The record keeper, p.24
The Record Keeper, page 24
Frank gestured to the coffee. “The beans are from Nicaragua. I own the farm. They’re quite good.”
When I didn’t respond, he crossed his legs and pointed again. This time at me. “I’d like to make you a proposition.”
I said nothing as I figured he was going to talk to me whether I responded or not. I don’t think he was used to people not responding to him, so he said it a second time. This time with a twist. “I’d like to make you a proposition . . . David.”
There it was again. I turned and stared at the image in front of me.
He smiled. “Your books are quite good. Such a shame about your editor. What was it, a brain hemorrhage? So strange how certain toxins can bypass the blood-brain barrier and set up shop inside our”—he tapped his head—“medulla oblongata.” He held up a finger. “Research has shown that cigarettes are a perfect delivery system. Just goes straight through the sinuses.”
He continued, “Even with much persuasion, my brother isn’t much help.” That meant they were beating Bones. “Despite our best attempts, he’s not talking. So I’m moving on to plan B.” He pointed at me. “You.”
“What have you done to Bones?”
He thumbed over his shoulder. “He was always the stoic one, so he can sit and think about his future, or not, while you can find it for me. And before you tell me you won’t do anything I request, or some such thing, just realize that you roam freely around the planet attempting to be this savior of humanity only because humanity doesn’t yet know you are also the hopeless romantic who writes the books they can’t live without. If only they knew . . .” He smiled and then uncrossed and recrossed his legs. “So, David, you’re going to find and bring me my birth certificate, which my brother has kept in hiding. A small thing, I know, but you worry about you. I have my own reasons.”
He stood. “Here’s where we are.” He walked around some barrier to Bones, who was hanging from ropes. “Truth be told, I hated doing this. But he’s pretty thickheaded, always has been, and this is about the only way to get through to him. So . . . my birth certificate. You’ll find it. And of course, when you do, I’ll be watching and I’ll be in touch. If you don’t find it, then the whole world will know that David Bishop and Murphy Shepherd are one and the same, and you won’t be able to buy gas without attracting a crowd, much less find what you call the Apollumi.” A sick smile as he tapped his back between the shoulders. “Just think of how many people I’ll profit from in your absence.”
He moved again. This time behind Bones. Allowing Bones’s face to come into view alongside him. His face was swollen, and he was unconscious. Gunner saw it and barked. Frank continued, “I know how much you love this pile of Bones, but if you want to see him again, then you’ll turn your attention to my request. If not, I’ll ship what remains of him to you in a box. Oh, and just in case you need any more incentive, you might want to check in with all those fine folks in Colorado.” Another sick smile. “Maybe Freetown isn’t so free.”
He smiled, snapped his fingers, and the video disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. I slid down the wall and sat on the floor, and only then did I hear footsteps behind me. Summer sat alongside me, locked her left arm inside my right, and said nothing. Camp stood across from us. An MK4 hanging from a single-point sling. Neither spoke. Then my phone rang.
Chapter 30
Day 7 Without Bones
The three-hour flight to Colorado seemed infinite. Clay met us on the tarmac, and his face was not happy. Nor did he speak. He opened the door, we sat down, and he drove. Quickly. Which was unlike a man who’d learned to live with time. At midnight we drove onto Main Street to lights and a mob of people. Many crying. Most looked shell-shocked.
Angel stood in the center of the street, flanked by Casey. Both were carrying rifles lifted from my safe. Spent shell casings littered the road. Three men dressed in black tactical gear, tied hand and foot, lay on the ground behind them. Someone had pulled off their masks, but I didn’t recognize them, and all three were bleeding from various holes. I doubted they knew much.
We exited the vehicle as Ellie ran through the crowd and launched herself into my arms. One eye was puffy, and there were bruises on her neck and powder burns alongside one cheek. Closer inspection of Angel, Casey, and Clay proved the same. They’d been in it. A firefight on Main Street. The truth didn’t take long to set in. Frank had sent a team of people here while he was yapping it up with me, and somehow our security team, along with the girls, had defended Freetown. Eddie stood off to one side talking with our on-site commander. Both were carrying rifles.
Eddie was out of breath, but he spoke first. “We caught movement on the sensors. And we did what you told us. They never knew what hit them.”
Angel stood just a feet away. “You okay?”
A nod.
“Anybody hurt?”
She shook her head.
I turned to Casey, who was holding Shep. “They take anybody?”
Another shake.
Ellie clung to me, pressing her cheek to my stomach. Her hair smelled of gunsmoke. I scanned the world around me, and one thing was apparent. No, glaring. I was losing. Frank was winning. And Bones’s life hung in the balance.
We gathered everyone in the Planetarium, including newcomers Phyllis and her two kids, who seemed to like the excitement. My fatigue had not relented, but I needed to circle the wagons. Rally the troops. They looked at me, and their faces all said the same thing—I was their hope. Yet I was growing hopeless. I stood and knew I couldn’t let my face say what my heart felt. Six members of our security team surrounded the Planetarium, providing a show of force. The three unmasked goons lay on the ground just outside in full sight.
I started with the obvious. “Anybody hurt?”
I scanned a room full of shaking heads.
Then I feigned a smile. “Anybody scared?”
Most every hand rose.
“That’s okay. Me too.” I studied their faces, and they were. All scared. I was too tired to be crafty, so I decided to shoot straight. “As I look across your faces, I’m reminded. Each of you, every single one of you, has one thing in common with me. I found you, lifted you out of that place, and then offered to bring you here. To heal. Forget. Remember. Start over.” I slowly studied the eyes of many. “You remember?”
They nodded.
“I don’t want to resurface bad stuff, but if you’ll let me, do you remember how you felt? How you prayed for someone, anyone, to break down the door?”
More nods. Even smiles.
“Right now . . .” My emotions surfaced and I was unable to choke them back. I paused, gathered myself. “My best pal on the planet needs me to find him and bring him home. He’s in that place where you were. And the guy holding him, his brother”—I waved my hand across Freetown—“is the reason for all this. Everything. From the explosion to”—I pointed to the guys hog-tied on the ground outside—“them, to my island, to”—I gestured to Clay—“Clay, to my being shot. I thought about moving all of you to our summer getaway up in the mountains. You’ve heard us talk about it. It’s an old converted bunker. You’d be safe there and probably enjoy the excursion, but I’m not doing that. I’m not moving all of you to a hole in the ground because of him. I’m not doing that to your hearts. We’re bringing in some more tattooed and jacked guys from DC. Most will be current military on leave, wanting to make some extra money for Christmas, so we thought we’d help them out.” I feigned a laugh and pointed to Camp, who’d been the source of more than one googly-eyed whisper since he arrived. “Not to mention some of them are single.”
Laughter rippled through the room.
“I’m not moving you and I’m not changing your routines. Tomorrow morning the shops will be open and we’re getting on with our lives, albeit with a few more guys circling the perimeter.” I had a feeling my pep talk was falling short. I also knew I was way past tired. So I pulled up a chair, sat, and scanned the crowd. Making eye contact.
“Jeanie, you remember the Harley we used to get out of Vegas?”
She nodded and smiled.
“Pamela, you remember when I opened the door and said, ‘Tell me what you need’?”
She smiled and spoke loud enough for the room to hear. “I need a pizza. Right now.”
The room laughed.
“And Jacqueline, what was the first thing you did when you arrived here?”
She lifted up one foot. “New shoes.”
“Katy, you remember how I got you out of Brazil?”
She nodded. “You stole a plane.”
More laughter.
“Well, let’s just say I borrowed it. And Becca, did I sit with you in court the day you testified against your exploiter?”
A nod.
“And is he spending the rest of his life in jail?”
A second nod.
I studied the room. “It’s not always clean. Sometimes it’s messy. Sometimes we take one step forward and maybe one back, but this is what we do.” I waved my hand over them as they wrapped arms around shoulders. “For one another.” I looked out through the windows. Down Main Street. “I’m sorry about tonight. I’d like to tell you it’ll never happen again, but I didn’t think it would happen the first time. I do know this—there’s a bad man out there who wishes us harm, and I’m going to find him. I’m going to make it so he can’t do that anymore. And I’m going to do what I can, the same way I did with all of you, to bring Bones home. Now, I need to ask one favor.”
They waited.
“I need you all—I’m asking you all—to lean on each other. Be a wall for one another. A shield against the world. You can be. Every one of you is tougher than you think, as evidenced by the fact that you survived. You made it. You’re here.” I paused. “After the explosion here, I told you I wasn’t rebuilding Freetown. You were. You all thought I was talking about buildings and hospitals.” I shook my head. “I was talking about you. You are Freetown. You matter more than bricks and mortar. You are of priceless value. And every single magnificent one of you is worth rescue. Again. And again. The one who taught me that needs rescue right now, so if you don’t see me for a little while, just know I’m”—my emotions surfaced again—“trying to bring him home.”
I looked at Eddie, who nodded, and then at Summer, who had the concession stand up and running. “Now I think it’d be a good idea, since we have all these armed men currently circling our town, if you would spend some time remembering. Not the bad, but the good.” Eddie clicked Play and Bones’s slideshow started. “Eat some popcorn—”
Pamela spoke over me. “And pizza.”
The room laughed.
I slid out the side door and spoke to myself. “In the meantime I need to find the one who taught me to find you.”
Summer found me. In the basement. Sitting in Bones’s photo lab, in his chair, staring at the wall. Every few seconds another picture flashed. Someone we’d rescued. Another reminder that I hadn’t protected him. She stood behind me, arms wrapped around my neck. In my lap I held his orange case. Pelican cases are made out of the same stuff with which they make kayaks, so they can take a beating. Which his box had. I ran my fingers across the deep scars in the plastic. If only they could talk, what story would they tell me? How many grooves had been made chasing me around the planet? How many had I caused?
I could not count.
Summer ran her fingers through my hair and thumbed away my tear. Finally, she set the box on the ground next to us and sat in my lap, wrapping her arms around my neck. “How you doing?”
I shook my head, but no words came.
She waited.
A few minutes later, I spoke. “I was at the Academy. Had a long week. Hadn’t slept in three days. Bones got one of his wild hairs, and with me at my weakest and most tired, he decided to test me. So he pulls me out of class, it’s snowing, he hands me some gear, a pack, points to a snowcapped mountain, and says, ‘Start walking.’ So I did.
“He wanted to see what was on the edge of my plate. How far he could push me before my body quit. About twelve hours later, I was climbing through a snowstorm at thirteen thousand feet. En route to a cabin where he’d conducted some of my mountain training. I was well outside my limit. Starting to shut down. Wasn’t processing. Not making good decisions. Fatigue. Altitude. Hunger. He had found the edge of me. The snow became a whiteout. Couldn’t see my hand. I just kept walking. Somewhere in there I fell and couldn’t get up. I just physically could not pick my body up. I passed out facedown in the snow.
“When I woke, I was sitting in the cabin. Fire. Dry clothes. Smell of coffee. He was sitting across from me. Sipping Cabernet. I found out later he’d carried me—and both our packs—nearly a half mile along a ridgeline. When I asked him how he found me, he just shrugged and smiled.” I shook my head. “Bones has a gift. I do not. He’s part bloodhound. Finding him is beyond a needle in a haystack. I don’t even know where to begin.”
She hugged my neck several seconds. Saying “All the world will be right” without saying it. Finally, she let out a deep breath, stood, and pulled me up alongside her.
“Okay, cowboy. Pity party over. He chose you. He trained you. Shared the best parts of himself with you. And sitting here whining is doing nothing. So let’s get to work. What would he do?”
I shrugged. “He could be anywhere. Think needle and haystack.”
“I’m pretty sure if you were missing, he wouldn’t be sitting in this basement staring at the walls. He’d be turning over every—”
“Summer!” My frustration and failure flared. “I don’t know where to look. I have no idea where he is. Frank could have taken him anywhere. I have no lead. Nothing. Zero.”
She held my hand. “I know. Me neither. But we can’t sit here, and we’ve got to start somewhere. What about Eddie and the team?”
“They’re doing everything they know to do.”
She kissed me. “Think like Bones.”
We assembled in the basement. No phones. No electronics. No Frank. Summer sat on my left, Shep on her lap. Gunner on the floor. Clay on my right. Camp, BP, Jess, Angel, Casey, and Ellie sat around the table.
I fought the weariness. “Anybody got anything?”
Nobody spoke.
“Any leads whatsoever?”
Still no one spoke. I rubbed my face. “I have nothing. Bones could be anywhere in the world.”
Eddie broke the silence as he projected the pictures I’d taken at the hospital in New York City and the comms room of the Hotel California onto the screen. “Our assumption is that Bones made this symbol or letter or something as he was being dragged out the door. So he made it in haste. Probably less than a second. We have to assume that if he’s trying to tell us something, then whatever we’re looking at is a shell of the larger version.”
Both symbols were three lines. One horizontal across the top. And one vertical down the right side that connected to the horizontal. The two made one half of a square. A third curved line started at the intersection of the two lines, swooped left several inches, and then swooped back right, where it connected at the bottom of the right vertical line. It looked like a left parenthesis. But a wider arc. There was a fourth mark, but the team couldn’t come to an agreement on whether it was an unintentional smear or purposeful dot. An inch to the right of the intersection of the vertical and horizontal lines, we found a single fingerprint. It was clearer in the comms room than the hospital but both contained the same mark. Had it been in only one, it certainly could have been a mistake, but the fact that it appeared in both suggested it was purposeful.
While I originally thought the marking in the hospital could have been a number, we all agreed, when compared with the comms room, it was not. Bones had rapidly drawn a symbol in blood. Was that purposeful or was he using available resources? In both cases it looked as if his last brushstroke was to dot the horizontal “i.” But in both cases, the dot was directly to the right of the horizontal line but two inches down the vertical. To make matters worse, both horizontal lines that ran across the top were smeared, with the New York City symbol being the worse of the two. Almost as if after Bones had painted it, he used his forearm to brace against whoever was pulling him and had smeared it on his way out. It was the angle of the smear that suggested this. It started at four o’clock and finished at ten o’clock, swiping right to left across the horizontal.
My eyes were tired and I was starting to see double. Summer handed me a coffee and sat rubbing my neck.
I’d never felt so useless. So utterly incapable.
The rest of the team sat silently as we stared at the screen and compared the two pictures side by side. After fifteen minutes, I had to stand up because I was about to fall asleep in my chair, so I started pacing. Trying to wrack my brain. When I vacated my seat, Shep took an interest in the screen and sat cross-legged in my chair. He studied it, turned his head sideways, then stood and walked around the table to the wall, staring up at the picture.
Then he turned to look at all of us. The look on his face was calm and matter-of-fact. Don’t you see?
When we made no response to him, he walked to my safe room and stood at the door—which I’d locked after I’d dumped all my and Camp’s gear. Not to mention the girls’ rifles. Then he just stood there, looking at me and waiting.
“You all right?” I asked.
He knocked on the door.
“You want in?”
He made no response. Summer motioned for me to open the door, so I punched in the code, LOVESHOWSUP, and turned on the light, and we followed him into the room where he slowly circled the table in the middle. That he was looking for something was obvious. What he was looking for was not. He circled the table once along with the pile of wet, dirty, and disorganized gear lying just where I’d left it when I dumped it there thinking, I’ll deal with this later when I can think. Shep circled the table a second time. Halfway around he used his finger to lift my vest, and a second time he lifted a small duffel to look beneath it. On his third trip around, something higher up caught his eyes, so he turned to his left and stared up at Bones’s weathered and worn million-mile Pelican case resting on top of my safe. I’d set it up there when I walked into the room because that’s where Bones kept it.
