“He’s been tranquilized,” she said. “You can’t miss it once you’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m a biologist myself.”
The man called Green stared at her. He unshouldered the sack and placed it carefully on the ground. He did the same with his backpack.
“Who are you?” she said firmly.
“Bic Green, ma’am.”
She cocked her head. “What’s the scientific name for a grizzly bear?”
Bic didn’t respond.
“Answer the lady” said William Bennington. “What’s the scientific name for grizzly bear? William reached back and pulled out his knife.
Bic Green stood silent.
“Listen,” said William, “if I were you, I’d haul ass on outta here.”
Bic removed his sunglasses.
“Oh my word,” said William, staring into the misty, lifeless red eyes. His hand faltered and fell to his side.
“I didn’t come for the bear,” Bic said too calmly.
William knew what Bic meant to do. He lunged forward with all the speed he could gather and thrust the eight-inch blade toward Bic’s abdomen. Bic moved faster than William, redirecting the blade away from his body with his left hand. As William’s body extended outward, Bic’s right fist exploded into his side. The punch landed right on his kidney. The pain was excruciating and he fell to the ground.
The man grabbed Lynn, who was too shocked to resist. He reached into a side pocket of his cargo pants and pulled out a Ziploc bag with a rag inside. He removed the rag and buried her mouth and nose in the cloth.
“Ursus arctos horribilis,” he whispered into her ear.
He moved toward William and placed the damp rag over his nose and mouth.
56
Light, dark. Light, dark.
Gabriel Hernandez stood on the platform, five bodies scattered below him. Four agents, one hooker. But a creak of wood told him there was at least one more agent to take out.
The wood below his feet came to life as a spray of bullets popped into the platform. Ah, there was Number Five. Having lined the platform and surrounding attic floor with Kevlar vests, Gabriel avoided being hit. He quickly retreated upward, going through the ceiling opening into the attic. He lay on a bed of bulletproof vests as he waited for the last man to enter the bedroom.
He saw a flicker of movement, but it turned out to be the hooker in the corner of the room. She was covered in blood, but she was alive, and now stood up, crying. Dumbass puta.
The man in the hallway opened fire again. Lines of bullets torpedoed through the ceiling and into the roof. Splinters of wood fell from the rafters. Several slugs popped into the Kevlar blanket beneath Gabriel. Each struck like a ferocious two-hundred-pound man’s punch.
The bullets stopped. Gabriel heard the unmistakable click of a weapon magazine releasing beneath him. Before Gabriel even thought, “he’s reloading,” he acted. With catlike agility, he jumped feet first through the hole in the ceiling, dropping into the bedroom, facing the hallway, and fired shots into the hall.
He crouched, his gun at the ready. In the intermittent, strobing light, he was unsure if his shots had hit the agent.
The room lit, and he caught a glimpse of the agent dropping his automatic rifle and reaching for his sidearm. Gabriel dropped to his belly, rolled to the right, and took aim.
The strobe light flashed. Catching a glimpse of the agent in the hallway, Gabriel emptied what was left in both Berettas. He fired twelve shots total in a tight box pattern.
Gabriel watched the agent fall eerily in the stuttering light to the floor.
Unsure if the agent was playing dead, Gabriel reloaded his weapon with his final clip. He lunged toward the agent and put two bullets in his head.
He bent down to identify the man, whose ID was emblazoned on his jacket. DEA! Gabriel thought. He would never be able to step foot in this house again after killing five of their agents.
Well, no great loss. He went back into the bedroom, grabbed his bed’s metal frame, and flipped it up against the wall. He then bent down and pulled up several floorboards up to expose a safe. He opened the safe and removed his “travel gear:” a duffel bag containing about a $150,000 American in cash, several bricks of uncut cocaine, Diablo, and two handguns.
Gabriel walked to the front door and dropped his bag. He went to the kitchen, opened a cabinet under the sink, and smiled. With an evil little chuckle, he grabbed two Molotov cocktails he had stored there for emergencies. “Time to redecorate.”
Each tightly-capped glass whisky bottle was filled with a murky liquid, and had a tampon tied to its side. He grabbed a lighter off the counter and lit the tampons. The cottony material quickly ignited.
Seeing the trembling woman’s eyes stare at him confusedly, he began to sing in a slow methodical voice, “Old McGabriel had a cocktail, E-I-E-I-O. And in that cocktail, he had some gas ’n’ oil, E-I-E-I-O… With a shake-shake here and a shake-shake there...”
Standing in his bedroom doorway, Gabriel whipped the first bottle up against the wall. It shattered, and the room burst into flames with a huge roar. As fire screamed toward him from the bedroom entrance, he made his way down the hall.
He stopped and bent over the hemorrhaging woman lying on the floor.
“Te veré en el infierno,” he said to her, and as he walked out the front door, he threw the bottle hard against the wall beside her.
57
Lynn Bennington opened her eyes. Everything was blurry, and she felt a numbing pain radiating all over her head. She raised it sluggishly and realized she was lying on the ground at the base of a large tree.
She had been drugged, but sobered suddenly to see—and smell—the pile of bloody fish guts draped over her stomach. Feverishly, she pushed the rank remains off her body. A chaotic panic swept over her. In its wake, she noticed her husband lying to her left, just out of arm’s reach.
She looked around but saw no sign of their attacker. “William,” she whispered. “William, answer me, please!” He didn’t respond, but he was breathing at least. He, too, was covered in fish parts.
She tried to go to him but couldn’t. Her wading boots had been removed, and her right ankle was wrapped in a thick leather shackle attached to an iron stake by a single chain link. She thrashed with all her might but couldn’t shake the stake loose.
Lynn tried again, but was too woozy to continue. She found it odd that the leather cuff’s insides were lined with a soft fleecy material.
She heard rapidly approaching footsteps and looked up. Their attacker was sprinting down the edge of the river toward her.
“Please don’t hurt us anymore,” she whimpered as he approached. “We’re good people.” Tears rolled down her cheeks.
The man ignored her pleas as he passed by her. He stopped at his backpack and rummaged through it with haste, looking several times over his shoulder.
He pulled a thick rope and a syringe out of his pack. Lynn gasped as she saw the pre-made noose at the end of the rope. “Dear God! Don’t hang us, please!”
Ignoring her, Bic walked over to his duffle bag, unzipped the pouch, and pulled the tranquilized cub out. He placed the noose first over the cub’s head, then its front legs, and then pulled it snug. After checking to make sure the rope was secure, he injected something into the cub. After a moment, it started to move.
Bic walked up to William.
“Leave my husband alone, you animal!” Lynn snarled.
As if in answer, the cub whined, low and wet. The sound was horrifying.
Bic took something else out of his pocket and waved it below her husband’s nose. William regained consciousness.
“Honey, are you okay?” Lynn cried.
He could barely mumble.
Lynn watched her husband’s pale face for some time, before Bic’s movement regained her attention. She watched as Bic, rope in hand, climbed the large tree. She still had no idea what he was doing, but quickly the rope
tightened as Bic ascended the tree, which dragged the cub nearer to her. The cub struggled helplessly in the other direction. As it struggled, its cries grew louder.
“Are you crazy?” Lynn shrieked. She’d recognized this behavior in the cub, having seen it many times in the field.
It was calling for its mother.
58
Bic secured himself on a large branch about fifteen feet above the ground. The cub’s calls grew increasingly more distressed.
Lynn’s voice caught in her throat. She found she was unable to scream.
The cub was dragged directly between William and Lynn. It now thrashed in its bonds.
“William,” she said with barely any voice at all, her breath coming in hitches. Her husband lolled his head toward her, his eyes like glass.
A stream of water splashed onto William’s face from above. The man in the tree had just emptied his canteen onto William. The water roused him. He sat up and looked to Lynn. He squinted, in obvious pain, and asked her, “What the hell’s happening?”
“We’re... we’re...” The words skipped and slid. Her horror was absolute.
Her husband, suddenly conscious of the bear, shook and thrashed from side to side as he attempted to free himself from the leather shackle. Fish guts flew off his body.
There was a sound. Something rumbling and low and hollow. A red glare of terror flashed in her brain, blotting out all reason. She had no scream left in her as she spotted the mother grizzly charging toward them in full stride.
The thing was at least a half-ton, with a short, stocky neck and massive shoulders.
Something landed in Lynn’s lap. It looked like a pork chop.
The grizzly barreled into both William and the tree. Unfazed, it rose up and struck William and Lynn wildly with its front paws.
The death had been a messy one.
When it was done, Bic pulled the cub up into the tree, immediately drawing the attention of the mother.
The big grizzly stood on her hind legs and swatted at Bic. Her swinging paws rattled the tree branches far below him. Bic quickly loosened the noose and lowered the cub to the ground, letting go of the rope. The cub struggled at first, but quickly worked its way free. Without a glance back, both the mother bear and her cub ambled off into the woods.
He waited for some time before climbing down out of the tree, his rifle loaded and ready. He scanned the area briefly and began to clean it up.
He removed the shackles from the corpses and the stakes from the ground. He then filled the holes with loose dirt and poured water over both to tamp it down. Walking down to the river’s shoreline, he pulled a collapsed one-person raft out of his backpack. He yanked the pack’s ripcord and the thing inflated in seconds.
Moments later, he was far downstream.
59
Caroline braced herself when she saw him through the coffee shop window
“Where have you been for the past twenty-four hours?” Mack growled at her.
“I needed to take care of something,” she said, avoiding his gaze.
He sat down at the round table across from her. “And that’s it? You can’t just up and abandon the case when you like. We’re partners here.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just, after hearing about Mason... he would be alive, you know, if we hadn’t... I don’t know. It’s just hard to process.” She pushed the cup of coffee she had bought him across the table.
“I get it,” he said. “But we have to man up here. This is the big league, Caroline. This isn’t some cozy little law firm job.”
Mack looked at her grimly and buried something behind a swig of coffee. “You left me hanging in the middle of a hot mess,” he said.
“I’m sorry. That wasn’t my intention.”
“Where were you?”
“Helping a friend,” she said coolly. “Like I said, I just needed to get my mind off things for a sec.” She felt warm inside knowing that she’d gotten April moved from the not-so-nice homeless shelter to the best prostitution recovery center in California.
“What did Ashton need?”
“I didn’t tell you? We broke up.”
“A rebound?”
Caroline didn’t meet his eyes.
Mack’s eyes narrowed. “So there’s a new guy.”
She looked at him now. “Yeah.”
“And who is this mystery man?”
“It’s none of your business. But if you must, an old friend helped me with a new friend,” she said.
“What kind of kinky hippie stuff do you have yourself into?”
Caroline looked all over the diner, scanning for anything that would help her escape the conversation. Then her eye landed on something, and it made her breath catch in her throat.
She walked over to an empty table and grabbed an abandoned newspaper. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said. She showed him the headline. “Looks like I owe you a nice dinner,” she said. She took a long, slow sip of her latte as he read.
Billionaire Couple Killed by Bear
He tapped the headline with his finger. “I can’t friggin’ believe this.”
“You want to make it double or nothing?” she said without affect.
Mack looked up quizzically. “Did you know the government is going to receive over fifty percent of their money in death taxes?”
“They should.”
Caroline immediately regretted her comment, as she watched Mack’s face turn a shade redder. “Any money that was taxed once shouldn’t be taxed again. It’s un-American. We had a revolution about too much taxes once.”
She held her hands up in surrender. “Relax. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion. I think it makes sense for wealth to be redistributed to the less fortunate.”
“Redistributed? Why, so they can—”
Caroline held her hands up again. “Are you going to take the bet, or what?”
“Maybe we should just give it to the government. They’re so efficient with the other trillions of dollars we give them. I’m sure they’ll put it to good use.”
“I guess you don’t want to up the bet. Where do you want me to take you? Applebee’s?”
“Ha, ha. No thanks. I’m ready to let it ride, but the stakes just changed. If I win, I get to cook a candlelit dinner for us.”
“You get to cook for me? Okay then. I guess it’s my funeral.”
Mack thought for a moment. “I’m sticking with the threes,” he said, “so I’ll bet you another billionaire doesn’t die by the end of the month.”
No kidding, another billionaire isn’t going to die. But it seemed to keep him from asking her about her little escapade of the previous night.
“It’s a bet,” she said.
He stood behind his chair. “So, are you interested at all in what’s going on with our case?”
Caroline leaned back. “What’s going on?”
“Bender called for a briefing.”
“Are you kidding? Mack, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Makes sense now why I called your cell phone twenty times in two minutes. It wasn’t because I missed you.”
“Well… no.” She paused, “so, what’s going on with the case?”
“They located our perp—the only living link to this investigation—in Mexico. Turns out, the DEA went in, and pretty hard, too. They sent in a strike team.”
“What?”
“Bender said he was, quote, confident the DEA would handle it.” Mack shook his head. “Anyway, according to Bender, with Hernandez dealt with, the case is closed.”
“That’s insane. This isn’t a one-man operation. Senator Bryson sure didn’t make it sound like that.” She paused. “Wait, you said with Hernandez dealt with? So, the case is definitely closed?”
“There’s more to this,” he said. “The whole SWAT team was killed and burnt to a crisp in the suspect’s house.”
Caroline blanched. “And the suspect?”
; “Still at large.”
“We’d better get back to HQ,” she said, gathering up her things. “Am I in trouble with Bender?”
“I told him you were doing research off-site,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll always have your back,” he said, turning away from her. “It’s what partners do.”
She followed him out to the car without another word.
60
Bic sat reading a newspaper at an outdoor café in downtown Austin. Across the busy intersection was the entrance to the main campus of Texas Computer Corporation, the largest computer hardware manufacturer in the world. It was huge and solid, built of thick Texas granite and concrete, and looked more like the portcullis of a medieval castle than the gateway to one of the world’s largest corporations.
Bic looked at his watch. If his intel was correct, the sixty-nine-year-old CEO and founder of TCC, Henry Barron, would be leaving the campus at 6:00 PM sharp—like he had done every single day for the past twenty years. Bic mused over how widowers grow set in their ways as they age.
A black Cadillac stretch limo pulled out of the campus drive and turned right, exactly at 6:00 PM. Bic watched carefully to confirm the vehicle’s course. His intel was perfect—as it had been for every hit so far.
His employers had gathered astonishing amounts of information on the targets. Bic frowned at that thought. People like that were not to be defied. He was sure they were linked to the government somehow. The intel packets just had that kind of wordy-yet-bland feel about them.
The first three hits had gone exactly as planned, but these hits wouldn’t stay accidents for much longer. Somebody, the FBI or a clever cop, would connect the dots. Recent newspaper articles written were playing to the imaginations of the readers, invoking all sorts of theories. Some were uncomfortably close to the truth.
Bic shuddered as he pictured himself gunned down like a wild animal. But that’s just how it would end. He would never allow himself to be taken alive.
That’s right. Die, then go straight to hell and make Clarence Green suffer remorselessly for—
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