Along Came a Spider

pulled with all my weight and strength at the small plane’s armrest. I yanked the armrest again and again. The plastic and metal piece ripped halfway out of the seat. I kept at it. The other half of the armrest broke off with a ripping noise like a deep and painful tooth extraction.
    Two running strides and I was at the plane’s open doorway. The contact man was already down on the ground, getting away with the suitcase. I dived at him. I needed to slow him until the Bureau got there. I also wanted to flatten the bastard, show him who was doing the controlling now.
    I hit the contact man like a hawk striking a field rat. We both struck the tarmac hard, woofing out air. The armrest still dangled from my handcuffs. Metal raked across his face and drew blood. I belted him once with my free arm.
    “Where is Maggie Rose? Where is she?” I shouted at the top of my lungs.
    To my left, over the shiny darkness of the sea, I could see lights floating toward us, approaching fast. It had to be the Bureau. Their surveillance planes were coming to the rescue. They had managed to follow us.
    Just then I was hit on the back of my neck. It felt like a lead pipe. I didn’t go out immediately.
Soneji
? a voice inside me screamed. A second hard blow cracked the back of my skull, the tender part. This time, I went down for the count. I never saw who was doing the swinging, or what he had used.
    When I came to, the small airfield in South Carolina was a raft of dazzling lights and activity. The FBI was there in full force. So were the local Carolina police. EMS ambulances and fire engines were everywhere.
    The contact man was gone, though. So was the ten-million-dollar ransom. He’d made a clean getaway. Perfect planning on Soneji’s part. Another perfect move.
    “The little girl? Maggie Rose?” I asked a balding emergency doctor tending the wounds on my head.
    “No sir,” he said in a slow drawl. “The little girl is still missing. Maggie Rose Dunne was never seen around here.”

CHAPTER 25

    CRISFIELD, MARYLAND, lay under gloomy, elephant gray skies. It had been raining on and off for most of the day. A lone police car raced along rain-slicked country roads with its siren screaming.
    Inside the car were Artie Marshall and Chester Dils. Dils was twenty-six, which made him exactly twenty years younger than Marshall. Like many young, rural policemen, he had dreams of getting out of the area — the same kind of hopes and dreams he’d had while attending Wilde Lake High School in Columbia.
    But here he was, still in Crisfield.
Twin Peaks II
, he liked to call the town of under three thousand.
    Dils almost physically ached to become a Maryland state trooper. It was tricky sledding because of the demanding trooper exams, especially the math. But becoming a trooper would get him the hell out of Somerset County. Maybe as far away as Salisbury or Chestertown.
    Neither Dils nor especially mild-mannered Artie Marshall was ready for the exposure and the quicksilver reputations they were about to get. Just like that on the afternoon of the thirtieth of December. A telephone call had come into their station house on Old Hurley Road. A couple of hunters had spotted something that looked suspicious over in West Crisfield, on the way to the camping ground on Tangier Island. The hunters had found an abandoned vehicle. A blue Chevy minivan.
    For the past several days, anything and everything vaguely suspicious immediately got associated with the big Washington kidnapping. That pattern had gotten old real fast. Dils and Marshall were ordered to check it out, anyway. A blue minivan had been used to take the kids from the school.
    The afternoon was dying when they arrived at the farm out on Route 413. It was even a little spooky heading down the badly rutted dirt road onto the property.
    “Old farm or something back here?” Dils asked his partner. Dils was behind the wheel. Doing about fifteen on the muddy, rutted road. Artie Marshall preferred to ride shotgun,
sans
the shotgun.
    “Yeah. Nobody lives here now, though. I doubt this’ll amount to anything monumental, Chesty.”
    “That’s the beauty of The Job,” Chester Dils said. “You never know. Monumental is always out there somewhere.” He had a short-standing habit of making everything a little more glamorous than it actually was. He had his dream and all his big ideas, but Artie Marshall thought of them more as the immaturity of a younger man.
    They arrived at the dilapidated