KnockOut

by Catherine Coulter

  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.

  Galen 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 firs
t 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 house 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.”

  “How do you know all this about her, Ms. Schuster?” Sherlock asked.

  “She dated my son for four months,” Carly said simply. “I saw her up close and personal. Of course Jason talked about her. I know she was having sex with him, and I’ll tell you, that scared me.”

  Savich and Sherlock waited.

  Carly drew in a deep breath. “He broke up with her last spring. Though he wouldn’t admit it, I think he was a little frightened of her. After the breakup, she threatened to kill him. That might sound like a melodramatic teenager, but I was afraid for him. She accused him of sleeping with another girl, though he hadn’t. A few days later, the girl, Lindy, was struck by a car while she was riding her bicycle, broke her leg. We never found out who hit her. Lissy didn’t ever hurt Jason, but someone slashed the tires on his old Honda.”

  “Is Jason around, Carly?” Sherlock asked.

  “No, I’m sorry. He’s in Spain with his father, my ex. He won’t be back until September. You know, I think Jason breathed a big sigh of relief when Lissy and her mother left town.”

  25

  THEY’D JUST CLIMBED INTO the Porsche when Céline Dion’s beautiful voice sang out the theme from Titanic on Savich’s cell phone.

  “Savich.” He listened, then said, “I’m betting on a twenty-two and a Bren Ten, ten-millimeter auto ammo. Yeah, verify when you know.” He slipped his cell back into the pocket of his leather jacket. He met Sherlock’s eyes.

  “You wanna know something fantastic? The deputy is alive, out of surgery, and we can head up to Overlook Hospital in Pamplin, try to speak to her. The hospital is filled with her family and cops. The sheriff said we’re to go directly to the ICU on the third floor. He’ll meet us there.”

  “It had to be Victor and Lissy, on their way down here. I wonder why she’s alive?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure hoping she can tell us.”

  Sherlock said, “The license number was off an old Impala, right?”

  He nodded again.

  Sherlock closed her eyes, remembering clearly getting shot herself, wondering if she would die. “What’s the deputy’s name?”

  “Gail Lynd. She’s been in law enforcement for six years. She’s married, two small kids. As for the deputy they killed, he also had a family.”

  “We’ve got to get them fast, Dillon, before they kill anyone else.”

  “My gut keeps telling me Victor will head for home, for Winnett, North Carolina, though I know that doesn’t make sense. We were right about Fort Pessel, but they’re not stupid. Everyone and his mother are looking for them. But they’ve got to go under for a while before they try for me. Maybe Victor knows a place to hide in or near Winnett. I want to get home, though, after we speak to Gail at the hospital.”

  When Savich pulled into the parking lot in front of the hospital, Galen called again, told him about the break-in at Kougar’s Pharmacy in Fort Pessel, and the couple dozen stolen Vicodin. “Maybe that’s why she fell asleep.”

  Sherlock and Savich walked the long third-floor corridor. The walls were a light green, meant to be restful, she supposed, but it didn’t work for her. She felt itchy, jumpy. They passed some uniformed officers and what must have been family in the waiting room but didn’t slow or look in.

  The sheriff wasn’t waiting for them.

  Nurse Dolores Stark eyed them and their creds over her bifocals. “The sheriff had to leave on an emergency.”

  Sherlock said, “Talk to us about Deputy Lynd.”

  Dolores, an ICU nurse for twenty-three years, tough as her mother-in-law, said with a big smile, “She got through surgery, both of them. Dr. Lazarus worked on her for four hours, and then had to go back in for bleeding. They lost her twice but got her back. She’s going to make it, barring anything else coming down the road we’re not expecting. I’m not sure she can speak right now, they just extubated her a couple of hours ago. Ah, Dr. Lazarus, these are Special Agents Savich and Sherlock, here to see Deputy Lynd.”

  Dr. Lazarus didn’t look happy. But neither did he look like he’d spent the night inside someone’s chest. He wasn’t rumpled, didn’t have any bags beneath his eyes, like he wanted to fall over and sleep for a year. Instead, he looked like he’d just waltzed in from the golf course but had shot too many bogies. “You can’t,” he said. “She’s not up for it yet. Maybe tomorrow. Call me.”

  Sherlock gave him a lovely smile, walked up into his face. “Would you like to accompany us, Dr. Lazarus? We’re hopeful she’s with it enough to give us information about who shot he
r. What room, Nurse Stark?”

  “Room Three forty-three,” said Dolores.

  Savich and Sherlock walked quickly down the hall, Dr. Lazarus on their heels. “Wait! You can’t do this. I can’t allow—”

  Savich waved Sherlock on and turned to say easily, “You can monitor, Dr. Lazarus, all right?”

  When they walked in, it was to see Sherlock bent over Gail Lynd, her fingertips lightly stroking her forearm. “Gail, can you hear me?”

  No response.

  “You see, she’s not—”

  “Gail? Can you hear me? I’m Special Agent Sherlock, FBI, and I really want to find the yahoo who shot you and throw him in the Mariana Trench. That deep enough for you?”

  Gail Lynd moaned.

  “That’s it,” Sherlock said, and continued to lightly rub her fingertips over Gail’s forearm. “You don’t have to open your eyes, but I would like to see you, if you can manage it, and you to see me.”

  Deputy Gail Lynd managed to open her eyes. She looked up into blue eyes the color of the August sky. “The Mariana Trench should be fine,” she whispered.

  “It’s good to meet you, Deputy Lynd. We both have blue eyes. Call me Sherlock. Do you think you can tell me what happened last night?”

  “Last night? It was just a moment ago, no, it was—” Gail felt something wonderfully cold and wet rubbing lightly against her mouth, and she licked it. Sherlock turned to Dr. Lazarus, who looked like he wanted to leap on her to protect his patient. That made her smile a bit. “Water?” she asked him. “A little bit?”

  At his unsmiling nod, Sherlock held Deputy Lynd’s head up a bit and put a straw between her lips. “Just a little bit, we don’t want you to get sick to your stomach.”

  “Thanks,” said Gail Lynd, her voice a croak. She blinked, surprised she could actually speak.

  “Are you in pain?”

  Gail thought about that a moment, then shook her head. “No, fact is, I feel dead from the neck down.”