Page 66 of Return of the Spider
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 onMonday 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.”
