“Ever heard of Carvedilol, Brad?”
No answer.
“Carvedilol is your way out of this mess, and it’s far more humane than you deserve. You’ll take a handful, feel a few seconds of mild to moderate chest pain, and then drift away to whatever hell awaits you after this life. You can even wash the pills down with what’s left of your drink if you’d like.”
Jack watched Chilcott’s chest rise and fall rapidly. The man was nearly panting, and Jack thought the odds were close to fifty-fifty he would suffer a heart attack on the spot.
Jack stood and moved to the big desk.
Lifted Chilcott’s hand. It was simultaneously cold and sweaty.
He uncapped the pill bottle and dropped maybe two dozen tablets into Chilcott’s palm, then closed his fingers around them. The doomed man was shaking so badly, Jack wondered whether he’d be able to get them into his mouth without spilling them all over the floor.
“Take these,” he demanded. “Now.”
Chilcott didn’t move.
“Or I shoot you in the head,” Jack said. “Your decision. But our time is up. You need to make your choice.”
Chilcott finally spoke, answering in a whisper. “Don’t let my wife and kids find me. I can’t do that to them.”
Jack was ready for the request. His response was swift and harsh. “But you had no problem traumatizing someone else’s child, did you?”
“Please…”
“Fortunately for you, I don’t have it in me to torture your family for your mistakes. I’ll be sure your body is discovered before your wife returns home with your children.”
Jack had barely gotten the words out when Chilcott lifted his fist to his mouth and dumped the pills inside. He drained the glass of now watered-down scotch and sat back in his chair, refusing to meet Jack’s eyes.
Jack retreated to the couch and waited for the end.
It wouldn’t be long.
44
Carvedilol belongs to the class of medications known as Beta-blockers. Their main purpose, ironically, is for treatment of individuals with heart disease. Used properly, Beta-blockers prevent excessive stimulation of the heart muscle by slowing the heart rate.
An overdose of a Beta-blocker such as Carvedilol would induce the obvious result: the heart rate would not just slow, it would stop. Death from a dosage of Carvedilol in the amount Jack had given Chilcott would take less than five minutes.
From the couch Jack watched impassively as Chilcott choked down all the medication in two massive swallows. The politician refused to meet Jack’s gaze, staring over Jack’s shoulder at something, or perhaps nothing.
Within ninety seconds of swallowing the medication, Chilcott’s eyes grew wider and his face paler. His chest rose and fell rapidly and his eyes darted about the room.
Still he said nothing. After all the talking he’d done on Mike Hargus’s secret tape, maybe there was nothing left to say.
His body began to shake as sweat rolled down his face. Without warning he clutched at his heaving chest and dropped sideways out of his chair, nearly striking his skull on the corner of the desk.
Jack stood and moved slightly so he could see. Chilcott lay on his side, shivering like the temperature had dropped thirty degrees.
“Help…help…me…” Chilcott whispered.
“Just thought you should know something,” Jack said calmly.
Chilcott’s eyes focused desperately on him as he continued. “I was just kidding about sending those tapes to the FBI and the New York Times. Even if I had been successful at removing my name and those of the Tollivers from the tapes, the authorities would eventually have been able to trace us. Given your experience in the intelligence community, you really should have seen through that ruse, Brad.”
Chilcott’s eyes were bloodshot and glazed but he held Jack’s gaze steadily, even as his head thrashed and he struggled to breathe.
“Oh, and one last thing before you go,” Jack said. “You shouldn’t have been so quick to throw your gun at me after firing that snap cap. The rest of the rounds in the magazine were live. You would have felt the difference in the gun’s weight if I’d replaced them all. If you’d just taken a second shot, you could have blown my skull all over your wall.
“Ah, well.” He shrugged and smiled. “Live and learn, right Brad?”
He returned to the couch.
Placed the mini cassette player and the remainder of the Carvedilol tablets into the briefcase and snapped it shut.
Picked the case up by the handle and craned his head to see that Bradley Chilcott had stopped struggling. His eyes were closed. Death had taken him with his face locked in an agonized grimace.
Jack moved to the prone body. He bent and felt for a pulse, first on the inside of the wrist and then on the carotid artery.
Nothing.
Chilcott was gone.
He stood and walked behind Chilcott’s desk, stepping over the body and sweeping the floor with his eyes until locating the gun the man had thrown after firing his one pointless shot. He picked it up and removed the snap cartridge. Placed it in his pocket and smiled, picturing the investigators trying to determine why in the hell the lieutenant governor had thrown his gun at his attacker instead of firing it.
Finally he looked for the key ring Chilcott had used to open his locked desk drawer. It was on a corner of the desk, exactly where the desperate man had tossed it after removing his gun.
Jack pocketed the keys.
Shrugged into his overcoat and hat.
Lifted his briefcase and descended the stairs to the first floor.
***
Bradley Chilcott’s car was a midnight blue Ford Thunderbird. It was one of the retro models from a few years ago, manufactured to look old but in reality completely modern. The car was exactly like Bradley Chilcott, flashy and conspicuous.
Jack picked through the keys until locating the right one. He could have hotwired the car, but why bother?
A garage door opener remote was affixed to the sun visor and Jack pressed the button. He started the car as the door rumbled upward on its tracks. Outside, the rain continued to fall, pelting the ground in a cold spray.
Good. The weather should help facilitate his escape.
He wondered briefly whether the lieutenant governor’s movements were being coordinated with the Annapolis Police for the benefit of the patrol officer parked outside.
He doubted the authorities would go to that much trouble in the absence of a specific threat against Chilcott but couldn’t be certain.
Hopefully the heavy rain plus the element of surprise would combine to prevent a confrontation that could get messy. Jack backed the car down the driveway and eased into the road. He couldn’t make out any details of the officer’s appearance behind the police cruiser’s windshield, which of course meant the officer couldn’t tell for sure that it wasn’t Bradley Chilcott behind the wheel of his car.
Hopefully.
Jack raised a hand in salute to the officer—a salute that wasn’t returned—and accelerated slowly away. He kept his eyes glued to the rearview mirror as he signaled for a left turn, waiting to see whether the cruiser pulled away from the curb and began to follow.
It didn’t.
Good. Jack had no desire to injure an innocent police officer, not to mention deal with the shitstorm an altercation with law enforcement would bring.
He rounded the corner and drove out of sight of the sentry.
Seconds later he arrived at his rental.
He pulled to the curb and exited Chilcott’s car, leaving the keys in the ignition and the vehicle unlocked.
He climbed behind the wheel of the rental and drove off in a direction opposite the police officer and the now-dead lieutenant governor’s home, heading for the freeway and the auto rental agency.
As he drove, he picked up his burner phone and punched in the number he’d used earlier to report the suspicious package to the Annapolis Police.
The dispatcher ans
wered, again on the second ring, and Jack began speaking immediately. “Listen carefully, because I’m only going to say this once. Lieutenant Governor Bradley Chilcott has suffered a massive heart attack inside his home. He’s dead.”
“Who is this?”
“I’m not finished yet,” Jack said sharply. “Pay attention. The lieutenant governor’s final wish was that his family—particularly his children—not be the ones to find his body. Please send the appropriate medical personnel to his home address immediately, as his family is due home within the hour. Do you understand everything I’ve told you?”
“Sir, you’re going to have to tell me your name. Right now. And how are you getting your information? Are you with Lieutenant Governor Chilcott?”
Jack disconnected the call. He drove up the ramp to Interstate 97, which would take him to I-95 North toward Baltimore. His hope was that no one in Chilcott’s neighborhood had taken note of the nondescript Ford Focus rental during the short time it was parked around the corner from Chilcott’s home, but the possibility that someone had was one reason he’d chosen a rental agency located more than ten miles from Annapolis.
There was no reason to make the authorities’ job easy.
Even if someone had jotted down the license plate number of the Focus, the situation would be chaotic at the Chilcott residence. It would take time to determine just what the hell had happened, and before the neighborhood had been canvassed for witnesses, Jack would long since have returned the car to the agency.
Once that happened it wouldn’t matter if the car were traced. Jack’s forged driver’s licenses and credit cards, provided by The Organization to their operators upon request and with no questions asked, were sophisticated enough to fool even the most suspicious examiner.
The documents, of course, would lead nowhere. The trail into the mysterious man who’d rented three separate cars over the course of three consecutive days would turn colder than a New Hampshire winter. Jack had been sure to wear a baseball cap pulled low on his head to obscure his face from the ubiquitous CCTV cameras during his transactions, which meant identification would be impossible with only the grainy, black and white footage to go on.
Less than twenty minutes after Bradley Chilcott’s sudden—and as far as Jack was concerned, unlamented—death, Jack had returned the rental.
Less than fifteen minutes after that, he’d briskly walked the three-quarters of a mile to the parking lot in which he’d left his truck.
Barely half an hour after pouring the Carvedilol into Bradley Chilcott’s shaking hand Jack was in his truck, moving steadily north on I-95.
45
There was no real reason to stay another night in the Baltimore/Washington area. Jack was wired, as he was upon the completion of every job. He could easily have driven the eight to ten hours home without any concerns about falling asleep at the wheel. Even after dealing with rush-hour traffic delays early in the evening he’d have been home by three a.m.
But that kind of timing didn’t work for Jack. He wanted to be back in New Hampshire at a particular time, and for a particular reason.
So when he reached a point halfway between Washington and Philadelphia on the interstate, Jack found a cheap, anonymous roadside motel, the kind of place he was most comfortable in, the kind of place that accepted cash and asked few questions.
He slept well and was back on the road before sunrise.
46
When the call came in on her cell phone, Edie briefly considered ignoring it.
But only briefly.
She’d been thinking almost nonstop about Jack Sheridan since leaving him standing alone and miserable in his driveway four days ago. She’d watched him in her rearview mirror as she drove away, his shoulders slumped and his hands jammed into his pockets.
He hadn’t called or come around since, a request she’d asked him to honor but one she now found herself second-guessing.
She missed him.
She missed his gentle manner and his corny jokes and the way he smiled when he looked at her. Every single time he looked at her.
And she missed the way he treated Janie. Not like a father, not exactly, but as the kind of role model a young girl needed from a man: strong and calm and caring. He was never too busy to stop what he was doing and listen intently to the seven-year-old’s stories, as if her words were the most important thing in the world to him at that moment.
It was all so damned confusing. How the hell could she even consider a professional assassin the kind of role model she wanted for her child? How the hell could she consider a professional assassin a suitable partner for herself?
How?
She didn’t know the answers to those questions. She didn’t know whether there even were answers to those questions. But they’d been on her mind constantly. From the moment she woke up in the morning until the moment she finally drifted off to sleep at night—and sleep hadn’t come easily since Janie’s kidnapping—those issues were practically all she thought about. Between confusion about her relationship with Jack and worry about any lingering effects of the kidnapping and subsequent rescue on Janie’s psyche, it was all she thought about.
So when her cell phone buzzed, her hesitation had been almost—not quite, but almost—nonexistent. She picked up and felt the familiar butterflies in her stomach at the sound of his voice, the butterflies she’d experienced when she first started dating in high school and that she’d been convinced she would never feel again until she’d met Jack.
She kept her voice noncommittal, though.
Cool.
Distant.
“Hello, Jack.”
“Hi, Edie. How are you and Janie doing?”
“We’re fine.” She worked to keep her voice emotionless.
“I’m glad. Listen, Edie…”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been out of town for a couple of days. I’m driving up I-93 now and I was hoping maybe I could stop by the diner and we could talk. You know, just for a few minutes.”
She hesitated. She was still hurt and confused but she knew one thing with utter certainty: Jack Sheridan would have given his life—without hesitation or regret—to get Janie back, and that the only way he would have been denied in that quest would have been if he’d been killed trying.
And her workday at the diner was almost finished.
Janie had insisted on going back to school the day after her return from that awful cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee. Edie considered her desire to resume a normal routine a positive sign, but at the same time she wasn’t about to allow her only child to walk home to an empty house like she’d done on the afternoon of the kidnapping, even if it was in the middle of the day.
Yes, she had to keep the diner up and running. As her only source of income, it was critical she not allow her focus to slip. And yes, running a small business required a herculean effort and major investment of time.
But her business was her business.
Her child was her life.
So every day since Jack had recovered Janie, Edie left the diner in the capable hands of her head chef at three o’clock and drove to Edie’s school. She picked up her daughter, chauffeured her home and they spent the rest of the day together.
Janie had already begun complaining that she wanted to go back to the way things had been before the kidnapping, that it was embarrassing to be picked up at school every day like a baby. Edie couldn’t help but consider that another positive sign, but she also wasn’t prepared to approve that kind of request.
Not yet.
She glanced at her watch. Two-fifteen. There was really no good reason she couldn’t spare a few minutes for Jack.
But it was so soon, and the wound on her heart was still open and raw and sore, and she was still so confused.
This was a very small town, though, and it was inevitable she would bump into Jack Sheridan. A lot. Even if he stopped eating at the Three Squares, their paths would cross at the grocery store or the drugstore or the town
’s only movie theatre. The odds of going more than a few days at a time without them seeing each other were slim.
They would have to talk eventually. Maybe it would be best to get the awkwardness out of the way, rather than letting it build and fester. Maybe a few minutes spent in conversation now would allow them to reach some sort of understanding, even if Edie had no earthly idea what that understanding might be.
And she missed him so much.
That was what it all boiled down to, really. She could rationalize agreeing to see him, tell herself it would be the wise choice to make for all the sensible reasons in the world, but the essence of the matter was simple: she missed him.
She checked her watch again and realized it had been a long time since anyone had spoken. The phone was still pressed to her ear but no one was saying anything. She could just make out the rumble of Jack’s truck’s engine in the background, but he was being patient, allowing her to work through the issues he knew she was dealing with.
“Okay,” she said, as if there had been any doubt. “I’ll meet you. But only for a few minutes. I have to leave soon to pick up Janie at school.”
“Of course. And thank you. I’m turning off the highway now, so I’ll be at the diner in less than ninety seconds.”
She spoke brusquely. “That’s fine. But I don’t want to do it inside the diner. It’s hard enough dealing with well-intentioned questions from my coworkers and all the customers who know we’re…who know we were…together, without making the situation worse by sharing a booth as if nothing’s changed.”
“I understand.” His voice stayed even, but Edie could sense the pain behind the words and she felt a momentary flash of savage satisfaction. See? I can hurt you, too.
Then shame replaced satisfaction and she softened her tone. “I’ll be in the parking lot when you get here and I’ll join you in your truck. Is that okay?”
“That’ll be fine, Edie. Whatever you’re comfortable with is fine by me.”
“I’ll see you in a minute.” She thumbed the button to disconnect the call and closed her eyes. She felt exhausted.
Trigger Warning Page 20