in pain as he motions in pantomime, his right hand scribbling on the palm of his left. He wants something to write with.
Frantically I look around, but there is no pencil or paper in the room. The best way to quiet him is to give him what he wants.
“I have a pen in my pocket. If I let go, you won’t pull on the tube? You promise?”
He gives me a quick sharp nod, anger in his eyes.
I release his wrists and fish the pen from my inside coat pocket. I find a couple of loose business cards in the side pocket. “Sorry. Best I can do,” I tell him.
He turns one of the business cards over and scribbles quickly on the back. With the needle inserted and taped to the back of his hand, the scrawl is barely legible. “Liquida?” He points at it with the tip of the pen.
“You got him good,” I tell him. I am hoping this news may calm him. “The cops found blood all the way out of the garage and onto the street. He won’t get far. You may have killed him. He may be dead for all we know.”
Herman shakes his head violently. He glares at me from under furrowed brows. He’s trying to tell me something, and I’m not getting it. He grabs the business card from my hand and starts to work the point of the pen over it again.
I move up a little toward the head of the bed to watch as he writes. The word Sarah and then farm. He stabs the last word with the point of the pen.
“Yes, Sarah is still there. She’s OK. I talked to her last night.”
Herman shakes his entire body this time, bellowing through the tube so violently that I’m afraid he is going to rip it from his throat. Suddenly the sensor on the monitor over the bed goes off, a screaming tone that fills the room.
“Herman, stay with me.” I pull away as if to get help. Where the hell is the doctor?
Herman grabs my sleeve once more. As I turn back, he points to the words on the card Sarah, farm, and then the word Liquida. It is as if he is struggling to deliver one last message before the grave closes over him.
The revelation suddenly seeps into my brain. “Liquida knows about the farm?”
Herman’s stark eyes stare at me as he gently nods.
“He knows where Sarah is?”
He drops the sleeve of my coat and nods once more as his body collapses onto the bed, his head slumped onto the pillow.
Chapter Three
Liquida motored slowly down the country road in front of the house, checking his watch as he drove. The place was dark inside, just a porch light and one of those bright yellow vapor lamps high on a pole near the barn. It lit up much of the front yard and cast an eerie glow out toward the road.
He drove on three hundred yards or so, turned off his headlights, then swung a quick U-turn and headed back the other way.
It wasn’t a working farm or by this time they would be out milking the cows or feeding the animals. No signs of life. He knew from earlier observation that, unless they were into eating dogs, it was a hobby farm. They raised guard dogs.
It was what most gringos knew about farming. Food came out of a can or grew in plastic bags and cartons on grocery store shelves. All you had to do was add water and zap it in a microwave. If it had to be picked or killed, they didn’t want to do it or see it being done. It was how many of the twelve million Mexicans they now called illegals came to be living in the States.
The gringos had borrowed all the money there was from foreign governments. Now they wanted to send all the Mexicans home. If they kept working at it, they could become the first empire in history to starve to death with bumper crops in the fields and feedlots full of cows and chickens, all dying of old age.
He pulled off and parked along the side of the road behind a line of bushes where the car couldn’t be seen from the house. It was the area near the berry bushes where he had seen the girl the last time, near the edge of the property. In his present state, Liquida didn’t want to have to go far to get to his car if something went wrong. If they tried to run, Liquida, with the car parked as it was, would be in a good position to follow them. When it became light, he would move the vehicle to a less visible location, then watch and wait.
He grabbed the binoculars from the passenger seat, stepped out of the car, and quietly closed the driver’s- side door. He went to the rear of the vehicle and opened the trunk. He leaned over as he fished with his one good hand inside an open zippered bag. He pulled out a cloth bundle about fourteen inches long. It was rolled and closed with laces that were stitched to the fabric and tied in a bow. It looked like a storage roll for silverware, which was, in fact, what it was.
Liquida untied the bundle and rolled it out flat in the bottom of the trunk. Slipped into narrow pockets stitched into the fabric were a dozen textured metal handles, each one machined with a fine crosshatch design etched deep into the steel. This made for a better grip. It also prevented fingerprints from being lifted from the surface of the handle.
Liquida slipped a leather glove on his one good hand, his left. Then he pulled one of the stilettos from its cloth pocket and examined the edges of the blade. They were razor sharp. The stilettos were made in a small machine shop in Tijuana, no wood or plastic, just a single piece of high carbide steel sharpened to a point, a five-inch handle with a nine-inch double-edged blade. The blade was very thin all the way to the needlelike point. It was designed for probing and piercing vital organs and slicing major blood vessels. In the hands of an expert, it could kill almost instantly or exact excruciating pain from its victim as the person twisted and squirmed in agony on the long spike of the blade.
Liquida laid the stiletto on the floor of the trunk and rubbed both sides of the metal with a piece of cloth, making sure that any prints that might be on it were either smudged or polished clean.
Now that the FBI had the other stiletto, the one he had dropped on the floor of the garage in D.C., the one Liquida used to kill the investigator, he would leave this one near the body of the girl as a calling card. Liquida wanted to leave no doubt as to who killed her, not that there should be any question.
He slipped the stiletto into the fold of the sling supporting his injured arm and quietly closed the lid on the trunk.
To the east, the Ohio horizon began to take on the hazy blue glow of a midsummer morning even as the last stars struggled to stay in the sky.
Sarah Madriani slipped out of the house, easing the rickety screen door closed behind her so that no one inside would hear. They were asleep. It was four thirty in the morning and still dark outside.
Today she was feeling a little better. Last night she had talked to her father on the phone, the first time in several days. The farm was isolated. She didn’t even have access to a television, no cable. And they wouldn’t allow her to get near a Wi-Fi signal for fear she might send an e-mail disclosing her location.
To save her sanity, Sarah had taken to running with one of the dogs, a Doberman named Bugsy. Each morning before the crack of dawn, without anyone knowing, she would turn off the security alarm at the control keypad in the kitchen, unbolt the front door, and head out.
She worked with Bugsy for a week around the farm and they bonded. There was nothing else to do. The dog gave her a sense of security and someone to run with. She needed a little exercise without being under Harry’s gaze or the watchful eye of her aunt and uncle. Harry Hinds was her father’s law partner.
The two of them had been stuck on the farm for two weeks. Sarah was climbing the walls. She was tired of it, and so was Harry, though he took pains not to show it.
Fearing for her life, her father had shipped her off to her Aunt Susan and Uncle Fred. Fred was a gun enthusiast with an arsenal in his basement and contacts with the local police, some of whom seemed to live on the farm. They were always there. The place felt like the county honor farm. The couple bred and raised Dobermans. Her father figured she’d be safe here. Safe was one thing, imprisoned was another.
For almost a week now, Sarah and the Doberman had gone for a morning romp through the fields past the berry bushes and the fence line, well beyond view from the yellow wood-framed house owned by her aunt and
