The Doll 14（文稿）

英文有声《第43条疤痕》三部曲

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Chapter 14 IRVING, TEXAS
Samantha Walker laddered over Bradford’s body, from knee, to shoulder, to wall,
and then settled, balanced, at the top and belly-crawled in a slow move toward a better view.
She’d gone up instead of him because she was the smaller and lighter of the two,
and her whisper fed into his earpiece: Equipment. Camera positions. Distance.
If they’d been planning to play it safe, to run conventional surveillance, this would have been the place to set up shop,
but they didn’t have the time or the resources for smart or safe.
Saving Munroe meant finding Logan, and tonight that meant kicking down doors.
After a long pause, Walker said, “Window. Second floor of the warehouse, north side. A yellow light just switched on.”
Bradford heard the snag in her thoughts, felt it, too, as it charged down his spine.
Until now, the property had appeared empty, but where there were lights there were people, and people meant guards, and guards meant prisoners.
“Come on down,” he whispered. “Let’s go in through the front door.”
Walker slid backward, hung off the wall, and dropped the remaining four feet.
“Drunk and angry?” she said.
He nodded. “Should work.”
Should. On a run like this, everything was guesswork.
While Bradford drove, Walker stripped out of her overshirt, leaving just the tight-fitting cami to conceal what little it could of her chest.
They were possibly walking into a line of fire without protection, but they’d never get through the front door dressed for war.
She pulled her hair out of the ponytail and ran her fingers through it. Thick black waves dropped over her shoulders.
“You sure you want to do this?” Bradford asked.
She rolled her eyes, and he said, “Okay then.”
From the end of the alley, he headed back to the main road. Stopped just before reaching the target, beyond the range of the cameras, and stayed only long enough for Walker to step out.
Bradford continued one complex south, parked where he could keep an eye on her while she meandered to the front gate, steps uneven and exaggerated.
She pulled on the chain-link gate and shook it. Attempted to climb, one clumsy boot toe that couldn’t gain purchase. Slid down in an incoherent stumble.
Additional security lights powered on. Once more she shook the fence, shouting. Paused to wipe her nose against her arm.
On the northeast corner of the warehouse, a camera shifted. Her performance kicked up a notch,
and she continued, dragging her fingers along the loops of the fence, a slow stumble in Bradford’s direction, while occasionally attempting another unsuccessful climb to the top.
A side door to the warehouse opened and a solitary male stepped out.
He was bulky, though not from fat, and short enough to look like a brick in rumpled clothes, shirt half-tucked into jeans.
If he was carrying a weapon, he was smart enough to keep it out of sight.
The closer he got, the softer his expression became, until, right in front of Walker, he almost looked compassionate.
Walker staggered some more, rubbed her eyes, and swiped at her nose again.
Held a conversation that Bradford couldn’t hear because with Walker so scantily dressed there’d been no place to safely stash a wire, but he got the general idea.
The man gestured. Walker nodded and ran her palm over her eyes, wiping away tears.
In her lifetime, she’d taken more than one poker pot with that same act of drunken, pitiful helplessness that wrenched male heartstrings and tugged at their zippers.
The man pulled a key ring from his pocket and opened the lock to the gate. Walker slipped inside.
The man made to relock it, but Walker’s drama started again and she strode in the direction of the door he’d exited so that he had no choice but to leave the lock and follow her.
No further camera movement, no light flickering from the few warehouse windows, no backup personnel.
The entire response seemed to be a solitary watchman pulling night duty and sleeping on his shift.
Bradford waited until Walker was halfway from gate to building, and then moved out of the vehicle and into the night. Slipped through the opening.
Ahead, Walker stumbled slightly, and when the man dropped an arm around her and stooped to help, she glanced over her shoulder, noted Bradford, and continued on.
The two reached the door, and as Walker passed inside, her right hand transferred from her back pocket to brush along the door frame. The door shut.
Bradford fought the urge to rush in ahead of plan to watch the back of a partner who had just broken every rule in the live-long playbook.
He’d known it would happen and still bristled. Counted seconds.
And then hand to handle, he tugged on the door. The latch, depressed by a strip of tape, opened effortlessly.
Bradford listened, scoped out what he could, and then slipped inside.
The warehouse was truly that, a large and mostly empty building lined with industrial shelving that bore empty pallets.
Forklifts slept nearby. Near the truck bays at the front stood a minimal amount of freight, stacked and ready for loading.
The legitimacy took him by surprise. There had to be a holding place, a way station, some soundproof location to keep the trafficked women,
and it made sense that if such a place existed, it would work equally well for keeping Logan.
Everything they had learned about this warehouse, about this company, screamed that what they looked for must be here. But this place was all wrong.
To Bradford’s right, metal stairs ascended along the inner wall to the second floor, to offices apparently, which occupied only the back quarter of the building and hung over pilings and empty space,
and from where voices now carried, one of them distinctly Walker’s being drunk, which was good.
Bradford traced the ceiling, searching out cameras, and found nothing.
For all the electronic eyes pointed outward, security on the inside was sparse.
He moved along the perimeter, from shelving to pallets to forklifts, and found nothing that might indicate a false-paneled room or even a hiding place beneath his feet.
The conversation upstairs continued, still only two voices.
Men weren’t often silent around Walker, which meant that Warehouse Man was alone, and without more men, Logan, if he had ever been here, was not here now.
The office door opened, and Bradford retreated to the shadows beneath the stairs.
Walker teased and stumble-walked her way down with the guy close behind. Fiddled with the keys to a forklift.
Warehouse Man tried to take them from her and she slipped beyond him laughing, plugged them into the ignition, and ran the engine.
The noise, however long it lasted, was a perfect cover for footfalls against the metal stairs.
Bradford hurried now. Warehouse Man would only endure so much teasing and forklift play before the situation turned nasty.
The upstairs was as Bradford expected, two rooms and a restroom area the size of a small closet,
the latter with a small outside ventilation window, which was where Walker had spotted the light.
Half of the first room was allocated for security monitors, the other half to a desk with two computer towers, one without a monitor.
On the desk in front of the security cameras, a handgun lay naked and exposed. A nice Walker touch.
Bradford reached for the weapon, then stopped. Taking it would only alert the Doll Maker’s people to their movements.
Bradford turned to the second room, in which was a conference table, several chairs, a coffeemaker, and a couple of filing cabinets. No Logan.
Then, even from this far back in the office he could hear the change of tone downstairs.
The forklift had been silenced. Walker was shouting. Bradford headed out the door.
Downstairs, Walker shook a fist in Warehouse Man’s face. He tried to grab her hand, to grab her.
Bradford started down the stairs. Warehouse Man lunged at Walker and she scooted around a pallet, a lot less drunk and a lot more angry.
The man swore at her, and with an accent thick and foreign called her a bitch and a whore.
Bradford made it to the bottom of the stairs and hesitated.
Walker screamed, “Get the hell out of my way,”
and Bradford bolted for the exit knowing that the message had been intended for him and not the cur that stood between them.
In the parking lot he checked his watch, anxiety rising. To be on the outside while a partner was still within those walls was wrong on every level.
Half a minute and the noise moved in his direction.
Bradford retreated toward the shadows, mindful of the cameras and of the distance yet to cover. Louder it came: Walker close and moving quickly.
Bradford bolted for the gate and reached it just as she came barreling out the door, running full out with Warehouse Man not far behind.
Bradford faced the two, waited until Walker blew past, and then, in character, charged toward Warehouse Man. “What the fuck are you doing with my girlfriend?”
The man slowed, his hands forward indicating caution, but before he’d fully stopped, Bradford collided into him, palms to chest, instep to knee.
The guy staggered at the shock of the first hit, buckled with the second, and attempting to right himself, swung wildly in defense.
Bradford ducked, moved into his personal space, chest to chest.
“Keep your filthy hands off my woman,” he said, and drove forward, forehead to nose, breaking cartilage and drawing blood.
Warehouse Man reached for his face and, smearing red, howled a smarting rage.
Right hand went behind his back to draw the weapon still sitting on the desk upstairs.
Swearing, he threw himself at Bradford. The guy was wide and his bulk ungraceful.
Bradford sidestepped. Used the man’s weight and momentum to continue his top half forward, used a leg to keep his bottom half in place. The man hit the pavement hard.
Bradford began to walk away. Paused long enough to point a finger at the man crawling to his knees. “You touch her again,” he said, “and I’ll kill you.”
WALKER WAS IN the Explorer, seated and buckled in, when Bradford returned.
He slid behind the wheel, put key in ignition and foot to gas.
Peeled out into the deserted street with far more noise than was prudent and ran a red light in the process. Damn adrenaline.
“I hope you broke his nose,” Walker said.
“Taken care of,” he said, then glanced in her direction.
Arms crossed and fists clenched, she glared through the windshield. “When this is over, when we have Logan and Michael,” she said, “I’m going back in.”
“Fair enough,” Bradford said. “Why?”
Walker turned toward him. “Because that man’s a lunatic psychopath.
“I swear to God, there’s a body count somewhere, and if I don’t get to him first, another woman somewhere is going to get hurt bad.”
“The stuff he promised to do to you, huh?”
“Among other things.”
Bradford turned focus to the road. “Michael and Logan first,” he said. “Then we take out the trash.”