by Jude Hardin
“I hope you’re right. Okay, one more question. What if your guy isn’t successful tonight?”
“Oh, he will be,” Colonel Davidson said. “You can count on that.”
“And if by some unforeseeable quirk of fate he’s not?”
“How long have you known me, Victor? I’m a military man. I have a backup for everything I do. If by some unforeseeable quirk of fate my first guy isn’t successful, my second guy will be.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Diana grabbed her gun and crouched beside the bed. She wore nothing but the black satin teddy and the black lace panties that had been under her nightgown. The fuzzy pink socks were on the floor. They had little rubber traction pads on the bottom of them, which she thought might come in handy, so she took a few seconds to slip them on. Not that her feet, or any part of her, was cold at the moment. A chill had washed through her at the sound of shattering glass, but it was followed by a hot bolus of adrenaline that now fueled her forward.
She crept into the hallway, sweeping the space side to side with her pistol. The house was still dark. Her eyes had adjusted somewhat, but probably not enough to immediately distinguish between Colt and the intruder. She didn’t want to shoot the wrong person, but she knew that even a split second of hesitation could cost her dearly.
She stopped, listened, thought she heard a slight rustling sound, thought it came from outside this time and not from the garage. She inched along with her back against the wall, both hands gripping the Ruger. Slowly, steadily, she made her way to the end of the hallway. She noticed now that one of those atrocious ultramodern lamps in the living room was missing, the one that had been on the end table furthest from the kitchen. It hadn’t registered before, maybe because the house was so new to her.
The door to the garage was on her left. It was closed. She cupped her ear against the adjacent wall, heard nothing.
Not good. If Nicholas Colt had been able, he would have gone for his gun, and he would have shot the attacker. If he was still conscious, he would have turned the lights back on by now. He would have come back into the house, and he and Diana would now be discussing what to do about the dead man on their garage floor.
But shots were never fired, and now there was only silence. Which meant this was a trap. Someone was trying to lure Diana into the garage. Maybe Nicholas was dead already. Maybe he’d been stabbed to death with a knife or choked to death with a garrote. Why, Diana didn’t know. She didn’t have a clue why anyone in Sycamore Bluff would want to kill Karen and John Millington, but it was obvious that someone did.
She remembered something she’d refreshed herself on recently while preparing for the battery of tests she’d been forced to take.
In the field, no two situations are ever alike. You must construct the problem in your mind, and then solve it with a mixture of logic and intuition that only comes with experience. Every problem has a solution, but it must be noted that time is of the essence. The difference between the operative who lives and the operative who dies is often only a matter of seconds.
Diana constructed the problem in her mind. Her partner was incapacitated, either dead or unconscious, and the culprit who had rendered him that way was now lying in wait to do the same to her. She made no assumptions, but it was probably a single perpetrator. No shots had been fired. The perp probably hadn’t come with a gun, but of course he had Colt’s now. He’d cut the power to the house, so he probably had a way to see in the dark. Night vision goggles or binoculars.
Charging through the inside entrance to the garage would be a mistake. She probably wouldn’t get one foot through the door before the bad guy gunned her down. She needed to get inside the garage, but she needed to be sneaky about it. And sometimes the best way to be sneaky was to make a lot of noise.
She sidestepped to the kitchen, keeping her gun aimed at the door to the garage just in case it abruptly swung open. Colt’s keys were on the kitchen table. Diana wrapped her left hand around them, grasping them tightly so they wouldn’t make any noise. She padded to the front door and clicked open the deadbolt as quietly as possible. She turned the knob, eased the door away from the jamb, and slid through the opening. She closed the door as quietly as she had opened it.
It was about ten degrees outside, and Diana was practically naked. The fuzzy pink socks protected her feet, but the dramatic change in temperature made the rest of her body feel like a flash-frozen haddock fillet. It would take no more than fifteen minutes for hypothermia to set in, she thought, but she wasn’t especially worried about it. She would either be back inside the house or dead long before she had a chance to freeze to death.
She crept to the car, unlocked it manually and climbed inside. She closed the door enough to switch off the dome light and block some of the arctic breeze, but she didn’t shut it all the way. She didn’t want to alert the perp to her presence. Not yet.
Although she and Nicholas hadn’t had the occasion to use it yet, Diana knew there had to be a remote control garage door opener somewhere in the car. She checked the driver’s side visor and the passenger’s side visor and the glove compartment and the center console. No luck. She felt under the seats and all along the front floorboard, thinking it might have fallen at some point, but she didn’t find anything except a petrified French fry from the car’s previous owner.
No garage door opener. Maybe it was in the house somewhere, but she certainly didn’t have time to go back inside and look for it. Now she would have to resort to Plan B, which involved starting the car and flooring the gas pedal and crashing through the bay door and firing at the intruder through the windshield, hoping she didn’t run over Nicholas Colt in the process or kill him with a stray bullet. It was a low-budget action film kind of plan, what some of her colleagues from The Circle jokingly referred to as the I’ll be back method of combating a crime in progress. It always seemed to work like a charm in the movies. In real life, not so much. Diana figured her odds of securing the scene without getting herself killed or her partner killed—or without getting both of them killed—were fifty-fifty at best. But she was out of options, and out of time. Plan B was the only way to get inside the garage without waltzing through the inside door, which she’d already decided would be tantamount to suicide.
She was about to slide the key into the ignition and start the car when she noticed two small overhead compartments bisecting the headliner between the windshield and the dome light. She opened the one furthest aft. From the contours revealed on the other side of the hinged cover, she deduced that this compartment was meant for stowing sunglasses. It was empty.
She opened the one closest to the windshield, and there it was. Now she felt stupid for not familiarizing herself with the car when they first got it. She grabbed the remote and slinked out of the car and crept over to the corner of the house. She stood with her back against the home’s clapboard siding, about six inches from the vertical two-by-ten that framed the right side of the single-car bay door. She was freezing. Her joints were stiff, and she had to make a conscious effort to keep her teeth from chattering. This was it, she thought. Win or lose, it would all be over in a few seconds.
She held the remote toward the doorway and pushed the button.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Colt opened his eyes and saw blackness and heard nothingness and wondered for a moment if he had died. The concrete floor was like a block of ice, and the left side of his head felt as though someone had hit a homerun with it. Maybe that was a good sign. You can’t feel pain when you’re dead, he thought. Or maybe you can. Only the dead knew for sure.
He tried to say something, but could not. He couldn’t speak, and he couldn’t move his arms or legs. He was helpless. He was trapped in a dark void, and all he could do was breathe.
He lay there in the vacuous silence, and after a few seconds he realized someone else was breathing too. Then he remembered. The power in the house had gone out. He’d gotten the flashlight from his backpack, and he was checking the b
reaker box in the garage when someone clobbered him with the base of a lamp. One of those lamps from the living room with a stainless steel base and stem, and a frosted glass globe that looked like a flying saucer. He had turned in time to see it coming, but not in time to evade it and go for his pistol.
Now he could hear the attacker breathing on the other side of the room. By the bay door, Colt thought. Waiting for Diana to come out, waiting to ambush her and shoot her with Colt’s pistol. He’d used the sound of glass shattering as a lure. But why? Why would anyone here in Sycamore Bluff want to kill John and Karen Millington? And if the attacker wanted them both dead, why was Colt still alive? He had no answers, and little hope that he would ever get any.
This must be what it was like to be Juliet, he thought. Unable to see, unable to speak, unable to move. Only her condition was permanent, and his, he hoped, was not. He hoped that either Diana would rescue him somehow and that he would recover, or that he would die here on the garage floor. He didn’t want to live if it meant living like this.
But his current condition was much different from Juliet’s anyway. He could feel the frigid pavement beneath him, and he could hear the assailant breathing. He was aware of his surroundings, while the doctors couldn’t say if Juliet was or not. They just didn’t know. And some feeling had started coming back into Colt’s hands. He could wiggle his fingers now. The floor around him was covered with shards of glass, and he winced as he felt one pierce the middle finger of his left hand.
And that’s when it came to him. It was the only way, he thought. It was what she would have wanted.
As Colt made his decision about how to handle Juliet’s situation after the baby was born, a car door slammed and an engine roared to life and a million wooden splinters and metal lock parts exploded inward as a pair of headlights came crashing through the garage bay door.
Colt could see Diana’s silhouette as she slung the driver’s side door open and emerged from the vehicle with her pistol at the ready. She crouched behind the door, using it as a shield, and shouted, “Freeze!”
“Wow,” Colt said. “Just like in the movies.”
“Nicholas? Is that you?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you all right?”
“I think so. Be careful. There’s glass everywhere.”
With both hands on the grips, Diana made a continuous sweeping motion with the Ruger. She was ready to blast anything that moved, but nothing did.
“Is someone else in the garage?” she said.
“Yeah, but I think his singing days are over. He’s a little flat.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s had way too much to drink. He’s really smashed.”
“Cut the wisecracks, Colt. Are you trying to tell me he’s dead, that I crushed him under the weight of the car and the garage door?”
“Yeah.”
Diana tossed the gun into the backseat of the Kia and closed the door. The engine had stopped, but the headlights were still on. She tiptoed through the minefield of glass and splinters, made her way over to the breaker box and switched the power back on.
“Can you stand?” she said.
“Give me a hand.”
She stretched her arm out and they locked wrists, and with some grunting effort Colt managed to get to his feet. When she let go, he staggered back a step and leaned against the wall.
“Do you need a doctor?” Diana said.
“I’ll be all right.”
Colt’s head hurt, and he was a little dizzy. He’d suffered mild concussions before, and that’s what this felt like. He probably should have gone to The Hospital for some x-rays, but he knew he probably wouldn’t.
He looked toward the opening where the bay door had been and saw several people standing on the driveway. Neighbors. They’d bundled up and ventured outside to see what all the commotion was about. One of them, a man wearing plaid pajama pants, house slippers, and a black leather jacket, stepped forward. The others huddled close behind him.
“What happened?” the man said.
“Silly me,” Diana said. “I put the car in drive when I meant to put it in reverse. Now look what I’ve done. What a mess.”
She pretended to start crying.
“Is everyone all right?” the man said.
“Yes. We’re okay. Thank you for your concern. I just can’t believe—”
“Hey, everyone makes mistakes. My name’s Bill Lott, by the way. I live right across the street here. Did they give you a list of phone numbers when you moved in?”
“Yes,” Diana said.
“You’ll find a number for The Handyman on there. Give him a call tomorrow, and he’ll come over and fix your garage door good as new.”
“Thank you,” Diana said. “I’ll do that.”
“You sure y’all are okay? Your husband looks a little banged up over there.”
“I’m all right,” Colt said. “Really. Thanks for your concern.”
“Not a problem,” Bill Lott said. “Come on, everybody. Let’s go home.”
The crowd dispersed, and everyone headed back to their residences. Colt noticed a couple of the women whispering to each other on the walk across the street. Gossiping, he figured.
“They’re probably talking about what a bonehead the new lady is,” he said.
“Shut up. I had a better plan, but the stupid garage door opener wouldn’t work. The battery must be dead.”
“Kind of like the human being under that door there. You think The Handyman’s going to know what to do with that?”
“You just never know when to turn it off, do you? I’m going to back the car out to the driveway. If you’re able, I want you to go find something to cover the doorway with. Take the curtains down in the living room if you have to.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Colt walked back into the house. A wave of nausea sent him to the bathroom, and he stood over the toilet and dry-heaved for a few seconds. He took a deep breath, turned the light on and looked in the mirror. There was a knot and a bruise on the left side of his forehead and a small laceration with blood crusted over it. He splashed some water on his face, grabbed a hand towel from the linen closet and dabbed himself dry.
“Did you find anything?” Diana said.
Colt jumped. She startled him. She’d somehow come into the house and put on a hoodie and a pair of sweat pants without Colt hearing her.
“I haven’t looked yet,” he said. “I guess I’m not quite as stable as I thought I was.”
Diana peered into the linen closet. “These’ll do,” she said. She grabbed a couple of navy blue bed sheets from a stack on one of the shelves. “Have you seen any duct tape?”
“Yeah. In a drawer in the kitchen.”
Diana headed that way, and Colt followed.
“Here,” Colt said.
He opened one of the drawers by the stove, grabbed the roll of silver tape and handed it to her. There was a box of trashcan liners in the same drawer, and Diana instructed him to bring those as well. She went to the living room, spread the sheets out on the floor and started taping them together.
“Hold that end straight,” she said.
Colt knelt down across from her and held the hems of the sheets together. He still felt a little woozy, and a thin and squiggly thread of psychedelic light kept worming its way across his field of vision. He closed his eyes for a couple of seconds and tried to will it away.
“What’s the plan?” he said.
“I’m going to cover the gaping hole where the garage door used to be, so the neighbors won’t see us extracting the dead body.”
“I figured that much. Then what?”
“There’s a shed out back. We’ll use it for a makeshift morgue until I can contact The Director for further instructions. This just wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Yeah,” Colt said. “Any idea why that guy was trying to kill us?”
“No, but he was kind of clever about it.”
“H
ow so? If he’d been smart, it seems like he would have shot me right away.”
“There might have been a couple of reasons why that didn’t happen. He didn’t want to make a lot of noise, because of the neighbors, but I think there was more to it than that. Somehow, he must have known we were both armed. If I’d heard a gunshot, followed by you not coming back into the house, I would have assumed that he’d killed you, and I would have approached the problem in a different way. He didn’t want me to think you were dead, because he wanted me to come to the rescue. He was expecting me to come through the inside door to the garage, the same way you’d come. Then he was going to shoot both of us with your gun. He wanted it to look like a domestic dispute that had ended tragically. He wanted it to look like a murder-suicide.”
“How could he have known we had guns?” Colt said. “Nobody was privy to that information, except—”
“Exactly. Other than you and me, only two people knew. The Director, and the commanding officer at Grissom Air Force Base. The acting CO, that is. Lieutenant Colonel David A. Davidson. For some reason, Davidson wanted us dead. Which makes that whole situation with Needleman make more sense as well. The two of them must have been in cahoots.”
“This is getting a little strange,” Colt said. “Can we go home now?”
“Believe it or not, that’s exactly what might happen. If there’s some sort of conspiracy that involves senior military officers, then this is way bigger than anyone imagined. And it won’t be a case for The Circle anymore. The President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be forced to declare martial law. They’ll pull us out and send in a National Guard battalion while the FBI conducts an investigation.”