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  According to Clayton’s files on the Smoot crew, son Click had two registered vehicles: a silver 2004 Nissan Z and a 1974 GMC panel van. Winter hoped he was driving one of them. He took one bug, a dark gray plastic wafer with a magnetized disk on one side, and found a silver Z parked on the deck’s second level, its grille facing out. Winter checked the tag to make sure it was Click’s, then he stuck the bug behind the license plate so that only its thin-wire antenna was visible.

  Winter’s cell phone began vibrating in his pocket just before he heard footsteps approaching. He moved silently to a position behind the vehicle parked beside the Z and waited. He heard an electronic chirping, and the door to the Z open and shut. The engine roared to life and the Z drove off down the ramp.

  Winter sprinted to his truck and speed-dialed Alexa while he was backing out.

  “I tried to let you know Click was coming up,” she said.

  “I planted the bug,” he said. “You got a signal on him?”

  “Ten and ten,” she said, her voice flat and professional. “I’m pulling out behind him. Will feed location and direction.”

  24

  Hank Trammel, Winter’s law-enforcement mentor, once told Winter that law enforcement was like a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week gambling casino. The bad guys ran the house, so while there were hot streaks for the cop players, over the course of any lawman’s career the house odds prevailed. The best a lawman could do was to ride the hot streaks and grin and bear it when the deck went against you. Since you couldn’t count on luck, you used your brain, worked hard, and called upon your skills to raise your odds of success. Life-and-death cases like this one were the high-stakes table. If Lucy and her child were still alive, they wouldn’t be breathing any longer than necessary.

  Winter didn’t know why Click had left the hotel, but he was sure the boy hadn’t run because he knew anybody was onto him.

  The rain and the traffic acted as an effective veil. Winter used the cell phone’s earpiece so he could talk hands-free. He stayed a quarter mile behind Alexa, who remained far enough behind Click so she could keep him in sight, but far enough back so he wouldn’t notice her car.

  “You think somebody spelled him at the hotel?” Alexa asked.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “If we’d been a couple of minutes later in realizing who he was, he’d have been long gone. We couldn’t have spooked him, could we?”

  “No,” Winter said.

  “Not like we have a lot of leads, if this doesn’t pan out,” Alexa said.

  “The fact that he was tagging after the judge is more than enough evidence for me that the Smoots are involved in the abduction.”

  “Clayton’s the best there is at gathering and interpreting intelligence. Far as I know, if the man says he’s sure, he’s right on target.”

  “He certainly gathered a lot of information in a very short time. Does he have his own firm?”

  “He’s part of a larger network, I guess you’d say.”

  “They know he hacks intel systems?”

  “Well, if they didn’t trust him, he couldn’t do it. Not in these troubled times. The intel community has been under so much pressure lately.”

  “You’ve used him on official business?”

  “I’ve used him in an advisory capacity. Brass doesn’t like agents going outside, especially when it turns out they are successful where we weren’t. I don’t have to tell you how it works.”

  “Territorial imperative meets the Peter Principle,” Winter said.

  “All I know is that without Clayton, we wouldn’t have been able to get our hands around this one. If he hadn’t come in, I’d have done about as well standing on a median strip with a cardboard sign that said, ‘Stop if you’ve seen any missing people.’ ”

  Winter laughed. “You couldn’t say which people.”

  “Click might not know any of the specifics about the grab or where our people are being held,” Alexa said, sadly.

  They were driving on Independence Boulevard in light traffic. Click wasn’t trying to be evasive in the least.

  “What do you hear from Precious?” Winter asked.

  “Why do you ask?”

  Precious was Antonia Keen’s nickname. Antonia was Alexa’s younger sister, but before they had found a permanent foster home, Alexa had also been a mother to the younger girl. Antonia had been a tomboy with a capital “T.” Winter had never particularly cared for her, and perhaps that was because she had openly resented his relationship with her older sister. He understood the psychology, but he couldn’t forgive her hostility toward him.

  “Why wouldn’t I ask?” he said to Alexa. “Last I heard she was burning a path to the top of the Army. That still the case?”

  “You have me in sight, Massey?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Our boy’s turning into a shopping center,” Alexa said.

  “I see him.”

  Winter noted that Alexa had just avoided answering his innocent question about her younger sister. Maybe Antonia had done something to upset Alexa, but more likely Alexa had too much on her mind at the moment to make small talk.

  Winter put his mind on two people being held by scary people.

  25

  Lucy Dockery had lived a life of privilege. As the only child of a successful divorce attorney and a federal judge, she had attended the best schools, lived in nice homes, and enjoyed social contact with wealthy and influential people. At that moment, if she could have gone back to the worst day of her life and relived it over and over for eternity, Lucy would have done that rather than to have gone through the hours since she had been kidnapped.

  Lucy’s previous worst day had begun like any other, and was as mundane as any before it. Walter and her mother had left to go to an antique store to look at a grandfather clock for her father’s birthday. Lucy had intended to go along with them, but she had stayed home with Elijah because he felt feverish. Around four P.M., while she was loading the washing machine, the doorbell rang. She had opened the front door to her father standing with their minister.

  Her father had said simply, “Lucy, Walter and your mother are gone.” The words hit her like a hammer blow that left her seeing everything through a watery filter of shock. After that, he had sat in a chair and cried like a baby. She had stood there wishing that she had been with Walter.

  Battling tears, Lucy thought about that again now, recalling how her sense of life being ordered and perfect had drained away in that moment, leaving her alone in a dark, frightening place. Lucy had been cast out from a paradise into a world where everything had sharp edges and where the super-heated air wasn’t breathable. Her loss had taken her like some predator striking out of nowhere and grabbing her up in its jaws. It had shaken her until she was empty of everything but fear, and an awful, unbearable blackness. And there was no doubt that she would have joined Walter had it not been for their Elijah.

  But the day a drunk driver had killed her husband and her mother was a sunny stroll in the park compared to the day she was now living.

  Hopeless. At that moment, Lucy wished once more, as she had often for the past year, that she could just curl up and die. What did these hideous people have in mind for her child and her? The worst that could happen would probably happen no matter what she did. So, what should she do? What could she do? She knew what Walter would tell her. Save our son. You are the only chance Elijah has. Death will come to you just like it came to me. Live until you die, Lucy. Let our son know me through you—you who knew me better than anybody.

  The distinctive growling of what sounded like an approaching motorcycle refocused her thoughts. She had heard the sound earlier when two or three of them had roared off together.

  The woman left the trailer, slamming the door.

  Another metal door, very near the trailer, creaked open. Lucy had heard that door open and close before, always before someone came or right after they left.

  Straining, Lucy heard angry voices.r />
  She was sure the male voice was the vile man with scaly hands. The woman and the man were arguing about something. Lucy heard the word “twins” used several times. She also heard the names Buck and Dixie and believed those were probably their names.

  The metal door slammed again.

  The motorcycle started and roared off.

  The woman stomped back into the trailer and slammed the door.

  Elijah started crying.

  The woman stormed into the bedroom, the light pouring in blinding Lucy. She put her hand up in front of her face to protect her eyes from it.

  “I’m fixing to have to leave you two here by yourself for a few minutes. Don’t you even think about trying to get out, because I’ll know it if you do and I’ll take it out on your kid. You got that?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “You just remember that watching one of you is easier than watching both of you.”

  “I understand.”

  “You damn well better, missy. You better. Because as the Lord above is my witness, I will twist his little head right off and pitch it out into the woods for the coyotes to clean. And stop cryin’.”

  “I understand.”

  The woman plucked Elijah out of the playpen and brought him to Lucy.

  Elijah, realizing that the silent woman on the bed in the strange room was his mother, clung to her. Lucy watched as the big woman snatched a coat from the arm of the couch, and slammed the door going outside.

  Lucy heard the outside metal door creak open and slam shut again. A few seconds later she heard what sounded like another motorcycle roar to life and drive away. The other door must be to a shed . . . or a gate in a fence.

  For a precious minute she held Eli to her, caressing his head, kissing his cheeks.

  “Momou. Momou. Momou,” he said over and over.

  “It’s okay, Elijah,” she told him. “I love you, baby. I love you so much. You are going to be safe.” Your father says so.

  She thought about the big woman’s threat, and she believed the woman would make good on her word by hurting them, but she couldn’t make herself believe the woman would actually kill them. If these people intended to do that, why hadn’t they already done so? Everybody knew that abductees had no value once they were dead. Lucy was increasingly sure this was about money. A ransom. But, she thought, the woman is obviously unstable. People in these circumstances do die, and for your sake, Walter, I can’t risk that happening to Elijah.

  FREE. A four-letter word for getting the hell out of Dodge.

  26

  Peanut Smoot strolled into the brightly lit drugstore and made a beeline for the prescription counter in the rear. The store was one in a chain of fifteen regional stores owned by a pharmacist Peanut did business with. The owner had a problem that involved deviant sexual needs that respectable people didn’t advertise, and Peanut had fixed it up so the man could safely get the urge met. As a result, the owner had been recruited to buy any pharmaceutical drugs Peanut’s people came across as well as the other kinds of drugstore items you might find—like shampoo, tampons, and batteries—in a truck you’d hijacked.

  When the owner spotted Peanut through the observation window in his office, he hurried out into the area where three lab-coated pharmacists were filling small bottles from large ones. The man seemed a little nervous, but that was probably because they usually met late at night after the employees had left.

  “Mr. Smoot,” he said.

  “I need something for back pain, George.”

  “What type of pain?” The skin on George’s face seemed stretched tighter than usual, his eyes darting around the store behind Peanut like he was suspicious that something odd was going on out there in the aisles.

  “The back pain kind.”

  “By that I mean how did you injure your back?”

  “I fell off a ladder.”

  “I have just the thing,” George said, holding a finger in the air. He darted off into a back storage room. When he returned, he handed Peanut a box of over-the-counter pain medication and, after winking at Peanut, said loudly enough to be heard, “These will work as well as anything nonprescription.”

  Peanut handed the druggist a ten-dollar bill and waited for him to go through the cash register motions and make change for it.

  “Please come again,” George said with a forced cheerfulness, like he was talking to just anybody who had come in to spend money in a store he earned by marrying the owner’s daughter, who herself looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy with hair that looked like a hat made out of straw painted red.

  George had made up the incapacitation liquid Peanut needed to make the Dockery woman stay put. It was a potent blend of chemicals that doctors used for operating and had the effect of making it impossible for someone to move until it wore off.

  Back in the truck, Peanut opened the small pasteboard box and took out a bottle that contained, not the blue caplets the box promised, but a couple dozen capsules filled with tiny colored balls.

  Peanut swallowed two of the caps and chased them with a carbonated sip of warm soda out of a can he’d had sitting in the holder a good while.

  When his unregistered cell rang, he saw that it was a familiar pay phone number. Peanut knew that cellular calls were not private. Ask Pablo Escobar about using a cellular when the government wants to track you by your voice.

  “What?”

  “There’s a little problem.” It was his son Buck’s voice.

  “What?” Peanut felt the hollow burning in his stomach he always got when Buck said he had a problem. Buck’s little problems tended to be larger than he’d admit to.

  “Damn twins.”

  Peanut took a deep breath and shifted in his seat. “What’d they do?”

  “I gave them that little digging job to do, but when I came back they’d gone off. Hadn’t more than just started it.”

  “Go find ’em and you get it done.”

  “I don’t know where to look.”

  “Hellfire, boy, they didn’t go to Mars in a flying saucer. Just go to where you saw them last and track ’em down. Y’all mess this deal up, I’m gone mess you up. You got that?”

  “I hear ya. Everything’s fine, except for the twins getting lost. Everything else is a hunnerd percent right like it’s supposed to be.”

  “It damn well better be.” Peanut checked his watch. “You don’t find them in a hour, you call me back and I’ll come out and see to it. And you make damn sure the you-know-what stays put. Don’t do nothin’ stupid.”

  Peanut closed the phone. It was obvious that Buck had ordered the twins to do what he was too lazy to do, then left them alone with just his instructions to go by. Peanut had told Buck to dig graves so he’d stay occupied. He didn’t know for sure where the Dockerys would be buried, because nobody had told him that yet. Maybe they’d want the bodies found sometimes, or put under a slab, or ground into burger. He should have told Buck not to involve the twins—or leave them alone to do the digging. Some things you could tell the twins to do, some things you couldn’t leave them at. Buck knew that better than anybody. Trouble was, Buck was like some kind of animal that couldn’t think about food until he was nearly starving to death. You couldn’t trust him to plan ahead or stick to any particular job for very long.

  The psychologist that Peanut had taken Buck to because the public school made him do it had said he had behavioral issues. Peanut loved the term issues.

  Peanut knew all there was to know about his oldest son.

  Buck didn’t give a damn about anybody but himself.

  He didn’t like people telling him what to do.

  He had a hair-trigger temper.

  He got a kick out of other people’s pain.

  He was a liar.

  He imagined things.

  He was a bully.

  Nothing made him sick to his stomach.

  He never felt guilty about anything he did.

  He took what he wanted when he wanted it.

&
nbsp; He always got his revenge.

  All of the “issues” that made Buck a hellcat to teach or to get to follow orders worked in the boy’s favor when it came to enjoying a successful career in his chosen field—the family business.

  27

  Dixie Smoot opened her mouth and snapped it closed to click her porcelain teeth loudly—something she did out of habit when she was really pissed off.

  Buck said he’d left the twins to take a turn digging, and that he had just been gone for a “few” minutes to go and check on something. She couldn’t imagine what he had to check on out in the plumb middle of nowhere. Now Buck was gone off to the Utzes’ store down the road to use the pay phone to call Peanut about the twins. Her daddy would be fit to be tied if things weren’t going smoothly. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time he had needed to punch out Buck. When it came to discipline, her daddy didn’t spare a rod.

  Dixie figured she’d find the twins before Buck got back and joined her, because whenever he could get by with it, he’d get back too late to do any work. Buck was worse things than lazy, but what he did to others was between him and whoever he did it to. It was mostly the lazy part of Buck that complicated Dixie’s life.

  Dixie’s four-wheeler was one of several that Peanut’s people had found inadequately attended and had brought out to the house for hunting and chores. You could do a lot more with the 400cc Honda four-wheel-drive ATVs than use them for getting yourself and your gun into the woods, and bringing deer back out when you killed one. The roads on the thousand-acre property were really just trails and a challenge for the most rugged four-wheel-drive vehicles.

  There was only one real road onto the land, and it was hardly more than a dirt path with some gravel scattered on it so you could get vehicles to the barn. You could get around the land on a tractor, and they had one in the shed, but the ATVs were a lot faster. The tractor had a winch on it, and if you wanted to get around on the land to work with it you spent more time pulling it up out of the steep and eroded creek banks than working.