The Deal (A Ray Hammer Novel Book 2) Read online

  The man had a routine when he arrived. He stepped into the room, undid the shackles that held the dog in place. The German shepherd wandered over to his side. The man held the chain and walked the dog around to each one of the girls. The dog would push his face into their faces, their bodies, their flesh. He nuzzled and slobbered and growled. But Piper and the other girls knew that any sound you made, any whimper, was a sign of weakness. And any weakness made you a target.

  The dog was on the other side of the room; the owner holding the chain. The girl over there was slim. She had dark brown hair, mousy almost. Piper didn’t know all their names. There was Frankie, of course, but she had only learned Frankie’s name when her sister had screamed it out as the dog latched onto her throat. But they didn’t talk about Frankie. Piper tried not to look in that direction, no matter how hard it was, and no matter how many times she caught herself doing so. For the most part, the girls had kept quiet, kept their names to themselves. There was no point knowing someone’s name if ... well, Piper would rather not think about what happened if one of them was taken.

  The girls whose names she did know were all on her side of the room. They whispered together when he wasn’t here and when the guard was distracted on the other side. He always turned around but decided not to engage, mainly because he couldn’t. At the end of his chain, his mouth reached close to where the girls huddled. Until the man came and took him off the chain, used it as a leash and walked the dog round to each of them, it reminded them of how mortal they were, how real this was and how little chance of escape there could actually be.

  The girl next to Piper was about the same age. She had green eyes, the kind you could get lost in for days or weeks if you had time. But for the most part, the girls kept their eyes averted. Her name was Sammy. Beside Sammy was Jane, a young Indian girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen. It was hard to tell. The girls on the other side of the room barely spoke, not to Piper and Sammy anyway. They may have whispered from time to time amongst each other.

  The man moved on to the second girl on the other side of the room. She was the youngest, thirteen maybe. She wore a uniform for a baseball club - Ladera Little League. She flinched back as the dog pushed his face into hers. She whimpered. The man pulled the dog back roughly by the chain, grabbed the girl under the chin and lifted her up so she was standing. Piper kept her head turned away but one eye watched, waiting for her opportunity, waiting for any kind of chance to escape. The girl shivered as the man looked her up and down.

  “You think this is scary?” he asked. “This ain’t shit. You ain’t seen nothin’ in this world if you think this is scary. Right now you’re alive, you’re safe. Brutus here is lookin’ after you.” He petted the dog, rubbed his hand in the stinky German shepherd’s fur. It was hard to tell if he was trying to put her at ease or make her feel more afraid.

  Piper wondered what this man wanted, why he had brought them here, and why he had taken the twins the other day and where to. What had happened to them? She wondered what his motivation was for doing this. None of them had been raped so far as she could tell. No-one had been hurt, Frankie aside, and he did genuinely seem to want the girls to feel safe, protected to some extent.

  There was an automaticity to the way that he did things. The routine was clear and logical; he moved his way around the room in the same way each time, tied the dog back up, went out, came back with food for each of them, and set it down where they could reach it but just out of the dog’s reach. Then he went out and came back in with a bone for the dog. It was almost military precision, a habit. The kind of thing Piper had learned in the Academy. The kind of thing she had been hoping for so her life would become ordered, regimented, understandable. But this ... this not knowing, this confusion, this fear of what might happen to her, to the other girls ... this was not what her life was supposed to be. Her life was supposed to make sense, to herself at least.

  Piper saw the chain dragging along the floor. He’d forgotten to tie Brutus back up when he left the room. She held her hand out, the way you do to a dog you’ve never met or a cat that seems a little put off and a likely to strike out—calming, gentle. The dog padded over towards Piper, sniffing the air in front of it, sniffing her fingers. Brutus’s tongue flashed out of his mouth and he licked the cold flesh of Piper’s hand.

  She realized that this was the chance she needed. If only he’d come a little closer.

  He took another few steps forward, sniffing, and she scratched behind his ear.

  Chapter Five

  It hadn’t taken me long to overpower the pilot. He’d swung again, overbalanced, and crashed down to the floor of the aisle. I rolled him over and pushed his face into the carpet before dragging him back into the cockpit. I found some luggage straps and strapped him tightly into the chair.

  Then I made him tell me his name. Not as any form of torture or anything, just a subtle form of pressure that comes with asking a question and then staring, silent, waiting, looking into his eyes until he answered. Mike Casey. I’d heard the name before. I wondered where and asked him as much. He didn’t answer.

  A sound came though on the radio. The FBI, were here and so were the US Marshals. The whole burst of crackling sounded like everyone with a badge—and a sense of ego that couldn’t be assuaged in another field—had swarmed the plane and they all wanted to be let in. I looked at Casey and he looked at the instrument panel.

  “Which button?” I asked. Casey looked at me like I was crazy. “How the fuck do I open the doors, Mike?”

  He didn’t answer, just watched as lights flashed on the dash. I knelt down, pulled off his shoe and held it menacingly over his head. “How do I open the doors? I don’t want to have to beat it out of you, Casey.” He didn’t like that and started screaming. I pulled off his sock, shoved it into his mouth and stepped back out into the cabin, closing the cockpit door.

  There were warning and safety signs all over the aircraft door. They said things like: DO NOT OPEN and PULL HERE IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. I didn’t know if a ladder had been pulled up so I opened the window blind and looked down. Sure enough, there was a marshal standing right outside, his badge up to the window. I indicated for him to stand back because I wasn’t sure whether the doors opened outwards or inwards. I tried some of the levers. Nothing happened. The marshal knocked again, stepped forward. Again, I pushed him back with my hand as a signal. Seriously, these people—too pushy, too impatient. They think just because they have a badge and a bit of authority they can boss us all around. I waited for him to step back and tried another lever. This time the door gave way. I pushed first—again nothing—tried pulling it back towards me. The door pivoted, opened, and the air, just heating up for the day, rushed in, followed closely by the marshal with the badge and a retinue of followers.

  I stepped out onto the stairs and looked down at the carnage on the runway below. A team of forensics officials, suited up, stepped on small plastic boards and took photos of the crime scene. They didn’t put out any of those little labels because there was too much—they’d never be able to label everything. Instead, the photos would have to serve as the evidence for this case. I stepped back into the plane to find the marshal looking up at me expectantly.

  “Frank Whitcombe,” he said, flashing me his badge. “And who the hell are you?”

  Normally, in situations like this, I’d go for the stock-standard, “No comment.” It was easier that way. You didn’t have to explain. But given everything that had happened with the carnage outside, I figured that at least some explanation was necessary.

  “Ray Hammer,” I said, “investigative journalist. I was a witness, so the pilot decided to keep me on board so I could talk to you lot when you arrived.”

  “The pilot?” asked Whitcombe.

  “Yeah, Mike Casey.” And then I remembered where I had heard the name.

  Mike Casey had been on the news just last week appealing for information about his eleven-year-old twin daughters, who had been abducted. No wonder he was
cagey. No wonder he wanted to fight. I couldn’t imagine coming to work, flying a plane halfway across the world, all the while not knowing where your family was. People did strange things when they were anxious.

  “Casey’s in there,” I said to the marshal, nodding toward the cockpit door. Whitcombe looked me up and down. “You know how it is ... he was going crazy. I had to tie him up. Shock, it affects people in different ways.”

  Two of the other officers turned, opened the door to the cockpit, and stepped inside. Whitcombe lifted his elbow and pushed it against my chest, slamming me against the wall at the front of the plane. I didn’t resist; didn’t fight back. One thing you learn in the Marines, and in life in general, is that sometimes it pays to wait.

  “Don’t get smart with me, boy,” said Whitcombe, despite the fact that I was only a couple of years younger than him, judging by his appearance, his mannerisms, and the grey streak in his hair. We were both somewhere approaching forty.

  “I don’t do smart,” I retorted, “I only do what I have to do.”

  Chapter Six

  Piper wrapped the chain tight around the dog’s throat and pulled it taut. Choking. Suffocating. She’d never do this normally, not to any living creature. Not a dog, not a cat, not a snake. But she had to escape. She had to get away from this maniac before whatever had happened to the twins happened to her.

  She held on tight as the beast thrashed around, and barked and barked. She tried to quieten it, cover its mouth as much as she could with her free hand, but it was hard to hold with her wrists still bound with cable ties. She was sure he would come back.

  Sammy’s eyes lit up. She began coughing, trying to cover up the barks. The scrabbling paws on the concrete slowed their frantic pace, and the barking became less pronounced. Then the hound gave one final kick, lurching out of her hands. Piper spun. The chain released around its neck and the beast was almost entirely free. She lunged, landing on top of the animal, wrapping the chain once more around its throat. Her feet caught in the manacles and she fell on its now still body.

  The door opened and the man froze on the doorstep, taking in the grim tableau. Piper grabbed the chain, a weapon, held it between her two cable-tied hands and swung it around and around.

  To her surprise, the man didn’t attack. Instead, he took stock of the whole situation, watching her swinging the chain. His eyes met hers and implored her to stop, to give up, to leave this thing alone. But she couldn’t. This was her way out—her one chance, her only opportunity to escape. And whilst she didn’t know what he was going to do or why he was doing it, she did know that something bad would happen if she stayed here much longer, especially now that she had killed his dog. The man scratched at his ski mask and stepped away from the door, closing it once more.

  Piper sat down on the ground, held onto the chain, and stroked the fur of the dead dog. “I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry,” she muttered under her breath. There was no excuse for what she’d done but it was worth trying.

  When Piper heard the sounds of the keys once again, she realized that she had somehow slipped off to sleep. The silhouette of the man filled the doorway. Then he stepped to the side and a woman, about half his size and certainly less than half his weight, stepped into the room. She wore a ski mask too. Unruly strands of light blonde hair were caught in the fabric. She walked over towards Piper.

  Piper took a step forward, she gripped the chain tight in her hands—threatening, dangerous, not to be messed with. But the woman ignored her. She stepped up to the dog, knelt down, and scratched the dead German shepherd, Brutus, under the chin. Piper found it funny that he didn’t respond. He should have been able to respond. It was so sick, it made her laugh—a small, tinny echo escaped the corner of her mouth. She couldn’t believe what she had done, couldn’t believe her actions had resulted in nothing at all. And she couldn’t quite reach the woman with the chain, unless she let it go. And she sure as hell wasn’t letting go of that chain. It was her only bargaining chip. The other girls had asked her to hand it over, had begged for a chance to have it. Sammy had tried to use the chain to cut through the bindings on her wrist but that hadn’t worked and the girls were still stuck, trapped as they had been for the last week.

  The woman looked up at Piper, her eyes brown. Deep, dark, almost the same color as the ski mask she wore. The stench of death already permeated the room with Frankie’s remains but now, with the dog’s as well, so close to her, Piper was almost overcome. She felt like agreeing with the woman—nodding, and asking for forgiveness, apologizing. But she didn’t. She kept her mouth shut, kept her jaw clenched firmly, her chin up, eyes forward, hands tight around the chain. Ready to fight. This wasn’t about life or freedom, she suddenly realized. It was about something greater than that. It was about having a sense of purpose and knowing she was in control of her own future, her own destiny, her own death if that’s what it came to. Because this last week in captivity, she had none of that: no control, just the cold seeping through the concrete floor and the constant sound of Brutus padding around.

  The woman darted forward and Piper swung the chain at her. But the woman was too quick. She dodged, feinted to one side and then ducked back in under the blow until her face was just inches away from Piper’s.

  “You really shouldn’t have done that.”

  Chapter Seven

  “So you’re a journalist, huh?” Whitcombe’s breath had the odor of old eggs and garlic, tainted by some ineffectual chewing gum. “You’re one of those peeping Tom types that comes around, trying to get off on the suffering of his fellow humans. You enjoy suffering, do you, Mr. Hammer? It makes you feel good. Makes you feel like a bigwig. Makes you feel like you’re important. Well, let me tell you something …”

  I didn’t have any inclination to hear what he was going to tell me. “I’d rather you didn’t,” I said.

  But Whitcombe wasn’t going to be dissuaded that easily. “You journalists, you reporters, you are the scum of this earth. You know that grime you get between your toenails? That’s what you are.”

  “Well, you’d know,” I said. “Smells like you’ve been eating a lot of that toe jam recently.” I barely had time to register before Whitcombe drew his arm back; but the fat, slightly squishy fist that jabbed up into my stomach under my solar plexus told me he meant exactly what he was saying - and that he believed it.

  “Did you have a bad experience with journalists?” I asked him as soon as I could recover enough breath to talk.

  He met my gaze. “Mr. Hammer, you have no idea the experiences I’ve had with journalists over the years.”

  “But there was one, wasn’t there?” I pressed. “One that changed your opinion of us, one that cut you to your core—a story where the emotions were so raw and so real to you that you couldn’t let it go.”

  The man was a hulking tub of lard, but he was just doing his job and there was a streak of empathy in him somewhere. He released a bit of pressure on me.

  “I believe we got off on the wrong foot there, Mr. Hammer.”

  I nodded, didn’t say anything. There was nothing to be said.

  “What are you doing aboard this flight, Mr. Hammer? Why are you still here after the rest of the flight has disembarked? There are officers back there,” he nodded his head toward LAX, “My officers, and the FBI, and the Air Marshals. They’re interviewing every single person on this flight. They’re working their way through the flight manifest one name at a time. When they get to your name and you’re not there, you’re going to become our prime suspect. And the fact that you’re here right now—that makes you my prime suspect. The fact that you tied up the pilot—well, that’s certainly not doing you any favors.”

  “He’s a chump,” I said. “He wasn’t doing himself any favors either when he tried to attack me. Why am I here? Well, that’s a different story.” I indicated one of the seats in First Class, suggested we sit down and talk—civil like. Whitcombe struck me as the kind of man who didn’t mind sitting down a lot. He eased h
imself into the chair.

  “Go on, Mr. Hammer.”

  “Well, you see, I’m the scum of the earth, Mr. Whitcombe. I saw a story here, something to take back to my editor—to make him happy. He put me on this flight; I was due in Bougainville later tomorrow. But it’s fairly unlikely his Bougainville story’s going to be written, and this story has potential. Two people sucked into two separate jet engines on opposite sides of the same plane at the same time ... that’s not coincidence. That’s gory, bloody murder. It’s going to take you a long time to figure out who those two people were because I can imagine that the bodies are not in much of a state to be identified. The fact that just about every agency in the US is here looking into it suggests to me that it’s something bigger than just an accident, a prank or anything of that magnitude. So I figured I’d stick around for a little bit, see what I could find out, start piecing together my story. My editor’s a son of a bitch—he won’t accept anything that isn’t the best. So, what have your boys got so far, Mr. Whitcombe?”

  Whitcombe chuckled, a long, low, deep, booming laugh. “Well, I never,” he started. “You fancy yourself a bit of an investigator. Usually it’s me who’s asking the questions. But I like your forwardness, Mr. Hammer. Have we met before?”

  I told him we hadn’t and that I didn’t have any particular fondness for investigating anything. My press pass said ‘Investigative Journalist’ but I preferred to leave the investigating to others. It didn’t matter—these things just kind of happened to me. You could say I was a bit of a shit-magnet. I told Whitcombe as much.