Hazard and Somerset Off Duty Page 8

  Working his way through the crowd, Somers dug out his phone and dialed.

  “Don’t check up on me,” Hazard said.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Terrible. I’ve been sitting here for half an hour. Nothing.”

  Somers checked the clock. “You’ve been there twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Ok, twenty-five.”

  “And nothing, Somers. This is a waste of my time. I’ve got stuff I need to do.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned that. You’re still on leave from the force, and I did the grocery shopping yesterday. What are these important things that need to get done?”

  “Errands.”

  “Ree, just tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Come pick me up. This is—”

  “I know: a waste of your time. I’m not picking you up. I’m sure the physical therapist will be with you in a few more minutes; just hang on.”

  “Come pick me up.”

  “I can’t hear you. I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Somers, don’t you fucking—”

  He disconnected the call.

  Boxes crammed the narrow hallway at the back of the store, and where the cardboard flaps hung open, they exposed tightly packed paperbacks waiting to be shelved. A battered door was marked Restroom, and a red Exit sign glowed dumbly at the end. The exterior door was closed, and Somers popped it open with his hip. The May sunlight, bright, scattered over the gravel lot behind WRB, picking out the dandelions and thistles among the stones with crisp shadows. The air smelled like summer: motor oil, hot rocks, and road dust.

  The rest of the scene took Somers’s full attention. The H2 he had seen earlier that day—it had to be the same one, it was so goddamn ridiculous—cut a diagonal across the lot, and the rear door was open. The TV dad was forcing someone into the car, and faint, squawking protests came from inside the H2. On the ground, a red-headed woman was shouting, “You motherfucker, you goddamn motherfucker, you can’t do this,” but she had her hand over a bloody nose, muffling the shouts.

  “What’s going on here?” Somers said. “Hey, you. What do you think you’re doing?”

  The TV dad shot Somers a look. With his sailboat-print shirt and his dock shoes and his blow-dried hair, he looked like the kind of guy who threw barbeques and had a wet bar in his basement. Everything except for the eyes. The eyes were pinched, hard, and angry. After one look, the man ignored Somers. He slammed the H2’s rear door.

  “Wahredua police,” Somers said, advancing on the man. “Put your hands where I can—”

  Faster than Somers had anticipated, the man jerked open his door, jumped behind the wheel, and gunned it. Churning gravel, the H2 lumbered out of the parking lot. Somers ran alongside it for a pair of yards, hammering on the glass and shouting, and then the big car pulled ahead, and he had to stop. The tinted windows showed nothing but his own face and windblown hair, and then the H2 took a corner and even that was gone.

  He trotted back to the red-headed woman, who was wiping blood from her face. She was pretty in a very put-together kind of way, lots of money, good taste, but not beautiful. Her eyes were dry, and even though her nose was obviously broken, she seemed to be back in control of herself, and those two things counted for a lot.

  “What happened?”

  “He just kidnapped my mother,” she said in a honking voice. “Roseland Weeks.”

  III

  MAY 18

  FRIDAY

  2:12 PM

  SOMERS INTRODUCED HIMSELF. Maggie Weeks-Gray—divorced, she added, as though it were a suffix—refused to go anywhere except after her mother.

  “He’s getting away with my mother.”

  “Let’s get you inside and we’ll call the police.”

  “No. No phone calls.”

  “If this is a kidnapping—”

  She let out a bitter laugh and then winced and tented her fingertips over her broken nose. “Is it kidnapping if he’s my asshole brother?”

  “It is if your mother didn’t want to go with him. Let’s go—”

  “No.” The word honked with the force of air through her broken nose, but she didn’t waver. “Nothing official. We can’t. I can’t.”

  Somers studied her for a moment. She looked like she’d run headfirst into a brick wall, and she also looked so stubborn that he figured she’d do it again. With a sigh, he said, “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

  For a moment, the woman said nothing. Then she peeled sticky fingers away from the bloody wreck of her nose. “You’ve got a nice face.”

  Somers waited for the rest of it.

  “That doesn’t mean shit, usually, but I don’t have a lot of choices right now. And you did try to stop him.” For another moment, the only noise was the whirr of distant tires. “Can you help me without getting the police involved?”

  “To a point.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Exactly what it sounds like. I’m not going to be a vigilante. If this really is a kidnapping, it’s my job to report it. Right now.”

  “What if it’s not a kidnapping? What if it’s a power play, and all I want you to do is put a little scare into my brother?”

  “How big of a scare?”

  “Nothing major. Just shake him up a little.”

  Somers hemmed.

  “You’ve got a bag full of my mother’s books, right? What if I get them all signed for you. Individualized. To you. To your daughter. To whomever you want. You won’t have to wait in a godawful line like the one inside there.”

  “I’m not pulling a gun or a badge on this guy. If I do that, things are official, and then I have to do things the right way.”

  “My brother is such a pussy,” Maggie said with another honk, “about all you have to do is turn out the lights and he’ll pee himself.”

  “If we’re doing this, we’d better get out of here. The crowd’s getting restless in there, and Trask is going to get curious about where your mother is. Somebody will come looking.”

  “Jared will recognize my car.”

  Hitching a thumb towards the seven long, hot blocks, Somers said, “Let’s take mine.”

  They walked in silence; the sun baked the back of Somers’s neck, and waves of the early summer heat shimmered above the blacktop. Sweat made his shirt cling to him, and he was aware of Maggie’s discreetly admiring looks where the cotton grew translucent and clung to muscle. The day might have been going to shit, but there was always something to be said for being admired, and Somers found himself whistling.

  His phone buzzed. “Hey, Ree.”

  “What are you so goddamn happy about?”

  “Nothing. I just said hey.”

  “You sound like you did after we went to that gay bar in Springfield and the college boys kept buying you drinks.”

  “I don’t sound like anything. I said two words.”

  “You sound like—”

  “How’s therapy?”

  “They finally moved me back to one of the therapy rooms. Bunch of goddamn medieval torture devices. I swear to Christ, Somers, if they hook me up to that one with the weights again, I’m going to break it. I’ll cut the cables. I’ll smash it.”

  “You’re going to smash an exercise machine?”

  “You sound exactly like you did at that club. Where are you?”

  “I’m with Roseland Weeks’s daughter. Maggie, say hi.”

  “Hello.”

  “That’s it. I’m heading over there.”

  “No, you’re not. Sit your butt down and wait for the PT.”

  “If you’re with Roseland Weeks—”

  “Ree, this is serious. Your arm, I mean.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine.”

  “I’m fine, Somers.”

  “If you were fine, I wouldn’t have to button your shirt.”

  On the other end of the line came heavy breathing. “Fuck you.” And then the call disconnected.

  Somers dropped his phone in the cup holder, cranked the AC, and eased the car into the street.

  “Problems?”

  “Every day of my life. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “If you need to—”

  “What I need to do is get these books signed. After that phone call, it’s probably the only chance I have that my boyfriend might at some point consider sleeping in the same bed as me again.”

  The Interceptor’s tires thrummed underneath them, and then, like a woman picking her way through a minefield: “Your boyfriend.”

  “For the love of—will you tell me about your brother?”

  “I knew you were too good looking not to have a ring.”

  “Thanks. Where am I going?”

  “Savoy Garden. I’m all turned around; hold on, let me check my phone.”

  Guiding the Interceptor south and west, Somers said, “No need. I know the place.” The Savoy Garden was a relatively new condominium complex riverside of the college. It had made headlines throughout every stage of its construction, beginning when a local investment firm, InnovateMidwest, purchased tracts of subsidized housing and then bulldozed everything. The mayor’s stake in InnovateMidwest, and the ease with which government contracts and permits had been obtained had also made it into the paper. But the most interesting part had been Savoy Garden’s complete and total failure as a luxury community. Most of the complex was empty, and now the ultra-high-end condos moldered in the swampy heat. “Why the Savoy? Are you sure?”

  “Sure enough. That’s where Mother and I are staying. Jared will need to get her checkbook, her ID, and a few of her things.”

  “If I were kidnapping someone,
I’d do all that stuff first.”

  “Trust me: you’re much smarter than my brother.”

  “Go on with the rest of it. However bad the family stuff gets, I’ve probably seen worse.”

  “Jared is two years older. That’s a big deal in his mind. He’s—I don’t know. Feudal. Firstborn, birthright, inheritance. That’s all really solid in his mind. A lot of that came from our dad, who was about as lovely a misogynist as you can imagine.”

  “Roseland Weeks was a pretty big icon for female success. How’d that go over at home?”

  “Like you’d imagine. He loved the money, of course. He was a lazy, selfish bastard, not that I knew it at the time. At the time, I thought it was normal for dads to sit around, bellies hanging over their boxer shorts, watching The Price Is Right and bitching about the quality of the prosecco in the house. And when it came time for photo ops, he knew which side of his bread was buttered. The perfect family.”

  Somers nodded along to the conversation as he drove into the more recent construction around Wroxall College. This part of town gleamed like a new penny: lots of stucco, lots of oil-rubbed bronze, lots of plate glass for the sun to streak with white, wavy glare. “And big brother soaked this all up. Meanwhile, you and your mom were running a feminist underground operation.”

  Maggie honked a laugh, then winced and wrapped a hand around her nose, as though afraid it would snap off. “Feminist underground? I wish. Mother wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Well, I guess she might to a goose, but she wouldn’t to a gander. Dad didn’t have to hit her or push her around; she did whatever he wanted. And when he got angry, when he yelled, she’d just duck her head and take it. You ever read the books?”

  “The Little Stoic series? No.”

  “One of the later ones, Marcus Makes a Mistake, has Marcus lie to his father. And the rest of the book is one long sermon on why the patriarchy deserves our undying support.”

  “Pretty advanced stuff for a children’s book.”

  “Not in those words, it doesn’t say that, but that’s basically the idea. The early ones, Mother’s best work, they’re really something. She believed that stuff, Stoicism, and there’s some value in it. Resilience, fortitude, integrity. But by the end, it went too far, and a lot of that was Dad.”

  The tires hummed for another mile of stucco and glass. “What does that have to do with your brother?”

  “Well, Jared isn’t much of a Stoic. He takes more after Dad: he’s greedy, bitchy, and impatient. And no matter what you see at the book signings and in the photo ops, Mother’s . . . fading. Mentally, I mean.”

  “Do you have custody of her?”

  “No, we haven’t had to go that far. She and Dad set up a trust and a will very carefully. We can get to some of the money right now, to care for her. She lives with me; I take care of her. I wash her clothes, bathe her, cook. I’m the one at home alone with her all day. But Jared—he was doing banking or something out in California, and most of his money went up his nose in cocaine before he got into really hard stuff. He tried to come to the house one day. By then, I knew enough about him not to let him anywhere near Mother. His ex-wife had told me plenty, and we live in a gated community, so I had the guard keep him out. That pissed him off, and he kept the phone ringing for about three days. I figured he’d given up. Then, today.” Over her tented fingers, she glanced at Somers. “That’s enough, right?”

  “It sure as hell looked like kidnapping to me. If we go to the police—”

  Another honking laugh interrupted him, and Maggie flicked fingers crusted with blood. “That’d be the end of us. You can’t. One of Dad’s little tricks was to write a morality clause into the trust. Any kind of public scandal and the money stops. I don’t have any money, so I’d have to turn Mother over to the executors, and they’re a bunch of Dad’s old cronies. They’d put her in a home as fast as they could and pocket whatever they could squeeze out of the trust.”

  “You didn’t break the morality clause.”

  “No, but my name would be in the papers, and Jared and I would be tied up in a he-said, she-said type of case, and that’s all it would take.” She had eyes the color of a summer horizon, a blue that was almost white. “If you won’t help, that’s fine. But don’t go to the police. Please.”

  “You know I am the police.”

  “I know.”

  “This is a bad way to handle things.”

  “Just a scare. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “My boyfriend would knock me upside the head for something like this.”

  Those blue-white eyes narrowed fractionally. “He hits you?”

  “He’d sure like to sometimes.” Somers sighed. “This would be one of them. All right, let’s see what we can do. Just a scare, though.”

  “Just a scare.”

  “And I want every one of those books. Personalized, not just a scribbled autograph.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Somers returned his attention to the streets, heading towards the Savoy Garden. Emery Hazard was going to owe him for this. Big time.

  IV

  MAY 18

  FRIDAY

  2:39 PM

  THE SAVOY GARDEN occupied a rise that overlooked the Grand Rivere. With its brick facade and manicured landscaping, the condominium complex looked exactly like what it was: a place for people who had more money than sense or taste. At this time of day, the place had a strangely dreamlike feel; the only movement was sunlight burning white on sheets of glass, and heat thickening the air and drawing it up like a stage curtain. Everything else was still.

  The H2 had rolled up on the curb and looked like it was waiting to pounce.

  “How does a junkie who’s willing to kidnap his own mother keep an H2?”

  “The title is in Mother’s name,” Maggie said as she reached for the door. “He couldn’t sell it without her signature, which I wasn’t going to give him. I suppose he could have taken it to a chop shop or something like that, but that would be beneath him.”

  “But kidnapping his mother isn’t.”

  “Obviously not.”

  As she pulled the latch, Somers said, “You’re staying here.”

  “I can’t; Mother’s terrified. She won’t know you. I’m not even sure if she’ll know Jared. She’s probably out of her mind right now.”

  “Do you have a phone?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have AAA?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re going to call and explain that you need them to tow you to a dealer.

  “But the Hummer—”

  “It’s under your mother’s name? And you and your mother are both on the AAA membership?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Go ahead and call.” He wedged open the door with his knee and opened the gun safe under the seat. He’d left his Glock 22 at home, and he was missing the .40 caliber handgun right then. Regardless of what Maggie insisted, Somers knew it was always best to prepare for the worst, and if Jared really was a doped-out bastard willing to kidnap his own mother, then the odds were good that he’d have a gun.

  Somers ignored the Smith & Wesson M&P Shield, the tidy little 9mm that he kept as a spare, but he did retrieve two gel pepper sprays. Then, after locking the safe, Somers gave Maggie a look.

  “Last chance.”

  “He’s a stupid bastard and he broke my nose,” she said. “We’re in 307. Here’s the key.”

  Accepting the key, Somers started towards the Savoy Garden. His words to Maggie Weeks-Gray followed him. Last chance. This was his last chance too, his last chance not to do something stupid. A year ago, Somers might not have been here. He’d never been particularly rule-bound. He was self-aware enough to know that with good looks and charm, he could skate past a lot of rules, and break a good goddamn more, before he came anywhere close to trouble. But he also had a certain degree of self-preservation. He’d been careful in high school: careful always to be cool, always to be popular, always to be straight. He’d shaken off some of that in college, but not all of it. It wasn’t until Emery Hazard that he’d thrown self-preservation out the window; he’d practically thrown it off the top of the Empire State Building.