“If you think you’re going to intimidate me with that, you’re mistaken,” he said, sounding nervous for the first time.
I popped the magazine and thumbed out six high-impact rounds before replying, “Why would I care? It all pays the same.”
I let him watch me snap on the surgical gloves before toweling the steering wheel, then each bullet, clean. I reloaded two rounds into the magazine and killed the dome light. When I opened the door, he made a reflexive, mewing sound as he inhaled, then recovered by clearing his throat.
Now the man was looking at me. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing? You get some kind of power rush playing the hard-ass? If you want to negotiate, let’s negotiate. We can come to an agreement. There’s another friend I can call. I can guarantee you sixty thousand-no, seventy thousand-cash. No questions, no risk. I’ve got my cell on me. Cut my hands loose and I’ll have the money waiting.”
I replied, “I’ve already been paid,” then pushed the door closed. I walked to the passenger side, hoping to hell police didn’t choose now to cruise this dirt utility road, with its detritus of garbage and beer cans, close enough to Interstate 75 to hear the wake of traffic. No combination of lies could explain kidnapping a Who’s Who millionaire. My own distaste for what I was doing would probably have given me away before I tried. In psychological warfare, tactical cruelty is just another arrow in the quiver.
I told myself that if I was right, what I was doing might save the boy. If wrong, Myles was tough enough to recover, then deal with it along with his long list of other personal problems.
I opened the door, grabbed the man behind the neck and tumbled him onto the ground, hearing him say, “Why is this happening to me?,” his voice shaky. He repeated it several times, a sign he was going into shock, then yelled, “Say something! You’re driving me crazy with the damn silence. Tell me what I did wrong. Give me a name, for godsakes.”
I cracked the slide, chambered a round, then stood over him holding the gun. Parallel to the barrel, I was gripping the ASP light, but it wasn’t on. “They said you won’t talk. So they hired me.”
“Talk? About what? Jesus Christ, ask me anything, I’ll tell you.”
I said, “I don’t get paid to listen,” then extended my arm, pistol a foot from his head. A moment later, I clicked on the ASP light. In the laser-white scintillation, Myles’s eyes widened as if about to be hit by a car. He jerked his head away. “You’re blinding me!”
I said, “I’m doing you a favor,” but then dimmed the little flashlight so only the gun barrel and a wedge of the man’s face were illuminated.
He cracked an eye. “Jesus Christ, I thought you pulled the trigger. It was so damn bright.”
“They say it’s like that.”
“Being shot, you mean?”
“Close your eyes, you tell me.”
He opened his eyes wider. “But you don’t have to kill me now. Seriously, I’ll tell you anything. But I can’t answer unless I know what they want.”
“I’m doing what they want.”
“ Please. At least give me a minute to think this through. Just one minute, I’ll make it right, I swear-and I’ll pay you. An entirely different business deal. Isn’t that fair? I’m wealthy. I can pay you a hundred times more than they paid you.”
I said nothing. After a long silence, he began to cry. The man had pissed his pants, I realized. He pulled his knees to his chest, fetal position, then squinched his eyes closed until he remembered, then opened his eyes wide, as if looking up at me was his only defense. He began to moan, “I’m begging you, please… please. ”
I felt a mounting contempt for myself that was proportional to a rising respect for the man at my feet. He had handled the bullying better than most and taken longer to break than it might have taken to break me under like circumstances. Dying clueless, among garbage, on a dead-end road, is sufficient reason to beg.
But my assessment was premature.
My cell phone had a digital-recorder function. I pressed the RECORD icon and dropped the phone on the ground near the man’s head. “So talk. They won’t believe me unless I get it on tape.”
Myles opened his eyes. “ Sure. What do you want me to say? I’ll tell you anything.” His eagerness to survive, his clinging devotion to hope, summarized our species yet, oddly, also debased it.
“They want the truth.”
“Of course! I’m a cooperative person-you’ll see. But first, I think we’d be more comfortable if-”
I interrupted before he could mention freeing his hands, saying, “They’re looking for a missing kid. That’s all I know. You asked for a minute to figure it out. You’ve got it. So tell me: What’s the question you’re supposed to answer?”
“I don’t know. I swear it, I have no idea.”
I said, “Then we’re wasting time,” and leaned closer with the gun.
“Wait! Maybe I do know something.” I watched his face. When I saw his eyes rotate upward, I knew he was assembling a lie. I touched the gun barrel to his ear. He winced but offered the lie anyway.
“There are always questions when somebody’s kid disappears. No one’s to blame, it’s just the way it is. And let’s be honest, young girls disappear all the time. What I don’t understand is-”
“How do you know it was a girl?” I said.
When he replied, “Well… it’s only natural to assume-” I pressed the pistol into his ear.
He lied again. “You told me it was a girl! ‘They’re looking for a missing girl,’ isn’t that what you said?”
I began counting off seconds-“… thirty-nine… thirty-eight
… thirty-seven…”-and used my foot to pin him to the ground when he tried to wiggle away.
“Stop… stop, I’ll talk! But I need more information. Could be, the people who hired you got the wrong idea about the missing girl-boy-whatever. Did they say anything about finding something? Or about a type of radar-this was on a farm I own in New York where someone used ground-penetrating radar-”
I kept counting-“… thirty-one… thirty… twenty-nine. ..”
“Stop that! I’m trying to cooperate. I think what happened is, someone in that area heard about an incident, but the radar was wrong. False readings are so damn common with that sort of technology. I don’t expect you to understand. But if that’s what this is about, I’m sure the people who paid you-”
“You made me lose count, Nels,” I said. “So we start at ten. Ten seconds.
What’s the question? I won’t understand the answer unless I hear the question.” I was studying his eyes as I counted-“… nine… eight… seven…”
“Please don’t. One more minute…”
I leaned my weight on the pistol, and said, “One? Zero. ”
“No! You win!” He stopped squirming and lay in the sand panting. “I’ll tell you. The question would be… I guess what anyone would want to know is…” I watched his eyelids blink closed, then open. As he thought about it, his eyes rotated downward. “The question,” he said, “might be about a girl named Annie Sylvester. Where is the girl buried? I guess that’s the first question someone would ask.”
“The answer?”
It was several seconds before he could make himself say it. “She’s near the Hamptons, Long Island-that’s in New York. Annie is buried in a pasture. A horse farm called Shelter Point.”
25
Nine p.m. I battled the urge to rush as I drove the Range Rover south on U.S. 41 toward Venice Beach Road and Falcon Landing, governing my speed with cruise control and using the blinker to shift lanes. I didn’t know where Will Chaser was. Didn’t know if he was dead or alive, aboveground or below, and I was convinced Nelson Myles didn’t know either. But I now felt sure the boy was somewhere in Florida, probably close to Sarasota. It would be unwise to invite the attention of a traffic cop.
Myles hadn’t told me the whole truth-yet. But I believed him when he said he hadn’t seen the boy and didn’t know where he was. I did not believe him, however, when he said he didn’t know that he’d been helping the kidnappers. Too many holes in his story, too many headlines on the television news.