Page 33 of Nightshade

AS THE SUN set on Friday, Corum and his team of investigators piled into two helicopters and flew back to the mainland. The reporters had left earlier, as had the body of Henry Gaston, which was escorted across the Santa Monica Bay by a sheriff’s boat, offloaded, and taken to the coroner’s office for autopsy. The hit man Merris Spivak remained at large and it was a coin flip as to whether he had somehow gotten off the island or was still in Avalon or in the mountains hiding. Stilwell had no opinion. His attention was on how to make a case against the man who he believed had brought Spivak to the island with the purpose of killing Gaston.

Stilwell had been awake for thirty-eight hours by the time he got home. He had expected Tash Dano to be waiting for him, but the house was dark. She had not responded to his earlier texts about plans for the evening or to his heads-up that he was on his way home. The truth was that he was too tired to eat or discuss his day. He wanted to sleep. He called her, but when it went straight to voicemail, he was relieved—he was too exhausted even to engage in a basic phone conversation.

“Hey, Tash,” he said. “I’m home and I’m beat. I’m going to crawl into bed and sleep for about ten hours. Come on by if you want, but I can’t promise that I’ll be good company. Love you.”

He disconnected, wondering if his utter exhaustion had lowered his defenses enough to say the last two words of the message. He had never said those words to her before and wondered what her reaction would be.

About a month earlier, they had reached a point in their relationship where they had agreed to let each other track the location of the other’s phone. Tash had suggested this, admitting that she felt slightly insecure about being involved with a man who often left the island for work-related trips or to deal with the final dissolution of property and emotions from his marriage. Stilwell understood this and agreed to the mutual tracking. It seemed to him a modern addition to the steps of a deepening relationship, even though he felt no personal need to always know where his lover was. But now, for the first time, he attempted to track Tash.

He opened up her contact on his phone and thumbed the photo he had assigned to her number, and it opened up to her details and a map. The map showed her at the Buffalo Nickel, a bar that was out near the desal plant in the industrial section of the island. The bar was a locals’ hangout away from the tourist sector—he had been there with her at least twice—and he was not surprised that she had gone there after work on a Friday evening. But under the map it said the location was more than two hours old. It would normally say Live under the map if it was a current location, so she must have turned her phone off, and that was puzzling.

Stilwell realized he was stumbling into the same insecurity trap that Tash had fallen into and that modern technology only served to heighten. Again, he ascribed it to his exhaustion and tried to dismiss it. He plugged his phone into the charger on the bedside table, set an alarm for seven the next morning, stripped off his clothes, and got into bed. Within five minutes he was asleep.

An hour later he was awakened by the phone. He checked the screen and saw it was Tash calling him. He hoped she wasn’t going to try to entice him to come out to the Buffalo Nickel. He tried to answer with a cheery voice.

“Hey, you still at the Nickel? You get my message?”

There was no response.

“Tash?”

“So you love her, huh?”

It was a male voice that was muffled in some way. Stilwell didn’t recognize it. It had a sneering tone to it.

“Who is this?”

“It doesn’t matter who it is. What matters is what you’re going to do to save the girl you love.”

“Put Tash on the phone.”

“Can’t do that.”

“Where is she? What is this?”

“You have something we want.”

“What are you talking about? I don’t—”

“The tool. We want the tool.”

The fog of exhaustion cleared and he suddenly knew what was going on.

“The saw handle? I don’t have it. It went to the lab in L.A.”

“Don’t lie to me, Stilwell. You lie, and Natasha is never seen again.”

The formal use of Tash’s name somehow underlined the seriousness of the call. This man had her and had read her name off a credit card or some document. Tash didn’t have a driver’s license because she never drove anything but a golf cart or a boat.

Stilwell stood up and started pacing to keep the panic out of his voice. “Okay. What do you want me to do?”

“We want you to get the tool out of the evidence safe and destroy it.”

Stilwell thought he recognized the voice now. Merris Spivak. His neurons were firing and he broke out in a cold sweat. The image of Henry Gaston with his neck gaping open rushed into his brain.

“Listen to me, Spivak. You hurt her and I will hunt you down to the ends of the earth.”

“Don’t threaten me. This is simply business. A trade. We have a camera set up at the boat ramp. You go there with the tool and we watch you. There’s a trash barrel there. You leave it in the barrel and go away. After that, you get your girl back—in one piece. You fuck with us, then it will be two pieces. I don’t know, maybe three or four.”

Stilwell knew the boat ramp was part of the Catalina Boat Yard in the industrial sector, behind the Buffalo Nickel and not far from Baby Head Terranova’s cart barn.

He suddenly realized that Spivak had turned Tash’s phone on to call him. Using her phone guaranteed that Stilwell would answer. Stilwell put his phone on speaker and as he talked, he opened Tash’s contact to track her phone’s location.

“All right,” he said. “I need to talk to her first. I’m not doing this without proof of life. You understand me?”

“You want proof of life, you’ll get proof of life,” Spivak said.

The phone showed her location on the point behind the desal plant.

Stilwell heard a rustling sound and then his name. He knew it was Tash’s voice. Her next words were muffled by a gag or a hand over her mouth. Spivak came back on the phone.

“There’s your proof of life,” he said. “Now, do we have a deal or should I do some work here?”

“I want to talk to her,” Stilwell said.

“Impossible.”

“That could have been a recording and she could already be dead. I want to talk to her.”

“Fine.”

He heard rustling again and an off-phone instruction from Spivak: “Answer yes or no only. Say anything else and you get hurt.”

He returned to the phone.

“Okay, Detective, talk,” Spivak said. “You have ten seconds.”

“Tash, you okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” Tash said, her voice strained with fright.

“You trust me?” Stilwell asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“I’m going to get you home. I promise.”

“Yes,” she said.

Then it was Spivak back on the phone.

“The boat ramp,” he said. “If I don’t see you on the camera within an hour, she’s a goner, man.”

“I’ll be there,” Stilwell said.

The line went dead. Stilwell looked down at his phone, went to the Settings menu, and stopped sharing his location with Tash’s phone. He didn’t want Spivak to know when or how he would be coming for him.