The two of them had argued bitterly all weekend over everything from the wedding to finances to Roni’s day care.

  Part of him wanted to just divorce Missy—or kill her—but another part of him acknowledged that his marriage to Missy gave him valuable cover, cover he was sure he would need in the future. But another fight like that and who knew what he might do to her.

  Leaving home that morning, he’d decided to give in to the hunger. He was now two hours south of Washington, DC, waiting to sate his appetite. He wore the workman’s coverall and sat in the battered white panel van, a black balaclava rolled up on his forehead. He’d parked the van in a dirt lot across the street from a strip club called Tillie’s, a low, gray cinder-block affair with a garish neon sign on a lonely route just north of Richmond near the town of Short Pump.

  Two summers ago, when he was working to drum up new heating-oil business in the region, Soneji had often visited Tillie’s. He’d been obsessed with a dancer there named Bunny Maddox. Lean physique, large breasts, and wild mane of auburn hair.

  He’d not only thought about taking Bunny to the Pine Barrens; he’d planned it all out, knew just how he’d grab her. Now he was going to put his plan into action.

  Soneji sat there in the van, hoping that Bunny still worked the early shift. She tried to clock out by eight thirty so she could be home for her kid.

  The boy had to be—what, five? Six? Not that he really cared. He remembered Bunny telling him that half the time, her kid lived down in Florida with her mom and older sister.

  “I get anxious,” Bunny had told him, running scarlet fingernails down his cheek the last time he’d paid her to dance for him. “Which makes me want to get high or drink or both. Which gets me in trouble. Makes me a shitty mom sometimes.”

  Soneji wondered if that was still true as he watched a dancer leave through the employee door at ten past eight. Then five more women from the day shift came out and drove away. He didn’t want to go inside the strip club and risk showing up on a security camera.

  At eight fifteen, Bunny was still a no-show. Eight twenty, same thing.

  At eight twenty-eight, he was thinking that it might be time to head north. He’d actually started the van when Bunny Maddox came out the door and stumbled slightly as she crossed the lot.

  “Still has problems,” Soneji said, smiling. He felt a little breathless as he watched Bunny climb into a Ford Galaxie that had seen far better days.

  Soneji waited until she’d pulled out of the parking lot and swung onto the county road heading toward Richmond. His heart beat faster. He put the van in gear and drove after her at a distance, telling himself to breathe deeply and slowly against the anticipation swelling in him.

  There was no room for any sloppiness.

  As Soneji had seen her do repeatedly during his scouting trips in years past, Bunny drove from the club to the closest Virginia state liquor store, where he knew she’d buy her usual pint (or quart) of vodka. Anticipating that she’d continue her typical pattern, Soneji drove ahead to her next stop, a Winn-Dixie about a mile away.

  He parked the van and waited patiently with a panoramic view of the rest of the lot. Bunny’s Galaxie came rumbling in ten minutes later. After parking, the dancer ducked down where she could not be seen, probably so she could take a swig off her newest bottle.

  The second he saw Bunny leave her car and wobble her way to the grocery store entrance, Soneji felt a sense of overwhelming confidence. If he stuck to his plan, took every precaution, and avoided sloppiness, Bunny Maddox was his.

  CHAPTER 52

  WHILE BUNNY WAS IN the Winn-Dixie, Soneji drove west on Route 6 toward Maidens, Virginia. He took the Crozier exit and drove into a checkerboard of farmland and small wooded lots.

  He liked rural areas. There weren’t a lot of people around, and residences were scattered and often isolated, making situations far easier to control here than they were in urban environments.

  Bunny lived with her brother and a male cousin and, at times, their girlfriends. The presence of so many people would ordinarily have all but eliminated the dancer as a target in Soneji’s mind, and it certainly would have if she’d lived in a city. But Bunny’s house was well off a county road and largely blocked from sight by a kudzu infestation that crawled up the trunks of the pine and oak trees and hung down from their limbs like so much green drapery.

  He saw the mailbox and slowed. Rain began to sprinkle as he lowered his window and peered down the drive into the kudzu and pines. He saw rusted gate posts set to either side about thirty yards in from the road.

  Everything was as he remembered it.

  Soneji drove over a rise in the road, pulled the van onto the shoulder where Bunny wouldn’t see it, and turned off his headlights. Then he tugged down the black balaclava, put on a headlamp and a second layer of latex gloves, and stepped out of the van. He shut the door softly and turned on the red bulb on his headlamp.

  As he trotted back down the road, he peered south for headlights approaching but saw none before reaching the drive. He walked fast up the shallow grassy ditch and tiptoed across the gravel to the open gate.

  Soneji swung the gate shut and wrapped the chain around the post just a few moments before he heard the growl of Bunny’s car coming. The rain was falling harder. He ignored the drops in his eyes, walked fifteen feet toward the road, pressed himself back into the kudzu, and turned off his headlamp.

  The Galaxie came closer. Soneji retrieved the Bulldog pistol from his right pocket. He tugged a ragged two-inch strip of flannel fabric out of his left pocket and pushed it into the vegetation behind him.

  Headlights slashed the county road, then flooded the drive as Bunny pulled in. Her tires crunched across the gravel and the car slammed to a halt a few feet from the closed gate. She threw the car in park and heaved open her door, which squealed on its hinges.

  “Assholes,” Bunny slurred. She slammed her door shut and started forward. “Close the gate? Calvin, what the—”

  She had no chance to finish the expletive because she had stepped in front of Soneji, so close he merely had to raise his free left hand to clamp it across her mouth. He jammed the muzzle of the Bulldog against the side of her head.

  “Scream and you die, Bunny,” he said, seeing her eyes, wide and terrified. “You’re not going to scream, are you? You want a chance at a long life, don’t you? Another chance to see that son of yours?”

  The dancer was trembling, but she nodded.

  “Good,” Soneji said. “Now, back up with me.”

  He stepped from the kudzu. He guided her backward several steps and told her to open the Galaxie’s door. When she did, he saw groceries in the back and a quart of vodka on the passenger seat beside her purse.

  “Lean in,” he said. “Turn off the headlights. Turn off the engine. Leave the keys, your purse, and your groceries. Take the bottle if it’ll help.”

  The dancer hesitated when he lowered the gloved hand from her mouth. He pressed the pistol muzzle harder against her temple and she did as he’d asked. The driveway went dark and quiet save for the rain and the ticking of the Galaxie’s engine.

  He turned on the red light of his headlamp as she straightened up, gripping the liquor bottle, and turned to face him.

  Bunny was crying. “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

  “I’m going to tell you everything, Bunny,” he said. “Just come along quietly and I promise you’ll hear all about it, and you’ll be seeing your son before you know it.”

  CHAPTER 53

  AT NINE THIRTY ON Monday evening in late October, a bank of chill, dank fog rolled in off the Chesapeake Bay. It swept, curled, and misted slowly through the oaks and pines overlooking the west side of the razor wire and chain-link fence that surrounded the construction equipment, the supplies, and the big steel-sided warehouse out of which Patrice Prince supposedly ran his import/export business.

  We thought we’d come prepared, wearing winter clothes over our body armor and carrying wool blankets, radios, a thermos of hot coffee, binoculars, and a Tupperware with sandwiches. I had all the warm stuff on, but the fog wormed its way through the clothes, making me shiver as I adjusted an earphone and mic connected to my radio.

  Two police-issue combat shotguns rested against a nearby tree. We were perched in cover on the bluff above the fence and inner compound.

  Sampson checked his watch, murmured into his mic, “Any second now they’re going to start knocking on doors and bringing in the first Haitian gangbangers.”

  “You’d think there’d be a delayed effect,” I said. “We probably won’t see any kind of real reaction for a few hours, maybe not till close to midnight.”

  He nodded. “If Prince knows he’s under assault, he’ll come here.”

  “Or, if he’s here already, he’ll leave,” I said. I had my binoculars up and was looking over the fence. “We’ve got two more sets of guards coming from the north side of the complex with a pair of Malinois attack dogs.”

  “I see ’em, going by the backhoe and the bulldozers,” Sampson said, peering through his own binoculars. “That complicates things.”

  “Only if we need to go in there,” I said.

  “Well, I’m hoping that’s the eventual plan, search warrant or no search warrant, so we better figure out the canine situation.”

  For the next forty-five minutes, we stood and stamped our feet in the fog and the cold, shivering in the shadows and trying to monitor the radio chatter as Metro detectives moved in to take various members of LMC 51 into custody. Kurtz and Diehl evidently rapped on Valentine Rodolpho’s front door but got no answer, and his row house was dark. They remained in position, watching his place.

  The coffee shop Rodolpho liked and the crab-boil shack in Chesapeake Beach his cousin loved had long since closed for the day. Teams had left those locations with plans to return in the morning.

  The other officers assigned to find the members of LMC 51 were also coming up short. It was as if the gang had disappeared from all their usual haunts.

  I said, “Wish the hell we knew where Prince lives full-time.”

  “You think Donovan might have found out?”

  “If she found out in the wrong way, it could explain her disappearance.”

  “It could,” he said, “but I—”

  We both heard vehicles approaching and tires crunching on the driveway into the warehouse. A few moments later, two black Chevy Suburbans rolled up to the gate, which the armed guards opened.

  As they drove in and parked near the second loading dock, John double-clicked the radio, said, “Chief Pittman, this is John Sampson. We’ve got action here in Davidsonville. Two vehicles. One of them could be the Suburban used in the drive-by.”

  Pittman came back immediately: “You’ve got that confirmed, Sampson? Can you see your bullet holes?”

  “Negative. Too far and there’s fog, but stand by. Doors are opening and—”

  “I’ve got Rodolpho coming out of the first Suburban,” I said. “Three guys with him, all armed, heading toward the first loading dock door.”

  “And here’s Prince from the back of the second Suburban,” Sampson said. “Three other armed men with him are going to the rear of the vehicle.”

  One of the gunmen opened the back door and pulled out Officer Donovan. She was blindfolded and gagged with her wrists tied behind her.

  “We’ve got Donovan,” both of us said at the same time.

  “That’s confirmed?” Pittman demanded.

  Sampson said, “Yes. They’re taking her inside in restraints, blindfolded, and gagged.”

  “Hold your position,” Pittman came back. “I’m notifying the Maryland state police and everyone else with jurisdiction out there. Repeat: Unless you believe Donovan’s life is being threatened, hold your position until we’ve got the kind of team we need to contain and breach the place safely.”

  “ETA on that, Chief?”

  “Two hours, maybe?”

  “And if they try to leave with her in the meantime, sir?” I asked.

  “Then you stop them, Detective Cross.”

  “Roger that,” I said. “We’re standing by.”

  “Don’t send sirens or flashing lights,” Sampson said.

  “Roger that,” Pittman said.

  Two minutes later, we heard a diesel engine rumbling and then gravel crunching. An eighteen-wheeler emerged from the fog and the trees and pulled up to the gate.

  The guards seemed to recognize the driver and opened the gates. The rig rolled forward and hard to the right of the two Suburbans and backed up to the third loading dock. The overhead door rose, revealing four more armed men in the bay.

  “Looks like something important is getting delivered,” Sampson said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “This is starting to get—”

  Out in the fog near the far northwest corner of the fence, an explosive device detonated in a dull flash and blast that, even at a distance, boxed our ears and pulsed through our chests.

  CHAPTER 54

  WE’D NO SOONER RECOVERED from the shock of the blast than the wind shifted, intensified, and cleared away ribbons of fog. We saw many of Prince’s men racing through the construction equipment and piles of supplies toward the site of the explosion.

  Sampson triggered his mic. “Chief, we just had a bomb go off at Davidsonville.”

  “What? Repeat!”

  Before John could, the wind blew another clear lane through the fog, revealing a heavily armed force of at least eight attackers in black hoods entering through a hole in the fence in the northwest corner of the complex. They spread out behind a bulldozer and a dump truck and began firing at the LMC 51 gunmen, who released their dogs.

  Pittman yelled, “Sampson, Cross, repeat!”

  Over the flash and rattling of the small-arms fire and the pinging of bullets ricocheting, I triggered my mic, said, “Davidsonville site is under attack by armed men. Firefight in progress. Donovan is inside. Send reinforcements! Now!”

  “Jesus Christ. Roger that!”

  I put up my binoculars and got glimpses of the combat through the ribbons of fog, seeing the dogs race toward the attackers as if I were watching through a lazy strobe. Three of the hooded men went to their knees, held up canisters, and waited until the Malinois were all but on them and sprayed the dogs with some kind of high-strength pepper spray.

  The dogs fell down, screeching, whining, coughing, and pawing at their muzzles, and the emboldened attackers moved past the machines and piles of supplies in coordinated fashion, covering each other, firing when they could. One gunman went down, and another was hit hard; LMC 51 reinforcements began pouring out of the open loading docks.

  Carrying automatic weapons, Valentine Rodolpho and Patrice Prince appeared at the first dock’s door, the one closest to the Suburbans.

  “They’re gonna try to make a run for it,” Sampson said. He spun around and grabbed one of our shotguns.

  “What are we doing?” I said as I grabbed the other shotgun.

  “You heard the chief. If they try to get out before the cavalry gets here, we’re supposed to stop them.”

  “He said if Donovan was threatened.”

  “She and everyone in there is under attack!”

  He took off before I could reply. I followed, running along the spine of the high ground that paralleled the fence, heading toward the gate.

  Inside the fence, gunfire was near constant, a full-on war in a porous fog.

  Prince’s men were fighting ferociously and seemed to outnumber the gunmen of the attacking force. Even the gang leader and his limping cousin were forced to move away from the SUVs. They disappeared into the fog and joined the fray.

  We reached the gate, now unguarded. Sampson was right, I decided. We needed to get to Donovan before the fight got to her.

  Just as Sampson reached through the gap to raise the bar holding the gate shut, six more hooded attackers jumped out of the back of the eighteen-wheeler that had arrived before the explosion.

  “It’s a Trojan Horse!” I yelled and pulled Sampson down. They opened fire as a group, sweeping their guns left to right, catching Prince, Rodolpho, and the rest of the attacking gunmen in a crossfire somewhere in the fog.

  CHAPTER 55

  THE SIX NEW ATTACKERS split up and sprinted past us into the swirling mist and the roaring gunfight.

  Sampson jumped up when the second wave of attackers were out of sight, threw up the gate bar, and said, “Let’s get Donovan out of there.”

  He pushed open the gates, crouched down, and sprinted toward the second of the two loading docks, and I was right behind him. Bullets cracked through the air, slapped the pavement, and pinged off the Suburbans, forcing us to take cover behind them even as their windows shattered and safety glass rained down on us.

  There was a lull in the shooting but not in the shouting. I heard French, Spanish, and English. John and I eased ourselves up, looked through the blown-out windows of the nearby Suburban, and saw Prince darting up the stairs to the first of the three loading docks, Rodolpho covering him from the open dock door. He shot two hooded attackers, who spun and fell.

  I had the gang leader’s cousin square in my sights, but at seventy yards away, he was too far for me to hit with the shotgun or my pistol. Prince and his cousin disappeared into the warehouse.

  The fog swirled. The gunfire to our north started once more, fiercer than ever.

  “Let’s go in at another angle,” Sampson said. “Third bay. Wait. I’ll cover you.”

  He hunched over and ran away from the vehicle and the gunfight and toward the rear of the semi. I took one more look in the direction of the gun battle.

  Through the fog, I spotted a hooded attacker in full body armor clubbing the skull of one of Prince’s men with the butt of his weapon. When the man went down, he sprinted toward the open second loading dock.

  Sampson whistled.

  I ran to him, keeping low.

 

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