gritted under my elbows and aside from the croaking of frogs, it was the only sound to be heard. This wasn’t a job for two men; hell, even the ATF would’ve been screwed. Not that that was saying much.
It didn’t matter. I didn’t have the ATF. I had Saul, myself, and a set of balls that would’ve impressed even King Kong. It would have to be enough. Saul hadn’t bothered to ask why we didn’t just call the cops and have them investigate. He was smarter than that. Lukas was still listed as a missing child, true. And if we’d gone to the police with our information, skimpy as it was, they would’ve looked into it. But by the time they made it past that massive gate, I seriously doubted there would be anything left to find. I had no idea what we were dealing with, not one goddamn clue, but it was safe to say the police might be every bit out of their depth as we were. It was a risk I wasn’t about to take. If this teenager was Lukas, I wasn’t giving any advance warning that might lead to a second disappearance. I had one chance to pull this off . . . one chance to save him. I wasn’t going to blow it.
Not this time.
Grimly, I took another look at the place. Normally the resources needed for a place the likes of the one before me would’ve made me think government, but Saul had already discounted that. They had to be private, but that didn’t tell me a damn thing about who they were and what they were doing. Regardless, sitting spinning my wheels trying to figure it out wasn’t going to get me any closer to getting inside the walls. What we needed was a good measure of boldness and a shitload of luck. And there was no time like the present to get started. Doing a little slithering of my own, I headed down the slope for an up close and personal look at the walls of Jericho.
The walls didn’t fall that night. They didn’t quake; hell, they didn’t even shiver, but at least we’d taken stock of what we were up against. That was something, right? I knew because as we had walked back to the car, Saul kept telling me so—repeatedly. I think he was concerned that I might have a psychotic break and try to scale the wall with my bare hands. Maybe it was an exaggeration, but truthfully he wasn’t far off the mark. All those years. I clenched the steering wheel until my knuckles blanched bone white. All those years, and the best I could manage was slinking around in the dark. Lukas was there; he was right there. But he might as well have been on the moon . . . distant and unreachable . . . solitary and untouched . . . untouched. One could dream anyway. Jesus.
I rested my forehead on the wheel, exhaled once, twice, then straightened. “So, daylight surveillance tomorrow?” I asked mildly. The calm was hard won, as I tucked every bit of despair, frustration, and rage into a mental box and closed the lid tight. That box had been with me a long time now. Born on a windswept beach, whelped on the blood and pain of child and horse, this box had teeth. Considering what I fed it, it needed them.
The car in which Saul and I sat was a good two miles from the compound; a safe distance we’d thought, and so far we’d been right. The whites of his eyes glimmered in the darkness as he considered his answer. Fiddling with the volume control of the silent radio, he finally sighed and leaned back in his seat with a snort of self-disgust. “What the hell was I thinking? There is not enough money in the world for this cluster fuck.” Jerking impatiently at the seat belt, he fastened it, then drummed the dashboard with his fingers. “You and your stupid questions. I didn’t have a brother. I had a sister. Rosemary. Rosemary and Thyme, only she didn’t have a lot of time. We grew up poor as hell.” He rubbed his face. “I grew up anyway. We shared one room. I made her teddy bears out of old clothes. Ripped them to pieces and tied them in knots. They didn’t look anything like a damn bear, but . . . she was little. She didn’t know differently and she loved them. Loved me. You take that for granted when you’re a kid.” He looked out the window at the night. “She died of meningitis when she was five. Our parents were useless. They didn’t care or just assumed she’d get better. They wouldn’t even stay with her in the hospital. I did. It was my hand she held when she was sick. It was my hand she held when she died.”
And he didn’t have to look for her, because he knew where she was . . . which plot of grass she lay under. Fuck. At least I’d had some hope all these years, not much, but Saul had nothing. I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to come, but the cold, hard truth was if he didn’t, Lukas might end up like Rosemary . . . or lost again. And Saul, money or no money, Saul with his Rosemary living only in his shadow and in his memories couldn’t let that happen.
Resigned himself to his fate, he went on. “So, tomorrow it is. You bring the sunblock; I’ll bring the strippers and margaritas. It’ll be a party.”
It’d be a festival, all right—no lights, no music, no dancing. But if we managed to walk away unshot, I’d still consider it nothing but gravy.
Chapter 6
It was six days before we spotted it—our in. Six miserably endless days. Hope, determined but no fool, had taken to lying low, leaving me with nothing but a frozen and empty calm. I still did my job, more or less, on the days I absolutely couldn’t weasel my way out of it. It wasn’t as if I had personal days coming to me in my line of work. Fortunately, nothing too annoying reared its head. With my level of distraction, it was doubtful I could’ve foiled a hit man any more clever than your average third grade delinquent. But now it was suddenly over. The walls hadn’t tumbled, but they had opened up. It was a tiny hole, the fleetest windows of opportunity, but it was there—one minute chink in the armor.
It was all we needed.
Ever dug a pit before dawn, covered yourself with the sandy soil, and lain in it until dusk? Ever had sand mites set up camp in places a scrub brush couldn’t touch? Ever burrowed down in your homemade grave while large men with even larger guns prowled less than a hundred feet away? I wouldn’t recommend it. Using stiff and knotted muscles, I kept watch through miniature binoculars, and hoped my bladder wouldn’t swell to exploding over the long hours. I’d done it three days in a row while Saul had pulled the previous watches. He hadn’t enjoyed it any more than I did. From the bitching and moaning, he seemed to doubt he’d ever be able to satisfy any woman again, much less his flavor of the week. Apparently the stallion wasn’t so much running now as limping pathetically.
It was nearly seven p.m. on the sixth day that I received some genuine joy. And it was just that, a heat that unfurled at the base of my brain and traveled as tiny jolts of electricity throughout my body. I could all but feel the warm fingers that squeezed my heart into a heavy, racing thump. This is it, it whispered. This is what you’ve been waiting for. Watch and see.
A food delivery truck usually wouldn’t make such late stops, but this one did. And it was expected. Four men were waiting at the gate nearly fifteen minutes before it pulled up. Big men with short haircuts in identical khaki pants and black T-shirts that labeled them guards in all but the name tags. They were duly efficient and strictly professional with no laughing or unnecessary talking among them. One of them opened the back. It was a small truck, panel sized. The amount of food it could haul wouldn’t hold the personnel required to run a setup like this for any more than seven days. That indicated a pattern, a delivery once a week and hopefully on the same day.
After checking out the inside of the truck, the guards waved it on through and closed the gate behind it. Twenty minutes later it returned. This time in addition to checking the back, the guards ran metal poles topped with mirrors along the undercarriage. That was odd, damn odd. They seemed concerned someone might get in, but a helluva lot more so that someone might get out. The place was shaping up more and more like a prison the longer the surveillance dragged on. The kids inside might be the toughest little monkeys outside
Difficult to get into maybe. Impossible to get out of? Not anymore.
Chapter 7
“Where you going, Stef?”
It was a question I’d heard a hundred times before. You could search the world, any country or culture, and it was a good bet you’d hear the same words or a version of them anyway. It was the siren call of little brothers far and wide. Lukas, for all that he was a great kid, was no different there. Rolling my eyes with all the long sufferance I could scrape up, I stuffed another pair of wadded-up jeans into the duffel bag resting on my bed. “Football camp,
