Page 99 of Nightshade

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?”