The Night Monster

CHAPTER 32

Even with the windows down, the interior of my car was broiling hot. I put on the air, then punched in Karl Long’s number. His secretary stuck me on hold.

“Pick up your damn phone,” I said angrily.

My heart was pounding in my ears. Mouse and the giant were on the run. They’d been waiting for two days to move Sara Long out of Broward County, and now they had no choice. If they didn’t immediately get out, they were going to get caught.

Desperation time.

I knew how to catch them. The motel manager had said they’d driven west. That meant they were either heading for the swampy Everglades, or would drift north through Palm Beach County. My guess was that they’d pick the Everglades. The back roads were desolate, and they wouldn’t have to drive fast, or risk getting stuck in traffic.

Finally, Long picked up the line.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” Long said.

“Your daughter’s abductors are making a run for it.”

“For the love of Christ. Do you know where they are?”

“I’ve got a general idea. Is your private helicopter still available?”

“It’s on the helipad behind my office. My pilot is here as well. Tell me where you are, and I’ll have him pick you up.”

I was still parked in the Sunny Days lot. The motel’s address was printed on the manager’s door. I read it to Long.

“I’m staring at the map of Broward hanging behind my desk,” Long said. “I own a ten-acre parcel of land three miles west from where you are, on the same road. Go there, and my pilot will pick you up in ten minutes.”

“Make it five minutes,” I said.

“I don’t know if he can move that fast.”

“Then kick him in the ass. This may be our last chance to find Sara.”

I dropped the phone in my lap and burned rubber leaving the motel lot.

Karl Long had to be one of the richest men in south Florida. The number of office buildings and pieces of undeveloped land that bore his name were endless. I parked in front of the parcel where I was going to meet his pilot, and leashed Buster.

The land was surrounded by a white three-board fence. I hoisted Buster over the fence, then climbed over myself. My dog quickly found a stick in the grass and offered it to me. He wanted to play. I was in no mood for games, and I pulled the stick from his mouth, and tossed it onto the other side of the fence.

“No,” I told him.

Dead center in the property was a billboard with Karl Long’s name printed on it. As Buster and I headed toward it, a chopper roared overhead.

I glanced at my watch. Four and a half minutes.

The chopper landed fifty yards from where I stood. It was a metallic blue and had the initials KL painted in gold on the wings and on the tail. Through the tinted windshield I spotted two individuals, one of whom waved to me. My jaw tightened.

“For the love of Christ,” I said.

The passenger door banged open. Long jumped out, wearing combat fatigues and a leather holster with a sidearm. A red bandanna was tied around his forehead that made him look like a mini-Rambo. Had he not given me fifty thousand bucks to find his daughter, I would have laughed in his face. Instead, I scowled at him.

“What are you doing here?” I yelled as he came toward me.

“I’m going with you to rescue Sara,” Long replied.

“Bad idea, Karl.”

“You don’t want me along?”

“No. You’ll only be in the way.”

Long grabbed my arm and squeezed the biceps so hard it made me wince. The desperation in his face was all too real. I didn’t back down.

“Stay here,” I said.

“I can’t do that,” he yelled back at me.

“I’ll give you my car keys. You can drive back to your office. I’ll call you once I know something.”

“No! I’m coming with you.”

I would have stood there and argued with him, only Sara’s life hung in the balance. I picked up Buster and put him into the backseat of the chopper, then climbed in myself. Long climbed into the front seat, and told the pilot to take off.

People thought flying in helicopters was glamorous. My guess was none of them had ever been inside a chopper. The engine noise was deafening, the vibrations scary, and if you didn’t focus on the ground as you rose into the air, you threw up.

I buckled myself into the backseat, grabbed my dog, and braced myself for the ride. Long introduced me to the third man in the chopper, a silver-haired, retired air force chopper pilot named Steve Morris.

“Which way do you want to go?” Morris asked.

I pointed at I-595, which was off to our right.

“Follow the interstate toward the Everglades,” I shouted.

“What are we looking for?” Morris said.

“A navy Jeep Cherokee with a dented rear bumper and tinted windows.”

“Got it.”

Morris lifted the chopper into the air, steered us over I-595, and headed due west. The legal flying limit for choppers was a thousand feet. It felt like we were flying much lower, and I was able to tell the makes of the cars speeding down the highway. None matched the getaway vehicle.

Within minutes we reached the exit for U.S. 27, the last exit before the tollbooth for Alligator Alley. Traffic had thinned, and I asked Morris to lift the chopper into the air as high as the law would allow. He complied, and we hovered in the cloudless sky.

“Do you have binoculars?” I shouted.

“Sure do,” Long replied.

Long removed a pair of binoculars from a bag lying at his feet and passed them to me. Holding them up to my face, I looked down Alligator Alley. The Alley was ninety miles of four-lane highway that dissected the lower half of the state. It was ruler-straight and had no housing developments or strip centers on either side of it. If Mouse had gone this way, all we had to do was follow the Alley, and we would eventually spot him.

I lowered the binoculars into my lap. I didn’t think Mouse had gone this way. The Alley was bordered by swamps on either side, and contained only a handful of exits. It was a bad road to use as an escape route.

I looked down at State Road 27 directly beneath us. Twenty-seven ran due north, and had plenty of cut-offs. Mouse would feel safer on 27, and I envisioned him taking it north until he reached 441, where he could then easily get lost. I tapped the pilot’s shoulder.

“Let’s take Twenty-seven,” I yelled in his ear.

Morris gave me a thumbs-up. The chopper turned, and we roared north.

Broward is one of the most populous counties in America; when you head west into the swamps the population drops to nothing and vast farms spring up. If Mouse had driven this way, we would find him soon enough.

I glanced at the pilot’s instruments and found the speedometer. We were pushing a hundred twenty miles per hour, or a mile every thirty seconds. Long turned around in his seat and addressed me through cupped hands.

“How can you be sure they went this way?”

I stared down at the highway. “I’m not,” I yelled.

“But what if-”

“Shut up, and watch the road.”

Long didn’t like that. People hired me to do a job, and that didn’t include explaining my actions. I grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around.

“Look at the road!”

“You’re a real prick!” Long said angrily.

“Who cares?” I replied.

The chopper suddenly slowed. Morris waved to me, then pointed straight down. He had spotted something and wanted to take a closer look. I gave him the thumbs-up, and he took us down. It felt like the floor had dropped out from beneath our feet, and Buster buried his head in my lap and shut his eyes.

I continued looking down at the highway. A crew of tree cutters were trimming back the overhang on 27, and had traffic stopped in both directions. If Mouse had run into this during his escape, it would have slowed him down considerably. I hadn’t had much to cheer about lately, but this turn of events lifted my spirits. Maybe I’d finally caught a lucky break.

We flew another five minutes, each of us focused on the backed-up line of vehicles below. Long had stopped speaking to me. I supposed I could have apologized, but I didn’t look very good on my knees.

Another minute passed. Off to my left, I spotted something strange. A compound of white, deserted buildings sat in an overgrown field, the buildings surrounded by a chain-link fence topped by razor wire. It looked like an abandoned prison, yet I knew of no prison in this part of the county.

“I want to take a look at that,” I yelled to Morris.

The chopper dipped, making me feel weightless. Morris brought us down directly over the compound’s entrance. I stared at the shell of a guard house. At one time, the abandoned place had been some type of institution.

A single road made of crushed seashells led into the compound. I spotted a fresh pair of tire tracks in the shells, their indentations several inches deep. Someone had recently been here, and I told Morris to see where the tracks led.

Morris followed the road into the compound. It was an enormous facility, and I counted six towering buildings, each painted an institutional white. The buildings’ windows had been knocked out, as had the doors, giving them a ghostly feel. On one building, rusted bars covered the windows on every floor. Not a prison, I thought, but a mental institution.

The tracks stopped in a courtyard, then made a complete circle, and went back out. It could have been teenagers, or some curious tourists looking for a photo opportunity. Or it could have been Mouse and the giant, looking for a place to hide.

Long turned around in his seat. “Why are we stopping?”

“I think they came here,” I said.

“You’re nuts. This is a ghost town.”

It was a ghost town, its memories long since displaced. But sometimes people returned to places that filled their souls with darkness. Mouse and his partner had been in Broward eighteen years ago, and something told me that this was where they’d lived.

“Let’s go!” Long told the pilot.

The chopper left the compound. Flying over the entrance, I spotted a rotting wood sign lying on the ground beside the front gate. The name of the institution was painted on the sign in bold letters, and it screamed up at me like a horrible voice from my past.

Daybreak.