Sky's Shadow
Page 15
“Go screw yourself.”
“Hate me all you want. But I did your sister a favor. If she came to those woods, she was addicted to heroin and fentanyl. Can you imagine being enslaved to substances like that, the miserable existence? She was looking for a way out. It was going to happen soon enough. I just sped things up for her.”
“You’re giving the organs to soldiers, right?”
“Hell yes we are,” the partner says. “You got a problem with that?”
“Not with helping soldiers. But how you’re going about it, yeah. I have a big problem with it.”
“Were you in the service?” Brent asks.
“No.”
“Well we were. We get it. And you never will.”
“I get it all right. You made the blanket assumption that all sick soldiers deserve to live, while anyone sick with substance-abuse problems deserves to die. You must know a lot of homeless people are veterans. Ones with PTSD who turned to drugs. How do you reconcile that?”
“Well…we…most vets—”
“You can’t reconcile it. Because you shouldn’t make decisions about who should live and who should die off of some Goddamn category you put them in.”
“I doubt we killed a fellow vet. But if we did…then…well, it was collateral damage. A few are hurt to save many. That’s a reality of war. Which you wouldn’t understand because you were never in one.”
“No I wasn’t. And I don’t have PTSD. But I was a fireman. And I knew other firemen who had it. And I’m sure you both do.”
“You don’t know me. You don’t know us.”
“I don’t. But I know PTSD. Know the extremes it pushes people to. Extremes just like this crazy shit you two got into.”
“Shut up.” Brent slaps him across the face.
“What’re you, like fifty? So you fought in what, Desert Storm? What happened to you there?”
Brent slaps him again.
Tommy says, “Or maybe it’s not something that happened to you, but something you did to someone else. Is that what made you crack? I saw guilt tear firefighters apart, good men. Something they could’ve done to save a victim, but were too scared to. Couldn’t face themselves. What were you too scared of in Iraq?”
Brent grabs his throat. “You want to see scared?” He steps to the base of the table. “Are you familiar with the tibia? It’s commonly referred to as the shinbone. I’ve always found it a particularly interesting part of the body. Its second largest bone. Yet, unlike other sizable ones, the tibia hardly has any flesh on top of it. That’s why banging your shin hurts so much. Not a lot of cushion to absorb the pain. It’s as if it shoots right into your nerves.”
Brent lifts the cuff of Tommy’s right pant leg, exposing his shin. “Who else knows about me?”
“I’m not telling you shit.”
“An understandable position. But one I’m confident I can change. First I’m going to set my blade a half-inch below your right knee. Then swipe downward, scraping the epidermis off. I’ll keep going until I see the white of your shinbone. Then I’ll switch implements. Move from a cutting device to something blunt. Possibly the tire iron in the trunk of my Aston Martin. My motion will change. Instead of scraping, I’ll bang. Onto your skinned shin. Until the bone cracks.”
“I don’t scare like you do.”
“Once the bone breaks, I’ll let you have a minute to scream. When you’re done, if you’re able to muster up the air to speak, you’ll likely tell me everything I want to know. If you don’t, I’ll repeat the process on your left tibia. If you still don’t talk, I’ll simply move to another section of your anatomy. And we can keep going. And going. Or…we can bypass all that complication. What do you say?”
“I say you’re never getting away with this. Even if you kill me.”
Brent chuckles. “Okay then.”
Tommy closes his eyes, awaiting the first of the pain. A boom echoes through the warehouse. He hears Jordana shout, “FBI.” Tommy, opening his eyes, whisks his attention toward the voice. Jordana, in an “FBI”-imprinted bulletproof vest, runs into the warehouse. Clyde, in the same vest, stands in the doorway clutching a battering ram.
“Glen Brent,” Jordana yells, pointing her gun at him. “Put your hands where I can see them.”
Forty-Four
Brent raises his hands over his head. “You too,” Clyde says to the other suspect, aiming his weapon at him.
The partner lifts his bulky hands. The fingers of his right move as if dispatching a military signal. Brent nods.
“Both of you get down on your knees,” Jordana says.
They remain standing, Brent’s left hand signaling to his partner.
“Now dammit,” Clyde shouts. With slow steps, the agents cross the warehouse toward them.
“Go,” Brent yells. He sprints to his right. His partner dashes left behind the block of shelving, uproots a gun from his waist. The agents scramble for cover behind a metal trash bin.
Brent rolls under the stainless-steel table. Tommy feels it going vertical. The chain links dig into the flesh of his wrists. Brent seems to be employing Tommy as a human shield.
“Stay calm Dapino,” Clyde says.
A scraping noise as Brent drags the table toward the sports car.
“Out from behind there,” Jordana says.
He ignores her. The authority in her and Clyde’s expressions when they barged in here is gone, replaced with antsiness. Their eyes jump between Brent and his partner, training a gun on them.
Brent reaches the Aston Martin, shoves the table forward. Tommy crashes onto the concrete, banging his cheekbone. “Son of a bitch,” he says, pain crackling through his skull.
The stainless-steel slab pinning him down, Tommy watches Brent open a car door and reach in. He points a pistol at the agents, says, “We’re flanking you. You will not survive in this position if we open fire. We do not want to kill you. We just want to leave. Slide your guns toward the center of the floor, let us simply drive away. Nobody will get hurt.”
Jordana pulls a radio off her waist, says into it, “I need backup. Dunbar Warehouses, Building C. All available units. Two suspects are armed and—”
Puchaw. A gunshot from Brent’s partner smashes into the trash bin. Clyde shoots at him, missing, hitting a cooler.
Brent’s weapon blasts. Clyde flails, drops to the floor.
“No,” Jordana shrieks.
He isn’t moving.
She shoots at Brent, shattering an Aston Martin side mirror. Brent climbs inside. The engine starts. The car hurtles toward the agents. Jordana pulls Clyde’s body out of its path. It slams into the trashcan, sending it careening toward her. She dives out of the way.
The car backs up toward Brent’s partner. He opens the passenger door and hops in. The garage lifts.
Jordana unloads at the car, striking the side, but neither suspect. The vehicle zooms out of sight. The tires screech. Then the sound of the engine softens as if distancing from the warehouse.
“I need an ambulance,” Jordana shouts into her radio. “Agent down. I repeat, agent down.” She scurries to Clyde, a crimson puddle around his head. She kneels, pressing her hands on the back of his neck as if to control the loss of blood.
It does not seem to help. The puddle soon triples in size.
Forty-Five
Glen zips along a road in his Aston Martin. “Goddamn son of a bitch,” he screams. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“You hit, brother?” Bo asks.
“No. You?”
“I’m good. We’re both good. We got out of there, right?”
Glen takes a deep breath. “You’re right.”
“How did the feds find us at the warehouse?”
“Must’ve been Dapino. He has to be working with them. The one agent, the man, called out his name.”
“You said Dapino was out cold before you left your house. When did he have a chance to tell them he was there?”
“Got to be his phone. I heard it vibrating in his po
cket on the drive over. He was sedated and his hands were tied, wasn’t going to answer it, so I just…disregarded it. Could’ve been the feds. Who almost certainly have access to his signal. They likely tracked him via GPS.”
“Dammit. That shit-talking prick. I was looking forward to killing him before they showed up.”
“If I come across him again, he’s finished.”
“Where you driving?”
“Just…away from Dunbar.”
“We got to get off the road in this thing. The feds probably already have APB out.”
“You don’t think I know that?”
Bo points at an intersection a couple hundred feet ahead. “There’s a Shop-N-Save grocery store a few blocks to the right of the light. Let’s park it there.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll take a new car from the lot.”
“You know how to hotwire one? Don’t you need tools?”
“We don’t have time for that. We’ll have to…be more direct. Be quiet too. Get your head straight. We can’t hack this up.”
Glen slaps himself across the face. “I’m good.”
“The girl said your name. Cops are probably already surrounding your house. My truck is still back there. They’ll figure out who I am from the plates any second.”
“We’ll need a place to hide. Somewhere safe.”
“Remember my friend Hawks?”
“The guy you did mercenary work with after Desert Storm?”
“He lives about an hour from here. Lost a couple buddies who couldn’t afford the right medical care after the war. He’d be sympathetic to our cause. He should let us duck out at his place and regroup.”
“That’s huge.”
“Plus he’s an absolute psycho. Will do anything for the right price. If we need an extra body on the run, he’s our dog.”
Glen turns at the intersection, pulls into the lot, and kills his engine. He gazes at the fifty or so other parked vehicles. Then the automatic doors beneath the red-and-yellow Shop-N-Save sign.
Two beefy guys in San Diego State tee shirts come out, a case of beer in each hand. A half-minute later a late-thirties woman pushes out a shopping cart, a girl no older than eight at her side. A few seconds after, a scrawny, mid-twenties man in a plaid shirt and glasses leaves with a canvas shopping tote over his shoulder.
“He’s perfect,” Bo says. “Follow my lead.”
They step out of the car. Tail him to a Toyota Prius. He opens the hatch and lays his tote in the trunk. Bo nudges the barrel of his gun into his lower back, says in his ear, “If you scream, I shoot.”
A whimper. “My wallet is in my front pocket. Take it.”
“I don’t want your wallet. I want your keys. Give them to my friend.” Glen holds out a cupped hand. A set of keys plops into it.
“There. Can I go?”
“No. Get in.”
Bo opens the backdoor, gets in with him. Glen turns on the quiet electric engine, exits the lot.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” the shopper mumbles. “Where’re you taking me?”
“We need your car to get out of the area,” Glen says. “Once we do, we’ll let you go.”
“What’re you, like bank robbers or something?”
“No.”
Bo says, “In the meantime, to prevent yourself from doing anything stupid like calling the police, give me your phone.”
In the rearview mirror, Glen watches the shopper passes Bo his phone.
“You promise you’ll let me go?” the guy asks.
“I promise,” Glen says.
Forty-Six
A pair of double doors at Mira Mesa Hospital zings open as EMTs push through Clyde’s stretcher. “Stay with us, come on, come on,” Tommy says over a paramedic’s shoulder, he and Jordana pacing the gurney.
Clyde’s shirt is off, his neck swathed in a special pressure-application bandage that would look like a scarf if it didn’t extend across his chest under his armpit. Little creatures of blood squeeze their way from under the bandage.
An Indian man in scrubs, gloves, and a mask strides to the stretcher. “Has he undergone hypovolemic shock?” he asks the paramedics.
They answer in medical jargon Tommy can’t make sense of, one addressing him as “Doctor Khurana.” Backpedaling down the hallway, the doctor flashes a light in Clyde’s eyes.
The EMTs hook the gurney through another set of doors, Tommy following. “This is as far as you can go,” a paramedic says, clasping his shredded dress-shirt sleeve. Tommy glares at him.
“Let the man do his job,” Jordana says to Tommy.
He looses a pent-up breath, follows her back into the main hallway. He stands at its center, the stream of foot traffic bending around him. She disappears into the crowd.
He kicks the first door he sees, a thud radiating through the hall. A man in a lab coat steps up to him, asks, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Get out of my face, asshole.” Tommy roams the corridor for a while. Finds Jordana in a waiting room, its ceiling low, at least a foot shorter than the one in the hall.
She doesn’t make eye contact with him. He sits a few chairs from her. Sets his elbows on his knees, hangs his head in his hands, closes his eyes. He wants to put on music, drown out the reality of the waiting room, but his headphones are gone.
Jordana says into her phone, “Agent Quick.”
During the next fifteen minutes or so, he listens to her field two more calls about the manhunt for Brent and his partner, whose last name is apparently Archer. A recognizable voice flows through the waiting room. Tommy turns to it, noticing Clyde’s wife Val talking to a receptionist. Her feet are still in slippers, as if she didn’t even want to spare a minute to put on proper shoes after hearing the news about her husband’s emergency surgery.
Her gaze stops on Tommy. It’s cold. She must know about his role in Clyde’s suspension. He walks to her. “Hi Mrs. Gabor.”
“What did they say? What are they saying? The doctors.”
“The EMTs told me the bullet luckily missed his jugular and trachea. They gave him fluids to help with the blood loss. But they…well, they said part of his spinal cord was hit.”
“Lord.” She presses her palm over half her face and looks up at the fluorescent lights. Her mouth moves, but he can’t make out the wispy words. He guesses she’s praying.
He sits back in his chair. His foot taps the linoleum floor. Another twenty minutes go by. A figure appears from a doorway. Dr. Khurana, his scrubs dotted with blood. He looks at Tommy and Jordana, then nods at an empty corner of the room.
They meet him there with Val. Their gazes stick to him. He says or does nothing for about five seconds. Then shakes his head, three quick, horizontal motions. “We did all we could.”
Val’s body smacks onto the floor. She yells. Cries. Yells while crying. “No. I can’t.”
Tommy lifts her to her feet. On the linoleum is a sprinkle of the glitter from her anniversary collage. She must’ve been working on it when she got the call.
“Give me drugs,” she screams. “Numb me.”
People stare at her. Jordana stares at Tommy. Her complexion is red with anger.
Soon Helga Wichita, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s San Diego office, stomps into the room. She asks Jordana, “What the hell were you doing at that warehouse?”
She hesitates to answer.
Tommy says, “Don’t blame Jordana. Blame me. Brent…lured me there. I called Clyde for help, and he called Jordana. She didn’t even know what she was walking into.”
Wichita points her finger in his face. “You son of a bitch. First you get the man suspended. And instead of walking away like I told you to, you get him killed.” He wipes specks of her spit from his cheek.
“This was your fault?” Val shouts. She slaps him over the ear. Hits him again. He raises his arms over his face. Her fist bangs the top of his head.
“Please ma’am,” Dr. Khurana says. He steps in front of her.
Forty-Seven
Glen drives the stolen Prius through a desolate region of San Diego County’s Mountain Empire. A red ball of sun burns in the sky above sandy hills checkered with cacti. He glances into the rearview mirror at the abducted supermarket shopper, says, “I don’t think the chance of a cop driving by is too high out here. Should be safe to drop you off.”
“Thank you sir.”
“We’re keeping the car. You’ll have to hitchhike back. Could be a while before anyone picks you up. Your bag from the grocery store. Anything good in it?”
“I guess. Why?”
“You should put something in your stomach now. It’s only getting hotter outside. Whatever you bought could lose its flavor sitting in the sun. What’s your favorite food in there?”
A pause. “The apples probably.”
“Green or red?”
“Green.”
“I like green apples too.” Glen smiles. “Reach into the bag and enjoy a green apple.” Glen watches him grab one, have a bite. “How is it? Juicy?”
He swallows. “It’s good.”
“Don’t stop there. Finish.”
Glen eases off the gas, slows to a stop on the side of the long rural road. He turns around, watches his abductee chomp away at the apple. “All done,” the guy says. “Am I getting out here?”
“This seems like it’ll do.”
A boom fills the car. After it subsides, the only audible sound is a croak from the abductee’s mouth. His eyes go to his chest. Where a bullet hole oozes blood. Then to Glen’s hand, clutching a pistol. Bo watches him die without a trace of surprise in his expression.
Glen hooks the Prius off the road onto the desert terrain. He drives about three miles. They dump the body behind a couple bushes, then get back in the car, return to the road.
Soon they pull up to the property of Hawks, Bo’s mercenary friend. A weathered one-story home on about ten acres.
Bo knocks on the front door. A man about their age in a black eye patch, smoking a cigar, opens it.