Smiling at Ellen Corley I said, “I don’t mean to bother you and all, but I need to get some money to Pat Corley. I thought I knew where he lived, but there wasn’t anyone there when I knocked. No car either. You’re his aunt, right?”
She smiled and nodded.
“Oh good,” I said. “Is he in town right now? ‘Cause I told him I could pay him back this next week, but my folks told me if I borrow money from someone I got to get it back to them as soon as possible.” I waggled the hand clutching bills about. “So I got it, so I got to get it to him I guess. He, uh, he heard me saying I needed the money to get my boyfriend a birthday present and he loaned it to me.” I smiled. “That Pat. He’s a great guy.”
It felt like too much padding. For all I knew Pat and his aunt hated each other’s guts, but ultimately all she said was, “I don’t think he’s back yet.”
“Oh. He’s out of town?”
“He’s out of- Well he told me he was going out of town this weekend – He and his friend Arlo – Is that right? That’s right. Arlo. Pat said they were going out of town to a gun shoot.”
“A gun shoot?”
“Mmm-hm.” Nodding her head. “Pat’s a member of one of the gun clubs in town. I don’t think it’s an official shoot. Just a chance to go drink beer and show his stuff with a gun.” She laughed. “Hopefully not in that order.” She laughed again and I smiled to help her enjoy her joke.
“Well, darn. Do you know when he’s supposed to be back?”
“Oh,” she said. “Sometime tonight I would imagine.”
“Right.” I sighed a mighty sigh. “Well, does he have a phone number you know of? I mean, if I could at least call him and tell him I had his money then I could at least tell my folks I’d done that much.”
“I have it written down. Let me go check.”
“Sorry for the bother.”
She made a little noise and then stutter stepped a turn around and went back inside the house, the screen door shutting behind her. Her body widened amply at the hips. The grunts accompanying the stiff movements she seemed barely capable of left me feeling guilty.
Number in hand she returned. Once she opened the door to pass the sticky note to me the dogs chattered at her in yips and she called them bad little boogers, barking at a perfectly nice girl.
Back at Sherman’s car we pondered what to do with Pat’s phone number. We guessed he had caller ID. So if he had a hand in taking me and then taking Maddy, how would he react to getting a call if the caller implied they knew what he was up to?
My phone rang. We both jumped a little. I checked caller ID. It was Dad.
“They didn’t find anything,” he said.
“At the cabin?”
“Nothing. At least nothing they’ll tell me.”
“I’d imagine they’d tell us if they had.”
He grunted a little disbelief. “You all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m with Sherman.”
“All right.”
“I’ll be back before dark. We might get something to eat. Or something. I don’t know. Do you want me to check in before then? Just so you don’t worry?”
He sighed. “If you want to.”
“I can. I will,” I said.
“You sure you’re ok being up and running around?”
“It’s better than just sitting there.”
“Ok.”
“Ok,” I said. “We’ll find her. They’ll find her.”
He didn’t reply. I said, “I can hear you nodding.” I heard him grunt.
“Love you, Dad.”
“I know. Love you, too.”
Hanging up, I stared out the windshield at the street.
I didn’t know what good it would do to tell Dad about this string of thought we were following. I didn’t know if we should tell Dina or Jack. Not after what happened to Nick. What if they were responsible for killing Nick? Would the same thing happen to Pat? And what if he had nothing to do with Maddy and me getting taken? I didn’t want to do anything to get him killed. I didn’t want anything to do with getting anybody killed.
Something sparked in my head. I called Dad right back. I asked him if he had Ruth Arnett’s phone number. He didn’t ask why I wanted it, but he let me have it. I thanked him and hung up.
Sherman was thumbing his phone, browsing the Internet.
“Where’s the shoot?” he asked.
“What shoot?”
“You said the lady said Pat was at a gun shoot.”
“I don’t know.”
Looking at his phone he said, “The Ashmond Gun Club holds shoots once a month. Every 3rd Saturday of the month.”
“You’re on their website?”
He looked at me. He started to say something, but I cut him off. I said, “This is, I mean, yesterday was only the 2nd Saturday of the month.”
“Right.”
“Maybe they changed it. Or maybe it’s the Eaton Gun Club. Maybe that’s the one he’s a member of.”
“I looked. Eaton doesn’t have a gun club.”
“Maybe they just don’t have a web site.”
“Everyone has a website, Lucy.”
“Do you have a website, Sherman?”
“I have a Facebook page. Oh shit, that’s a good idea. Hold on.” His thumbs ran furiously. Shortly he said, “And so does the Ashmond Gun Club.”
He kept thumbing the phone and then stopped. He said, “Shi-it,” and turned the phone so I could see the screen.
The Facebook page had pictures from gun shoots. There were also photos from what looked like a dinner. Two older men held up a check either from the NRA or to the NRA, I couldn’t quite tell. It was a prop sized check, and even so I couldn’t really make out the dollar figure. I didn’t recognize either man.
However, standing near the two men, his eyes red from the camera flash, was Pat Corley in a pair of jeans and a yellow button down shirt.
Chapter 37
Ruth’s intentions Friday night had centered on unsettling Horace Walton.
Made up, showing some major league cleavage, her disguise seemed to be working. Once she’d left us poolside and made it inside the country club none of the Lucentologist security personnel appeared to be making a move towards her.
She’d spotted Horace holding court with some local country club luminaries and closed in on him and his assistant, Nawzat.
When the latest local dignitaries turned from the head of the church, Ruth swept in, right in Horace’s face.
He was in automatic mode. Greeting mode. Everyone coming into contact with him was blowing smoke up his ass. He’d gotten used to it. She said she waited for that moment where the plastered smile started to waver, where he recognized her.
“Evening, Horace. Sure is a swell shindig. Hey, by the way. Did you know Selkie Rosenfeld kept a diary?”
Pinched between two fingers of her right hand was a folded over piece of paper. She more or less forced it into his hand. And was waiting to look at his face as he unfolded the paper and looked at a photocopied page from the dead actress’ diary.
Seconds later things started blowing up in the country club parking lot.
The rush of people, all in full out panic mode to get away from the entrance and the balls of flame, pushed her away from her intended target.
In the aftermath she just kind of wandered, trying to reconcile her aims at the party with what had just happened. Dina had slid up to her at one point.
“She said ‘I’m going to bet, Ms. Arnett, that you had nothing to do with what happened here tonight, did you?’ And I was so out of it, I don’t know what I replied. But whatever it was it seemed to satisfy her. She left me alone. She must’ve told the other black suits to leave me alone, too. Although,” Ruth sighed, “I’ve no doubt they ran my prints against the SUV wreckage. Whatever bits of the bombs they were able to discover in the aftermath.”
/>
Ruth sat at the table in her dim Eaton motel room. Sherman and I sat on the edge of the bed facing her. The rest of the bed covered by notebooks, a backpack, a flung open suitcase.
A bottle of Scotch sat on the table and a quantity of the amber liquid was freshly poured into a disposable plastic cup. Several blank journals sat on the table. A pen jammed into the pages of the journal on top like a bookmark.
Ruth played with a cup, spinning it between her fingers on the tabletop.
Prior to Saturday, she’d been over in an Ashmond motel. After Friday, the influx of out-of-towners had dissipated enough she’d been able to get a room in Eaton.
Sneaking around the country club prior to making her entrance poolside, Ruth hadn’t seen anything that struck her as odd. She’d seen a golf cart rolling around the grounds, but given the brouhaha, she figured that was expected.
I told her about Pat Corley. She stopped playing with the plastic cup and squeezed the tip of one of her right fingers with her left hand as she listened. She nodded along, but didn't say anything. No insight. I wondered how long ago the booze had traveled out the bottle and into her small frame.
“Why are you still in town?” I asked her.
“They’re still in town. I don’t know if Horace is, but the things I’ve heard are that Jack is still here. I don’t know. I figure if Jack’s still here then maybe Horace might still show up. Pop up like Vincent Price in some old scary movie.”
She sighed.
“I was so close, Lucy. I was so close to him on Friday. I handed him that piece of paper. He was going to read it and it was going to be like a punch to his head. I knew everything I was going to say. I had backup things I was going to say in case he tried to weasel out or throw one of his Ray Ban wearing pit bulls my way, and then-“
She silently mouthed ‘boom’. She reclaimed the plastic cup. Eyed its contents.
“Maddy’s missing,” I said.
“’Maddy’s missing’.”
I nodded.
“When she dropped off the money, they took her. Whoever got me. Whoever Tasered Sherman. They took her and they took the money. We haven’t heard anything from them. Not since yesterday.”
Waiting for her to reply I looked at Sherman. He looked a little out of it. I thought he might be a little scared of Ruth. Meeting, shaking her hand she’d squinted, looked up into his face like she was trying to remember whether or not he was friend or foe.
Looking towards the floor she said, “They took her,” and nodded, like that made all the sense in the world.
“I saw on your blog,” I said, “that you’ve heard that they put chips in some of the higher ups. I mean for the Lucentologists. That that was something you’d heard of them doing.”
Ruth shrugged.
“Kip heard that. One of the girls she was in the Becoming phase with told her that her Counselor had mentioned that. How some of them, like the important ones, the important church members, someone like, I don’t know, a Jack Ford, had a chip implanted on them that was like a GPS kind of thing. So if they went nuts, you know, off reservation, they could be found. Or so if something silly like all of this happened, they could be tracked. Or found. I think, or at least Kip thought, the Counselor had been full of shit. Like he was trying to impress the newbie.”
“Do you know where they’d put the chip?”
“You know, probably someplace easy to get to. It’s not like they would crack open someone’s skull, you know,” she smiled and swiped hair from her eyes, “but probably most likely I would think, it’d be the shoulder. Someplace like that. Someplace easy to get to.”
“So if these people took Maddy. And they knew about the chip-“
“Would they take it out?” Ruth interrupted, finishing my thought. She finished the last bit of Scotch in her cup.
“They could. I mean even if it existed. Again, I got my intel from Kip. God knows the mental state of the person that told her. I mean anyone that gets into Lucentology is kind of screwy to begin with. Forgive me for saying that. I know you probably love your sister. God knows I loved Kip, but…”
In the silence I could picture some small metallic nub of a device, like a fingernail clipping, being exposed in bloody flesh, being extracted with needle nose pliers, Maddy twisting and screaming as the steel touched nerve endings.
Ruth closed her eyes. She almost looked she might be tipping over into sleep. I looked at Sherman. He shrugged like he didn’t know what to do if she suddenly started snoring.
“Can I ask one thing?” Apparently she wasn’t slipping into sleep.
“Sure,” I said.
Her eyes were open. “How much money was it?”
“The ransom?”
“Yeah.”
“Half a million. But Jack got a lot more than that ready to pay, I mean, he had $2 million ready to hand over if they asked for it.”
The information landed on her skull and slowly seeped in. She set the cup on the table.
“That’s all?”
I nodded.
Ruth leaned forward. She threaded her fingers and looked left, towards the head of the motel room bed, whispering the dollar figure to herself.
“See that doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
She stood up. Stepped over the motel room’s single window and brushed the curtains back and looked out at the quiet Sunday afternoon street.
“Jack makes 20 to 30 million a movie. Maddy makes what, 5 mil, 8 mil, something like that. So if you’re going to take someone hostage – like they did with you – why not hit the people paying the ransom for a titanic amount of money? You said Jack could get $2 million, fine, then go and demand that amount. But they didn’t demand that amount. Or twice that amount, you know, figure if Jack could get that, so could Maddy. That’s $4 million right there. Four million. They didn’t ask for that. It’s like they didn’t do their homework. It’s like they were guessing or – and here’s the thing – like they didn’t give a shit about the money. The money’s just part of it, part of the package. That’s how they treated the whole thing. Like ‘well, we’re doing a kidnapping. Let’s go down the checklist. Oh part of doing a kidnapping is asking for money, der-der-der-der…’ But these people aren’t der-der-der-der. They’re not morons. Those were military grade explosions, Friday night. Taking you, and vanishing like that, that was a military grade exercise. And Maddy’s gone without a trace. Again. These are pros. What if they didn’t care about the money to begin with? What if the whole time all it was about was getting Maddy?”
She’d let the curtain slip back into place. She looked right at me.
“They haven’t gotten back to you guys, right? No demands of any sort. And it’s been what, a day now that they’ve had her? Look at all the work that went into the plan. They did some fine planning. Ballsy, smart planning. They blew things up. Distracted people. Nabbed you. Worked the whole psychological angle on a crowd. That took tactical knowledge. Someone knew what they were doing. Crowd logistics, okay? They really, really knew what they were doing, right? You can’t have that much know how, that much smarts, and not apply it to the entire operation.”
A chill worked up and down my scalp. I knew I was breathing heavily.
Ruth sat down. Looked at me.
Quietly she said, “So the question is…What do they want with her? And who wants her? And what do they do with her when they’re done?”
Chapter 38
Driving back up East Jennings towards the house I was staring at my lap, on the brink of nodding off when Sherman asked if I was all right.
“I’m fine.”
“Ok.”
“I lost the bracelet,” I said.
“Huh?”
“I don’t know where, but I lost it.”
He shrugged.
“I don’t think you could help losing it. Not w
ith everything going on.” After another moment he added, “It’s cool. Don’t worry about it.”
They’d found my heels at the swimming pool. Maybe the thin gold band was somewhere in proximity. Tossed inconspicuously upon the gravel lining the chain link fences.
Just past the turn offs to the Jackson and Verney places Sherman pointed out the windshield. A black insect shape rose into the sky. A helicopter. It looked to have risen from our house.
In the deepening evening sky it swung to the right like all the weight shifted to one side of the craft then it continued through an inexplicably wide and dangerous looking turn, accelerating northwest towards the tree covered hills rising in the far distance. By the time we drove up to the house the helicopter was a blot headed for the mountains.
Dad and Jack were in the backyard. The single SUV remained unmoved from where I’d last seen it. A patina of kicked up dust coated its exterior.
“We saw it coming up Jennings,” I said. “Who has a helicopter around here?”
“Florence Lancaster’s,” said Dad.
“Who’s that?”
“She owns some property out here. Out around Sunnyside. She also owns about 30-35% of Clear Channel. Something like that. She’s rich. She knows Horace.”
“They’re looking for Maddy?”
“They’re been looking for Maddy. Just took Dina and another one of them up. Fresh eyes. Guess they think they can get something done before it’s full on night.”
I remembered Ruth’s quip about ‘pit bulls with Ray Bans’ and pictured a helicopter literally full of pooches. I was a little delirious, but I still almost smiled.
Dad ticked his chin at Sherman in greeting.
“Sir,” said Sherman. He’d never called Dad anything other than ‘Sir’. He didn’t know how to greet Jack, didn’t even try.
“I saw Ruth,” I said.
“And what did she have to say?”
“She said a lot of things didn’t make sense.”
“No?”
“She said the kidnappers didn’t ask for enough money. Not nearly enough. Not with what Jack and Maddy had access to. She thinks Maddy being taken was the point the whole time. They just wanted her. I didn’t matter. The money didn’t matter. And whoever took her, whoever has been doing all of this, they know what they’re doing. I think she was basically saying these people are ex-military.”