CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

The guard rounded the corner, looking up toward the eave, straining to follow the thin black TV cable.

Larson, both hands gripping the broken stick like a Louisville Slugger, stepped into the swing and put the man’s unsuspecting forehead into the nosebleeds. The guard fell on his back with a whomph of released air, clearly unconscious before he landed.

Larson considered tying him up, gagging him, but feared he had no time. If he could bag all three guards, then he’d return to this one. He rolled the man onto his side, so he wouldn’t drown in his own vomit, and left him.

With no choice but to risk it, he entered the glare and hurried up the wobbly front steps. He thumped an elbow onto the door and said in a gruff, intentionally muffled voice, “Hey, help me out here…”

As the door came open, he thrust the broken limb like a battering ram into the gut of the guard, connecting just below the V of the rib cage. He stepped inside, past the one staggering back, and clipped the skull of the next, who, at that moment, had been kneeling in front of the TV, his back to the door. The one behind him went for a gun.

Larson broke the man’s wrist with the stick and, as he cried out, dimmed his lights by breaking his jaw. The guard’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he slumped. Out cold.

Sweating profusely now, Larson surveyed the fallen. He kicked the door shut, and breathed for what felt like the first time. He rounded up weapons and pocketed their magazines.

He’d bought himself a few minutes at most.

The guard with the broken wrist moaned himself awake, grabbing at his flapping hand. Larson raised the club above his head and lowered it like a camper going after a snake.

The shabby interior reeked of years of cigarettes and beer. It reminded Larson of a crappy college dorm lounge. A Formica galley kitchen offered a two-burner stovetop, a microwave, and a fridge under tube lighting. The building’s modular design left the kitchen and living room at one end, a bath, and two other doors off a narrow hallway lit by an overhead fixture missing at least one bulb. Larson’s heart remained in his throat as he carried the bloodied club with him down the hall. The doors seemed to stretch farther away the more he walked.

He threw the first open, club hoisted and ready.

Two sets of bunk beds, complete with sheets and wool Pendletons. Signs of bachelor life: Ashtrays that needed emptying. Copies of men’s magazines with cover shots of bare-breasted starlets. Soiled laundry in a far corner, looking like an animal’s nest.

Clear.

He hurried to the second room, threw this door open, expecting either the fourth guard or the expectant eyes of the two kids. Another bunk room, not dissimilar to the first.

No kids.

He tried to wrap his mind around all this. The speed with which the two guards had fled the main lodge had convinced him they’d taken the bait of Hope’s phone coming online.

The most pressing thing now was to buy himself time to find the children. He could bind and gag all three guards, leave the one out back, perhaps behind the trash bins, the other two here in the bunkhouse.

He felt a rumble in his legs and knew it to be a vehicle. He switched off all the interior lights and cracked open the front door in time to see only the back of a panel truck up at the top of the hill, rounding the north corner of the lodge. He couldn’t make out its writing on the back from here.

He shut the door, set down the club, and grabbed for Hope’s mobile.

caterer? @ gate

Party time or a Trojan horse, courtesy of Rotem? Something was wrong: Hope should have been supplying him with more information than this.

Where to go from here?

He spotted two rolls of silver duct tape-further evidence of the kids, or wishful thinking?

No matter, he would put them to good use.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

“What the fuck is this?”

Philippe watched the panel van disappear around the far corner of the lodge. But his attention was elsewhere, out into the night, down the hill to the bunkhouse, which he couldn’t see from here.

Paolo would reach the bunkhouse any minute. Philippe had the rest of his guards patrolling the manor. Representatives from the other families were due any time now. All this should have made him feel more confident than he did. But the mark’s cell phone coming alive while on this property did not sit well. That had yet to be explained, and was the most troubling of his concerns.

Ricardo, older than him by a year, but technically his nephew, answered from behind him. “Jimmy Nans decided to make a little contribution to your meeting.”

“I don’t want his contribution.”

Philippe had never learned to feel comfortable around Ricardo. Never had. Never would.

“Not the way to play host,” Ricardo chided.

“They’ll set up upstairs. Then I don’t want them anywhere near the meeting.”

Philippe decided to follow the van around the building and make sure his guys were on it. “Where you going?” Ricardo called out. “You got something going with Katie?” Philippe stopped in his tracks, then decided that the worst response was any at all.

“She’s a nervous twitch. Can’t stop moving around the house. You know what’s up with that?”

“Katrina is miserable, Ricky,” Philippe answered, using a nickname Ricardo loathed. “Everyone around here knows that. We’ve known it for a long, long time. But at least you don’t have to worry about losing her.”

“How’s that?” Ricardo asked, suddenly all the more curious.

“Because you never had her.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Prostrate, Hope peered out of the back of the catering truck. By the time it rounded the second corner of the lodge and descended down a small ramp, she anticipated its coming to a full stop and slid out, feet first. As her shoes made contact, she fell onto the pavement, tucked into a ball, and rolled an ugly back somersault. She quickly came to her feet and stuffed herself into a cave of steel formed between two massive Dumpsters. The catering truck continued another thirty or forty feet, its brakes squealing as it stopped.

Odds were that Penny was somewhere inside this building.

She heard a male voice first: “Stupid shit…” Then the rolling open of the truck’s back door, the driver angry at the gate guard for leaving it unlatched.

A smallish man not with the catering crew walked within inches of her and started shouting at people. Hope leaned back, put her hand into something disgusting and had to bite her tongue to keep from groaning out loud.

The one barking orders explained that the caterers would be let inside. The back door would be opened for them. If caught anywhere in the building other than the basement or the first-floor dining room, they were told they’d spend the rest of the night in the truck, under guard, and could say good-bye to any tip.

“And I’m a big tipper,” he said, his voice fading into the building.

She wondered if she could pull off being part of the catering crew. She picked out the voices of two women and a man, all three having arrived in the truck, she assumed. The back door now open, they went about unloading the truck. Hope sat up into a crouch, brushed herself off, and poised herself.

Prepared to head to the back of the truck, pick up a crate and act like she knew what she was doing, she willed her feet to move, but they remained frozen to the pavement. Terrified, she collapsed and hunkered back down.

She couldn’t do it.

It was then, sitting there between the two Dumpsters, with only a wedge of visible landscape and sky in front of her, looking out across an empty golf green where sprinklers made rain with random precision, that she spotted a flicker of movement high in a tree at a great distance. She saw a low stone pillar that supported the wrought-iron fence. This tree was on the far side of that fence.