“She’s gone, Mr. Cade,” he says, then licks his pallid lips. His tongue looks like a worm crawling on a wound. “You already know where. Absalom told you, just as I ordered them to do.”
I don’t blink. I start counting. Because I don’t believe him. She isn’t in Wichita.
When I get to five, my finger tightens, and Rivard blurts out, “Stop! All right! If you want to know, I’ll tell you! But please, let me put my arms down!”
“Tell you what,” Mike says, taking out his handcuffs. “I’ll make it easier for you.”
The bitter rage that flashes over Rivard’s face confirms for me that he had a plan, and once Mike has his hands secured to the strap that keeps his chair in place, I search Rivard.
There’s a sleek, small gun in his breast pocket. Fully loaded. I toss it to Mike. “Engraved,” he says. “Only assholes put their initials on a gun. Go on. Shoot him.”
Rivard is sweating now. Everything he’s counted on is failing, and he has to know I’m serious. If he doesn’t, he’s going to find out when his kneecap hits the floor. “All right,” he says, in an oily tone that manages to be desperate at the same time. “Let’s just calm down. We’re all men of reason here. And I can be reasonable. You know the resources I have at my disposal. What exactly is it that you’d like me to do? Turn over some of our more creative suppliers? I’m happy to do that. I’m sure the FBI will find me very useful.”
“I’ll bet,” Mike says. “And you know what? We’re going to get it all without your help. Shoot him, Sam.”
“I can’t even feel my legs. Shooting me is just theater!”
“I think the sight of the inside of your knee might make an impression,” I tell him. “One, two—”
Rivard blurts out, “There’s a pay-per-view event at midnight!”
“And why the hell do we care?”
“It’s how we do things,” Rivard says. “For . . . premium content. A live event, a thousand virtual passes, fifty thousand dollars per pass.”
I already feel sickness boiling up. I can see the shape of this thing coming, and it’s a horror. “You have two seconds to tell me how this helps me find Gwen.”
“It’s her!” he blurts, and he flinches when he sees what crosses my expression. The loathing I feel is making me sick, it’s so intense. I want so badly to kill this man, so badly I can taste it. Murder has a sharp, metallic taste, like biting tinfoil. “Her and Melvin Royal. We wanted it recorded. It starts at midnight. We sell the recordings later, but the live event is—special.”
“Fuck you,” I say, and I come so close to pulling the trigger; the tidal wave of fury that’s breaking inside me nearly drowns my sanity. “Where is it?”
Somehow, impossibly, he smiles. It’s a sickly thing. Sweat glitters on his forehead. “You can buy a seat, Mr. Cade. It’s not quite sold out yet. I think we have five tickets left.”
Shoot him. Shoot this piece of rotten meat right now. I don’t know whose voice that is, but I think it’s my sister’s, and I might have done it if Mike hadn’t stepped in by the end of that awful little taunt and slammed his fist squarely into Rivard’s mouth. The surprise shocks me out of the urge to kill, and I think he just saved Rivard’s life. And mine. My skin feels like it’s going to burst, the container of a bomb that’s going off inside me with too much force to contain. I’ve never felt hate like this before, not even for Melvin Royal. Everything’s tinted with it, tastes of it.
Mike’s punch leaves Rivard rocked back in his chair, and his mouth is bloody. He looks shocked, and vulnerable, and all of a sudden, I see a pathetic old man.
I take my finger off the trigger.
“Let me tell you one true thing, Mr. Rivard,” Mike says, and I know that tone in his voice. That’s the Mike who kills. That’s the Mike who walked me out of a war zone when my plane went down in enemy territory. The Mike who put down every bastard in our way. “Sam Cade’s the nice guy in this van. So you think real goddamn hard about the next thing you say, because I don’t care anymore about my badge, or my career, or how much time I have to spend in prison.”
I believe him. I don’t know if he’s lying, but I know that Rivard certainly doesn’t, and there’s a savage joy in that, in seeing the real, liquid fear in his eyes.
“Louisiana, outside Baton Rouge. There’s a derelict house there, right on Killman Creek. Triton Plantation. That’s where it will be held.” He tries a smile. “You need me, though. You need me to order it to stop. You can’t get there in time.”
“We don’t have to,” Mike says. “That’s the great thing about modern police work. All I have to do is make a phone call and get everybody out there arrested.”
Rivard’s not quite broken. He bares bloody teeth now. “In Louisiana? I don’t think so. We own many, many police officers down there, and we’re not careless. You have no assurance that the police on the other end will do anything. Even if you get lucky, find an honest cop, that area is very well defended. You’ll never get her out alive. Or Melvin. You need me to—”
Mike yanks the expensive silk handkerchief out of Rivard’s pocket and shoves it in his mouth, then roughly strips off the man’s tie and cinches it in place as a gag. “Sick of your voice,” he says, then turns to me. “I’m calling a guy. He can keep Rivard on ice until we have enough proof to put him away.”
My throat’s dry, fried with anger and adrenaline, and I have to try twice before my voice works properly. “You believe him about the police?”
“I think it’s possible. Worst thing we could do is call the local cops and tip his men off down there.”
“You think he’s telling the truth? That he can call it off?”
“I think if we let him near a phone, the first call he’s going to make will burn that place to the ground and kill everybody in it,” Mike says. “Because a cockroach like this? He knows how to survive, first and last.”
Mike steps out of the van and makes a call, and I hear Rivard making muffled noises, but I ignore him now. He’s meaningless. I’m trying to calculate how far it is to Baton Rouge from Atlanta, and what the chances are we can get there in a few hours. Not good. The flights up and down the East Coast are a mess from the storm, and even if Mike can somehow work his FBI magic again, the storm’s moving southwest, which means it’s between us and where we need to be. It’ll cause rolling chaos.