s touches: always a house with an attached
garage.

“Oh, honeeeee!” he
called, being careful not to use her name, but trying to keep things light.
“Here I am, home from a tough day at the office.” He found her
standing in the middle of the living room waiting for him.

She was grinning, as he’d
hoped she’d be.

“Hey, honey, yourself,”
she said. “Did everything go… ?” Her grin faded as her eyes
took in the bundle he was carrying. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s the
package.” Her face got a funny look as she backed away a couple of steps,
like he’d just told her he had AIDS or something.

“Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Not a
kid. Don’t tell me that’s a kid!”

“Yeah. It’s a kid. Six
years old.”

“Oh, shit, Paulie.
Shit!”

“Hey, keep your voice down.
And don’t use my name. She’s out cold now, but she could wake up
any minute.”

“Take her back! Tell your good
buddy you don’t want to have anything to do with snatching a kid.”

This was stupid. He wasn’t
going to stand here jawing with Poppy and holding the kid. She was starting to
get heavy. He stepped into the “guest room” and gently placed her
on the bed. The longer she stayed out, the better.

“She’s already
snatched,” he said. “I can’t undo that. So we’re stuck
with her, like it or not.”

Poppy was standing at the guest
room door, her gaze nicking from Paulie to the blanket-wrapped lump on the bed
and back to Paulie. Her shocked expression was gone, replaced by red-faced
anger.

“I can’t believe you
never told me!”

“I didn’t know. How
could I tell you if I didn’t know myself? He hit me with it this morning
when I went to pick up the limo.”

“I don’t want any part
of this.”

“I don’t like it any
more than you do, but we’re stuck with it.”

“What do you
mean’we‘? I didn’t sign on to babysit no kid. I’m outta
here.” She turned and headed toward the other bedroom.

This was awful. Paulie hurried
after her and grabbed her arm. He wanted to shout but kept his voice down to a
harsh whisper.

“You can’t walk out on
this. Poppy.”

“Watch me.”

“We made a deal!”

Her eyes flashed. “The deal
didn’t include no kid! This could turn out like that Limbaugh
thing.”

“Lindbergh.”

“Whatever. I don’t want
nothin‘ to do with it! Now let me go!”

He released her arm and she
continued toward the other bedroom. He couldn’t make her stay or
he’d wind up baby-sitting her and the package. He’d have to try
something else, like maybe guilt. From years with Poppy he knew that guilt
tended to work on her pretty good.

“Fine. Leave me hanging. Walk
out and leave me with a kid I don’t know nothin‘ about. Bad enough
if it was a little boy, but this is a little girl. How’m I supposed to
take care of a little girl?” She stopped at the door and turned,
eye’s blazing.

“Damn you, Paulie!”

“Hey, quit saying my
name.”

“I oughta shout it from the
goddamn roof!”

“You oughta help me,
Pop—honey. We both got sucker punched on this one. I thought we were a
team. It ain’t right to jump ship as soon as the going gets rough.”

She wandered around the room
muttering, “Damn, damn, damn!” under her breath, over and over.
That was good in a way… at least she wasn’t in the bedroom packing
up her stuff.

“I don’t see why
you’re mad at me,” he said. “I didn’t know a thing
about this.”

She wheeled on him. “I knew
we shouldn’t have trusted him! I knew it. I didn’t want to take
this job in the first place, but would you listen? Nooo! You said…”
Paulie let her rattle on. She was blowing off steam. In a few minutes maybe
she’d run out.

Took more than a few minutes, but
finally she quieted and stood there in the middle of the living room, glaring
at him.

“All right,” she said.
“I’ll help you out. But so help me God, this is the last time we
have anything to do with you-know-who. Is that totally clear?”

“As a bell,” he said,
reaching for her to seal it with a kiss.

She danced away. “I gotta see
to the kid. And I like totally hate kids, you know. I ever tell you
that?”

“Like a zillion times.”

“Well, that ain’t
changed.”

“But you never said
why.”

“I just do, is all. If I
liked kids I’d‘ve had some by now. But I don’t. I’ll
never have kids. Ever. You understand that?”

“Sure.” Christ, she was
acting crazy. “No kids. No problem. That’s all fine with me.”
He tried to lighten things up. “This one’s only on rental anyway.
We get to return her in a few days or so.” Another glare, this one even
meaner than the first— like she was trying to bore holes in his skull or
something.

“We’d better,”
she said. “Because I don’t know no more about taking care of kids
than you do. What do I do with her?”

“What else? Make sure she
can’t walk or talk when she wakes up… just like all the other
packages.”

“Great, Paulie,” she
said with a venomous glare. “Tie up a little girl. Just great!”

He watched her stalk off into the
big bedroom. He was about to offer to help but thought better of it. She looked
like a cranky wildcat with PMS, ready to scratch his eyes out if he got too
close to her. Better to back off and let her do it her way… alone.

Poppy approached the
blanket-wrapped lump on the bed gingerly, as if it might rear up and bite her.
She didn’t want it to wake up.

A kid. Of all things, a damn kid.
Well, wasn’t that where the word came from anyway? Kidnapping? What were
they going to do with a whiny, crybaby kid?

Cautiously, she pulled the blanket
aside to take a look. Skinny little thing. Wearing a uniform. Probably a
private school. Rich kid. But that dumb red beret—where’d she get that?

Poppy knelt so she could get a look
at the face. Round, kind of cute, with chocolate smeared on her lips. Nice
hair… long, dark, braided. Poppy wondered what color her eyes were, but
wasn’t about to pry up a lid to see.

As she knelt there, staring at the
child, a strange thought came to her. How old would Glory be now? Probably
about the same age. Would Glory have looked like this little thing? She’d
had dark hair and…

Poppy leaned forward and pushed up
one of the kid’s eyelids—just far enough and long enough to see the
color—then let it drop.

Blue eyes…

Just like Glory’s…

Poppy shook herself. This was doing
her like no good at all. She hadn’t thought of Glory—hadn’t
allowed herself to think of her—in years.

Glory was gone. Long gone. And
there was no coming back from there.

She busied herself with trying to
find a way to bind, gag, and blindfold a six-year old. All their supplies were
geared for adult sizes.

“Damn!” Snake slammed
the heel of his palm against the Dataphone—in the Mayflower Hotel this
time—nearly dislodging it from the wall.

He glanced around. One passerby
through the lobby stopped to stare at him for a second, then passed on.
Probably thought he was talking to his stockbroker.

He shackled his rage. After all, he
went online through these hotel phones to avoid detection. The last thing he
wanted to do here was make a scene. But damn, he really wanted to punch his
gloved fist through the Dataphone’s blue screen.

He reread the Vanduyne e-mail on
his Thinkpad screen one more time, just to be sure he wasn’t seeing
things, then saved the message to his hard drive.

The kid’s a goddamn
epileptic! All that primo inside information on Vanduyne and his brat but not
one rotten mention of epilepsy, or medicine.

A defective package—the
worst!

Served him right for getting
involved with someone he didn’t know. In the first place, he never would
have touched an upright citizen; in the second, never an upright
citizen’s kid; and third, he’d never pick up a sick
package—anything could go wrong.

So what did he have on his hands
now? An upright citizen’s sick kid.

He wanted to scream. He wanted
to— He disconnected and walked away from the phone bank before he did
something stupid. When he was cooler, he came back to another phone and punched
in Salinas’s private number.

“Il Giardinello.” Snake
had expected to hear Salinas’s butt boy. Alien Gold. But this voice was
thickly accented.

“It’s me,” he
said, snarling. “Tell your boss the package has been picked up but
it’s defective. Tell him I want to talk to him now.”

“Defective? What
do—?”

“I’ll tell him.
I’m only going to explain it once.”

“Hold on.”

Snake waited what seemed like a
long time before the guy came back on the line. “He is not here right
now, but he is on his way in. He says to give me your number and wait there. He
will call you back as soon as he arrives.”

Snake read off the number on the
phone and hung up; then he sat back and waited. He calmed himself. No snarling during
his next conversation. He didn’t like Carlos Salinas, didn’t trust
him, and wouldn’t be working with him if he thought he had a choice, but
you didn’t snarl at a guy who had his fingers in most of the drug trade
east of the Mississippi.