The Abduction

38

Vincent Gambrelli woke at sunrise, five minutes before the alarm would have sounded. He’d risen the same time every morning for more than thirty years, since his first night as a Green Beret in the jungles in Vietnam. He’d never really needed an alarm clock, and he’d only started setting one in the last few months, as he neared the half-century mark. It was a kind of competition for him, man against machine. The day his body no longer knew it was time to get up was the day he would no longer trust it.

His six-foot frame was covered in his usual sleepwear, dark green sweat pants and a camouflage T-shirt. He dropped to the carpet and lay on his back, knees up, bracing his ankles beneath the bed frame. He breathed audibly, inhaling and exhaling at regular intervals as he ripped off two hundred sit-ups. He rolled onto his chest, facedown with his hands planted firmly in the push-up position. His back was rigid as a steel rod for the first set of fifty. Up on his fingertips for fifty more. Another twenty-five using just his right arm, then twenty-five more using only the left.
He sprung to his feet, pumped with energy. He swung his arms across his body, stimulating the circulation as he crossed the room and entered the bathroom. Stripped of the T-shirt, he checked himself in the mirror. The red glow of the heat lamp gave him an evil cast, which he rather liked. Thick purple veins bulged from his forearms and biceps. His clean-shaven head glistened with tiny beads of sweat. He turned for a look at his profile. Lean. Nothing he didn’t need. Not an extra gram of body fat. Not an extraneous hair on his head. Not a hint of compassion in the cold, dark eyes.
He showered and dressed quickly. Hunger pangs gripped his belly, but that would have to wait.
He pulled a duffel bag from the closet, laid it on the floor, and unlocked the zipper. He smoothed out the bedspread and pulled on a pair of thin rubber surgical gloves. Gloves were a must when handling the equipment. No prints.
Carefully, almost lovingly, he reached inside the bag and removed a sleek and lightweight AR-7 rifle, laying it on the bed. The barrel was already broken down for storage inside the stock with the clip, and the serial number just above the clip port had been completely drilled out. Beside it, he laid the three-to-six-powered rifle scope, powerful enough to ensure deadly accuracy up to sixty-five yards. That was far more scope than he’d needed last night. From across the street, Repo had been easy prey.
With a small screwdriver he methodically disassembled the rifle. He ran a wire cleaning brush down the bore, then used a rattail file to alter the barrel, shell chamber, loading ramp, firing pin, and ejector pin—all the parts that created ballistic markings. It seemed like overkill in a way, going to all this trouble to thwart an unlikely attempt by police to match the bullets in Repo’s body to the ballistic markings on Gambrelli’s weapons. Even if the cops could find Gambrelli—good luck—no one was likely to find Repo’s body in the smoldering ashes, let alone the bullets. A generous sprinkling of wood alcohol and a single match had taken care of the crime scene. The police would likely surmise that some crack-addicted vagrant in search of shelter had broken into a vacant house and forgotten to open the flue before lighting the fireplace, setting the place ablaze and toasting himself in the process.
Still, it was good practice—if not just an ingrained Gambrelli habit—either to dump the weapons or change the ballistic markings after every kill. With General Howe’s granddaughter in the next room, this wasn’t the time to be out shopping for a new gun. That left only one choice.
A knock on the door broke his concentration. On impulse, he grabbed his pistol from the duffel bag.
“It’s me,” came the voice from behind the door. “Tony.”
Gambrelli looked up from his disassembled rifle. “Come in.”
The door opened. Tony Delgado stood in the doorway. His eyes were slits, still crusted with sleep. “You want me to feed the kid?”
Gambrelli was deadpan. “Did I tell you to feed the kid?”
“No.”
“Then don’t feed the kid. Don’t blow your nose, don’t wipe your ass. From now on, don’t do anything unless I tell you to do it.”
Delgado lowered his head like a chided boy. “You know, nobody feels worse about what happened to Johnny than I do.”
Gambrelli shook his head, the disapproving uncle. “Siddown,” he said, pointing to the chair in the corner.
He moved without a sound, slow but obedient.
Gambrelli said, “Johnny was family, but he was a f*ckup. Too damn cocky for his own good. Somebody was gonna do him, sooner or later.”
Delgado made a face. “That’s it? C’est la vie?”
“Shut up, Tony. I’m talking here.”
A lump swelled in the younger man’s throat, visible from across the room.
Gambrelli narrowed his eyes. “Let me explain something to you, Tony. Your brother was how old, twenty?”
“Twenty-one.”
“When I was his age, I had one concern. Kill the Viet Cong before they killed me. One mistake, you were dead. You can see it in my eyes—I lived because I killed. Take a good look at me, then look at somebody like your little brother. Johnny and every kid born after him is part of an entire generation of whiny little brats who think the whole damn world is a video game. You screw up, you put another quarter in the slot. And Mommy never lets you run out of quarters. That’s why boys like Johnny never grow up to be men. Their idea of fighting for their own survival is going on TV talk shows to bitch about having to put on a condom before they f*ck their fifteen-year-old girlfriend. Useless. An entire generation. Utterly useless.”
“Are you saying Johnny deserved to die?”
“I’m saying that with one less Johnny or Repo or Kristen Howe, for that matter, the world is no worse off. It’s better off.”
“What about me?”
“You’re older,” Gambrelli said with a shrug. “I thought maybe you were different. I trusted you with this job, Tony. It was just my bad f*cking luck that after twenty years in the business, my biggest job ever comes after I’m married and retired. My old lady’s not cool, you know what I’m saying? I can’t tell her I’m taking the week off to go kidnap General Howe’s granddaughter. But this job was too big to pass up. So I figured, hey, Tony can handle this. He’s got guts. Got some brains. I figure I’ll be like a general myself, in the background, you know, giving orders. So I cut the deal, I get everything lined up. All you gotta do is stick to the plan. Next thing I know, Johnny’s dead on the kitchen floor with a knife in his chest, you’re hung over from too much tequila, and the girl’s f*cking gone—she’s flying down the highway with some amateur named Repo, like a twelve-year-old Bonnie and a shit-for-brains Clyde.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Shut up, Tony.” He gnawed his lower lip in anger, glaring at his nephew. “I don’t like doing it this way, me being directly involved. This is one of those jobs where the triggerman should never know his client, and the client should never know the triggerman. Too much publicity in this case, too much risk of people talking. When people talk, they start pointing fingers. But if the middleman does his job, the client can’t finger the triggerman, and the triggerman can’t finger the client. Ever. Which makes it real tough for the cops to prove a conspiracy. Thanks to you, a*shole, I’m not the middleman anymore. Now there’s a direct link between the client and triggerman. That’s why I’m pissed at you, Tony.”
Tony sank in his chair. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Just don’t screw up. Ever again.”
He lowered his head. “I won’t.”
Gambrelli took a deep breath, cooling his anger. The kid was appropriately contrite, remorseful. If he weren’t family, he’d be dead. But like it or not, he was family. If Gambrelli had to keep him around, he had to lift his spirits. A partner with no self-confidence was a dangerous liability. He reached across the bed and grabbed a white spiral binder from the nightstand, which he’d been reading last night before going to sleep. “Here,” he said as he tossed it to him.
He caught it and checked the title: Missing and Abducted Children: A Law Enforcement Guide to Case Investigation and Program Management.
Gambrelli said, “It’s published by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The bible for cops who chase child abductors. The bible for men like us who elude them.”
“You want me to read this whole thing?”
“I want you to absorb it. You have to start thinking like the FBI. That book, right there, it’s written by an FBI special agent named Harley Abrams. If you read this, you know exactly how he thinks—very analytical, step-by-step. Last night I was rereading the part where he lays out all the possible motives for child abductions. Sexual savagery, ransom, sale of children for profit, a few others. He comes up with a total of seven most likely motives. At the end, he theorizes that an eighth possible motive is political gain. But this is very interesting. He says that never in the history of the United States has there been a documented case of a child abduction for political purposes. What do you think of that, Tony?”
His eyes widened, like the kid in class who hated to be called on. “I don’t know. Guess it means there are easier ways to screw up an election than to kidnap a child.”
“Smart boy,” he said with approval. “Very smart boy. I suppose the FBI could be thinking that. What else could they be thinking?”
He made a face, thinking. “That there’s a first time for everything.”
Gambrelli smiled thinly. “Sometimes I think you’re too ugly to be my sister’s kid. But you just might be smart enough.”
He cracked a thin smile.
Gambrelli winked. Mission accomplished. His confidence was building; the boy was back on the team. He pulled a Polaroid camera from his duffel bag, then popped open the film compartment and loaded it. “You just go on and read that book, okay? Study hard. I have to go shoot some pictures.”
“Pictures? What kind of pictures?”
Gambrelli looked up. All traces of a smile had fallen from his face. “You’ll see. Just one good shot is all I’m after. The kind of shot that drains mothers of emotion. And families of their bank accounts.”