“He put a bag over my head,” Jeremy said. “I couldn’t see.”
I felt nauseated. His abductors had evidently chosen him at random, an easy target riding his skateboard in an alleyway near his house in Pasadena. A club to the head, a bag, and that was all he could remember. When he woke, his finger was missing. He’d spent the next several days in a dark room, mostly sleeping under the influence of the drugs they’d given him to keep him quiet.
We drove on for a bit before Keith continued, glancing up at the rearview mirror. “He made a threat in the note he left us. Did he say anything to you about that?”
The boy looked out the window. “He said I couldn’t tell anyone or he would kill my mother.”
Keith glanced at me in the mirror. “That’s going to be hard, Jeremy. I know how difficult this is, but I think he means it. Your family and the police will want to know everything about how you were taken, exactly what happened, about us…everything. But he cut off your finger, which means he’s serious about what he says. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to tell them something, I understand that. You don’t have any information that could lead them to whoever did this, so it’s probably okay to tell them what you know, that you were taken and you don’t know why. But if you say anything about the note, or about us, I think whoever did this might carry out his threats.”
It was true. Sicko knew that if the boy led the police to us, we could lead them to Randell. We were the link that could incriminate him.
“Tell the police that whoever took you brought you back and dropped you off a block from home. Don’t tell them about the warehouse or about us. I know that may not sound right to you, but I can’t think of a better way to go. Trust me, we’ll get to the bottom of this, and when it’s safe everything will come out. Until then, you can’t say anything about us. Fair enough?”
“Yes.”
My heart was already broken, but I saw myself in Jeremy’s shoes, and it was everything I could do to remain calm. I gave him a long hug and helped him out of the car a block from his house in a low-rent district on the east side of Pasadena. We followed him at distance until he entered a duplex, safe.
But really, he wasn’t safe. Neither was Danny.
Only two days had passed between the time we drove away from Jeremy’s house and the time we drove up to the large white house on Sunrise Street, but those two days felt like a week to me.
“This is it?” I asked, pulling the car to a stop twenty feet back from a stucco mailbox marked with the brass numbers 1227.
“That’s it.” Keith shoved the Google map into the car’s door pocket. “Kill the lights.”
I did.
“Turn the engine off.”
I looked at him, then up the driveway at the house, which was lit by an array of exterior lamps affixed to the stucco walls. Two white pillars bordered a tall arched ironwork door. Using Google’s satellite view, we’d zoomed in on the house, complete with red adobe tiles on a dozen roof lines. It was clear then that our target was wealthy. But we still didn’t know who owned the property or who we were supposed to kill, only that he lived here.
My palms on the wheel were clammy with sweat. “I think we should leave it running,” I said. “We might need to get out quick.”
“Saving the three seconds it takes to start the car isn’t worth the risk.”
“Risk of what? It’s Beverly Hills.”
“These are public streets. A cop comes by and wonders why the car’s running? No, turn it off.”
So I did. “What time is it?”
“Eleven fifty-one. We have nine minutes.”
“So I just go up and knock on the door, right?”
Keith reached back and grabbed my black kit. “Just like we agreed. You go to the front door, I hold back until the door’s open. Assuming you’re still good with that.”
Was I?
The plan was mine, dredged up from my better days with Danny. He would have insisted on a thorough surveillance, but the timing Sicko had given us didn’t allow for that. The home owner probably wouldn’t see any threat in a skinny girl like me dressed in Miss Me jeans and a bright blue blouse. Once he had the door open, Keith, who was dressed in black, would step in from the side with his gun and force the man back in the house.
Looking at the house, I was having second thoughts. We didn’t even know if the owner had a wife in there, or daughters, or guards, or dogs.
“What if he’s the wrong man?”
Keith pulled out his gun and chambered a round. “Whoever’s pulling our strings is too meticulous in his planning for that. The man they want is in that house, guaranteed.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“And then you leave it up to me.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I don’t either, but trust me, it’s the best way. Go in fast and hard and control the situation before he has a chance to react.”
Something about the look of that fortress struck me as odd. Maybe it was my frazzled nerves, maybe my suspicious nature, maybe my fear of bedbugs and rats—I don’t know. There was too much we didn’t know about our target. Too many things that could go wrong. I knew that as a cop Keith had been through his share of similar situations, but nothing had gone right for us so far. And we’d failed to follow the instructions on the last note. It was suddenly all happening too fast.
What would Danny do? I’d asked that question a hundred times in the last two days, but staring at the house, a part of me saw our present situation differently. My instinct to start out with deception was good, but the part about barging in with guns drawn wasn’t sitting right. We didn’t know enough!
Danny would already be on the perimeter circling the house. He would be patient. He would find a weakness first and then exploit it, right?
“You ready?” Keith asked.
“Read the note again,” I said.
He turned his head. “We’ve been over this.”
“I have OCD.”
He stared at me, then pulled the note out of his pocket, fished a penlight out of my kit, and read the note under its light.
“‘At midnight Monday night you will go to an address I will give you. You will force a full confession from the owner of the house and learn where he put the money. If he refuses, you will kill him and wait for my next instructions. If he confesses, you will have forty-eight hours to retrieve the money. Once you have the money, you will return and kill the man and wait for my instructions. Either way, you will kill the man. If he’s alive in four days, both Danny and that scumbag you’re with are dead.’”
He lowered the note.
“You know what I’m thinking?” I said, eyes still on the house. “This isn’t about the money. Whoever lives in that house has all the money Randell could want. He doesn’t need us to get it; he could find another way.”
“We’ve been over that too. Randell doesn’t know who he can trust on the outside anymore. His partners turned against him.”
“It’s not about the money,” I said. “He’s obsessed with us killing whoever’s in that house. That’s all that matters to him. But why us?”
“And we’ve been over that too. Revenge.”
“Against who?”
Keith looked up at the house. “Me. You. Danny.”
I nodded and looked at the side of his face. “Okay. But what about whoever’s in the house? What if he’s more than just a drug dealer? If it’s not really about the money, why does Sicko want him dead?”
“We don’t know.” His voice took on a frustrated bite. “We don’t know squat—you don’t think I know that?”
“That’s what I’m saying…we don’t know.”
“We know Sicko’s enraged about something Danny did. Revenge. You kill this man, you take the blame, you go to prison. It’s his way of messing with Danny.”