“Tell him,” Kellie said.
The car went silent.
The fog embraced it.
“Any questions?” Avery asked.
“Yeah. How do you get out of this chickenshit outfit?” Cal said, and laughed at his own witticism.
Nobody laughed with him.
IN THIS CITY,the facades of the buildings conceal a multitude of endeavors, many of them criminal. Whore houses flourish on any avenue or side street, blatantly advertising themselves in the trendiest magazines as massage parlors, offering up to the tired businessman or the restless college kid a variety of pleasures to satisfy the most obsessive connoisseur. Here in this carnal candyland, the night stalker can find whatever he desires, at whatever price. Nor is this American flesh bazaar limited to the big bad city alone. Travel to the so-called heartland. Open the yellow pages of the local telephone directory, or surf the Internet in your hotel room. It is there. It is everywhere. It is available.
Many of the hidden warrens in this and other American cities now house drug pads to shame the ancient opium dens of China. Where not too many years ago, you could smoke a crack pipe in one of these places for a mere five bucks, this cheap cocaine derivative has now mysteriously fallen out of favor, to be replaced by heroin as the drug of choice, an ascendancy that no doubt thrills the poppy growers in Afghanistan now that they’ve been liberated by American soldiers. A sharp loaded with a heroin hit now cost almost three times as much as a puff of crack used to cost. You lay on a narrow cot, and an attendant wrapped a rubber tube around your arm and serviced you. It was like getting blown by a Korean whore in a similar shabby little apartment two blocks away, only better.
Early Sunday morning, far from the sordid city scene, in a gray-shingled beach house on a fog-shrouded beach in Russell County, miles from where the abduction on the River Harb had taken place, Tamar Valparaiso was just regaining consciousness.
3
SOMETHINGwas covering her eyes.
She could not open her eyes because whatever it was—a cloth blindfold, duct tape, whatever—was so tight. Her first instinct was to reach up with her right hand to pull it free, whatever it was, but she discovered at once that her hands were bound behind her back. Her next instinct was to scream, but there was a gag in her mouth, as tight as the blindfold over her eyes. Run, she thought, run!, and tried to get to her feet, but her ankles were bound, too. She struggled for a moment, angrily, panicking in her helplessness, kicking out at nothing, and then lying still and silent, breathing hard, trying to figure out what was happening to her here.
All at once, she remembered.
Two men coming down the steps just as she was finishing the number. One of them hitting her. The other one clamping a sweet-smelling rag over her nose.
She lay still in the darkness.
Remembering.
She knew even before she began exploring with her legs, reaching out with her legs and her sandaled feet to touch the boundaries of the space she was in, knew somehow even before her feet touched the confining, defining walls, that she was in a closet. Lying on the hard wooden floor of a closet, her shallow breathing seeming to echo back at her in a small airless cubicle.
She almost panicked again.
She kicked out at the walls, tried to scream again, almost choked, tried to cough out the gag, tried to force her eyes open, her lids fluttering helplessly against the blindfold. She tried to calm herself. Sucked in great gulps of air through her nose. Lay still and silent for several moments, regaining her cool, telling herself to relax, be still.
She eased herself up into a sitting position, her back to what she supposed was the rear wall of the closet. Exploring with her feet, she located what she guessed was a hinge, the thin sole of her slightly heeled sandal catching on something that jutted from the otherwise flat surface, yes, it had to be a hinge, yes, she was indeed facing the closet door.
Bracing both feet hard against the floor, she inched her back slowly up the rear wall of the closet, banging her head on what was obviously a recessed horizontal shelf, but easing her way up and around it, and struggling to her feet at last. Her hands tied behind her back, her feet bound, essentially blind and mute, she used her head and her shoulder to explore the hinged side of the door, locating another hinge higher up. Using her nose as a pointer, she zeroed in on a small protruding knob at the top of the hinge.
The blindfold ended just above her cheekbone. She pressed the side of her face against the hinge, and tried to hook the edge of the blindfold over the knob. She was about to give up, when—on the eighth or ninth attempt—she finally snagged it. Yanking downward with a sharp jerk of her head, she pulled the blindfold loose, and opened her eyes.
A thin ribbon of light limned the lower edge of the closet door.
She waited for her eyes to adjust.
Duct tape.
It was duct tape.
The same thing that bound her ankles, and undoubtedly her hands, which she could not see.
She searched the closet floor and the shelf at eye level for any sharp object that might help her free her hands or her feet.
There was nothing.
She tried to hook the gag over the same hinge that had served her with the blindfold. But because it was a rag twisted an inch or so inside her mouth, and tied tightly at the back of her head, there was no slack to it at all, and she could not free it.
She did not know what to do next.
CARELLAwanted to know what they were supposed to do next.
He had waited till a respectable sevenA.M. before phoning Lieutenant Byrnes, and now the two men were discussing whether or not they should drag the FBI into this.
“For all I know, Loomis has already called them,” Carella said.
“Who’s Loomis?” Byrnes asked.
In the background, Carella could hear a television set going. He imagined his boss at breakfast, sitting at his kitchen table over bacon and eggs, watching television as he ate. Byrnes was a compact man in his fifties, white-haired and blunt-featured. He had no particular fondness for the FBI.
“Barney Loomis,” Carella said. “He’s the CEO of Bison Records. He thinks the perps are going to ask him for the ransom.”
“Oh? How come?”
“Her parents are divorced, one in Mexico, the other in Europe. Also, neither of them has any money.”
“State line been crossed here?” Byrnes asked.
“We don’t know where the boat went after the snatch. Could’ve gone across the river, sure, docked someplace there. In which case, yes, a state line’s been crossed.”
“You say this girl’s a celebrity?”
“Personally, I never heard of her, Pete. According to Loomis, she’s the hottest thing around. But he owns the label, so what do you expect him to say?”
“You think he may have already called the Feds?”
“I have no idea. He wants that girl back.”
“What’d you say her name was?”
“Tamar Valparaiso.”
“Cause here she is now,” Byrnes said, and got up to raise the volume on the television set. “Can you hear this?” he asked Carella.
“I can hear it,” Carella said, and nodded grimly.
“…from a luxury yacht in the River Harb last night,” a television newscaster was saying. “According to U.S. Coast Guard reports…”
“How’d they’d get in this?” Byrnes said into the phone.
“Harbor Patrol called them.”
“…two armed and masked men boarded theRiver Princess at about ten-fifteen, seizing the talented young singer as she was performing her debut album,Bandersnatch, for a hundred or more invited guests…”