The Evan Buckley Thrillers: Books 1 - 4 (Evan Buckley Thrillers Boxsets)

by James, Harper

  ‘I don’t have the answer to that one Evan, but here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to put my gun down.’ Next to Evan, Forrest tensed. ‘Call it a gesture of good faith. Then you’re the only one with a gun. Then we’ll get the local cops out here and take it from there. Okay?’

  Now it was Evan’s turn to say nothing. They were both watching him, waiting for his decision. He couldn’t hear Forrest’s labored breathing any more. Was he holding his breath? A trickle of sweat ran down the middle of his back. Angel’s proposition was a much better idea than anything he could think of.

  ‘Okay.’

  Angel bent slowly and placed his gun on the ground. He stood back up and lifted his empty hands for them to see.

  ‘Kick it over here,’ Evan said.

  Angel gave him a nice-try sort of smile. Like I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night. ‘Uh, uh, not where he can get it’—he gave Forrest the same smile—‘I’ll kick it under the car if you like.’

  Evan nodded. Angel gave the gun a kick.

  ‘It’s a trick,’ Forrest hissed at his side.

  If it was a trick, Evan couldn’t see how it was going to play out. ‘Just shut up.’

  ‘He tried to kill Jesse,’ Forrest said, ignoring him. ‘I spoke to him on the phone this morning.’

  ‘I said shut up.’

  ‘He’s lying,’ Angel said. ‘Get him to show you the call.’

  Evan looked from one to the other. Forrest looked jittery as hell. Angel was relaxed, almost detached. Maybe he should just shoot both of them and head for the hills. ‘Show me,’ he said to Forrest.

  Forrest gave a noncommittal twitch of the shoulders and smiled like he was pleased to be able to prove his story. He pulled his phone from his pocket and looked down at the screen. Evan glanced down at it and then quickly back up at Angel. He hadn’t moved. Forrest scrolled down and found what he was looking for. ‘There we go,’ he said under his breath, ‘just after seven this morning.’ He leaned in to read the small text easier.

  Angel’s warning shout came a split second too late. ‘Evan, don’t—’

  Evan leaned in.

  Forrest brought his hand up hard and fast and mashed the phone into Evan’s face. Evan let out a gasp, more from surprise than the force of the blow, staggered backwards a half-step. Forrest buried his fist in his stomach. The air exploded out of his body as he dropped to his knees, the gun still in his hand. Forrest kicked his hand at the same moment Angel started moving. The gun went flying. Forrest jumped after it, ten feet closer to it than Angel. Angel hesitated, turned to see where his own gun had ended up, lost vital seconds. Forrest snatched up Evan’s gun, stepped away from them both and brought the gun round on to Angel.

  ‘Get away from the car. Get over there with him.’

  Forrest waited as Angel walked slowly and carefully over to Evan, keeping his eyes on the gun the whole time. Evan was still kneeling, bent double and sucking back great hunks of air like he’d just got out of an alien space pod and was trying out oxygen for the first time—and it wasn’t agreeing with him. Forrest retrieved Angel’s gun from under the car. He stood back and looked at the pair of them with smug satisfaction plastered all over his face.

  ‘Looks like you got your answer,’ Angel said to the top of Evan’s head and gave it an irritated slap.

  Chapter 72

  EVAN WANTED TO PUNCH himself for being so stupid and being tricked so easily by Forrest. Angel wasn’t too pleased either. Forrest, on the other hand, looked like a dog with two tails. Or a man with two guns—all the guns.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Evan said. The effort made him wheeze again.

  Angel looked down at the top of his head. Sorry about that? Like all he’d done was spill some barbeque sauce on his new suede shoes. ‘Shit happens,’ he said and gave Evan’s head another slap. ‘At least you know now that you didn’t kill Gina. She might still be alive.’

  Evan wasn’t sure he knew exactly what to do with that information. Too little, too late came to mind. ‘That’ll be a great consolation to me in my last five minutes alive.’ He had to admit, it was better than dying in the next five minutes thinking he had killed her. The little things count.

  ‘At least I won’t have to tell Guillory I broke my promise, failed to stop her favorite lunatic from hurting himself. Oh, and me as well.’

  ‘That’s enough talking amongst yourselves,’ Forrest said with a smirk on his face and sounding like a school teacher quietening down a noisy class. His voice was still thick with blood from his broken nose. With any luck it hurt like hell.

  ‘Sorry about your nose,’ Angel said. ‘Hope it doesn’t hurt too bad.’

  Forrest ignored him. Evan wondered if it was part of a plan to provoke him into doing something silly. Like shoot them. ‘You’ll never get away with it,’ he said, hoping Forrest might be stupid enough to tell them what he was about to do. He had to chew on the inside of his mouth to stop himself from grinning like an idiot when Forrest took the bait.

  ‘Really? I think you’re wrong. First, I’ll use this gun’—he held up the one he’d taken from Evan—‘to shoot Angel here. It’s the same gun that killed D’Amato’s men and ...’ He paused to see if either of them would be dumb enough to go for him. Clearly disappointed when they didn’t, he carried on, ‘And I’ll use this one’—he waved the other one in the air—‘to shoot you. I’ll say it fell out of Angel’s pocket when you shot him and I picked it up and shot you. Who’s going to worry about little details anyway?’ His smile invited them to congratulate him on his brilliant plan. Neither of them took him up on it.

  ‘Easy as that?’ Angel said with a short, dry laugh.

  ‘Ain’t nothing easy,’ Forrest said, taking on a Southern twang and a good ol’ boy manner that told them one of life’s greatest secrets was about to be revealed to them. ‘Simple, though.’

  Neither of them could fault his logic.

  ‘I can see it now. I’ll be a hero. I killed the cop-killer madman—that’d be you,’ he said with a nod towards Evan. He stood up straight and pushed his chest out. ‘Just think, I might get interviewed on TV.’

  Evan closed his eyes, pictured himself clamping his fingers tightly around Forrest’s throat, digging his thumbnails into his Adam’s apple until his eyes bulged and filled with blood, feeling the hyoid bone snap under his fingers, breathing in the stench as he lost control of his bowels and bladder. He went to stand up, but Angel held him down with a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Looks like Angel’s got more sense than you,’ Forrest said. ‘You, get down on your knees next to him,’ he said to Angel, waving the gun at him.

  Angel laughed as he knelt.

  ‘You think this is funny, do you?’ Forrest spat.

  ‘So how are you going to explain an execution? How’s that fit with your master plan, dickhead?’ Angel said.

  Now it was Forrest’s turn to laugh. He pushed one of the guns down the back of the waistband of his pants and walked over and patted Evan’s face, the gun in his hand inches from Evan’s ear. ‘Who knows what’s going to happen when the balance of a man’s mind is shot to hell by a dangerous hallucinogenic drug like ketamine?’ He sniggered at his own ingenuity. ‘That’s why they call it special k, super acid. Because it sends you …’ He trailed off and circled the fingers of his left hand at his temple as he walked behind them.

  ‘Let’s see how it might go—you told him you had to bring him in for Gina’s murder and he went completely berserk. Ranting and raving at you. Made you kneel. Shot you in the back of the head. Bang.’ He shouted the bang so loudly they both flinched.

  ‘It all falls apart when Gina turns up alive and tells everybody it was you.’

  ‘What do you care? You’ll be dead by then. Besides, Gina won’t turn up alive because she’s—’

  He stopped talking abruptly as Evan’s phone rang in his pocket.

  ‘Aren’t you going to see who it is? It’s going to be the last call you ever get, after all.’r />
  Evan put his hand into his pocket.

  Forrest stepped forward and hit him on the back of the head with the side of the gun. ‘Don’t get any ideas.’ He gave Angel’s head a swipe too. ‘Or you.’

  Evan pulled the phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen, prayed it wasn’t Mitch, or Hendricks escalating his crusade from email to text to actual conversation—if that’s what you’d call an exchange of words with a man like him.

  ‘Who is it?’ Forrest said.

  ‘Why don’t you look for yourself?’

  Forrest snapped his wrist and hit him again with the gun. The front sight caught Evan on the cheekbone and opened a ragged gash. Blood welled and climbed out of the wound like it had finally found its purpose in life and ran down his cheek.

  ‘Don’t be smart. Who is it?’

  ‘It’s your mother. Something about the inside of her leg.’

  Angel forced a grin. ‘Yeah, and the best part of you.’

  Realizing they were trying to goad him, Forrest had the good sense to ignore them. The phone stopped ringing and they all stared at it. Then it rang again immediately. Evan knew there wasn’t any point continuing with the game.

  ‘It’s Destiny.’

  ‘Ha. Perfect,’ Forrest jeered. ‘Go on, answer it.’

  Evan answered the call. ‘Hello?’ He listened for a few seconds and nodded. Around him the silence was absolute. He felt Angel’s eyes on the side of his face and Forrest’s gun hanging in the air inches behind his head. Nobody breathed. Sweat mingled with the blood that ran from the cut on his cheek and dripped onto his shirt.

  ‘What’s she saying?’ Forrest said, his voice a high whisper.

  ‘She wants to know where we are. She’s bored with sitting around the hotel doing nothing.’

  Forrest sniggered again. ‘Give me the phone. I’ll give her something to pass the time. Easy now.’

  Evan put his arm behind his back and held the phone out. Forrest snatched it out of his hand.

  ‘It’s a shame we can’t take a video,’ he said, ‘like the Islamic terrorists do.’ He peered at the phone in his hand. ‘I don’t know how to work the stupid things. This will have to do.’

  He stepped behind Angel and pointed the gun at the base of his skull. He held the phone in the other outstretched hand. A small, tinny voice came from the phone: Hello. Hello? Angel hung his head, but not before he met Evan’s eyes. Something passed between them, a bond was forged, the sort that can only be made when you kneel side by side in the dirt ready to meet your maker together.

  If we act together, he can’t shoot us both.

  Evan nodded and closed his eyes, concentrated on Forrest’s presence behind them. He heard Angel mumbling something softly under his breath. He tried to concentrate. Jesus and Mary? Was he praying? Making his peace with his maker?

  ‘What’s that?’ Forrest said, unable to stop himself from leaning forward.

  Evan sensed Angel tense next to him, felt the impending violence on a baser, primeval level. A barely controllable surge of anticipation rose up inside him, the buzz in his stomach intensifying, animal excitement bonding them like a pack of wild dogs picking up the scent of a wounded calf.

  Any second now.

  He risked a fast glance down to the side. Angel’s hand was balled into a tight fist, the tendons corded on the back of his hand, as he willed Forrest to lean further into range. Evan saw faded white scars against tanned skin, one knuckle twice the size of the others. Angel mumbled something incomprehensible.

  ‘What did you say?’ Forrest screamed, his face puce, voice cracking. He took a half step forward and jabbed the barrel of the gun hard into the back of Angel’s neck.

  Angel grunted and bowed his head further towards the ground. Forrest’s whole arm shook as he increased the pressure on Angel’s neck.

  ‘Tell me what you said, you wetback piece of shit.’

  Evan felt like he hadn’t breathed for a week. He stole a glance at the side of Angel’s face. A hint of a smile curled the corner of his mouth. Evan looked away, looked up at the hard, powder blue sky above, saw their chance slipping away into the ether.

  And the words engraved on the Zippo that weighed heavily in his pocket, the words he might never know the truth about, filled his mind with a dazzling clarity. He laughed silently to himself at how fitting the words were, how perfectly he filled the roles of the unwilling, the unqualified and the unfortunate, and how he might well be about to die for an ungrateful bastard like Jesse.

  Then Angel put it more succinctly.

  ‘I said suck my dick, cocksucker.’

  At last.

  Evan’s heart surged as the fear gave up its paralyzing grip, the adrenalin sledding through his legs and arms. The murderous tension that had been growing like a malignant parasite inside him, feeding on his anger and disgust, erupted out of him even before he started moving.

  But Angel was faster, much faster. He ducked his head forward. Forrest stumbled as the pressure against his gun arm suddenly disappeared. Angel’s arm, rigid, the corded tendons vibrating under his skin, whipped around in a murderous backhand arc with all the wild, untamed power of a tree caught in a tropical storm.

  Too late.

  A loud, whip-crack report shattered the air.

  Evan started at the sound. Then, in the split second before his own muscles reacted and launched him blindly backwards at Forrest, something registered in his subconscious and stopped him dead. It should have been louder—much louder. It should have been deafening that close to his ear. His head snapped sideways towards Angel. His arm was frozen mid-strike. He was still kneeling, hadn’t toppled over, wasn’t even swaying. Then his head pivoted slowly and he looked straight back at Evan, his eyes as full of unholy relief as any gladiator granted missio as his blood soaked into the sand of the amphitheater.

  They turned as one and looked at Forrest. He was suspended in mid-air with his two arms outstretched and his mouth hanging open. His eyes were open and tilted up and to the right, as if he were trying to remember his wife’s shoe size or where he’d left his car keys. The bottom half of his nose was missing. His upper lip was hanging off his cheek, most of his teeth gone. He dropped onto his knees as if a rope around his neck had been severed, and his head fell forward until his chin was on his chest, like a man stretching out a painfully stiff neck. Then he gently rolled onto his side, the gun and phone falling from his hands and clattering away across the cobblestone courtyard.

  ‘Why not stretch it out a bit longer next time?’ Evan said.

  Angel grinned at him. ‘Why not grow some bigger cojones? No wonder Guillory asked me to keep an eye on you.’

  A new sound made them both turn and look behind them. They scrambled to their feet. The throaty burble of a big V8 engine pushing out three hundred and fifty horsepower grew louder, echoing off the walls around them, as a black ‘69 Corvette Stingray rumbled down the driveway towards them.

  Evan was never sure afterwards but he’d have sworn he heard Angel say: I’m gonna have to tan your hide, young lady. I told you to stay in the hotel.

  Chapter 73

  DESTINY CUT THE ENGINE and climbed out. A Remington 700 deer rifle with a Leupold VX scope lay on the passenger seat. Evan lifted the rifle out of the car and studied it.

  ‘Gina was right about you and your guns. You just want to be one of the guys.’

  It was all BS of course. Even in jeans and a heavy sweat top she didn’t look anything like one of the guys. He wondered if she was going to ask Angel for a second opinion. He was staring at her like he’d fallen in love.

  She took the rifle out of Evan’s hands. ‘I thought everybody had one of these. I’ll show you how to shoot one if you like.’

  ‘I’ll take that,’ Angel said, taking the rifle from her and putting it in the trunk of his car. ‘We’ll be needing it as evidence.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ she said, ‘I’ve got lots of others.’ She leaned against the car and crossed her arms.


  ‘Anyway, I thought I told you to stay in the hotel,’ Angel said, doing a good job of keeping a straight face.

  Evan noticed he didn’t say anything about tanning her butt—sorry, hide—at this point.

  ‘Well, you know how it is, officer, I got bored painting my nails’—she held out her perfect red-tipped fingers for them to see—‘besides, something told me you guys might need a hand.’

  His eyebrows lifted a fraction. ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘From somebody who knows one end of a gun from the other.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Angel said, unable to keep the smile off his face any longer.

  She nodded like it was never in doubt and looked from one to the other of them. ‘So, are you two okay? You look a little peaky.’

  ‘Peaky’s fine,’ Evan said.

  She took a closer look at Evan’s face. ‘Looks like you’ve got a little scratch on your cheek as well.’

  He waved that away like he’d done a lot worse shaving. ‘We’re a lot better than him, that’s for sure.’ He inclined his head in Forrest’s direction.

  She walked over to Forrest’s still warm body and pushed it absently with the tip of her pointy boot. Dead things obviously didn’t give her a problem.

  ‘I think you got him,’ Angel said.

  She studied the remains of Forrest’s face for a few seconds with a strange look on her face. For an unpleasant moment Evan was sure she was about to bend down and put her finger in the bullet hole.

  ‘Not bad,’ she said, more to herself than anyone else. ‘Should’ve been four inches higher. Wouldn’t win any competitions, but he’s the first human I’ve shot. I’ll do better next time.’ She turned back to face them with a look in her eyes that made them wonder if she was joking or not.

  ‘You gonna skin him now?’ Angel said.

  ‘I wouldn’t dirty the knife,’ she said and they all laughed, laughed hard until it hurt, especially Evan with his sore gut.

  ‘We better see if we can find Jesse,’ Evan said when they’d calmed down. That certainly wiped the smiles off their faces.