Smith's Monthly #22 Read online

  “No, thanks,” Danny said, staying with the script they had worked out. “I think I just need to rest.”

  “All right,” Craig said. “We’ll meet you for dinner at seven in the restaurant.”

  “Sounds good,” Danny said.

  Bonnie opened the door, then let it close a moment later with a loud thump. Her own heart seemed to be pounding even harder and she was sure Maxwell and his people could hear every beat through the microphone taped inside her blouse.

  Craig held his finger to his lips in the motion for all of them to be very silent. Then he moved over and turned on the television, putting it on one of the movie channels at a moderate volume.

  He pointed to the couch for Danny to sit, then motioned for Bonnie to come with him into the bedroom.

  Craig eased the door almost closed behind them, leaving just enough of a crack in the door that he could see Danny sitting like a statue on the couch.

  Bonnie glanced around at Danny’s clothes from yesterday tossed on the chair, and an unopened Star Trek paperback book on the dresser. Then she glanced at Craig.

  He gave her a quick thumbs-up sign.

  Now all they had to do was wait.

  Silently.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sunday, April 9th

  5:31 p.m.

  CHARLES ROBINS STARED at the ringing phone for a few moments, then decided he might as well answer it. Last night he hadn’t slept much, and all morning he felt as if he was walking in a haze. He could never remember feeling like this before.

  The phone that was ringing was a private number known only to a few people. The man working for him today was not one of them, but Charles had no doubt the man knew it.

  Charles moved across his lavishly furnished study to the cell phone sitting on the corner of his oak desk. He hadn’t asked the man for an update, but somehow he expected one since the extra demand for money. How else was he to know when to pay?

  He picked up the phone on the fourth ring and said, “Yes.”

  The man’s distinctive voice filled Charles’s mind as if the volume on his phone was turned up high.

  “Oh, pardon the interruption,” the man said, his voice as level and controlled as always. “I was trying to call the hospital.”

  The line went dead and Charles put the phone down. He didn’t know how he felt. Clearly Senator Knight was in the hospital, the man’s mission accomplished as planned. But he wouldn’t let just one phone call be his confirmation.

  Charles moved over to a wall cabinet and opened it so his large television was exposed. He quickly turned it on and flipped to a local Phoenix news channel. They were covering the Senator’s tragic accident, as he would have expected they would. It seemed the Senator’s cart had gone out of control on a steep path and rolled down a rocky slope. The Senator had been airlifted to the hospital where his condition was considered critical.

  Charles flipped off the television and moved back to his desk. He was feeling even more numb than he had earlier, but he was sure a good night’s sleep would solve that problem. And now that his companies were out of immediate danger from the good Senator, he just might get some sleep.

  He dropped down into his chair and clicked on his computer screen. He had the money set up to transfer to the man’s account after it was confirmed about the Senator. But it wasn’t as much as the man had demanded. In fact, it was nowhere near as much.

  Charles glanced at the total, then laughed. “You think you can blackmail me, do you?” With a click the funds were transferred to the man’s account. “I can change the rules just as easily as you can,” Charles said to the man, as if he could hear, “and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. Not with the security I’ve got around here. You work for me, remember?”

  With a laugh Charles shut down his computer and stood. “A good brandy and a steak for dinner is just what the doctor ordered.”

  Charles laughed again, starting to feel a lot better. “Probably not the Senator’s doctor.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sunday, April 9th

  5:47 p.m.

  TO CRAIG THE first fifteen minutes of waiting seemed to drag on and on as they stood just inside Danny’s bedroom door.

  Bonnie paced silently while he leaned against the door frame. Every thirty seconds or so he peeked through the slightly open door to make sure Danny was still sitting on the couch. The young golf pro was, watching television and doing his best to remain still, mostly without success.

  But his orders from Maxwell were to stay on the couch, without moving around, until the man showed up, and that was exactly what Danny was doing.

  Craig couldn’t blame the kid for squirming and worrying. He was in a situation different from anything he had ever seen outside a movie. And his wife had been taken hostage all because of someone’s desire to get to a United States Senator. How completely unfair was that?

  If that was what had really happened.

  At first Craig hadn’t believed the kid, but over the last hour he had started to. Craig’s biggest worry now was that Danny’s wife was already dead. There was no doubt that the Senator would be injured or dead and Danny might be facing a death sentence shortly if he and Bonnie hadn’t accidentally overheard that conversation the first night. But finding Danny’s wife was another matter.

  Right now Maxwell and his people were scrambling to triangulate cell calls and track down any lead that might give them a clue to Steph Baines’s location.

  Bonnie found a hotel note pad on the nightstand beside the phone and scribbled a quick note, holding it up to him to see.

  This waiting is driving me nuts!

  Craig smiled at her and nodded his agreement. They still had almost thirty minutes before the man Danny was supposed to meet was even scheduled to show.

  Craig took the pen and pad and wrote a note back to her.

  Me too. Wish we had turned the television on in here as well.

  She read his note and nodded. Then took the pad and wrote: That would have helped.

  They wrote a few notes back and forth for the next ten minutes until suddenly there was a knock on the hall door into Danny’s room.

  Craig checked on Danny through the crack in the open door. The young pro was staring his way, a very frightened look on his face.

  Craig silently opened the bedroom door enough for Danny to see him and motioned for Danny to go ahead and let his contact into the suite.

  Danny took a deep breath and went for the door as Craig eased the bedroom door closed and pulled his gun, quickly checking it to make sure it was loaded and ready to fire.

  Bonnie had her gun in her hand as well. Her face was flushed and she was fighting to control her breathing. That knock must have really startled her.

  It startled him, that was for sure, even though that was what they had been waiting for.

  He motioned for her to take a position on the far side of the dresser behind where the door would open.

  Craig then moved over against the wall by the closet so he would have a clear angle at the doorway. If the guy checked in here before Maxwell and Hagar came in, Craig planned on greeting the guy with a loaded gun, and he wanted Bonnie flanking the man, but not in his line of fire.

  Also he and Bonnie had worked out that if they had to go through the door, he would go first and to his left, she second and to the right. These starting positions would make it easier for that to happen.

  Bonnie got into position and nodded she was ready.

  “Yeah,” Danny said as he opened the doorway into the hall.

  A very long pause.

  Craig glanced at Bonnie and motioned that she should take a deep breath. She did, silently, then mouthed to him to be careful.

  “I see our Senator had himself a little accident, as planned,” a man’s voice said as the door to the hall closed.

  Craig glanced at Bonnie, whose eyes were wide. She recognized the voice as well as he did. It was one of the guys they had overheard on Friday nig
ht.

  “My wife?” Danny asked. “Is she all right?”

  “Ahh, sure thing, kid,” the man said. “Right as rain. You and her can be doing the humpy-bumpy tonight.”

  “So when can I talk to her?” Danny demanded.

  Craig glanced at his watch. Thirteen seconds had gone by. Maxwell and Hagar should be coming through the door at any instant.

  “I’m goin’ to take you to a place where you can talk to her,” the man said.

  Craig knew that the place the man wanted to take Danny to was where Danny would be killed.

  “No!” Danny said. “I want to talk to her now!”

  Craig glanced at Bonnie, whose eyes were round. That wasn’t in Danny’s script.

  “Sure, kid,” the man said. “No skin off my nose.”

  Craig could hear the beeping of a cell phone as the man dialed a number. If he was actually dialing the location of Danny’s wife, Craig hoped Maxwell and the others were listening and would give the call time to happen. That way they had something to triangulate to find the location.

  “Put the kid’s wife on the phone again,” the man said.

  Then Danny said, “Steph? Are you all right?”

  There was a pause.

  “I love you,” Danny said.

  “That’s enough, kid,” the man said. “You’ll see her soon enough.

  There was a clear sound of the cell phone cover being snapped shut. “Now, let’s go.”

  At that instant the door from the hall burst open and Maxwell’s voice shouted “FBI!”

  Craig took one step toward the bedroom door and yanked it open, moving left, his gun aimed at the man standing near the television. The guy looked to be no more than thirty and couldn’t have been taller than five-foot-five.

  Danny dove away from the man for the couch, rolling over a coffee table as he went.

  The man drew a revolver from under his coat jacket, spinning at Maxwell coming through the hallway door.

  “Don’t!” Craig shouted.

  “Drop the gun!” Maxwell shouted.

  The guy didn’t listen.

  It was a very stupid thing not to do.

  The guy had his gun out and was turning on Maxwell when both Craig and Maxwell fired.

  The two shots slammed the room in sound.

  Craig was aiming at the man’s shoulder and arm. From fifteen feet, he knew he didn’t miss.

  Maxwell was even closer and clearly didn’t miss either.

  The man spun around like someone had put a boogie-board under his feet and yanked on him. His gun banged against the wall from the force of the impacts and ended up near the small bar.

  The man did a complete three hundred and sixty degree turn and smashed to the floor, face up, staring at the ceiling, his legs twisted under him.

  The noise inside the small room was deafening from the two shots and the air stank of gunpowder. Craig had had to fire his gun in a few enclosed areas before, and the intensity of the explosion and smell always caught him by surprise.

  Both Craig and Maxwell were over the man before he even stopped falling. Craig could see that the guy had been hit twice. Once in the right shoulder, which was Craig’s shot, and once in the stomach, which had to be Maxwell’s. The guy clearly wasn’t going anywhere. He was going to be lucky to live.

  Now the copperish odor of blood filled the air, mixing with the gunpowder smell as blood stained the carpet black below the guy.

  Maxwell bent down over the man, whose eyes were fluttering like he had sand in them.

  Craig glanced around at Bonnie, who was standing over Danny, her hand on his shoulder as he sobbed into the couch. Two other agents and Hagar were also in the room.

  “Ambulance,” Craig said and Hagar grabbed the phone off the stand beside him.

  “And get the number of that last call and its location,” Maxwell said, picking the cell phone out of the man’s front pocket and tossing it to one of the agents. “Stat!”

  The agent with the phone grabbed it out of the air, jumped toward the door, and disappeared into the hall.

  “Who hired you?” Maxwell asked, turning back to the man on the floor.

  The guy stopped blinking long enough to look at Maxwell, then at Craig.

  Craig knew the look. It was an awareness of death coming, as if suddenly a person knew death now and accepted it all in one instant. Craig had seen it on every death he had witnessed. The guy had the look now.

  “Come on,” Maxwell said, urgency in his voice. “Who hired you?”

  The guy looked like he wanted to say something.

  The silence as they tried to listen for what the man would say seemed extra intense in the room after the sound of shots.

  But there was going to be nothing but silence.

  All that came out of the guy’s mouth were a few bloody bubbles before he died.

  To be continued…

  Harold wants to end his life because he knows he will never attain perfection. Then, while waiting, he meets Linda, a woman who wants to end it all because she hates her perfection.

  When perfection meets imperfection, anything might be possible.

  Even living.

  STANDING IN LINE AT THE INTERSECTION

  Today, Wednesday, the nineteenth day of July, the line of people at the intersection stretched only a few city blocks, back past the front door of the triplex theater showing reruns of Heaven Can Wait, It’s a Wonderful Life, and You Can’t Take It With You.

  Harold Jones had decided to wear his best work suit, the one with the dark pinstripes, to stand in line. He had polished his shoes and combed his newly cut gray hair twice. He had left home to join the line at ten minutes after seven and ended up standing behind a beautiful and very nude young woman. She had dark skin, long dark hair, and a perfect all-over tan, plus a slight dimple in her left butt cheek.

  The big electric sign on the bank a block from the intersection read 78 degrees at two minutes before eight a.m.. Two short minutes before the traffic started and the line of people began to move. Those standing in line who wanted to talk complained about the heat. “Muggy,” they muttered to each other. Harold agreed and nodded his agreement to those he could hear muttering.

  Harold had decided to stand in line on a Wednesday because Wednesday symbolized the middle and nothing different at the same time. Every day people stood in the line. This particular Wednesday was a hot, muggy day in the city, but still a day just like any other in the fact that people stood in the line to step into the intersection. However today was different for Harold because he stood with them behind a naked woman with a slight dimple on her ass.

  As with every day, the people around Harold in line were all types and nationalities. Eighteen was the youngest, as was the law, but the oldest sometimes could barely walk. They were short, fat, thin, tall and almost every color of the rainbow. In other words, the line always seemed to be a basic cross-section of the human race.

  The people in the line dressed in everything from full suits to nothing at all, with a large majority choosing to stand in line in their bathrobes. A few dressed formally, figuring it would save time later, and a few stood nude, choosing that form of expression as a symbol of their lives.

  Harold and the beautiful naked woman were at least a block from the intersection, standing in front of a laundry called Mun Chings Dry Cleaning and Laundry Service. No matter how much Harold concentrated on what was going to happen at the intersection, no matter how hard he tried to look at the others in line, his gaze kept returning to the beautiful little dimple in the left cheek in front of him.

  Every time she moved, shifted her weight from one foot to the other, the dimple seemed to smile at him, talk to him. “You’re wasting your life,” it said. “Leave the line, call off the ex-brother-in-law, find a new job, a new wife. Most of all keep living.”

  The dimple on her ass said all of that to him every time she moved. She moved a lot and the dimple just kept right on talking.

  Of course, sin
ce his wife had left him a year before he had been constantly horny. He figured that might have had something to do with the lecture. But after a few minutes he discarded that theory and decided the dimple truly was speaking to him.

  For the first time the line eased slightly closer to the intersection and Harold noticed over the dimple lecture the squeal of brakes. Everyone in the line started to look and act a little more nervous. Harold took a deep breath and smiled, glad the waiting was almost over.

  Slowly, much slower than a wedding march, the line moved forward.

  Harold just kept staring at the dimple, listening to it lecture him like a young boy being scolded by his mother.

  Finally, while passing in front of a Taco John’s, he couldn’t take it any longer. He had to, in the final moments of his life, know the woman who owned that dimple.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the back of her dark hair.

  The dimple instantly shut up.

  She turned and smiled at Harold. She had a full, white-toothed grin, beautiful dark tanned skin, and almost no pubic hair. He took that all in at once before his gaze moved quickly back up to her deep brown eyes and colored eye shadow she wore.

  She smiled and nodded. “You like what you see?” she asked, holding her arms up in the classic look-at-me gesture.

  “Of course,” he said. “What human being wouldn’t like the perfection of another human body, especially one as proportioned as yours.”

  She appeared a little startled at his answer, letting her arms drop back to her sides. For the first time she seemed to look at him. Then her gaze moved down his front, taking in his suit, his shoes, his very stance on the hot sidewalk.

  “Corporate?”

  “Dressed like this,” this time it was his turn to hold his arms up in the look-at-me expression, “what else? Twenty-eight empty years with the same company, a failed marriage, and enough money so that money doesn’t matter any more.”