The Florentine Deception Read online

  An instant later, my phone began vibrating. I barely stifled the follow-on ring with a quick press of the top button.

  “Fine, thirty minutes,” fired off Khalimmy, and a moment later he hurried to the Mustang shaking his head.

  I yanked my Outback’s door closed, pushed the lock button, and speed-dialed Steven. He answered before the first ring.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “They’re going to kill him.” I turned the key in the ignition. “Today.”

  “You’ve got to call the cops, man.”

  “I was just about to after I called you. You got a pen?”

  “Yeah … one second … okay.”

  “Write this down: 19591 Gilmore, in El Segundo. That’s Khalimmy’s address, just in case anything happens. Are you familiar with that area?”

  “No.”

  “I think it’s industrial. Anyway, I’ll give you a call once I figure out what’s up with the cop.”

  A few minutes later, with business card in hand, I was on hold for Officer Flanco. At least he was in the office.

  “Officer Flanco is on the phone,” responded a female agent, “do you want me to transfer you to his voicemail?”

  “No, I’ll wait.”

  “Okay, please hold,” and after a click, I was returned mid-advertisement to the mayor touting rewarding job opportunities with the LAPD Valley Division.

  A few seconds later, the on-hold advertisements cut out. “Officer Flanco.”

  “Hi Officer Flanco, this is Alex Fife.” I paused, waiting for a click of apprehension. “I reported the computer kidnapping threat last week.”

  “Oh, hello Mr. Fife. No progress so far, but I forwarded my notes over to the computer crime guys in West LA.” He took a sip of something. “Have they contacted you?”

  “No. Listen, I tracked down the kidnapper guy and I think he’s going to kill this Ronald Lister guy today.”

  “Whoa. You tracked him down?” His voice more entertained than serious.

  “I got another email. He said he wanted to kill Lister,” I said, exasperated. “So I set up a meeting and … it’s a long story … I got his address.”

  “You what?” Now he sounded infuriated. “You can’t go around playing cop—you’re going to get yourself killed.”

  I ignored him and continued. “I overheard him on his cell and he says he wants to kill Ronald Lister today.”

  “Alex, listen to me. What exactly did he say?”

  “It’s hard to remember.… He said something like he was going to take care of things today.”

  “Did he say ‘kill,’ ‘murder,’ ‘harm,’ anything explicit?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I reviewed the conversation in my head. “He wasn’t explicit—but it was pretty damn clear what he meant.”

  “Did he mention Ronald Lister by name?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “That’s pretty thin, Alex. You heard a conversation saying they were going to take care of something, but what it was they’re going to take care of, you’re not sure. Are you even sure this was the right guy?”

  “Dammit. He’s going to kill the guy.”

  “Listen, first of all, unless he explicitly says he’s going to kill or hurt the guy, this won’t even make it on the list. Those are our directives. You can ask my captain if you like. Second, and this is more important, you’re,” he paused, “you’re a good kid but I think you’ve been a little obsessed with this whole thing. Don’t you think this might be a prank, that you might be blowing this out of proportion? I mean, trying to meet this guy in person, reading his emails?”

  “Listen to me. I’m not crazy. I’m not obsessed. This guy is going to be murdered.”

  “All right, Alex. Why don’t you come down to the station at one-thirty and I’ll take down your statement, and I’ll try to conference in our local FBI kidnapping liaison. He’ll give you a fair shot, and if he agrees, they can take over.”

  I banged the top of my dash with my fist.

  “It can’t wait. He said he would do it this morning, after he’s done meeting God only knows who—his partner or someone. Can’t you just send a car out to his address?”

  “We can’t—”

  “Just to take a look?” I interrupted.

  “Alex, unless you heard him explicitly say he was going to kill someone or have some other concrete evidence, we can’t go barging into his home.”

  “This guy’s death is on your head,” I shouted and then threw the phone onto the seat, my raw palms throbbing.

  “Screw it.” I’d go on my own. If I got arrested searching Khalimmy’s house, so be it.

  Chapter 31

  Khalimmy’s house sat at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac lined with remodeled fifties-era bungalows, reasonably well maintained lawns and mature, leafy trees in what had to have been one of the few upscale neighborhoods in industrial El Segundo. Just prior to reaching the house, I cancelled my phone’s navigation system, took a U-turn, and parked a block away in the lot of a neighborhood playground I’d seen on my way over. I made a final call to Steven’s cell, my sixth during the drive over, and was again sent to voicemail.

  Skin is the most sensitive of organs, densely packed with nerves, and the otherwise mundane process of exiting my car took on a whole new meaning as my abraded, scabbing skin stretched and cracked, radiating needles of pain through my body. I winced from the initial shot of pain, threw on a clean shirt from my trunk, and then began walking at a brisk pace down the sidewalk toward Khalimmy’s house.

  Based on my earlier house-hunting experiences, the beige stucco-covered single-story house was of the Spanish Hacienda-style and looked to have been built in the early 1940s. Before me, a quaint brick walkway led across a scrubby, yellowing lawn peppered with clovers, through an archway to the front door. The matching brick driveway, to my right, was thankfully empty.

  Despite my desire to look over both shoulders, I abstained and instead walked nonchalantly up the walkway until I reached a series of flagstones; these I followed left along the white rosebush-covered front of the house to the side yard. By the time I reached the gate just seconds later, my heart was hammering.

  This was crazy.

  But I had to do it.

  I looked back, and to my surprise and relief the gate was obscured by an unruly ten-foot-tall bougainvillea and largely hidden from the street.

  A nervous bit of blind fumbling for the latch revealed that the gate was padlocked from the inside, so I painfully mantled up the ivy-covered property wall and dropped behind the fence and into the backyard. The yard’s rear walls were covered by dark, thick masses of overgrown vines and shrubs, many fifteen feet high, while creeping ivy covered the rear wall of the house, giving the whole yard an ominous dark mood, even in the now dreadful August sun.

  This being my first and hopefully my last burglary, I had no desire to get caught—especially if Flanco was right and this was somehow a big misunderstanding. Yet deep down I knew it wasn’t and everything in my core told me what I was doing was right. Improvising, I approached a curtained window just behind the gate, hoping to find it unlocked—I wasn’t ready to start breaking glass just yet—then pushed my raw palms flush against the pane and attempted to use friction to slide the window open. After a few attempts, I gave up and walked around to the back to take a look at my other options. The rear of the house had two more windows, similarly shrouded in dark adobe-colored curtains, and a dilapidated back door with a doggie hatch.

  Just what I was hoping for—I’d taken advantage of our own doggie door dozens of times as a teenager. I crouched down on the rear porch and tried to push my hand through the flap, only to find it had been blocked from the inside by a plastic security insert. Without a second thought I formed a fist and punched straight through the insert, sending it flying into the room. While my arm was long enough to reach the interior knob, I had to jam my shoulder deep through the portal just t
o make contact with the deadbolt, and it took an eternity of painful straining and fingering the edge of the bolt before I was able to nudge it to the vertical position and unlock the door. After a firm shove, the old door grudgingly disengaged from the jamb and swung open into a cramped laundry room whose every surface was blanketed in dust. Taking my first step into Khalimmy’s house, and now surely guilty of committing a felony, I felt a surge of heat rush to my face and a wave of stress-induced perspiration. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes for a second.

  The room was cool and nerve-rackingly quiet, the only noise a slight whistle from an air-conditioning vent set into the floorboard. I turned to lock the back door, then, after a second’s thought unlocked and opened it a crack, just in case I needed a quick getaway.

  Within a minute I had completed a circuit of the first floor, which was connected via a single rectangular hallway that visited each of the shared living spaces—kitchen, walk-in pantry, dining room, family room, living room, and entryway with a staircase to the second floor. Khalimmy was an obsessive-compulsive collector; every surface on every table and chair, not to mention most of the oak floor, was covered in stacks of old Arabic or Farsi-language newspapers, books, and magazines, leaving a foot-wide conduit through the dust-laden detritus. The chaos was made all the more eerie by a near total lack of outside light. Blackout curtains were drawn over every window; he obviously liked his privacy. Noticeably absent was any sort of windowless room—the better to hold a prisoner—or any door leading to a basement, where I’d envisioned Ronald Lister would be held.

  Discouraged, I negotiated back through the stacks to the entryway and took the stairs two at a time up to the second floor. I cracked open the first of three doors accessible from the second-floor landing until it hit an obstruction, and peeking in, found it similarly packed to knee-level with thousands of books and periodicals. The second bedroom was similarly crammed, save for a six-by-four literature-free zone occupied by a card table, folding chair and old desktop computer, no doubt the one that had been sending me back electronic intelligence reports.

  I completed my investigation of the upper floor with a visit to the master bedroom and bathroom. No Ronald Lister, no rooms where he could be held, no evidence of him—just a house filled with stacks and stacks of reading material—if Khalimmy had Lister here, he was well hidden.

  A wave of nerve-induced dizziness overtook me. I steadied myself against the landing’s wood railing, and for a second time my mind fixated upon the barely audible hiss of the air conditioning. The dizziness passed.

  I worked my way down the stairs, through the entryway and back to the kitchen.

  “Dammit!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Am I fucking crazy? Where … the … fuck … are … you … Ronald … Lister?”

  The faint whistle of the air conditioning filled the void left by my outburst.

  “Dammit!” I repeated, and looked around helplessly.

  An instant later, a faint noise rose above the whistle, hopefully not from Khalimmy or the police, hopefully from some neighborhood kids playing hooky, or a dog. I dove into the pantry, closed the door to a crack, and tried to stifle my breathing so I could better hear.

  The noise—maybe a muted voice—repeated, this time louder yet still unintelligible.

  Then again: “… need water, plee …”

  My heart jackhammered. Lister was in the house.

  “Hello? Ronald?” I bellowed. “I’ve come to rescue you. Where are you?”

  “Water, please,” came the reply, this time less muffled and from directly underfoot. I pushed the door open an inch and fumbled for the light switch on the outside wall, then scanned the floorboards for a vent—the voice was obviously carrying through the vents, but there were none to be seen in the pantry.

  I stepped from the small room, and, after making my way to a dusty floor vent, yelled again. “Hello Ronald? Where are you?”

  Nothing.

  I spun around and ran back into the pantry, nearly tripping on the head of a mop, and yelled again. “Hello Mr. Lister?”

  “Please …” Lister’s voice was muffled, but definitely discernable. Fifty bucks there was a trapdoor to the basement in the pantry.

  Crazed, I dropped to my knees and began indiscriminately hurling the junk from the pantry into the kitchen until I’d cleared the floor. In retrospect, the three-by-three trapdoor should have been easy to pick out without my maniacal evacuation—the seams around it, while flush with the surrounding floor, were wide enough so as to be clearly visible. Only the door’s latch, now exposed, had been concealed behind a stack of phone books. A Phillips screwdriver, serving as a poor-man’s lock, had been inserted through the latch and a matching heavy-gauge steel bracket bolted onto the floor, effectively turning the basement into a cage. I withdrew the screwdriver, then grabbed hold of the latch and yanked open the door. A fetid combination of sour body odor and mustiness blasted up through the opening, nearly causing me to gag.

  “Hello, Mr. Lister?” I yelled down into the gloom. “My name is Alex Fife. I’m here to help you.”

  “Thank you lord,” he said, his voice parched.

  “I’ve opened the door. Can you make it up the stairs?”

  “No, I’m cuffed.… He cuffed me to a pipe.”

  “One second, I’m going to call the police and I’ll be right down.”

  I extracted my cell from my pocket and punched in 911; after a brief recorded message telling me not to panic, they promptly put me on hold. I turned the speakerphone on.

  “I’m coming,” I said.

  A steep set of wooden stairs led down into the darkness. Unable to locate a light switch in the pantry, I used the phone’s screen to illuminate the stairs and took them down one at a time until my head was just below the floorboards. I then swept the screen to either side of the stairwell and up along the basement’s ceiling, but the switch was still AWOL.

  “Where’s the light switch?” I asked.

  “Oh God, I don’t know. He turns on the light before he comes in. Just hurry.”

  It must have been behind something in the pantry.

  “One second. I’ll be right back. I’m going to find the light.” The phone, still on hold, was now droning instructions on how to conduct CPR until an ambulance came.

  Carefully, I rotated in place until I faced the stairs, then climbed back up until my head reached the floor level.

  Two black shoes stood in front of me. My body went into shock—not fear but uncomprehending shock. I looked up.

  Then everything went dark.

  Chapter 32

  “Oh God, please wake up.”

  Groggily, I opened my eyes and tried to turn toward the voice, only to be rewarded with a sharp twinge in my neck. I aborted the twist and instead squinted at the blurry bulb dangling from the ceiling.

  “What happened?” I said, closing my eyes against the harsh light.

  “Thank God. Are you okay?” asked Ronald. “I thought you were dead.”

  “I think so. I feel like I’ve been hit by a car. What happened?”

  “I couldn’t see in the dark, but from the looks of your face, that guy put a steel-toed boot in your cheek and sent you flying down the stairs.”

  “Where is he?” Given the shock of the event, I’d totally forgotten about the black shoes or the thug wearing them.

  “I don’t know. He took off about five minutes ago.” That was at least an immediate relief.

  “At least he had the decency to leave the lights on,” I said.

  I raised my right hand—fortunately it still worked—and gingerly touched my face.

  “Augh,” I screamed reflexively. I’d expected soreness but not daggers. Now lucid thanks to the sharp pain, I took inventory. Based on the throbbing, my left arm was going to be purple for a while, and both legs were bruised to hell—insult to injury after the morning’s fall—but otherwise, I’d live.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Around ten m
inutes. I’ve been trying to wake you since he took off. Listen, I want to get out of here now. Right now. Can you find something to get me out of these cuffs?”

  “Dammit. I’m so damn stupid,” I responded, dejected.

  “Just find something to cut these cuffs, and please tell me someone else knows you’re here.”

  “Yeah, I think so.” I’d told Steven the address, hadn’t I? The last few hours were a blur. I thought about it for a few seconds. “Yeah, I’m almost sure. Let me get my bearings and I’ll find something to cut you out. Give me a second.”

  “Okay, but please hurry. I don’t know when that Arab bastard will be back, but I do know I want to be long gone by then,” he said, then took a deep breath.

  I tried to sit up. “Oh boy.” A wave of dizziness hit me. I capitulated and lay back down.

  “Here I thought I was saved,” he wailed, “and then some fucking Russian thug out of nowhere fucks everything up.”

  “Russian thug?” What the hell? “What Russian thug? That wasn’t Khalimmy?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who abducted you. The Arab. Khalimmy. The guy who owns this house.”

  “No. This guy was new. I’ve never seen him before.”

  “So he wasn’t the guy that abducted you?”

  “No. At first I figured he was his partner or something. But he asked a lot of questions the Khalid guy already asked. I don’t think they’re working together. By the way, who are you anyway—a cop?”

  “No. It’s a long story. But I did come here to rescue you.”

  “What’s your name again?”

  “I’m Alex.”

  “Ronald Lister,” he replied, then after a pause, “would you mind trying to get up again? I really want to get the hell out of here. The fucking bastard tortured me.”

  Summoning all my strength, I powered through the dizziness and sat up.

  “Why didn’t you just call the police when you heard I was kidnapped?” he asked.

  “Whoa. One second.” My head was spinning. Holding myself upright, I closed my eyes and responded. “I did, they said they couldn’t help unless I had proof. The cop thought I was imagining it all.”