Bolt scoffed quietly. “Glad you picked me a pretty spot for it. I seen men die all sorts of twisted ways. Told their ghosts you’d rewind time and do them in trees by a river they’d be lining up for the shot. So don’t think you’re threatening me, boy. You ain’t seen the world.”
Marshall said, “Who was it who called me this morning?”
Bolt smiled, just the corner of his mouth, like it was snagged on something. “Probably the last person you’ll see before you cross over.”
That trigger urge again. Marshall kept it tethered. “What happened to the girl? Last chance.”
Bolt laughed. “Don’t kid yourself you’re going to shoot me out here. They’ll hear that thing all the way to fucking Kansas.”
Marshall clamped his mouth with a hand and smashed him on the top of the head with the butt of the gun and felt the brief pressure on his palm as the man cried out. Bolt sagged at the knee and Marshall pocketed the Colt and shifted his left hand so it covered both mouth and chin, and then he laid his right forearm across the top of Bolt’s head and jerked suddenly like cranking a vise handle and broke his neck. A flat crack, muted by flesh.
Marshall stepped away and let him fall. As he walked back toward the car, Bolt lay twitching.
Nearing full dark now. Hands in pockets and head bent as he crossed to the Silverado. He stepped to the rear and popped the handle for the tailgate and lowered it gently. Then he moved around to the driver’s side and slid in and started up, kept the lights off as he cruised around the corner to where Bolt was.
He set the brake and left the motor idling and got out and walked back into the trees. He caught a fecal odor. Bolt must have loosed his bowels. He grabbed the body by the collar and dragged him over to the truck, leaves and dirt troweled up ahead of him. The rear suspension settled a fraction when he propped him on the tailgate. The corpse slack, walleyed. He’d hit him fairly flat with the gun and the blow hadn’t drawn blood. Marshall got a hand through the rear of his belt and hefted him up into the tray, slid him forward, and closed him in, like shutting the morgue drawer. Flutter of the exhaust on his leg.
He walked back into the trees and kicked around blindly a moment until he found the radio and the gun. He picked them up and brought them back to the truck, slid in and laid them on the rear seat. Then he put the car in gear and rolled quietly up the road. When he reached the fork, he flicked on the lights and turned right and cruised back along Alameda on the north side of the reserve. After a moment he came up behind the black Chevrolet, just parked there at the curb. Dark tint, he couldn’t tell if anyone was inside.
A Santa Fe PD radio car cruised past.
Marshall eased off the gas briefly, giving himself a second to think, and then he swung to the roadside and stopped with the rear of the Chrysler caught square in his headlights maybe twenty feet away.
He dropped his window and opened his door and slid half off his seat with one foot on the road and leveled the .45 across the sill.
Rojas
Vance opened the side door, one quick jiggle off his bump key, and went in first, gun up. Dante followed with the woman, and Rojas brought up the rear. He closed and locked the door behind them. Quiet in the house. No one home, no alarm sensors either.
Through a short hallway and left into the living room. Cardboard boxes stacked everywhere and the smell of reefer. Dante put the woman on the floor and cable-tied her wrists. Same again for her ankles. She seemed calm, no panic in her face. Compliant as Dante cuffed her. Vance cupped a whisper to Rojas: “I’m sure no one’s home, but I’ll just clear it. Stay away from that window.”
He left the room. Not a word to Dante. They’d been paired so long they knew each other’s game.
Dante kept a hand on the woman’s mouth and leaned close. “Hush hush, sweetheart.”
They waited. Five minutes. Ten. Even cranked on meth, Vance was smoke-quiet. Still no word from Bolt. Dante was crouched motionless, the woman lying in front of him. Brown hair fanned across the floor, so still she could have been dead.
Vance walked back into the room, gun at his leg, practically strolling. “Clear. There’s that blue car in the garage, but it looks like there’s another one missing. So where is he, sweetheart?”
He drew the curtain and sat down on the couch elbows-to-knees with the pistol hanging in one hand. Dante started to pat the woman down. Car keys and some cash, no weapons.
Dante said, “Man, you smell good.”
Vance laughed. The woman tensed and lunged at him with a head butt. Dante leaned back and she missed, but not by much. He stood over her with the Glock aimed at her head. “Where’s your friend? Don’t make me start counting.”
The woman looked up at the gun. No tension in the trigger finger and no tension in Dante’s face either, and she must have realized they weren’t out to do things by halves. She said, “He’s not my friend. I don’t know him.”
“Who are you?”
She smiled. “You can call me Detective Shore.”
Rojas thought: Shit. But Vance and Dante didn’t even blink.
Dante said, “What you doing prowling round here?”
“Interviewing.”
“Don’t lie, bitch. You’re the first cop I seen out at this hour with no badge and no gun.”
The woman just looked straight up the barrel and smiled faintly and said, “Just keep that in mind when your cellmate’s telling you to unzip him.”
Vance cracked up. Dante didn’t move. Rojas knew he must be close to putting a bullet in her.
Dante said, “What’s your name?”
“Lauren Shore.”
“What department?”
“APD. Narcotics.”
“You’re a long way off your beat, sweetheart. What’re you after this guy for?”
The woman said, “He met a couple of traffickers this morning, down toward Albuquerque. Thought I’d ask him about it.”
She turned her head and looked up at Rojas with these flat, calm eyes and said, “How you doing, Troy?”
Jesus. He ran a hand through his hair and walked into the dark kitchen. She knew who he was. He stood by the table with his arms folded tightly like they might slow his breathing, and when he turned there was Vance, right in his face.
“Christ, don’t do that.”
Vance didn’t move, just watched him carefully. Eyes going left-right like following a far-off ball game. “Chill, Troy. You look like you just got spooked by a girl.”
“I am. I didn’t. But it’s kinda hard when you’ve got a police detective hostage, and she knows your name.”
Vance a foot away, voice a murmur. “We’ve got it handled. Me’n Dante know how to do this shit. She can say she goes to book club with Mrs. Obama, it don’t mean jack, because she’s not going anywhere. Why you looking all shook up, you’re meant to be Mr. Badass.”
“Yeah. I’m all up for making money, but when you’ve got a cop at gunpoint you sort of kick things into high gear.”
Vance just stood there, and Rojas figured his blood must be cut with antifreeze. Vance said, “It’s called civilian casualties. We do it in Sand Land all the time, don’t worry about it.”
“Someone might know where she is.”
“Dude, look at me. This is what we do. We got trained how to do this. We are the fucking pride and joy of the United States military.”
Rojas rubbed his face, ran his hands through his hair. “Cyrus still hasn’t called in.”
“He’s probably changing his face tape or something, I don’t know. It hasn’t been that long. Just stop fucking twitching and hopping, and chill. We’re under control.” He ran a palm midair, flat line.
Rojas said, “So what’s the plan?”
“The plan is self-evident: boyfriend isn’t here, we can’t drill the bitch in the house, we’ve gotta take her off site. Okay?”
“Back to the house?”
Vance nodded. “Back to the house.”
“This all seems out of control.”
“It’s not. Remember, you rolled out here planning to kill a guy, but now it’s a lady you’ve gone all cold feet. Man up.”
Rojas didn’t answer.
Vance said, “There’s nobody for miles better at this than me’n Dante. So just go with it.”
Marshall
Nobody in the Chrysler.
He walked up the street on the reserve side, keeping to the trees. When he reached the house he could see the white Audi parked farther east. Hopefully it was empty, too. He imagined Bolt had been sent to clear the other side of the river and whoever had been in the cars was now in his home. With the woman either dead or hostage.
He stood in the trees, watching.
Light traffic on the road, maybe a car a minute. Gut feeling said there was no one in the Audi. The dilemma being if he was wrong, he’d be seen as he crossed the street.
Which was probably more than a slim chance, because leaving both cars unoccupied wasn’t a bright move. Home invasion–cum-homicide, you want someone with eyes on the street. The very stupid or very arrogant might neglect it. Or maybe that had been Bolt’s role, covering the approach.
Choices.
The Audi had tinted glass. There was no way to check it without breaking a window. He knew it would trigger the alarm, but he preferred that to being seen crossing the street and getting shot as a consequence.
He stood looking at the car. Plans formulating, tactics of varied bloodshed. He slipped the Colt in his belt and jumped down into the cut of the river and ran crouched back along the road. The weak trace of water just a silver thread in the dark. When he reached the Silverado he scrambled up the bank and unlocked the truck and took the 870 from beneath the blanket on the rear seat and slipped back down into the river.
Rocks and dead branches through the little gulley: it was hard to keep his footing. When he drew abreast of the Audi, he stretched and laid the shotgun up on dry ground and then clambered quietly up the sheer bank.
The car cold and silent.
Marshall in a crouch amidst the brush. He took the Colt from his belt and held it one-handed with the other steadying him, like a runner at the starting block.
Blood in his ears building to a roar again. No traffic.
Count it in:
Three.
Two.
One.
And he was off, up out of the trees, across the road. A silent dash to the Audi and he raised the .45 by the muzzle like a hammer in his left hand and smashed the butt against the rear window, shattering the glass, and as the alarm blared he swapped the gun to his right hand, and in his shooter’s stance swung both ways to cover the whole cabin.
The car was empty.
The turn signals blinking orange in phase with the alarm. These huge shadows leaping away in all directions, and despite the commotion he felt calm standing there next to this empty vehicle. Better than death.
He backed up across the road and into the dark and slipped the pistol in his belt again and found the shotgun and dropped back down into the river. Doors opening and closing as a few people came to investigate the noise. The smashed window was out of sight on the river side, and with the Audi sitting there with no intruder, they must have brushed it off as some malfunction. The car playing cry wolf. He watched them go back inside, one by one.
When he reached the house he climbed back up the side of the cut and waited at the tree line in a crouch with the shotgun across his knees. The alarm clear in the cold night and with each flash the woods looming orange above him.
Two minutes. Three. The crouch burning him, but he didn’t move.
He saw a man in black emerge from the darkness beside his house, like he’d slipped out the side door. Marshall’s size and bearing and in the streetlight he could see the guy’s dyed green hair.
The man looked to his left along the street and saw the Audi sitting there blinking and blaring. He looked back right toward the black Chrysler, and then briefly into the trees, and then he jogged up the road toward the car. From thirty feet away he blipped a remote fob and the alarm quit and he opened the driver’s door and slid in.
Quiet a moment. What’s with that broken window?
The engine started.
The car’s lights came on, twin blue-white flares.
Marshall stood up, the shotgun in one hand, down along his leg. Across the street someone in his darkened garage raised the door.
The Audi pulled out into the lane and cruised toward him, heading for the house.
Marshall raised the shotgun. He jacked a round. Eerie and full of promise, and in the quiet it might have been heard across the street.
The car a hundred feet away.
Fifty.
Marshall moved out of the trees and onto the road. To the right the glare of the car, and to the left his shadow reaching long and thin for the dark, like he’d been stretched from the void.
One step. Two, three, four.
Gun to shoulder.
The driver anonymous behind the black tint and the white paint gleaming and Marshall sighted quickly and squeezed the trigger just as the driver saw him and jerked the wheel. The massive boom of the shot and the radial kiss of gun smoke as the stock kicked him and the pellets blitzed the door pillar and shattered the front window. The roar of it still dispersing through the quiet evening as Marshall corrected and jacked his next shell and with the car still in motion he fired again through the driver’s door.
The Audi lost control and bounced up onto the sidewalk and ripped to a halt, straddling the curb. Marshall was gone. Moving backward at a jog to the safety of the reserve. The guy from the garage was caught in the headlights, and he could see it was Troy Rojas. Gun in hand, shuffle-stepping left and right, unsure of the next play.
Witnesses now, just glances between blinds. Gunfire bringing them out. The green-haired guy from the Audi popped his door and practically fell on the road. His left side was bloodied, arm hanging limp. Twin swathes of rubber in the car’s wake, broken glass winking sharply.
Marshall lay prone, sighting the .45 two-handed, the shotgun beside him. He knew they’d seen him drop back into the trees. He waited, the gun on the green-haired guy. Every instinct said drop them right there, cold blood or not, but with an audience he didn’t want to see his escapades on a sworn statement.