Lethal

by Sandra Brown

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be. I’m just letting you and the sharpshooters who’ve got me in their night vision sights know that if they kill me, Mrs. Gillette and the kid will stay perpetually lost.”

  VanAllen gave a small shake of his head. “You made yourself clear to Hamilton, who made himself clear to me. There aren’t any sharpshooters.”

  “Tell me another one.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Wireless mike? Are you talking for the benefit of everybody out there listening in?”

  “No. You can search me if you don’t believe me.”

  Coburn deftly stepped around VanAllen, but kept his pistol aimed at his head. When he came face-to-face with the man, he sized him up. Desk jockey. Unsure. Out of his league.

  Threat to him, next to nil.

  Dirty or clean? Coburn would guess he was honest, because he appeared not to have either the guts or the cunning to be on the take.

  Which is why Coburn believed the man truly didn’t know about the sniper on the water tower over Coburn’s left shoulder at seven o’clock. Or the one in the caboose window at four o’clock. Or the one he’d spotted on the roof of the apartment complex three blocks away.

  That shooter would have to be extremely good, and the angle was lousy, but it could be done, and after blowing Coburn’s head off, the bastard would have all the time in the world to get away.

  Either VanAllen was really good at playing dumb, or he truly was in the dark, which was even more alarming.

  “Where are Mrs. Gillette and the child?” he asked. “They’re my chief concern.”

  “Mine, too. Which is why I’m here and she’s not.” Coburn lowered the pistol to his side.

  VanAllen followed the motion, looking relieved that he was no longer staring into the bore. “You didn’t trust me?”

  “No.”

  “What reason have I given you not to?”

  “None. I’d just hate to leave you out.”

  “You mistrust everybody.”

  “A life-preserving policy.”

  VanAllen nervously wet his lips. “You can trust me, Mr. Coburn. I don’t want this fouled up any more than you do. Is Mrs. Gillette all right?”

  “Yes, and I want to make damn certain she stays that way.”

  “You believe she’s in danger?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Because she has incriminating information on The Bookkeeper?”

  On the outside chance that VanAllen had lied about wearing a wireless mike, Coburn wasn’t about to answer that question. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to order the local P.D. to call off the manhunt for me. Like you, I’m an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in performance of my duty. I can’t have a bunch of trigger-happy yokels on my ass.”

  “Crawford isn’t going to shrug off eight murders.”

  “Homicide detective?”

  “For the sheriff’s office. He’s investigating Fred Hawkins’s murder. He sort of inherited the warehouse murders when Fred—”

  “I get the picture,” Coburn said, cutting him off. “Talk this Crawford into granting me a reprieve until I can bring Mrs. Gillette in safely. Then I’ll thoroughly brief him on the warehouse shootings and Fred Hawkins.”

  “He won’t go for it.”

  “Twist his arm.”

  “Maybe if you gave me some exculpatory information that I could pass along—”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. Your office leaks like a sieve and so does his.”

  VanAllen sighed, looking worried. “It all relates to The Bookkeeper, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And it’s big?”

  “Right again.”

  “Can’t you tell me anything?”

  “Can. Won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you were supposed to know, Hamilton would have already told you. He would have started by telling you about me.”

  The man winced, as though it pained him to hear that. He also must have sensed Coburn’s resolve and decided that trying to bargain was pointless. “Okay, I’ll do my best with Crawford. What are you going to do?”

  “Disappear. I’ll bring Mrs. Gillette in, but no one will be given notice. I’ll choose my time and place.”

  “I’m not sure that’ll fly.”

  “With who?”

  “Hamilton. He said to tell you that time is up.”

  “Hamilton can go fuck himself. Tell him I said so. Better yet, I’ll tell him myself. I’m still on the trail of something, and I intend to finish the job that he assigned me. If you need to go back to him with something, tell him that. Now, let’s get in the car.”

  “What for?”

  “We’re gonna make it look like I’m going peaceably.”

  “Look like?” VanAllen glanced around, and again, Coburn thought that if he was faking his ignorance, he was good at it. “Look like to who?”

  “To the snipers who’ve got me in their crosshairs.”

  “Who would want to shoot you?”

  Coburn frowned at him. “Come on, VanAllen. You know who. And the only reason they haven’t taken me out already is because they still wouldn’t know where Honor Gillette is. You and I will get in the car and drive away.”

  “Then what?”

  “At some point between here and your office in Lafayette, I’ll get out. When you arrive, surprise! I’m no longer in the car with you. Whoever balks first is the person you arrest immediately, because that’s the person who had the snipers in place. Got it?”

  VanAllen nodded, but Coburn hoped he felt more certainty than his nod demonstrated.

  Coburn said, “Let’s go.”

  VanAllen turned and walked to the driver’s side of the car and opened the door. The dome light came on, convincing Coburn yet again that the agent had no field experience. But he was glad of the light because it afforded him a check of the backseat. There was no one crouched between the seats.

  He opened the passenger-side door and was about to get in when he sensed motion in his peripheral vision. He turned toward the train. A shadow streaked past the gap between two of the freight cars. Coburn dropped to look beneath the train and saw a pair of legs on the other side of it sprinting away. He started crawling in that direction and was almost under the train when a cell phone rang.

  Coburn swiveled his head, caught VanAllen as he reached for the ringing telephone attached to his belt.

  Coburn looked beneath the train and at the man fleeing from it.

  Then to VanAllen, he shouted, “No!”

  Honor was winded and her left side was cramping, but she continued to run at full tilt. She hadn’t thought the train tracks were that far from the paint and body shop garage until she began covering the distance. Running in darkness over unfamiliar ground made it even more difficult.

  This was an industrial area of town comprised of warehouses, machine shops, and small manufacturing plants, all of which had been deserted for the night. Twice she plunged down blind alleys and had to retrace her steps, which became slower the farther she ran.

  Only once did she allow herself a few moments to try and catch her breath. She put her back to a crumbling brick wall that formed one side of an alley. She gulped air. She pressed both hands into her side to try and ease the cramp.

  She didn’t linger there for long, however. Rats scuttled nearby. She couldn’t see the dog that snarled at her from behind a cyclone fence at the dark end of the alley, but the sound conjured up menacing images.

  She continued on.

  Finally she reached the tracks. They were overgrown with weeds, but the steel rails reflected some ambient light and made the going a little easier, although her heart felt on the verge of bursting. Her lungs labored. The cramp in her side was causing her to gasp with pain.

  But she ran on because Coburn’s life could very well depend on her reaching him. She didn’t want him to die.

  When sh
e finally spotted the old train near the water tower, she would have cried out in relief, had she had enough breath to make a sound. Seeing her goal gave her additional strength, and she pumped her legs even faster.

  She made out the automobile parked near the train. She saw the two figures standing in front of the hood. As she watched, they separated. Coburn went around to the passenger side. The driver got in and closed his car door.

  A heartbeat later a ball of flame bloomed into the night sky, illuminating everything around it in the red glow of hell.

  The concussive blast of the explosion knocked Honor to the ground.

  Chapter 36

  Doral had the dubious pleasure of informing The Bookkeeper.

  “My guy in the FBI office had just enough time to plant the bomb on the car and program in the cell phone number. But it worked exactly like it was supposed to. Bam! They never had a chance.”

  The silence on the other end was palpable.

  Doral continued. “I witnessed it myself from the top of the water tower. All of us got the hell away from the area immediately. Nobody ever knew we were there.”

  Still silence.

  Doral cleared his throat. “There is one thing, though.”

  The Bookkeeper waited in stony silence.

  “It wasn’t Honor who showed up. It was Coburn.” Unsure how The Bookkeeper would receive that piece of news, he hastily added, “Which is better when you think about it. It’ll be easier to track down Honor than it would have been to deal with him.”

  “But those weren’t your instructions. That wasn’t my plan for Coburn.”

  Doral understood The Bookkeeper’s letdown. Between Coburn and Honor, the undercover agent was naturally the bigger trophy. For personal reasons, Doral would have enjoyed killing him in a manner that was painful and protracted. Instead, the son of a bitch had gotten off light. He’d gotten the instantaneous death planned for Honor and Tom VanAllen.

  When given his orders a few hours earlier, Doral had diplomatically questioned the necessity of killing the FBI agent. “He really doesn’t know anything.”

  To which the Bookkeeper had said, “He’s in a perfect position to ruin things, if unintentionally. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. And it will look good to the Mexicans that we killed a federal agent.”

  “We got two FBI guys tonight,” Doral said now. “That should really impress that cartel.”

  But The Bookkeeper didn’t seem all that impressed.

  Jesus, what did he have to do to make up for letting Coburn escape the warehouse? Now that Coburn and VanAllen were dead, the only remaining threat was Honor. She was just a pawn, but she was a dangerous one who had to be eliminated. Doral accepted that. Just as he’d accepted having to kill Eddie.

  He and Fred had tried to persuade The Bookkeeper to rethink that mandate. They’d bargained for his life to be spared. Did Eddie, their boyhood friend, really have to die? Maybe just a stern warning or a threat either real or implied would work.

  No loose ends. No mercy. The Bookkeeper hadn’t made an exception even for Eddie. He’d crossed a line. He had to go. The order had been issued in language that a one-year-old could understand, but for the sake of all concerned, he and Fred had made it as quick and painless as possible, while still making it look like an accident.

  Doral hoped he could devise something that easy for Honor.

  But if she died badly, she had only that friggin’ Coburn to blame, first for involving her—because Doral was convinced that she didn’t know Eddie’s secret—and then for stealing the quick death she should have had.

  Of course before Doral could do anything, he had to find her.

  With the mind-reading skills that often gave Doral gooseflesh, The Bookkeeper said, “Coburn’s dead, and he was the only person who knew where Honor is. How do you plan to find her?”

  “Well, now that Coburn is ashes, she may come out of hiding.”

  “You’re willing to wait on that?”

  The implication being that waiting would be a bad idea. “No, of course not. I’m going to focus on Tori Shirah. Because I’m convinced that when we find her, we find Honor and Emily.”

  “For your sake, I sincerely hope you’re right, Doral. For once.”

  The Bookkeeper hung up without saying more. Doral closed his phone and realized as he started his pickup truck that his hand was shaking.

  He hadn’t even been congratulated for getting Coburn, the asshole who was to blame for this whole fiasco. Instead, he’d received another veiled threat. He was still on The Bookkeeper’s shit list, where nobody wanted to be.

  He drove his pickup out of the crowded parking lot of a tavern, where, even before calling The Bookkeeper, he’d stopped to toast his success with the car bomb. He joined the stream of vehicles that were homing in on the area near the train tracks where Tom VanAllen’s car had been blown to hell and back and was still smoldering. It was attracting gawkers like moths to a giant light bulb.

  It did his smarting ego some good to know that he had caused all this commotion. Too bad he couldn’t crow about it.

  Some of the curious had felt the impact of the blast, others had heard it, a few had actually seen the fireball that had lit up that side of town. Doral had to park two blocks from the tracks and go the rest of the way on foot… for the second time that night.

  The area had been cordoned off by first responders. Uniformed police officers were still needed to keep the gathering crowd back and to make way for arriving emergency vehicles. The flashing strobes gave the whole scene a surreal aspect.

  New arrivals asked questions of those already there.

  Doral heard a dozen different versions of what had taken place and who was responsible, none of which were right. It was al Qaeda, it was dope dealers running a meth lab out of the trunk of their car, it was two lovesick teenagers with a suicide pact. Doral was amused by all the hypotheses.

  He received condolences for the loss of his twin, who had been a victim of this crime wave. A mass murder on Sunday. A kidnapping on Tuesday. Now a car bomb. Concerned citizens wanted to know, what had happened to their peaceful little town?

  Playing the role of city manager, Doral somberly pledged that the city government and local law enforcement were doing all they could to catch those responsible and put a stop to the series of violent crimes.

  He’d been glad-handing for about an hour when he saw the coroner backing his van away from the burned-out car. Doral positioned himself to be on the driver’s side when the van stopped while officers cleared a path for it through the crowd.

  Doral motioned for the coroner to lower his window. He obliged and said, “Hey, Doral. Had some excitement tonight, huh?”

  Doral tilted his head in the direction of VanAllen’s car. “Any guess who it was?”

  “The driver?” He shook his head. “No idea. Wasn’t enough to make a positive ID just by looking.” Lowering his voice, he said, “But don’t quote me on that. License plates were destroyed, too. They’re trying to get the car’s VIN number, but the metal is so hot—”

  “What about the other one?”

  “What other one?”

  “The other person. On the passenger side.” He hitched his thumb over his shoulder. “Somebody said there were two.”

  “Then somebody said wrong. There was just the one.”

  “What?”

  “There wasn’t anybody on the passenger side.”

  Doral reached through the open window and grabbed the man by the collar.

  Stunned by the sudden move, the coroner pushed Doral’s hand aside. “Hey, what’s with you?”

  “Are you sure? There was only one body?”

  “Like I said, only one.”

  The earth dropped out from under Doral.

  Coburn had been partially beneath the train when the bomb detonated, which is what had saved him. Triggered when VanAllen answered his cell phone, the explosion had instantly vaporized most of VanAllen and demolished the car.r />
  When Coburn crawled out from under the boxcar on the other side, burning debris showered him, scorching his skin, hair, and clothing. With no time to drop and roll, he batted out the most dangerous of the burning patches as he ran like hell the length of the train.

  The man in the caboose had saved his life. Had it not been for his running away, Coburn would have been standing in the open passenger door when VanAllen answered his phone. He rounded the caboose and ran in a crouch along the weed-choked tracks, trying to keep a low profile against the fiery glow of the burning car.

  He was almost on top of Honor before he saw her, and even then it took him a second to process that the huddled form on the tracks was a body, a woman, Honor.

  With full-blown panic, he thought, Oh, Jesus, she’s hurt. She dead? No!

  He bent over her and dug his fingers into her neck, looking for a pulse. She reacted by slapping at his hands and screaming bloody murder. He was glad she was alive, but at the same time furious with her for endangering herself. He hooked one arm around her waist, scooped her off the ground and up against him.

  “Stop screaming! It’s me.”

  Her legs gave way and she slumped.

  “Are you hurt?”

  He turned her and, holding her upright by her shoulders, looked her over. She didn’t have any wounds that he could see, nothing grisly like shards of glass protruding from her torso, or shattered bones poking through her skin, no deep gashes. Her eyes were open and staring at him, but unfocused.

  “Honor!” He shook her slightly. “We’ve got to get away from here. Now come on!”

  He jerked hard on her hand as he struck out running, trusting her to come along. She did, although she stumbled several times before gaining her footing. When they reached the garage, he opened the door, shoved her inside, then rolled the door shut. He didn’t even wait for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but guided her by feel to the car. He secured her in the passenger seat, then went around and got in on the driver’s side.

  He pulled off his T-shirt and used it to wipe off the grease camouflaging his face and arms. The shirt came away blood-smeared. He checked his reflection in the rearview mirror. He looked exactly like what he was: a man who had barely escaped becoming a human Roman candle by clambering beneath a freight train.