by John Lutz
To plant a second bomb, just in case the first failed.
In the bomb suit!
Harper was bringing Delilah the fiery death she’d just avoided. And he’d die with her.
“No!” he shouted.
He struggled to free himself from the hands that were pushing him toward Delilah. People didn’t understand why their hero was behaving this way. They continued to grin at him though their eyes were puzzled.
“What is it, you need to take a leak?” someone asked jokingly.
“He’s gonna barf, they always do that after they work on a bomb,” said a woman reporter in knowledgeable tones.
A voice started sputtering, “Delilah—Delilah—”
Harper had no time to explain. He didn’t want to yell Bomb! and cause a panic that might make it even more difficult for him to reach an exit. Shaking off the hands that grabbed at him, he wriggled and shoved through the confused, protesting crowd, heading for an EXIT sign he could see above their heads.
At last he reached it, and threw it open to find a flight of concrete steps leading to the basement. He hurtled down them. Behind him the door flew open. They were still pursuing him, shouting questions. Harper turned and yelled, “I’m the bomb! Markman planted explosives on me! Stay back!”
That did it. The people scrambled backward up the steps and the door slammed shut.
Harper was alone in a dank, narrow basement corridor. He patted at the stiff fabric of the suit. It had no pockets. The plastique must be sewn right into the material. It was so thick you wouldn’t be able to feel a small, flat charge—but up against his skin, it would eviscerate him. There would be a detonator the size of a thimble and a miniature timer—or transmitter. Which? No time to think about it. All that mattered was shedding the suit and getting away from it.
A man with two good hands could get it off in seconds. But for Harper it was a struggle. He tore open the Velcro straps at the wrists and neck. Then he yanked the zipper so that the groin-protecting flap fell heavily between his legs.
Crossing his arms, he pulled the top-piece up over his head. Now he was in darkness. The stiff, heavy garment wouldn’t come off. He wriggled and pulled. The sound of his trapped, panting breath filled his ears. Finally, with a desperate tug that made him grunt with effort, he got the top free of one shoulder. It was taking his sweat-soaked shirt with it. He could feel cool air on his bare back. He shrugged off the top and shirt and let them fall to the floor. Then he looked down at his pants.
And realized that to take them off, he would first have to take off his shoes.
Should he get the whole suit off, or run for it right now? One last time Harper tried to put himself in Markman’s mind. The thicker padding was in the top—easier to hide the bomb there and it’d be closer to his vital organs. Harper looked at the top lying on the floor.
Then turned and ran.
He sprinted down the dim, narrow corridor, gasping for breath. He could only hope he was leaving the bomb behind, rather than taking it with him.
He saw a turning ahead of him and ran at it full tilt, trying to get around the corner before the bomb—
A roaring filled his ears and the floor seemed to fall away from his feet. The blast picked him up and slammed him against the wall.
The next thing he knew, he was lying in a heap on the cool concrete floor. His ears were ringing painfully. Lifting his head, he looked down at his bare chest, his legs, his feet.
Still in one piece. Thank God!
He’d guessed right. The bomb had been in the top.
His entire body began to tremble. He lay quietly and let it, knowing that eventually the quaking would stop of its own accord.
And after that—he’d have the rest of his life!
Markman raised his head above the parapet and stared incredulously at the hospital. He’d just pushed the button. He should have heard the explosion. Seen the windows blown out, the crowd in the drive screaming and ducking. What could have happened?
What had gone wrong?
“Freeze!” yelled a voice behind him. Exactly like an actor on a bad TV show, Markman couldn’t help but notice.
So the cops searching the garage had found him at last. It meant hardly anything to Markman, compared to his sense of failure, to the crushing realization that he’d left the pattern uncompleted, his life’s mission unfulfilled, his message to the world undelivered.
Maybe he ought to allow his capture. Use his trial as a public forum, a platform to speak to the world about the big lie of celebrity.
No. It wouldn’t work. In captivity be would be a circus animal, to be gawked at and laughed at but not taken seriously. TV psychologists would explain him.
No. That would never do.
So Markman didn’t freeze. He turned and straightened up.
He never expected to complete the movement. He expected the bullets to hit. A moment’s heat and pain, and then oblivion.
But the cop didn’t shoot. His face was young and scared, eyes wide and mouth open under the SWAT team helmet and visor. The gun, though braced in both outstretched hands, was still shaking as he pointed it at Markman.
“Freeze!” he shouted again.
Markman smiled and stepped toward him.
The cop didn’t shoot. Christ, Markman thought, what was it going to take?
“Drop the weapon!” the cop shouted.
He meant the transmitter, which Markman was still holding in his left hand. Some weapon. Just a useless piece of plastic.
“Drop it! Now!”
Markman smiled. Maybe it wasn’t useless after all. Maybe it would bring him the only thing he sought.
He swung the transmitter up and pointed it at the young cop.
That was what it took.
Epilogue
Away from the brilliant TV lights, and the cameras, recorders, flashes, and microphones, Harper lay with Laura in the bedroom of the Brooklyn brownstone with its smells of fresh paint and raw wood and tacky varnish. It was a quiet night. Only the sounds of sparse but rushing traffic and an occasional faraway siren or high jet aircraft found their way into the dark bedroom.
Harper listened to those sounds and to the rise-and-fall sighing of Laura’s breathing and stared at the shadowed ceiling, feeling the past release its grip.
Markman was unmistakably and finally and forever dead. Like Jimmy Fahey.
Frances Wilson had been reassigned by the Bureau to the New York office Bank Robbery Division. Addleman told Harper this meant that teamwork and not supervision would be her life in the Bureau for the foreseeable future. Her career was stalled.
Addleman himself had been the subject of media speculation, had been offered a book contract, employment with private security firms. He’d turned everything down to do consultant work from his apartment in Philadelphia. Now that it was his choice, he’d told Harper, he was content precisely where he was.
Harper knew what Addleman meant, because he’d turned down the same kinds of offers himself. Most of them, anyway.
He had agreed to the book, to working with a writer an agency and his publisher had recommended. The contract wasn’t enough to make him and Laura fabulously rich, but it was a sum Harper wouldn’t have dreamed of a few months ago. Money wouldn’t be a problem ever again, if he played his investments right. And Laura would have whatever within reason she wanted, and could quit work at the hospital.
If she wanted to quit. Maybe she’d be like Addleman, and decide she’d rather continue doing what she’d been doing. That would be okay with Harper, who would go to Rodman’s Neck whenever he was invited.
Because now Harper was content in retirement, beside Laura, in the brownstone that was home.
AUTHORS’ NOTE
We’ve updated this novel by changing a few details here and there, the better, we hope, to entertain the reader. In a way, Final Seconds was prescient. We do think that this is the new and improved version, and present it for your enjoyment.
St. Louis, Missouri, 2008
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Don’t miss John Lutz’s next exciting thriller,
PULSE
coming from Pinnacle in July 2012.
Highway 72, Central Florida, 2002
It gave Garvey the creeps, transferring somebody like Daniel Danielle. The sick bastard had been convicted of killing three women, but some estimates had his total at more than a hundred.
They were the women who lived alone and let their guards down because the sicko could be a charmer as a man or a woman. Single women who disappeared and were missed by no one. Those were the kinds of women Daniel Danielle sought and tortured and destroyed.
Nicholson was seated next to Garvey. Like Garvey, he was a big man in a brown uniform. Their job was to transfer Daniel Danielle to a new, and so far secret, maximum-security state prison near Belle Glade, on the other side of the state from Sarasota. It was in Sarasota where Danielle Daniel (he had been dressed as a woman then) had been arrested while crouched over the body of one of his victims, and later convicted. The evidence was overwhelming. As a “calling card” and a taunt, he had put his previous victim’s panties on his present victim, panties he had apparently worn to the murder. He was damned by his DNA.
Daniel was all the more dangerous because he was smart as hell. Degrees from Vassar and Harvard, and a fellowship at Oxford. Getting away with murder should have been a piece of cake, like the rest of his life. But it hadn’t been. When his appeals were exhausted, he would be executed.
No one was visible on State Highway 72. This part of Florida was flat and undeveloped, mostly green vistas streaked with brown. Cattle country, though cattle were seldom glimpsed from the road except off in the distance. Wind and dust country for sure. Dust devils could be seen taking shape and dissipating on both sides of the road. Miles away, larger wannabe tornados threatened and whirled but didn’t quite take form.
The latest weather report said the jet stream had shifted. Hurricane Sophia, closing in on Florida’s east coast, now had a predicted path to the south, though not as far south as the dusty white van rocketing along the highway. Taking time to replace a broken fan belt ten miles beyond Arcadia had slowed them down. They were still okay, if the hurricane stayed north. If it didn’t, they might be driving right into it.
Now and then a car passed going the other way, with a Doppler change of pitch as the boxy van rocked in the vehicle’s wake. Off to the east there were more dust devils, more swirling cloud formations. The insistent internal voice Garvey often heard when some part of his mind knew something bad was about to happen wouldn’t shut up.
Suddenly it began to rain. Hard. Garvey switched on the headlights. Hail the size of marbles started smacking and bouncing off the van’s windshield and stubby hood.
“Maybe we oughta go back,” Nicholson said. “See if we can outrun whatever’s headed our way.”
“Orders are to deliver the prisoners.” Garvey drove faster. The hail slammed harder against the windshield, as if hurled by a giant hand.
The prisoner chained in the back of the van with Daniel Danielle was a young man with lots of muscles and tattoos under his orange prison jumpsuit. He was scarred with old acne and had a face like chipped stone, with a crooked nose and narrow, mean eyes. He was easy to take for a hardened ex-con, but he was actually an undercover cop named Chad Bingham, there for insurance if something weird happened and Daniel Danielle made trouble.
Bingham would rather have been someplace else. He had a wife and two kids. And a job.
The easy part of the job was just sitting there sulking and pretending he was someone else. But the way things were going, he was afraid the hard part was on its way.
The hail kept coming. Nicholson was on the edge of being downright scared. Even if it didn’t make landfall nearby, Sophia might spawn tornados. Hurricanes also sometimes unexpectedly changed course. He reached out and turned on the radio, but got nothing but static this far out in the flatlands, away from most civilization.
Garvey could see his partner was getting antsy so he tried to raise Sarasota on the police band. The result was more static. He tried Belle Glade and got the same response.
“Storm’s interfering with reception,” he said, looking into Nicholson’s wide blue eyes. He had never seen the man this rattled.
“Try your cell phone,” Nicholson said in a tight voice.
“You kidding?”
Nicholson tried his own cell phone but didn’t get a signal.
Both men jumped as a violent thumping began under the van.
“We ran over a branch or something that blew onto the road,” Garvey said.
“Pull over and let’s drag it out.”
“Not in this weather,” Garvey said. “That hail will beat us to death.”
“What the hell was that?” Nicholson asked, as a huge, many-armed form crossed the road ahead of them, like an image in a dream.
“Looked like a tree,” Garvey said.
“There aren’t many trees around here.”
“It’s not around here anymore,” Garvey said, as the wind rocked the van.
The van suddenly became easy to steer. Garvey realized that was because he was no longer steering it. The wind had lifted it off the road.
They were sideways now, plowing up dirt and grass. Then the van bounced and they were airborne again.
“What the shit are you doing?” Nicholson screamed.
“Sitting here just like you.”
The van leaned left, leaned right, and Garvey knew they were going to turn over.
“Hold tight,” he yelled, checking to make sure both of them had their seat belts fastened.
The wind howled. Steel screamed. They were upside down. Garvey could hear Nicholson shouting beside him, but couldn’t make out what he was saying because of the din.
The van skidded a long way on its roof and then began to spin. Garvey felt his head bouncing against the side window.
Bulletproof glass came off in sharp-edged, milky strips, and he was staring at the ground. With a violent lurch, the van was upright again, then back on its roof. Garvey realized that as addled as his brain had become, his right foot was still jammed hard against the brake pedal.
The van stopped. Hanging upside down, Garvey looked out the glassless window and saw that they were wedged against one of the rare trees Nicholson had mentioned. He looked over and saw that Nicholson was dazed and wild-eyed. And beyond Nicholson, out the window . . .
“Looks like a kind of low ridge over there,” he shouted at Nicholson. “We gotta get outta the van, see if we can burrow down outta the wind.”
“Everywhere!” Nicholson yelled. “Wind’s everywhere!”
Garvey unhitched both safety belts, causing the weight of his body to compress onto his internal injuries. Ignoring the pain, he leaned hard to his right, against Nicholson, and kicked at the bent and battered door. It opened a few inches. The next time it opened, the wind helped it by wrenching it off one of its hinges and flattening it against the side of the van.
“Wind’s dying down a little,” he lied to Nicholson, and then was astounded to notice that it was true. The roaring had gone from sounding like a freight train to sounding like a thousand lonely and desperate wolves. A hurricane-spawned tornado, Garvey guessed. Moving away, he hoped.
He wormed and wriggled out of the van. The hail had stopped, but rain was still driven sideways by the wind. Garvey was sore all over. Later he’d have to take inventory to see if he was badly injured. With great effort he could stand, leaning into the wind. Nicholson was near him, on hands and knees, his head bowed to Sophia’s ferocity.
The overturned van’s rear doors were still closed, though the roof was crushed and the wire-reinforced glass was gone from the back windows. A pair of orange-clad legs and black prison shoes extended from one of the windows, and a voice was screaming.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A multiple Edgar and Shamus Award winner—including the Shamus Lifetime Achievement Award—John Lutz is the author of over 30 books. His n
ovel SWF Seeks Same was made into the hit movie Single White Female, and The Ex was a critically acclaimed HBO feature. His recent titles include Pulse, Serial, Mister X, and Urge to Kill. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and Sarasota, Florida.
Visit him at www.johnlutzonline.com.
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