Packing Heat (16 page)

“Linda,” Ted said to a cute brunette in a striped apron, “scoot off and call the sheriff.”

Linda dimpled at Ted and scooted right off.

Before he could even begin to think of a way out, Cole found himself handcuffed and bundled into the back of a white SUV with a county sheriff’s shield on the door. He was taken to the sheriff’s office, the FBI was contacted, and the sheriff was only too happy to inform him that there were a couple of agents in the area.

Cole just sat there in a daze of disbelief, no question in his mind who the agents were and who they answered to. Victor Treacher was about to get his hands on Cole again, and Harmony was nowhere in the vicinity. Even if she hadn’t made it to Tulsa, she was too far away to help him.

So much for her promise to keep him out of jail. Then again, he was probably headed for much smaller accommodations than a jail cell. Like a coffin.

What? She’d have found another geek to handle the computer work? There hadn’t been time. No law-abiding computer expert on the planet would have broken into the FBI voluntarily, and dealing with the hacker community was risky. Unless she had leverage. Cole had been her only option, so she’d put on blinders and bulldozed ahead, and now here she was, at the edge of a cliff, hanging by her fingertips, weighed down by the sheer magnitude of her own shortsighted overconfidence.

Cole had told her more than once that the FBI had framed him, but she’d written it off as the typical jailbird’s protestation of innocence. Even after she knew Cole was basically an honest, moral guy who was keeping his word despite his distrust, she’d stayed focused on Richard and ignored the warning signs. It was all her fault. All of it. And it wasn’t bad enough that her neck was on the line, she was going to pull Cole and Richard down with her. True, Richard had been in trouble to begin with, but if he died she’d still blame herself.

She kicked at a clump of roadside weeds. It didn’t help. Neither would shouting more obscenities, because the truth was, she admitted with a heavy sigh, she wouldn’t change any of it, even if she could. There was no way she’d leave Richard to die.
No
.
Way
.

She’d find a method of neutralizng Treacher; she really couldn’t imagine any other possibility. She wasn’t without skills, and she wasn’t without resources. Mike had said he wouldn’t put his career on the line, but she knew him better than that. He talked a good line, but he was the human equivalent of a Tootsie Pop. It just took a little patience to work your way through the hard shell to find the soft center. Mike would be there if she needed him.

She kept on a circuitous route through the urban sprawl around St. Louis, on foot for a while longer, then briefly in a car she boosted, as much to create a diversion for Cole as anything else. Hopefully the cops would focus on the stolen vehicle and come after her, leaving Cole free and clear. He was a smart guy, but he was a computer geek, and his thought process was linear; it didn’t allow for the kind of quick adjustment necessary when the authorities were on your tail and a split-second decision was all that stood between you and iron bars.

She abandoned the car not far from a truck stop and hitched a ride with a long-distance trucker. Risky under normal circumstances. Having a couple of guns made it less dangerous. For her.

The truck driver looked a lot scarier than he turned out to be. He was a bear of a man with a lot of gray, bushy hair everywhere: face, arms, ears, and sticking out of the collar of his T-shirt. He didn’t watch the news, he preferred books on tape to the radio, and he had a soft spot for his daughter. Since Harmony reportedly resembled the aforementioned daughter, that worked for her. He’d told her to call him Bull, a nickname he said came from his tendency to spin a good yarn. And his hard head.

They pulled into Tulsa around daybreak, Harmony taking in the sunrise with bleary eyes. She hadn’t slept, worried about Cole and second-guessing her decision to split up. How much of it, she wondered now, had been anger?

“How ’bout I treat you to breakfast,” Bull said once he’d manhandled the big rig into a parking space behind the diner at the truck stop.

“I really need to be on my way.” She was hungry, Cole-level hungry, but she didn’t want to parade her face in front of a group of twenty-four-hour diner workers who probably spent the slow night hours watching television where no doubt she was starring on the morning news. “Thank you for the ride,” she said, smiling and waving as she slung the laptop case over her shoulder, hefted the duffel, and headed for the main road.

As soon as she got out of sight of the diner windows, she ducked between two parked big rigs and slipped into the motel parking lot next to the truck stop. She went to the farthest corner of the parking lot, hunkering down against a block retaining wall, with a minivan parked about five feet in front of her. Not the best scenery, and it was chilly in the shadows there, but it kept her out of sight.

She took out her official cell and called Mike, thanking providence when he picked up the phone.

“That explains a thing or two,” he said after she’d given him the high points of Cole’s run-in with Victor Treacher. “You know—”

“I know.”

“He’ll—”

“Want Cole dead. I’m on it.”

Mike whooshed out a breath, and she could almost see him scrubbing his hand back through his grizzled, marine-cut hair. “Gotta hand it to you, kid. You’re an emotional crackpot, but there’s nothing wrong with your brain. Just one thing, though. Hackett was arrested last night.”

“Oh,
man!”
Harmony shot to her feet, fighting the urge to do something.
Anything
. She wound up turning in a circle, caught between wanting to rescue Cole and knowing she’d never get the chance if she got arrested herself. She got a grip, mainly because she refused to give in to the picture that tried to form in her mind: Cole, behind bars again, miserable and blaming her. Like she was. “He’s not very good at this sort of thing. I never should have sent him off on his own.”

“Don’t apologize,” Mike snapped at her. “Splitting up was the right decision. Man can’t watch his own back—”

“He’s basically a computer geek, Mike. He was in prison for eight years, but there’s a big difference between watching your back inside and watching it out in the world.”

“You’re defending him.”

Mike was right. Shocking but true. “Not the point” was what she said out loud. “I need him to save Richard. Where is he?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you.”

“You wouldn’t have dropped the bomb if you didn’t want it to go off.”

“Treacher’s guys were in the area,” he said, not beating around the bush, giving her the bad news straight. “Hackett was his problem eight years ago, so he was allowed to handle the retrieval.”

“And?”

Mike heaved another windy sigh. “I can’t let Treacher have your geek killed.”

She might have protested the “your” part of that comment, if she wasn’t so busy being relieved to have Mike’s help.

“Treacher’s guys are going to get there first,” she said.

“I’ll call the sheriff’s office and make sure they don’t let Hackett go.”

“Long enough for me to show up and get him out.”

Mike was silent.

“Right?” she prompted.

He gave her a Springfield address, not sounding very happy about the situation. “There’ll be a car waiting for you there, with GPS. Hackett’s current location will be programmed in.”

“Any idea how I can spring him without getting arrested myself?”

“I figure history will repeat itself,” Mike said with a shrug in his voice.

“History included forged paperwork.”

“You’re not getting paperwork, forged or otherwise. It won’t do either of us any good if I get jammed up, too.”

“It’s not like I can get him out of jail without doing something you won’t like.”

“If you finish your operation, and it works out, I can explain it away. Just don’t shoot any good guys.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

Mike chuckled. Mike probably knew she was rolling her eyes. “You’re in over your head, kid, and there’s probably not a chance in hell you’ll be working at the Bureau when this is over, but I’m too old to start a new career.”

“Nice to know your priorities.”

“I shouldn’t even be talking to you, Swift.”

Yeah, she knew that, too, but she didn’t thank him. He wouldn’t expect it and he wouldn’t want it.

“Harmony?” he said. “I’d tell you not to do anything stupid, but it’s a little late for that. Just don’t do anything really stupid.”

The sheriff’s office was a converted storefront, sitting at the end of Shawville’s main drag. The town itself was surrounded by corn and wheat farms with barns full of cows, pigs, and chickens, and houses inhabited by farmers and their extended families, none of them between the ages of eighteen and thirty because the minute they came of age, kids went to college or joined the army. Cole couldn’t blame them. Even inside the building it smelled faintly of manure. He’d gotten used to that. It was the other occupants he found annoying, namely the current bane of his existence.

“I’m gonna get, like, a cert-certick—that whatchamacallit they give you for doing something good, right?” Ted Jasper said, hiking up his pants for the umpteenth time. No one was paying attention to him, but he never stopped talking, and he never stopped moving, pacing the floor, swinging his arms, checking out the Most Wanted board where Cole’s poster still hung with a big black X through his face. “I wanna be a real cop—I mean police officer—even if Granddaddy Jasper don’t approve. We got us a family trade, you know,” he said to Cole, “like the Bushes are politicians, the Jaspers do flea markets. My daddy says we both deal in garbage.” He laughed uproariously. “But I wanna be a cop. They won’t let me go to the academy without a college degree, and I’m not so good with, you know, learning stuff. I shouldn’t need to now, right? I should get a special, uh, something-or-other because I caught a fugitive.”

The deputy behind the front counter and the sheriff sitting at his desk on the other side of the room shared a look, eyes rolling, heads shaking.

“I mean he’s
dangerous
,” Ted said, doing a little shadow boxing in Cole’s general direction, bouncing on the balls of his feet then hitching his pants up over his Simpsons boxers a little too forcefully so he had to do a wedgie removal.

“What genius gave him a gun?” Cole wondered out loud when it fell out of the kid’s pocket and spun around in a circle on the floor.

“That’s a really good question,” the sheriff said. He came out from behind his desk and held out a hand.

Ted bobbled the gun, finally getting it turned around so he could show it to the sheriff. “It’s not even loaded, see?”

“Christ,” the sheriff said, “it’s just a BB gun.”

Cole let his head fall back to thump against the wall behind him. He’d been caught by a moron with a popgun. If any of his former cellmates found out, they’d make him hand in his tattoo.

“Feeling like an idiot?” the sheriff asked Cole.

“You have no idea.”

Stick to I-44, Harmony had said. That was the quickest route. She hadn’t factored in his bad luck, or a wet-behind-the-ears security guard with delusions of grandeur.

The phone rang, the deputy picked it up, and went through his greeting, then said, “Yes, ma’am, the sheriff’s here. Yes, we caught that escaped felon.”

“I caught him,” Ted said, outraged to be left out of the headlines. “Tell her I caught him.”

The deputy ignored him. “You gonna be around awhile?” he called to the sheriff over Ted’s continuing protests.

“ ’Cept for lunch,” the sheriff called back.

The deputy repeated that information into the phone, then said, “Hold on,” when the street door opened.

Two men walked in, looking like the guys in the Matrix, dark suits, perfect hair, and vaguely familiar faces. Cole had seen them before. Bobbing in Lake Erie. One of the agents glanced over at him, and Cole saw retribution in his eyes.

“Can I help you?” the deputy asked them.

They ignored him, walking around the counter to the desk where the sheriff sat. They flipped out wallets and flashed their badges, and even though they didn’t say a word the sheriff was already bristling before they gave their names, Special Agents Jones and Carter. Cole wondered if those were really their names.

The sheriff didn’t seem to care. He hardly glanced at their badges. “You have a warrant?” he asked them.

Agents Jones and Carter exchanged a look, appearing to communicate telepathically. Creepy. “We don’t need a warrant,” one of them said.

“Now that’s a real oddity, since I got a call from a Mike somebody or other a little while ago. Told me he was with the FBI and there’d be two agents coming to collect this yahoo.” The sheriff aimed a thumb in Cole’s general direction. “And we better turn him over or else. Said he didn’t know how a podunk outfit like ours had managed to catch him, but we better not think about hanging onto him so we could get ourselves some good press.”

The sheriff came out from around his desk and stopped a couple feet in front of the feds, resting his hand on his tool belt and putting an extra measure of “hick” into his voice. “Now, the idea of a press conference never occurred to me, but hanging onto him, why, poor fella ain’t even had lunch yet.”

Agent Jones, or maybe it was Agent Carter, started to say something. His partner stopped him with a hand. “We’ll be back,” he said.

Ted followed them to the door and watched them go through it. “You don’t think they’re going to drive a truck through the front of this building, do you? You know, like the Terminator? The police wouldn’t let him have Sarah Connor, so the Terminator said ‘I’ll be back’ and then he drove a truck into the police station and went in and killed all the cops. Can I have a real gun?” he asked the sheriff, “and some bullets, because, you know, if those guys are going to come in here blasting I want to shoot back.”

The sheriff and the deputy shared another eye roll. Cole was right there with them.

“You still got the phone in your hand,” the sheriff said to the deputy.

“Shit, you still there?” he said into the receiver, then shrugged. “Must’ve hung up. Probably just a reporter.”

“C’mon, Ted,” the sheriff said. “I can’t give you a commendation, but I’ll spring for lunch. We’ll bring you back a burger,” he said to the deputy on the way to the front door.

“Wife has me on a diet,” the deputy said back.

“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” The sheriff stopped at the front door and looked out. “The government stiffs are nowhere in sight, Ted, so it looks like we’re safe.” And they left.

Nobody thought to ask the dying man what he wanted for his last meal.

They couldn’t have been gone ten minutes when the door opened again. Cole’s bench was against the wall, opposite the front counter, and his hands were cuffed to the arm of the bench farthest from the front door. He twisted around, expecting to see Agents Jones and Carter coming back to try their luck now that the sheriff wasn’t around to give them a hard time.

Harmony came in instead. Cole almost swallowed his tongue, he was so surprised. It took a minute for his brain to kick in, and when it did, his thoughts were hardly comforting because what he was thinking was,
Great, now we’re both going to die.