Body wires have gotten smaller over time, but they’re still easy to detect if the informant gets frisked. So wiring Teddy was out. But Annie assured us that Bassett wouldn’t touch her. “He’ll never suspect that I cut a deal with the cops,” she told us. “Hell, I can’t believe it myself.”
The ground rules were simple. Go in, get a confession, and get out.
“You’ll need a safe word,” Kylie said. “If anything goes wrong, just say it once, and we’ll come running.”
“How about help?” Teddy said.
“Smart thinking, kiddo,” Annie told her son. As soon as he was out of earshot, she changed the safe word to hot chocolate.
The four of us piled into the junker, and by one thirty we were in a parking lot behind an Audi dealership on Main Street in Mohegan Lake, waiting to rendezvous with our backup, an ESU entry team from the Bronx.
At 1:50, the team leader radioed us with the bad news. “We hit a deer on the Taconic. Two of our guys are on the way to the ER, and the truck is out of service until the motor pool picks Bambi out of the fan housing. I radioed dispatch, and they can have another unit in place by sixteen hundred hours.”
Annie shook her head. “No. We’ve got to go now.”
“We can’t,” I said. “The man’s got enough firepower to defend the Alamo. We’re waiting for backup.”
“Then you can wait for them without me. If I call a mark ten minutes before showtime and try to put him on hold for two hours, he’s going to know something’s going down. Just get me there on time, let me do what I have to do, and once I’m out, you can wait as long as you want before you storm the castle.”
“Annie...”
“I’m serious, Detective. I talked to the man on the phone last night. He’s squirrelly enough as it is. Either we go now or the deal is off.”
She was bluffing. She’d do anything to keep her kid out of jail. But I couldn’t take the chance. I looked at Kylie. It was easy to figure where her head was at.
“Let’s roll,” she said, and Teddy pulled the van out of the parking lot for the final three-mile drive to Bassett’s house.
Less than twenty minutes later, Annie had delivered. She’d wormed a confession out of Bassett. Now all we had to do was wait for our two informants to get out of the house.
And then Teddy, who had been told not to talk, talked. “We got enough,” he said.
“Did Teddy just tell Bassett that they got the confession they came for?” Kylie said.
“It sounded that way to me,” I said. “But we know what he means. The question is, will Bassett pick up on it?”
We waited for Annie to ask Bassett if he could make her a cup of hot chocolate, but she didn’t. And then she said, “Teddy and I will get the necklace.”
“They’re coming out,” Kylie said. “You ready?”
“We’re not waiting for backup, are we?” I said.
“Too risky. If she doesn’t come back right away, he’ll know we’re out here, and we’ll lose the element of surprise. As soon as she and Teddy are safe, you cover the back, I’ll go in the front, and we’ll take him down.”
We heard footsteps over the wire as Annie and Teddy walked through the house. As soon as the front door opened, the signal started to break up.
“Fabric rubbing against the mic,” Kylie said. “It’s freezing out there. She’s probably hugging her arms to her chest.”
The static continued, and then the signal dropped. “Lost her,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kylie said. “She and Teddy are on their way back to the van, and Bassett is probably sitting in his living room with a loaded elephant gun, waiting to get his hands on the—”
The impact was bone-jarring. It felt like the van had been hit by a train. We found out later it was a Land Rover, which is almost as lethal.
The side panel caved in, and the van slid across the frozen ground. Neither Kylie nor I had been braced for the collision, and we both wound up on the hard metal floor.
Before I could get my bearings, I heard an engine roaring, bearing down on us hard. The second crash was a bigger jolt than the first. The van flipped over, teetered, and then rolled downhill, flipping over one more time, and another, and another, until something big — a tree, probably — broke our descent.
If it hadn’t been for a wall-mounted safety bar, I’d have been thrown around like a rag doll in a washing machine. Even so, my left shoulder and my right knee took a pummeling.
Kylie wasn’t as lucky. She was holding on to the back of the driver’s seat, a glazed look in her eyes, blood streaming down her face.
“We should have waited for backup,” she said.
Chapter 71
As soon as Max realized that the Ryders were there for his confession and not for the money, he reached behind his back for his gun, held it inches from Annie’s head, and put his index finger to his lips.
Slow-witted as he was, Teddy got the message. He froze.
Max carefully lifted the bottom of Annie’s sweatshirt. No wonder the old crone didn’t want to be patted down. She was wired.
He turned the gun on Teddy and whispered in Annie’s ear, “How many cops in the van?”
She held up two fingers.
Maxwell Bassett was a doomsday prepper — a lifelong survivalist. For decades he’d been prepared for that apocalyptic day when he would have to run from life as he knew it. In all his Armageddon scenarios, he pictured a foreign invasion, a catastrophic natural disaster, or a total societal collapse. Never in his wildest fantasies could he have imagined that he’d be taken down by a conniving old hag and her idiot son.
It didn’t matter. He was ready. With the gun trained on them, he went to a closet and pulled out a timeworn, well-traveled Rufiji Safari bag. It was filled with everything he’d need to escape to the fortress he’d built thirty years ago in the middle of the British Columbian wilderness.
He’d have liked to put a bullet through Teddy’s empty skull, but the need for silence trumped the desire for payback.
“Now you just sit here and be a good boy,” he whispered in Teddy’s ear. “If you’re not, you know what’s going to happen to your mother, don’t you?”
Teddy nodded, and then sat stone-faced as Bassett led Annie out of the room and closed the door behind them.
As soon as they were outside, Bassett manipulated the old lady’s microphone just enough to convince the two cops that she was on her way to the van. Then he yanked it out of the transmitter and tossed it in the snow.
“Get in,” he said, opening the driver’s-side door of the LR4 and shoving her over to the passenger seat.
“Buckle up,” he said, starting the car. It was a noisy beast, but the odds were that the cops would have their headsets pressed to their ears, trying to pick up a signal from their informant. They’d never know what hit them. The 340-horse supercharged V-6 engine roared to life.
The aging van was sitting a hundred feet away, its side panel a perfect target for the Rover.
Annie held her hands up to shield herself.
“What are you afraid of, Grandma?” Bassett said. “You’re the hammer, not the nail.”
“What do you think I’m afraid of, asshole? You T-bone that van, and we’re both going to get a face full of air bag.”
“How dumb do you think I am?” Bassett said, turning the Rover so that it was facing away from the Chevy.