The supervisor was already implementing instruction 17 which informed her that N. Wainwright, v/p Security, was to be advised immediately by telephone that the special Keycharge card issued in the name H. E. LYNCOLP had been presented, and where. By depressing keys on her own keyboard, the supervisor summoned from the computer the additional information:
PETE’S SPORTING GOODS
and a street address. Meanwhile she had dialed the office number of Mr. Wainwright who answered personally. His interest was instant. He responded crisply to the supervisor’s information and she sensed his tension while he copied details down.
Seconds later, for the Keycharge supervisor, operator, and computer, the brief emergency was over.
Not so for Nolan Wainwright.
Since the explosive session an hour and a half ago with Alex Vandervoort, when he learned of the disappearance of Juanita Núñez and her child, Wainwright had been tensely and continuously on telephones, sometimes two at once. He had tried four times to reach Miles Eastin at the Double-Seven Health Club to warn him of his danger. He had had consultations with the FBI and U. S. Secret Service. As a result the FBI was now actively investigating the apparent Núñez kidnapping, and had alerted city and state police with descriptions of the missing pair. It had been arranged that an FBI surveillance team would watch comings and goings at the Double-Seven as soon as the manpower could be spared, probably by this afternoon.
That was all that would be done concerning the Double-Seven for the time being. As FBI Special Agent Innes expressed it, “If we go in there with questions, we tip our hand about knowing the connection, and as for a search, we’ve no grounds to seek a warrant. Besides, according to your man Eastin, it’s mostly a meeting place with nothing illegal—except some gambling—going on.”
Innes agreed with Wainwright’s conclusion that Juanita Núñez and her daughter would not have been taken to the Double-Seven.
The Secret Service, with fewer facilities than the FBI, was working the hideout angle, contacting informers, probing for any scintilla of fact or rumor which might prove to be a lead the combined law enforcement agencies could use. For the moment, unusually, inter-force rivalry and jealousies were put aside.
When Wainwright received the Keycharge H. E. LYNCOLP alert, he promptly dialed the FBI. Special Agents Innes and Dalrymple were out, he was informed, but could be contacted by radio. He dictated an urgent message and waited. The reply came back: The agents were downtown, not far from the address given, and were on their way there. Would Wainwright meet them?
Action was a relief. He hurried through the building to his car.
Outside Pete’s Sporting Goods, Innes was questioning bystanders when Wainwright arrived. Dalrymple was still inside, completing a statement by the clerk. Innes broke off and joined the bank security chief. “A dry hole,” he reported glumly. “It was all over when we got here.” He related the little they had learned.
Wainwright asked, “Descriptions?”
The FBI man shook his head. “The store guy who served Eastin was so shit scared, he’s not sure if there were four men came in or three. Says it all happened so fast, he can’t describe or identify anyone. And no one, inside the store or out, remembers seeing a car.”
Wainwright’s face was drawn, the strain of anxiety and conscience showing. “So what comes next?”
“You were a cop,” Innes said. “You know how it is in real life. We wait, hoping something else will turn up.”
22
She heard scuffling and voices. Now she knew they had Miles and were bringing him in.
For Juanita, time had drifted. She had no idea how long it was since she had gasped out Miles Eastin’s name, betraying him, to end the horror of Estela’s torture. Soon after that she had been gagged again and the bonds holding her to the chair were checked and tightened. Then the men left.
For a while, she knew, she had dozed—or, more accurately, her body had released her from awareness since any real rest was impossible, bound as she was. Alerted by the new noise, her constricted limbs protested agonizingly, so that she wanted to cry out, though the gag prevented it. Juanita willed herself not to panic, not to struggle against her bonds, knowing both would be futile and make her situation worse.
She could still see Estela. The chairs they were bound to had been left facing each other. The little girl’s eyes were closed in sleep, her small head drooping; the noises which awakened Juanita had not disturbed her. Estela, too, was gagged. Juanita hoped that sheer exhaustion would spare her from reality for as long as possible.
Estela’s right hand showed the ugly red burn from the cigar. Shortly after the men had left, one of them—Juanita had heard him addressed as Lou—came back briefly. He had a tube of ointment of some kind. Squeezing the tube, he covered Estela’s burn, glancing quickly at Juanita as if to tell her it was the best he could do. Then he, too, had gone.
Estela had jumped while the ointment was being applied, then whimpered for a while behind her gag, but soon after sleep had mercifully come.
The sounds Juanita had been hearing were behind her. Probably in an adjoining room, and she guessed a connecting door was open. Briefly she heard Miles’s voice protesting, then a thud, a grunt, and silence.
Perhaps a minute passed. Miles’s voice again, this time more distinct. “No! Oh, God, no! Please! I’ll …” She heard a sound like hammer blows, metal on metal. Miles’s words stopped, changing to a high-pitched, piercing, frenzied scream. The screaming, worse than anything she had ever heard, went on and on.
If Miles could have killed himself in the car, he would have done so willingly. He had known from the beginning of his deal with Wainwright—it had been the root of his fears ever since—that straightforward dying would be easy compared with what awaited an exposed informer. Even so, what he had feared was nothing beside the unbelievably awful, excoriating punishment being meted to him now.
His legs and thighs were strapped tightly, cruelly together. His arms had been forced down onto a rough wooden table. His hands and wrists were being nailed to the table … nailed with carpenters nails … hammered hard … A nail was already in the left wrist, two more in the wide part of the hand between the wrist and fingers, fastening it tightly down … The last few strokes of the hammer had smashed bone … One nail was in the right hand, another poised to tear, to hack through flesh and muscle … No pain was ever, could be ever … Oh, God, help me! … would be ever greater. Miles writhed, screamed, pleaded, screamed again. But the hands holding his body tightened. The hammer blows, which had briefly paused, resumed.
“He ain’t yelping loud enough,” Marino told Angelo, who was wielding the hammer. “When you get through with that, try nailing down a couple of the bastard’s fingers.”
Tony Bear, who was puffing on a cigar while he watched and listened, had not bothered concealing himself this time. There would be no possibility of Eastin identifying him because Eastin would soon be dead. First, though, it was necessary to remind him—and others to whom the news of what had happened here would filter out—that for a stool pigeon there was never any easy death.
“That’s more like it,” Tony Bear conceded. Miles’s agonized shrieks rose in volume while a fresh nail penetrated the center finger of his left hand, midway between the two knuckles, and was hammered home. Audibly, the bone in the finger split apart. As Angelo was about to repeat the process with the middle finger of the right hand, Tony Bear ordered, “Hold it!”
He told Eastin, “Stop the goddam noise! Start singing.”
Miles’s screaming turned to racking sobs, his body heaving. The hands holding him had been removed. They were no longer needed.
“Okay,” Tony Bear told Angelo, “he ain’t stopped, so go right ahead.”
“No! No! I’ll talk! I will! I will!” Somehow Miles choked back his sobs. The loudest sound was now his heavy, rasping breathing.
Tony Bear waved Angelo back. The others in the room remained grouped around the table. They were
Lou; Punch Clancy, the extra bodyguard who had been one of the four in the sporting goods store an hour earlier; LaRocca, scowling, worried about how much he would be blamed for sponsoring Miles; and the old printer, Danny Kerrigan, ill at ease and nervous. Although this was normally Danny’s domain—they were in the main printing and engraving shop—he preferred to keep out of the way at moments such as this, but Tony Bear had sent for him.
Tony Bear snarled at Eastin, “So all the time you were a stoolie for a stinking bank?”
Miles gasped out, “Yes.”
“First Mercantile?”
“Yes.”
“Who’d you report to?”
“Wainwright.”
“How much you found out? What’d you tell him?”
“About … the club … the games … who went there.”
“Including me?”
“Yes.”
“You son of a bitch!” Tony Bear reached over and slammed his clenched fist in Miles’s face.
Miles’s body sagged away with the force of the blow, but the strain tore at his hands and he pulled back desperately to the painful, bent-over position he was in before. A silence followed, broken only by his labored sobs and groans. Tony Bear puffed his cigar several times, then resumed the questioning.
“What else you find out, you stinking turd?”
“Nothing … nothing!” Every part of Miles was shaking uncontrollably.
“You’re lying.” Tony Bear turned to Danny Kerrigan. “Get me that juice you use for the engravings.”
During the questioning until now, the old printer had been eying Miles with hatred. Now he nodded. “Sure thing, Mr. Marino.”
Danny crossed to a shelf and hefted down a gallon jug with a plastic cap. The jar was labeled NITRIC ACID: Use for Etching Only. Removing the cap, Danny poured carefully from the jar into a half-pint glass beaker. Being careful not to spill the beaker’s contents, he carried it to the table where Tony Bear faced Miles. He put it down, then laid a small engraver’s brush beside it.
Tony Bear picked up the brush and dipped it in the nitric acid. Casually he reached over and dabbed the brush down one side of Eastin’s face. For a second or two, while the acid penetrated surface skin, there was no reaction. Then Miles cried out with a new and different agony as the burning spread and deepened. While the others watched in fascination, the flesh under the acid smoldered, turning from pink to brownish black.
Tony Bear dipped the brush in the beaker again. “I’ll ask you one more time, asshole. If I don’t get answers, this goes on the other side. What else did you find out and tell?”
Miles’s eyes were wild, like a cornered animal’s. He spluttered, “The counterfeit … money.”
“What about it?”
“I bought some … sent it to the bank … then drove the car … took more to Louisville.”
“And?”
“Credit cards … drivers’ licenses.”
“You know who made them? Printed the phony money?”
Miles motioned his head as best he could. “Danny.”
“Who told you?”
“He … told me.”
“And afterwards you spilled your guts to that cop at the bank? He knows all that?”
“Yes.”
Tony Bear swung savagely to Kerrigan. “You drunken stupid fart! You’re no better than him.”
The old man stood quaking. “Mr. Marino, I wasn’t drunk. I just thought he …”
“Shaddup!” Tony Bear seemed about to hit the old man, then changed his mind. He returned to Miles. “What else do they know?”
“Nothing else!”
“Do they know where the printing’s done? Where this place is?”
“No.”
Tony Bear returned the brush to the acid and withdrew it. Miles followed every movement. Experience told him the expected answer. He shouted, “Yes! Yes, they know!”
“You told that bank security bum?”
Despairingly, Miles lied. “Yes, yes!”
“How’d you find out?” The brush stayed poised above the acid.
Miles knew he had to find an answer. Any answer which would satisfy. He turned his head to Danny. “He told me.”
“You’re a liar! You lousy, stinking goddammed liar!” The old man’s face was working, his mouth opening and closing and jaw quivering as emotion gripped him. He appealed to Tony Bear. “Mr. Marino, he’s lying! I swear he’s lying! It isn’t true.” But what he saw in Marino’s eyes increased his desperation. Now Danny rushed at Miles. “Tell him the truth, you bastard! Tell him!” Demented, knowing the potential penalty for himself, the old man looked around him for a weapon. He saw the acid beaker. Seizing it, he tossed the contents in Miles’s face.
A fresh scream started, then abruptly stilled. As the odor of acid and the sickly smell of burning flesh mingled, Miles fell forward, unconscious, across the table where his mangled, bleeding hands were nailed.
Though not wholly understanding what was happening to Miles, Juanita suffered through his cries and pleadings and finally the extinction of his voice. She wondered—dispassionately, because her feelings were now dulled beyond the point where more emotion could affect her—if he were dead. She speculated on how long it would be before she and Estela shared Miles’s fate. That they would both die now seemed inevitable.
Juanita was grateful for one thing: Estela had not stirred, despite the uproar. If sleep would only stay with her, perhaps she would be spared whatever awfulness remained before the end. As she had not done in many years, Juanita prayed to the Virgin Mary to make death easy for Estela.
Juanita was aware of new activity in the adjoining room. It sounded as if furniture was being moved, drawers opened and slammed, containers set down heavily. Once there was the jangle of metal cascading on cement and curses afterward.
Then, to her surprise, the man she had come to recognize as Lou appeared beside her and began unfastening her bonds. She supposed she was being taken somewhere, exchanging one perdition for another. When he had finished, he left her where she was and started to untie Estela.
“Stand up!” he ordered both of them. Estela, coming awake, complied, though sleepily. She began crying softly, the sound muffled by her gag. Juanita wanted to go to her but could not yet move forward; she supported her weight against the chair, suffering as blood flowed through her cramped limbs.
“Listen to me,” Lou told Juanita. “You got lucky because of your kid. The boss is gonna let you go. You’ll be blindfolded, taken in a car a long ways from here, and then let out. You don’t know where you’ve bin, so you can’t bring nobody back. But if you blab, tell anybody, we’ll find you wherever you are and kill your kid. Understand?”
Hardly able to believe what she was being told, Juanita nodded.
“Then get goin’.” Lou pointed to a door. Evidently it was not his intention to blindfold her yet. Despite her inertia of moments earlier, she found her normal mental sharpness coming back.
Partway up a flight of concrete stairs, she leaned against the wall and wanted to be sick. In the outer room they had just passed through, she had seen Miles—or what was left of him—his body slumped across a table, his hands a bloody pulp, his face, hair, and scalp burned beyond recognition. Lou had pushed Juanita and Estela quickly past, but not fast enough to prevent Juanita taking in the grim reality. She had also learned that Miles was not dead, though he was surely dying. He had stirred slightly and moaned.
“Move it!” Lou urged. They continued up the stairs.
The horror of Miles as she had seen him filled Juanita’s mind. What could she do to help him? Clearly, nothing here. But if she and Estela were to be released, was there some way she could bring aid back? She doubted it. She had no idea where they were; there seemed no chance of finding out. Yet she must do something. Something to expiate—at least a little—her terrible sense of guilt. She had betrayed Miles. Whatever the motivation, she had spoken his name, and he was caught and brought here with the consequence she had s
een.
The seed of an idea, not wholly thought out, came to her. She concentrated, developing the notion, blotting other things from her mind, even Estela for the moment. Juanita reasoned: it might not work, yet there was a slim chance. Success depended on the acuity of her senses and her memory. It was also important that she not be blindfolded until after getting in the car.
At the head of the stairway they turned right and entered a garage. With cement block walls, it looked like an ordinary two-car garage belonging to a house or business and, remembering the sounds she had heard on arrival, Juanita guessed they had come in this same way. There was one car inside—not the big car in which they had arrived this morning, but a dark green Ford. She wanted to see the license number but it was beyond her view.
In a quick glance around, something puzzled Juanita. Against a wall of the garage was a chest of drawers of dark polished wood, but like no other chest that she had seen before. It appeared to have been sawn vertically in half, with the two halves standing separated and she could see the inside was hollow. Beside the chest was what looked like a dining-room sideboard cut in the same peculiar way, except that half the sideboard was being carried out of another doorway by two men, one shielded by the door, the other with his back to her.
Lou opened a rear door of the Ford. “Get in,” he ordered. In his hands were two thick dark cloths—the blindfolds.
Juanita entered first. Doing so, she tripped intentionally and fell forward, supporting herself by grabbing the back of the car’s front seat. It gave her the opportunity she wanted—to look toward the front on the driver’s side and read the odometer mileage. She had a second only to take in the figures: 25714.8. She closed her eyes, committing them—she hoped—to memory.