Big Three-Thriller Bundle Box Collection

by Gordon Kessler

  But how could she have known that? Such a small detail. Maybe she’d been in the Gold Mine Grill when I’d ordered one. It was a little quirk of mine. Cheese on the bottom of a burger made it different from the fast-food variety. It made it homemade. I was suddenly convinced that somehow this strange woman did know me. She’d simply gotten the place she knew me from wrong. I wanted so much to remember her.

  “No, I can’t,” I told her. “Really. You don’t understand. It’d be dangerous.”

  “Robert. You’re scared. This isn’t a joke, is it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Tell me. What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Come on, Robert. After all we’ve been through. You can tell me anything.”

  I wondered what all she thought we’d been through. It didn’t matter. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Try me, Rob. We used to be close. You used to tell me all of your secrets.”

  I exhaled with a puff and shook my head again. “This one, I don’t even believe.”

  “Come on. If I laugh, you can quit.”

  I felt the need to tell someone, to talk it over and try to figure it out, even if that someone was a stranger. What could it hurt? Whatever I had was probably killing me, too. She’d been exposed to me longer than anyone else over the last ten hours, so she might drop dead, also. She must have had a stronger resistance than some of the others, that’s all. How my customers in the store earlier in the day weren’t affected, I didn’t know. Maybe it was their clothes. No blue suits. And of course, Sunny’s jogging outfit was green, not navy blue, if that made any crazy difference.

  “First of all, I’ve never been to Stanford or California for that matter. Either you have me mistaken for someone else, or we met at some other place. You’re vaguely familiar to me, too.”

  “All right, Robert,” she said skeptically, “I’m not laughing. Now, what’s going on with you?”

  “Okay, you want to know? I’ll tell you.” I looked around for some soft grass. “Sit down.” I pulled her toward a large patch of blue grass by the spirea bushes.

  We sat cross-legged, our knees touching. She looked at me intensely, those eyes of hers, the deep pools opening up and drawing me inside. They made it difficult for me to concentrate.

  I said, “People are dying because of me.”

  “What? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m serious. I don’t know how. But there have been at least four people I’ve been around today who just keeled over. There could be more I didn’t see. I don’t know. And I’m concerned about my wife.”

  “Yeah,” she said, and her eyes went wide again. “All the deaths. It’s the big topic all over town. They think it might be some kind of epidemic or something. Some sort of new viral heart disease, maybe. You mean you think you’re like a carrier or something?”

  “Or something. I don’t know.”

  “That’s crazy. It’s only a coincidence. No virus works that fast.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe nothing they’ve discovered yet. Maybe it isn’t a virus. Maybe it’s a kind of charge or something I emit. Some poisons act real fast, and all it takes is less than a drop to kill somebody. Maybe I’m putting off some kind of fast-acting, toxic chemical. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. It’s just happening.”

  I hoped this would be enough to scare her off, but instead, she tilted her head and her eyes narrowed with concern.

  “Robbie,” she said and reached out to me. Her long bangs had fallen down around her eyes and her lips were moist and inviting. She stroked the side of my head, running her fingers through my hair. It felt good, and I relaxed a little. I gave up on convincing her I didn’t know her. I didn’t care. Her voice came out as soft as her hand. “We’re going to find out what’s going on, I promise. You’ll be okay.”

  Looking at her, I couldn’t think of what to say, as if my mind was stuck in neutral. She gazed back at me, taking all of me in, looking at my hands — touching them, my wrists, my face. I felt as though I was being examined — not by any sort of medical professional, more like by a lover.

  Her eyes grew misty, and her lip trembled. “Whatever happened to us?”

  An odd question to ask at the time, but still a good one. I certainly wished I could remember, even if the memory was stolen from whoever she had me confused with. Evidently, at one time, she’d had strong feelings for me or whoever she thought I was.

  She dropped her hand to my knee and blinked the tears away before they could form. “I’m sorry. Go ahead. Tell me more.”

  I took a moment to think. “It started this morning with a note I found in my shower that said for me not to trust anyone.”

  “A . . . note in your shower?”

  “Yeah, then my TV blew up. Then, after I bumped into you, and I got that little bee sting . . .” She grimaced in sympathy as I gently patted the back of my neck. I continued. “. . . I was accosted by a couple of goons — military types — looking for somebody. They tried to grab me, but I pushed them away . . . and they just disappeared.” I didn’t elaborate about them vanishing into thin air. “About three blocks down the street, I noticed that the air had calmed, and the birds had quit chirping. It was like something was going to happen, something bad. You know, like in the eye of a storm, and you’re just there waiting for it to hit you again.”

  “Again?”

  “Yeah, I’ll get to that later.” I carefully recounted to her the incident I’d had with the woman in the street.

  “The car horn, Rob, the excitement killed her. She probably had a bad heart, anyway.” Her face looked so kind and smooth. Faint freckles were splashed across her nose.

  I told her, “I’m not nearly finished.”

  She took my hand.

  I drew a deep breath and went on. I told her about the van driver.

  “There you go. Another heart attack. A little odd, but nothing more than a coincidence. Don’t be so silly. You’re okay. Quit worrying.”

  “Silly? Huh. I wish I were. There’s more to this little ‘coincidence.’”

  She patted my hand, but said nothing. I could tell she was being cautious not to be too patronizing.

  “The van. It was a dark-blue Ford van. Then I remembered the guy who honked before the lady died. He was driving a dark-blue Ford van, too. It was the same guy.”

  We stared at each other for a moment.

  I looked at the ground. “Then before lunch, while I was walking over to the Gold Mine Grill, I noticed a couple more goons — guys I hadn’t seen before — were watching me from across the street. These two were wearing suits. Navy-blue suits.” My words came out faster. I couldn’t slow down. “Then I realized both the guy in the van and the lady wore blue fricking suits. Next thing I know, the two guys start chasing me.”

  Sunny was looking at me as if I’d told her aliens had kidnapped her grandmother.

  “I know,” I told her, “you’re still thinking I’m paranoid or something. Maybe what happened next will change your mind.”

  “I believe you, Rob. It’s just kind of difficult for me to take in all of this. Go ahead. What happened then?”

  “I couldn’t hear them behind me anymore so I turned around. They weren’t there.”

  “You were getting too close to the police station. They were afraid they’d get caught for whatever they were up to.”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “They were lying in the middle of the sidewalk, both of them, dead.”

  Finally, the skepticism left her face and she appeared convinced I was in trouble. “My god, Robert, this is terrible. What are you into? Who are these people?”

  “I have no idea. I didn’t ask any questions, I just ran. I ran and ran and ran. And everywhere I ran, I saw people in blue suits. I didn’t know if they were after me or not. A lot of people wear blue suits. And you’re supposed to trust people in blue suits, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Yo
u know, you always hear, ‘true blue, trust them, do.’”

  “I’ve never heard that. Sounds ridiculous. Where’d you get such a thing?

  “I don’t know, everywhere. My mother, father, teacher, I don’t remember. I just know it’s supposed to be true. Right?”

  “No,” she said simply. “Don’t believe it. How could the color of someone’s clothes make them trustworthy?”

  I stared at her, and it finally sunk in. It was ridiculous. Still, somewhere from the back of my mind, a whisper came — not from Harvey — and I heard: true blue, trust them, do.

  Sunny looked sympathetically at me. “Now settle down a little. Let me see that sting on your neck.”

  I obliged her and began to lean forward.

  Before my head had moved six inches, I heard a snap, and I felt something like another bee buzz behind me.

  “Damn,” I said, “am I wearing a bull’s eye back there?”

  We frowned at each other. She gently pulled my head down, and I wondered if the sting had something to do with this disease or whatever it was I had. This time, as she brought my head forward, I heard a solid thud, and splintered bark seemed to jump from the spruce tree beside us.

  Our eyes met, wide in amazement. I remembered the silencer on Vanzandtz’s gun, and it took only a second for me to realize we were being shot at.

  Chapter 14

  I bolted to my feet, at the same time pulling Sunny to hers.

  “Run,” Sunny shouted.

  “The police station!” I said leading her by the hand. We ran a hundred feet to the street and leapt from the curb onto Sluice Drive, the main artery joining the east side of Gold Rush to Summit County Road 539. That blacktop was the only way out of town to the south, and it dead ended at Mount Rainy Biotronics to the north. As we ran across, I briefly considered going in that direction. I’d already missed our appointment with Dr. Xiang. I wondered if Michelle was okay, if she had gone without me. I wondered what Will’s prognosis was, if he would walk again. I wondered what they both thought, if they knew the truth of what was going on, and if that truth was that I was somehow deadly to them.

  As we made the opposite sidewalk, the stop sign at the intersection danced to the unmistakable whine of a ricochet.

  Two seconds later, a small chunk of limestone popped off the side of the building we rounded. Both occasions were absent sound of an initial gunshot.

  We ducked and cut the corner to head back up Prospector Lane toward the police station and flung ourselves against the side of the wall, gasping for air as we savored our brief safety. With our arms entangled protectively, we only had a second to give each other a questioning look of incredible terror.

  From the angle the shots came from, I guessed the corner of the building kept us safe from the sniper, at least temporarily. He was probably the guy I’d seen earlier behind the roof parapet of the building on the other side of the park. I scanned the street and sidewalk around us to ensure our momentary safety. No one in view.

  Sunny glanced at my shoulder and reached beside my neck. I felt her messing with something below my collar.

  “God, Sunny. This is no time to pick off lady bugs.”

  But she persisted even at this deadly time. She looked puzzled as she pulled back the sport coat. One hell of a time for fussing with a loose hair. She took only a second to inspect whatever it was she found, and as she yanked the thing off, I remembered Mike Wu and Lieutenant Vanzandtz also having a fixation with my collar. I thought of the bump, the bee sting, and everyone wanting to touch me back there. I wished they could all keep their hands and stingers to themselves.

  She held her discovery in front of me, and I took it. Roughly the size and shape of a dime, it was sticky on one side and covered in black latex about the thickness of a condom.

  “What the hell?” I threw it on the sidewalk and scuffed it with the toe of my shoe. The thin latex cover peeled back and underneath was a copper foil with a tiny gold-plated circuit board like some sort of a computer chip. I had no idea what it could be. Sunny stared at it also, and I began to wonder if she didn’t know more than she seemed to about the quagmire we’d stepped in.

  I lifted her chin with my index finger to make her look at me. “Let’s go!” I said and took her hand.

  * * *

  At the wooded staging area, Jax heard the DPVs approaching and walked to where they would park. Shortly, Senior Airmen Craig, Jagger and Chang pulled up in the first DPV. Lieutenant Carpenter whipped the second vehicle in beside it, a German shepherd sitting at his side.

  “We’re ready, sir,” the lieutenant reported. “And we brought the infrared and motion-sensor covers you requested.”

  The dog leapt out and ran to Jax. He wagged his tail and licked the major’s hand.

  The lieutenant explained, “Sorry, sir. I know you didn’t tell me to bring him, but I thought he might come in handy.

  “Good thinking, lieutenant,” Jax said. “That’s why he’s on the team, to help.”

  The major knelt and pet the dog, and the canine whined enthusiastically in response.

  “That’s right, Sarge. We might need you and that wonderful nose of yours. Whadaya say, boy, you up for it?”

  The dog stomped his feet eagerly, and it made the major smile.

  “Good, boy.” Major Jax looked to Carpenter and said, “Put on your ears, lieutenant.” To the three newcomers, he said, “Let’s get those covers in place on the detectors to our west.”

  Carpenter put his headphones on. The other men went to the back of the DPV.

  “Set the counter-sensor laser on low for their sensors,” Jax instructed. “We only want them temporarily disrupted while we put on the covers. Don’t burn them out, or they’ll be all over us.” The next step would be to send his men out to place the hologram illumination devices. That might take a couple of hours.

  Jax looked up the ravine Sunny had followed. To himself he said, “And then, we wait.”

  * * *

  Xiang got out of his limousine and headed for the back entrance of the police station. Bungling idiots — he was in charge of a bunch of bungling idiots. His men had fallen for a diversion of fireworks, sending all of the search teams to the opposite side of town to find a burning tool shed and the fragments of about a thousand Black Cat firecrackers.

  Chief Dailey came through the doorway slowly and down the steps to meet him.

  Xiang growled, “Firecrackers!” and shook his head.

  Bailey looked at the ground.

  “I understand our sniper spotted the subject and a woman hiding in the park,” Xiang said. “But he missed them.”

  Dailey nodded. “He couldn’t get close enough. Those tranquilizer darts aren’t very accurate at much of a range.”

  “Who is this woman? Who?”

  “We don’t know, Doctor. We’re checking.”

  “I’ve been told she isn’t one of ours.”

  “We — ”

  Dr. Xiang exclaimed, “Who the hell is she, then? Where did she come from?”

  “We don’t know yet, but we’ll get ‘em.” Dailey held his hands out in a calming gesture that only pissed Xiang off more. “We’re right on their trail, now.”

  “We will see,” Xiang said as he shoved Dailey to the side and stomped to the back steps. As Dailey followed, Xiang turned to his driver waiting outside the car. “Get me some supper. I will be coordinating the search from here.”

  “No need for that, Doctor,” Dailey said. “I’ve done everything you instructed. All my men except the desk sergeant are out looking for him. We’ve alerted all the merchants whose stores are open late, put the word out to as many citizens we could contact. They’re watching for him as if he had the plague. As a matter of fact, that’s what we’re saying, that he has some sort of contagious disease. I’m sure we’re going to get the both of them within the next few minutes.”

  Dailey’s patronizing words set Xiang off as the limo drove away. Xiang had controlled his anger, measured and doled
out only what was necessary until now, but he felt that grasp on civility slipping. His arms waved emphasizing his frustration. “That is what you keep telling me. Yet I do not see them. Do you?”

  * * *

  Sunny and I sprinted all out, both of us panting heavily as we ran. From as out-of-shape as I’d felt earlier, I knew I was drawing my energy from pure adrenaline. However, the nearer we got to the police station, the more I was sure we’d soon be safe. Gold Rush had only ten full-time lawmen, the chief and his nine officers. I knew them all to be good men.

  When we made it to within a block of the city building where the jail was housed, I saw Chief Dailey standing outside with Dr. Xiang. How could we have been more fortunate?

  Sunny held back, pulling my arm like an anchor. “I’m not sure . . . ,” she said in between breaths, “ . . . this is such a good idea.”

  “Come on,” I panted out. “Why back out on me . . . now?”

  “It was on the way . . . to my motel room,” she gasped, her words coming out in short bursts. “Let’s forget about the police . . . and go to my room. We can hide out there for a while. Figure this thing out.”

  “No, look,” I said. “It’s Doc Xiang . . . and Chief Dailey. They’re my friends.”

  Until they saw Sunny and me stampeding toward them, the doctor and chief seemed in a heated discussion. Doc Xiang’s long arms flailed in the air as if he were describing King Kong loping through New York. The chief was giving the doctor a come-on, settle-down wave. I couldn’t tell what they were discussing, but conflicting opinions were obvious.

  Then Dailey turned toward us and quickly became moon-eyed as if the grim reaper himself were coming for his soul. Xiang, in the middle of his arm waving, glanced to see what the chief found so frightening. He gave a double take and stared. The look in Xiang’s eyes could not be mistaken — pure anger — and it was being directed toward me.

  I was in utter surprise. For a moment, I felt the hair actually raise on the back of my neck as we gazed at one another. I expected him to do something, yell something, and I was sure he was going to as his lips curled, and at the same time, the pains started in the back of my head again. But Doc Xiang seemed to reconsider, and within a second he did an about face. His once flailing arms reached for the handrails along the five concrete steps leading to the back door of the jail.