"And husband of this lovely wife. Look at those curls. Natural, I'll bet any money. Hey, keep your eyes on the road. Swerved a bit there. And keep going where I told you." Then the hijacker said, "Hand me your cell phone."
His voice was calm. Calm is good. It means he's not going to do anything sudden or stupid.
Billy heard the man punch in a number.
" 'Lo. It's me. Write this down." He repeated Billy's address. "He's got a wife and two kids. Wife's real pretty. You'll like the hair."
Billy whispered, "Who's that you're calling? Please, mister . . . Please. Take the truck, take anything. I'll give you as much time as you want to get away. An hour. Two hours. Just don't--"
"Shhhh." The man continued his phone conversation. "If I don't show up, that'll mean I didn't make it through the roadblocks because William here wasn't convincing enough. You go visit his family. They're all yours."
"No!" Billy twisted around and lunged for the phone.
The gun muzzle touched his face. "Keep driving, son. Not a good time to run off the road." The hijacker snapped the phone shut and put it into his own pocket.
"William . . . You go by Bill?"
"Billy mostly, sir."
"So, Billy, here's the situation. I escaped from that jail back there."
"Yessir. That's fine with me."
The man laughed. "Well, thank you. Now you heard me on the phone. You know what I want you to do. You get me through any roadblocks, I'll let you go and no harm'll come to your family."
Face fever hot, belly churning with fear, Billy wiped his round cheeks.
"You're no threat to me. Everybody knows my name and what I look like. I'm Daniel Pell and my picture'll be all over the noon news. So I don't have any reason to hurt you, long as you do what I say. Now, summon up some calm. You've got to stay focused. If the police stop you I want a cheerful and curious deliveryman, frowning and asking about what happened back in town. All that smoke, all that mess. My, my. You get the idea?"
"Please, I'll do anything--"
"Billy, I know you were listening to me. I don't need you to do anything. I need you to do what I asked. That's all. What could be simpler?"
Chapter 6
Kathryn Dance and Carraneo were in the You Mail It franchise on San Benito Way, where they'd just learned that a package delivery company, Worldwide Express, had made its daily morning drop-off moments after the escape.
A to B to X . . .
Dance realized that Pell could commandeer the truck to get past the roadblocks and called the Worldwide Express Salinas operations director, who confirmed that the driver on that route had missed all remaining scheduled deliveries. Dance got the tag number of his truck and relayed it to the MCSO.
They returned to Sandy Sandoval's office, coordinating the efforts to find the vehicle. Unfortunately, there were twenty-five Worldwide trucks in the area, so Dance told the director to order the other drivers to pull over immediately at the nearest gas station. The truck that kept moving would contain Daniel Pell.
This was taking some time, though. The director had to call them on their cell phones, since a radio broadcast would alert Pell that they knew about his means of escape.
A fig
ure walked slowly through the doorway. Dance turned to see Michael O'Neil, the senior MCSO chief deputy she'd called earlier. She nodded at him with a smile, greatly relieved he was here. There was no better law enforcer in the world with whom to share this tough burden.
O'Neil had been with the MCSO for years. He'd started as a rookie deputy and worked his way up, becoming a solid, methodical investigator with a stunning arrest--and more important, conviction--record. He was now a chief deputy and detective with the Enforcement Operations Bureau of the MCSO's Investigations Division.
He'd resisted offers to go into lucrative corporate security or to join bigger law-enforcement ops like the CBI or FBI. He wouldn't take a job that required relocation or extensive travel. O'Neil's home was the Monterey Peninsula and he had no desire to be anywhere else. His parents still lived there--in the ocean-view house he and his siblings had grown up in. (His father was suffering from senility; his mother was considering selling the house and moving the man into a nursing facility. O'Neil had a plan to buy the homestead just to keep it in the family.)
With his love of the bay, fishing and his boat, Michael O'Neil could be the unwavering, unobtrusive hero in a John Steinbeck novel, like Doc in Cannery Row. In fact, the detective, an avid book collector, owned first editions of everything Steinbeck had written. (His favorite was Travels with Charley, a nonfiction account of the writer's trip around America with his Standard Poodle, and O'Neil intended to duplicate the journey at some point in his life.)
Last Friday, Dance and O'Neil had jointly collared a thirty-year-old known as Ese, head of a particularly unpleasant Chicano gang operating out of Salinas. They'd marked the occasion by sharing a bottle of Piper Sonoma sparkling wine on the deck of a tourist-infested Fisherman's Wharf restaurant.
Now it seemed as if the celebration had occurred decades ago. If at all.