On the fifty-eighth day, there seemed to be calendars everywhere, reminding him of the date. Don kept his eyes turned down, kept looking away. Terry was watching him; Terry knew why.
He could barely do paperwork. Every time he signed anything he had to date it, nine five zero five. Thirty years to the day after nine five seven five--the date Aunt Irene had embroidered on a soft yellow blanket--the date Don's life had changed forever. The date his father had lifted him up to the edge of a hospital bed and introduced him to his brother.
Don sat in a bar, buying drinks just often enough that no one encouraged him to move it along, barely tasting them. Fifty-eight days. They hadn't even begun to plan a party before it happened, though Don had made some threats on the basis of his own thirtieth birthday. He hadn't had the faintest idea what he was going to do for a present, and wouldn't have come up with anything until the weekend before, maybe the night before. Twenty-nine years of baseball cards and books with numbers on the covers. He'd been sure he could do better this year, sure that he and Charlie were really getting to know each other, working together.
So much for that. This year he hadn't gotten Charlie a present at all.
After midnight, Don stood on the sidewalk outside the bar, ran himself through a couple of field sobriety tests just to be sure, and then drove to his dad's. The house looked dark and quiet, and he let himself in with his key, walking softly toward the stairs only to stop short at flickering bright light in the living room. Charlie was on the TV screen, seven years old, his mouth moving without sound as he talked to their father behind the camera; Don could almost hear him.
Charlie's head turned abruptly, and he dashed away from the camera, and then Don could hear him, memory washing over him with almost hallucinatory clarity: it had been Charlie's seventh birthday, and Don had been twelve and bored and ignored. He'd climbed up a tree and onto the garage roof, and launched a paratrooper attack with GI Joes, including a couple of the new recruits Charlie had just unwrapped.
On the screen, Charlie ran toward the garage, into the bright plastic hail of action figures, screaming. Don remembered the rough shingles under his belly and elbows, remembered Charlie's high, thin voice yelling, "Don, stop it, stop it, you're killing them!" The picture jerked and Charlie was kneeling on the grass, gathering up GI Joes and clutching them protectively close, small and bright in the scratchy, faded image, his head down and his face invisible.
Don walked into the living room and sat down on the floor, a stack of video tapes between him and his father's knee. Twenty-three years ago Charlie bounced to his feet, laughing again with his arms full of toys, and ran.
Coop showed up two days later out of the blue, on his way from somewhere else to somewhere else. He called from an hour away. Don named a bar outside of town, and Coop said he'd be there when he got there. His father was watching him as he hung up his phone.
"David," Don said calmly. The lie was as smooth and easy as any he'd ever told undercover, and the easing of worry in his father's face was its own reward.
"I think it's girl trouble," Don added with a wink, and his father was drawn in, snorting a half-laugh.
"He should be talking to someone who knows something about it," his dad said.
Don just smiled. "I'll be home for dinner," he said, lightly, like there was no question of him not being home for dinner, and his father nodded.
He was at the front door when his father called from the kitchen doorway, "I love you, Don."
He looked back, wondering if he'd fooled his father for a second, if his father thought this might be the last time he'd see Don for weeks, months, forever, and was letting him go anyway.
"I love you too, Dad," he said, but he didn't quite pull off the smile.
Coop was there before him, and the bartender set their beers down as Don settled onto a stool.
"So, I heard," Coop said, and there was no need to say what he'd heard. "Came as soon as I could."
Don nodded. It was no wonder it'd taken a while for word to get to Coop; they'd ruled out any kind of public media appeal early on, knowing that the kind of professionals who had Charlie wouldn't be swayed by a tearful father but might be spooked by an angry brother in the FBI. Spooked kidnapers meant dead victims. Don's throat closed on the beer, and he set the glass down hard.
Coop's shoulder bumped his. "Kind of surprised to find you here, as a matter of fact."
And that was the reason Don had had to see him, no matter what his father was home thinking right now. Billy Cooper was the one person Don would never fool with the Dutiful Agent scam he was running.
"Yeah," Don said slowly, "Well, right now I got nowhere else to be."
Coop nodded at that. He might generally support going off half-cocked, as long as it meant going sooner, but Coop knew as well as Don did that Don was only going to get one shot at this thing. He had to sit tight and pull down every scrap of intel he could get before he made his move.
"You know Eddie's still in business, down in El Cajon."
Don nodded. Eddie was strictly gray market: guns and prescription drugs and anything else almost legal and totally untraceable. Information, too, when you put the right kind of squeeze on him, which was how Don and Coop had gotten to know him in the first place.
"If I need anything, I'll know where to find it," Don said. He'd want a weapon that wouldn't get back to him, or to anyone else, when the time came.
"Yeah," Coop said. "Figured you would."
Coop gave him a thoughtful, measuring look that reminded Don of the first day of their partnership, the skeptical way Coop had said, "So you're our new manhunter, huh?"
Don sat up a little straighter, and Coop gave him a small smile and a smaller nod, and started talking about baseball.
They finished their beers, and Don didn't ask whether Coop wanted another, but tapped his fingers against his empty glass and said, "I better get home."
"Yeah, I got places to be, unlike some people," Coop said. They walked out to the parking lot together, and hugged one-armed between their trucks. Coop grinned at Don as he unlocked his door. "Tell Charlie the next round's on him, next time I'm in town."
Don grinned, feeling the same anticipatory surge of adrenaline he'd always gotten from working with Coop, looking forward to a job about to go down. The certainty rushed through him that he could do this, he would do this, and he and Charlie and Coop would be back here drinking beers together somewhere down the road.
"I'll tell him," Don said, and Coop slammed his door and drove off without looking back.
When the break came on the seventy-third day, it wasn't the oblique reference or buried allusion Don had told himself to expect; it was right at the top of the daily Bureau briefing. He read it through, forcing himself to keep still and quiet, pressing his hands to his desk to keep them from shaking, and only looked up after he'd scanned it, carefully, three times. No one was looking at him. No one was shouting that this was it. No one else saw what Don was seeing.
Three days earlier, a coordinated crew of six had robbed a shipment of condemned cash headed for destruction from the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis. They'd taken less than a quarter of the cash--close to $20 million, not a shabby payday--and had executed the robbery in slightly under two minutes. The driver of the armored truck had reported that one of the men had actually called off a countdown as they worked, which appeared to have been the limiting factor on how much money was taken. They'd gotten away clean, leaving no useable physical evidence. Their faces had been masked.
No one had used the word mathematical precision in describing the job in the briefing, but it was all Don could think of. This was the job Charlie had stopped the Charm School Boys from pulling, but this time it had been done right.
Don knew what he wanted to check next, but he also knew enough to know that this was the earliest of early indications. He had to risk a reality check before he spiraled off completely into investigation by wishful thinking.
"Terry."
Terry looked over her shoulder at him and then swiveled her chair in his direction, giving Don her undivided attention.
"What's up?"
Don tilted the briefing toward her. "You see this? Robbery of a shipment of cash headed out of a Federal Reserve bank for destruction?"
She nodded. "Little bit like the Charm School Boys, except there was no pattern of bank robberies leading up to it. So really not like the Charm School Boys at all."
Don nodded slowly. "Yeah, yeah. I guess not."
Terry was watching him closely now. "Don? You think it is?"
Don shrugged. "It's obviously not them, they're all in prison."
And not a conventional copycat, either: their bank robberies had made the papers, but the public had never heard about the biggest heist the Charm School Boys didn't pull off. He'd told Charlie a lot about how that went down, bragging to his wide-eyed baby brother.
Terry nodded, and then stood up and walked over to him, leaning over his chair without quite touching him, speaking too softly to be heard by anyone else.
"Don, how are you doing?"
Don blinked as he looked up at her, as clear-eyed and honest as he knew how to fake. "Terry--"
"Seriously, Don, I know you didn't get much time off, and Henne told me you finally went through the files--" finally, because obviously Terry, for one, had expected him to crack sooner. It might not be long now before she found out she'd been right. "So I want you to tell me, honestly, are you okay?"
Don let his shoulders slump, flipping the briefing shut as he looked away. Terry wouldn't expect him to be able to meet her eyes. "I--you know. Some days, I think I can--and then some days I can't think of anything but--he's still out there somewhere."
When he glanced up at Terry's face, he could see her being kind enough not to say out there somewhere in an unmarked grave, probably.
"Okay," she said finally. "If you want to talk about anything, I'm here, all right?"
Don nodded, and Terry touched his shoulder in passing on her way back to her desk. He set the briefing on a stack of papers and left it there for a day and a half, as though it didn't matter at all. He didn't research anything but their current case from his computer.
At home that night, he started putting it together from publicly available wire reports. There had been no neat pattern of bank robberies leading up to the big heist, but there had been bank robberies.
Four in northern Missouri, all in different cities, in the three weeks before the hit on the armored truck. Eight in Arkansas, three in Southern Indiana, four in western Kentucky and two in western Tennessee. The same MO was shared between no more than two of them. There was no pattern to the frequency or locations.
They'd scored anywhere from two hundred to six thousand dollars, and though some had involved brandished weapons, none had resulted in injuries to bystanders, so in the absence of a pattern they wouldn't be top investigative priorities. They were in different states, local to different FBI field offices, being investigated by a total of eight different agencies, none of which seemed to be talking to each other yet. But they were nearly all inside the St. Louis Fed District, and had all taken place at least four weeks after Charlie was taken and ended two days before the hit on the armored truck, and they were all unsolved.
Charlie had told him once, quite confidently, that bank robbers stuck with a pattern; here were bank robbers who didn't. Charlie had used the pattern to catch the Charm School Boys, but whoever had pulled off these robberies wasn't leaving that kind of trail, and wasn't getting caught.
It was a lot of information, taken together, and it all pointed to a coordinated op planned by someone who was too smart to leave a trail and knew how to get the information they'd need to hit a Federal Reserve shipment. It had Charlie written all over it, but Don didn't think he could--or should--go to Terry and tell her that his evidence was that there was no evidence, the pattern was that there was no pattern.
Even if anyone did believe him--if they accepted that Charlie might be alive, if Don wasn't just strongly encouraged to take a good long leave to get over his brother's death--it would be the same as the original investigation all over again. No one who knew Charlie would have anything to do with it, no one who cared about him, no one whose first priority was getting him out safely.
They would, in fact, want to arrest whoever was responsible for planning these crimes. Don didn't like the thought of Charlie in prison one bit more than he liked the thought of Charlie wherever he was now. If Charlie was doing this, he was under duress, maybe suffering from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, whatever. Charlie needed rescuing, not arresting, and as long as Don was the only one looking into this, he could make those kinds of decisions.
It wasn't like he had any privileged information, anyway; if the people actually investigating these crimes managed to solve them, then they'd find Charlie, and Don would probably thank them for it. But if Charlie was as smart and as good as Don thought he was, nobody else was going to find him.
"Just let me find you, buddy," Don muttered, and then he realized he was talking to his computer, shut it down, and went to bed.
He couldn't act on a single data point, no matter how big it was: after a job like that they'd be long gone, and with $20 million in untraceable cash, they'd have no trouble going just about anywhere. Despite the payday, Don had a feeling that whoever had Charlie wasn't going to want to stop now. They knew what he could do. If they were smart, the next one wouldn't be so high-profile, but they'd pull something else. If Don could find the next crime, maybe he could get a handle on how to find them. Find Charlie.
On the eighty-first day he spotted it: a media report of a robbery three days prior, four armed men cleaning out an illegal high-stakes poker game in Denver. It was estimated they'd made off with close to two million dollars in cash, and naturally, despite the number of witnesses no one had come forward with useful information to identify the thieves. They'd left no evidence, and from what sketchy evidence local law enforcement had put together, they'd pulled the job off like clockwork.
Two data points formed a long and wobbly line in this case, but it was enough for Don to set things in motion. He'd already done most of the background work, but now it was time to get serious. Once he filled out his forms and spoke to the AD--assuring the man he'd speak to Terry and David himself, make sure they were up to speed--the clock was ticking. He was on his way.
The last two weeks were the trickiest. He was already committed but had to wait, had to keep his cool, and he had to continue looking for more information. Terry had an eye on him these days--waiting for the explosion--and if she found out before he was gone, she'd stop him. Luckily they got slammed with cases, one after another--a double murder and then another kidnapping, and this one took four horrible days to solve, following which Don slept twenty-four hours straight without dreaming at all.
When he woke up, he staggered straight to his computer to start prowling his usual news sources for signs of Charlie. It took him less than an hour to find a hotel robbery in Casper, Wyoming that had what Don was starting to consider the hallmarks of one of Charlie's jobs: it involved three men, none of whom matched the vague descriptions from the other two jobs any more than the rest of the population. Nothing about the MO connected it to the armored truck job or the heist in Denver, though Don thought it had a similar feel to one of the bank robberies in Kentucky, nothing he could have put into words. They'd gotten away with about $100,000 and various valuables estimated at twice that. Police had no leads.
Don was starting to feel weirdly proud of this string of slick, competent crimes. Mainly, he supposed, it was the habit of being proud of anything Charlie did. Partly it was the pride of knowing he was the only one who saw the connection between them. But partly...
This was how he'd commit crimes, if he were going to. You couldn't help thinking about it, when your job was to exploit the mistakes the bad guys made. After ten years, he knew just about every trick in the book, but he didn't know how to catch these guys--certainly he'd never be able to make a prosecution stick for most of them--and he had to admire that.
Their only mistake had been taking Don's brother, really--because Don wasn't going to stop until he'd taken Charlie back.
Alan woke up when the door opened, and he had a moment of sleepy confusion--Don was standing in the doorway, must have had a bad dream--but the Don in his doorway was far too tall to have come to him when he couldn't sleep. Or at least, he hadn't, not any time in the last twenty-nine years.
"Don," he said softly, and Don came inside, a dark blur in the dark room.
He crouched at the side of the bed, and when Alan reached to turn on the bedside light, Don reached out a hand to stop him.
"Don't," he said quietly, and his voice sounded strange. Not so far from that brave but frightened six-year-old after all. "Dad, I have to--"
And Alan knew, right then, that he was about to lose the only son he had left. He caught Don's wrist, unable to say a word.
Don shook his head, but didn't pull away from his father's grip. "Dad, I think there's a chance--like, a crazy, win-the-lottery kind of chance--that Charlie is still alive."
Alan caught his breath; it hurt to hope for that, to think of what Charlie's life might be like right now if he was still alive, and Don was talking about a big gamble for even that much.
"And I think there's a chance--like a struck-by-lightning-while-holding-the-winning-ticket chance--that I can find him. Dad, I think I can find him. I can bring him home."
Alan could see that, dreamlike and vivid: a slip-of-paper victory burning to ash in Don's lightning-struck fingers. He couldn't imagine Don bringing Charlie home at all.
"Donnie, don't do this. I can't lose both of you."
Don shook his head. Stubborn, always stubborn. Why had they ever told their little boy that he had to look out for his baby brother? Why had he ever listened?
"Dad, I have to. If there's a chance and I didn't try--"
And yet Alan couldn't bring himself to say to his son, There's no chance. Even to himself, he couldn't say Charlie is dead. And if Alan couldn't pull him back from this, then Don was already lost. Alan could see it clearly there in the dark, and maybe he'd always known it. Maybe Don had been lost to him from the moment Charlie was taken. Maybe it had all been borrowed time since then.
He raised his hand from Don's wrist to his cheek, and his son smiled unsteadily under his hand.
"I can't stop you," he said softly. Don's smile winked out.
Alan leaned up on one elbow. "Go with God," he said softly. "Find your brother. I love you both."
Don bowed his head, and Alan pressed a kiss to his hair, as dark and soft as the day he was born. Then he lay back and closed his eyes, and did not watch his son go away.
There was something unspeakably terrible about the sight of Don's desk, empty and clean. Terry forced herself to keep walking, and sat down in her own desk chair only a little hurriedly. There was an envelope tucked under her keyboard, a proper memo dated twelve days before, from Don to her and David, notifying them of his upcoming indefinite leave of absence. On a Post-It, in smudgy pencil, he'd written, I couldn't tell you. You'd have stopped me.
He hadn't resigned, then: that was something. He was allowing for the possibility that he'd come back. The Post-It, on the other hand, was alarming. She tore it from the page, crumpled it and shoved it in her pocket; eating it or burning it would be far too conspicuous. Then she picked up her purse and briefcase and walked right back out of the office, leaving David to find out for himself when he got in.
She drove over to the Eppes' house, quietly and methodically cursing morning traffic for the entire hour it took. When she knocked at the door, she had to wait a few minutes before Mr. Eppes answered. He gave her an almost wary look, but said rather lightly, "I'm sorry, Terry, but Don can't come out to play today."
She smiled almost despite herself. "Can I come in? Just for a second?"
"For a whole minute, if you want," he said, stepping back from the door.
She waited only until he closed the door behind her to ask, "Do you know where Don is?"
He didn't look surprised, or caught out. "He's visiting friends. Up in Minnesota, I think it was. Getting away for a while, trying to deal with things. It's been hard for him."
Terry nodded. He had his story straight. He'd protect Don as surely as she would.
"Good," she said, "Minnesota, with friends, that's a good place for him to be."
Mr. Eppes nodded, and when he offered her a coffee for the road, she accepted. He made it with milk and sugar, just the way she liked it, and it was a damn sight better than what she could get at the office.
Don had had a bag of IDs and cash in a storage locker, just waiting, for weeks. He cleared that out in the middle of the night, and by the time the sun came up he was officially in the wind. He had a choice of names to use, personas of varying stability, even one he'd used before in case he wanted a little history.
Two of the IDs he carried had Charlie's face and stats, just in case Charlie needed someone else to be when this was over.
He drove down to Eddie's, and he saw Eddie notice that he wasn't flashing his badge or asking for information. Eddie nodded, and Don nodded back, looking down at the case of handguns.
"See anything you want?" Eddie asked, after Don had been staring for a few minutes and the only other customer in the store had edged away.
He wanted his Glock. It fit in his hand like an old friend; he'd fired a good thousand rounds with it in the last three months, thanks nearly entirely to the shooting range. It had his fingerprints all over it, inside and out, and it was publicly and traceably registered to Don Eppes, backed by his ten years' exemplary service with the Bureau. Even if it weren't traced, it was FBI standard and might as well say FED on the side in letters of fire.
It was safe in his apartment with his badge, and Don had to fight through a moment like looking down from a rooftop, wanting so bad to go back and get it, get both of them, find some way to make this work on the level despite everything he'd done to get this far. Maybe, maybe he could keep control of the situation, maybe he could make it come out right, if he got lucky, if they listened, if--
But maybe wasn't enough, not when it was Charlie on the line. Don had already made his choice a thousand times, but he stood staring down at the array of weapons available to him and had to make it again. He was about to buy an unregistered handgun under a false identity without observing any kind of waiting period. It wasn't exactly the heat of the moment, rubber meeting the road, but this was the moment he had to make his choice for good.
Don took a deep breath and forgot all about his Glock and his badge. They were behind him now.
He tapped the glass decisively. "The Sig."
It was still a cop's gun, but he'd be damned if he'd carry some nickel-plated gangbanger's toy. "And I'm gonna need a car, something that won't light up every hot sheet from here to Vancouver."
Eddie had a little Honda that fit the bill, and Don's bag of IDs fit into a pocket of the duffle bag he filled with clothes, ammunition, and a backup weapon. The Sig rested under his arm, shoulder-holstered; it felt huge and awkward, but he knew by the time he got where he was going, he'd only notice its absence. It only took him ten minutes to find the hiding place already concealed in the backseat by the last criminal to own this car, thirty seconds to stash his and Charlie's real identification inside where nobody but a fucking narc would find it.
He was on the road barely after daylight, headed east, toward Charlie.
He'd chosen Chicago half randomly--because random was the name of the game--but he'd had his reasons, too. It was a big city, and Don had a better idea of how to operate in big cities than anywhere else. It was inside the territory of the crimes committed so far, which had stayed off the coasts and out of the Southwest, but not a city they'd hit yet. They were going through a lot of personnel, changing crews to keep from attracting attention, and that was going to create a pretty big footprint at a certain level. If they stuck with that technique, they were going to keep going through a lot of personnel, and if Don was in position when they worked their way around to Chicago, he just might manage to be one of them.
It felt almost easy; he knew the kinds of places to go, the attitude to adopt, the things to say to the people who talked to him. Inside of five days (after he'd found word of a robbery in Des Moines, new faces, no leads, a quick million dollars) he was standing behind a middle-tier dealer named Dre, watching over a drug deal, the Sig comfortable in its holster. He'd loaded it with gloves on, no prints on the rounds.
Eleven days later he'd shepherded half his body weight in coke safely onto the streets of Chicago and found newspaper accounts of two more robberies, one in Milwaukee, one in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati job was worrying him: it had included a murder, one of the robbers shooting a security guard in the head on the way out. It was unnecessary, sloppy. He would bet anything they hadn't listened to Charlie on that, and if they weren't listening to Charlie, Charlie was in more danger than ever.
But Don wasn't thinking about that now; he was watching another deal going down, keeping an eye on the other side's guns, because that was his job. When the shouting started and the weapons came out, he pushed Dre behind him with one hand and pulled the Sig with the other, because he was working on autopilot, because he'd had ten years of practice pushing people behind him. And when he saw a gun taking aim--light flashing on the nickel-plating--he brought the Sig down and fired for center of body mass, dropped the shooter cleanly.
They hustled out of there and he didn't think about it, because he'd had years of practice at that part, too. Dre kept thanking him, and Don kept brushing it off. It wasn't until later, until he was back in the bare little room where he was sleeping these days, that he let himself think.
He'd just killed someone--hardly more than a kid, carrying a flashy gangbanger's gun--and not in the line of duty, but to protect a drug dealer, a drug dealer who was paying Don to do that sort of thing so he could go on selling poison to Chicago's kids.
He tried to think about it, poking at what he'd done like a bruise, like skin scraped raw or gashed open. He could see the kid, but only as a body on a slab, a photo tacked up on a bulletin board; in Don's memory he was just a blur eclipsed by the flash of light off his weapon. He thought of the cops who would investigate, who would go down to some south side neighborhood to tell a mother or sister or girlfriend, who would do their best but find nothing: ballistics would be a dead end, forensics at the scene too confused by the crowd who'd been present, witnesses willing to talk as plentiful as free lunches for footsore detectives.
He could only see it as a case; a frustrating one, one that would make him angry with everyone from himself to his team to forensics to--to Charlie--because of the unfairness of it, because no one should get away with a murder just because the victim had been the wrong kind of guy. The thought of having Charlie around to be angry at caught his imagination more than the man he'd killed, and Don put his head in his hands.
He couldn't detach himself from this. This victim wasn't his to investigate, his to champion; he'd killed that kid, he was the perp, the murderer. Don shuddered as it finally, finally hit him, like a physical thing, like a punch in the gut. He felt sick, felt pained, doubling over with his arms wrapped around himself, gasping for air. He'd killed somebody. He'd done this thing, he'd turned his back on everything he'd ever been, and still he couldn't hold that poor dead kid (a life, snuffed out, ended, over forever, just like that, and who knew what he might have been if Don hadn't--) in his mind. Still it was Charlie he kept thinking of.
The sick stabbing pain in his belly was just like he'd dreamed: Charlie whispering "If you loved me you'd have found me by now,", and it felt a little like dying already.
He was a murderer now, a dealer's hired gun. That was what he was capable of, if it meant getting to Charlie--and after tonight, he'd be Dre's favorite. Information, introductions, it would all be a hell of a lot easier to come by, and all he'd had to do was kill some kid in the middle of a drug deal.
Don sucked in a breath, forced himself to lie down like he was going to sleep. As long as tonight got him to Charlie, he'd deal with it. Getting Charlie out was all that mattered now. Charlie was the only one who would have a life worth going back to after this, and Don meant to get him back to it.
Early the next morning, Don went to the post office and rented a box. Later, from a few blocks away, he dropped a heavy, padded envelope in the mail to himself--his wallet, and Charlie's. He could go and get them (go and get his real self, go and get Charlie) anytime he was ready to lay claim to them. For now, they were best kept out of the way.
In the next sixteen days Don found a report of a robbery in Fargo and saw half a news story about a shootout in Billings that seemed to have been sparked by the theft of several labs' output of crystal meth. There was no way of knowing from the half he saw which victims might have been shot during the thefts instead of after; the reporter talked like it didn't make a difference.
He couldn't sleep for more than an hour or two without having horrible, vivid nightmares of prison. It was him on the inside some nights, his father writing him to tell him they'd found Charlie's body, but it was worse when it was Charlie he dreamed behind bars, scared or dead-eyed. It took longer, after he woke up, to convince himself those ones weren't real. He took to cat-napping at odd hours, and spent a lot of his long dark wakeful nights sitting around with Dre, now that he'd become one of the boys. He said as little as he could, but listened to every word, every rumor about who was doing what in Chicagoland.
Sixteen days of listening, talking to Dre's friends and some guy a friend of Dre's knew, and a guy he had sort of heard could be found at a certain bar. That guy talked to a guy he'd worked for one time, and then Don was sitting in a noisy bar, across a table from a man with dirty blond hair and a smile not quite charming enough to raise Don's hackles. Nothing wild-eyed about this one; he was in control and sane and smart. Smart enough to be the guy using Charlie, Don would bet. And now he was interviewing Don for an opening in his organization.
Don watched his eyes for any sign of recognition. If this guy had ever so much as seen a photo of Don it might all fall apart right here. He could get himself killed, get Charlie killed, before he ever got closer than this. But so far, there was nothing. So if this was the guy who had Charlie, maybe he didn't know what Don looked like. Or maybe he didn't have Charlie, and this was a blind alley, and Don was sitting here having a beer with some random criminal while Charlie--no. He had to focus on the lead he had.
The guy was probing Don's past, but Don had had the entire drive across country to practice this and weeks since then to perfect it. He knew his story backwards and forwards, knew how much of it he wouldn't talk about. He was just a guy looking for work in a particular field of expertise. He didn't play any harder to get than anyone in his right mind would, faced with a mysterious job at an undisclosed location with a potential employer lots of people knew about but no one would exactly vouch for.
"I dunno," he said, fiddling with his beer. "We're talking, what? Shooting, smash and grab, something like that?"
"We're talking a lot of money," the guy said, giving Don a critical look.
Don snorted, settling into his identity, letting himself stop thinking about playing a role, stop waiting for the guy to notice his real self behind his alias. "Sure, money's great, unless you're dead. Then it's just paper in somebody else's hand. I like to know what I'm getting into."
The guy was silent, looking him over intently, but Don knew his story. He had nothing to hide. The blond guy said abruptly, "What's the most math you ever took in school?"
Don didn't think he could breathe until he heard himself say in a nicely puzzled voice, "I got to third base with a girl who took calculus, that count?"
The guy barked a loud, sharp laugh, and Don let himself give the guy a skeptical look as he took a sip of his beer to wash the cotton out of his mouth. Math, God, he was talking math. The guy was talking Charlie, this was it, and still he didn't seem to have twigged to Don. Don wanted to laugh, for one dizzy, horrifying second, at the thought that this might work.
"Yeah," the guy said, still smiling, "yeah, that counts just fine. Listen, I hear you do good work on guard duty."
"Yeah, sure," Don said slowly, like he had no idea. "But you look like you can take care of yourself."
"Oh, I do," the guy said. "But there's an item I have. An item that I would prefer not get lost or stolen. Lately I've been thinking it needs more security, and I'm thinking you might be just the man for the job."
And Don was glad, suddenly horribly fucking glad that he'd killed that drug dealer, that kid, because it was going to get him to Charlie. It was going to get this guy to make Don the fox guarding his henhouse. Don took another swallow of his beer and managed not to choke on it.
"Sounds kinda boring, just guarding some package," he said, and he almost actually sounded bored. Close enough for government work, like they used to say.
The blond guy snorted. "Weren't you just saying you wanted to know what you were getting into? Long periods of boredom, doesn't that sound good?"
"Only if I survive the short periods of terror," Don replied, raising an eyebrow.
The guy grinned. "See, smart. Smart. I like that."
"Smart enough to know it sounds like I should be getting combat pay."
They haggled the rest of the way through their beers, and then the blond reached a hand across the table to shake on it--ten grand base and two percent of every haul, not bad since he'd never be anywhere near the action--and said, "Williamson."
"Lenny McDonald," Don replied, without missing a beat.
Williamson grinned, tilting his head. "You don't look much like a Lenny."
Don shrugged easily. "My mom's the only one ever thought I did."
"Right," Williamson said. "Mac it is." He scribbled something down on a coaster and slid it across to Don. Don palmed it without looking.
"Meet me there tomorrow, six sharp. And I mean in the morning. I'll take you up to the location, you can start immediately."
"Sure," Don said, showing Williamson a cocky money-in-the-bank smile when he wanted to beg to go now, now, now. "Tomorrow, six sharp. See you then."
It had been one hundred thirty days since Charlie was taken when Don got into a car with the guy who had probably taken him. It was still dark, cold and--naturally--windy, and the chill got into his bones. Don was wearing a stocking cap and a quilted flannel jacket over his jeans and long-sleeved t-shirt. The Sig was tucked under his left arm in its holster, and he'd tossed his duffle in the backseat before he got in the front.
Williamson didn't say anything, except when they stopped at a drive-thru for coffee, and then he just asked what size. Don drank his coffee and stared out the window as they headed to the freeway. The coffee was bad, but no worse than he was used to. He sipped at it slowly and let the stomach-lining burn of it ground him. He was all nerves and adrenaline, and adding caffeine to the mix was probably a bad move, but he had no idea how much longer he'd have to keep running without a stop. If he and Charlie got an early chance--if Charlie said the wrong thing and blew it inside the first ten minutes--if Williamson did know who Don was and was just driving him out of the city to dispose of him...
Don crumpled the empty cup between his hands and slumped back in his seat, letting the sharp broken corners prick his palms as he watched the road signs go by from under his eyelashes. They were into Wisconsin now, and the sun was well up. A few miles past Janesville, Williamson took an exit and headed out on a two-lane road, north and east into the middle of nowhere. Don watched the turns, estimated the mileage as best he could. Williamson didn't seem concerned about him knowing the route. Given what Don was pretty sure he knew about Williamson, that didn't strike him as a good sign.
Williamson pulled the car into the gravel driveway of an ordinary-looking ranch house with an attached two-car garage on a tidy half-acre lot. There were trees along the fence line between the house and the next one to the north, branches half-bare, leaves gone red and yellow and brown. To the south was a much larger lot, the house set a long way back from the road.
The house had blue aluminum siding, the porch railing painted white. There were dying flowers in the flower beds and the grass had been cleared of leaves and cut in wide, even stripes. Williamson got out and headed up the drive to the side door into the garage, and Don followed him, duffle bag in hand, gauging the distances as he walked.
It was twenty feet from the car to the side door. Fifty feet to the trees at the south property line, a good fifty yards from the side door to the road. It would take ten or twelve seconds, running flat out--twenty under fire, in a serpentine pattern. Maybe as long as thirty, if Charlie was hurt or stumbled, and then there'd better be somebody waiting on the road, and Don had no backup to call for out here. They'd passed all of four cars in the last ten miles.
One last glance around and Don stepped through the door. It was dark in the garage after the dazzle of morning sunshine, and Don had left his sunglasses in a pocket of his coat; he just had time to blink before Williamson grabbed him, wrenching his right arm behind him. Williamson had five inches and forty pounds on Don, and he had Don's gun hand immobilized. Still, Don tensed for a second, about to break the hold, frantic--Charlie, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I blew it--and then his brain caught up with his muscles.
Don relaxed, letting Williamson shove him face-first against the rough-finished wall. It wasn't an all-out attack; if it had been Don would've been dead as he stepped through the door. This was an orientation.
Williamson dragged his right arm high enough to start putting serious strain on Don's shoulder, and Don turned his head and said, "Okay, boss, I got it."
In his peripheral vision, Williamson smiled. "You got it when I say you got it, Smart Mac. I am the boss here. I know more than you do and I am stronger than you are. I am in charge, and there are eight guys in this house who will all kill you as soon as look at you, on my say-so."
Don nodded, and resisted the urge to go up on tiptoe to ease the dull burn in his shoulder; he didn't really need the punch in the back of the head it would probably earn him. He listened to what Williamson was telling him, instead: eight guys. Figure eight hours of sleep apiece a night, so probably only four to six of them were on watch at any given time. If they were getting less sleep, there'd be more awake, but they'd all be less alert. Maybe as few as two or three on watch at night, if Williamson was telling the truth. Maybe Charlie would know, if he'd been paying attention...
"This is not to say I won't stand by my deal with you," Williamson said evenly, and Don trained his eyes on the wall and focused on Williamson's voice again. "But you need to understand how things work around here. We are not a team. I am the boss. You work for me. Everyone here works for me. You copy?"
"I copy," Don said, as calmly as he could.
Williamson would hold him here until Williamson felt his point had been demonstrated, and there was nothing Don could do but let him demonstrate it. Williamson liked Mac because Mac was smart: smart enough to know his place. Terry, Don thought longingly, would already know what Williamson's mother had been like, and whether he'd wet the bed as a kid, and his precise odds of killing Don in the next five minutes just to watch him die.
Williamson stood there in silence for a minute, and Don's skin crawled with the sensation of Williamson's breath on the back of his neck. Then he gave Don a hard little shove and let go. "Turn around, stay against the wall, spread 'em."
Don raised both hands, turned around, and leaned against the wall. Williamson shoved him again, open hand in the middle of the chest, and Don just widened his stance and spread his hands further. Williamson patted him down with his free hand, reaching under Don's jacket to pull the Sig from its holster. He pressed the point of his elbow to Don's chest as he examined the gun two-handed, and Don noted that Williamson never pointed the gun at him as he checked it; he was only going to threaten Don when he intended to threaten him.
Worse and worse: Don hated competent criminals. All the time that he'd been admiring Charlie's work, though, he'd been admiring Williamson's, too. That was crystal clear by now. He hadn't thought enough about that. He hadn't thought enough about a lot of things.
Williamson jammed the Sig back into its holster and continued the pat-down, shifting his restraining hand down to jam uncomfortably and unnecessarily hard against Don's belt buckle, just about where that morning's cup of coffee was sitting. He didn't find anything but the spare change in Don's pocket, and nodded in satisfaction.
"Stay there," he said, and Don didn't twitch a muscle as Williamson picked up his duffle and unzipped it. He wondered what he'd have to have in there to get himself summarily shot in the head. IDs for Charlie probably would have done it, but those, along with his own extra sets, were long gone by now. A cell phone might only have gotten him laughed at as it was confiscated, depending, but he hadn't risked it.
Williamson checked Don's backup weapon as efficiently as he'd checked the Sig, noted the boxes of ammunition, rifled through his underwear, checked the toes of his socks and the pockets of his pants, unzipped his shaving kit and examined the contents. He snorted at the first aid kit in the side pocket, opened it up and checked it, but it was all ordinary stuff in single-use packets. He flipped through the worn wallet that contained the McDonald ID and some cash, an old phone card and an expired condom and a piece of paper, soft with age, crumpled and smoothed and neatly folded and entirely blank. Williamson unfolded it, looking it over carefully, and then refolded it neatly and tucked it back in, right next to the condom. He dropped Don's wallet back into the duffle, zipped the bag, and tossed it at Don. Don caught it readily but didn't otherwise move, waiting for whatever would happen next.
"Well," Williamson said, turning toward the door into the house. "I guess it's about time you met him."
"Him," Don repeated neutrally, heart suddenly pounding double-time, feeling fluttery and wild in a way that he couldn't honestly blame on exhaustion or caffeine. This was it, this was really it. Charlie.
Williamson glanced over his shoulder with a knowing smile. "Hoping for a her?"
Don smiled crookedly back and shrugged, hoping his inability to get another word out looked like some kind of nonchalance. Williamson led him through the ordinary-looking kitchen of the house. There were two guys sitting at the table, both prominently armed, and Williamson said, "Sam, Jimmy, Mac," without particular direction as he unlocked the basement door. Don supposed Sam and Jimmy would get the drift, and he at least had two names to go with two faces.
He took a quick glance around, noting that Sam and Jimmy had lines of sight on both the garage door and the basement door, while the fridge and cupboards blocked the line from one door to the other. It would be a bad corner to get caught on. The other option was a doorway that probably led into the front room, but that would be worse, a complete U-turn in full view of the men at the table.
Williamson stepped back from the door and gestured for Don to precede him down the stairs. They were bare wood, and the floor at the bottom was cement. In the light of a bare bulb, Don could see a heavy door to the left at the bottom of the stairs, locked and barred from this side. A bright orange extension cord was plugged in to a socket and disappeared under the door. The framing around the door was solid, the gap above the floor barely allowing the extension cord to pass. The door wasn't getting busted down from the inside, not without SWAT gear. If he was locked in with Charlie, they'd be sitting tight for a while; any escape would rely on seizing a moment when the door was opened for them.
"Here," Williamson said, behind him, stepping to the right at the bottom of the stairs, switching on another light. Don turned his back on the locked door and looked at the other half of the basement, washer and dryer and furnace and water heater, shelves of unmarked boxes and various supplies. Williamson grabbed a sleeping bag, rolled up and tied with a ground mat and pillow, and handed it to him. Don took it, suppressing the giddy thought that this was just like going to camp as a kid, duffle in one hand, sleeping bag in the other. Waiting to meet his bunkmate, already calculating how soon he could call his dad and say he wanted to come home.
"You need anything, you use this," Williamson said, holding out a compact walkie-talkie. Don started to shift his loads to free a hand, but Williamson grinned and tucked it into the front pocket of his jeans.
"Banging on the door's a little unscientific," Williamson explained, without backing out of Don's personal space.
Don nodded and didn't back away from Williamson, holding his gaze steadily. Williamson jerked his chin toward the door and said, "Well, in you go, then. You're on the clock, Mac."
Don turned, shifting everything to his left hand as he took the few steps to the door, and lifted the bar. His hand didn't shake as he turned back the deadbolt. He had to take a step back as he pulled the door open, and Williamson was right behind him as Don took his first look inside.