“What about the candy you stole?”
Peter looked at her as if she were crazy. “They were cupcakes. And I
didn’t
steal them. I
tried
to steal them. Dudley Do-Right behind the counter wouldn’t let me.”
“That’s not exactly respectful for the dead, Peter,” Carter offered.
Peter laughed. “That a crime in New York, Counselor? Chas Delphin was a pansy-assed dickhead. I didn’t respect him in life. Why the hell would I respect him after he’s dead?”
Carter didn’t know what to make of the aggression, and judging from her scowl, neither did the deputy.
Peter caught the look. “What, you want me to lie to you? I’m not a violent guy. Why the hell would I go there and shoot him today? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Because you didn’t go in there to kill him,” Carter said. “Because you didn’t even think the gun was loaded. You just wanted to scare Chas and then you got tackled from behind and the gun went off.”
Peter recoiled. “Is that what happened in there?”
“Where were you, exactly, at around two this afternoon?” Darla asked.
“Right here. I been here all day. Couldn’t buy a break on the table till just before you guys got here.”
“Will these people testify to that?” Carter asked.
Peter snorted a laugh. “You kidding? These guys are my friends. They’ll tell you I was in Tahiti if I ask them to.” When he saw that no one else was smiling, he dialed it down. “Yeah, sure. They’ll vouch for me.” He turned to Carter again. “You think the gun was unloaded?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I think
you
thought it was unloaded.”
“I don’t even own a gun.” The magnitude of the problem Peter faced was dawning on him, and there was a new hint of desperation in his voice. “You can’t possibly think I did this,” he said.
“Do you own a red baseball jersey?” Carter asked.
“No.”
“How about a red T-shirt?”
Peter started to deny, but then opted for honesty. “Yes,” he said. “And I own a blue one, two green ones, and God knows how many white ones.”
“We’re talking about an Essex High School jersey, probably,” Darla prompted.
“What, like the ones Hines wears? Hell, no.”
“Like the ones half this county wears,” Darla corrected. “And why not?”
Peter’s scowl deepened. “You mean because of all my rah-rah school spirit?” His tone dripped sarcasm. “I wouldn’t let any part of that shithole school touch my body.”
“Is that a fact?” Darla said. She stood from her chair and pulled a set of handcuffs from the pouch on her belt. “I need you to come along with me.”
Peter couldn’t believe this was happening. “You’re
arresting
me?” Carter was a little stunned himself.
“No, I’m taking you into custody as a material witness.”
“To
what
?” Peter protested. “I told you that I had nothing to do with that murder. You’ve got no evidence.”
“I don’t need evidence to treat you as a witness,” Darla said. “Please put your hands behind your back.”
Carter found himself surprised that Peter did as he was told. Apparently, the mouth worked independently from his spirit. “Hey, Mr. Lawyer, can she do this?”
Carter shrugged. “If she considers you to be a material witness, and she believes that you constitute a flight risk, then yeah, she can.”
The panic didn’t enter the young man’s eyes until the bracelets ratcheted closed, but when it came, it came in a rush. “I didn’t kill anybody,” he protested. It was hard to tell, but he might have been crying. “Honest to God, I wasn’t anywhere near that store today.” He struggled, and Darla pulled once on his arm, bringing him to a stop.
When she spoke, her voice was soft, almost soothing. “Look, Peter, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of if you haven’t done anything. I’m just taking you in to keep you at arm’s reach while we look into this.”
Peter tossed a quick look back at his buddies in the pool room, all of whom were gaping at the scene.
“Think of them,” Darla continued, her voice even softer. “Today or tomorrow, if everything works out, you’ll be back with them. Be a man now, and it won’t come back to haunt you.”
* * *
The act of getting off the sofa exhausted Nicki. She’d never had a spell this severe, and as her heart raced even faster, she had the sense that everything would soon get worse. She felt as if her head weighed fifty pounds, her arms and legs a hundred pounds each. She imagined that this was the way Superman felt in the presence of kryptonite, as if someone had found the valve to her body’s strength reservoir and cranked it all the way open, until all that was left were the dregs on the bottom. All that, and the sensation that there wasn’t enough air in the world.
She needed her meds.
With Scotty gone, Brad turned his rage to Gramma. “Sit down!” he commanded, gesturing with the Sig to a padded wooden chair in the corner.
She did as she was told, her face showing that she’d resigned herself to dying today.
He helped Nicki back into the corner of the sofa and handed her the .22. “Keep an eye on her,” he said, “while I find something to tie her up with.”
“Oh, Brad,” Nicki moaned.
“Please don’t do that,” Gramma begged, but Brad seemed not to hear as he moved to the window and checked behind the drapes. He gave a satisfied nod when he saw the cord strung vertically between pulleys. Tucking his weapon under his arm, he fished his Leatherman out of its tiny holster on his belt, folded out the blade, and cut the cord into two six-foot lengths.
When he turned around again, Gramma’s eyes were red as tears spilled down her cheeks. “Please don’t tie me up,” she said. “You don’t have to do that. You can trust me. I swear.”
Brad chuckled, then winced against a cramp in his belly. “I tried trusting,” he said. “Just rest your hands on the arms of the chair.”
“I’m claustrophobic.” She was stalling for time, but the panic in her eyes was genuine.
“Please don’t make this into a fight, okay? I’m tired of fighting.” As if to emphasize the point, his belly cramped again, bringing a grunt. “You won’t be here all that long anyway. Scotty will bring the police soon enough.”
Gramma did not fight. She placed her hands on the arms of the chair just as she had been asked, and she didn’t move as Brad lashed her in place with loop after loop of the cord.
“We’re just going to take your truck and see what we can do to get away. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Why bother to tying me up at all, then?”
“In case you have a machine gun in here.” Brad smiled as he finished the last knot. “I don’t need you shooting me on my way out, know what I mean?”
“Looks to me like you’ve already been shot,” Gramma said. She nodded at some smears of blood on his shirt.
Brad’s hand went to the spot, and as it did, the cramp fired up again. When he lifted the front of his shirt he saw a larger smear of blood and a purple bruise. “Shit.”
“Let me see,” Nicki said from the sofa. Sitting up was difficult, but there was nothing wrong with her vision.
Brad pulled his shirt off over his head and took a couple of steps closer to Nicki. She saw what might have been a big bee sting, just a half inch up and to the right of Brad’s navel. She started to touch it, but Brad recoiled, and stepped away.
“There’s a hole, Brad. No shit, there’s a hole right next to your belly button.”
He made a sound that might have been a grunt or a chuckle “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I thought the little shit missed me. I wondered how it was possible, but I thought for sure that he missed me.
Damn
it!”
“Doesn’t it hurt?” Nicki didn’t understand. She’d seen the damage done to Chas. This hardly looked like anything.
“Shit, shit,
shit
.” He looked at Gramma, whose expression was a study in intentional passiveness. “Look what he did!”
“What did you expect him to do?” Gramma asked.
Brad looked again at his bloody fingers. “I expected him to be a scared little kid.”
“You disgust me,” Gramma said.
Yeah, well, I disgust myself sometimes,
he didn’t say. He picked up Gramma’s car keys from the table where she’d dropped them and turned to Nicki. “You’re looking pretty bad,” he said. “Can you still walk?”
Nicki looked sad. And exhausted. “It’s over, Brad,” she said. “Don’t you see? With my spell and you being shot, it’s over.”
“Not yet it’s not,” Brad said.
“There’s no way we can get away,” Nicki argued.
“Not if we stay here. Now, I’m leaving in that truck. Are you coming with me?” When she didn’t answer in two seconds, he started for the door.
“Wait!” Nicki called. “Just help me up.”
He hesitated. “You sure?”
“Somebody’s got to keep you out of trouble,” she said with a little smile.
Brad took back the .22 and stuffed both it and the Sig into the back of his waistband, then paused just long enough to put his shirt back on before holding out both hands as an invitation to help her out of the deep, soft cushions of the sofa.
It was a struggle, but he got her to her feet, and together they limped toward the door. Nicki paused and looked back toward Gramma. The old woman looked helpless. “I’m sorry,” Nicki said. “Honestly, you’ll never know how sorry I am to have put you through this.”
“Come on,” Brad said, and he pulled on her arm. “We don’t have time.” When they were on the stoop, he closed the door behind them.
“Where are we going?”
“Away. The plan’s the same as it’s always been. When we get some miles between us and the cops, we’ll switch out cars again.”
“What about that?” Nicki pointed to his blood stain.
“I can make it,” he said. “It’s a tiny bullet, but a hospital would still have to report it. We’ll figure something out on the way. Can
you
hold out?”
“If you can, I can,” she said. Fact was, she was probably going to sleep through most of it. Brad was the one in the most pain.
“Good,” he said. “That’s very, very—”
He froze in mid-step. The hood of the Bronco was open. “What did that little shit do?” He left Nicki and moved to the truck. As he crossed the back side of the vehicle, he saw the long-handled bolt cutters lying in the sand, and he knew exactly what he was going to find.
“Shit!” He shouted the word to the gray-black sky, turning his face up to the pounding rain. “God
damn
it!” In a rage, he picked up the bolt cutters, holding one of the handles as if it were a baseball bat, and swung it as hard as he could into the driver’s side door, over and over again. “You. Son of a bitch. I. Should’ve shot you. When I had the chance.” To punctuate the last phrase, he threw the cutters through the window in the door, launching a shower of glass pebbles.
Nicki stood there, stunned, watching as Brad melted down in front of her. When he was done, the bloodstain on his soaked shirt was three times the size it had been before, and the look she saw in his face was one of utter defeat.
“You don’t get it, do you?” he said, listing to one side and struggling to catch his breath.
“What is it?” Nicki asked.
“He was still out here when I came after him. He’d had a good half minute to run away, but when I stepped out, he was still here.” He said this as if it would somehow explain his outburst. Nicki just waited for the rest.
“He cut the damn battery cable, Nicki! He took those bolt cutters and he cut the cable in two. We’re screwed. We’re totally, hopelessly screwed.”
Of the things that Nicki understood, cars were nowhere on the list. “Can’t you hot-wire it, like you did with the others?”
Brad looked at her as if she’d grown a new eye. “No! It’s the fucking battery! The little shit did the one thing that irreversibly cripples a car. When you hot-wire, you just bypass the ignition. You still need the goddamn battery.”
When he was done, there seemed to be nothing left. He breathed hard, waiting for someone to cough up an idea. Nothing came but darkness and harder rain.
“What are we going to do?” Nicki asked.
Brad snorted a chuckle, and his shoulders sagged. “I guess we go back inside and wait,” he said.
“But the police will be here.”
He nodded. “And soon.”
Nicki was confused. “What happens then?”
“Let’s go inside,” Brad said. “You’ll catch your death out here.” He tried to smile, but there was no humor left.
Nicki started to move, but Brad didn’t. “Are you coming?”
“I’ll be there. I just have one more thing to do.” He pulled the Sig from his waistband.
“Brad, no!”
He raised the weapon and fired one shot through the Bronco’s radiator.
To be continued . . .
Chapter Four
“W
here do you want me?” Boxers asked.
Jonathan pointed ahead and to the right. “Take the red-black corner. I don’t expect they’ll run away from a knock at the door, but we might as well be prepared.”
“Just side arms, I presume?”
“And keep it concealed. Like I said, I don’t anticipate a panic response from a knock at the door.”
Boxers backed into a parking space across the lot from room 124, threw the transmission into park, and sat, his massive hands poised at ten and two on the steering wheel. “This doesn’t feel right, Boss.”
Jonathan pulled on the door handle. “Let’s see what happens.”
Playing drunk was a tricky thing. The staggering, slurring caricature drunk wouldn’t fool anyone. In fact, your average drunk tried very hard
not
to look drunk when he was at his drunkest, which was a doubly difficult task when the person trying to look sober was in fact sober, trying to look sober while drunk. It was about understatement, and the stink of booze should go a long way toward selling the bluff. If Room 124 was indeed the right place, then alcohol would be against the occupants’ religion, triggering an even greater level of disgust.
Jonathan’s plan was simple. He would knock on the door and when someone answered, he’d eyeball them to see if they matched the description of the kidnappers. He’d apologize for the interruption, and then evaluate the options to rescue the little girl. Boxers monitored the action from the shadows of the building’s right rear corner, where he could simultaneously see if anyone bolted out the back, while keeping an eye on Jonathan.
“Is everybody on the channel?” Jonathan asked softly as he approached the door.
“Big Guy’s here,” Boxers said.
“And Mother Hen.” Venice monitored most of their ops when they went hot. Jonathan had considered wearing a body cam to give her a more complete view, but she’d asked him not to. It was hard enough for Venice to live with the stuff she heard. She didn’t need to see it, too. Plus, if people were killed, there were some records that needn’t be kept.
“Here we go,” Jonathan said. He settled his shoulders and sagged his knees a little. He let his eyelids droop just a bit, and then rapped on the door with the knuckle of his left middle finger.
He heard motion on the other side. Multiple voices. It took nearly ten seconds for one voice to say what is normally said immediately. “Who is it?”
Jonathan said nothing. Noting the motion of the curtains as someone peeked out, he knocked again.
More motion, more voices. They sounded angsty.
Jonathan whispered, “I think you might be getting some business after all, Big Guy.”
“Now you’re making my nipples hard,” Boxers said.
Jonathan smiled and kept knocking. Not hard—not a search-warrant pound—just a steady, annoying-as-hell thump with his knuckle. The whole point was to get them to open the damn door.
“Go away!” a voice said. It carried an accent, but these days, in this neighborhood, unaccented English was more the exception than the rule.
He heard a little yip—maybe squeak was a better term. Was it a little girl being hurt?
Jonathan kept knocking.
Finally, he heard the chain move on the back of the door, and the knob turned. The door cracked a few inches, enough to reveal a man’s left eye. It looked like a pissed off left eye. “I said go away!”
“Dude!” Jonathan said. He wedged his body closer to the door. “Whatcha doin’ in there? This is the party room, right?” He pushed on the door, opening it just enough to see the shadow of a second man wedged behind the door panel. He was hiding. In the mirror on the wall over the dresser, Jonathan saw a seam of light around the closed bathroom door. That made at least three targets. And the one he could see looked Middle Eastern. Check, check and check.
“There is no party here,” the doorman insisted. “You need to leave.”
When Jonathan saw what appeared to be blood on the floor, he decided it was time to call an audible. “Dude, look, I’m sorry, man. Can I just use your pisser?” He pressed in tighter.
The doorman pressed his hand to Jonathan’s chest. “No, you may not. You are drunk. You do not belong—”
“Hey, Mindy, are you there?” Jonathan shouted.
The doorman’s eyes flashed fear as commotion rose behind the closed bathroom door. The doorman’s hand whipped around to the back of his trousers. It was all the confession Jonathan needed.
Jonathan shouldered the door hard and drove the heel of his left hand into the other man’s nose. Knocked off balance, the guy staggered back three steps. Jonathan hammered the door again, harder this time, to unbalance the guy in the shadow. In one smooth, practiced move, he lifted his T-shirt with his left hand, pulled his 1911 from its holster and thumbed the safety off.
The man he’d driven back into the room recovered enough to draw a pistol, and had nearly brought it to bear when Jonathan fired two one-handed shots into the gunman’s chest. The guy was still collapsing when Jonathan pivoted left to encounter the hider behind the door. He never saw the man’s face, but he saw the gun in the man’s hand. A pistol-grip pump shotgun with a shortened barrel. Jonathan fired three times in to the shadow’s center of mass, and both the weapon and its owner fell like bricks.
When Jonathan turned back to the first guy, he saw that he still sat upright, bleeding from his chest, his face a mask of confusion. Jonathan shot the mask through the eye.
“Mindy, are you in the bathroom?” As he spoke, he pulled a fresh mag for the Colt out of its pouch on the left side of his belt, and brought it up the pistol’s grip.
“Help! I—” The young voice was silenced by a slap.
He dropped the partially spent mag into the space between the middle and ring fingers of his left hand and jammed the new one home. The whole maneuver took less than two seconds. He dropped the mostly empty mag into his pocket. Never enter a new gunfight with old ammo.
Jonathan fired a kick that landed square on the bathroom door’s flimsy brass-colored knob.
The panel exploded inward, launching a shower of splintered mirror.
Mindy screamed. Her kidnapper held her by her flaming red hair, lifting her off her feet as he cowered behind, trying to get a bead on Jonathan. Black zip ties bound her hands in front of her. Motel bathrooms were not big spaces, and old shitty ones were even smaller. At a range of maybe three feet, the worst marksmen in the world would have a hard time missing.
Jonathan went for the gun. It was a Glock—either a 19 or a 23. He grabbed the weapon at the slide, behind the front sight and he twisted it inward and up. If it fired, it wouldn’t hit anyone. As the kidnapper’s finger snapped inside the trigger guard, the guy lost his concentration on Mindy’s hair. As she moved, she opened a space that revealed the bad guy’s face. Jonathan thrust his colt through the opening till he felt hard contact with the guy’s forehead, and he pulled the trigger, opening a star-shaped hole in flesh and bone. The kidnapper left a crimson arc on the shattered green tile wall as he slid sideways into the bathtub, pulling the shower curtain and rod with him.
“We’re clear,” Jonathan said, holstering his Colt. “Three sleeping. PC is secure.”
“Holy shit, Scorpion, what did you just do?” Boxers nearly shouted. The cadence of his words told Jonathan that Big Guy was running.
Without saying a word, Jonathan grabbed Mindy around the middle and lifted her off her feet. She struggled. “Let me alone!” she yelled. “Let me go!” She swung her fists as a single unit, as if chopping wood.
Jonathan used a second arm to pinion her hands to her side. “Don’t look at the bodies,” he said, as he maneuvered her out of the bathroom. “I’m here to take you back to your parents.”
“Put me down!”
She’d been through a lot. Jonathan didn’t expect her to understand what was going on, and this was no time to go into detail. He just gripped her tighter and hustled across the parking lot toward the Ford. He carried her sideways to avoid getting kicked by her pedaling feet, and was a little ashamed at how quickly his grip had begun to slip. Apparently, kids are born with a wriggle instinct, and young Mindy was particularly gifted. He picked up his pace.
Boxers was already in the cab and cranking the engine when Jonathan was still twenty feet away. Reading the situation for what it was, Big Guy swung back out of the vehicle and opened the back door on the driver’s side. Jonathan ducked his head, stepped high, and sort of leaped onto the back bench seat, while at the same time turning to keep from landing atop the squirming little girl. Knowing that a door slam was coming, he tucked his knees up to prevent losing his feet at the ankles.
Five seconds later, they were on their way.
“Leave me alone! Let go of me!”
Boxers shouted, “Hey! Mindy, shut up! We just saved your life! Show some respect!” When Big Guy wanted to be loud, he could be seismic. They were harsh words, but they worked. Mindy fell silent, and even Jonathan felt a little stunned.
He unwrapped his arms from around the PC and helped her sit up straight. “Are you hurt?”
“They hit me,” she said. Some of the wind had left her sails, but she was still spun tight. Clotted blood mixed with her red hair.
“Well, they can’t hit you anymore,” Jonathan said.
“You killed those men.”
“Yes, I did. They’ll never hurt anyone ever again.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
Jonathan didn’t know how to read the emotion in her words, and he didn’t much try. At this point in a mission, his job was simple. He needed to return the precious cargo to her family and move on. He was not a counselor and he was not a soother of souls. In his experience, those who were so drawn were born with a radically different skill set than his.
“I didn’t ask you to do that,” Mindy repeated.
“I heard you the first time,” Jonathan said. “But it’s done anyway. Here, let me see your hands. I’ll take those ties off.” As he spoke, he lifted out the three-inch folding blade that was clipped to the pocket of his jeans and opened it with a one-handed flourish.
The suddenness startled Mindy. She retreated from him.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Jonathan said. “I’m just going to cut the plastic away.”
“Stay away from me.”
Jonathan sighed. “Fine.” He folded the knife and put it back in his pocket.
“Who are you? You’re not the police.”
“That is true,” Jonathan said with what he hoped was a friendly smile. “We are definitely not the police. But we are on your side. We came here just to save you.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re the good guys,” Jonathan said. She didn’t need to know anything about his business arrangement with her father, and she didn’t need to know anything about his operations. These were the times when he most missed his days with the Unit, doing the official bidding of Uncle Sam. Back then, the Army psychologists would take care of the emotional damage, and all he had to concentrate on was the physical stuff.
Right now, their biggest concern was to get rid of this vehicle and transfer over to the Batmobile, their heavily armored and wildly modified Hummer. All the screaming and shooting almost certainly attracted attention, and if anyone saw them hustling Mindy into the backseat of the Ford, they would conclude that Jonathan and Boxers were the bad guys. So far, he heard no sirens or indicators that word of the shoot-out had made it to the authorities, but any delay would buy him only minutes.
They’d stashed the Batmobile in the bay of a body shop owned by Marcus Glenning, a former MARSOC operator who’d lost a leg in Afghanistan and retired on disability to pursue his passion for cars in the community of residents who would most appreciate his sacrifice. Marcus and Jonathan had crossed paths a few times back in the day, and Marcus was willing to do his old friend a favor without asking too many questions. Within an hour of trading the Ford for the Hummer, the Explorer would be a pile of parts awaiting re-sale.
Jonathan pressed his transmit button. “Mother Hen, Scorpion. Call the hammer man and tell him we’re two minutes out.”
“Calling now,” Venice said.
Jonathan turned to his precious cargo. “Mindy, I need you to listen to me. I need you to trust me. Your father sent Big Guy and me to rescue you from those bad men—the ones who hit you and tied your hands. Can I cut that band off your wrist now?”
She held her hands out. He opened his knife again and carefully slid the razor-sharp blade under the plastic band, near her thumbs, and sliced it away. The deep red lines in her skin angered him. Mindy pulled her hands back and rubbed her wrists.
Jonathan continued, “In a few minutes, we’re going to pull into a garage and we’re all going to transfer to another truck. That’s the truck we’re going to use to take you home.”
“How do I know I can believe you?”
“I don’t know how to answer that. Let’s start with the fact that I killed the men who hurt you. That’s got to buy me something.” He smiled, showing off his fake buck teeth. “I need you to cooperate with the transfer, okay? No more kicking and screaming, no trying to run away. We’re still in danger, and need to move quickly. Will you do that for me?”
“Are you going to kill anybody else?”
Jonathan scowled. It was an odd question. “I hope not. I’ll certainly try not to.” From the way she pulled back, he saw that it was not the right answer. “Let me put it this way. The only way I would kill anyone else would be to protect you from harm.”
Something clicked behind her eyes. “So, you’re, like, my bodyguards?”
He winked. “We are exactly like your bodyguards.”
“Promise you’re telling the truth?”
He drew an X across his chest with his finger. “Cross my heart.”
Mindy thought some more, then nodded. “Okay, then. I’ll trust you.”
Jonathan bladed his hand and held it out. “Let’s shake on it.”