“To inspire you to deliver the fine in full by the deadline, the court has authorized us to begin prosecution by removing—”
“Oh, Jesus,” Felk said aloud in his quiet room as the captors spread the man’s fingers so that one index finger was exposed on the cinder block.
“—a finger from each man now.”
A large blade glinted, pressed down on the finger, swiftly crunched, as if cutting celery, severing it cleanly from the hand. Spurting blood cascaded over the cinder block as the man’s screaming pierced Felk’s ears.
“God, no. Damn it, no!”
The injured man’s hand was wrapped in a towel, the finger held to the camera, then tossed out of frame. Off-camera dogs yelped and Felk shut his eyes to the horror. For the next thirty minutes, he endured the screaming as one by one each of his men lost a finger, including his brother, Clayton.
Felk shook with rage as tears rolled down his face.
“I swear we are coming to get you and we will waste the motherfuckers. I swear to God.”
After it had ended, Felk sat on the side of his bed with his head in his hands until dawn broke over San Francisco. The entire time his thinking had been crystalline while hate-fueled adrenaline pulsated through him as if he were in a firefight.
He analyzed their situation.
The mutilations resulted from Rytter’s arrest and death. Rytter’s arrest must’ve arisen from information police possessed. What did they know? The press had reported early in the case that the FBI had a key eyewitness to the federal agent’s shooting.
If it was true, that witness had to be the woman beside him.
She’d looked right at Felk, pleaded for her life.
Why did I hesitate? Why? Why? Why? Fuck, I don’t know why.
It was a mistake to let her live.
What did she see?
Goddamnit.
By 5:00 a.m., Felk had summoned the others to a briefing in his room for 6:00 a.m. He showed them the grisly video, explaining its link to Rytter’s arrest, which had to be linked to the witness.
“What did the FBI get from her?” Felk said. “What could they know?”
“How can we be sure it’s her and not someone in our network who may have gone to the FBI for the reward?” Northcutt asked.
“Because anyone who knows anything of our mission is involved,” Felk said. “Everyone helping us has a connection to our men who are being held hostage. There’s no way in hell they would give us up.”
“So what could this woman have seen?” Unger shook his head. “We were so goddamn careful. We took shell casings. We left nothing—no DNA, no debris. We took out their security cameras.”
“We were covered in racing suits,” Northcutt said. “We wore helmets with dark glass, gloves. Nobody could see anything.”
“How close was this woman to you?” Dillon asked Felk.
“Less than three feet, maybe two,” Felk said. “She was on her stomach, on the floor, right beside the agent.”
“Why don’t we reenact it and see if that helps?” Dillon said.
“Okay, get the gear. Bring up my suit, gloves, helmet to the room. We’ll do this ASAP.”
Within twenty minutes Dillon had returned with a large sports bag. Felk stripped down to his T-shirt and boxers, then got into the one-piece leather racing suit. He pulled on his boots, strapped on his motorcycle helmet and tugged on his gloves.
“Unger, you’re the agent, get on the floor on your gut, here,” Felk directed him. “Northcutt, you’re the witness, get next to him here and turn your head like this.
“All right, I was standing like this and I put my gun on his head like this.” Felk slowly shaped the fingers of his right hand into a gun and lowered it to Unger’s head. “Northcutt, your head is turned facing Unger’s, so you’re watching the gun on him. What do you see?”
As Felk extended his gun hand, the cuff of his racing suit slipped back.
“Freeze,” Northcutt said, raising his hand to touch the Red Cobra Team 9 tattoo wrapped around Felk’s wrist. “I see your tattoo.”
Felk raised his wrist to study it in disbelief.
“Fuck!” Felk said. The others looked at their own wrists as if they were passports to doom. Felk tore off his helmet, unzipped his suit, cursing under his breath. He shoved his gear in the bag, dressed, went to his laptop and started working.
“What are we going to do?” Dillon asked.
“Stay true to our mission,” Felk said. “We’ve taken losses, but we’re not going to abandon our people. We’re handcuffed to the schedule of that armored car shipment to Oakland International. We’ve got to hang on for four days.”
“But we’re vulnerable, Ivan.” Unger took uneasy inventory of the others.
“Don’t you think I know that?” Felk said.
His anger rising, Felk rummaged through his other bag until he found Lisa Palmer’s photo-ID employee card for Good Buy Supermart.
He held it up to the others.
“This bitch will not bring us down!”
43
Queens, New York
Lisa.
That was the only personal information Gannon’s caller had given him when she phoned him this morning.
She’d set their meeting for 4:30 p.m. at a McDonald’s in the Rego Park area of Queens. Gannon’s dashboard clock read 4:15 p.m. As he guided his Pontiac Vibe along Queens Boulevard, he estimated he was eight blocks away; glad to take Queens traffic over Manhattan’s nightmare.
Nightmare.
He thought briefly of Katrina.
How did it go so wrong?
The fact she’d dumped him underscored the emptiness of his life. To hell with her, he thought as the golden arches came into view.
Concentrate on work.
He was onto something big here.
After parking and heading for the door, he checked out the news boxes on the street displaying the Post, the Times and Daily News. Each paper had a heist item on the front page. The story was still huge and Gannon could not afford to blow it. Sure, he’d gotten a few lucky breaks, but he’d invested a lot of sweat, too.
He’d worked it, no doubt about it.
As he stood in line for a small coffee, he hoped that “Lisa” wouldn’t stand him up. He understood that she was nervous and that this was an audition of sorts for him. He’d done a few of these dances with sources in the past and usually they went well. Usually, he got the story.
But experience taught him to never, ever take anything for granted.
He found an empty booth and flipped through a copy of the New York Daily News that someone had left. Then he checked his BlackBerry for updates. There were snippets here and there but nothing major. Lisa, his witness, was the story right now.
In their last call he’d started describing himself before she’d stopped him. “I know what you look like and you know what I look like. We met at Ramapo when I was with Morrow.”
Gannon kept a vigil on the after-school, after-work customers streaming into the restaurant. He studied the women who resembled Lisa before he spotted her entering the side door. She scanned the dining area and upon seeing him, she approached his table.
“Hi, I’m Lisa.” She had a nice smile, pretty eyes.
“Jack Gannon.” He stood, shook her hand.
“I’m sorry to have to meet here but we’ve got a lot on the go these days,” Lisa said. “I’m so thirsty. I just need to get a drink, can I get you anything?”
“No, let me get it for you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Please, I need a fresh coffee. Have a seat. What would you like?”
“Okay, a small Diet Coke, thanks.”
When Gannon returned with the drinks, it became clear to him by the warm casual way Lisa carried herself, without pretense, that this was her McDonald’s, and he was a guest on her turf.
“Thanks for coming out to Queens,” she said.
“Thanks for agreeing to talk to me.”
“This is off the record, not for print, or whatever you guys say.”
“Yes,” he said. “So can you tell me a bit about yourself?”
Lisa glanced out the window then at her hands.
“My husband was killed two years ago. He was a mechanic. He stopped to help a stranger fix their car on the Grand Central Parkway when he was hit by a truck.”
This added a new dimension.
“I’m so sorry.”
Lisa’s eyes shone. “It’s been hard, but we take things day by day.”
“I understand,” Gannon said. “My parents died together in a car accident several years ago in Buffalo, where I grew up.”
“That’s sad,” Lisa said.
“I take it you live in Queens?”
“Yes.”
“Where do you work?”
“I’m a supermarket cashier.”
Gannon smiled.
“My mother was a waitress much of her life.”
As they talked he found a lot to like about Lisa, she was blue collar, working-class, just like him. They quickly grew comfortable with each other as Lisa told him how she’d grown up poor in Queens, forgoing college to work, getting married, having two kids and then facing her husband’s sudden death. To Gannon, she was getting on with her life as a single parent with a kind of heroic dignity. After some twenty minutes, Gannon figured it was time to get down to business.
“So you witnessed the agent’s murder?”
“Hold on. It’s just like we agreed, you can’t take notes and you can’t report anything until I agree to an interview later. That’s our deal.”
“All right, that’s our deal.”
“Give me your word.”
“I give you my word.”
“The FBI would go nuts if they knew I was talking to you. But I’m a witness, not a criminal. I’m free to find out what I need to know.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“Tell me about this case. You seem to have good sources. You seem to know everything.”
“Not as much as the FBI. Wouldn’t they keep you informed?”
“They’re guarded. After I helped them on this case, after they got what they needed, they seemed to have forgotten about me.”
“But they have victim witness programs.”
“They’ve got a process for keeping witnesses and victims informed after an arrest has been made. They’ll keep you updated on the status of a prosecution. But it’s different with a live investigation.”
Gannon nodded.
“They want it sealed so they can make arrests,” he said.
“Is this guy they got in Nebraska, this Rytter, is he the one who killed the FBI agent?”
“Why is that important?”
“I was on the floor next to the agent when it happened. Some of his blood splattered on me.”
“What?”
“Then the killer put his gun to my head. I begged for my life, he hesitated and one of the others pulled him away.”
Images swirled before Gannon. He was on the brink of a powerful story.
“And you helped ID the killer for the FBI?”
“I’m their key witness.”
“How? What did you see that identified him?”
Lisa shook her head.
“I don’t think I should say.”
She glanced at her watch, then toward the play area, as if she was here with someone else. Gannon sensed his time was running out.
“Didn’t they put you in any kind of witness protection?” he asked.
“They offered, but their thinking was that since the killers did not know my identity, they wouldn’t look for me, or any of the victims. The killers took all our cell phones and burned them. The FBI said they would flee the area, and what happened in Nebraska convinces me that they were right about that.”
“So what happened immediately after the murders?”
“The FBI took me to a hotel and got a psychiatrist to help me with the trauma and to remember details of the agent’s death.”
“Did the psychiatrist hypnotize you or something?”
“Something like that. Then we had an FBI agent live with us in our home for a while, but we really didn’t like it. Before all this we were preparing to move across the country, to get on with our lives after my husband’s death. I had debts. I had to sell our cabin, our only asset. It’s been complicated and stressful.”
“I see.”
“So it would give me peace of mind to know that the bastard who killed the agent and almost killed me is dead. Can you help me with that?”
Gannon looked at Lisa.
“I’ll work on it. But I need you to promise me exclusivity. I want to tell your story.”
“You give me your word that you will keep me informed on everything. Then, once we know the FBI has this thing under control, I’ll give you your interview. I’ll tell you everything.”
“Deal. How can I keep in touch with you?”
“I’ll give you my new cell-phone number, but it might not work all the time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Before this happened, I had just sold our cabin upstate. We’re going up for one last visit to close it. The cell-phone service is not reliable up there and we don’t have a landline.”
Lisa’s attention shifted beyond Gannon to another part of the restaurant. She nodded to someone. Gannon turned to see a woman and two children coming to their table.
“Can we go now, Mom?” Ethan asked.
Smiling at Gannon, Lisa said, “This is my posse, Ethan and Taylor. And this is my friend Rita.”
Gannon shook hands with everyone.
“I have a niece and I’m guessing she’s about your age, Ethan.”
“Cool. What school does she go to?” he asked.
“I’m not sure, she lives in Arizona.”
“It doesn’t snow there,” Ethan said.
“Not too much.”
“Does Santa still go if there’s no snow?” Taylor asked.
“I’m pretty sure he does,” Gannon said, noticing Ethan’s pearl-handled penknife clipped to a small chain on his belt loop.
“I like your knife.”
“My dad gave it to me as a present before he died.”
“Oh, I see.”
“My brother lives in Buffalo.” Rita changed the subject for the kids. “I work with Lisa. Sorry, I looked you up on the internet, Jack. You used to write for the Buffalo Sentinel.”
“That’s right,” Gannon said and smiled at Taylor. “We get a lot of snow in Buffalo.”
“Do you have any kids, Jack?” Rita asked.
“No, no kids. I’m not married. Got a sister in Arizona and a niece.”
“Time to go, Mom?” Taylor asked.
“Time to go,” Lisa stood.
“Wait.” Gannon fished out a business card with all of his contact information and gave it to Lisa. “This is how you can reach me, or get word to me. There’s a toll-free number on there.”
“Could I have one? I collect cards,” Ethan asked.
“You collect sports cards.” Rita laughed.
“Sure, buddy.” Gannon stood and gave him one. “It might be worth something someday.”
Gannon sat down.
Watching Lisa leave with her children and her friend, he shook his head at what had just transpired, recalling when he first saw her at the Ramapo truck stop office, with her head on the desk, reenacting the shooting.
Now, seeing her walk across the McDonald’s parking lot, he was in awe of this young widow from Queens, who had just promised him an unbelievable story.