Chapter 16
Ryder pulled up to the newsstand with less than a minute to spare. He double-parked in the street and grabbed the two bags, moving in an all-out sprint. The stand was closed, just as the kidnapper had promised, but a small, side door stood ajar, and he shouldered his way inside.
It was little more than three walls and a roof. The half wall that opened up to the public could be propped overhead like a porch, shading the counter beneath. The concrete sidewalk served as its floor, and Ryder dropped both bags on it with a thump and walked out.
All the way back to the car, he had the impression that he was being watched.
He didn’t know whether that came from the Feds who had followed him here, or from the kidnapper waiting for him to leave.
When he slid into the driver’s seat and started the car, his instincts kept telling him not to leave—not to leave Casey’s welfare up to kidnappers.
But he ignored the urge and drove away, and had never been this afraid in his life—not even the night his plane had crashed—not even when he’d known that Micah was dead.
He left with the knowledge that he’d done all he could do.
The ransom had been delivered. Hopefully, his next point of contact would be the phone call telling him where to pick up his wife.
As Ryder drove away, Wyandott and his men began to slip into place around the area. A couple of blocks away, Gant watched from his car with binoculars trained on the door through which Ryder had come and gone.
And the wait began.
Five minutes passed, then ten, then twenty.
In spite of the coolness of the evening breeze blowing through his window, Gant was starting to sweat.
He could just imagine what was going through Wyandott’s mind.
The Feds must have been made. If the kidnappers got spooked and didn’t pick up the ransom, he wouldn’t give a plug nickel for Casey Justice’s chance of survival.
Just when he thought it was over, an old man turned the corner and headed down the street, pulling a little red wagon behind him as he made toward the stand. Gant thought nothing of his presence until the man paused at the door, opened it up and then stepped in, leaving his wagon just outside.
Gant sat straight up in the seat, adjusting his binoculars for a clearer view as the man emerged.
But it wasn’t the bags Ryder had put inside that he was carrying out.
It was a large black garbage bag. He tossed it into the wagon and started down the street when Wyandott’s men suddenly converged upon him.
Gant threw down his binoculars in disbelief and started his car. In spite of the kidnapper’s instructions, Wyandott was pulling him in. God help them all if this stunt got Casey Justice killed.
* * *
“You’re under arrest!” Wyandott shouted, as two of his agents wrestled the old man to the ground.
The terror on the old fellow’s face seemed sincere. “What did I do? What did I do?”
An agent slapped handcuffs around his wrists while another tore into the bag. But they all stared in disbelief as a cascade of crushed aluminum cans fell onto the street.
“What the hell?” Wyandott muttered.
“They’re mine, fair and square,” the old man cried, as they pulled him to his feet. “Anthony gave them to me.”
Wyandott turned. “Who the hell is Anthony?”
“The man who owns the newsstand. I pick them up once a week, regular as clockwork. Everyone knows. Anthony doesn’t care. He saves them for me.”
A knot was beginning to form in the pit of Wyandott’s belly. He pivoted and pointed toward the stand. “Check it out!” Two of the agents were already running as Gant’s car slid to a halt near the curb.
Gant strode toward Wyandott with murder in his eyes. “Have you lost your mind?”
Wyandott hunched his shoulders and thrust out his jaw. “Mind your own damned business.”
“This is my city. That makes it my business,” Gant yelled. One of the agents came running. “Sir! You’d better come take a look.”
Everyone converged on the stand, leaving the old man handcuffed and alone in the street near his cans.
The bags were gone!
“This is impossible,” Wyandott muttered. “We didn’t take our eyes off of this stand for a second. Not a damned second.”
Gant stepped inside, and, as he did, caught his toe. He staggered, then looked down. A certainty came over him that they’d been lying in wait for nothing. Chances were that the bags had disappeared seconds after Ryder had left
“He didn’t take them out, he took them down,” Gant said, pointing toward the slightly raised edge of a lid covering the opening that led down to the sewers.
Wyandott paled. “Hell.” He grabbed his two-way. “Ambrewster… is that bug sending?”
The radio crackled, and then the man’s voice came over the air loud and clear. “No sir. Everything is status quo.”
Gant was on his knees and pulling at the lid when several of the agents followed his lead and began to help.
A flashlight was produced, and even though they were yards above them, and it was black as a devil’s heart down below, there was enough light to see two empty bags lying at the foot of the ladder.
And they had their answer. The signal wasn’t sending because the bags were more or less right where Ryder had left them… minus the three million dollars that had been inside.
The radio crackled again. Wyandott jerked.
“Captain…this is Tucker…come in, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
“Sir, we’ve been following Marlow as you ordered. He parked his car and went into the courthouse at fourteen hundred hours. We have men stationed at every exit and he has yet to come out.”
Wyandott was starting to worry. He kept thinking of the threat Justice had made to his face. This wasn’t going down as he’d planned.
“I want to know if he’s inside. Look for him, dammit, and don’t stop until you do. He’s mixed up in this somehow, I know it.”
* * *
Ryder turned off of the highway without slowing down and skidded to a halt in front of the mansion. He was out of the car before the dust had time to settle.
But when Roman came around the house on the run, Ryder paused at the front door with his hand on the knob. He could tell by the look on his brother’s face that something had happened.
“What?”
Roman grabbed him by the arm. “Gant just called me. The drop went sour. The kidnapper went underground into the sewers. He’s got the money and all they’ve got left are those damned bags.”
Disbelief, coupled with a pain Ryder couldn’t name, nearly sent him to his knees. It was coming undone.
Roman grabbed him by the arm. “Don’t give out on me now. We’re going to plan B. Come with me. We don’t have much time.”
For the first time since Ryder had exited the car, he became aware of a loud, popping sound, but he was too focused on Roman to consider the source. “Where are we going?”
“Marlow is on the move,” Roman said. “I’ve been tracking him, but he’s moving out of range. You’re going to have to help me, brother, or we’re going to lose our best chance to find your wife.”
They had just cleared the corner of the house in full stride, when Ryder stopped in his tracks.
“Son of a bitch.”
Roman grabbed him by the arm, almost yelling in his face to be heard above the noise. “It’s a Bell Jet Ranger, just like the one you have at home.”
“I know what it is,” Ryder said, staring at the helicopter’s spinning rotors. “Where the hell did you get it?”
Roman almost grinned. “I borrowed it, so don’t wreck the damned thing. I have to take it back when we’re through.”
Ryder started to sweat. Wreck? Hell, that meant making it fly first.
Roman grabbed him by the shoulder and jerked. “Are you going to stand there, or are we going to try to save your wife?”
Ryder started to run. “If you stole this, I’ll break your neck.”
“Just shut up and get in,” Roman yelled, as he leaped into the passenger seat and grabbed at a laptop computer he’d laid on the floor.
A strange sensation swept through Ryder’s body as he climbed into the seat. The sounds were familiar, even the feel of the seat at his back and the scent of fuel mixing with the dust and debris flying through the air caused by the rotor’s massive pull.
Then he glanced at his brother and the moving blip on the computer screen in front of him. The tracking devices! Roman had bugged Marlow’s car after all. His pulse surged. “Is that him?”
Roman nodded. “Yes, but I’m losing him. Take her up!”
Ryder stared. That blip kept blinking—blinking—blinking—like a pulse.
Like Casey’s pulse. He grabbed the seat belt.
It snapped shut with a click he felt rather than heard.
He took a deep breath and pushed in on the throttle and it felt as if the helicopter took a deep breath.
Ryder glanced at the blip one last time and the guilt he’d been living with for the better part of a year simply disappeared.
“Roman.”
Roman glanced at his brother.
“Buckle up.”
Seconds later, the chopper went straight up in the air, then flew into the setting sun like a hawk flying out of a storm.
* * *
Lash was ecstatic. It had all been too easy.
Just this afternoon, he’d driven Fostoria Biggers’s little car to an abandoned garage near the downtown courthouse, then taken a cab back home.
A short time later, he got in his own sedan, drove to his office, picked up some legal briefs, then drove to the courthouse and parked in his usual place.
Only when he got into the elevator, he didn’t go up, he went down.
Down into the basement. Down through a maze of heating pipes and furnaces, past the janitor’s quarters where he picked up two large bags he’d hidden earlier, as well as a pair of gloves which he immediately put on.
He was smarter than Pike. He wasn’t leaving traces of himself anywhere to be found.