by Sam Sisavath
Pain lanced through her body, but the unabated surge of adrenaline helped her to roll out of the crater she had put into the roof of the car until she felt spiderwebbed glass under her, and then a second later bounced onto the trunk with a loud thwump!
Quinn tossed the shredded pillow as she pushed off the vehicle and landed in a slight crouch in the street, every part of her body screaming. It would have been pitch-dark around her if not for the lampposts, but even as she staggered away from the car, crunching broken glass under her feet, she heard voices coming from the apartment behind her and saw lights turning on one by one up and down the street.
She glanced up at Ben’s window. It was easy to make out with its broken frame. She expected the two faceless men to appear, but they didn’t. Instead, there was just the light flooding out from the other side and the curtains dangling off the sill.
Ben’s dead.
Oh God, Ben’s dead.
Someone shouted something from one of the windows flanking Ben’s apartment, but she couldn’t make out the words and didn’t care to try.
She stumbled up the street. One of her legs might have been broken, but she couldn’t be certain and didn’t have time to check. She should have been listening for sounds of pursuit, but all she could hear was Ben’s last words to her, echoing inside her head:
“I told myself I did it to protect you, but maybe…I don’t know. Maybe I did it to protect myself a little bit, too.”
What were you going to tell me, Ben? What were you going to tell me?
And why did you keep it from me for so long?
Chapter 15
Ben was dead.
They had killed him.
No. Not they. Pete Ringo had killed him.
“He’s dead, you know. Ben, I mean. Probably should have shot him more than once, but I wanted to see how far he could make it with a bullet in his gut.”
He might have even laughed after he said that. She couldn’t remember anything beyond the words. The cavalier way he had shouted them through the door at her, like it meant nothing. Like killing Ben, the most important man in her life, meant nothing.
And they were blaming it all on her.
ROGUE FBI AGENT KILLS AGAIN scrolled on the ticker along the bottom of the large TV inside the display window as a blonde reporter, immaculately dressed and made up in the high-definition curved LED screen, droned on from behind a news desk. Recorded footage of the FBI director in town to personally run the manhunt for her played in a small box over the woman’s right shoulder.
Quinn didn’t need to hear what the anchorwoman was saying to get the gist of it. She didn’t need to read her ruby red lips, either. They were pinning Ben’s death on her just like they had the others. Sterling and Brown, then Pender, Clyde, and Gavin.
But none of it hurt as much as Ben’s.
Her FBI picture was displayed underneath the recorded footage of a press conference held this morning just hours ago. She had forgotten how promising she had looked when the badge photo was taken. Ben had flown into town to congratulate her, and they’d had breakfast before she showed up for the shoot. She’d been happy; happier than she had ever remembered being at any time in her life. It wasn’t because she was becoming an FBI agent, but because of who was there to see it happen.
She hardly recognized the woman in the picture now. She was tired and her entire body ached. The only saving grace was that she didn’t have a broken leg from the fall, even though every other inch of her was sore and bruised and she wanted nothing more than to lie down and go to sleep for the next week.
Except she couldn’t.
Not only did sleep not come last night inside the dingy alley where she had holed up, but she hadn’t been able to even force herself to do something as simple as close her eyes, because when she did all she could see was Ben in that dark hallway, bleeding, as his life force drained from him. She had instead sat huddled in the shadows, clutching the Glock in her hand until morning sunlight found her. The fatigue threatened to drag her down to the sidewalk and stay there, but she pushed through it.
The man in the suit and tie was too busy with his phone to notice she had lifted his wallet after she bumped into him. Quinn said, “Sorry,” and continued down the street.
She kept her head down, her face mostly hidden underneath the filthy hoodie that came with the black sweater she had dug out of a trash bin in the same alley she had spent last night. It stank, and she did too as a result, and the man in the suit was in such a hurry to get away from her that it would be a while before he realized he no longer had his wallet on him.
Quinn turned right and went into a McDonald’s before a small group of kids in school uniforms could reach her. She made her way to the bathroom in the back, ignoring a pair of eyes watching her walk past.
She struck gold with the wallet and pocketed three one hundred dollar bills and forty-six dollars in paper money. The man, an Artie Granger, lived a block from the fast-food joint. Quinn took everything else of value, including Artie’s driver’s license, and tossed the rest.
Artie Granger lived on the third floor of a decent apartment building without any guards or security in the lobby, so accessing the place was easy. She took the stairs to avoid the continuous line of uniformed students, some of whom were being escorted by their harried parents.
She picked Artie’s lock without any trouble and found an immaculately kept place on the other side. Not that she had any time to appreciate the décor. The shower came first, then searching the bathroom for medicinal ointments but finding nothing that would work on her aches and bruises. The bedroom produced better results—bottles of over-the-counter pain medicine that she wolfed down before searching the closet for clothes.
Quinn had picked wisely; Artie was only an inch or two taller than her, and thin. His clothes mostly fit—black dress slacks, white dress shirt, and a blazer. She couldn’t have done better if she went to the store to buy them herself.
Before she left, Quinn searched every room and dresser, not caring if she left fingerprints behind. It didn’t matter if the FBI somehow found out she’d been in Artie Granger’s apartment robbing him of the extra roll of cash he had stashed away in a shoebox in the back of his closet, or that she had feasted from his fridge until she couldn’t eat anymore.
She took a moment to turn on the TV and flipped through the channels, but the local stations were already into their regular programming. She didn’t come across anything on the cable networks about her or Porter, though there were live updates on the scrolling ticker about the manhunt for her, but nothing she hadn’t seen or heard already.
She left the apartment feeling as clean as she had all week—externally, anyway. Internally she was tortured with memories of Ben at her Quantico graduation ceremony, beaming in the large, gathered audience of proud families and friends…
Pete Ringo.
In many ways, he had replaced Porter as the face of her problems. Unlike Porter, whom she had only seen for a brief few minutes before he took her hostage and then spent the remainder of their time “together” locked in front of him, she knew almost everything about Pete Ringo.
But that turned out not to be true after all. She only thought she knew the man.
Quinn went through all those times she was in the same room with Ringo and tried to remember if she had ever spotted anything that didn’t quite…fit. But there was nothing. Everything about him, up to two nights ago, had been perfect. The perfect instructor when he taught, the perfect friend when he wasn’t, and the perfect coworker when she landed in the same unit as him.
He had been perfect.
Too perfect, as it turned out.
She watched him now, coming out of the seven-story FBI building. It was hard to miss the field office even in the middle of a bustling downtown thanks to its greenish (some would say, garish) color and shoebox-shaped construction.
Quinn focused on her target as he bounced down the driveway before turning into the parking lot next
door. He stopped a couple of times to chat with some fellow agents—a man and a woman, neither of whom looked familiar to Quinn—before climbing into his car—the same sedan he had picked her up in earlier before taking her to his apartment and then betraying her.
Who are you, Pete Ringo? Who are you really?
He was too busy waving to the guards as he drove through the barricade to see her—not that he would have anyway, even if he were on high alert and knew she was out here. Quinn had been taught by the same people as Ringo and knew how to evade detection during a tail, and she had the benefit of knowing what was happening while he didn’t.
She put the stolen car—a plain white Ford—in gear and slipped back into traffic five cars down from him. The road around her hadn’t yet filled up, the office drones still counting the hours before abandoning their jobs.
She was surprised to see Ringo leaving so early, a day after Ben’s supposed “murder.” What was going on with the unit now that Ben was gone? There were two other people she could have asked. Miller and Danford. But what were the chances she could trust them?
No. She couldn’t risk it. Ben had been the only person she could trust, and he was gone.
Killed.
Murdered.
After Ringo took his fifth turn in the last ten minutes, Quinn was certain he wasn’t headed home. His apartment was on the other side of town, and he was clearly headed away from it. So where was he going?
It didn’t matter. Nothing about what Ringo had planned for today mattered.
She waited and waited, and didn’t act until the moment was right.
She finally found it at a stoplight thirty minutes from Downtown, with only one other vehicle coming up slowly behind her—a black Kia with an elderly couple in the front and handicap plates.
Good enough.
Ringo’s Ford was still moving but was slowing down for the light up ahead when Quinn gunned her car. If Ringo saw her coming he didn’t react fast enough, and his sedan was almost at a complete stop when she smashed into his back bumper. She pitched forward in her seat and had to fight every instinct to cry out when the seatbelt constricted against her body.
It was a full five seconds before she could gather herself and grab the backpack from the passenger seat. She pushed her car door open and stepped out into the street. Her chest hurt from the seatbelt, but she could still breathe and that was enough.
She stumbled more than she walked to Ringo’s car and was mildly aware that she wasn’t even close to moving in a straight line. The front grill of the Ford had come loose, and steam shot out from underneath its crumpled hood. The Chevy was in much better shape and had been pushed a good ten yards farther up the road by the collision, past the stoplight and into the intersection. Fortunately there were no vehicles approaching from any direction. She had chosen the right spot after all.
Quinn took the Glock out from behind her back and risked a quick glance down the street. The Kia had parked about thirty yards behind her, the old couple leaning forward to see what was happening. They weren’t panicking, which meant they hadn’t yet seen the gun in her hand or figured out what was happening. For all they knew, it was just a traffic accident.
She faced forward and picked up her pace and was at the driver-side door of the Chevy just as Ringo was turning his head. The dazed and confused look on his face was a good sign the impact had sent him reeling. He blinked through the glass at her, as if he couldn’t quite make himself believe it was her staring back at him.
One second, two—and then he was reaching for his holstered sidearm when she smashed the window with her gun. He shrank back as jagged glass shards flew at his face, almost completely leaving his seat but not quite.
Despite the pain and headache, the smile came easily to Quinn’s lips. “Fancy meeting you here, asshole.”
“Quinn?” he said, blinking through drips of blood at her. Small pieces of glass were sticking out of his forehead.
She hit him in the face with the butt of the Glock before he could say anything else. His head snapped sideways, then sprung back.
“What—” he said, when she hit him again, and again, and again.
A dozen or so people exited buildings or leaned out of their windows to see what was happening, but by the time anyone bothered to call the police, she had pushed Ringo over onto the front passenger seat and climbed into his car and taken off.
It wouldn’t take long for the Bureau to realize that one of their agents had been abducted, and maybe someone had even glimpsed enough of her face despite the hoodie to give them a good description. Not that it really factored into how much time she had. The fact that she was in a city crawling with law enforcement already searching for her meant she didn’t have much of an open window to begin with anyway.
A day, at the most.
Two, if she was really lucky.
She took him to the same abandoned building where she had hidden after escaping Hofheinz. It wasn’t ideal, but the alternative was finding a place she wasn’t familiar with, and that carried more risk.
It was easy to stash Ringo’s Chevy in the back among the weeds that had broken through the concrete parking lot. The vehicle was still in surprisingly good shape even with the back bumper barely hanging on. But it did hold on, which was the only reason they hadn’t attracted attention as she drove to their destination. The broken driver-side window was easy enough to ignore; people drove with windows down all the time, especially in good weather.
Ringo was covered in blood, both from flying glass and the dozen or so times she had struck him with the butt of the gun. The first hit had been on purpose—she just needed to get all the anger out on his face—but the ten or so following shots had been necessary because the man simply refused to submit. But eventually he had, groaning and bleeding in the front passenger-side seat while strapped in by the seatbelt.
He was a bloody mess as she dragged him out of the car. Heavy, too, but she was used to pulling around bodies that were bigger than her at the academy. He left enough blood on the cracked walkway in the back of the building that if anyone bothered to take a look they would have easily spotted the mess. But that was a big if—after all, the place was abandoned for a reason and had hurricane fencing up front to keep out intruders. The fact that the fence was badly cut in places told her she wasn’t the first one to make a nest here.
She propped Ringo up on a flimsy metal chair she had rescued from one of the piles of garbage in the lobby and fastened him in place using duct tape she had paid a kid twenty bucks to buy for her at a hardware store this morning. She left Ringo’s mouth exposed because she needed him to be able to talk and wasn’t worried about him screaming for help.
When he was secured, Quinn took out a bottle of water and sandwich she had bought from a Mexican food truck and sat down with a heavy sigh. If her body was aching this morning, it was practically on fire now after the collision. Her arms were jelly as she fed herself while sitting against a wall next to Ringo, with the Glock resting in her lap.
Ringo had left the office with his own service Glock—a G41 that came with thirteen rounds. He was also carrying two spares in a pouch on one of his hips, so bullets were something she no longer had to worry about. She reloaded the G42 and kept it out while putting Ringo’s away. It just seemed right that if she had to kill the piece of shit bleeding on the trash-strewn floor in front of her, it would be with Ben’s birthday present.
When she was done eating and drinking and Ringo still hadn’t gained consciousness, Quinn decided to help him out by pouring one of the water bottles over his head. He woke up slowly, his broken nose and the gashes along his forehead exposed now that most of the blood had sloughed away with the water, leaving behind trails of pinkish liquid.
He raised his head and immediately tried to move his arms and legs. He blinked at her through the wet hair hanging over his eyes before looking around at the building.
There was a calmness about the way he did those things that unnerved her
. At first she thought he might not fully grasp the situation, but the more she thought about it, the more she concluded the man just didn’t take danger very seriously. It was the same attitude he had shown back at his apartment when she had him at gunpoint and he was standing in nothing but a towel.
You should be afraid, she thought, looking at him. Why aren’t you afraid?
“Ballsy,” he said, finally turning back to her. “Real ballsy.”
His words were slightly slurred because she had punched him in the mouth more than once and cut his lips and probably shaken loose a tooth or two in the process. She told herself that she hadn’t meant to do that, but maybe that was just a little white lie.
“You changed your hair,” he said. “I liked you better as a blonde.” When she didn’t answer, he continued: “Staying in the city is one thing, but actually coming after me…” He grinned at her, showing bloodied (and missing) teeth. “A chair and blood. Now this looks familiar.”
“I had such a good time with Hofheinz, I thought I’d repay you the favor.”
“How thoughtful.”
“It’s the least I could do.”
“How long do you expect to keep me before they track that mess you made in the streets to this?” He glanced around him. “Whatever ‘this’ is?”
“You still don’t get it, do you?”
“What’s that? Tell me what I don’t get, Quinn.”
“That I don’t have anything to lose anymore. Not after you murdered Ben last night. That was a mistake.”
He shrugged. Or as much as he could with his hands bound behind him. “Not my first, and probably won’t be my last.”
“You’re taking this very well.”
“What? You think you’re the first person to torture me? You still don’t have any idea who you’re dealing with, do you? And I’m not talking about me, kiddo.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“What’s the matter, kiddo? Missing your father figure?”
She stood up and walked toward him.