problem at hand? A criminal like Skouras wouldn’t operate like a conventional military enemy. He’d be more like a terrorist. But the times being what they were, we’d studied a bit about counterterrorism in school.
Terrorists lived among the general population. They didn’t wear uniforms. Sometimes you knew who they were but couldn’t prove it. You could watch them, but their actions looked innocent on the surface, and their communications were carefully coded. You couldn’t be sure who around them was a disciple and who was an innocent acquaintance. They attacked in small-scale but sometimes very deadly operations. They always needed money, and if you could disrupt their flow of funds badly enough, you could cripple their operation.
I knew how the Army would deal with a high-level terrorist: It would watch his home and track the movements of his vehicles with spy satellites capable of reading numbers off license plates. That didn’t help me. That was the difference between being the United States Army and a twenty-four-year-old with one gun. If anyone was going to be crippled by dwindling funds, it was me.
I could try to watch Skouras, but I doubted that would lead me to Nidia. Surely she wasn’t in his own home. It seemed unwise, in the first-place-anyone-would-look sense. And I just didn’t think he’d want her around, no matter how many rooms his place had. Home was where a guy like Skouras went to ground. It was where he locked out his complicated world and poured himself a Macallan. He wasn’t going to want a frightened teenage hostage in the next room.
They shoot me, I lose consciousness and probably crash the Impala at a slow speed into the tunnel wall. They drag me out of the car, strip me of my ID, and take me outside the tunnel and shoot me, far enough off the road that no one is supposed to find me. That had been the important part of the story to me, but in terms of the kidnapping, it wasn’t relevant. I hadn’t been their objective. Nidia had been.
She might have been injured in the crash, though not badly. I hadn’t had enough time to work up any speed. So assume she was basically all right, maybe dazed. Either she got out and tried to run, or they reached in and got her. They put her in one of the cars and drove away. They also drove the Impala away and disposed of it, probably in a river or a lake. Again, not important to the story. Where was Nidia at that point?
Getting a Mexican without papers across the border would have been difficult. Illegal Mexicans crossed the border all the time, of course. They simply walked across at unguarded, unobserved areas or were smuggled across in trucks allegedly carrying consumer goods. But Nidia wouldn’t have been cooperative, and handling her roughly or drugging her would have been too risky; she was pregnant, and a healthy Skouras grandchild had been the point of the whole operation.
But Skouras had something better than a truck: He owned a shipping line. What if the tunnel rats had taken Nidia to a port and onto one of the Skouras cargo ships? They could have sailed her right to San Francisco. That made a lot of sense.
Whatever the logistics of getting Nidia where she was going, Skouras would then have to have someplace fairly private to keep her. That was most likely a second home or a vacation home, which could be almost anywhere. Once they had her safely there, the rest would be easy. It wouldn’t take more than one guard to keep her in line, maybe a second to relieve the first one from time to time, and to keep him company. Other than that, Nidia would require only healthy food, some fresh air, maybe some prenatal vitamins, and-
I sat up. I’d been thinking, an occasional checkup from a doctor, but how were they going to work that? They couldn’t just take a kidnap victim into town to sit around in a doctor’s waiting room. I drummed my fingers against my thigh, thinking.
Like everyone else, I’d heard casual references in movies to “Mob doctors,” but those films were never quite clear on where those guys came from. They were just there, available at any hour of the night, corrupt and unconcerned about whom they worked for. Or they couldn’t have a conventional practice, because they’d never finished med school or been barred from practicing.
I thought about that a moment longer. Maybe I’d just found a way in.
twenty-five
I wasn’t sure whether the medical library would be open to the general population, or exactly what data base or archives I needed to ask for, but if somehow I could find a listing of doctors who’d been barred from practicing medicine in San Francisco in the past several years, I might find doctors who would be open to an overture from Skouras.
My theory was that Skouras would feel most comfortable reaching out to a man. No matter how ruthless he was, I didn’t believe he’d ask a woman to help him use a powerless teenager as an incubator. So if I was right about that, it would narrow the field of candidates some. There weren’t as many men practicing obstetrics as there used to be; it was an area increasingly dominated by women. A male ob/gyn who’d been suspended or expelled from the profession: That just might be a narrow enough bottleneck that I could catch the right suspect there.
In addition, a doctor with a prescription-drug problem, once separated from his supply, might quickly need money. That’d be an extra incentive to get in bed with someone like Skouras.
I was theorizing wildly and I knew it. This kind of work was uncharted territory for me. Not to mention the fact that all of this depended on my initial premise being correct: that Nidia was pregnant with a Skouras baby. This bordered on pointless.
The bus was approaching, but now I was undecided. As the people around me began to move into boarding position, I stayed back and glanced away, then stepped directly into the path of a well-built, nicely dressed man, who happened to be the lead gunman from the tunnel, the one I’d called Babyface.
When he saw me, surprise rippled clearly across his face and his steps faltered. Then a mask of normalcy fell over his face. He was very good. All this took maybe two seconds.
The bus opened its doors with a pneumatic hiss, and a section of the
I paid and moved down the aisle. Behind me, I heard someone else dropping coins into the fare box. I didn’t look back but kept going until I found a seat close to the back of the bus.
When I was seated and looked up, Babyface was standing over me.
“Hailey?” he said. “That’s your name, right? We met in Texas, remember?” He was looking at me with that same half-benign curiosity in his heavy-lidded eyes that he’d shown in the tunnel.
“Yeah,” I said. “Hailey Cain.”
I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know. Clearly, he and his guys had looked through the personal items they’d taken off me down in the tunnel.
“You mind if I sit down?” Without waiting for an answer, he slid down into the seat, forcing me to move over.
He was wearing a leather bomber jacket over a cream-colored shirt, dark trousers, good shoes, but no tie, no briefcase or PDA. It would have been hard to say what his line of work was or where he was coming from.
He said, “I wasn’t expecting to run into you here. I thought you lived, what, in Los Angeles?”
I understood where he’d gotten that idea: The driver’s license he and his guys took off me in Mexico had my old L.A. address on it. But we both knew the truth: Babyface hadn’t been expecting to run into me anywhere aboveground.
“I do,” I said. “I’m just up here for a few days.”
We were playing a game. I wasn’t sure what it was. But he hadn’t been shadowing me. I’d seen surprise clearly on his face, however briefly, when he first caught sight of me. Had he been shadowing me, intending to kill or even seriously question me, he would have waited to get me someplace private. I didn’t think Babyface had any
