“Yes, sir, I hear you,” said the Texan. “Just say the word, though.”
Jess Ripton and Rance Eugene Wolf continued tossing Rook’s loft in another search for the last chapter of Cassidy Towne’s manuscript. Across the room, The Firewall was on his knees looking through a built-in that housed DVDs and even some dinosaur VHS tapes that Rook no longer had a machine to play. Ripton clawed them all out of the cabinet onto the floor. When it was empty, he turned to Wolf. “You’re absolutely sure you saw him with it?”
“Yes, sir. Got out of the cab and came up with a manila envelope. Same one he brought out of the mail drop.”
“You were following me?” said Rook. “How long were you following me?”
Wolf smiled. “Long enough, I figure. Not hard to do. ’Specially if you don’t know you’re being tailed.” He stepped around behind the desk, moving without registering any discomfort, which Rook attributed to heavy painkillers, a high threshold of tolerance, or both. He was dressed in new blue jeans that were tight on his lean frame and a Western-style shirt that had pearl buttons. Wolf had accessorized with a sheathed knuckle knife on his belt and an arm sling that looked like it was from a hospital supply store. Rook also clocked a .25 caliber handgun, holstered on the small of his back, when he turned to clothesline everything but the laptop off of Rook’s desk with his good arm. Every item he and Nikki had so painstakingly replaced there—his pencil cup, framed photos, stapler, tape dispenser, copter controller, even his cell phone, hit the rug around his feet.
The Texan then spun the laptop to face him and leaned over to read the draft of Rook’s Cassidy Towne article.
Ripton got up off the floor. “Where is it, Rook? The envelope.”
“It was from Publishers Clearing House. You wouldn’t be interes—” The Texan smacked Rook’s mouth with the back of his hand, hard enough to whiplash his neck. Dazed, Rook squeezed his eyes closed a few times and saw kaleidoscoping pinpricks of light. He tasted his own blood and smelled Old Spice. As he came out of his haze, the most disturbing thing to Rook wasn’t just the surprise, the quick uncoiling of the violence. What chilled him to the core was that Wolf then went back to reading his computer screen as if nothing had happened.
For a time, Rook sat in silence while Jess Ripton continued ripping apart his office and the Texan scrolled through his article an arm’s length away. When Wolf finished, he said to Ripton, “None of the information that would be in that chapter is in here.”
“Information about what?” said Rook. When the Texan snapped down the lid of the computer, he flinched.
“You know perfectly well what,” said Ripton. He surveyed the mess on the floor and bent over, coming up with the unfinished Cassidy Towne manuscript her editor had supplied. “What’s written in the rest of this.” He tossed it on the desk in a discarding motion, and the fat rubber band holding it together broke, scattering pages.
“I never got it. Cassidy was holding it back from the publisher.”
“We know,” said Wolf casually. “She shared that with us a couple of nights back.”
Rook didn’t have to think hard to imagine the ghastly circumstances of that confession. He pictured the woman strapped to a chair, being tortured, giving only that much up to them before they killed her. He reflected on how her last act was so in character with her life—the power play of giving them the assurance that there was something valuable they wanted, and then denying it to them, taking its whereabouts to her grave.
Ripton signaled Wolf with a head nod. The Texan stepped out of the room and came back in with an old-fashioned black leather physician’s satchel. It was weathered and embossed with a caduceus stamped with a “V.” Rook remembered the FBI report on Wolf, whose father had been a veterinarian. And that the son liked to torture animals.
“I told you I don’t have it.”