Courage Stolen Read online

  The nature center was dark and abandoned, no other cars in sight. I parked in front and, keeping the headlights on, got out of the van. I went to the only garbage can in sight, a few feet away from the center’s front door. There was no note. I looked inside the can, but it had been emptied and a fresh plastic liner put in place, probably by the last employee closing down the center to prevent raccoons or other animals from making a mess. The can sat atop a four-legged iron stand elevating it above ground about four inches. The headlights provided enough light to confirm nothing alive lurked under there, so I reached in with my hand and felt underneath. My fingers detected something thicker than a piece of paper stuck to the underside of the stand, and I managed to yank it out.

  The swatch of cardboard had been ripped from a box and contained more of the magazine words.

  Sand Cove Beach Park.

  Leave van. Put keys under van.

  Walk to Virgin Sturgeon for next instruction.

  Remember: we’re watching.

  We’re watching. I had no doubt about that. I could all but feel the eyes on me as I stood, note in hand, bathed in the lights from the van.

  I didn’t know Sand Cove Beach Park, but I knew where the Virgin Sturgeon Restaurant was on the banks of the Sacramento River a few miles north of downtown. I pulled up the map program on my phone and found the location of Sand Cove, about a mile up river from the Virgin Sturgeon.

  My cell phone rang when I merged onto Highway 50 towards Interstate 5. I answered warily, though I doubted my adversaries had my cell phone number or knew I’d been selected courier of the twenty million.

  “Ray? It’s Ken Wiggin. How are things going?”

  “I don’t know. I’m driving all over town at the moment. I think my next stop is where they’re going to take the money, but I can’t be sure.”

  “Where are you going?”

  I paused. Our extortionists may not have known I was driving the van. Then again, maybe they did. And if so, there was a remote chance they could monitor my phone. They wouldn’t like me telling someone else where I was delivering their twenty million. “Sorry, I can’t tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  “Have you seen anybody yet?” Wiggin seemed nervous, not the laid-back surfer dude I’d come to know.

  “No, not so far.” I checked the rearview and side mirrors on the van. “I’m not sure if I will.”

  “Be careful. This is some scary shit. When it’s over, call me back.”

  “You’ll be my first call.”

  I took I-5 through downtown and exited on Garden Highway, which bordered the east side of the river. Once I passed the Virgin Sturgeon, I slowed to thirty miles an hour, unsure how well marked the entrance to Sand Cove would be. Garden Highway was a narrow two-lane road with no street lighting and light traffic this time of evening.

  The phone rang again as I located the beach park’s entrance.

  “Is everything okay?” Candace asked when I answered.

  “Smooth as can be.” My voice was shallow, unable to mask my nerves. I turned left onto the entry road to the park.

  “Where are you?”

  “About to make the drop, I think.”

  “Mr. Courage, do what they say. It’s not worth you getting hurt. Not even for twenty million dollars.”

  “Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

  “I mean it,” she said and hung up.

  The van crept along at less than ten miles an hour as I tried to determine if anyone else was in the area. The road made a one-eighty degree loop and opened onto a rectangular parking lot behind a thicket of trees about a hundred yards from the highway. The lot was large, enough spaces for forty or fifty cars. It was empty now. I made a lap around the lot, which was surrounded by trees on all sides, the river about fifty feet away to the east.

  I left the van parked in one of the spaces at the far end of the lot, tossed the keys on the ground under the driver’s side door, and began the hike towards the Virgin Sturgeon.

  nineteen

  Once I hit Garden Highway, I took a deep breath, the tension in my shoulders easing. If someone wanted to take me down, their best shot would’ve been in the parking lot by the river. I patted the gun on my back for comfort and continued up the dark road. The night had turned cold, my breaths billowing into clouds as I walked, hands thrust in my front pockets for warmth. About fifteen minutes later, I arrived at the restaurant.

  The original Virgin Sturgeon had actually been on a barge floating on the river. It sank about forty years ago and was replaced by the current structure, which cantilevered off the roadside levy and hung over the riverbank. The descent from the road to the restaurant ended with a thirty-foot tunnel made of corrugated sheet metal that deposited you at the hostess station. The place was river rustic, the kind of restaurant you’d find on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive Ins and Dives. All of the fifteen or so tables were occupied, and the bar was packed. I managed to find a barstool at the far end of the bar. The banter and laughter filling the room seemed strange, normal sounds of good cheer oblivious to my mission as a courier of twenty million dollars to an unseen criminal. Rather than calm or reassure me, the noise in the room put me more on edge. I told myself to take deep breaths of air.

  My hands shook as I tried to retrieve my cell phone. The note had said to walk to the restaurant for my next instructions. But how was I going to get instructions here? Was someone in the crowd of drinkers and diners in on the conspiracy? Was one of them observing me as I sat at the bar?

  I pulled up the map on my phone. The GPS tracker under the car showed it was still positioned at Sand Cove. Same thing with the other four GPS trackers I had inserted into the packets of money. So far, the van hadn’t been moved.

  We’re watching. That’s what the note said. As much as I had the sense of being watched at Effie Yeaw, I felt it a hundred times more so at the bar. I looked around the room. No one seemed to be looking at me. At the same time, I felt everyone was sneaking peeks when I looked away. Two windows flanked the liquor rack in the center of the bar. The inside light reflected off their darkness, and I could get a decent look at everyone sitting at the bar. We were an eclectic mix, young and old, men and women, black, white, Asian, and Hispanic. No one looked out of place. Then again, I hadn’t any notion whatsoever of who to be looking for.

  My heart beat hard against my chest. When I scanned the room yet again, everything seemed surreal, as if I were watching a movie of the scene rather than being a part of it. People moved in slow motion, as if under water, the sound of their voices lagging behind the movement of the mouths.

  “What’ll it be?” a deep male voice asked.

  I jumped in my seat. The bartender, a middle-aged guy with an impressive paunch, was asking for my order.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said.

  “Sorry. I…I was kind of spacing out.”

  “Something to drink?”

  “Iced tea.” I wanted a shot and a beer, but I needed a clear head given what might lie ahead.

  “You’re no fun,” the rather tipsy woman sitting next to me said. She was younger than I, mid-thirties and attractive. She and her girlfriend appeared to have been doing a nice job putting away glasses of Chardonnay.

  “I know. But I’m working.”

  “Working? It’s too late to be working. Have a drink.”

  “Wish I could.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ray.”

  “Hey, Tom, get my good friend Ray here a drink on me, will ya? And none of that ice tea bullshit. Ray, what’ll you have?”

  Because I was starting to feel self-conscious, and resistance seemed futile, I relented and ordered a Guinness Stout.

  “Atta boy,” my new friend said. Her shoulder-length hair was dark with light red highlights. She brushed a strand of it back from her face and gave me a smile.

  We clinked glasses once my beer arrived, and I thanked her for the drink. Her na
me was Anne, and her friend, Debra, was chatting up a guy next to her. The two women worked at the insurance company just down the road towards downtown. They came here once a week to blow off steam after work. We talked for a good fifteen minutes. In spite of my circumstances, I found myself attracted to Chardonnay-drinking, insurance-working Anne. The ring finger on her left hand was bare. First Jolene Gillingwater and now Anne. I’d gone decades without having women throw themselves at me, and now in the same week it happened twice. Ray Courage: Chick Magnet. Either that or I was imagining things. I voted for the latter.

  “You seem nervous, Ray,” Anne said, snapping me back to the moment.

  “Sorry. A lot on my mind.” I wanted to check my phone again, to see if the GPS trackers had been moved, but Anne moved so close she’d see what I was doing. I didn’t really suspect her of being in on the extortion plot. Even so, it felt smarter not to take a chance. She might simply ask about why I had a map pulled up on my phone while I was sitting at a bar. If someone was observing me and overheard her question, the observer might conclude I was tracking the van’s location.

  After an hour at the bar, Anne’s hand now resting well up my thigh, I felt a sense of panic. Not about Anne’s hand. I feared I had somehow misread the directions, and now the line of communication with the extortionists had been cut. I pulled my phone out of my pocket, turned away from Anne, and risked a look. The van and the money still sat there, in the parking lot. Something was wrong.

  “You’re hardly touching your beer,” Anne said.

  To appease her, I took a sip, set the beer down, and smiled at her. She smiled back and looked deep into my eyes. I took another sip of beer and decided it was time for me to go back to the van, instructions or no instructions from the bad guys. I was about to slide off the barstool when the bartender spoke loud enough to be heard over the sounds inside the room.

  “Does anyone here have a van parked at Sand Cove?” he asked after setting down the phone at the back of the bar.

  I raised my hand and looked around to see if anyone watched me. No one seemed to care about a guy with a van parked up the road. The bartender approached.

  “Not sure why you would have your car parked down at Sand Cove this late this time of year, but I got a call saying you can go move it now. That’s all they said.”

  “Was it a man or a woman?”

  He gave me a funny look. “I guess it was a guy. But I could barely hear, and the voice sounded kinda distorted.”

  This time I made to effort to hide what I was doing when I checked the GPS on my phone. Still no movement. That didn’t make any sense to me. Had they abandoned their plan to take the money? Why? Cold feet? Did they fear a setup?

  “Why you parked down there?” Anne asked. She removed her hand from my leg, as if anyone who drove a van and parked it in a deserted parking lot might be a bit perverse. A serial killer. A pornographer. Or maybe a coin collector.

  “Long story.”

  The smile she gave me was forced, the kind you might get from a grocery store clerk after she told you “have a nice day.” She angled her body away from me and back to the bar. I felt a jab of disappointment. Even in the midst of an illicit twenty million dollar deal, I’d let myself think about a romantic encounter. The human mind goes where it goes. Without another word, I slid off the barstool and left the Virgin Sturgeon.

  Fog crept off the river and shrouded the road. I started at a fast walk and then broke into a jog, concerned about what lay ahead at Sand Cove. My mind turned over several possibilities, none of them good for the Monarch team or for me. The deal had gone off the rails for some reason. The more I thought about it, the more I believed one of GPS trackers had been discovered and scared them off. I hadn’t told Wiggin or anyone else about putting the trackers on the van and inside the money. They’d be upset with me for doing so. My motives had been worthy. Worthy or not, it appeared I’d cost the Monarch team the chance to retrieve their project.

  When I arrived at the parking lot fifteen minutes later, the van sat in the same spot where I’d left it. The driver’s door was locked. I found the keys underneath the van and unlocked it. I opened the rear door of the van. All of the mailbags were gone. They’d been replaced by a large cardboard box adorned with the Heavenly Soft Toilet Tissue logo. Twenty million dollars just bought us a case of toilet paper.

  It was difficult to see inside the box in the darkness, so I used the flashlight app on my phone. I folded back the top flaps, shone the light inside, and saw six objects—my five GPS tracking devices and a thin metal box about one foot by two feet.

  Forty minutes later, Ken Wiggin, Candace Symington, and I assembled in Wiggin’s office. A few minutes after that, the director of technology arrived. It was eleven o’clock and he was grumpy, though his mood brightened when he saw the object on Wiggin’s desk.

  “Is that what I think it is?” he asked.

  “That’s why we called you,” Wiggin said.

  We followed him to the administration building, where he unlocked the front door and led us to the university’s server room. Fifteen minutes later, we were all giving each other high fives.

  It had cost twenty million dollars. But the Monarch Project had been recovered.

  twenty

  By the time I arrived home it was after one in the morning. I poured myself three fingers of bourbon, cracked open a beer, and slumped into a chair in my living room. Sometime later I drifted to sleep.

  The nightmares returned. The men convulsed each time a round from my gun penetrated their flesh, the epic violence playing out in slow motion, the events of several seconds stretching out into minutes, over and over again. Then Thomas Chan’s bloodied, disfigured body came into view in Technicolor vividness. Chan lay there on his blood-stained bed. He spoke to me, his eyes dead, his mouth moving up and down like a puppet’s. “You did this,” he said, raising his bloodied hand and flipping me off with that middle finger. “You, you, you…”

  The banging on the door cast away the image and awakened me. I had fallen asleep in the living room. The beer and whiskey glasses were both empty. Morning light came in from the front window. I picked up my cell phone from the coffee table to check the time. It was a little past seven in the morning. The screen indicated I had five missed calls and voice mails from Granderson University.

  Jerry Langford greeted me when I opened the door.

  “What the fuck!” he said as soon as he saw me, his face wild-eyed, spittle flying from his mouth.

  “Good morning to you, too, Jerry. Would you like to come in?”

  “No!”

  “Is it me or is something troubling you?”

  “How could you do that? You paid twenty million dollars to an extortionist?”

  I held up my phone and showed it to him. “Are these calls from you?”

  “Bet your ass they are. You’ve been dodging my calls. Why do you think I’m here?”

  “Look, I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you in the loop. It’s what the project people wanted. They said if—”

  “I don’t care what Wiggin wanted. You were working for me. You were to find out what was going on and report back to me.”

  “I was going to do it today.” I really was, but in the moment it sounded ridiculous.

  He bore a hole in me with his seething eyes. “I’m going to have to report this to the administration. They’re going to be incensed. I’ll be lucky if I keep my job.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Of course it is. I have no choice.”

  “I’m not so sure Sunrise and NAFC are going to want it known they paid off an extortionist. That’s a bad precedent for them to set. And it makes the university look bad.”

  “If the university wants to keep a lid on it then that’s up to the president or the board of trustees. But I need to tell them.”

  He was right. I hoped the administration had the good sense to not release the information to the media. Nothing good would come of that. The
elation I’d felt the night before about retrieving Monarch morphed into something else in the light of morning. Yes, we’d retrieved the project. But we’d given into criminal demands. How could doing so possibly reflect well on any of us involved? Selfishly, I thought about what that might do to my reputation. Not only had I signed off on paying the ransom money, I’d been the one who’d delivered it. Aside from what our actions might do to our reputations, how could we be assured the SCS or whoever was behind the plot would not come back to steal the project a second time?

  “How did you find out about the payment?”

  “I got a phone call.”

  “From whom?”

  “Never mind.”

  “And you came all the way out here from Granderson to thank me for my great work.”

  “I came out here to fire your sorry ass. You are never to set foot on the Granderson campus again. Do you understand?”

  “It’s an easy concept to grasp.”

  “And if I can find a way to bust your ass or to sue you, you’d better be ready because that’s my top priority right now.”

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee, Jerry? You seem a bit stressed.”

  He stormed off and appeared not to hear my “drive safely” as he did so.

  My firing put an exclamation point on the entire Monarch case. With Monarch’s return and Granderson cutting me loose, the Thomas Chan investigation was up to the police to handle, not me. Yet, something didn’t feel right about that. Maybe it was the unease I felt about paying the ransom and then getting tongue-lashed by Langford. Yeah, that was part of it. But there was more. I shut the door and leaned back against it trying to get my mind around why I didn’t have a good feeling about any of it. Nothing came clear. Except that I needed a good breakfast and at least two cups of strong coffee.

  After clearing my breakfast dishes, I showered, dressed, and headed out to run a few errands before my eleven o’clock appointment with Dr. Beckly, the shrink Dr. Nelson had referred me to. It was about nine-thirty, as I was parking in the grocery store lot, when my phone rang.