Deadline

by L. T. Ryan

  That’s exactly what I wanted him to think.

  Twenty minutes later we found ourselves on a deserted dirt road that split a wooded area. The grass track in the middle had spread out, leaving two small brown ruts. The sedan jostled and dipped along the path. Bear slowed to a stop once we were deep enough into the forest that we couldn’t see anything through the trees.

  The big man left the vehicle idling and stepped outside. He opened Joosten’s door and gestured for the guy to step out. I exited simultaneously, keeping my pistol on the guy. Bear had the man in his grasp as soon as the guy stood.

  Birds sang all around us. Wind rustled through the trees. The air smelled fresh, clean. A big contrast to the city garage where everything smelled of diesel and gas fumes.

  We walked thirty or so feet into the trees. A small animal scampered away nearby. Guess we’d gotten too close for its comfort.

  “This should be far enough,” I said. “Not like anyone travels this road anymore. Would take years to find a body back here.”

  “If they found it at all,” Bear said. “Scavengers would make quick work of it out here. Scatter the bones around. Could take months to find enough parts to put any semblance of a skeleton back together. Hell, they might never figure out the identity.”

  The guy’s knees went weak. He dropped to the ground. Dead leaves scattered and puffed into the air under the sudden weight. He buried his face in his hands and sobbed. In between his cries, he managed to talk.

  “I said… I wouldn’t… tell anyone… I haven’t… I won’t.”

  “Get ahold of yourself, man,” Bear said. “Christ, stand up.”

  The guy didn’t budge.

  Bear nudged him in the back with his foot. Perhaps it was more than a nudge, because the guy fell forward and landed face first in a patch of tall grass.

  “Goddammit.” Bear leaned over, grabbed the guy and yanked him up. The man remained limp. His feet dragged as Bear moved him over to a tree and parked him there.

  I stepped in. “The woman who came to visit you. Who was she?”

  The guy regained his composure and pressed back against the tree. He wiped his eyes and face. A long strand of snot stuck to his hand and dangled in the air, catching the sunlight. His eyebrow hair stood up and scattered in every direction.

  “Well?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’d never seen her before this morning.”

  “What’d she say?”

  He scratched the back of his head against the tree bark for a second or two, looked up into the foliage. “She reiterated what the men had said to me.”

  “Which was?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Would I be asking if I did?”

  He furrowed his messy brow at me. “I suppose you might if you were testing me to see if I’d spoken to anyone.”

  Bear coughed. Guess he was impressed at the guy. Or getting pissed at me for not getting the information.

  “You see that man there,” I said, jutting my chin toward Bear. “If you don’t tell me what I want to know, then he’s gonna extract it from you. You want that?”

  Joosten glanced at Bear and shuddered. He shook his head while casting his gaze downward. Perhaps he felt ashamed at cracking so easily.

  “All right, then,” I said. “What did she say to you?”

  “Keep my mouth shut. That’s it.”

  “We watched the whole thing go down.” I leaned into the guy. All the sweat had left a residual stink on him that I associated with fear. “What was in the envelope she handed you?”

  His eyes glossed over as he glanced around.

  “There’s no escape,” I said. “You can run, but you won’t get far. Tell me what was in the envelope. Answer a few more questions. Then we’ll take you back to your car.”

  “A, uh, down payment,” he said.

  I waited for him to continue and said nothing.

  He lowered his voice as though the trees were recording his words. “For keeping quiet about what I saw.”

  “What’d you see?” I said.

  “Do you work for them?”

  “I don’t work for anyone.”

  “Then why do you care?”

  “I have a personal interest in what happened to that woman. Problem is that no one knows anything. Except for you. So why not tell me what you know?”

  He glanced around again while biting his bottom lip.

  “There’s no one out here,” I said.

  He shifted from foot to foot for a few seconds, then recounted what had happened. “There were two of them. They confronted her.”

  “Men? Women?”

  “Men,” he said.

  “What’d they look like?”

  “Uh, I dunno. Locals, I guess.”

  “You guess? How could you tell?”

  “Nothing stood out about them. They were average guys to me. I really wasn’t paying attention. I was sitting there, having a coffee. It’s the kind of area where people are walking about, shopping, stopping, talking. You know. So seeing these women stopped by these men was nothing that got my attention.”

  “Women,” I said. “Can you describe the other?”

  The description he gave of her matched the woman from the hotel. I pulled the picture up and showed it to him.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s her.

  “But that’s not the woman who came to your house this morning.”

  He shook his head.

  “OK,” I said. “Go on.”

  “The men, they turned to her, the brunette, and pushed her out of the way. See, this is what I remember more than anything. They knocked her into the, uh, how you say, railing. I caught it all out of the side of my eye, then I heard the noise of the metal grating against the concrete walk. Oh, how it sounded like a car wreck. The woman, she grunted as she hit it full force with her stomach. And when she tried to stand, the guy shoved her so hard, she flipped over the railing. I guess she had enough of the beating by then because she crawled into the café, leaving her friend alone with the men.”

  “Didn’t come back out?”

  “I don’t know.” He leaned back against the tree and stared up again. His demeanor was more relaxed as he recounted the events. Didn’t know if that meant he trusted us now, or if it was due to his brain focusing on a problem.

  “Either she did or she didn’t,” I said.

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Elaborate.”

  “After she went in, the first and second gunshot rang out and the other woman fell to the ground. It was chaos after that.”

  “Which of the men shot her? And where first?”

  “Neither. It came from somewhere else. The red bloom filled her chest, so I assume that’s where the bullets hit. Right? Anyhow, the men seemed as surprised by the shots as I was. I distinctly remember locking stares with one of them. He looked frightened, as though the next bullet was meant for him. Perhaps the first, too.”

  “What’d they do?”

  “They took cover for a few seconds. They ran after the third shot. I think it was then that they ran. You’ll have to excuse me, everything but a few memories is now a blur after watching that woman die like that, choking on her own blood before that final shot caused her head to jerk violently.”

  His words painted a picture that played on repeat in my mind.

  “Anything else you can remember?” I said. “Maybe someone coming up to the body, checking it, and then running off? The other woman coming back out? Seeing a shooter on a roof? Anything like that?”

  “No,” he said. “Really, everything is so jumbled together I couldn’t tell you if the tomatoes I smelled were from the cafe or at home later that night.”

  I glanced over at Bear to gauge his feelings on the story. He stood with his arms loose, leaned back and nodded slightly, indicating he bought the man’s story. I did, too. Aside for the occasional glance up to recall a memory, there was nothing he did that could be taken as a sign of
deception. And the guy obviously had not been trained to conceal lies. He’d opened up and recounted every memory he had about the murder.

  “The woman who came to your house,” I said. “Did you recognize her?”

  “Hard to see her face the way she was dressed,” he said. “But, no, I didn’t recognize what I saw or her voice.”

  “OK. Wait here.”

  I walked with Bear to the car. The idling engine would help to muffle our voices as we discussed what the man had said. We had to determine if there was any benefit to keeping him around for a while. Perhaps he’d open up further, tell us a few more details that he held back whether consciously or not.

  We never got that far.

  CHAPTER 30

  The shot sounded like a cannon erupting amid the tranquility of the forest. Birds scattered, squawking their warnings to all nearby to get the hell away. Bear and I drew our weapons. The line between training and instinct at this point in our careers was blended. Both had been counted on enough that they were ingrained as the same reaction. One or the other or both took over and we aimed our pistols in the same direction.

  Bear fired off three rounds into the green veil. The chances of hitting anyone were low, but the move bought us some cover and a little time to gather our bearings.

  Using the trees as shields, I made my way toward Joosten. He writhed on the ground, clutching his chest. Blood spilled from the gaping hole he tried to plug with his fingers. A crimson stream trickled from his mouth. He coughed a couple times while trying to speak, sending a cloud of blood-laden saliva into the air. The muscles in his cheeks spasmed. His near lifeless eyes stared at me, begging for help.

  The risk of moving closer was too great. I wanted to help him and put him out of his misery, but he’d been exposed to the shooter where he had stood. If I went to that same spot, I’d be dead, too. In the grand scheme of things another thirty seconds wouldn’t make too much difference to Joosten. He was beyond saving.

  So I waited, listened, watched. Bear did the same a dozen yards from me. Leaves crunched under heavy footsteps. Someone whistled, an obvious sign there were at least two of them and they were working together. Were they coming for the body? Or us? If they wanted Joosten’s corpse, they were welcome to it.

  I started a slow retreat to the car, remaining low to the ground and darting between trees, using them as cover. At the same time I kept an eye out for movement in the woods. Things had settled somewhat. The sound of their approach had dimmed to nothing. The animals had not returned. The area took on an eerie silence.

  Bear met me about two-thirds of the way. It would have taken maybe ten seconds had I been walking. But maneuvering in a way to remain unseen had left me feeling that the journey had taken an hour.

  “Make a run for the car?” Bear whispered.

  “They could be watching it.”

  “We just gonna stay here all night? I mean, they know we’re here. Probably got another team en route to block us in.”

  “Then I guess we should get moving.”

  Bear lunged through the gap between where we stood and the next tree over. The second he cleared it, the bark near his face exploded into hundreds of shards. The shooter was a half-second off.

  And he’d pay for it.

  I stepped to the right with my pistol raised, located the man. He was a good fifty feet away. Plenty close enough for me. One shot. Dead center. The guy dropped where he stood.

  His partner yelled out. I saw him cutting through the woods like he was going to assist the fallen man. He must’ve wised up because in my anticipation of his destination, I lost him.

  “He’s running.” Bear didn’t wait for me to respond. He took off in the direction of the man, hurdling the guy I’d killed and dodging low hanging branches.

  “Christ,” I muttered, taking off after him. I stopped and looked down at the corpse. Didn’t recognize the guy. A quick search of his clothing turned up no wallet, no cell phone. They’d ditched before coming out, perhaps in their vehicle.

  I heard Bear off in the distance. “Who the hell are you?”

  His large hands wrapped around the man’s neck, pinning the guy to a tree with his feet a foot off the ground. The guy kicked against Bear and the tree. It had no impact on the situation.

  “Who are you?” Bear repeated. His nostrils flared, cheeks twitched, and his eyes looked as though they were going to shoot fire at the man. The guy’s twisted mouth tried to spit out words, but his crushed larynx prevented it.

  “Let him down if you want him to talk,” I said.

  Bear raised the man higher. The guy’s eyes rolled back and he wet himself.

  “Goddammit,” Bear said as he let go and stepped back.

  The man fell into his own puddle of piss. He grabbed his throat. His face turned from blue to deep red. He looked up at me, then Bear. Perhaps out of instinct he reached for his pistol, which had fallen nearby. He almost got to it. Bear lunged forward, drove his knee into the guy’s arm, smashing it against the tree with a snap. He let out a gargled scream. Bear reached down, yanked the guy up, tossed him into another tree.

  “Who are you?”

  The man was on his knees and one hand. The other hung at an odd angle. Strands of blood seeped from his mouth and cuts on his face. I stepped closer to him. He looked up, made eye contact. He smiled, revealing several broken or missing teeth in his mouth. The guy managed to make it to his knees, wobbling the higher his torso went. Slowly, he lifted his hand to his face to wipe the blood away.

  Or so I thought.

  I took a step back, raised my sidearm at his chest.

  He shoved something in his mouth, then clenched his jaw tight. By the time I reached him it was too late. Thick white foam poured through the gaps in his teeth. His eyes rolled back, and his body convulsed several times before falling over.

  “What the hell?” Bear said.

  “Poisoned himself,” I said, kicking the opened tin into the space between us. “Cyanide would be my guess.”

  “We dealing with the KGB now?”

  I shrugged. Anything was possible at this point. I looked up at Bear. “Someone who didn’t want to be caught.”

  CHAPTER 31

  We were both on edge as we walked back to the car. Bear spun toward every noise with his pistol extended. I almost shot a squirrel that ran out from under a pile of brown leaves. Were there more men out there? Did someone have us in their crosshairs at that very moment?

  Continuing to use the trees as cover, we moved toward Joosten, stopping to snap pictures of the slain assailants. Poor bastard had expired. His dull eyes stared up at the green canopy. Nasty way for a guy like that to go. Probably had never even been in a fistfight in his life. Then he had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and became witness to a brutal execution.

  I assumed that the two men we killed were the ones Joosten had seen confront the woman at the murder scene. He had mentioned that the guys seemed startled by the gunshots. That was part of the act. They were on the ground to control the situation. Isolate the target by moving everyone else away. In this case, they caused a scene that made normal people nervous. Most men and women won’t confront a hostile individual, let alone two of them. They’d rather turn a blind eye and cross over to the other side of the street than get involved.

  Joosten had hinted that he had been visited by these very same men. They had told him to keep his mouth shut. And then they had continued to monitor him. Perhaps by his car. Or maybe one of them had bugged an item the guy used every day. His phone or wallet, something like that. As soon as his daily pattern deviated from what they considered his normal routine, they went on the offensive. Must’ve been close, too, because we weren’t in the woods for that long. They saw him with the two of us and figured the best course of action was to eliminate the threat.

  They should have aimed for me or Bear.

  Collateral damage.

  That was what they settled for instead.

 
We made it to the relative safety of the BMW. Bear took the wheel again, navigating the rutted dirt road. The tires crunched on the ground. A cloud of brown followed in our wake. We were silent, both of us scanning as deep as we could into the trees. When we reached the clearing I spotted their vehicle parked a hundred yards or so away.

  “Let’s check it out,” I said.

  Bear had already started turning the other direction. He threw it in reverse and whipped the BMW around. We approached the parked vehicle slowly and cautiously. I had my window down, arm resting on the sill, pistol sweeping the woods. If there had been a third, we would have seen him by now if he intended to exact revenge for his fallen partners.

  Bear pulled up alongside the car. The late model sedan still ticked and banged. I hopped out. Heat radiated off the hood. I checked the driver’s door and found it unlocked. The car was empty except for a messenger bag on the backseat and a handheld device facedown on the dash. I assumed they used the unit to track Joosten.

  Bear opened the backdoor and grabbed the bag. He yanked on the seats, and pushed on the floor. I did the same. Neither of us found any hidden compartments inside. I popped the trunk and the hood. Up front, we checked behind the grill. They could have used it to wire something they wanted to remain hidden. There was nothing there. The trunk also was empty. Bear pulled up the spare tire cover, removed the tire and tools and checked for a compartment underneath.

  “Nada,” he said.

  “Check the wheel wells,” I said.

  He took one side, and I the other. Neither of us found a damn thing.

  “What’s in the bag?” I said.

  He opened it, pulled out a couple pieces of paper. “Pictures of the guy.”

  “Take them and leave the bag.”

  “What about that device on the dash?”

  “I’m tempted. Maybe Brandon can use it. Only concern is someone could be monitoring it.”

  “We can hide it down the road.” Bear leaned in and grabbed the unit. “Call Brandon on the way.”

  I wasn’t sure where we were going at this point. Joosten had been our only lead other than the officers on the report and the two false names Frank had supplied on his version of the report. If we were going to talk to anyone else, it was between those four.