Call Of The Witch (27 page)

“
Sure, I’m in love,” I
told him, “but what about the spell?”

“
Tony, there is no spell.
That’s the magic of love. You can’t eat. You can’t sleep. You can’t
think. You can’t do anything.”

“
I don’t understand. How
come I’ve never felt this way before?”

I remember how he set his hands on my
shoulders and squared my body to his. At six-four, he’s a few
inches taller than I am. I looked up at him, my eyes blinking; his
were cast in a perpetual glint. “That’s because you’ve never been
in love before, Tony.”

“
Yeah?” is all I
said.

He smiled back thinly. “Yeah.”

So that’s where my mind was, as I sipped
coffee and gazed out on the courtyard, watching late afternoon
shadows creep from the lamp posts like echoes of Stonehenge on a
late-summer’s day. I thought about how I left Lilith after she
attempted to locate Kelly through scrying. Though her attempt was
unsuccessful, she did give it her best shot. Afterward, she wanted
me to go with her, to the bedroom and…. I pushed her away.

I started to feel guilty about that. I looked
down at my hands, my fingers and my arms. My skin looked smooth, my
muscles firm and tight. It wasn’t so long ago when I was a
washed-up sixty-something year old man. The backs of my hands
rippled like the sands left behind by a receding tide. I had age
spots the size of dimes and blue veins like tree roots budging
beneath my skin every time I made a fist.

Then Lilith came into my life. Better yet,
she gave me life. She took me from the twilight of winter and
brought me back to the dawn of spring. I couldn’t know the reasons
why at the time, but did it matter? That she spent a century and a
half of her child-bearing years never wanting children came as no
surprise to me. She had always maintained her distain for the
noisome varmints; her words, not mine.

Perhaps she was simply waiting for the right
guy to come along. We got married, sure. I think I wanted it as
much as she did. I only wish she had first told me that she wanted
a baby, instead of passing off the consummation ritual as nothing
more than a completion of the wedding ceremony proper. Did she
think I wouldn’t figure it out? After Ursula got pregnant following
the ritual, I expected Lilith to come clean about its true purpose.
Yet she didn’t. She continued to play dumb to keep me in the
dark.

Still, I supposed I owed Lilith. So in light
of my overwhelming debt to her, I decided to lay it all out to
chance. I took a coin from my pocket and flipped it into the air.
Heads, I would fight Lilith on the issue of the consummation
ritual; tails I would capitulate. The coin flipped end-over-end in
its brief flight up and back down again into my hand. I slapped the
coin to the back of my left hand and kept it covered with my right.
I wanted to look. I really did, but the fear of what lay before me
paralyzed my entire body.

I sat there, staring at the back of my hand,
my breath shallow, my chest tight. I resolved to look at the coin
on the count of three and abide to whatever decision fate
prescribed for me.

“
One,” I counted
softly.

“
Two.”

“
Tony!”

I looked up and spotted Carlos and Dominic
hurrying across the cafeteria floor towards me. Without looking at
the coin, I stashed it in my pocket.

“
Tony,” said Dominic.
“There you are. We’ve been looking all over for you!”

I stood and met them half way. “What’s
up?”

“
The kidnappers called,”
said Carlos. He didn’t seem the least bit angry with me.

“
They did?
When?”

Dominic checked his watch. “Twelve minutes
ago. They laid out their ransom demands.”

I put my hands to my head and rubbed my
temples briskly. “So let me think. If we’ve got Santana and
Martinez down in holding, then that means….”

“
Means they ain’t the
kidnappers,” Dominic finished.

“
Maybe,” Carlos added.
“Either one of them could still be partnering with the
kidnappers.”

“
I’ll give you that,” I
said. “Dominic, were both Lionel and Amanda Brewbaker present when
the call came in?”

“
Brittany said both
were.”

“
What are the details of
the ransom drop?”

“
Tomorrow morning, ten
o’clock, Lionel makes the drop alone.”

“
Is it still three-hundred
thousand dollars?”

“
Yes.”

“
Okay, so he still needs
to go to the bank. Where does it happen?”

“
They told Lionel he’s to
put the cash in a flat leather bag and drop it over the railing at
the south side of the Garfield Street Bridge.”

“
Drop it over the
railing?”

“
Yeah. He’s to drop it
into the water right in the middle of the creek.”

“
A leather bag, you say.
What, like a satchel?”

“
Not a satchel. They were
very specific. It had to be a flat leather bag.”

“
What are they thinking? A
leather bag full of cash won’t float. They won’t be able to pick it
up downstream anywhere.”

“
That’s what they
want.”

“
Okay, that’s bizarre. Why
don’t we head on out to the Brewbaker’s and work out the details of
this thing?”

“
I’m ready when you are,”
said Dominic.

“
Carlos?” I said. “We
good?”

“
Yes.”

“
You sure?”

He gave me a look as though I had asked him
if he had eaten today. “Of course. Why wouldn’t we be?”

I shook my head. “No reason.” I gave him a
slap on the back. “Let’s go.”

We arrived at the Brewbaker’s and assembled
in the room we had set up earlier as a command center. Brittany
Olson rolled out a two-foot by four-foot map of New Castle and
began marking it up. The map was a beauty, a laminated satellite
image showing streets, buildings, cars and even people in crisp
details. The resolution was so clear I could see manhole covers in
the streets and ripples in the water along the shores of
Edgewater.

She drew a circle around the Garfield Street
Bridge and punctuated it with a jab of her red grease pencil.

“
This is the drop point,”
she said. “It’s clever really. The kidnappers did their
homework.”

“
How so?” I
asked.

“
You can see here that
Garfield Street is just a two-lane road about a mile long,
stretching between Broadway and Madison. There are no side streets,
and the bridge is just a mere puddle jump over Garfield Creek.
Tomorrow morning crews from the DOT are going out to put up
barricades at both ends of the street and block off the entire road
to traffic.”

“
Why?”

“
Scheduled maintenance.
The bridge is so old they have to close it down once a year for
inspection. Starting at eight o’clock, they’ll detour everything,
including pedestrian traffic, for most of the day.”

“
It’s going to be
difficult, setting up surveillance without the benefit of blending
in with the public.”

“
That’s why I say they did
their homework.”

“
Tell me about the creek.
How deep’s the water?”

“
Not so deep,” Brittany
replied, sketching a dashed line with her grease pencil several
hundred feet up and downstream from the bridge. “The area where the
bridge crosses is the deepest and widest part on the creek for
about a mile in either direction. After a hard rain, you can expect
water levels to run about two to three feet there.”

“
But?” I said, sensing it
coming.

“
But this time of year,
I’d expect to see only a foot or so in the area closest to the
bridge.”

“
What about flow
rate?”

“
Barely a trickle. Again,
except when it rains.”

“
Are we
expecting––”

“
No rain,” said Dominic,
anticipating my question. “Least not for the next several
days.”

“
All right then. That
explains why the kidnappers don’t want the money bag to float.
They’re going to pick it up right there where it drops.”

“
But why in the water?”
Carlos asked.

“
Simple,” Dominic
answered, “They want it out of sight so that no one happens up on
it by accident like yesterday.”

“
He’s right,” I said.
“That’s the reason they did the dry run at the park. If yesterday
were the real deal, the kidnappers would have been shit-out-of-luck
getting the money.”

“
Okay,” said Brittany. “So
if we’re watching the creek, what direction do the kidnappers come
from to make the pick up?”

“
Here,” I said, pointing
to a heavy line of trees west of the drop point. “A person can move
in from outside the surveillance zone and emerge from behind these
trees. Once he felt confident that we weren’t too close, he could
swoop in, jump into the water and retrieve the bag.”

“
No,” said Carlos, shaking
his head. “If I were the kidnapper, I’d scope it out from back
here.” He pointed to an area east of the drop point a hundred-plus
yards back. “That’s a delicatessen. It’s a favorite hangout for
high school kids. Tomorrow’s Monday. There’s going to be a dozen
kids hanging around there between classes, smoking
cigarettes.”

“
Yeah?”

“
I can imagine the
kidnappers simply blending in with the kids, keeping an eye on
everything we do.”

“
But it’s too far away,”
Dominic remarked. “If anyone breaks from the group and starts
walking towards the bridge, we’ll see him coming.”

“
Not if he’s on
wheels.”

“
What do you
mean?”

“
Think about it. The
kidnappers wait for Lionel to make the drop. Then two of them hop
on a motorcycle and shoot over there in like five seconds. The one
on the back of the bike hops off, grabs the money, hops back on the
bike and then the two rip out of there like a bat outta
hell.”

“
That’s good,” I said.
“The bridge is so far out in the open, we wouldn’t be able to get
within two hundred yards of it without being spotted.”

“
That’s what I’m saying.
Even once we see that they’re making their move, they’ll be a
hundred yards up on us and moving quicker than spit.”

I looked at Detective Olson. “Brit?”

She gave a little shrug. “Beats what I
had.”

“
Which was?”

“
Not as easy.”

“
Let’s hear it
anyway.”

She ran her finger upstream toward the
bridge. “Well, as I mentioned before, the creek is low this time of
year. With three to four foot walls buffering each side, I figured
someone might simply walk upstream in a crouch with his head below
our line of sight. He might think we’d be expecting him to come
from the road and thus not see him sneaking up right under our
noses.”

“
That’s not bad,” I said.
“That covers east, west and south. Dominic, any theories on how the
kidnapper might try it from the north?”

He shook his head. “No. The north is
definitely out. Look. The woods there turn into heavy, thorny
brush. It’s too thick and nearly impassable. Traversing it would be
slow, arduous, painful and probably impossible. The only other way
through it is just marginally better.”

“
How so?”

“
Well, if I’m not
mistaken, there’s a concrete culvert about fifty yards long running
through the heaviest brush there. It’s barely eighteen inches in
diameter, though. Someone would have to get down on his belly and
pull himself through on his elbows. He’d have to be in phenomenal
shape to do it, and even then, it wouldn’t be easy. He’d come out
ten yards short of the bridge where the creek bottom is the
muddiest.”

“
What do you
mean?”

“
It’s where all the crap
washing through the pipe gets deposited. With such a heavy
build-up, he’d almost certainly get sucked in it and mired down.
No….” He shook his head doubtfully. “If the kidnappers did their
homework, as Brittany suggests, then I don’t see anyone trying an
approach from the north.”

“
That’s it
then.”

“
What’s it?” asked
Carlos.

“
We cover all four bases.”
I pointed to the wooded area to the west. “We’ll put a man here…” I
slid my finger clockwise to the thorny brush, “one here…” across
the school zone to the east, “here…” and downstream from the
bridge, “and there.” I said to Carlos. “I like your theory best. I
think we should move a blockade into position along the west
corridor from Madison to Jefferson immediately after the
drop.”

“
Good idea.”

“
Dominic, could you see if
our friends at the Danvers and Essex PDs would be kind enough to
pay a little social visit on Dmitry Kovalchuk and Russell Haywood
tomorrow morning?”

“
Sure. What
time?”

“
Just before ten o’clock
would be nice. If those two are where they should be at that time,
then we know they won’t be at the drop.”

“
I see, with Santana and
Martinez in custody we’ll have half the field covered.”

I gestured a nod over my shoulder toward
Lionel and Amanda Brewbaker who were still in the parlor. She was
drinking Scotch, smoking cigarettes and thumbing through a
magazine. He was standing by the window, staring out blankly and
mumbling incoherently to himself.