The FBI Thrillers Collection: Vol 11-15

by Catherine Coulter

  She got a look at Victor in the interior car light. He looked tired too, burned out to his toes, on edge. Well, after they got the money, they’d rest, take it easy for a couple of days, and she’d get well.

  Victor pulled the Corolla off the road behind the house and into the trees. He helped Lissy through the woods to the far side of the house. It was nice and dark, clouds covering most of the stars, no moon to speak of, and it was still really warm. They slipped quietly from behind one oak tree to the next, studied the few cars parked on Denver Lane. Most looked familiar, and those that weren’t were empty—no federal agents with infrared glasses looking out, no movement of any kind.

  “What do you think?” Victor whispered against her temple.

  “Mama always said the cops were stupid, didn’t know their butts from their earlobes.”

  “Yeah, but she’s dead, now, isn’t she, so maybe she wasn’t right all the time.”

  “Mama was never wrong. Those guys just got lucky,” Lissy said. “I don’t see anything, do you?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Maybe they’ve already been here, searched for the money, and left. You think it’s okay?”

  He started to say yes when Lissy saw a tiny arc of light come from her bedroom, then disappear. She grabbed his arm to pull him back and it hurt so bad she sank down against a tree. She was gasping a little. “You see that? Someone’s in my bedroom with one of those little flashlights.” She cursed. “I knew they wouldn’t just leave, I knew it. Victor, let’s sit down and let me rest a minute.”

  Victor saw she was in pain and said, “All right, Lissy, rest. When you’re ready, we’ll get out of here. We can hide someplace close by and come back for the money in a couple of days.”

  Lissy jerked awake when a blade of sun slashed through the oak branches and splashed across her face. She blinked, tried to remember where she was.

  “Good morning,” said Special Agent Cawley James, standing above her, his gun aimed at her heart. He was wearing black slacks, a white shirt, and loafers, as if he’d just been to church. Lissy jerked up her gun, but he kicked it out of her hand. “No, you’re not going to shoot me, little girl.” He took a step back and said, “Hey, Victor, time to rise and shine and let me escort you to jail.” Then he spoke into his radio. “Hey, Ben, Tommy, I’ve got them, a hundred yards southwest of the house. Get over here!”

  Victor moaned where he lay and twitched. But didn’t move. He turned his body slightly away.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Cawley said, and nudged him with his toe. He raised his head, shouted, “Tommy, Ben, get yourselves over here.”

  Victor moaned again, turned fast, brought up his .22, and shot Cawley in his right arm. Cawley’s gun went flying. He yelled out and kicked at Victor, but Victor was already rolling, twisting around to shoot again. “Stay out of the way, Lissy! Do you see his gun?”

  Cawley ducked behind a tree and kept yelling for Tommy and Ben.

  “Victor, we’ve got to get out of here!” Lissy was scrambling around, looking at the ground. “He kicked my gun away, I can’t find it. I don’t see his either, it’s still too dark. We’ve got to go.”

  Victor cursed, fired the rest of his clip toward where the cop was hiding, then jerked Lissy into the woods. They ran, branches cutting their arms and faces, not stopping until they drew up, panting, to jump into the Corolla he’d left sheltered beneath the full-leafed branches of an oak tree just off the two-lane road.

  They heard male voices yelling, heard them crashing through the trees. The Corolla screeched off in two seconds, Lissy leaning out the open window, dry-heaving, Victor’s empty .22 loose in her hand.

  Victor looked in the rearview mirror, saw the men burst out of the trees, guns in their hands, one of them on a cell phone. They were a long way from their cars.

  But they didn’t have much time. Lissy spotted an old black Trailblazer in the driveway of a house at the end of Miller Avenue, eight twisting blocks from Denver Lane. It took Victor three seconds to hot-wire it. Lissy stayed in the Corolla, Victor on her bumper in the Trailblazer, to the woods outside of Fort Pessel, then he drove it into the trees.

  “We’re going to Winnett,” Victor said. “Maybe they don’t know about me yet, and I know that place, know where we can hang low. If they do know about me, it won’t matter. We’ll trade out this piece of junk in another fifty miles. We’ll stay there until it’s safe to come back here and get the money.”

  “Okay, let’s do it,” Lissy said, her face tight with pain. He handed her a couple of pain pills, watched her pop them right down with half a bottle of water.

  “I just wish we could have taken a couple of those jerks down.”

  Victor said, “Who knows? Maybe you’ll have your chance. I’m going to see to it things turn out different in Winnett. You rest, Lissy; that was a crazy run through the woods. Hey, we’re okay, and that’s all that matters.”

  23

  RANDALL COUNTY HOSPITAL

  FORT PESSEL, VIRGINIA

  Monday morning

  Special Agent Cawley James’s arm hurt bad. On the bright side, the bullet hadn’t hit an artery and he hadn’t bled to death. He stared at the morphine drip machine they’d hooked up just a minute ago, willing it to kick in. His arm was cleaned, stitched, and bandaged, and the anesthetic had worn off. Now his arm was screaming at him.

  “It’s only been one single lonely minute since the nurse started the drip,” said Galen Markey, SAC of the Richmond field office. “She said it was faster than a shot. Stop whining, you’re going to live. You should be thankful, the doc said you won’t end up with any movement or rotation problems. No thanks to your pitiful brain.”

  “Yeah, yeah, kick me while I’m down,” Cawley said between gritted teeth. “Listen, Galen, I’ve a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch for you if nobody calls my mom. She’ll fly here on her private jet, her doctor in tow, and demand you let her take me to her villa in Cancún. I can see you’re pissed, ready to tell me I’m a screwup. All right, so I should have waited for Ben and Tommy, but I stumbled over them, and she was just a teenager, after all.” He sighed. “Then she woke up and tried to shoot me. What was I supposed to do? I told you, she wasn’t the problem. I mean, she could have been if she’d been faster.”

  “If she’d been faster, you’d be stone-cold dead.”

  “Maybe. Look on the bright side. It was that damned guy, he faked me out. I’ll admit it. Why didn’t I just shoot him? But I thought the scrawny little dude was asleep. He was fast, Galen. Holy mother, my arm feels like it’s burning off.”

  The ER nurse called out in a chipper voice as she hurried by his cubicle, “Another minute, tops. Suck it up, Agent.”

  Sure enough, only a few more seconds passed before he felt the monster fangs pulling out of his arm.

  Galen said, “I should cut off the morphine, you being such a Señor Nacho hot dog. Either or both of those lunatic kids could have killed you, Cawley. What didn’t you understand about ‘armed and dangerous’? And don’t forget crazy.”

  Cawley said, “Don’t you mean Señor Macho hot dog?”

  Galen stared him down.

  “Okay, yeah, so you’re right, pull the morphine. I should suffer. Too late. Ah, I’m basking right now in the total absence of pain.”

  Galen said, “I doubt it’ll blunt the pain you’re going to feel when our brothers from Washington show up. Ah, speaking of brothers, here he is right now. And we’ve got one sister.”

  Galen stood up as Savich and Sherlock came into the room. “You might have lucked out, Cawley,” he said over his shoulder. “Look who it is.”

  Cawley brightened when he saw Sherlock. He didn’t know the woman, had never seen her before, but she was something. His brain swam happily in the morphine, and he hummed looking at her.

  Savich said, “No, he hasn’t lucked out. Hello, Galen.” He turned to Cawley. “Are you the brain-dead yahoo who let them get away?”

  Cawley moaned.

  G
alen said, “Yep, in all his wounded glory.”

  Sherlock only nodded to Galen Markey, walked up to Cawley, and got right in his face. “You jackass! I’m the one you should be afraid of, the one who’s going to kick your butt into your backbone when you’re back on your feet, not Dillon. Do you hear me? I am royally pissed. You could be stretched out on the autopsy table, like that”—she snapped her fingers—“with all of us standing over you, shaking our heads. How could you let this happen? Uncontrolled testosterone? Because you didn’t wait for backup, those two young psychopaths are in the wind again and you’ve got a bum arm.” And she jabbed him hard in his good arm.

  Her punch didn’t hurt him because morphine was still the main ingredient in his bloodstream. He looked up at her, gave her a dopey grin. “I don’t know who you are, but I love your hair and all those soft, wild curls around your face. Would you go to dinner with me when I’m able to cut my meat again?”

  “Go out with a birdbrain like you?” She nodded toward Savich. “Don’t you know who he is?”

  “Well, yeah, that’s Agent Dillon Savich. I aced one of his computer refresher courses at Quantico last year. He likes me, he thinks I’m smart.”

  Savich said, “I have revised my opinion of you, Agent James. I’m beginning to see you in a new light, one that doesn’t have that many watts.”

  Sherlock said, “No, I won’t go out to dinner with you. I happen to be married to that guy, who, at this moment, would probably enjoy throwing you out the window. What floor are we on?”

  Cawley said, “The ground floor.”

  Sherlock knuckle-tapped him on the head. “Your lucky day, bozo. You will now begin at the beginning and tell us everything. Please, feel free not to spare yourself. Trust me, self-mortification is the way to go here.”

  Cawley cleared his throat, one eye on Savich. It was difficult for him to reconcile that he was in deep trouble, since he felt so very nice. He cleared his throat again. “The sun was just coming up. Tommy was checking the other side of the house, Ben was inside making coffee, and I was making rounds through the woods and all around the cul-de-sac.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I practically walked over the two of them leaning against a big oak tree, snoozing away. They looked so innocent, so young—well, until she opened her eyes and my nerve endings started screaming. She brought up a gun real fast, a big old whopper Bren Ten, probably a ten-millimeter auto. I kicked the gun out of her hand.”

  Sherlock said to him, “Good thing you did. If she’d shot you in the arm with that sucker, you’d probably have bled to death, or at least lost your arm and have to learn to tie your shoes with your teeth. Lucky for you Victor shot you with a twenty-two.”

  Galen said, “I wonder where Lissy Smiley got hold of a Bren Ten?”

  Sherlock said, “Maybe a granddad in World War Two? You may continue now, Cawley.”

  Cawley shuddered. “The other one, the young blond guy—Victor Nesser—he didn’t move, like he was asleep. I wasn’t about to shoot him in mid-snore but then the little creep came up with that gun so fast I—”

  “Mortification of the self, Agent James,” Sherlock repeated. “It’s best in this situation, trust me.”

  When he finished, Savich had to admit he hadn’t spared himself—very difficult, since all of them knew he felt very fine, what with the morphine on board. When he finished, Savich said, “Okay, they dumped the Corolla and stole an ancient black Trailblazer. I’m betting they dumped it once they got maybe fifty miles from Fort Pessel.”

  Galen said, “I’ve got state and local law enforcement out looking for them. They didn’t get much of a head start, but if Savich is right and the Trailblazer’s hidden somewhere and they’re driving something else now, it won’t be easy to spot them until we get a stolen-car call.”

  Savich asked, “What were they wearing, Agent James?”

  “The girl was wearing a loose white man’s shirt, skinny-legged blue jeans, and black sneakers. The boy, he was in a pale blue T-shirt with a John Deere tractor on the front, baggy blue jeans, and white sneakers. He had a nondescript ball cap pulled low, no writing on it.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “He looked real young, and he was very fair-haired, light-complexioned, not even any a.m. whiskers on his face. Both of them were slim. Lithe is a better word for her, scrawny for him. He looked pretty tall, but she looked like a child.” He paused. “Until she opened her eyes and looked at me. There’s something really wrong going on behind her eyes.”

  Sherlock said, “Did you get any impression she was hurting?”

  Cawley shook his head. “I saw Nesser jerk her up and pull her after him into the woods. Then I was putting pressure on my arm and trying to get to my SIG, hoping I wasn’t going to die. Ben and Tommy came up and we took off after them.”

  A few minutes later, just as Cawley James was about to fall into a morphine stupor, Savich gave him his cell phone number. “Call if you think of anything else.” He paused in the doorway, turned. “You didn’t deserve to be shot, Cawley; you did okay in that impossible situation.” He shook Galen Markey’s hand. “If you really want to punish him, call his mother.”

  Cawley moaned.

  Sherlock laughed.

  Galen Markey caught up with them just as they were leaving the hospital. “Hold up a second. We’ve got a report of two sheriff’s deputies shot last night near Pamplin, about sixty miles up the road from Fort Pessel. One of them is dead. The other deputy was sending in the license number while her partner made contact. When he was shot, she went to help and was shot herself, in the chest. They’ve taken her to surgery twice; don’t know if she’ll make it.”

  24

  FORT PESSEL, VIRGINIA

  Monday morning

  Savich got a call from Galen as he stepped into Carly Schuster’s house, telling him a hiker had found the Trailblazer in the woods just over the North Carolina border, and a dark blue 2001 Chevy Malibu was reported stolen from a small tobacco farm a half-mile away.

  He pocketed his cell, turned, and smiled at her as Sherlock said, “We appreciate your taking the time to speak with us, Mrs. Schuster. The principal told us you have no official affiliation with the high school, but you’ve tutored a number of students in computer science through the years, one of them Victor Nesser. Could you please tell us about him?”

  She waved them both to the sofa as she said, “Goodness, yes, I taught Victor everything I knew. He was self-taught to that point and really quite talented. I’ll tell you, he was beyond me in a few months. He’s a natural, the first one I’ve seen. He didn’t do that well in his school courses, a teacher friend of mine told me, and he never took any computer classes. He didn’t tell me why. But he was hungry for learning it, you know?”

  Savich smiled. “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  “Ah, do I have a kindred spirit in my living room?”

  Savich only smiled. “Can you tell us what you remember about the Smileys?”

  Her lips unseamed and her very white buck teeth appeared again. Carly Schuster nodded. “Ah, yes, the Smileys. I didn’t know Jennifer Smiley very well, saw her in town from time to time, nodded to her, you know, said hi and how are you, but nothing more than that. I’ll tell you though, the word is Mrs. Smiley’s a piece of work. She managed the Lone Star Bar out on Route Thirty-three, just south of town. Lots of stories about how the place got drunk and rowdy on the weekends, and she with it. She lived off and on with the owner, a biker with tattoos. I wondered how she could let Lissy live in the same house with that man. Then he was killed driving that motorcycle of his, ran headlong into a bridge abutment.

  “Everyone thought Jennifer Smiley would inherit the place, but he left it in his will to a cousin from up north somewhere. She was very angry about it, I heard. Then one day, maybe three months ago, she and Lissy were simply gone. Yes, it was right after school was over, I remember, though I don’t see how it mattered, since Lissy hardly went. Then poof—they were gone, their h
ouse locked up. Their neighbor, Ms. Ellie, thought they’d gone on a long vacation. It had been just the two of them, you know, since Victor left right after he graduated high school three years ago.”

  Suddenly her lips seamed shut over her buck teeth and she was shaking her head. “Oh, goodness, since you’re FBI agents, that must mean Victor has done something illegal. And the Smileys? Will you tell me?”

  Savich said, “We’re looking for both Lissy Smiley and Victor Nesser. They’re wanted in connection to a series of bank robberies.”

  Sherlock said, “Did you hear about the bank robberies in Kentucky and Virginia by a group called the Gang of Four? Most of them were killed up in Washington, D.C.”

  Carly Schuster shook her head. “Sorry, I refuse to watch the news, it’s too depressing.”

  Savich wanted to see those buck teeth again; they made her smile quite charming.

  Carly said slowly, “So you’re saying Jennifer Smiley was also involved in this Gang of Four?”

  Sherlock nodded. “From what we know now, she was the leader.”

  “Oh, dear. And Lissy? And Victor?”

  Savich said, “Yes. Two other men as well. Jennifer Smiley was shot dead in the middle of a bank robbery in Washington. Lissy and Victor escaped. We’re trying to locate them.”

  “But this is a small town, nothing bad ever happens here; well, not like this. I haven’t heard anybody say anything. My husband won’t believe it. He liked Victor, said he was okay for a scruffy geek. I liked him too.”

  She pursed her lips, did some thinking, and said, “I just can’t get over Victor. Lissy, now she’s a different story. I hate to say this about a sixteen-year-old girl, but I’m not at all surprised she’s involved. Lissy is…Well, I’m not sure quite how to say this…but she’s off, but it’s more than that. She’s strange in the head, and the way she sometimes looks at people, it’s frightening. The thing I finally realized was that she’s a chameleon, no other way to say it. She can charm you if she wants or look like she’s bored to tears.”