He walked into the living room. The static snow of the TV hissed quietly. The red PLAY letters indicated the VCR was on. Frye hit rewind and listened to the tape whine. When it stopped, he hit play. Li appeared on the screen. She looked exhausted, with dark pouches under her eyes, her face pale, her hair filthy. “Benny, I am all right. I love you so. They will release me to you if you bring the two million dollars they asked for and follow their instructions. If not, they kill me tonight.”
Someone offscreen pushed the barrel of a shotgun into her mouth. She sat there, staring out at Frye with her lips around the steel, tears running down her cheeks as a man’s voice gave instructions.
“Bennett, you must put the money in two suitcases and put them in your van. You must drive to the phone booth at U.S. Gas, at Division Street and Palmdale Avenue in Palmdale. Answer the phone at exactly ten forty-five P.M. You must not contact the police or FBI, or allow them to follow you in any way. We will watch you carefully. You must bring only the money. You must be alone. Do not be a fool and bring weapons.”
Frye felt his heart sink, then come back racing. He checked his watch. It was just after nine.
The Westminster Police lines were jammed. The FBI offices in Santa Ana were closed. A Los Angeles agent named Burns took the phone booth location, the plate numbers and description of the van and driver, the address and phone from which Frye was calling, then ordered him to stay exactly where he was.
Frye stayed exactly where he was for almost two seconds, then gave up. He found a .45 in Bennett’s drawer, shoved it into his pants, and headed back to the Cyclone.
Chapter 28
He remembered the way to Palmdale from his journey with Kim to the Lower Mojave Airstrip. She had taken him the long way, so he took the 605 to the Interstate, then bore north, through Los Angeles, holding his speed to seventy. Once past the city he flogged it to eighty plus, letting the old V-8 eat the highway, watching his rearview, feeling the air go dry and hot as he entered the high desert. Palmdale Boulevard crossed Division Street just a few blocks from the freeway. He spotted the Lucky Star Chinese Restaurant and U.S. Gas on the corner. It was ten thirty-nine. Bennett’s van was parked in front of the phone booth. His brother paced outside it. Two Vietnamese men stood and watched.
Frye parked a block short, cut the engine and waited. No sign that Burns’s agents were here. Just the watchers, hands in their coat pockets, still as statues. A thermometer readout from a savings and loan across the street said eighty-six degrees. Hot breeze blew in his car window. The Cyclone’s engine popped and hissed. Frye checked the clip in the .45. Seven shots, and he knew Bennett never kept one in the chamber. He held the thing in his hand, then slid it under the seat. At 10:45, a withered old man shuffled toward the phone booth. The two guards shooed him away. The man turned, shaking his head, and trudged into the darkness. Frye saw Bennett push into the booth, reach up, and take the receiver. He nodded twice, slammed the phone back in place and shoved his way out. His escorts were already in their white pickup truck.
Highway 14 was a ribbon of moonlight winding through the desert. The wind grew stronger, pressing against the Merc, stiffening the steering wheel in Frye’s hands. He stayed four cars behind the truck until there were no longer four cars to stay behind, then dropped back, killed his headlights, and followed. He prayed to his rearview for Burns and the cavalry, but saw nothing behind him except the night and slow truckers, and nothing ahead but a brother delivering a fortune to men who would take it and kill him.
Bennett stopped in Lancaster and waited outside a pay phone at a K-Mart. His escorts parked beside his van, but didn’t get out. Frye watched from the dark recesses of a parking lot across the intersection. At 11:02, Bennett answered the phone, took his instructions and climbed back into the van. Then back onto Highway 14 to Rosamond Boulevard; Frye knew for certain where Bennett was being led.
It was the same route now that Kim had shown him: five miles east down the boulevard, then north on the wide dirt road marked by the sign for the Sidewinder Mine. He dropped far back, let Bennett and the truck make the turn far ahead of him, then cruised past the turnoff — just another desert rat meandering home after a beer or two with the boys.
A half mile down, he turned around, pulled to the side of the road and waited. How long would it take Benny to go a mile north on the dirt road, pass through the gate, and travel the last five hundred yards west, across the arroyo to the airstrip? Five minutes? Less? He rolled down his window and listened. Except for the firm gusting of the wind, the night was silent. On the other side of the highway, the dry lake bed stretched flat and pale. No cars, no aircraft overhead. No FBI, he thought: We’re on our own.
At the rock pile he cut his lights and let the moon guide him down the wide dirt road. He drove past the gate, continued on another hundred yards, and parked. He put the .45 in his belt, left the hood up to indicate distress, then climbed the chain link fence, plopped down on the other side, and headed toward the airway on foot.
The rocks were treacherous, but the moonlight showed him the way. He climbed a gentle hill, crunched down the other side, then followed a long wash toward the terminal. The next rise was high and steep enough to hide behind. He lay on the warm sand and peered over the crest to the airfield. It was just as before, flimsy and beaten and apparently deserted. But now a naked bulb burned at the entrance of the Quonset hangar, and Bennett’s van was parked beside two pickup trucks in front. The terminal was dark. Behind it, just to the side of the dark slouching tower, a helicopter waited. Looks like an old Bell — Frye thought — a company craft for lifting executives above the traffic. As he watched, the hangar door opened and a Vietnamese man stepped into the raw light of the bulb. He slid shut the door, adjusted the strap of his automatic rifle, then lit a cigarette.
The back of the hangar seemed his only option. He ducked back down the embankment and looped out. A sandy gully took him almost all the way around the compound, while the wind puffed, echoed in his ears, shot sand at his ankles. Above him the stars blinked clear and sharp. From behind an outcropping of sandstone, he looked at the back end of the hangar. A dull light emanated from where windows had once been. No guard. The corrugated sliding door had long since fallen from its track and now stood at a tilt, its runners jammed into a low bank of windblown desert sand. No way to approach under cover. He stood, took a deep breath, crept from the rocks, and loped down a long wash that left him crouched behind a yucca plant, fifty yards from the helicopter. Another measured run and he was kneeling beside the chopper cabin, his heart pounding hard, his skin dry and hot, his right hand wrapped around Bennett’s pistol.
The hangar was thirty yards away. He crawled across, beneath the sightline of the windows, and brought himself to rest against the old building. The wind eddied, throwing dust and sand at the metal. A branch scratched at the siding. He moved to a window and stood. In the dark foreground he could make out the shape of an old prop plane, then the outlines of crates and boxes. But past them was a cone of light cast from overhead, widening down from the high ceiling. Dust wavered in the beam, which rocked gently in a draft. The light spread to a circle on the floor and Bennett sat on a chair in the middle of it. A guard stood behind him with a machine gun, the two suitcases of money at his feet. Bennett said something in Vietnamese, and the guard snapped something back. As Frye looked at Bennett stranded in the light, alone in a chair in the middle of this great nowhere, he felt a rage course through him. I’m too far away, he thought. Too far to hear, too far to shoot, too far to do anything but watch. Do they really have Li here, or did they just drag Benny all this way to take his money and bury him in the desert? His heart was thumping so loud he wondered if the guard could hear it.