The Innocent 34（文稿）

英文有声《第43条疤痕》三部曲

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Chapter 34
Logan brought the taxi to a stop several hundred feet from the warehouse. The building was impossible to miss.
Even in this remote industrial area, with fewer buildings and ample land between them, it still stood out from the rest, an easy story or two above the other buildings on the street.
And from this distance, with the exception of an SUV parked just off to the side at the front, the entire structure appeared quiet and empty.
Unlike the other buildings set off from the road, there were no trucks idling or laborers milling about, no activity at all.
And although Logan would have assumed it to be an illusion, the wide sliding doors were open and welcoming to the world.
“What do you make of it?” Logan said.
Gideon shook his head, as if pondering a puzzle for which he had no answer.
He reached to the backseat and grabbed the desk clerk’s shirt, pulled so that the man’s line of sight was above the dashboard.
“Are you sure that’s the right place?” he said.
The clerk, gagged and swollen, nodded,
and Gideon said, “Look at the doors. Is it normal for them to be open like that?” The clerk shook his head for no, and Gideon let him drop back to the seat.
They believed he’d led them to the right spot, and believed his answers.
Not because he was a trustworthy guide, but because two hours ago his self-interest had aligned with their own.
They’d taken him out of town and, in the dark of a field, with his body spread-eagled and staked to the ground and a gun muzzle pressed to his hand, threatened to shoot off one finger at a time until he told them what they wanted.
It wasn’t fear of pain that spoke to him as much as reassurance of release.
They wanted their friend, their predicament was that simple, and when he brought them to where she’d been taken, when they knew without a doubt where she was, they’d let him go. That was all.
It was either that or the fingers, and then toes, and whatever else it took to get what they wanted.
Logan took the cab another several hundred feet forward before stopping completely and shutting off the engine.
Here at this vantage point, not far from the warehouse entrance, they sat, watching and waiting.
The area was quiet, the street traffic slow, and after a half hour had passed with no movement, Logan reached for the door handle.
“We’re burning daylight,” he said. “She’s either in there or she’s not.”
Gideon turned to the backseat. “We live, you live,” he said, and the desk clerk nodded.
“They knew he’d try to get loose while they were away, any sane person would, but he wouldn’t succeed.
From the trunk Logan and Gideon pulled out the submachine guns.
The pieces were too large to conceal under their jackets, and with the building set back off the road, they still had a few hundred feet to cover,
but the security of having the higher-powered weapons overrode the little risk of being seen carrying them.
Gideon, whose hands were in the bag, tossed three loaded magazines at Logan and awkwardly shoved an equal number into his waistband and pockets. Any more and the weight would drag them down.
The clerk seemed to think they’d find between five and ten men with Munroe,
but even if he was off in his guess, or if he’d lied to skew the odds, unless a small, well-equipped army waited on the other side of those doors, what they carried should be enough.
Gideon closed the trunk, and Logan stopped at the front passenger door. He kicked at the side mirror until it came loose, picked it up, and carried it with him.
They walked in silence until they went off the pavement and Gideon stooped to gather several pebbles. Logan didn’t bother asking what for. He knew.
They came at the building from far off the street, from the side where their approach would be unseen from within the windowless walls.
Gideon neared the SUV, walked backward along half the body, peering into the windows, confirmed it empty, and signaled Logan forward.
The only sounds were the light crunch of their boots against the gravel.
Logan followed the building’s front wall to the edge of the open door, and there he tipped the mirror forward in a crude form of periscope, reflecting back what images he could gather.
The mirror showed no movement. Along the vast, empty floor were lumps here and there. Bodies, perhaps. The lighting and angle made it difficult to tell.
He nodded at Gideon, who in turn tossed a pebble through the doors.
The clack of the stone was hard against the floor, a repeated echo while the little rock bounced several times before settling.
Still, there was silence. Gideon repeated the procedure. Again they listened. No gunfire. No footsteps. No voices. Nothing.
Together, they rounded the open wall and flattened along its inside seam.
Daylight from the doors lit the interior nearly a hundred feet inward,
and although the building continued on past the light, the bodies were out in the open, visible from where they stood.
There were seven, all men, strewn across the floor with wide spaces between.
Gideon stood still, staring, mouth slightly agape. He walked toward the center of the violence, and there turned in a slow circle.
“This is the right place, isn’t it? She was here, wasn’t she?” The tone of his questions framed the level of his disbelief.
Logan reached the first body. Knelt. “Yes,” he said. “It’s the right place.”
“You should get a picture of this,” Gideon said. “Miles will never believe it.”
Logan felt for a pulse. Expected nothing, got nothing.
The man’s skull was shaped wrong; his body appeared broken and disjointed, as if he’d fallen from the rafters of the building— or been hit by a car.
“Miles will believe it,” Logan said. “He’s seen this stuff firsthand, up close and personal.”
Logan stood, turned to face Gideon and continue his explanation, but when he saw Gideon’s face, he remained silent and went on to another of the bodies.
He was allowing Gideon space to process the scene that surrounded them.
It wasn’t the carnage, Logan knew that much. Gideon had seen— experienced— far worse.
But there were seven dead, Munroe was missing, and Gideon would gradually realize that all of this had been caused by the same woman that he had tried to bully into a fight just days before.
The awareness of what he’d escaped was a little late in coming, but better late than never. “What do you think happened here?” Gideon said finally.
Logan shrugged. “At this level of violence, I think someone probably touched her. “You know, sexually.”
He strode to the next man, knelt again, and felt for a pulse as he had the first two. The bodies were cooling but not cold.
“She tries to avoid bloodshed,” Logan said. “Especially so much of it.
“But there are a few things that will completely set her off and cause something like this, and if someone gets sexually violent with her, he’s soon a dead man.”
“All of them?” Gideon asked.
“I don’t know,” Logan said. He paused, turned a slow circle, and then pointed at a man pooled in blood and crumpled up against a wall riddled with bullet holes.
“That guy,” he said, and walked toward him. “It looks like he bled to death from the knife wounds.
“I don’t know about the others, but this one carries all the hallmarks of Michael. Whoever he was, he really pissed her off. I venture he’s the one in charge.”
Logan pointed at the scars on the wall. “They were shooting at something or someone— not this guy.”
He ran the back of his hand along the wall and checked his fingertips. “No blood spatter,” he said. He searched the floor for spatter beyond the congealed pool.
“I don’t think they hit whatever they were shooting at,” he said. “I want to bring that clerk in and verify the ID on these guys.”
“What about Michael?” Gideon asked.
“She’s not here, and all seven of these guys didn’t arrive in that one vehicle outside. There had to be another, and it’s gone.
“So, either she’s dead somewhere else or there were more people and they took her somewhere else.
“But if that guy over there is the boss, then my guess is that she’s free and on the move.
“If that’s the case she’s going to be heading in Miles’s direction as quickly as she can. We should probably do the same.”
Logan paused, stared at the scene across the floor, and then stood. If the head of a local crime family fell off the radar, sooner or later someone was going to come looking.
“I’m going to check out the back of this place, just to be sure Michael’s not here,” he said.
“Go get the clerk. I want to identify these guys, and then I want to get the hell out of here before reinforcements show up and we take the heat for this.”
The morning was still early, city traffic still light, and Munroe drove as slowly as was possible to drive on Buenos Aires streets without attracting attention.
Moving through town inconspicuously wasn’t easy when driving a car dented from where she’d hit the warehouse wall, or a front grille spattered with blood, and a rear passenger window spiderwebbed from the absorption of several rounds against bulletproof glass.
A few more miles and she could ditch the thing.
She’d seen the SUV sitting by the side of the warehouse only after she’d spun out onto the road,
and although in retrospect it might have been the smarter option to go back for it, at the time going back wasn’t a consideration.
In the ebb and flow of changing lanes, Munroe’s mind ran in circles, attempting to put into place the series of steps that she would make next.
There were loose ends, pieces to be ordered, and like a house of cards, each one balanced on the ones below.
She needed clarity, but the adrenaline dump was slowing her down and making it difficult to focus beyond getting the car safely from point A to point B.
She had to get food into her system, had to pump up blood sugar levels, and she craved sleep too.
Food would be the faster and easier option. It had to wait just a little longer.
First a trip to her hotel room to confirm that Bradford was safe, that he’d followed the plan.
She needed to see it, know it, not only for personal assurance but also for guidance in deciding which direction to turn.
Because the way things stood now, she had to get to Bradford as quickly as possible, or locate and then rescue Bradford. One or the other.
If Bradford was alive, if he’d been successful in getting Hannah to safety, Logan would want his daughter, and Bradford would refuse. This was the way it had to be.
Bradford was neither Hannah’s guardian nor the one legally assigned to take her home;
he had no authority to do anything other than deliver the girl to her mother and would want her off his hands as quickly as possible.
Once successful, Bradford would be driven to return to Buenos Aires, to search for Munroe, no matter how long it took, and continuing this mess was the last thing she wanted.
She had to reach him before Charity did, and for reasons of her own had to reach Hannah before Charity did.
On both counts, time was running out. It would take time, a day perhaps, for Charity to get to Montevideo, if she wasn’t already en route.
Munroe entered the hotel with her head tucked down and one hand holding her sliced shirts closed.
She made directly for the small ground-floor restroom. She’d seen her face in the car’s rearview mirror, and it wasn’t pretty.
Her lips were swollen, both eyes blackened, and her cheeks and forehead bruised and mottled.
All told, the facial coloring was far better than the sheet-white alternative, but it made blending in nearly impossible.
She pushed into the unisex bathroom and locked the door.
Facing the mirrors, water running, she scrubbed the blood off her face, hands, and arms, and plunged her head under the water to wash everything out of what was left of her hair.
The best she could do about the slit shirts was to strip out of them, reverse the undershirt so that the opening faced the back, and pull the top layer back on over it.
Blood had dried on the clothes, had drenched the arm she’d used to create the chokehold, and there wasn’t much she could do about that.
Against the black, the stains weren’t obviously blood, they could be anything,
and although she would have preferred to wash them out, or at the least scrape the residue off into the sink, this was a procedure that would take more time than she had, and she’d already been in the bathroom long enough to attract attention.
She bathed her face in the cold water once more and patted herself dry. The water wouldn’t help much with the swelling, but it made her feel better.
Munroe left the restroom for the front desk and, amid curious stares at her battered face, requested a key to the room.
As was standard procedure, she’d carried nothing on her during the extraction. Her passport, money, and all personal effects had been left behind.
And although she expected the room had since been cleared out— for Bradford’s sake, she hoped that it had been— she was compelled to make sure.
The desk clerk did a poor job at concealing his disgust at her mangled face, and made no pretense of helping.
Yes, the room was still paid a week in advance, but as she could not prove that she was one of the occupants, and he certainly didn’t recognize her, there was nothing he would do.
The dangerous chemical cocktail brought on by the morning’s events still percolated through Munroe’s system,
and any ability to maintain cordial interaction with a snot-nosed brat had ended hours ago.