In response, Donnursk fired one shot without carefully aiming. The bullet struck Rose in the forehead just above the bridge of his nose. For a moment, the effect seemed benign. His head reacted as though he’d been gently pushed by an unseen hand, a barber adjusting it to clip the sides, a lover tilting the handsome face for a kiss.
And there was no blood. Not a single drop.
A moment later, the eyes in the Kilroy cartoon face atop the tombstone went blank. His cheeks scraped the stone until his knees gave way and his body twisted as he dropped with a thud to the dry grass. Above him, the tombstone read Devoted Fan of Singer Julio Iglesias.
Pushing through the pain, Glock in hand, Donnursk rose and stumbled in the opposite direction of the arriving KWPD. McCanliss, meanwhile, emerged from the back of what used to be his own truck, toting a heavy black satchel that he carried to his current ride, Chispa’s taxicab.
On the south side, the police officers rushed into the cemetery compound. They shouted at Donnursk.
“Stop…Drop your weapon…Freeze.”
Donnursk ignored them. He knew it wasn’t the best strategy, but he didn’t see a better one. Five minutes earlier, he believed his destiny was to be the next boss of FBI’s DFC. Now, he was finished. They had told Rose to eliminate him just as they had told him to eliminate McCanliss.
“Trippler,” he muttered. “She’s to blame.”
He limped past the tombstones, mindless of the dead Thomas Rose, the approaching KWPD, the surging foot pain.
“Drop the weapon!”
He could have done the job, but they hadn’t trusted him. After McCanliss screwed up in Bethel, the tenth floor panicked.
“Last warning…Stop where you are…Put your gun on the ground!”
It was the big risk of DFC membership. They made it understood from the beginning. Being on the only team in the U.S. with supreme authority to conduct domestic, pre-emptive kills meant a risk of being killed by order of the DFC if necessary. An occupational hazard, like black lung disease for a coal miner. That’s why they all enjoyed a pay scale higher than ordinary agents. But no one ever thinks it’ll happen to them. No one ever thinks it’ll—really—be necessary.
He looked over his shoulder at the four crouching uniformed cops spread out behind him, guns drawn as they maneuvered from gravestone to gravestone for cover.
That’s when they fired. All of them.
Most of the bullets struck him between neck and groin. Of those that did not hit the intended target, one struck a double-wide mausoleum, three struck the exteriors of conch houses on the north side of the cemetery, and one banged the rear door of a dilapidated old taxicab with an engine that sounded like a washing machine set to the spin cycle.
Where Donnursk fell, the gravestone read I Told You I Was Sick.
Chapter Ninety
“He’s still alive.”
“Who?” Eva asked her father.
“Harry, the one who’s trying to kill me. From Bethel. The one I told you about on the flight from Virginia Beach.”
Standing in the kitchen, Teagarden thumbed through the photos his daughter had snapped with her cellphone moments after the shootout. The war against her father had arrived at Eva’s front door, which triggered her fight or flight reflex. And she wasn’t about to flee. Fleeing was not what the U.S. Navy did. Her instinct was to fight back. Having been in the Navy since she was eighteen and a Navy pilot since twenty-two, she instinctively prepared a response.
“All right, here’s what we’re going to do…” she said after the shootout.
At the conclusion of her instructions, her father remained in the house with Chopper and the nanny in the baby’s bedroom, while she and Pangolin bicycled through the cemetery. Before departing, she connected a Bluetooth remote lens to her baseball cap next to the insignia of the U.S. Navy, and set her cellphone to snap a photo every three seconds. Rubbernecking as she pedaled, the camera received hundreds of covertly snapped photos before the KWPD set out barriers and shooed away the quickly gathered crowd of gawkers.
When they returned to the house, Teagarden flipped through the images on her phone. Several of them would have been the envy of any photojournalist in a war zone.
“I’m pretty sure I saw that man when I was hiding in the boathouse in Sparta” he said, looking at the shot of a bullet-riddled Durgan Donnursk. He was on his back, his head propped against the tombstone, eyes open, staring straight ahead. Except for the holes leaking rivulets of red, it was the casual reclining pose of a man watching football on TV.
Teagarden scrolled forward to the shot of Rose and pinched the screen to get a close-up. “I’ve never seen him before.”
“How many hit men are assigned to this thing?” Pangolin wondered aloud.
“Two fewer than this morning,” Eva pointed out. “My question is, why are they now killing each other?”
“The law of diminishing returns,” Teagarden answered. “Basic mathematics. There’re too many of them and they’re getting in each other’s way. Plus, they’re panicking. Whoever’s running the operation is scared past the point of reason. That’s probably to my advantage, but my key problem remains. McCanliss is not one of those two dead men. He’s still out there. That means the answer to Pangolin’s question is—at least three hit men are targeting me, two of whom are now dead. Please believe me that this McCanliss guy is not someone any of us wants to challenge.” He handed the cellphone back to his daughter. “And that’s a photo of the truck McCanliss was driving in Bethel. I guess he abandoned it. Silly, isn’t it?”
“What’s silly about it?” Eva asked.
“Black ops hitmen driving around in trucks called Harry’s Heating and A/C Repair or Durgan’s Lawn & Garden. It’s absurd.”
“Not really, Dad. In the military, that’s what we call a pretty good cover.”
Teagarden shrugged.
“I guess they can’t exactly wear T-shirts reading Covert Killer, though that’s what they are, or were. It’s definitely what McCanliss still is.”
“I got a good look at the inside of that truck while Pang and I were peddling around the cemetery,” Eva continued. “It’s loaded with high-tech equipment.” She scrolled back to photos of the truck’s interior. “You see that console? That looks like radar-tracking equipment straight from a carrier-based Hawkeye AWAC. The panel on the opposite side looks like a laser-guided bomb station. And, hey, look at that. That’s a pair of night-vision goggles hanging overhead. These guys lack for nothing.”
“Great,” Teagarden moaned. “My federal tax dollars put to good use trying to kill me. That’s just great.”
“And there’s that couple by the south gate wearing Minnesota Vikings T-shirts,” she said, continuing to scroll through the shots. “They came close to being arrested.”
“What’d they do?” her father asked.
“Nothing, which was exactly the problem. When police officers tell you to move along, it’s best if you move along. And look at that, the driver in that old taxi was doing the same as us. He just circled the cemetery, eyeballing everything. He’s in the background of a bunch of these shots. Maybe he was taking photos too.”
Pangolin’s ears perked up. He saw the taxicab while they were biking and wanted to pedal closer but he couldn’t manage it without challenging the KWPD’s comfort zone. After their audacious tour of the cemetery grounds, one cop shouted, “Get out or get arrested.”
They got out.
“Let me see that,” Pangolin said. He scrolled through the shots. “Sam,” Pangolin said thoughtfully, “describe this man McCanliss.”
Teagarden took a breath, recalling what he knew about the man he’d seen in Bethel, near Union Square Park, on security video from the lobby of the Madison Park Euro Lodge, near The Argonaut Hotel in Times Square, and most recently from the boathouse window on the lake in Sparta.
“White male, about six-foot-three, two-hundred pounds or so, about sixty-years-old, has long powerful arms and
a receding hairline. His most distinctive feature is a thick scar on his upper lip to correct what must have been one hell of a cleft palate.”
“That’s the guy I’ve seen knocking around here in old town,” his daughter said. Hearing that was too much for her father.
“Eva, that’s it. That monster is still out there. He’s alive, and he’s still plotting to get me and he doesn’t care who else gets killed along the way. For all we know, he killed those two in the cemetery so they wouldn’t get me before—he—gets me. I’ve come to understand how crazy he is, and—that—is exactly how crazy he is. It’s personal with him now. He wants to be the one who gets me, which makes me an ugly risk to you and Marnie. I told you I shouldn’t have come here.”
“Okay, okay. Easy, Dad.”
She knew the conversation was adding to her father’s strain. The challenges he’d faced during the past week were beyond most civilians’ coping skills and she didn’t want him to have another breakdown.
Pangolin, meantime, knew something else. He verged on telling them that he, too, knew McCanliss from the previous day’s tourist flight onboard his DC-3. But while Eva was trying to assuage her father’s fears, he changed his mind. He decided to keep it to himself, because he had a job to do. Alone. And if he told Eva about it, she wouldn’t let him go.
“Try to keep it together, Dad.”
She put a hand on her father’s arm. The bout of crying on the DC-3 while coming back from Virginia Beach was only the second time she’d seen her father shed tears. The first was at her mother’s memorial service the previous November, when he was in a wheelchair, still wearing casts on both legs.
“Listen, Dad, I know this sounds crazy at this point, but we’re family. We’re in this together. You, me, Marnie—” she looked at Pangolin, wondering if she should name him as well, but decided against it, “—and we’re going to get through this as family.”
“Eva—”
“It’s no good, Dad. You’ve handled it until now, but you’re tired. You need rest. You need sleep. And that’s what you’re going to get. Meantime, I’m on the job now. Got it? No more solo for you. I’m here. Cynthia Blair is in Washington. And we’re going to make this thing stop.”
“But Marnie—”
“Marnie is fine, and she’s going to stay fine. I’ll see to it. She will not leave my sight until this mess is over.”
That did it. From the back room, the toddler heard the voices all along, but when she heard her name, there was no more resisting. She escaped her nanny’s supervision during a game of hide-and-seek. While Pilar was hiding, Chopper strategically ceased playing. She opened the door and ran to the kitchen, rotor blades flying.
“Da-Da Tea-Tea, Da-Da Tea-Tea.”
He picked her up after she threw her arms around his legs. Watching her father and daughter, Eva was ready with her plan.
“All right, Dad, here’s what we’re going to do…”
Chapter Ninety-One
The Tomcat, Wisteria Island, FL
It was an odd dream, disquieting yet peaceful.
He was hiding in the woods the way Billy Carney did the day he spied on the house in Bethel. His wife Kendra was standing on the small front porch of their house. She was smiling with great happiness, looking out at nothing in particular. Next to her stood Cynthia who was neither smiling nor frowning, her face totally neutral.
What did it mean? Dreams were like the mystery of numbers. They all meant something. Sometimes the meaning was obvious. Sometimes it was more mysterious than the pulsating heart of the solar system.
He awoke from the first healing sleep he’d had since Thursday in the boathouse. His body had desperately needed it. He’d been able to grab only fitful naps while on the run. When he woke, the lights of Key West some five hundred yards off the stern of Pangolin’s boat were just beginning to glow in the approaching darkness.
To the starboard lay Sunset Key, a small privately owned island brimming to the edge with condos and cottages for the affluent. He was closer to another small land mass on the port side. Called Wisteria Island, it was a mid-twentieth century landfill created by the U.S. Navy, and currently only occupied by clusters of wild shrubbery. No people were allowed, though campers frequently snuck ashore for the thrill of breaking the rules, as all Conchs tend to do from time to time.
He was surrounded by scores of other boats at anchor, some small, some large. One in particular, a huge yacht, was given wide berth. No matter their size, they all held anchor at respectful distances, creating an odd sort of suburb, a floating community of boat dwellers who gave an occasional arm wave or the hoisting of a martini glass at sunset.
Teagarden was aboard one of them, The Tomcat. He’d teased Pangolin about the boat’s name, assuming it referred to randy sexual adventures.
“Not at all,” he was told. “It was my last fighter, the F-14 Tomcat. When they replaced the pilot with Robbie the Robot, I retired from the Navy. No use being a pilot if you’re not piloting.”
They reached the sailboat by motorized dinghy which Pangolin kept tied on the west side of Key West where tourists congregate to watch the sunset. It was there that a small army of buskers hoped to earn tips entertaining sunset watchers each night with a lineup of sword swallowers, jugglers, and acrobats.
Before leaving him alone on The Tomcat, Pangolin gave Teagarden a quick tour of the galley kitchen and emergency radio, pointed out the cabinet that held the .45 semi-automatic pistol and twelve-gauge shotgun. The combination code for the gun cabinet’s padlock was 4-5-1-2, easy to remember because the numbers matched the two weapons. Finally, before departing on the dinghy, Pangolin left his own cellphone with Teagarden for emergency use.
Sitting under the protective awning of The Tomcat’s open deck, Teagarden used the binoculars to scan the crowd of tourists watching the sunset on Key West. He’d changed to fresh clothes left at his daughter’s house during previous visits, including a beach hat. And he hid in the back seat of her truck for Pangolin’s drive to the dinghy. Teagarden hoped it all added up to mean that McCanliss couldn’t possibly know where he was. Then he thought like hell. That man is the Prince of the Air. He knows everything.
He surveyed the crowd of tourists, pausing the binoculars to focus on everyone who seemed more than six feet tall. One of the jugglers twirling fire batons fit the bill.
Not McCanliss.
A guy slowly strolling the waterfront with his arm around a young woman was easily the right height, but he was African-American.
The tallest man in the crowd was a giant—ten feet tall. He was a clown walking on stilts.
Certainly not McCanliss.
He withdrew his laptop from the backpack and logged onto the internet, still using the name Dan Jones and his “yellow4submarine,” password. It had been a couple of days, so he scrolled back, reading Dan’s most recent e-mails, to see how he was doing.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Mom is right, it is all your fault.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Dear Dan,
I am sorry but I can no longer make excuses to your mom or Amy. I told them you’ve run off to liberal New York for reasons unknown to me. Your mother just looked at me and said it was all my fault, while your daughter only cried.
And no, I am not using your e-mail to embarrass you.
Are you in trouble?
That’s what they do, they get your e-mail, then they steal your life.
I pray you really are my husband and not some trickster in that ungodly big city.
Please, please come home soon.
Love,
Your wife, Sandy
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
So, it’s been more than a day has it?
Well, even at that, not a day goes by that you don’t tell m
e I am doing everything wrong.
And one more thing—are you trying to embarrass me by sending e-mail in my name to Hollywood movie makers and military bases in Florida?
Such foolishness will only keep me away longer.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Dearest Dan,
I haven’t heard from you in more than a day. Please, even if you are angry at me, please let me know that you are alive.
Love,
Your wife, Sandy
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Dogfight Girl Sequel
Will be happy to meet regarding sequel to Dogfight Girl at Navy Air Station, Boca Chica Key, Florida.
Please phone the P.R. Ofc. at N.A.S. Key West at your convenience.
Ask for Raymond Bakerfield.
Best Regards
Public Relations Office
And that’s where I came in.
So, Dan, I’m getting a better picture of you. You’re not gay, suicidal, bankrupt or running from the law. And there is no other woman. You’re just an all-American, middle-aged, married man exhausted with being relentlessly ridiculed and reprimanded by mother and wife.
“Hang in there, Dan. New York’s not so bad. But she’s right about one thing. As a pilgrim from the provinces, you do need to be careful in the big city.”
He trolled online news sites for the latest on his own situation. His daughter was right; Capitol Hill was boiling with anticipation. No link was made with the two deaths in Key West Cemetery, but following Friday’s bizarre death of an aged right wing congressman, reporters suddenly smelled blood from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other. After that impromptu broadcast from Cynthia Blair’s hospital room, global media were zealously speculating that Teagarden was completely innocent. One inside-the-Beltway reporter called him a “heroic figure” and claimed to have a Deep Throat-source code-named “Orpheus” who could prove the FBI was hiding “a big load of (—bleep—) stretching back to Prohibition.” The op/ed columnists were moving into his corner, writing under headlines like: “Let Painful Truths Be Known,” “Shine a Light” and “Out, Out Damn Spot.” Others speculated on who this secret source named Orpheus may be. The suspect list included the CIA, FBI, NSA, teenage hackers, Russian trolls, foreign spies, the VEEP and even the man elected to the nation’s highest office in 2016.
Flight of the Fox Page 27