Her Winning Ways by J.M. Bronston (23)

 

It was like swimming up from the bottom of the ocean. The surface seemed so far away, he’d just as soon sink down to the bottom again. He was still desperately in need of rest.

But he knew he was awake and would have to open his eyes. Especially since he could feel someone was watching him.

And when he did, he saw that the room was now dim, the subdued light telling him it was late afternoon, and he knew that hours must have passed. A woman was standing there, watching him. Same blond hair, same general build, but not the same girl.

“You must be Bart,” Liz said. She held up a piece of paper. “She left a note.”

He blinked a couple of times and got himself upright. He rubbed his face and felt the stubble that had grown there since yesterday morning’s shave. He ran his hands through his hair.

“I fell asleep,” he said.

Liz laughed. “I guess you did.”

“You must be the sister.”

“Yes. I’m the sister. I’m Liz Cameron.”

“Where’s Annie?”

“I haven’t the foggiest. Last I saw her, this morning, she was headed to the library.”

He nodded. “The library. Yeah. I met her there. At about two o’clock. We had lunch and then we came here. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“You don’t know where she was going?”

He was still groggy from sleep, and he needed a minute to get clear. Then he remembered. How was he to tell Liz that her sister was off—on her own—to rescue a kidnapped horse from some very dangerous criminals? There was nothing she could do—and he figured she might freak.

So he punted.

“Has it stopped raining?”

“It has now. I got caught in it. On that tour boat that goes around Manhattan. Too bad Annie didn’t get to go. It was a great view of the whole island. And it was kind of pretty, being on the water in the rain.”

Bart was not really listening. He was fully awake now and his priorities were getting sorted out. Number one, he needed to find Annie before she got herself into something she couldn’t handle.

He raked his hands through his hair again and made a pass at straightening his jacket.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ll give you my cell phone number. If Annie calls—”

And just then, as if on cue, his phone rang. They both smiled at the coincidence, and he pulled it out of his pocket.

But it wasn’t Annie. It was Max, at headquarters.

“Bart. You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. What’s up? Is there any news?”

“Where’s that girlfriend of yours?”

Bart frowned. He didn’t like the sound of that.

“She’s not my girlfriend. Not really.” He made a face at Liz, embarrassed. “And I don’t know where she is.”

“Yeah. Well, whatever she is, you better find her. We’ve had a message from that crowd that took Lindy.”

Bart looked at Liz. He didn’t want her overhearing this conversation. He walked into the bedroom with the phone and closed the door behind him.

“What is it, Max? What’s the message?” Now he really was fully awake.

“A kid brought it into the precinct. He said some fat guy on the street gave him a buck to deliver it. Wait a minute. I’ll read it to you.” There was a pause. Then Max read, “You have our leader. We have your horse. If you do not release our leader, the pretty blond lady with Sergeant Hardin will be next.”

Bart sat down on the bed. He’d felt a blow right to his chest.

“You there, Bart?”

“Yeah. I’m here.” He was taking a couple of deep breaths. “That’s all it said?”

“That’s it. We have forensics on the note now. You better get back here so we can put together some information on this girl. What’s her name?”

“Annie. Annika. Annika Cornell.” He felt the words strangling in his throat. “It’ll take me maybe ten minutes. I’ll be right there.” He never heard Max’s answer. He was already on his way to the door.

“That was headquarters,” he said, keeping his voice as neutral as possible. “If Annie calls, tell her to call me. Right away. It’s really important. Here’s my number.” He was jotting it onto a notepad. “And call me if you hear from her. Please!”

He’d hoped to keep the alarm out of his voice, but Liz knew something was up. As the door closed behind him, Liz thought, Oh, Annie. What have you gotten yourself into now?

Riding down to the lobby, Bart was convinced he was trapped in the only slow motion elevator in New York. People got on. People got off. It was forever before he reached the street level. And across town, as he sped his motorcycle in and out of the evening’s rush hour traffic, he was thinking, Oh, God! Don’t let them get to her. Don’t let them hurt her.

And also, Annie, you damned fool!

 

But Annie was no fool. She knew just what she was doing. She was looking for a horse and she was thinking like a horse person. The place to start would be at Troop B headquarters down by the river, where Lindy left the building, so that’s where she was. Not easy, she thought, to track a horse in this terrain. All pavement and concrete, no trees to show a broken twig, no brush for a thread of fabric or a strand of horsehair to catch on, and so much traffic—pedestrian and vehicular—any trail would be obliterated by now. But still, she’d had a look at those protesters the other day, and they looked pretty dimwitted to her. She suspected their plan must be fairly simple. Maybe, if she could think simple-minded, she could pick up something.

The news report had said the rider went out of the stables and up Twelfth Avenue. So she looked up the avenue.

She started to walk along the route the rider must have taken.

Across the avenue, a convention center stretched for several long blocks. Its blank rear wall ran along the opposite side of the avenue and cast a long shadow over the street. Annie crossed over at the intersection—just as Lindy’s kidnapper must have done—and continued walking under the cover of that shadow. A rider—or someone leading a horse—would not be easily observed. But he’d also want to get off this broad thoroughfare as quickly as possible. He’d want to turn into the first available side street off the avenue, and when Annie reached it, she knew in her bones the ransomer would have turned up this street, the first one that would have taken him away from any observer. She saw immediately that her intuition had led her in the right direction. This was neither a residential nor a shopping area, nothing to keep things active after business hours. Not surprisingly, in this out-of-the-way part of the city, at the waterfront, there were only warehouses and parking lots, a large storage rental building, a couple of empty construction sites—a busy scene during the day with workmen coming and going, operating track hoes and graders, raising great cranes high into the sky, food carts on the streets and office trailers on the job site. But after five, after business hours, all would be shuttered for the night. These streets would be deserted.

She picked her way along the edge of one of the building sites. Scaffolding extended over her head, out beyond the sidewalk, and under her feet, concrete slabs had been torn up, exposing raw, clayey earth beneath. The rain last night had turned it muddy. And there, as though to confirm her intuition (her horse sense?) under the shadow of protective scaffolding above, on a path not conducive to ordinary pedestrian use, she spotted unmistakable imprints of a horse’s hooves. She smiled to herself. She recognized the print of the high-traction shoes made especially for the NYPD horses. But that trail of hoofprints was not made by a police horse on his daily patrol. No legitimate rider would have taken his horse across this stretch of torn-up, unstable, irregular sidewalk. Only someone keeping to the shadows would have brought a horse through here. And by the spacing between the imprints, she knew she’d been right. The horse was keeping to a slow walk. Staying unobtrusive.

Some thirty feet farther along, scaffolding jutted out across the street, low enough that if the kidnapper had been riding, he’d have been forced to climb down from Lindy’s back and walk. Like all of the scaffolding Annie had seen in the city, this looked as if it had been rather hastily assembled. There were bolts and crossbeams and protuberances aplenty, and there, sure enough, Annie found the telltale bit of light brown horsehair looped around an exposed bolt. A couple of strands of Lindy’s tail.

“Thank you, Lindy,” she said to herself. “Were you deliberately leaving a trail? Could you be that smart?” She laughed to herself at the idea.

She’d known horses that seemed pretty smart. Horses that knew how to get you off their backs if they didn’t want to be ridden. Horses that seemed sensitive to all sorts of human stuff, like music, and perfumes, even people’s moods. Horses that understood what you wanted as soon as you showed them. Some horses could learn any trick you tried to teach them. Look at how easily Lindy had learned the Cowboy Joe song. And there were the dumb ones, too. Horses that never seemed to figure out what they were supposed to be doing. Horses so dumb they could make you crazy, wasting your time while you tried to teach them stuff.

But Lindy was definitely one of the smart ones. She figured he couldn’t be a police horse if he wasn’t. So maybe he really was helping her to find him.

With her cell phone camera, she began to record the evidence of a horse’s passing along this street, a horse that most likely was Lindy. The shadows were beginning to lengthen as the sun moved closer to New Jersey across the river, and she didn’t want to lose the available light. Those hoofprints in the damp earth and the bits of hair in the scaffolding might well be obliterated by morning, and it would be useful to have photos of them.

When she was done taking pictures, she decided to take a break, think things through, try to come up with a creative idea. At a street cart at the corner, she bought a coffee and a donut, and studied the terrain again, trying to imagine herself into the kidnappers’ heads. Nothing helpful presented itself. She was at a broad intersection, where the side street met a wide avenue. Little storefronts, seedy looking tenement buildings, a couple of corner diners, a small grocery store with banks of fruit and flowers along its front—this was a neighborhood far from the glamor she’d been treated to since her arrival, a part of the city the tourists never see. Down the street, a couple of young men, ragged looking, lounged in a doorway. A homeless man dug for empty cans in a waste bin. At the corner, an older man eyed her up and down, his gaze resting on her face. She turned away and concentrated on her coffee. She wondered if she was safe.

Bart wouldn’t want her to be here. For sure. There were plenty of people around. She was probably safe, she decided. For the time being.

She finished her coffee. She brushed the crumbs of her doughnut off her fingers and crossed the avenue. She considered checking in with Liz, but decided Liz would only worry about her. Instead, she spent the next half hour crisscrossing the streets of the neighborhood, up and down the avenues, and back and forth along the side streets. She wasn’t turning up anything new, and the neighborhood was getting increasingly seedy. Her bravery was beginning to wear thin and she began to think she was very much alone in a city she didn’t know at all.

 

“My God, Hardin! What happened to you?” Captain Simon looked up from the file of papers spread out on his desk as Bart opened the door to the office. “I thought I sent you home to clean up. You’re a mess!”

Bart rubbed his hand over his jaw. The morning’s stubble was turning into a beard.

“Yeah. I guess. Sorry about that, sir.”

“I’m not going to have my men walking around like that, out in public. After I fill you in on what’s happening here, I want you to go upstairs and get cleaned up. Shave. And get into uniform.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’re going to have to find that girl and get her in here.”

“Can I see that note?”

It had been placed in a plastic sheet protector to preserve it as evidence. The captain handed it over and Bart confirmed that the handwriting matched the earlier note.

“They must have been following us. I don’t like it, sir. She’s out there somewhere, looking for Lindy. She thinks he’s somewhere nearby.” He was a lot more worried than he’d let the captain see.

“I don’t know why she’d think that. We’ve had sightings as far away as Yonkers. We have all units alerted—all units within a forty-mile radius. And now, just what we need,” his face registered his irritation, “is some amateur civilian sleuth getting in our way.” He opened the file in front of him. “Of course, those sightings we’ve had can be pretty unreliable.” He flipped through reports in the file. “We’ve also had reports coming in from all over the map, from Hyde Park upstate and Kingston across the river and from Setauket out on the Island and Englewood in New Jersey. Guy on a horse. Two guys on a horse. A guy and a girl on a horse.” He waved a paper at Bart. “This one is two guys on a camel.” He took back the note from Bart and added it to a file. “You need to be in touch with her, Bart. Get ahold of her—call her—find out where she is and we’ll send someone out to bring her in. We need to put some protection on her.”

“I’m calling her now,” Bart said. “But I’d like to be the one to get her. I don’t like her being out there somewhere, unprotected. I’d feel better if I were with her.”

“Can you shower, shave, and change in fifteen minutes?”

“Yes, sir! And thank you, sir!”

“Close the door behind you.”

And Bart was taking the stairs two at a time, phone in hand, trying to reach Annie.

Five o’clock had come and gone and the streets were turning quieter as offices emptied and people headed for home. With activity all around her, she was stopped in her tracks, feeling lost and trying to decide on a next move. Annie was beginning to understand how people could feel very much alone in the midst of the multitudes.

Her cell phone rang, and she felt a wash of relief when she saw it was Bart calling.

“Where are you?”

“I’m hunting for your horse.”

“Oh, that’s just fine.” His sarcasm—and irritation—were clear, even over the phone. “I need to know where you are.”

His bossiness got her back up. “Oh, you are, are you? Young Lochinvar, riding out of the west to rescue me again?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I need to know where you are.”

“Lochinvar. It’s a poem. Look it up. In the meantime, it’s your horse I’m looking for. You could at least say thank you.”

“Annie, don’t mess with me. You may be in danger and—”

With a glance around her, she realized he could be right. There were plenty of unsavory looking types all around. “I think I’m just fine,” she added stubbornly, “and I don’t think I need saving.”

“I want you to stay right where you are. Just tell me—”

“You could at least say please.”

“Jesus Christ, Annie. You’re impossible!”

“If you’re going to yell at me, I’m not going to tell you anything.”

“Annie! Stop it right now! Lindy is miles away from here by now. We’ve got reports of sightings as far north as Yonkers and New Rochelle. So just tell me where you are.”

She knew she was being childish, so she gave in and read the address of the nearest shop. “In front of a pawn broker.”

“Don’t move. And don’t talk to anyone. I’ll be right there.”

Mentally, she gave him a snappy salute.

“Did you hear me, Annie? Don’t talk to anyone! I’m taking a squad car. I’ll be right there.”

“I heard you. I won’t move.”