Back Spin (1997) (3 page)

"Yes," she said.

"Where is it?"

"Up in his room."

"I'm going to download everything on it to my office via his modem. I have an assistant named Esperanza.

She'll comb through it and see what she can find-"

' 'Like what'?"

"Frankly I have no idea. E-mails. Correspondence.

Bulletin boards he participates in. Anything that might give us a clue. It's not a very scientific process. You check out enough stuff and maybe something will click."

Linda thought about it for a moment. ' 'Okay,' ' she said.

' 'How about you, Mrs. Coldren? Do you have any enemies'?"

She sort of smiled. ' 'I'm the number one rated woman golfer in the world," she said. ' 'That gives me a lot of enemies."

' 'Anyone you can imagine doing this'?' '

"No," she said. "No one."

' 'How about your husband? Anybody who hates your husband enough'?' '

' 'Jack'?' ' She forced out a chuckle. "Everyone loves Jack.' '

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She just shook her head and waved him off Myron asked a few more questions, but there was little left for him to excavate. He asked if he could go up to Chad's room and she led him up the stairs.

The first thing Myron saw when he opened Chad's door were the trophies. Lots of them. All golf trophies.

The bronze figure on the top was always a man coiled in postswing position, the golf club over his shoulder, his head held high. Sometimes the little man wore a golf cap.

Other times he had short, wavy hair like Paul Hornning in old football reels. There were two leather golf bags in the right corner, both jammed past capacity with clubs. Photographs of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, Tom Watson blanketed the walls. Issues of Golf Digest littered the floor.

"Does Chad play golf?" Myron asked.

Linda Coldren just looked at him. Myron met her gaze and nodded sagely.

"My powers of deduction," he said. ' 'They intimidate some people."

She almost smiled. Myron the Alleviator, Master Tension-Easer. "I'll try to still treat you the same," she said.

Myron stepped toward the trophies. "Is he any good?"

"Very good." She turned away suddenly and stood '

with her back to the room. "Do you need anything else?' '

"Not right now."

"I'll be downstairs."

She didn't wait for his blessing.

Myron walked in. He checked the answering machine on Chad's phone. Three messages. Two from a girl named Becky. From the sound of it, she was a pretty good friend.

Just calling to say, like, hi, see if he wanted to, like, do anything this weekend, you know? She and Millie and Suze were going to, like, hang out at the Heritage, okay, and if he wanted to come, well, you know, whatever. Myron smiled. Times they might be a changin', but her words could have come from a girl Myron had gone to high school with or his father or his father's father. Generations cycle in. The music, the movies, the language, the fashion they change. But that's just outside stimuli.

Beneath the baggy pants or the message-cropped hair, the same adolescent fears and needs and feelings of inadequacy remained frighteningly constant.

The last call was from a guy named Glen. He wanted to know if Chad wanted to play golf at "the Pine" this weekend, being that Merion was off-limits because of the Open. "Daddy," Glen's preppy taped voice assured Chad, "can get us a tee time, no prob."

No messages from Chad's close buddy Matthew Squires. .

He snapped on the computer. Windows 95. Cool. Myron used it too. Chad Coldren, Myron immediately saw, used America Online to get his E-mail. Perfect. Myron hit FLASHSESSION. The modem hooked on and screeched for a few seconds. A voice said, "Welcome. You have mail."

Dozens of messages were automatically downloaded. The . same voice said, "Good-bye." Myron checked Chad's E-mail address book and found Matthew Squires's E-mail address. He skimmed the downloaded messages. None were from Matthew.

Interesting.

It was, of course, entirely possible that Matthew and Chad were not as close as Linda Coldren thought. lt was also entirely possible that even if they were, Matthew had not contacted his friend since Wednesday even though his friend had supposedly vanished without waning. It happens.

Still, it was interesting.

Myron picked up Chad's phone and hit the redial button. Four rings later a taped voice came on. "You've reached Matthew. Leave a message or don't. Up to you."

Myron hung up without leaving a message (it was, after all, "up to him"). Hmm. Chad's last call was to Matthew. That could be significant. Or it could have nothing to do with anything. Either way, Myron was quickly getting nowhere.

He picked up Chad's phone and dialed his office. Esperanza answered on the second ring.

"MB SportsReps."

"lt's me." He filled her in. She listened without interrupting.

Esperanza Diaz had worked for MB SportReps since its inception. Ten years ago, when Esperanza was only _

eighteen years old, she was the Queen of Sunday Morning Cable TV. No, she wasn't on any infomercial, though her show ran opposite plenty of them, especially that one with the abdominal exerciser that bore a striking resemblance to a medieval instrument of torture; rather, Esperanza had been a professional wrestler named Little Pocahontas, the Sensual Indian Princess. With her petite, lithe figure bedecked in only a suede bikini, Esperanza had been voted s FLOW's (Fabulous Ladies Of Wrestling) most popular wrestler three years running or, as the award was officially known, the Babe You'd Most Like to Get in a Full Nelson. Despite this, Esperanza remained humble.

When he finished telling her about the kidnapping, _

Esperanza's first words were an incredulous, "Win has a mother?"

"Yep."

Pause. "There goes my spawned-from-a-satanic-egg theory."

"Ha+ha." +

"Or my hatched-in-an-experiment-gone-very-wrong theory."

"You're not helping."

"What's to help?" Esperanza replied. "I like Win, you know that. But the boy is what's the official psychiatric term again? cuckoo."

"That cuckoo saved your life once," Myron said.

"Yeah, but you remember how," she countered.

Myron did. A dark alley. Win's doctored bullets.

Brain matter tossed about like parade confetti. Classic Win. Effective but excessive. Like squashing a bug with a wrecking ball.

Esperanza broke the long silence. "Like I said before," she began softly, "cuckoo."

Myron wanted to change the subject. "Any messages?"

"About a million. Nothing that can't wait, though."

Then she asked, "Have you ever met her?"

"Who?"

"Madonna," she snapped.- "Who do you think?

Win's mother."

"Once," Myron said, remembering. More than ten years ago. He and Win had been having dinner at Merion, in fact. Win hadn't spoken to her on that occasion. But she had spoken to him. The memory made Myron cringe anew.

"Have you told Win about this yet?" she asked.

"Nope. Any advice?"

Esperanza thought a moment. ' 'Do it over the phone,' '

she said. "At a very safe distance."

Chapter
3

They got a quick break.

Myron was still sitting in the Coldrens' den with Linda when Esperanza called back. Bucky had gone back to Merion to get Jack.

"The kid's ATM card was accessed yesterday at 6: 18

P. M.," Esperanza said. "He took out $180. A First Phila- (

delphia branch on Porter Street in South Philly."

"Thanks."

Information like that was not difficult to obtain. Any

body with an account number could pretty much do it with a phone by pretending they were the account holder.

Even without one, any semi human who had ever worked in law enforcement had the contacts or the access numbers or at least the wherewithal to pay off the right person.

It didn't take much anymore, not with today's overabundance of user-friendly technology. Technology did more than depersonalize; it ripped your life wide open, gutted you, stripped away any pretense of privacy.

A few keystrokes revealed all.

"What is it?" Linda Coldren asked.

He told her.

"It doesn't necessarily mean what you think," she said. "The kidnapper could have gotten the PIN number from Chad."

"Could have," Myron said.

"But you don't believe it, do you?"

He shrugged. "Let's just say I'm more than a little skeptical."

"Why?"

"The amount, for one thing. What was Chad's max?"

"Five hundred dollars a day."

"So why would a kidnapper only take $l80?"

Linda Coldren thought a moment. "If he took too much, someone might get suspicious."

Myron sort of frowned. "But if the kidnapper was that careful," he began, "why risk so much for $l80?

Everyone knows that ATMs are equipped with security cameras. Everyone also knows that even the simplest computer check can yield a location."

She looked at him evenly. "You don't think my son is in danger."

"I didn't say that, This whole thing may look like one thing and be another. You were right before. It's safest to . assume that the kidnapping is real."

"So what's your next step?"

"I'm not sure. The ATM machine was on Porter Street in South Philadelphia. Is that someplace Chad likes to hang out?"

"No," Linda Coldren said slowly. "In fact, it's a place I would never imagine him going."

"Why do you say that?"

"It's a dive. One of the sleaziest parts of the city."

Myron stood. "You got a street map?"

"In my glove compartment?

"Good. I'll' need to borrow your car for a little while."

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going to drive around this ATM."

She frowned. "What for?" '

"I don't know," Myron admitted. "Like I said before, investigating is not very scientific. You do some legwork and you push some buttons and you hope something happens."

Linda Coldren reached into a pocket for her keys.

"Maybe the kidnappers grabbed him there," she said.

"Maybe you'll see his car or something."

Myron almost slapped himself in the head. A car. He had forgotten something so basic. In his mind, a kid disappearing on his way to or from school conjured up images of yellow buses or strolling sprightly with a book bag. How could he have missed something as obvious as a car trace?

He asked her the make and model. Gray Honda Accord. Hardly a car that stands out in a crowd. Pennsylvania license plate 567-AHJ. He called it in to Esperanza.

Then he gave Linda Coldren his cellular phone number.

"Call me if anything happens."

"Okay."

"I'll be back soon," he said.

The ride wasn't far. He traveled, it seemed, from green splendor to concrete crap instantaneously like on Star Trek where they step through one of those time portals.

The ATM was a drive-through located in what would l generously be labeled a business district. Tons of cameras. No human tellers. Would a kidnapper really risk , this? Very doubtful. Myron wondered where he could get a copy of the bank's videotape without alerting the police.

Win might know somebody. Financial institutions were usually anxious to cooperate with the Lockwood family.

The question was, would Win be willing to cooperate?

Abandoned warehouses or at least, they looked abandoned lined the road. Eighteen-wheelers hurried by like something out of an old convoy movie. They reminded Myron of the CB craze from his childhood. Like everyone else, his dad had bought one a man born in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn who grew up to own an undergarment factory in Newark, barking "breaker one nine" with an accent he had picked up watching the movie Deliverance. Dad would be driving on Hobart Gap Road between their house and the Livingston Mallmaybe a one-mile drive asking his "good buddies" if there was any sign of "smokeys." Myron smiled at the memory. Ah, CBs. He was sure that his father still had his , someplace. Probably next to the eight-track player.

On one side of the ATM was a gas station so generic that it didn't even bother having a name. Rusted cars stood upon crumbling cinder blocks. On the other side, a dirt-bag, no-tell motel called the Court Manor Inn greeted customers with green lettering that read: $19.99 PER

HOUR.

Myron Bolitar Traveling Tip #83: You may not be dealing with a live star deluxe property when they prominently advertise hourly rates.

Under the price, in smaller black print, the sign read, MIRRORED CEILINGS AND THEME R0OMs SLIGHTLY EXTRA.