The Bliss Factor (38 page)

Kemp braced his feet in the opening and dropped onto his ass. And he began to shout. “Help!” he yelled. “He tied me to a tree. He’s going to torture me.”

Conn hauled Kemp upright by the collar of his shirt, planted his foot on Kemp’s ass, and shoved with every ounce of muscle he possessed. Kemp shot out of the cell like a champagne cork, bounced off the opposite wall, and fell on his face.

“Looks like torture to me,” Melnick said, having come into the holding cell area to watch the show.

The guard nodded solemnly.

Kemp got on all fours and tried to dive between Conn’s legs, back into the cell. Conn scissored his legs together, trapping Kemp at the neck. He gurgled a little, so Conn caught him by the waistband of his jeans and hauled him back out into the narrow hallway.

“Jesus,” he said, “I just want you to make a phone call.” Kemp rolled on to his back and peered up. “Promise you won’t hurt me?”

“Yeah.” But he didn’t tell Kemp who was waiting for him in the parking lot. He did handcuff him.

They got to the car, Annie stepped out, and Kemp tried to run. Conn took him by the collar and cuffs and stuffed him into the backseat of the Jaguar, following him in.

“Where to?” Nelson asked.

“Holly Grove. There’s a tree there with Kemp’s name on it. Unless he makes this phone call.”

Annie turned around and looked at Kemp; that was all it took. Conn had been in some nasty situations in his life, but confronted with that face, he had to admit he’d do whatever was asked of him.

He handed Kemp his own cell, retrieved along with the rest of his personal effects. Kemp dialed and handed the phone to Conn.

“You didn’t have to use Kemp’s phone for the caller ID,” Harry said once Conn had identified himself. “I would have picked up for you.”

“Just covering all my bases,” Conn said. He’d needed to retrieve Kemp anyway, and frankly he was tired of coming up empty-handed. Harry knew Kemp was in custody, and Kemp would rat him out without a second thought.

“My wife says you were at the house.”

“You have a nice family,” Conn said.

“You’re not married to her. I’m already in hot water, and she doesn’t even know what I did yet.”

“What if I offered you a way to cool that water off?”

“You want me to find out where your girlfriend is.”

“Yeah,” Conn said, not even wincing at the label. He had bigger problems than how the bad guys characterized his relationship with Rae.

“I’ll try,” Harry was saying, “but Greenblatt has gone berserk. He wants the plates and he’s not exactly trusting us to get them for him.”

“So is that a yes?”

“Can you keep me out of jail?”

“I can’t promise that.”

Harry was silent.

“You could disappear,” Conn said.

“Either way I’m gone from my family, but at least I’d be free.”

“But you’d still have to live with your conscience.”

IT WAS DARK, ALMOST PITCH-BLACK, AND QUIET
except for the rattle of the chain around her ankle when Rae shifted position. She was hunched on a lumpy mattress covered with a dirty blanket that had stopped making her skin crawl days ago. At least she thought it was days. It could have been hours or weeks, hard to measure time in the complete absence of light and sound.

One thing she knew, she was never going to hear the words
solitary confinement
again and envy the recipient a chance to get away from it all. Sensory deprivation was bad enough; being alone with her own thoughts for hours on end was torture. If she’d been a wolf, she’d have chewed off her foot by now. Not that she minded being in her own head, but she was a make-lemonade-out-of-lemons kind of person, a woman who needed to act in the face of adversity. It was damned hard to find anything positive about her predicament, and impossible to take action shackled to a bed.

Her parents must be frantic, and Conn . . . Best not to think about him. If anything would push her over the edge, it was the stew of emotions that made up her relationship with Connor Larkin, and her inability to sort them out, let alone articulate them—and not because she had a problem speaking her mind. Because she had a problem speaking her heart.

Not something she would need to worry about unless she got free, which wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Short of chewing off her foot.

She was imprisoned in Hans Lockner’s small trailer, one room, except for the bathroom. All the windows were covered, and her chain wasn’t long enough to reach any of them. The tiny bathroom had no windows at all, and she only got in there when Morris Greenblatt let her. Not that she had to use it much. He’d drugged her the first time she ate, so she hadn’t been eating, only drinking water when she could get into the bathroom and get it straight from the tap. And yelling hadn’t gotten her anything but a sore throat, and eventually another look at Greenblatt’s gun.

It galled her. All of it. From the moment Morris had come into her office and held her at gunpoint, she’d felt like a failure. The man was six inches shorter than her, sixty pounds overweight, and he’d probably burst a blood vessel if he had to run more than ten feet. But Smith & Wesson were the great equalizers, and she’d found herself out of the office and in the backseat of his car, hands and feet secured, gagged, and shoved over sideways.

She’d struggled upright just as Morris drove them out of the parking structure, barely missing getting creamed by a U-Haul pulling in. Shame, she thought now, as she had then. If the U-Haul had hit them she’d probably be in the hospital, but at least she wouldn’t be a hostage on the verge of death. And as if that wasn’t enough, she was spending her last hours in the place she detested the most: the Renaissance festival. Close enough to feel Conn’s presence, but no way to get to him.

Frustration was the least of what she was feeling; there was a cold, murderous rage building inside her, and it wasn’t all aimed at her captor.

Greenblatt had left his car in the overflow lot, a mile away through thick woods, and walked her into the night, keeping a death grip on her arm and the gun shoved into her ribs. She might have fought back under other circumstances, but in the pitch dark, on uneven ground, there’d been a pretty good chance he’d shoot her accidentally one of the times he stumbled. And he’d stumbled a lot. She had the bruises to prove it. Considering his frame of mind, she was lucky she wasn’t dead. He’d been on the edge when he kidnapped her, as the days passed and he didn’t get what he wanted; she could all but smell the desperation. She’d never understood that phrase before, but now she knew it was a combination of sweat, stale cologne, and clothing that hadn’t been changed in a long, long time.

A light flipped on, Greenblatt’s distinct shape just a silhouette against it. “Take these.”

Rae blinked and held up a hand, but he didn’t wait for her eyes to adjust before he tossed a bundle of clothing into her lap.

She unwound the bundle and held it up, rolling her eyes. “No. Way,” she said, her voice rusty. It wasn’t enough to be held prisoner for a week in a ratty trailer where the only alone time she got was in a windowless bathroom. It wasn’t enough to be chained to a filthy bed in a pitch-black room while he sat there in the dark . . . breathing and creeping her out almost the entire time. It wasn’t enough that she, a person who counted things for a living, didn’t even know what day it was, that she was practically dying of thirst and starvation, all the while she was mere feet from Conn and her parents, with no hope of rescue. Now she had to dress like a wench?

Morris cocked his gun.

“Go ahead,” she said, “you’re going to kill me anyway.” She could see the struggle on his face. He didn’t plan on letting her out of this alive, but he needed her cooperation. And her only hope was to get out of the trailer.

“If you promise to behave,” Morris said, “you can take a shower.”

She cut her eyes toward the bacteria breeding ground that was the trailer’s bathroom. “In there?”

“That or nothing.”

Rae heaved a breath. “Unlock me.”

“Uh-uh.” He tossed her the key.

She unlocked the cuff around her ankle and looked up at him.

He met her stare, moved his gun hand an inch to the right, and squeezed off a shot.

Rae eyed the tiny spot of anemic daylight coming through the new hole in the wall and decided she wasn’t okay with dying. At least not unless she could take Morris Greenblatt with her.

She showered in the stingy trickle of water, careful not to touch the sides, then let herself air dry, and although she nearly froze to death, she used the time to wrack her brain again. Her brain let her down, not that she blamed it; she just didn’t have the frame of reference it took to deal with an armed and desperate counterfeiter. She did, Rae thought, have the ability to adapt to circumstance and take advantage of opportunity. And she had a little desperation of her own to draw on.

She slipped into the wench dress; she despised it, but at least it was clean. Morris, when she joined him, looked ridiculous in tunic and tights. Except for the gun he held under cover of his cape. The gun looked pretty damn serious, especially as the smell of cordite still hung on the fetid air.

He held out a plastic tie. Rae bit down on her frustration and took it, putting it around her wrists and letting Morris tighten it.When he came at her with a gag, though, she balked.

“I’ll behave, I promise.”

“I can’t risk it,” Morris said.

“Why don’t you call this off? I won’t say anything.

Neither will my parents or anyone else. They’ll go to jail if they talk.”

It sounded reasonable to Rae, even if it was her idea. Morris seemed to consider it, too, but just when she began to have hope, he shook his head.

“Too late for that. It was too late when your boyfriend got involved.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“You better hope he has feelings for you, because I’m trading you for the plates.”

“He won’t give them up.”

“Then I’m sorry for you.”

“Not sorry enough to overcome your greed and selfishness.”

“I can’t go to jail.”

“Let me loose and you won’t have to.”

Morris studied her face for a minute, smirking at what he saw there. “You think you can kill me with your bare hands?” he asked her. “It’s not as easy as you think, killing.”

“No,” Rae said, “it just takes a certain kind of person.” He rubbed his forehead, ashamed, and Rae attacked, leading with all her fury and fear and hopelessness. It wasn’t much of a struggle, not with her hands tied, but she got in a couple good hits. She was also gagged before it was all over, but Morris was limping. And she hadn’t gotten shot, which she took as a minor miracle since he’d never let go of the gun.

He shoved her out the door, into a sunrise that had barely limped over the horizon only to disappear beneath an unrelieved layer of heavy, gray clouds. It was chilly and drizzling, and not much light made it through the canopy of dead leaves still on the trees.

Morris walked her around the outside of the faire grounds. Rae kept her eyes on where she was placing her feet, until he stopped, and then she looked up—way up—and said, “You have got to be kidding.”

 

 

CORNELIA FERDIC WAS A MAN. BETTER YET, SHE WAS a man with a past, and that past was counterfeiting. Frederick Cornelius, aka Cornelia Ferdic, had spent eighteen and a half years of a twenty-five-year sentence in federal prison for a bogus set of twenty-dollar-bill plates so good they were on display at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, D.C. He’d only gotten better in the last quarter century. He’d come out of the closet, too, but going around in drag didn’t hamper his skill with metal, and it had turned out to be a pretty good red herring.

Mike’s call about Cornelia wound up being the high point of a week Conn spent moving a hundred miles an hour and getting nowhere fast. Greenblatt had completely dropped out of his own life, and Harry had proven to be no help whatsoever. Hans Lockner had fallen off the radar, only to reappear in a hospital psych ward. He’d been dumped at the emergency room entrance by some well-meaning friend who hadn’t stuck around long enough to offer an explanation as to how Hans had gotten comatose on a combination of alcohol and Ecstasy, leaving the doctors to suspect suicide. Conn had a feeling Greenblatt’s Stooges might have been involved.

None of it brought him any closer to finding Rae.

Annie and Nelson weren’t giving him hell, but he felt it every time he saw the hope and anguish in their eyes. They blamed themselves. Conn knew he was really at fault. He’d screwed up this operation from start to finish. Getting Rae hurt, a woman he . . . Getting a civilian hurt would only be the capper.

A sleepless Friday night rolled into an overcast Saturday morning. The temperature had dropped into the forties, and all the leaves seemed to have fallen from the trees overnight. When Conn’s phone rang he was prowling the faire grounds not long after the place opened for the day at ten A.M. His gut was already talking, big-time, so he didn’t bother to check the phone’s display.

It was no surprise to hear Morris Greenblatt’s voice. What surprised Conn was the wave of fury, so violent it hazed his vision with red and had his hands fisting. The crack of the phone he was on the verge of crushing brought him back, far enough to keep him from destroying his one connection to Rae.

“Did you hear me?” Morris asked, sounding impatient.

“You’re bringing Rae to the faire grounds around noon,” Conn repeated. “Where should I meet you?”

“You’ll know. Bring the plates.” And Morris disconnected.

Conn made a phone call, said, “Holly Grove, now,” and hung up without waiting for a response. He was halfway back to the Airstream when he ran into Nelson Bliss.

Nelson took one look at his face and said, “Now?”