“Move,” he said. He’d rested for all the time that he could. Chuck stood, grabbed the rifle, and made his way through the next yard. His side immediately cramped again. He needed to either get a car or get inside one of the houses where he could lie low. He reached the street and looked for headlights—none. He continued through another pair of yards and came to another street. Still no cars were coming or going. He was smack in the middle of an older neighborhood, and he waited along the side of a house—it was only a matter of time until someone would come along.
Minutes passed, each one feeling like an eternity and an opportunity for the cops to get one step closer to him. Chuck couldn’t take standing still. He moved another block and then another. Off to his left, through one more yard, he could see what looked like the lit signs of businesses. He set the rifle down in the grass and watched the area. A car passed and then another. The street could be a coin flip. There were passing cars, which he needed, but it also meant putting himself out in the open. Chuck was about to gamble on it when headlights caught his eye down the block to his right. A car was making the turn toward him. In the streetlights, from almost a block away, the vehicle looked like a dark-colored sedan. It didn’t look like a cop car. He would chance it.
Chuck lifted the rifle from the grass, brought the stock up into his shoulder, and jogged out of the yard. He crossed the sidewalk and stopped dead center in the middle of the street. He took aim at the driver’s-side windshield of the car. The headlights got closer and closer. At a hundred feet, he could see the car slow. Chuck walked toward the car as it stopped, and he fired a pair of rounds into the driver’s-side windshield. No one fled from the passenger side. The car idled forward. Chuck put another round into the windshield. Still moving only at an idle, the car veered toward the edge of the road and found a tree just a couple of feet into the yard that Chuck had come from. Chuck jogged to the driver’s door and tried pulling the handle—locked. He put the butt of the rifle through the glass, sending it shattering inward toward a man who was slumped over toward the passenger seat. Chuck reached in and opened the door. The light from opening the door lit the blood-spattered interior. Chuck grabbed the guy by the back of his T-shirt and yanked him from the car. He had his wheels—it was time to go.
Chapter 35
I’d run through yard after yard after yard. The moon, almost full, scattered streetlights and motion lights in yards lit my way. Beth, Scott, and I had split up a couple of blocks back. We didn’t know if we were close to Burr. He could have been in the next yard, the one I passed through three yards back, or completely gone from the area. I slowed up and stopped on the sidewalk beneath a streetlight at the intersection of Pine and North Seventeenth Street—I had no clue how far I’d gone from Gerrianne Walters’s house. I pulled in a couple of big breaths, holstered my weapon, and dialed Beth—seven or eight rings and I got a voicemail. She was probably jogging and couldn’t feel her phone ringing. She usually kept it on vibrate. I tried Scott. He answered in about five rings.
“Hey.” His voice sounded strained, and I could hear him sucking in wind.
“Anything?” I asked.
“No, you?”
“Nah. We need to just get some patrol cars canvassing the area. I don’t think we’re going to have much luck this way.”
“How far have you gone since we split up?” he asked.
“Couldn’t tell you. Six, seven blocks, maybe.”
“Yeah, me too,” he said.
“I’m going to go up another couple blocks and then circle back,” I said.
“All right. I’ll do the same and meet you back at the house.”
“Sounds good.” I hung up, stuffed my phone into my pocket, and got my service weapon back in hand.
“Two more blocks,” I said.
I jogged a block up and stood in the street. I waited. I watched for any movement. Nothing. I started for the next block, again standing in the middle of the street, looking left and right, waiting for something to catch my eye. All was quiet. My phone buzzed against my leg. When I pulled it from my pocket, the screen said it was Beth.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Anything?”
“No. I’m headed back. We’ll get some cars canvassing the area. See how long it will take to get a bird—”
Midsentence, I heard two pops. Gunshots—without a doubt. I snapped my head left and right, trying to identify the direction in which they’d come.
“Did you hear that?” Beth said into my ear.
I heard another shot. It had come from my right, and it wasn’t far away—a block, maybe two.
I picked up a jog, still holding my phone to my ear until I reached the next block—Proctor Street. I spotted headlights about a block and a half down. Someone appeared to be standing in the street. I got to the sidewalk and advanced the block before crossing the intersection at Sixteenth and Proctor. I stayed in the shadows to avoid being spotted and took in what I could see—a car that appeared to be crashed into a tree and a man standing in the open driver’s door. “Proctor and Sixteenth,” I said to Beth. “I think I’ve got him. Get everyone over here.”
I ended the call, jammed my phone into my pocket, and walked down the sidewalk with my gun up and at the ready. There had to have been a dozen houses on the block, and I’d seen the lights in a couple of windows come on as I moved toward the car. At three houses away, on the far side of the street, I saw the guy standing in the open door of the car yank another man out. The guy who had been pulled from the car hit the street and didn’t budge. The man who had been standing got into the driver’s seat. I ran down the sidewalk until I was parallel with the car and used the two-foot-wide trunk of an oak for cover. While I couldn’t tell if it was Charles Burr behind the wheel, the odds of it not being had to be a million to one.
“Charles Burr!” I yelled. “FBI!” I put aim on him in the car, forty feet away.
The man behind the wheel snapped his head in my direction, though I wasn’t sure that he could see me tucked behind the tree.
“Let me see those hands out the window!” I called.
A porch light came on, and a woman opened her front door behind the car, drawing my attention. I glanced at her for a split second. The moment I focused back on the guy in the car, I saw a gun out of the window.
I fired twice. My rounds had to have entered the car—they had to have hit him. Whether they did or not, return fire came immediately. I stayed small, using the tree for cover. Bits and pieces of bark ripped from it and flew through the air. More rounds plunked into the front porch of the house at my back. With a pause in the gunfire, I peeked out from the tree to get a visual. And a visual I got—of Burr standing outside of the car with an assault rifle aimed at me. I fired off a pair of rounds, hitting him center mass. He took a stumbling step backward and bounced off the fender of the car before he opened fire.
I got as much of myself behind the tree as possible while round after round punched into the other side of the tree and ripped through the air just inches from me. The moment the gunfire stopped, I heard something odd. Kind of a metallic clank and slide. I got low and poked out on the other side of the tree in hopes he wasn’t just waiting for me to pop out where I had the last time. He wasn’t there, and the sound that I’d heard was the rifle hitting the street. The car’s motor revved, and it shot backward from the tree that it was pressed against—the sedan swerved back and forth, going in reverse down the block. I stepped into the street and put rounds into the already shattered windshield of the car. It continued to move in reverse as I unloaded my service weapon’s magazine into it. The car stopped.
A hundred-foot gap had formed between the car and me. I ran toward it, gun up, closing the distance. As I dropped the magazine from my gun to reload, and while I was still in midrun, the car launched forward. I wouldn’t reload in time. The gap between the car and me was gone, and my only options were diving left or right. I chose the right, which turned out to be wrong.
The he
adlights came at me like a flash. There was nothing that I could do. I felt my legs get taken out from under me. The car’s A-pillar, and top corner of the windshield, caught me square in the back before I flew over the roof, bounced off the trunk lid, and landed at the edge of the street. My forehead cracked off the ground, causing my vision to momentarily go black. I tried to shake it off and get my feet under me—I tried to get a breath after having the wind knocked out of me. I gasped in a lungful of air that was far more painful than it should have been—my ribs were broken, I was certain.
As I got a knee under myself, blood was dripping from my head to the street. I reached into my jacket and grabbed my extra magazine for my service weapon, which I put eyes on, lying in the street about five feet away. I got up and limped over to my gun. As I reached down for it, I was lit up by the car’s reverse lights. Gun in hand, I took two hobbling steps and dove as far as I could into the street. The car, rocketing backward, missed me by just inches. The tires squealed as the car slid to a stop.
I planted a hand in the street, pushed up, and stood in the car’s headlights. The engine revved.
I inserted the magazine into my gun, racked the slide, and lifted my weapon just as the sedan bore down on me. I fired round after round into the driver’s-side windshield. When the car was thirty feet away, and just when I thought I was about to be hit again, it made a sharp turn. The sedan tore through the front yard of a nearby house, bounded over some landscaping rocks, then crashed into the front porch of the home.
I kept aim on the car. The directional flashed. The engine still ran. There was no movement. Headlights caught my eye down the block. Red and blues were right behind them—my backup. I limped toward the car.
The driver’s door opened as I was twenty feet away.
“Burr! Show me your hands!” I called.
He spilled out into the grass and shattered boards of the porch that the car had crashed into. I proceeded forward, one hobbling step at a time, keeping aim on him. Burr lay facedown, looking as if he was trying to pull away from the car with his left hand. His right hand, I couldn’t see.
“Stop moving!” I said. “Put your hands out to the sides.”
My voice drew his attention. Burr held his left hand out, rolled, then I saw the gun he’d had in his right.
“Dro—”
The gunfire started and stopped in a fraction of a second. He fired once, I fired twice, and the slide of my gun locked back.
Burr dropped to the grass, just a few feet outside of the car. He didn’t move. He faced me with open eyes.
I moved toward him. The car’s interior light combined with the single closest streetlight lit Burr’s body. His clothing, his body, the pieces of white wood from the porch and the grass beneath him, everything that he’d come into contact with was covered in blood. His gun lay in the grass. I kicked it away from him and dropped to my knees, one at a time, at his side. I linked his left wrist and then his right behind his back. There was no resistance. The sound of the cars coming to a stop on the street registered in my ears, but I didn’t look—I kept eyes on Burr’s face.
“Burr,” I said.
Nothing—he was gone.
I fell to my backside and scooted toward the rear tire of the car. As I put my back to the car’s rim, I looked down at my left arm, which seemed to be burning more than it should have. My left hand was wet with blood—my own. The bloody wet tear in my jacket said that I’d been shot. I wiggled my fingers and lifted my arm—everything worked. It couldn’t have been too bad. I scooted up a bit farther, which caused a wave of pain to run through my chest. My breathing was labored. I coughed and tasted blood in my mouth.
“Shit,” I said.
While the bullet wound in my arm didn’t seem too serious, my ribs were another matter.
Beth, Scott, and Bill jogged to me, resting at the car.
“Burr?” Bill jerked his head at the body.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You all right?” Beth asked.
“No,” I said.
Chapter 36
“Run through the damages for me,” Ball said.
I adjusted myself in my Waco hospital bed, the same one I’d been calling home for three days—only about one and a half of which I actually remembered. The movement of rearranging made me wince, which made my chest hurt more than it already did. “The surgery was for a traumatic pneumothorax.”
“The hell is that?” Ball asked.
“A broken rib puncturing my lung from getting hit by a damn car,” I said. “Guess just one of my four broken ribs did the puncturing, though.”
“Ugh,” Ball said.
“Yeah. The ribs were really the worst of it. Not that getting shot is high on my list of shit to do.”
“Left arm was what Beth said.”
“Yeah. The bullet was a through and through just below the meat of my shoulder. It didn’t hit anything other than skin and muscle. Stitches and the instructions to ‘keep an eye on that.’ That’s about it. The rest was just stitches. Some in my head, a couple others here and there—maybe twenty total.”
“What’s the prognosis on the ribs and lung and all that?” Ball asked.
“Six to eight weeks,” I said. “I can probably work a desk but probably not field. I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to the doc back home.”
“Don’t worry about it. Get yourself healed up and let me know when you know.”
“Sure,” I said.
“When are they kicking you loose from where you’re at there?”
“Today. But that probably means tonight sometime. Karen and I fly back tomorrow morning.”
“And you’ll be okay to fly?”
“Gonna have to be. I have one hundred percent had enough of Texas. Ready to be home.”
“Just make sure,” Ball said. “I don’t know how that all works with pressure and whatever.”
“I’m sure Karen has already talked to the doctor about it,” I said.
Karen, who was out on an errand for me, had gotten the first flight out when Beth called her about what happened. While she had a hotel room about a half mile away, she’d been pretty much living in my hospital room with me since I’d gotten out of surgery.
“How are we doing with getting all the different forensics departments working together?” I asked. “When I talked to Beth, she said that getting everyone on the same page was starting to become a pain in the ass.”
“It’s a work in progress,” Ball said. “We’ll get everything collected into one big picture eventually.”
“So, did we connect any more dots on just what the hell was going on here?” I asked.
“We’re still working on getting this David Alterman picked up,” Ball said. “Good chance the guy got wind that there was some heat on him and dipped into Mexico.”
Through the messages on Gerrianne Walters’s phone, the team had gotten the guy’s name as a person of interest. I’d heard bits and pieces of how he was involved, but between sleeping, whatever drugs they’d been feeding me, and hospital staff interruptions, I wasn’t one hundred percent crystal on everything. I’d only been coherent for the previous twenty-four hours or so.
“Run through how he’s involved for me again,” I said. “I don’t know if I got the entire story on this guy.”
“It seems Ms. Walters set this David and Burr up together. David Alterman was going to try to get Burr out of the country, and the payment for doing so was going to be Burr working for him in Mexico. But at the same time, Ms. Walters was trying to set David Alterman up. Basically, stick Burr with this guy and then call in saying that she had information in hopes of getting the reward money. Burr would get busted, and at the same time, this David Alterman would go down with him. She’d profit, and Leland Walters would have the cash to buy himself favors inside.”
“Okay. Yeah, that’s pretty much what I got out of what Beth and the guys were saying. But why was she trying to set this guy up? What did he do to her?”
“The thinking was that he was responsible for her brother Leland Walters getting busted. We actually looked into that, and there isn’t anything there to suggest that he was. Either way, she believed it, I guess her brother believed it, and that was all it took, apparently.”
“Got it,” I said. “Anything further on Burr?”
“Nope. Dead in a Texas morgue somewhere,” Ball said. “We’re just trying to sort through the crap he left behind.”
“What was his final count?” I asked.
Ball let out a puff of air into the phone. “In the teens. We got him. About all we can say.”
“Yeah.”
The door of the room opened, and Karen came in with a small duffel bag draped over her shoulder.
“Hey, Karen is back, Ball. I’m gonna run.”
“Okay. Give me a call when you get home. I’ll bring you a fruit basket or something.”
“Beer works. Or a bottle of gin and a couple bottles of tonic would do as well.”
“Diet tonic,” Karen said, walking past the foot of my bed.
“Got it,” Ball said. “We’ll see you back home.”
“Yup.” I ended the call and tossed my phone onto the little table over my waist in my hospital bed.
“This is so wrong.” Karen fished her hand into the duffel bag and pulled out a brown paper bag. Grease stains soaked the bag’s sides.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I said.
Karen shook her head and walked the bag to my bedside.
“You know they’re going to take that from you if they come in,” Karen said.
“My ass,” I said. “I’d like to see them try to pry this baby outta my hands.” I tore open the Danny’s bag and pulled the French toast breakfast sandwich from inside. It smelled just like I’d dreamed it would. I ripped back the wrapper and took the biggest bite I could jam in my face. I chewed and smiled and chewed and swallowed. It was better than I could have possibly imagined.
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