by Patrick Lee
The Gravel Man had sent him to kill a pretty little thing like that?
I will hurt you. I will make it hurt like you’ve never imagined. I won’t stop no matter how hard you beg.
“Please,” Owen whispered.
You know what to do. So do it.
Owen took a deep breath and let it ease back out. He felt the familiar—awful, but familiar—calm sink over him. What was the big word for that? Acceptance, he thought.
* * *
Dryden thought about going for the SIG anyway. He would be shot if he did it, no doubt about that, but he would probably have time, even after taking his hits, to bring the pistol around and get in at least a torso shot of his own. Enough to leave the guy right there, bleeding out where he sat, instead of chasing Rachel. It would probably work.
Probably.
Unless the MP-5 was set to full auto. Then a dozen rounds would leave its barrel within the first second. If even one of those caught Dryden in the head, then forget the whole plan. Rachel would be left defenseless.
Dryden watched the machine gun’s barrel. Watched it sway through tiny arcs in the man’s shaking hand. Waited for it to sway just far enough—
“I don’t got a choice,” the man said softly. “It ain’t that I mean it.”
There was a trace of pity in the guy’s eyes, though it seemed to Dryden the man was mostly feeling it about himself. But that was the least of what Dryden noticed about him. What struck him the most was that his early impression—even in that first glimpse as the pickup slid across the road—had been dead on. This man’s intelligence could hardly be above that of a child. Even taking into account that he might’ve been dazed by the crash, there was no mistaking the signs.
It was, in its own way, the strangest thing about the situation: Why would Gaul—or whoever had sent the man—trust critical work to a guy like this?
Dryden had found himself at gunpoint before, and many more times he’d faced adversaries who at least had weapons close at hand. Every one of those men, no matter his ideology or his coldness or his rank in whatever pecking order, had been smart. Not just smart—animal sharp and quick. You could always see it in the eyes. Hired guns lived a Darwinian life. You didn’t meet many stupid ones; they didn’t last.
“I don’t mean it,” the man in the overalls said again.
“You’ve got the safety on,” Dryden said.
The man didn’t exactly fall for it. His reaction was nothing as dramatic as turning the gun sideways and peering at the thing. All that happened was a twitch of his wrist. A reflexive move, so-called muscle memory, in the instant before he caught himself. The MP-5’s barrel turned maybe five degrees aside from Dryden, aiming itself at the desert floor ten feet behind him, but almost at once it began to pivot right back to where it had been. The whole flinch opened up no more than a third-of-a-second window of opportunity.
That was enough.
Dryden’s hand moved. The action was as practiced and unconscious as flipping the light switch in his own kitchen. He drew the SIG from his rear waistband, leveled it, and fired twice.
Both shots took the man in the forehead. The first was centered, and the second was an inch to the left. The double exit wound blew the back of the guy’s head open, the explosive force of it actually causing the head to jerk forward toward Dryden, as if the guy were trying to head-butt the space in front of him. He flopped face-first onto his own shins and lay still.
Dryden fell back two steps, then turned and sprinted for the Honda as fast as he could.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Some impulse, maybe just good old-fashioned paranoia, told Dryden to steer clear of the town. He took the Honda off-road over the hard scrubland and went east for two miles until they came to a county two-lane running north; it had signs for an on-ramp to U.S. 50. Five minutes after that they were on the freeway again, eastbound. They’d said almost nothing since the moment they left the pickup behind.
“I don’t know,” Dryden said at last. “I don’t have the first clue what that was.”
* * *
He didn’t start to relax for another hour or more. By then they were on I-70, on the east side of the state. They came to a small town called Sumner; from the freeway it looked just big enough to have a library somewhere in it. When they found it, on Main Street across from a school, its parking lot was close to empty. That boded well for the place not being full of potential eyewitnesses. All the same, Dryden wondered just how effective the Oakleys and baseball hat really were.
The thought of sending Rachel in by herself went against all his instincts, but sometimes instinct was wrong. If someone spotted him, if they simply picked up a phone and dialed 911—
“A girl my age by herself might raise eyebrows, too,” Rachel said. Then, softer: “I don’t want to be alone again.”
* * *
There was a single librarian at the checkout desk, just inside the entry. She offered a professional but friendly greeting. Dryden answered with a nod, keeping his face in profile to her. Rachel gave her an energetic wave and a smile; it drew the woman’s attention like a magnet.
Pretty smart, Dryden thought.
“Thanks,” Rachel said, when they’d gone by.
“Anything in her thoughts like Is that the guy on TV?”
Rachel shook her head.
They found a counter with three computer terminals in the back corner, all of them deserted. So far as Dryden could see, the only other visitor in the library was a kid of maybe fourteen, sitting alone in a sunlit reading area at the opposite corner of the huge room.
They pulled up two chairs and woke one of the computers from its sleep mode.
The obvious first move was a Yellow Pages search for Holly Ferrel in Amarillo, Texas.
No results.
Dryden tried the same search for all of Texas; maybe Holly lived outside of town and commuted.
No results.
He opened a Google map, zoomed in on Amarillo, and searched for hospitals. There were three large ones and a number of smaller practices, almost all of those simply named for a doctor working privately. None of the private doctors was Holly Ferrel.
Dryden checked the Web sites for each of the three big hospitals and navigated to the staff pages. The third one yielded an interesting result: a doctor named Holly Reese, whose bio was conspicuously missing a photograph. Every other doctor working in that hospital had included a face shot.
For the sake of being thorough, Dryden navigated through every page on the hospital’s site that might contain photos of its staff, promotional stills of doctors at patients’ bedsides or working in labs. He was on the next-to-last such page, about to click the BACK button, when Rachel’s hand shot out and stopped him from touching the mouse.
“What?” he asked.
Her finger went to the screen. In a photo at the bottom, an EMT crew and a few ER docs were rolling a stretcher in off a rooftop helipad. The chopper was visible in the background, bright red and filling most of the frame.
Rachel was pointing to a woman standing just inside the corridor, half turned away from the camera. Because the camera’s aperture had adjusted to deal with the sun-washed helipad, the hallway in the foreground appeared very dark. It would’ve been easy to look right at this photo and not even see the woman.
“Is it her?” Dryden asked.
Rachel leaned closer to the screen. She narrowed her eyes.
“I’m sure of it,” she said.
Dryden stared at the woman’s face a second longer, running the implications through his head. It wasn’t unheard-of for a relocated person to hold on to a first name; the risk was minimal, and it made the transition easier, psychologically.
Holly Ferrel.
Holly Reese.
Different last name, and no photo on her bio page.
She wasn’t just in danger. She was hiding from it.
At least she believed she was hiding.
Dryden went back to the Yellow Pages and searched for
Holly Reese in Amarillo.
One entry. Complete with address.
Dryden found it on the Google map ten seconds later, the photographic overlay showing a marker right above the house.
Holly lived close to downtown, on a street of narrow homes jammed together. Dryden opened Street View and got a look at the place from eye level, out front. It was the Texas equivalent of a town house like you might see in Brooklyn or Georgetown. Others of the same size lined the street on both sides, most of them adjoining their neighbors, a few with narrow alleys in between.
“If she’s still alive, you think Gaul’s people are watching her,” Rachel said. Not asking.
Dryden nodded. “Have to assume it.”
“So how do we contact her?”
“I want to know more about her before we do that,” Dryden said. “I believe you when you say she’s someone who cared about you, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to go introduce ourselves.”
He studied the layout of the street, his thoughts going to the eavesdropping equipment he’d used so often in his time with Ferret. A good laser microphone would be useful; it could be pointed at one of Holly’s windows from down the block and pick up sound from inside by measuring vibrations on the glass. It was decades-old technology, very reliable.
Very hard to come by, too. You couldn’t get it at RadioShack or Best Buy.
Rachel put her hand to the screen again. She pointed to the narrow homes on either side of Holly’s. “Do you think we could get inside one of those? Maybe if no one was home?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible. A lot of buildings like that are broken up into apartments. If we got lucky, there might be a vacant one.” He turned to her. “What are you thinking?”
“How wide are those houses?”
Dryden shrugged. “Twenty-five, thirty feet.”
Rachel turned and stared on a diagonal across the library, to the young boy reading alone. “How far away do you think he is?”
Dryden considered the distance. “Sixty feet, maybe a little more.”
Rachel faced forward again and shut her eyes. She took on the expression of someone trying to make out a just-audible voice over a bad phone line. Then she spoke as if she were reading from a page. “Well, he’s dead now hisself. He knows the long and short on it now. And if ever a rough hand come to port, it was Billy. Right you are, said Silver. Rough and ready. But mark you here, I’m an easy man. I’m quite the gentleman, says you. But this time it’s serious. Duty is duty, mates. I give my vote. Death.”
She seemed about to continue, then let it go. She opened her eyes and met Dryden’s.
“Treasure Island,” Dryden said.
He stared at the distance for another moment, then looked at the houses on the screen again. Rachel wouldn’t need to be in the one right next to Holly’s to get in her head. She could do it from two or even three houses away. Maybe even from across the street.
“Interesting,” he said.
Rachel managed a smile.
Dryden opened a real estate site, entered Amarillo, selected the rental tab, and pulled up a map. Within thirty seconds he was staring at Holly’s house.
There were three apartments available within the necessary range. The best was a second-floor walk-up, two doors down. That would put Holly’s entire residence in a zone between thirty and sixty feet from Rachel.
“When can we be there?” Rachel asked.
Dryden looked at the clock in the corner of the screen. He did the math. “Midnight local time, give or take.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
He kept to five above the limit the whole way. They stopped twice for gas, and once at a hardware store to buy a metal file. Dryden burned another ten minutes using the tool on one of the house keys that hung from Dena Sobel’s key ring.
They pulled off I-40 into Amarillo at 12:35 Central Time. Dryden found a quiet parking lot a block and a half from Holly’s home. The night was cool and full of the smells of restaurant food and vehicle exhaust.
* * *
“Don’t look around for anyone watching,” Dryden said. “We’re two people walking home with groceries. Nothing more than that.”
They were on Holly’s street now, a hundred yards from the place they wanted. Dryden had the shopping bags Dena had bought in Modesto. The sidewalk was deserted and mostly dark. No sound in the night except the background hum of the city. The diesel groan of a bus trundling by, a few blocks over.
The building’s entry was locked, as expected. Dryden already had the modified key in his hand. A bump key, to use the common term. He had notched its blade into five equal-sized teeth, like little shark fins. With skill, a person could use one of these to bypass most of the standard door locks in the world. Dryden had used them in a dozen or more countries, at times when quiet entry into a structure was critical. In the years since his service, he’d never used anything less than a disc-tumbler lock for his own door. Those were immune to bump keys. They were also rare as hell.
The house two doors down from Holly’s had a standard lock. Dryden got through it about as quickly as he would’ve with the correct key. The apartment door, on the second-floor landing, was no more difficult.
The unit was bare of furniture. They left the lights off and locked the door behind them. The interior was like most empty apartments Dryden had seen: new paint on the walls, the air scented by carpet shampoo.
The moment they were inside with the door shut, Rachel went to the east wall—the closest she could get to Holly’s home—and shut her eyes. She stood there, leaning with her fingers splayed on the plaster, and said nothing for over a minute.
Dryden’s vision began adjusting to the gloom. The only light came from the glow of streetlamps against the closed window blinds and the blue LED display of the stove.
“You must be hearing fifty people from here,” Dryden said.
Rachel nodded. “It’s like trying to find one voice in a crowd.”
“It’s late. Maybe she’s sleeping.”
“I don’t think so. I can read people even when they’re asleep. Right now I’m getting a bunch of people in the building right beside us, and a few that are a lot farther away, in that direction. But in between, there’s a big space where there’s nobody. I think that’s Holly’s house. I think it’s empty.”
Rachel continued listening, waiting.
“Doctors keep strange hours,” Dryden said. “Don’t worry too much just yet.”
Rachel nodded again.
“You hearing anyone else?” Dryden asked. “Anyone Gaul might have sent?”
For a long time Rachel didn’t reply. Dryden saw her face tighten in concentration.
“Not that I can tell,” she said. “Even bad people’s thoughts are pretty normal, most of the time.”
She gave it another minute, then opened her eyes and turned from the wall.
Dryden went to the living room window; it faced out over the street in front of the building. He left the blinds closed but put his eye to the crack at their edge. From just the right angle he could see Holly’s front porch. A single newspaper lay atop the steps, in a plastic sleeve.
Dryden returned to the door, where he’d set down the groceries. He opened the bag with the gauze pads and disinfectant.
“Let’s have a look at your arm,” he said.
* * *
It was a quarter past two in the morning. Rachel had been asleep for an hour, curled on the floor near the wall. She’d made no sounds or sudden moves; that effect of the drug, at least, was long gone.
Dryden thought he could tell when she was dreaming, though: At times the chill at his temples seemed to intensify, doubling or tripling in strength. He’d gotten used to the steady background feel of it—it was there even when Rachel was asleep—but these swells and ebbs were something new. Some artifact of dream sleep, he guessed—uncontrolled activity, like rapid eye movement or night tremors.
He watched the blinds for the glow of headlights and listened for vehicles s
topping or footsteps ticking on the sidewalk. Every time it happened he checked the window. So far, no arrivals at Holly Ferrel’s house. The paper lay right where it had been.
He’d familiarized himself with the apartment; it hadn’t taken long. There were five rooms: the kitchen, the living room, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. The second bedroom had a sliding door to a small balcony off the building’s rear. In the murky light outside, Dryden saw a narrow alley running east to west, paralleling the street in front. On the far side of the alley were a few more town houses, but mostly there were nondescript little buildings that could’ve been anything. Real estate offices. Travel agencies. Coffee shops. There were broad alleys between them, leading out to the next street over.
He was sitting now, his back to the wall beside the living room window. From this position he could check Holly’s porch just by turning his head.
He rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept in well over forty-eight hours. He dropped his hands to his sides and opened his eyes. If he kept them closed for any length of time he’d only get more tired.
He listened to the sounds of the building. The HVAC system humming. The dull bass of speakers somewhere upstairs. Laughter—drunk friends, men and women.
Life being lived.
“Do you ever think about trying again?”
He turned.
Rachel was lying with her head on her good arm, her eyes open. Regarding him.
“Having a family again, I mean,” she said.
“I don’t know. I guess I don’t. I haven’t, at least.”
He’d told her almost nothing about Trish and Erin—not by speaking, anyway.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel said. “There’s no way to keep from hearing it in your head, but I can shut up about it, if you want.”
He shook his head. “Don’t worry.”
The song upstairs ended and another started. Dryden thought he recognized the bass rhythm—“Undercover of the Night,” by the Rolling Stones.
“You should be someone’s dad again,” Rachel said. “You’d be good at it. You are good at it.”
She got up and crossed to the window and sat down beside him. She leaned her head against his shoulder. A minute later she was asleep again.