The Recruiter (A Thriller) Read online

  Samuel pulls the car forward and parks just past the cabin, the car’s trunk a good ten yards from the side door of the cabin. He shuts the car off and turns to Beth. “Welcome to the Bear’s Den,” he says, and gestures at the small sign above the front door. The words “Bear’s Den” are roughly carved into the wooden sign.

  She puts her hands on Samuel’s face, pulls him to her, and kisses him. “It’s absolutely beautiful,” she says. They both get out of the car, and Beth breathes deeply, the strong scent of trees and the lake combine like potpourri. She stretches, overcome with good feelings and a concept very strange to her: the feeling of peace and harmony.

  “Why don’t you take a walk around while I unload?” Samuel says.

  “Why don’t I help you first?”

  “No, really. Take a walk,” he says. She hesitates at the sound of his voice. It seems a little…sharp. Beth looks at him, and as their eyes meet, Samuel’s expression immediately softens. He smiles at her, and Beth says, “Okay. I’ll take a walk.”

  Although her offer to help unload the car was sincere, the truth is, she can’t wait to look around. See the water. The woods. The inside of the cabin.

  And she can’t wait to make love to Samuel.

  Now she walks around the front of the cabin to the water’s edge. She scans the horizon, the green bluffs surrounding the lake seeming to serve as a border for a beautiful work of art. Out in the middle of the lake, a lone loon calls out to her.

  Beth turns from the water and takes in the old stone hearth sitting halfway between the front of the cabin and the edge of the lake, the old dock sticking out into the water, its metal wheels half-buried in the water. There’s a ring of stones for bonfires. And the smell of the lake—fishy, pungent, and cool.

  She steps onto the dock and looks over the side. A small school of fish swim out from beneath her, startled by the sound of the wood creaking under her footsteps.

  She walks to the end of the dock and looks into the water. It’s clear and much deeper here, the tops of weeds a few feet below the surface. Beth scans the surrounding shores and sees a few cottages here and there. But it seems sparsely populated to her. Very private. Very romantic.

  Beth walks back toward the cabin, and she hears Samuel close the trunk of the car. On the ground near the cabin’s side door are a few bags of groceries, a twelve pack of beer, and several bottles of wine. She scoops up the groceries and one bottle of wine and heads inside.

  Immediately, the faint smell of wood smoke hits her, and she sees that Samuel has already touched a match to the logs in the fireplace.

  “Always have a fire ready when you leave; that way, you don’t have to scrounge for wood right away,” Samuel says. “Especially important when it’s cold and you want to heat things up right away.”

  Beth sets the bags of groceries on the countertop and looks around the cabin. It’s small, but tidy. The main room holds the stone fireplace and some old, faded furniture. The floor is made of oak planks, and a bearskin rug is in the front of the fireplace. A door to the left of the fireplace leads to a small bedroom and bathroom.

  A small kitchen area holds an old gas stove, an old refrigerator, and a sink.

  Samuel comes to the kitchen and helps Beth put away the groceries. Beth takes his hand and leads him to the bear skin rug in front of the fireplace. She has slipped off her shoes and feels the warmth from the fire on the rug. She sheds her clothes, and the pale sunlight washes her skin in a light glow.

  “Make love to me,” she says.

  He does.

  Eighty-Eight

  Her breath comes in ragged gasps. To an impartial observer, it sounds more like sobs. But the breath comes. The oxygen comes. It trickles into her lungs, and her nerves respond. She opens her eyes. She becomes conscious.

  And she realizes where she is.

  In the trunk.

  With that realization, other things come back to her. The vague memory, muted by the whiskey, of her confronting Ackerman. Of him punching her. Knocking her down.

  And then it had all gone black.

  Now, the memories bring the pain. Her jaw is on fire. Shafts of pain shoot through her mouth and face. She can feel without touching that the whole bottom of her face is swollen and inflamed.

  Her body hurts as well. Her ribs. Her back. There, the pain is less intense, but its sheer pervasiveness shocks her and leaves her gasping for even more air.

  She struggles to move but finds that she can’t. Her arms are bound. Her hands are taped behind her back. In the pitch blackness of the trunk, she can’t see anything. But the bindings on her hands don’t feel like rope. She shifts her weight and feels the texture on her skin.

  It’s tape.

  Does he intend to kill her? She struggles to come to grips with it. Murder? Is he really going to kill her to get Beth to sign up for the Navy?

  She doesn’t know a thing about him.

  But if he would do this to her, Anna can easily imagine what he will do to Beth.

  Suddenly, she’s paralyzed with fear. Where has he taken her? What is he going to do to her? Think, Anna. Think.

  First off, where is she?

  In her driveway? No. There’s no sound of traffic.

  Is she parked somewhere? In a parking garage?

  No, she can smell wood smoke. The old-fashioned kind. Like from a fireplace.

  So she’s not in the city. She’s out somewhere, rural. And probably near a cabin.

  She’s up north somewhere.

  And then she realizes: Ackerman has a cabin up north.

  He’s brought her here to get rid of her.

  To bury her in the woods.

  She moans, a half cry/half scream, and panics. She thrashes, pulling and pushing her arms, kicking her feet against the side of the car. She keeps at it, thrusting her head forward and back. But it’s no use. The exercise leaves her breathless, covered in sweat, and racked with pain.

  She waits a moment to catch her breath.

  The tears come then. Hot and furious, streaming down her face. Oh God, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die. Not here. Not now.

  Not with Beth out there, unprotected and vulnerable. Open to this psychopath.

  The image of Vince floats before her. She sees his eyes, so calm and so beautiful, the day he left for military duty. She remembers how he looked, climbing into the car with three friends, throwing his duffel bag in the trunk. So young. So proud. So strong.

  At the memory, Anna’s heart skips a beat, and she clenches her hand.

  And something strange happens.

  She feels something cutting into the skin of her arm. She manages to move it down to her hand.

  Anna knows what it is.

  A bottle cap.

  For a brief moment of absolute clarity, she knows what she has to do.

  Kicking and making noise isn’t going to do any good. There’s probably no one here but Ackerman.

  Second, kicking the trunk door open, even if it is possible, which it probably isn’t, will not really do anything.

  So first things first.

  Get your hands free.

  She works the bottle cap from her palm to her fingers, praying to God that she won’t drop it.

  She feels the sharp edge on her fingertip and quickly presses it against the widest part of the tape holding her hands together. She pushes the bottle cap down.

  And then she runs it back.

  Back and forth.

  And slowly, Anna Fischer develops a plan.

  Eighty-Nine

  Property searches sound easier than they actually are. You would think it could be accomplished by entering the subject’s name, hitting a keystroke or two, and up on the screen would pop a few addresses.

  But Esposito knows the truth about property searches: they’re a giant pain in the ass.

  It took him nearly two hours to get the fucking thing in motion. And now, sitting at his desk, he can only wait. Wait for the city assessor to look up the information tha
t he, Esposito, had to receive authorization for from a judge. Goddamnit, the wheels of justice grind not just slowly; sometimes they positively become entrenched. He looks at the papers on his desk. Folders, case notes, all waiting for him to slog through it all.

  He looks at his cell phone.

  Somewhere, Ackerman has a young girl who probably has no idea the type of guy she’s with.

  The bad feeling in Esposito’s gut is mutating and growing.

  He looks at the phone again.

  Ring, goddammit. Ring.

  Ninety

  The fantasy momentarily soothes Samuel. It is a gauzy, filmy dream in which all sins are forgiven, in which his past is clear of violence, clear of slit throats and women hanging from ceiling fans. It is a blissfully uneventful past, leading to a wondrous, fulfilling future.

  In the fantasy, he and Beth are married. They make love long into the night. In the morning, they sleep in, eventually sharing a pot of good coffee and even better bagels for a late breakfast. Maybe a couple years down the road, they’re up all night taking care of the baby.

  Samuel can almost picture himself a father.

  The thought frightens him initially. The nightmare images of his own childhood, of his father’s flushed, insane eyes come at him, and he lapses into a fear of what would happen if he would become his father. But the fear passes. He thinks, fools himself into believing anyway, that he wouldn’t make the same mistakes, be the same monster his own father was.

  He nearly laughs out loud.

  The hypocrisy of it all.

  “Beth?” he asks.

  They have moved from the rug in front of the fireplace to the bedroom. Samuel has no idea what time it is. They’ve made love…how many times Samuel doesn’t know. He’s lost track.

  Beth, half asleep with her right arm and leg draped over his body, murmurs into her pillow.

  “What are you planning on doing, Beth?” he asks.

  She rolls over onto her back and opens her eyes.

  “About what?” she asks, yawning in the process.

  “About the phone call. From the basketball coach.”

  Please let her give the right answer, he thinks. Instead, she sits up in bed and asks him, “Do you want something to drink?”

  She gets out of bed, throws on shorts and a T-shirt, and pads into the kitchen.

  Samuel does the same, and he takes a seat across from her at the counter. She pours a beer into a glass and hands it to him. She opens another beer and takes a sip straight from the bottle.

  “We have to talk about this, don’t we?” she asks.

  He nods silently.

  She takes a long drink, and when she puts the beer can back on the counter, she looks into his eyes.

  “I’m not going into the Navy.”

  He says nothing. The words reverberate in his head, and a cold wave washes over his body. The feeling makes his head spin, and his eyes seem to burn back at Beth. He can feel the frustration threaten to implode.

  “Are you all right, Samuel?” she asks him, concern on her face.

  He can’t even muster a response.

  “It’s just that, after my injury, I never thought I’d play ball again. Never thought I’d go to college. Never thought any of my dreams would come true. And when I was faced with that,” she holds her hands out, “I just had to get out. Any way to get out. But back then, I didn’t have a choice. Now I do.”

  She walks around the end of the counter and puts her arms around Samuel. “It’s so weird. I went from having a shitty future, from having none of my dreams come true, to all of a sudden having two of them come true. Basketball. And you.”

  She kisses him, and he feels the warmth of her lips, feels the moisture from her eyes on his cheek. She’s crying. She loves him.

  But he won’t accept it.

  He won’t accept that everything he’s worked for, all of his dreams, are crashing to the ground. Like a shithouse going up in flames. Goddammit. Everything he’s worked so hard at, all of his plans, his energy, his ideas. All for naught.

  The fury sweeps over him, and he puts his arms around her. Beth snuggles in closer to him.

  He hugs her to him, and she tells him, “I love you, Samuel. I love you with all my heart.”

  He hugs her tighter. Can feel the bones in her rib cage protecting her. He squeezes harder.

  “Okay, Samuel,” she says and pushes away from him, but he pulls her tighter. “Ow, I can’t breathe,” she says, pushing even harder. But he keeps his face buried against her chest. He grits his teeth, a red mask of fury suffocating his brain, and all he wants to do is kill. He wants to rip apart everything and everyone whoever got in his way. The pain in his head is phenomenal, and he cries out in pain.

  Keeping one arm around her, he lifts his other arm up and encircles her throat, clamping her like a vise grip, cutting off her air flow.

  She struggles harder, pushing and kicking, but he easily lifts her off the ground.

  She’s dying in his arms.

  And then a brighter, more intense pain explodes in his head. He can actually see colors, like a rainbow before him. The nerves in his arms become numb, and Beth squirts out from his arms.

  He falls off the chair, stunned, landing on the oak floor with a thud that sends shooting pains the other way up his arm.

  He looks up.

  A small shovel from the fireplace is still in the air.

  It’s connected to a small pair of old, arthritic hands. The hands travel down to bony, chicken-skin arms.

  And then Samuel sees the face of Anna Fischer.

  “No one fucks with my daughter,” she says.

  Ninety-One

  “Three thirty four Bear Den Lake Road.”

  The woman’s voice on the other end is breathless. Did she actually run to the phone? Esposito wonders. If she did, she deserves a gold fucking star.

  “Got it,” he says and slams the phone down, mentally reminding himself to find out who she is and to thank her properly.

  He snatches the phone back off the cradle and immediately calls the dispatcher, gives her the address, and tells her to notify the local police and have them immediately send all available officers to the address. He gets basic directions from the dispatcher, and she tells him it’s no more than fifty miles north of the city.

  Esposito races for his car. He can be there in an hour. Something in his gut tells him he needs to go. That Ackerman is there. And the girl.

  God knows what he’ll find when he gets there.

  Ninety-Two

  Gasping for her breath, Beth watches as Samuel gets to his feet with a roar. In his hand is the fireplace shovel, the very same one her mother had used to clobber Samuel and break free. Now, as a scream flies from Beth’s throat, the shovel swings in a high arc and smacks with a meaty thud on the side of her mother’s face.

  Beth hears bone crunch and watches as Anna falls to the floor.

  Samuel steps over Anna without so much as a glance. Beth is wobbly and disoriented. This can’t be happening, she thinks. This can’t be happening.

  “Samuel.”

  “You shouldn’t have changed your mind, Beth.”

  His voice is the same. But everything else is different. His eyes are almost yellow with an insane light. His face is waxy. A streak of blood from his scalp streams down the side of his head.

  “But why are you doing this?” Her voice is hollow and thin, and she can hear herself pleading. She starts to go toward her mother, lying motionless on the floor, blood now pooling around her head. She stops, knowing what Samuel will do if he gets the chance.

  “Why? I just needed a recruit,” he says. His voice low and gritty. His jaw is clenched. The muscles in his face bulge as they become slick with blood.

  He is coming toward her now, backing her against the wall.

  “All I needed to be a SEAL was to get a few lousy fucking recruits—one who was supposed to be you, Beth—and then in a few months, I would have been on my way. But no, you h
ad to change your mind and decide you want to play basketball. Because that was your dream, right? Well, what about my dream, Beth? Huh? What about my fucking, goddamn dream that everyone seems to want to shit all over? Well the good goddamned fuck if I’m going to let everyone else live their dreams while mine go down the fucking toilet. Now do you understand, Beth?”

  Beth sees the spittle hanging from Samuel’s mouth. She understands everything now. Samuel is completely insane and will kill her unless she can think of something. Anything.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll go in the Navy if you let me go.”

  “Too late, Beth, and I’m not that fucking stupid. The minute you leave here, it’s all over. In fact, it’s over anyway. It’s too late for me now too.” His voice trails off.

  A soft moan escapes Anna’s mouth, and Beth turns, just for a split second, shocked that her mother is still alive. In the brief slice of time, she realizes the move is a mistake.

  She snaps her head back to see the flash of silver as the shovel whips at her face.

  Beth reacts, unthinkingly, her basketball reflexes still lightning-quick despite the months of rehab. She ducks her head at the last moment, and the shovel smashes down on her shoulder. At the same time, she lashes out with her foot, catching Samuel in the solar plexus. He sinks to his knees as Beth is knocked backward against the cabin wall. Beth recovers first, wrenches the shovel away from Samuel, and swings it. The blow isn’t very powerful, but it cracks him in the temple, and he falls to the floor.

  Beth staggers to her feet, stepping toward her mother. Her legs wobble beneath her, the pain in her knee is searing. The cabin floor tilts upward at her. She regains her sense of balance. She looks again at her mother.

  She’s dead.

  She has to be.

  Her face is gray.

  Her mouth is open.

  The pool of blood is big…and spreading. A gasp catches in Beth’s throat. She starts to walk toward her mom, wanting to hold her and stroke her hair, but just then, Samuel gets to his knees. He shakes his head, and then his eyes clear, and he looks at Beth.