Back Spin (Myron Bolitar 4)

Man, the humidity was definitely getting to him.

Myron wheeled to the right and looked ahead.

Nothing.

Green Acres was a short cul-de-sac with maybe five homes. Fabulous homes, or so Myron assumed. Towering shrub walls—again with the shrubs—lined either side of the street. Locked gates were on the driveways, the kind that worked by remote control or by pushing a combination in a keypad. Myron stopped and looked down the road.

So where was our boy?

He felt his pulse quicken. No sign of him. The only escape route was through the woods between two houses in the cul-de-sac. He must have gone in there, Myron surmised—if, that is, he was trying to escape and not, say, hide in the bushes. He might, after all, have spotted Myron. He might have decided to duck down somewhere and hide. Hide and then pounce when Myron walked by.

These were not comforting thoughts.

Now what?

He licked the sweat off his upper lip. His mouth felt terribly dry. He could almost hear himself sweat.

Suck it up, Myron, he told himself. He was six-four and two hundred and twenty pounds. A big guy. He was also a black belt in tae kwon do and a well-trained fighter. He could fend off any attack.

Unless the guy was armed.

True. Let’s face it. Fight training and experience were helpful, but they did not make one bullet-proof. Not even Win. Of course, Win wouldn’t have been stupid enough to get himself into this mess. Myron carried a weapon only when he thought it was absolutely necessary. Win, on the other hand, carried at least two guns and one bladed instrument at all times. Third world countries should be as well armed as Win.

So what to do?

He looked left and right, but there was no place much for anybody to hide. The shrub walls were thick and fully impenetrable. That left only the woods at the end of the road. But there were no lights down that way and the woods looked dense and forbidding.

Should he go in?

No. That would be pointless at best. He had no idea how big the woods were, what direction to head in, nothing. The odds of finding the perpetrator were frighteningly remote. Myron’s best hope was that the perp was just hiding for a while, waiting for Myron to clear out.

Clear out. That sounded like a plan.

Myron moved back to the end of Green Acres. He turned left, traveled a couple of hundred yards, and settled behind yet another shrub. He and shrubs were on a first-name basis by now. This one he named Frank.

He waited an hour. No one appeared.

Great.

He finally stood up, said good-bye to Frank, and headed back to the car. The perpetrator must have escaped through the woods. That meant that he had planned an escape route or, more probably, he knew the area well. Could mean that it was Chad Coldren. Or it could mean that the kidnappers knew what they were doing. And if that was so, it meant there was a good chance that they now knew about Myron’s involvement and the fact that the Coldrens had disobeyed them.

Myron hoped like hell it was just a hoax. But if it wasn’t, if this was indeed a real kidnapping, he wondered about repercussions. He wondered how the kidnappers would react to what he had done. And as he continued on his way, Myron remembered their previous phone call and the harrowing, flesh-creeping sound of Chad Coldren’s scream.

10

“Meanwhile, back at stately Wayne Manor …”

That voice-over from the TV Batman always came to Myron when he reached the steely gates of the Lockwood estate. In reality Win’s family home looked very little like Bruce Wayne’s house, though it did offer up the same aura. A tremendous serpentine driveway wound to an imposing stone mansion on the hill. There was grass, lots of it, all the blades kept at a consistently ideal length, like a politician’s hair in an election year. There were also lush gardens and hills and a swimming pool, a pond, a tennis court, horse stables, and a horse obstacle course of some kind.

All in all, the Lockwood estate was very “stately” and worthy of the term “manor,” whatever that meant.

Myron and Win were staying at the guest house—or as Win’s father liked to call it, “the cottage.” Exposed beams, hardwood floors, fireplace, new kitchen with a big island in the middle, pool room—not to mention five bedrooms, four and half baths. Some cottage.

Myron tried to sort through what was happening, but all he came up with was a series of paradoxes, a whole lot of “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Motive, for example. On the one hand, it might make sense to kidnap Chad Coldren to throw off Jack Coldren. But Chad had been missing since before the tournament, which meant the kidnapper was either very cautious or very prophetic. On the other hand, the kidnapper had asked for one hundred grand, which pointed to a simple case of kidnapping for money. A hundred grand was a nice, tidy sum—a little low for a kidnapping, but not bad for a few days’ work.

But if this was merely a kidnapping to extort mucho dinero, the timing was curious. Why now? Why during the one time a year the U.S. Open was played? More than that, why kidnap Chad during the one time in the last twenty-three years the Open was being played at Merion—the one time in almost a quarter of a century that Jack Coldren had a chance to revisit and redeem his greatest failing?

Seemed like a hell of a coincidence.

That brought it back to a hoax and a scenario that went something like this: Chad Coldren disappears before the tournament to screw around with his dad’s mind. When that doesn’t work—when, to the contrary, Dad starts winning—he ups the ante and fakes his own kidnapping. Taking it a step further, one could assume that it had been Chad Coldren who had been climbing out of his own window. Who better? Chad Coldren knew the area. Chad Coldren probably knew how to go through those woods. Or maybe he was hiding out at a friend’s house who lived on Green Acres Road. Whatever.

It added up. It made sense.

All of this assumed, of course, that Chad truly disliked his father. Was there evidence of that? Myron thought so. Start off with the fact that Chad was sixteen years old. Not an easy age. Weak evidence for sure, but worth keeping in mind. Second—and far, far more important—Jack Coldren was an absent father. No athlete is away from home as much as a golfer. Not basketball players or football players or baseball players or hockey players. The only ones who come close are tennis players. In both tennis and golf, tournaments are taking place almost all year—there is little so-called off season—and there is no such thing as a home game. If you were lucky you hit your home course once a year.

Lastly—and perhaps most crucial of all—Chad had been gone for two days without raising eyebrows. Forget Linda Coldren’s discourse on responsible children and open child-raising. The only rational explanation for their nonchalance was that this had happened before, or at the very least, was not unexpected.