“You’re the next one to die, Alex.”
Alex listens to the background sounds. Wind. A car passing at a high speed. She discerns Jack is on a highway.
“What happened to Phin? Were you too much of a downer so he took off?”
“Get to the point.”
“I wanted to tell you that I watched you try to save your husband. Exciting stuff. You know, you were only about thirty seconds late. If you’d been just a little faster, he’d still be with us.”
Another sound joins the wind and car noises. Alex is overjoyed to hear it.
“Lieutenant Daniels, are you crying?”
The sound becomes muted. Jack has put her hand over the mouthpiece. Not only is she devastated, she’s also embarrassed.
How delicious.
“He’s in a better place, Jack. If he lived, he’d just be pining for you. Did you know his Internet password was Jacqueline? I’m not making that up. And he still had a picture of you in his wallet. Poor sap. I bet he was the type who sent you poems. Did he write you a poem, after your first time? Something about how lovely you were, fucking him in that restaurant bathroom? What rhymes with toilet?”
“I’m…I’m going to—”
“Jack, woman to woman, threats don’t really work when you’re crying like a baby. It’s pathetic. Now, fun as this little chat has been, I’m painting my toenails and it isn’t easy holding the phone at the same time. So here’s the deal. When I call tomorrow, with the clue to save your partner, you’ll have to react fast. You won’t have twelve hours, or two hours. You’ll have less than a minute. Use it wisely.”
Alex hangs up, pleased with how the call went, but not pleased with the job she’s done on her first few toes.
Now isn’t the time to be sloppy. Alex pads over to the bathroom, dumps some acetone on a hotel towel, and wipes off the nail polish to start again.
CHAPTER 47
BY THE TIME I found a room for the night I was a mess. Mentally, physically, emotionally. I’d walked several miles, freezing my tail off, before finding a small mom-and-pop motel with carpeting older than I was. I ate out of the lobby vending machine, not tasting a damn thing, and drew a bath in a cracked tub with water tinted orange.
I crawled in and let the guilt overtake me, crying until my throat hurt. Mixed with the guilt was shame, for not being there for Herb when he needed me most, and anger, at Phin and Harry and Alex, but most of all at myself for allowing all of this to happen.
And hate. I felt hate so dark it scared me. I didn’t just want to kill Alex. I wanted to burn her alive and watch her scream. I’ve lived—hell, I’ve dedicated my life to upholding the law, but I would trade every arrest I’d ever made, ever perp I ever put behind bars, for twenty minutes alone with Alex in a small cell, her handcuffed to a chair, me with a baseball bat.
What had I become?
A drip, from the lime-coated showerhead above me, dimpling the surface of the water between my feet. I stared up at it, and then the shower curtain, old and stained but on an aluminum rod that looked strong, sturdy. It would probably support my weight. I didn’t have any rope, but there was a gas station on the corner.
Stupid. Cops don’t hang themselves. They eat their guns.
I thought about the Beretta in my backpack. One bullet, and I’d stop feeling this awful. I’d let so many people down, myself included. One bullet would make it all go away.
You’re being weak, Jack.
So? Can’t I be weak for once?
Killing yourself is the coward’s way out.
Okay, I’m a coward. One more reason to hate myself.
I stood up, walked naked into the bedroom. Stared at my backpack.
You’re seriously considering this?
A sob caught in my throat. I blinked away some tears.
Yes. It’s the best idea I’ve had all week.
I reached my hand inside, wrapped my hand around the butt of my gun. It felt solid. Reassuring.
Just do it.
I closed my eyes, tried to think of a reason to stop myself. Faces popped into my head.
Mom, begging me not to.
Sorry, not good enough.
Dad, tacking an article about my suicide onto the wall in his spare bedroom, to add to the dozens of other articles and pictures of me.
Take it all down, Wilbur. I’m not worthy of a shrine.
Harry, telling me I hated myself.
You nailed that one, bro.
Phin, saying he loved me.
Looks like you’ll outlive me after all.
Alex, laughing at all the pain she’s caused.
Not my problem anymore.
Latham, his kind, sad, beautiful face, telling me I had to be strong.
Why? Why do I have to be strong all the goddamn time? Where has it gotten me?
Alan, his eyes rolled up in his head…
Enough. I’m done.
I want out.
I opened my mouth, brought up the gun, my hand shaking so much I had problems getting the barrel between my lips.
Lieutenant Jacqueline Daniels vs. the world.
The world wins.
It always does.
I flicked off the safety, put my thumb on the trigger, and opened my eyes so I could watch myself do it in the bureau mirror. I wanted the last thing I ever saw to be how pathetic I looked.
Movement, peripherally, to my right.
My gun pointed reflexively, and I pulled the trigger on instinct.
Rat. Big one in the corner.
Deader than hell now, without a head.
I laughed, once, but it sounded more like a strangled cough.
In a way, that’s all I was good for. Killing rats.
But I was good. I was very good.
And there was still one rat left to kill. The biggest one of all.
I put the gun back in the pack, got dressed, and called a cab to take me to a better motel, all thoughts of suicide momentarily replaced by thoughts of murder.
CHAPTER 48
THE MORNING AND EARLY AFTERNOON are going to be uneventful. Alex orders room ser vice and spends some time familiarizing herself with a M18A1 she’s taken from Lance’s boss, the bomb squad lieut. It’s a serious piece of hardware, appropriate for the job, and comes with det wire and a spring trigger. On the green plastic cover are three words.
FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.
Alex runs her fingers over the embossed letters and smiles her half smile. God love the military.
Next she shapes a good-sized hunk of PENO into a cone and sets up the blasting cap, sun cord, and sparker.
Then it’s a pay-per-view action film, charged to the room. A cop thriller, with a hard-nosed veteran chasing a wily serial killer. Alex liked it up until the end, when the cop predictably shot the villain down. Why can’t there be a movie where the killer beats the cop and gets away? Wouldn’t that be cool?
Alex blames the writers. None of them have the balls to let the bad guy win.
But the bad guys do win sometimes. People have to learn to accept that.
Lunch is room ser vice, again, and the food is so bland and mediocre, and the room so run-down, that Alex wonders how this place can even stay open, especially since it isn’t really cheap. Maybe they have a lot of conventions here.
The hotel has a tiny workout room with a dearth of decent equipment. Alex makes use of the StairMaster for an hour, a towel wrapped around her neck and hiding her face should anyone else come in. No one does. Then it’s back to her room for a shower and another movie—this one a romantic comedy starring Sarah Jessica Parker, who is cute and dresses great but can’t make up for a lackluster script.
Finally, the clock zeroes in on three p.m. She grabs her gear, fights awful traffic, and makes it to downtown Chicago and the corner she’d staked out yesterday. Alex parks in a pay lot, sets up her laptop, finds a free WiFi connection—Chicago abounds with hot spots—and accesses the phone taped to Herb’s tree. She watches the live feed.
The house
looks normal, no unusual activity, but Alex can guess that there are a bunch of cops inside, as well as throughout the neighborhood. All waiting for her.
Won’t they be surprised when she doesn’t show up?
Alex keeps her cell phone handy—when things happen, they’ll happen fast. Then she settles in to watch the show.
CHAPTER 49
IT WAS ALL I COULD DO not to tear out my hair in frustration.
Two calls to Detective Tom Mankowski confirmed that Herb was being closely guarded. He was still home—something he insisted upon because he wanted to be bait—but he had three cops and two Feebies in there with him. In neighboring houses were ten more cops and just as many Feds. There were three SRT snipers on nearby rooftops. Air support was standing by. As Mankowski said, a squirrel couldn’t fart within a block of the area without having six guns drawn on it.
But the waiting was still torture. Herb was my partner. I should be there. Instead, I was pacing in a Wisconsin hotel room, my fingernails chewed down to blood, waiting for something to happen. Hopefully, the something would be of the good variety, involving Alex getting gunned down. But I had a feeling that Herb wasn’t as safe as everyone wanted to believe.
What were they missing? What was I missing? How do you get to a guy who is heavily protected?
A long-range weapon? That had been anticipated. A mail bomb? The mail for Herb’s route had been checked out and cleared back at the post office, and FedEx, UPS, and DHL had nothing for Herb or for his address. Hidden explosives? Earlier in the day, two bomb-sniffing dogs had covered every inch of Herb’s property.
He was safer than the Pope. But we had to be forgetting something.
Unless Alex was lying. Unless Herb wasn’t the target at all.
She couldn’t get to my parents. Phin was unreachable. Harry?
I called him, using the hotel room phone.
“Hi, sis. I forgive you for acting like a jerk yesterday. I found the Milwaukee cell phone. Motel lobby, at the Old Stone Inn, behind the ice machine. Weren’t you just there?”
“Where are you now?”
“On my way to Chicago. That’s where the next one is. You wouldn’t believe how much gas I’ve gone through the last few days. I think I’m getting about three hundred yards per gallon.”
“Harry, Alex might have been lying about Herb. You might be the next target.”
“Let her try for me. Slappy will take care of her.”
“I’m being serious.”
“I am too. After you left, I gave the monkey some pills, to calm him down.”
I shook my head, amazed. “You gave the monkey Vicodin?”
“I thought it was. But the wrong pills were in the bottle. I actually gave him Viagra. He’s been a little, uh, aggressive since then.”
“I bet.”
“I got him back in his cage by throwing in a cashmere sweater he’s taken a serious liking to. He and the sweater have been going at it non-stop for about eight hours. But if I open the cage, he’ll pounce on Alex like a starving man after a donut.”
“Be careful, McGlade.”
“I’ll be okay. If he jumps on me, I’ll be wearing earplugs and nose-plugs and keep my mouth closed tight.”
“I meant with Alex.”
“Slappy and I are ready. Does Mom like cashmere?”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Not this sweater. A new sweater. I was going to give this one to Herb.”
“Stay in touch,” I told him.
“Does this mean we’re partners again?”
“Just stay in touch.”
I hung up, did some more pacing, tried to eat a room ser vice turkey club, failed, did more pacing, tried to watch a movie, failed, called Tom again for an update when none was needed, did push-ups until my arms wouldn’t work anymore, paced, and finally around four p.m. Alex’s phone rang.
I picked up, expecting to see a text message. But instead I saw a photo, of Herb’s house, a red car parked in the driveway.
No, it wasn’t a photo. This picture moved, the car door opening.
This was a live feed.
I got on the phone, my phone, and hit the speed dial for Herb.
One ring.
A man was getting out of the car. Big, muscular, wearing a tight shirt.
Two rings.
The shirt had a logo on the back, large enough for me to read even on the small LCD phone screen.
1-800-MEATS4U.
Three rings.
But this couldn’t be the meat I ordered for Herb. That was being sent UPS, and not for another few days.
Alex. Somehow Alex knew about it.
The man reached into the passenger seat, removed a large white foam box.
Why weren’t the cops taking him down?
“Hello?”
“Bernice! It’s Jack!”
The big guy walked up to the front door. Two figures with FBI on their jackets rushed at him from both sides.
“Jack, the Turduckinlux is here.”
“I didn’t send the—”
Herb’s front door opened, and then an explosion shook the camera. I heard a shocking BOOM through the tiny speaker of my cell, so startling I dropped my phone.
My other hand clenched Alex’s phone, the screen fuzzy and gray. I watched, horrified, as the smoke cleared.
Herb’s front porch, and a large chunk of his house, were gone.
I picked up my cell, whispered into it, “Bernice.”
She didn’t answer. But in the background, I heard screaming.
CHAPTER 50
PERFECT. ABSOLUTELY PERFECT. The male stripper Laugh-O-Gram showed up with the package right at the scheduled time, and wore the meat shop T-shirt Alex had made for him, using the inkjet printer and an iron-on silk-screen design. She hopes the guy spent the five hundred bucks she paid him yesterday to make the trip from Milwaukee, because he certainly wouldn’t be spending it now.
Quite a lot of damage a few pounds of plastic explosive can cause. The house is trashed, and Alex can see several dead bodies inside. It would be fun to sit and watch the ambulances come, the corpses removed, but Alex has business to take care of.
Big business. The original plan. The real reason she’s in Chicago.
She tucks away her cell phone, checks her watch, then grabs her gear, which is resting on the dead body in the backseat. A few police cars whiz by, sirens blazing. Perfect. The authorities, and the media, will be going crazy over the bombing. Which means they’ll pay less attention to what she’s going to do in about sixty seconds.
Alex pulls up her hood, dons her movie star sunglasses, gets out of the car, and removes the M18A1. She holds it and the cord in one hand, the plastic trigger in the other, and waits for the truck to arrive.
It’s a minute late. Understandable, given all of the police traffic. There are other cars on the road, but Alex doesn’t give them any unneeded attention. She’s got tunnel vision, focusing on one thing and one thing only: the armored money truck, heading her way.
When it’s within twenty yards, Alex steps out in front of it, raising her hand up. The truck slows. Alex walks forward, waits for it to stop, then drops the M18A1 down onto the street and kicks it under the truck’s front end, directly beneath the engine.
She backpedals, playing out line, and then hits the detonator while the truck is shifting into reverse.
The M18A1 Claymore mine does what it was made to do: fire seven hundred steel balls in a sixty-degree outward pattern at 1,200 meters per second.
Not enough to seriously damage the truck, or hurt its occupants. Not even enough to crack the engine block or sever the drive train. But enough to shred the armored vehicle’s electronics under the hood.
It won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
Moving quickly without rushing, Alex heads to the rear of the truck, sticking her cone of PENO onto the back door lock. She unwinds some cord, stands clear, and hits the sparker.
The armor is thick, tough. But so is a Sherman
tank’s, and the plastic explosive makes easy work of the door, blowing it open so it hangs outward on its hinges. Alex waits alongside the truck, out of the line of sight, for the hopper to come out. A trained professional, one with enough experience to follow this training while in combat situations, would take cover and wait inside for Alex to enter. But an average guy with average training would want to get the hell out of there.
This guy is average. He fires twice, then comes jumping out of the cargo hold and racing down the street. Alex shoots him in the back. She approaches the truck low, on an angle, and makes sure there are no other guards. The driver wisely stays in the front cab. He’s protected as long as he doesn’t come out.
Alex isn’t concerned about him for the time being. If he wants to try to be a hero, she’ll deal with it. What has her attention are the canvas money bags on the floor of the cargo area. She has extra PENO and detonators with her, in case she had to deal with safes, and also an extra Claymore in case this truck turned out to be a bust and she needed to find another.
Alex uses her folder knife to cut open the first bag, and one look confirms that a second robbery won’t be necessary. The bag is loaded with banded stacks of twenties. Maybe ten thousand dollars’ worth.
And Alex counts twelve bags in the back of the truck.
She opens up the army duffel, begins stuffing in bags. She fits five, and can sling five more over her shoulders. The last two she has to leave behind—she doesn’t have time to make two trips. The driver has already called it in, and even with all the commotion the bombing has caused, the cops will be here soon.
Alex heads for the alley, following it through to the parking garage, waddling up a flight of concrete steps, and loading everything into the Prius. Almost home.
As she pulls down the circular driveway, heading for the exit, she hears police sirens. She stops at the exit gate, lowers her window, and sticks the parking stub into the slot. The automatic machine flashes twelve dollars—a ridiculous amount to have to pay for parking less than an hour. Alex reaches for her purse, but it isn’t on the passenger seat. She looks around the Prius, on the floor, in the back, and her purse is nowhere to be found.
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