ZERO HERO (The Kate Huntington Mystery series) (24 page)

            She slurped some more coffee, hoping the caffeine would clear her fuzzy head. The house phone rang.

            As usual, Rose cut right to the chase. “Been thinking about the kids and Maria, and about my grouchy husband. Got a two-birds-with-one-stone idea for you.”

            “Hunh?” Kate mumbled, not at all sure what her friend was talking about.

            “Be safer for them if someone was inside the house, as well as the cruisers on the street. Mac’s not supposed to move around too much yet. I’m afraid to leave him alone all day. Figured I’d bring him over on my way to the office. He can be the inside eyes and ears for the cops, and Maria can make sure he doesn’t overdo.”

             Kate breathed out a sigh. “That’s an excellent idea. We’d already decided to keep the kids home from school. They’ve met Samuelson and would assume he’s a good guy if he approached them. The only way I could change that would be to scare them to death by telling them the man tried to kill their parents.”

            “Might not be a bad idea to scare them some.”

            Kate sighed again. She probably should warn them, but they’d already had their innocence shaken a few too many times in their short lives. “Bring Mac on over,” she said into the phone. “Maria will love the opportunity to fuss over him.”

            Rose let out a low chuckle before disconnecting.

            Forty-five minutes later, they were getting Mac settled on the living room sofa. He slipped his gun under the pillow Kate had given him, then leaned back against it.

            Kate wasn’t sure how she felt about having an unlocked gun in the house with the kids home.

            He caught her expression. “Don’t worry, sweet pea. I won’t leave it unattended. Where I go, it goes.”

            Kate nodded as Rose handed her cousin a bottle of pills. She rattled off something in Spanish. Maria rolled her eyes and put the pill bottle in her apron pocket. Kate surmised Rose had warned Maria that Mac might resist taking the medication.

            She smiled to herself. She’d love to stick around to see who won that battle, but she needed to get to the office.

            “Behave,” Rose told Mac as she pulled the front door closed behind them.

            On the porch, she put a restraining hand on Kate’s arm. “I’m following you to work and there’ll be a guard in your waiting room today.”

            Kate opened her mouth to protest, then thought better of it.

~~~~~~~~

            Dave Samuelson was multitasking–packing his belongings, watching the noon news, and trying to decide on a new name.

            He had credentials, a driver’s license, Social Security card, credit cards and even a passport, for two different additional identities. They were part of the emergency kit that he carried with him at all times. But they’d been provided by his employer’s forger. So he’d have to hire someone else to make new documents in a completely different name.

            He had used the credit card from one of those identities to book a flight to Costa Rica for tomorrow afternoon. From there he would hire a private charter plane, with cash, to take him to his new home, in Belize. Today, to be on the safe side, he was moving to a different motel, one near the airport.

            He’d grown fond of the name David, having answered to it for nearly a decade, but maybe he would make that his middle name. What last name should he go with?

            He paused in his packing to plug “common surnames in Belize” into Google on his laptop. Wikipedia informed him that over half of the twenty-two most common ones were not Spanish.

           
Excellent! Hmm, Smith or Jones are too obvious.

            Yet the more unusual ones would probably elicit too many questions from others with the same surname, curious to know if he was a relative. Williams sounded promising.

            “Hi. My name’s John David Williams,” he said to the mirror over the desk. “But I go by Dave.” He flashed a boyish grin at himself and then went back to his packing.

            He was stuffing the last of his underwear into his oversized duffel bag when a name mentioned on the TV had his head jerking up. He grabbed the remote and turned up the volume. He’d been watching for the face of a black hooker named Gazelle. That was not the face he now saw on the screen.

            “This man is wanted for assault and attempted kidnapping. He is believed to be armed and dangerous,” the news anchor’s voice said.

            Dave was staring at a photo of himself.

~~~~~~~~

            Monday afternoon, Skip was once again working on paperwork. He could have sworn he’d only left a couple reports in his in-box on Friday, but somehow they’d multiplied like bunnies over the weekend.

            He was tired and cranky. Kate had awakened them both at three a.m., in the throes of a nightmare.

            She’d eventually settled back into a fitful sleep, but then his mind had turned to the loss of his granddaddy’s gun. Twice, it had been confiscated by the police as evidence after a shooting, once when he hadn’t even been the one who fired it. He’d been lucky to get it back. But this time it was truly gone for good, at the bottom of a cliff in western Maryland.

            He pulled his back-up gun out of his desk drawer and held it in his hand. It didn’t feel all that different, and yet it did. It was relatively new, actually a better gun. But the older one had been his grandfather’s and then his father’s. It was more than a gun or even a keepsake. It was a connection to the strength and courage of the Canfield men who had come before him.

            He shook his head. How silly to get maudlin over a pistol. He put the .38 back in his desk drawer.

            Shifting in his chair, he tried to get more comfortable. There were very few parts of his body that weren’t bruised from his close encounter with that cliff yesterday. He was washing down an aspirin with a swig from his water bottle, when his desk phone rang.

            He grabbed up the receiver. “Canfield.”

            “When you were poking around downtown,” Tyrell Cooper said in his ear, “did you happen to talk to a tall, skinny, black hooker?”

            “Goes by Gazelle? Yeah.”

            “Shit!”

            Skip’s stomach sank. “What happened?”

            “Two of our uniforms found her this morning in an alley, bullet hole in the side of her skull. No money on her so at first it was assumed she’d been robbed of her evening’s wages.”

            “Gazelle was the gal who tried to pick my pocket. She let it slip that the girls are expected to turn in a certain number of wallets a day.”

            “Were there witnesses to that?”

            “The other ladies with her would’ve seen me grab her arm, and her trying to pull away. So they might’ve guessed at what happened. But no one was close enough to hear what we said to each other. And I seriously doubt she told them.”

            Silence on the line for a moment. “It doesn’t feel right to me. I can’t see Freddie killing off a source of income just because she tried to pick your pocket and failed.”

            “Me neither,” Skip said. “But she did seem pretty damn scared when I figured out about the wallet quota. Suddenly she seemed a lot more afraid of something other than me or being arrested. She almost broke her wrist trying to twist free.”

            Skip toyed with the idea of trying again to discourage Tyrell from using Dolph for the sting operation. But if Dolph got wind of it, he’d be furious.

            “Thanks for the info,” Tyrell said. “I’ll let you all know when I’ve got the details ironed out for Wednesday.”

            “Okay.” Skip hung up the phone and stared at it for a moment. He wished he could shake the feeling that this sting wasn’t going to go well.

            He saw Gazelle again, in his mind’s eye, running away from him in those ridiculous shoes. Her life hadn’t been much but these greedy bastards didn’t have the right to take it.

            He went back to his paperwork, now glad for the distraction.

            His cell phone rang.
Now what?

            “Pete’s gone,” Manny said when he answered it.

            “What the hell?”

            “I went out to make a circuit around the trailer. Todd was sleepin’. I was only outta sight of the door for maybe five minutes. When I came back inside, he was gone. We’re almost out to the main road. No sign of him, and no fresh vehicle tracks in the mud. But there’s lots of woods to hide in around here.”

            “What’s your take on it?” Skip asked.

            “He left on his own. He’s been antsy all morning.”

            Skip ran fingers through his hair, then grabbed a hunk and gave it a yank. “Can you stay out by the main road where you’ve got phone service? I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

            “Sure, Boss.”

            He glanced at his watch. Five of three. With any luck, he’d catch his wife between clients.

            “Kate Huntington.”

            “We’ve got a problem. Your boy’s slipped his leash.”

            “What?”

            “Pete’s gone and all signs indicate he left of his own accord, on foot.”

            “Holy crap! Hang on, lemme tell my next client I’ll be a few minutes.”

            While Skip waited for Kate to return to the phone, he tried to shove aside his anger so he could sort out the best course of action. What was with this guy? They were giving him all kinds of
pro bono
services. Hell, they were buying his groceries and paying to guard his ass, and he just slips off when he’s feeling restless? Not to mention the small matter of attempts against their lives because of him!

            “We need to find him,” Kate said in his ear.

            “Maybe, maybe not.”

            A couple beats of silence. “What do you want to do? Drop the case?”

            The word
Yes
was on his lips. They’d invested so much in this case–money, sweat, risk. Mac had been shot, almost killed.
They’d
almost been killed yesterday. Enough was enough. Time to end the craziness.

            Gazelle’s emaciated face swam in his mind’s eye. He tried to ignore the lump of guilt and sadness in his throat.

            Bottom line, he had two men out there waiting for instructions.

            “I need to go out there. See for myself what’s going on. But yeah, I might tell my men to come home.”

            “I’m going with you.”

            “Why?”

            Another beat of silence. “For the same reason. I need to see what’s happening with Pete, if we can find him. Decide what to do. And we can’t just leave him stranded out in the boonies with no transportation. If nothing else, Rob promised Judith and a judge that he’d be responsible for him.”

            “Okay. We need to leave as soon as possible.”

            “My four o’clock client’s in pretty good shape right now. I’ll call and see if she can reschedule. But I’ve gotta give my three o’clock her full hour. It’ll be about four-fifteen when I’m done here.”

            “I’ll ask Rose if she and Mac can stay at the house this evening, until we get back,” Skip said. “And I think I’ll run home and check on things, then pick you up at your office. That’ll save us some time.”

            “Thanks, sweetheart. See you later.”

            Skip disconnected.

            As he headed out to retrieve his rental truck from the parking lot, he called Rose to fill her in, and then Manny to tell him to sit tight.

            At the house, he greeted Mac, who was channel surfing, then checked on the children.

            Rose was in the kitchen, talking to Maria. “Just did a circuit of the house. Everything’s secure,” she said when he entered the room. “How’re you doing?”

            “I’m fine.” His tone was sharper than he’d intended.

            Rose cocked an expressive eyebrow at him.

           
Damn it!
His partner knew him a little too well.

            “I’ve been in better moods. Depending on what we find out there, I may pull our guys off this case.”

            Rose processed that for a second, then nodded.

            She walked with him to the front door. “Sorry to disrupt your evening,” he said.

            Rose snorted and tilted her head toward Mac, stretched out on the sofa, remote in his hand. “It’s not like I had big plans.”

~~~~~~~~

            Dave sat in another nondescript stolen car, this one light tan, a block down from the Canfields’ house. The anger that only Nell had ever seen fully expressed was now raging inside his head. He took a deep breath to steady himself. Things were spinning out of control, but that just meant he needed to be more careful.

              Aside from the desire for revenge, he’d decided that Kate Huntington-Canfield was a true threat. Yeah, the cops had his picture and his fake name, but other than that they had squat. They wouldn’t be able to convict him of anything if the only person who could definitively identify him and testify against him was dead.

            Dave pulled down the visor and looked in the mirror. He practiced a more reserved smile than his normal boyish grin. The expression matched his newly-dyed brown hair and black-rimmed glasses. The brown contact lenses were a bit annoying, but he’d get used to them.

            His overall plan was intact. He’d still be able to come and go in the U.S. as needed to pursue his new career. He’d just have to use disguises and other identities. But first he was gonna deal with the bitch who’d screwed things up for him. He ground his teeth.

            The red Explorer with the rental car sticker in the back window had been parked in front of the house when he’d arrived. Dave figured it was Canfield’s replacement for the Expedition he’d tried to send over a cliff. There were quite a few other cars parked on the street, but no sign of the wife’s blue Prius.