“Listen, this isn’t the way to handle this,” I said quickly. “Trust me, it isn’t.”
Ordonez answered me by cuffing my arms behind my back.
“Get up!” he snarled.
I stood, feeling strange and powerless. I felt like I was weightless as the drug dealer forced me down the stairs, holding the back of my collar.
“Check this out,” Ordonez said as we stepped outside onto the loose dirt of the front yard.
He flashed his light on a form lying beside our car.
The image came to me spottily, as if through TV white snow. It was Paul, faceup, his body almost completely under our car. Blood pooled on the ground beneath his head. He wasn’t moving at all.
“Oh, God!” I said, dropping on my knees. “Oh, no! No! Paul!”
My mouth dried instantly as Ordonez yanked me up and dragged me around one of the mounds of earth, and I saw the van. Its side door was slid open wide, an open doorway leading to blackness.
The only sound now was from our feet crunching gravel.
I lost one of my shoes. After I hobbled for a moment, Ordonez stopped, stooped, and yanked off my other one. He heaved it away into the darkness.
“You won’t need it,” he said. “Trust me on that.”
Down the hill behind the van, I watched a window light go on in one of the distant houses. I pictured a family sitting down at a dining room table, kids laying out plates and silverware, Dad loosening his tie. The countless stars above the houses twinkled.
Not for you, I thought, as I was thrown into the van’s open doorway.
The cold metal floor slapped against my cheek, and then there was just blackness and the slide-bang of the door shutting. The metallic noise echoed in my ears.
It was the sound of the world slamming its door in my face for good.
Chapter 85
I COULDN’T STOP PICTURING Paul’s body lying in the dirt beside his car.
It took me a full ten minutes to stop shivering and to finally recover my ability to speak.
“Where are you taking me?” I said, turning toward the front of the van.
Mark Ordonez was fiddling with a silver gadget on the van’s dashboard as he drove. Music suddenly filled the van. Old music with a lot of horns. It sounded absurd under the circumstances.
“You like XM?” he called back to me. “This oldie’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon.’ Frank’s Place shit is the mack daddy.”
He rolled his neck. With his military-style flattop, he looked like an understated, more disciplined version of his brother, Victor. The only flashy object he wore was his watch, a steel Rolex. Why did he scare me even more than his brother? He had a travel mug in the drink holder by his elbow. He lifted it out and took a sip.
“Where are we going?” I asked again.
“Oh, nowhere,” he said. “Got a Piper in an airport across the Connecticut border in Rhode Island. I thought I’d take you on a little night flight. You up for it?”
What was left of my heart sank. I wanted to cry, but to cry was to care too much about myself. The last thing I should do at this point, after all the pain and destruction I had brought to every person I was close to, was worry about myself.
A searing numbness possessed me as I thought about Paul. Dear God, I prayed. Let Paul be okay. I really must have been in shock — like God was taking requests from me at this point.
I lay there, silent, as we rattled along.
“Ah, screw it,” Ordonez said, lowering the radio. “I’ll tell you where we’re going if you let me in on something.”
I watched as his cold gray eyes found mine in the rearview mirror.
“So, tell me, why did you and your partner kill my brother, then frame him for murder? He didn’t kill that cop. You know it, and so do I. I mean, what the hell? Why?”
I felt a stab of hope as we rolled along. Ordonez thought I had something he wanted. Information about his brother. I had to use that to stall him, get him off balance, create a chance to save myself.
“We got a tip from an informant,” I finally said.
“An informant?” he said. “How convenient for you. Snitch have a name?”
“I’m sure they do, only I don’t know it,” I said. “The tip came through Scott’s task force team. Somebody in your organization, I can tell you that for a fact. Give me a chance, and I’ll help you find him.”
“Wow,” Ordonez said. “You’re almost as good a liar as Scotty was. He always liked sharp-minded pieces of ass like you, even back in high school.”
I craned my neck and stared, wide-eyed, at the rearview mirror.
What did he just say?
“You knew Scott?” I blurted out.
“Scott was my homeboy,” the drug dealer said, rolling his eyes. “Back in the day when me and Vic was moving nickel bags, we used to plan fake busts with Scotso. Split our boss’s money. I used to tip him off about our competition, money couriers. He used to tip me off about heat coming in my direction.”
Ordonez laughed at my shocked expression.
“The night Scott ended up dead, I was supposed to meet him. Only he postponed. Told me he had a booty call from this hot little Homicide detective. Up in Yonkers. You know who that hottie was?”
I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth. I couldn’t believe what an idiot I was.
“Yeah, Scott was one slick cat,” Ordonez said. “Only, I guess he ran out of lives that night with you. You ever ask yourself what angle he was playing on you? Besides getting in your pants, of course. Because he never did nothing without some twisted reason, believe me. My boy Scotty, he was Freddy Krueger with a badge, more twisted than a pretzel.”
We drove in silence after that little bit of wonderfulness.
“You still want me to tell you where we’re headed?” Ordonez said after a minute.
I nodded. “Yeah, I do.”
“We’re going to fly due east of Providence for an hour or so. You know where that will put us?”
I shook my head. “I don’t.”
Ordonez winked at me in the mirror.
“The Atlantic Ocean,” he said. “About a hundred and fifty miles from land. Then — pay attention now, this is good — I’m going to slice open the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.”
My breath started to come in sobbing bursts.
“Don’t worry, lady. Nothing life-threatening,” Ordonez said. “But then I’m going to slow air speed, lower altitude, and plonk you out the door of the Piper into the deep blue sea. You getting the picture now? You feeling me?”
I suddenly couldn’t get enough oxygen. If my hands hadn’t been cuffed, I would have covered my ears.
“From that point, you have exactly two choices,” he continued as I experienced my first-ever asthma attack. “Drown yourself, or try to survive. You seem like the spunky type. I’m guessing you’ll think you’re going to get lucky — a passing boat or plane will spot you, pick you up. Only that’s not going to happen.”
Ordonez took a sip of his drink and adjusted his rearview mirror. He cold-eyed me. Then he winked at me again, horribly.
“While you tread water, your blood will seep. Then the sharks will come, Lauren,” he said. “Not one, not two. I’m talking hundreds of sharks. Every hammerhead, blue, sandtiger, maybe even a great white or two, will be all over you like a bum on a bologna sandwich. And then, Lauren — I’m not kidding here, I want you to be fully informed — you’re going to experience the worst death imaginable. Alone, in the middle of the ocean, you’re going to be eaten alive. In case you’ve been wondering, I loved my brother, well, like a brother.”
Ordonez suddenly turned up the radio, I guess to show his total disdain for me.
What I heard couldn’t be, I thought. But it was.
Frank Sinatra.
Oblivious to the irony, Ordonez checked his Rolex and took another sip from his mug.
“ ‘Just the way you look . . . ,’ ” he sang along with ol’ Blue Eyes, with a jaunty snap of his fingers,
“ ‘tonight.’ ”
Chapter 86
FOR THE NEXT TEN MINUTES or so, a kind of terror seizure overtook me. I lay facedown on the floor of the van, as still as a corpse in the back of a hearse. Mark Ordonez drove smoothly, keeping it at a steady fifty-five in order not to attract any attention.
From the occasional rumble of passing trucks, I assumed we were on I-84 heading east toward Rhode Island. How much more time until we arrived at the airport? Another hour?
Slowly, I began to come out of my fit. Just in time to realize who, in all of this, I’d hurt most of all. I turned on my side and brought my knees up until my thighs were almost touching my stomach.
Whoever you are, I told the baby in my womb as I shook with sorrow, I’m so sorry. So sorry, so sorry for you, my little one.
There was a hard shake as the van suddenly jogged sharply to the right.
“Hey!” Ordonez shouted, staring into his driver’s side mirror as we swerved back again.
“This guy’s gotta be drunk. Pick a lane, buddy.”
A second jarring shift flipped me over onto my stomach. Immediately after that, there was a loud, crunching bang, and the driver’s side wall of the van bent inward. Jesus! What now?
A steady rumbling noise along with a violent vibration suddenly filled the van. I realized that we had driven over the grooved shoulders that are there to keep drivers from falling asleep. The sound was like a bizarre alarm clock going off inside my skull as my forehead did a drumroll on the van floor.
“Son of a bitch!” Ordonez yelled, gunning the accelerator. The van’s engine roared, and the rumbling vibration stopped as we whipped to the left, back onto the road.
I slid in the opposite direction and hit the passenger side wall like a forgotten pizza box.
“Hey! It’s not a drunk,” Ordonez called back to me. “The driver’s covered in blood. I don’t believe it! How do you like this shit? It’s your husband!”
He gunned the accelerator even more then. The engine whined, and the van began to wobble dangerously from too much speed.
“White boy thinks he’s a badass, huh? Want to play bumper cars?” the dealer sneered into the driver’s side mirror as he floored it.
My stomach dropped when I saw him reach over and click on his shoulder belt. I didn’t even have a lap belt to restrain me.
“That’s right, you dumb son of a bitch. Catch up, four-eyes! That’s it. Now, how do you like . . .”
There was a sudden shriek of metal and rubber as Ordonez slammed on the brakes.
“. . . them apples!” he screamed.
For a moment, the only sound was the whisper of me sliding forward toward the passenger seats.
Then the back of the van blew in with an eardrum-ripping bang.
I did a headstand as the van sprang forward, then a belly flop as it dropped back down with a hard bounce. Through my shock and the gap of the now-bent rear double doors, I saw the smoking front of what had been Paul’s Camry. At the very top of the accordioned hood, through the shattered windshield, I could see Paul. He was covered with blood, but blinking at least, as he pawed at the deployed airbag in his lap.
I turned toward Ordonez when I heard a loud, metal clack. He showed me my own Glock as he opened the door.
“Don’t worry, Lauren,” he said. “Our departure is still right on schedule. Be back in a jiff, honey.”
As he stepped out of the van, one thought pounded through me like a sledgehammer.
He’s going to kill Paul! After all this, Paul is going to die!
Chapter 87
I SCREAMED THEN. One of those wordless, guttural roars that singed my own ears as I scrambled up with my hands still cuffed behind my back.
Headfirst, reckless, without thinking, I propelled myself toward the open driver’s side door. I missed the open door by a mile, but I did manage to bang my head a nice lick off the steering wheel before I landed upside down in the driver’s footwell. Unbelievable.
The idling engine raced as I thrashed against the gas pedal somewhere behind me. I kicked my legs, trying to get some leverage to push myself outside. My foot was stuck between the steering wheel and the gear shift.
I kept kicking, trying to free myself.
Uh-oh.
The gear slid free with my foot, and suddenly the van was rolling. The van was picking up speed!
Based solely on the sudden sound of car horns and the elongated blast from a semi, I guessed that I was rolling into traffic. I’d managed to sit sideways in the footwell by the time Ordonez arrived in the open doorway at a run and jumped in.
“Where do you think you’re going, you crazy bitch?” he yelled. He slapped me across the face before he lifted me up and threw me into the passenger seat, then steered the van back onto the shoulder.
He shut the engine, pulled the emergency brake, and put the keys in his pocket before he stepped outside again.
Then Ordonez raised a finger at me and smiled wickedly.
“Okay, let’s try this again,” he said. “You stay ri —”
I never got to hear him finish his sentence. Or his word, for that matter.
The truck that removed him and the van door was a car carrier. Loaded to full capacity with Chevy Tahoes and creaking like a trailer park in a tornado. It must have been doing a good seventy-five or eighty.
One second Mark Ordonez was standing there, and the next he was simply gone. Erased, like in a magic trick.
The best one I’d ever seen.
Chapter 88
I SAT THERE, blinking at the van’s windshield. The car carrier didn’t stop. Didn’t even hit its brakes. It was as if the driver hadn’t even noticed. A hundred feet or so up the highway, I caught the movement of something sailing end-over-end into the thick roadside brush. Van door or drug dealer, I wasn’t sure.
Maybe God had heard my prayers after all. Or heard somebody’s prayer for me.
Paul was lying on the ground behind his totaled car. I saw his body as I managed to exit the van. My heart was back in my throat again.
“Paul, I’m here,” I said as I ran and knelt down next to him. I prayed he was okay. CPR was going to be a stretch with my hands cuffed behind my back.
“Lauren,” he said. His teeth started chattering. “I saw the taillights leaving, and I —”
“Don’t talk,” I said.
The blood seemed to be coming mostly from the back of Paul’s head, where the drug creep had hit him, probably several times. My breath caught as the words subdural hematoma flashed from my mental Homicide detective Rolodex. I usually saw it on coroner’s reports under cause of death. It seemed like a miracle that Paul was conscious, that either one of us was alive, really.
“Stay still,” I whispered in his ear. “Don’t move.”
Cars whipped past us on the highway as I sat down in the broken glass beside my husband. Blue and red lights started to bubble in the distance. Paul’s blood was warm on my legs.
“You saved me, Paul,” I whispered as two state troopers’ cars zipped out of the traffic and screeched to a stop in front of us.
Again, I thought, but didn’t say. You saved me again.
Chapter 89
“MILK AND SUGAR OKAY?” Trooper Harrington said as she came toward me across the UConn Health Center ER waiting room.
Ever since she and the other statie, Trooper Walker, had seen my badge, they had gone above and beyond. Instead of waiting for an ambulance, they laid Paul down in the back of Harrington’s cruiser and only asked questions as we headed for the nearest hospital at about 110. Trooper Harrington even loaned me a pair of sneakers from her workout bag in the trunk to put on over my bare and cut-up feet.
“How’s your baby and your husband?” she wanted to know.
“The ultrasound showed everything was fine,” I said. “But Paul has a concussion and needed stitches. They want to keep him overnight for observation. The doctor thinks he’s going to be okay, thank God. Thanks to you and your partner.”
“
Can’t say the same about that Ordonez fella,” the female trooper said with a shake of her head. “I radioed back to the scene. They found him in the weeds a couple of hundred feet up the road. It was a car carrier that hit him. They said he looks like one of those pennies after you leave it on a railroad track. That’s the downside of looking for trouble, isn’t it? Sometimes you manage to find a little more than you bargained for.
“Hey, important thing is, you came out on top. You and your husband and your baby. Your family is safe. What else is there?”
I looked into the state trooper’s caring face. Her pulled-back blonde hair, her scrubbed cheeks, her alert blue-gray eyes brimming with competence. She was maybe one or two years out of the academy. Had I been that earnest once upon a time? I guess I had been. A million years ago, it felt like. And on another planet. I envied her, admired her, too.
“So, what’s NYC Homicide like?” she said. There was a starstruck glow in her eyes. “What’s it really like? Not like Law and Order, I hope.”
“Don’t listen to a word she says” came a booming voice from behind us. “She lies like a rug.”
I turned around toward a smiling face I hadn’t seen in a while. In way too long, I decided.
It was my partner, Mike.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“One of these Connecticut Chip wannabes called Keane, and he called me,” Mike said as he squeezed my hand. “I came straightaway. The brother came for you, huh? Unbelievable. What a trip. Guess he shoulda stuck to the friendly skies instead of our nation’s highways, huh? They pulled him out from underneath a semi or something like that? Nice work, Lauren. That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”
I nodded my head. Then I finally started crying. I had treated Mike like the enemy, and now here he was, holding my hand, supporting me as always.
“I’m sorry, Mike,” I said. “I’m . . .”
“Going to buy me a late dinner?” Mike said, linking our elbows as he stood me up. “Okay, if you insist.”
We found an all-night diner just up the street from the hospital.