But before she could, two nearly simultaneous gunshots blasted from inside the room, the sound heavy and piercing even through the mostly-closed metal door.
She spit out a curse and kicked at the door, her heart refusing to acknowledge what her brain was telling her: that she was too late.
35
“It’s been a long road,” FBI Special Agent Alton Ferriss/Wesley Krupp said to Jackson Healy, who was yanking and jerking on the handcuffs in a desperate but futile attempt to escape. Healy’s skin was raw and bleeding from his efforts, but he didn’t seem to notice. His eyes rolled wildly in his head and his ever-present body odor had seemed to intensify in direct proportion to his panic.
“But all things come to an end, even for someone who’s been alive for nearly two hundred years.” Ferriss stepped around the table as he talked, moving next to Healy. He rested his pistol lightly against the side of the prisoner’s head.
Agent Cooper/Amos Krupp now flanked Healy on the other side. He had sidled carefully past Mike’s chair, training his gun directly on Mike’s chest as he did so, being careful to keep the weapon out of his reach. Mike thought briefly about going for it anyway, despite the fact he could by now barely see.
The endgame had clearly begun. Time had run out. Mike thought he might be able to take Cooper down by standing suddenly and bringing the crown of his head directly up under Cooper’s chin. With luck, he might stun the agent enough to make a play for his gun.
But the problem with this hastily devised plan was obvious. Ferriss would need only a half-second to pull the trigger on Healy, and there would be no way Mike could demobilize Cooper that quickly, even operating at one hundred percent, which he was not.
So he reluctantly allowed the man to pass, and now Cooper held his weapon against the other side of Healy’s skull. The prisoner had stopped struggling and sat completely still, breathing heavily but unwilling to move a muscle, as if the act of doing so might cause one of the men to squeeze off a shot.
Mike tried one last time to reason with the men. “Guys, don’t do this. You don’t have to kill him. You don’t have to kill anybody. With me as a hostage, you can get out of here safely and get away clean. I’m law enforcement, there’s no way SWAT or anybody else is going to risk shooting me. As long as you have me, you’ll be as safe as a baby in its mother’s arms.”
“Shut up,” Cooper growled, swinging his weapon Mike’s way and then immediately returning it to bear on Healy.
Ferriss shook his head. He seemed almost sympathetic. “Haven’t you been listening? It’s not about getting away. It’s about finishing what this traitor started a hundred and fifty years ago. We’re not interested in getting away clean, dirty, or otherwise. We sickened of this endless life long before you were born, and we want nothing more than to end this goddamn curse.”
Ferriss/Wesley Krupp looked at his brother. “Are you ready?”
Cooper/Amos Krupp nodded. “I’m way past ready.”
Mike could see what was coming, and he started to rise from his chair. He would have to make a play for Cooper’s gun, it was the only option left, and—
--And he heard what sounded like a key rattling in the door’s lock just as the two FBI men fired their weapons in near-unison, the criss-cross effect of the two 9mm slugs ripping into Jackson Healy’s skull in a spray of blood, bone and tissue. The nearly headless corpse slumped back in the seat, an obscene splattering of crimson gore striking the dingy wall behind the table as if tossed from a bucket.
Mike froze in open-mouthed horror halfway between his seat and the now-dead prisoner as Agent Cooper/Amos Krupp swiveled smoothly and trained his gun on Mike.
The door burst open and he heard Sharon’s voice, loud and amped on adrenaline. She shouted, “Everybody freeze!” and he watched as Agent Ferriss/Wesely Krupp lifted his gun and pointed it at the door.
36
It was a perfect standoff.
Sharon leveled the shotgun at Ferriss, who pointed his Glock back at her with steady hands. Cooper held his weapon in a two-handed shooter’s grip aimed directly at Mike, less than five feet away.
For what felt to Sharon like a long time nothing happened.
The two echoing gunshots seemed to reverberate much longer than they should have, the sound trapped by the concrete walls of the small interrogation room. In her peripheral vision, she could see the devastation: the corpse of Jackson Healy, his head hideously misshapen and bloody. The gore littering the area around the body. The unidentifiable gristle dripping off the clothing of the two assassins.
“Drop the guns now,” Sharon barked, not because she thought there was any chance in hell the men would, but more because she couldn’t think of a single thing else to do.
Ferriss/Wesley ignored her and spoke to his brother, never taking his eyes off Sharon. “Never mind the lawmen,” he said. “Let’s do this,” and Sharon stared in utter disbelieving horror as Cooper nodded once and then the two men swiveled their arms smoothly, bringing their weapons to bear on each other’s foreheads.
Before she could say another word, the brothers squeezed their triggers, again firing in near-perfect unison, and the centuries-old assassins blew each others’ brains all over Mike McMahon and the ruined body of Jackson Healy.
And Sharon screamed.
37
It was after midnight before they left the station. Mike carried a canvas equipment bag slung over one shoulder while Sharon maintained a firm grip on his arm. They moved as quickly as they could to navigate the gauntlet of television cameras, flashbulbs and shouted questions. Mike felt off-balance, with one eye swollen shut and the other nearly so.
He stopped roughly in the middle of the chaos, Sharon sticking closely by his side. Even nearly blind, Mike could see that the skin of the assembled journalists had been bleached a glaring white by floodlights erected haphazardly around the lot like fast-growing weeds. He scanned the throng with his half-open good eye as he waited for the buzz of excited voices to recede, picking the expectant face of the Portland Journal’s Melissa Mannheim out of the crowd, as well as those of representatives from Fox News, CNN all of the other major networks’ news divisions. He wondered how they had gotten to the flyspeck of a town in extreme northern Maine so quickly, then realized they wouldn’t have had to – he and Sharon had been answering questions by investigators from the FBI and the Maine State Police for more than eight straight hours.
He waited patiently, and when it became clear to the reporters no one would get any information until everyone stopped shouting, they reluctantly closed their mouths and waited for Mike to speak.
Finally he did. Sort of. “We have nothing to say at this time. A joint press conference will be held here tomorrow at 9:00 a.m., and will include myself, as well as representatives from the FBI’s Portland office and the Maine State Police. At that time, we’ll give a short statement regarding today’s events and then answer any questions you might have to the best of our ability, given that the investigation is ongoing. Thank you all for your patience, and we’ll see you tomorrow.”
A frustrated groan spread through the crowd and the shouted questions resumed as Mike and Sharon turned away from the cameras and walked determinedly toward Mike’s car, which he’d left at the far end of the lot. The voices rose in volume and intensity, blurring together into an indistinguishable roar as the journalists battled each other to be heard, but then Mike froze as Melissa Mannheim’s unmistakable screech ripped through the crowd: “Chief McMahon, is it true two FBI agents executed a suspect in cold blood inside your station this afternoon while you stood by and did nothing?”
He whirled to confront Mannheim, almost losing his balance thanks to exhaustion and near-blindness. Sharon steadied him and then tightened her grip on his elbow, practically dragging him to the waiting car. “Don’t let her bait you,” she whispered fiercely. “You’ll be giving her exactly what she wants.”
Mike allowed himself to be pulled to the car. Sharon opened the door and he dropp
ed heavily into the front passenger seat. He knew she was right, knew that confronting the pushy reporter to answer her infuriating charge would be playing right into her hands, not to mention would also cause pandemonium and do nothing to convince the media jackals that what she said wasn’t true.
The worst part was that he wasn’t even entirely convinced that her statement was untrue. He had given up his gun to the killers, and then he had stood by while Wesley and Amos Krupp – there was no point referring to them by their current FBI names; he knew without a shred of doubt that they really were the notorious Krupp brothers, wanted in the mid-1800’s for bank robbery and murder – executed a man inside the Paskagankee Police station before turning their guns on each other.
Sharon started the car and eased out of the lot, weaving around reporters and network film crews trudging to their vehicles. Mike leaned against the headrest, squinting hard, and watched as a small knot of journalistic die-hards, apparently refusing to accept the notion that there would be no more news to report until morning, continued milling around the police station’s granite front steps.
When they reached the road, Sharon picked up speed and turned toward their home. Mike considered telling her to keep an eye on the rear view mirror in order to ensure they weren’t being tailed by an enterprising reporter, then thought better of it. For one thing, Sharon was smart enough to do exactly that without being told, and for another, the Portland Journal’s Mannheim the Maneater already knew where they lived. If she wanted to hassle them, all she would have to do would be to let slip the address of Sharon’s little house and then stand back and watch the action.
He sighed quietly. As bored as he had been sitting around waiting for another job while Pete Kendall had been running the department, as much as he had missed police work, he would never have wanted to return to the job under these circumstances.
Sharon cleared her throat. Mike smiled – as much as he could, with sutures covering half his face like some horrible road map and his skin bruised and swollen – and said, “What’s on your mind, babe?”
She stared out the windshield as the headlights cut twin beams of light through the coal-black northern Maine night. “You’re not really buying Mannheim’s idiotic implication, are you?”
Mike sat in silence, watching the thick cover of the ever-present forest slide past, crowding in, as always, from all sides. A pervading sense of claustrophobia was never far off in Paskagankee, Maine.
After a while he spoke, but not to answer Sharon’s question. How can you give an answer you don’t have? “You should never have kicked in that door, you know, not all by yourself. Protocol would have been to call for backup, get everyone out of the station, and then wait for help. And if you were going to come charging in there like some modern-day Dirty Harry, you should have at least taken the time to put on a vest.”
“I know the protocol,” Sharon said tightly. “But I wasn’t going to wait while those two…freaks…blew your brains out. And putting on Kevlar takes time I didn’t feel could be spared. Sue me.”
“As a cop,” Mike continued, ignoring her angry aside, “I can’t condone what you did. But as your fiancé, I don’t know how to thank you. I owe you my life, literally.”
She turned and smiled, her face radiant, her teeth glowing white in the weak moonlight struggling through the side window. “As I recall, you saved me a couple of years ago from a fate worse than being shot in the head, so the way I see it, we’re even. Maybe now we can get to the point where one of our lives doesn’t constantly need saving.”
They fell silent for a while, and when Mike spoke again it was to address a different subject. “I owe you an apology,” he said simply and without preamble.
“Apology accepted.”
“Don’t you want to know what it’s for?”
“I already know what it’s for. You’re not that hard to read, remember?’
“Try me,” Mike said, although he had no doubt she knew exactly what she was talking about.
He wanted to hear her say it. Needed to hear her say it.
“You’re sorry you didn’t listen to me about Ferriss and Cooper being determined to execute Jackson Healy. You feel like if you had given more weight to my warnings, this whole fiasco might have been avoided.”
Mike chuckled despite the pain it caused his injured face and head. “You’re right on, as usual,” he said. “About most of it.”
“Really,” she countered. He could see she was now genuinely curious. “What did I miss?”
“There was no way anyone was going to stop the Krupps from killing Healy. If they hadn’t been able to do it today, they would have killed him tomorrow in his holding cell, or ambushed him outside the station as he was being taken to jail in Portland, or they would have taken him down some other time. But they were on a mission, and they weren’t going to stop until they completed it. Hell, they had been single-mindedly pursuing their objective for over a hundred and fifty years, what would a few more days or even weeks have mattered to them?”
“You really believe all that stuff Ferriss was saying about Peru, and the Fountain of Youth, and being betrayed back in 1858, don’t you?”
Mike hesitated and then nodded forcefully. “I sure do.” He turned in his seat and stared until she looked over, then he held her eyes and said, “And so do you.”
“Is that so?”
“Yep. As I recall, wasn’t it you who quoted the fictional Sherlock Holmes in saying, ‘if all other possibilities have been exhausted, then what’s left, however unlikely, must be the truth’?”
She grinned. “That would be me.”
“Well, then, think about it. The FBI has already begun examining the personal histories of Special Agents Ferriss and Cooper, and once you dig more than a year or two prior to their hiring, guess what you find?”
Sharon answered instantly. “Nothing.”
“Bingo. The trail is completely cold. You know how hard it is to live completely off the grid, to live so anonymously you leave no footprint for investigators to find and follow? It’s damned near impossible, and it never happens with federal agents.”
He paused and took a deep breath. “You’re damn right I believe it,” he repeated.
Sharon turned into her driveway and Mike blinked in surprise. He had been so caught up in their conversation he hadn’t even been aware of the miles rolling by. Sharon switched off the engine and they sat in the darkness, comfortable in each other’s presence, enjoying the nocturnal stillness.
“What are you going to do about the press conference tomorrow?”
Mike started in surprise. He didn’t realize he had dozed off before Sharon’s question. He shrugged. “I’m going to explain what happened to the best of my ability.”
“Are you concerned about more questions like Mannheim’s?”
“Not really,” he said, realizing he meant it. “I took what I felt was the best course of action at the time. There will always be those who second-guess you. The more significant the decision, the more vociferous will be the criticism. The important thing is to be able to look yourself in the mirror afterward. It’s the only thing you can control, when all is said and done.”
Sharon nodded and he said, “Besides, I’m only a minor story in this goat-rope. The feds are the ones who have to try to explain two of their agents shooting an unarmed, handcuffed man after beating the crap out of one officer and shooting at another. I almost feel sorry for Fred Griffin.”
“Who?”
“Fred Griffin. He’s Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Portland Field Office, and he’ll be here in the morning for the press conference. He’s going to be roasted alive by the media.”
“And you almost feel sorry for him.”
“Yeah, almost, but not quite. The guy’s an officious prick, and living proof that the bureau needs to refine their hiring and promotional procedures.”
Sharon laughed. It sounded like a softly pealing bell. “Well, if this doesn’t get them to do s
omething, nothing will.”
She opened her door and Mike squinted against the sudden brightness of the interior dome light. “Come on, old man,” she said teasingly, “let’s see if we can’t get at least a few hours of sleep before that stupid press conference.”
He shook his head. “Sleep is going to have to wait a little longer, at least for me.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because my work tonight isn’t done yet.”
38
Sharon extinguished the headlights as the car turned into the empty Ridge Runner parking lot. The crunching of gravel under the tires in the three a.m. stillness sounded to her as loud as a Fourth of July fireworks display. Mike had insisted on coming here alone, but she steadfastly refused to listen, telling him, “We’re in this together, and I’m sticking it out to the end.”
And she meant it, as far as that went, but the truth was Mike McMahon looked like hell. Lack of sleep, stress and the beating he had taken at the hands of Ward Cooper/Amos Krupp had taken its toll on him, and she feared he might fall asleep at the wheel on the way over here and drive into a tree.
The moment the vehicle rolled to a stop, Mike was out the door and reaching into the back seat for the equipment bag he had carried out of the station a couple of hours earlier. He moved with more energy that Sharon would have expected under the circumstances, slinging the heavy bag over one shoulder and marching toward the excavation in the field behind the bar.
She grabbed her flashlight and shovel they had thrown across the back seat and hurried to catch up. Ahead, Mike murmured, “Did Bo happen to mention when the septic system project was going to be finished, now that the pit’s no longer a crime scene?”
Wellspring (Paskagankee, Book 3) Page 23