by Sam Sisavath
He watched her come, one corner of his mouth curling into a devilish taunt. “What are you gonna do, kiddo? You gonna hit me again? Break my face? Oh wait, you already—”
She took out the scalpel from behind her back and before he could say anything else, she plunged it into his right leg. He would have let out a scream if she wasn’t ready for it and slapped the rag she had been using to clean herself into his mouth first. He gagged and tried to spit it out, but without his hands he had to rely on his tongue to push at it, and apparently Pete Ringo wasn’t very good with his tongue.
She touched the hilt of the knife and moved it around, and he bit down on the rag and narrowed his eyes at her while muffled grunts managed to slip out around the cloth.
“Keep trying to spit it out, and this is going in the other leg too,” she said.
He stopped struggling and forced himself to relax against the chair, even as little beads of perspiration were popping all along his forehead.
Quinn pulled the medical instrument out, then slapped a piece of duct tape over the wound just as a small stream of blood squirted into the air.
She put the scalpel down on the floor and crouched in front of him. “I’m going to ask you questions, and you’re going to answer them. If I sense that you’re being untruthful, I’m going to make another hole in your other leg and that’s going to continue for as long as it takes. So it’s very incumbent on you to make sure I believe your answers.” She stood up and reached for the rag, but stopped short of pulling it out of his mouth. “Do I even have to say it?”
He shook his head.
“Good boy,” she said, and pulled the wet rag out and pocketed it.
Ringo spat a big glob of phlegm and blood onto the floor. “That was disgusting, Quinn. That was awfully and truly disgusting. Where did you find that thing, anyway?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yeah, on second thought, you’re probably right.” He spat a couple more times before settling his eyes on her. “So what’s on tap for today? A little wining and dining, then some torture?”
She narrowed her eyes back at him.
Why aren’t you afraid? You should be more afraid, you piece of shit.
“Why did you kill Ben last night?” she asked instead.
“Ben? Who cares about Ben? I’d rather talk about you. You’re pretty amazing, you know that? We were pretty sure you’d left the city by now, but here you are.”
“Ben. Tell me about Ben.”
He sighed and gave her a bored look. “All right. Ben. What do you wanna know?”
“Why did you kill him?”
“It was his own damn fault. He was being nosy. Asking too many questions, going into places he wasn’t supposed to. After a while, the higher-ups just decided he was more trouble than he was worth. Plus, we already had a perfectly good way to get rid of him.”
“Me.”
“Yup. You.”
“So that was the plan from the beginning? Kill Ben and frame me for it?”
“Pretty much. You being there last night… Well, that was just a bonus. Your fingerprints are all over his place. Some of your blood, too. You remember bleeding in the bathroom?”
She didn’t answer him, but he was probably right. She had washed the wound on her forehead in Ben’s bathroom sink while waiting for him, then used one of his towels. There was probably some of her blood on the doorknobs and walls too, not to mention the bedroom window she had jumped through to escape.
“Plenty of evidence you were there,” Ringo continued. “The blood, the rounds you put into the door. And of course, the one in Ben’s stomach. You actually left so much evidence we had to go back and remove some of the ones we were planning to plant.”
“How did you explain the different bullets? Mine and yours?”
“What makes you think we had to explain anything? There were reports. And all the ballistics matched up.”
“You control the labs,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “You and whoever you’re working for.”
He shrugged. “Not quite correct, but eh, close enough.”
“Who are they? Who are these higher-ups of yours?”
“Sorry, but I can’t tell you.”
She picked up the bloody scalpel.
He flinched, but she could tell he was trying to fight the fear—and not quite succeeding. “The things I’ve already told you, it doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“It doesn’t matter to you, because you’re never going to leave this building.”
She stood up, the knife gripped in one hand. “Is that right?”
“You remember back at the apartment? When you had me at gunpoint? When you couldn’t hit me from five feet with a gun?”
She didn’t answer.
“Well, I’m not just fast,” he continued, “but I’m pretty goddamn strong too, kiddo.”
She opened her mouth to say, I told you not to call me that, when Ringo’s hands appeared from behind his back, pieces of the duct tape still stuck to his wrists. She took a couple of steps back, unable to hide the startled look on her face, when the tape around his ankles snapped into two pieces.
Quinn dropped the scalpel and was reaching for the Glock in her front waistband when he picked up the chair and threw it at her. She ducked—but just a half-second too late and one of the legs glanced off her left shoulder. She stumbled, almost toppling backward as she was dropping to the floor, even as the fingers of her right hand tightened around the gun.
Ringo was moving, lunging more than he was running, and was already halfway (Jesus, he’s fast!) to her when she squeezed the trigger while still on one knee and the round struck him in the chest from almost point-blank range.
His body came to a sudden stop and jerked back like someone had pulled his strings, but he somehow managed to remain on his feet anyway as if the gunshot didn’t hurt him so much as it stunned him.
“Fuck,” he said, “you shot me.”
She rose back to her feet and shot him again, and this time he collapsed in a pile in front of her.
Quinn stepped forward and fired two more rounds into his back. The body twitched and lay still, and a pool of blood began forming underneath him.
She allowed herself to take a breath before glancing toward the boarded windows. She was imagining someone out there calling the police, and turned and hurried to her belongings.
Quinn snatched up Ringo’s handgun and shoved it into the backpack, slung it, then rushed to the door. She stopped and glanced back at the body, expecting it to rise back up, but it lay where it had fallen, unmoving.
I guess you can’t dodge bullets after all, she thought before turning and fleeing.
Chapter 16
Ben’s killer was dead. He might have (somehow) managed to dodge a bullet from five feet away, but he hadn’t been able to pull off that trick twice in a row.
So where was the feeling of triumph? The uncontrollable burst of joy at having avenged Ben’s murder?
Why didn’t she feel…something?
She would have been satisfied with a little sense of accomplishment, but what had she accomplished really? She wasn’t any closer to finding out who was pulling Ringo’s strings, or Porter’s location, or why it seemed like Ringo’s people were working against the U.S. government, despite both of them searching for Porter?
It didn’t make any sense. But then, what did these days?
She sat in the back of the bus and watched the city flicker by through the generous layer of dirt and gum that caked the windows. Every now and then she could hear police sirens in the background and helicopters swooping by overhead, and a part of her kept waiting for the bus to stop and for men in urban assault vests to rush inside and overwhelm her. She wasn’t entirely sure what she would have done if that had happened. Could she really bring herself to shoot cops? Or FBI agents? Being accused of murdering five of her fellow special agents was one thing, but actually shooting them knowingly was entirely differen
t.
Could she do it? She hoped she never had to find out.
Getting away from the abandoned building where she had taken Ringo was easy—she had scouted the area long before she took him there to interrogate. She knew the back streets and alleys in and out, just as she knew where to park his car to give it the best chance of going unseen. But getting away had required moving on foot because she couldn’t risk being caught in Ringo’s damaged Chevy. When the police began approaching the building from the front, she was already half a mile from the property.
A few hours of running, walking, and running some more landed her at a bus stop, and now, inside a bus. She was already a good fifty miles from the building and putting more distance between them, and it didn’t take a lot of effort to hide in the back among people just getting out of work. Most of them were too tired to engage in conversation with random seatmates. The majority of them had their faces buried in their cell phones anyway. Of course she hadn’t stayed on the same bus or on the same route; she’d switched at least six times to keep the drivers from becoming suspicious.
It was easy to stay under the radar—her face wasn’t plastered over walls or billboards, and though she popped up on TV screens in store displays, those were far and few and who really stopped to pay attention anyway? Even if someone did, they were showing an official FBI photo of her, and it looked nothing like her appearance now. The scar on her forehead and the dark dye job under the ball cap, not to mention the almost complete lack of makeup, did more to “hide” her in plain sight than cowering in a dark corner somewhere ever could.
She was out of the dragnet, but that didn’t do anything to stop her left shoulder from hurting. First last night, dropping two stories onto the car, and now the chair. Christ, he’d flung that thing like it was a plastic Frisbee. If he had thrown it any lower, toward her chest, she wondered if it might not have knocked her out.
How did he break through the duct tape?
She still couldn’t figure it out even after replaying the whole series of events in her head at least a dozen times. He’d snapped not just the binding around his wrists but also his ankles. Ringo was no doubt fit, but that kind of strength…
How the hell did he do that?
But regardless of how he had managed it, he still hadn’t been strong enough to shake off a gunshot. Though, there had been a second or two when she thought he might have. What was that he had said after she first shot him?
“Fuck, you shot me.”
It wasn’t the words but the way he had said it, as if he couldn’t quite believe what was happening.
But Ringo was gone. Dead. Ben’s death was avenged.
So why didn’t she feel anything?
There was no joy or triumph, just an emptiness that refused to go away.
Who were you? Who were you really?
She pushed Ringo out of her mind. He didn’t matter anymore. A dead man couldn’t give her the answers she needed, and right now she desperately needed answers—about Porter, about why they had killed Ben, about…her.
“Tell me, Quinn, what do you know about your parents?”
Hofheinz’s voice was like a razor cutting across her brain. It refused to go away no matter how hard she tried, and the best she could do was to shove it into the background and let it keep asking the same question over and over, only at a lower decibel.
She concentrated on Ben instead. It was always easier to think about Ben.
…and the last time she saw him alive.
“The more I look into him, the more I’m seeing…things that don’t add up,” Ben had said about Porter. “Anyway, I’m not working alone on this. I have help.”
There it was. Not the answer, but an answer.
“Anyway, I’m not working alone on this. I have help.”
Someone was helping Ben dig into Porter’s history, someone who wasn’t Ringo, but in all likelihood someone from the unit. There were twenty people in all, counting Ben himself, and of those other seventeen (excluding her and Ringo) she could only think of two that Ben might have trusted enough to involve.
Miller and Danford.
Could it be one of them? Or possibly both?
“Anyway, I’m not working alone on this. I have help.”
He’d said he had help, not a helper, or helpers. He could have enlisted either Miller or Danford, or both of them.
Or neither.
That was the problem. She didn’t know, and the risks involved with approaching one or both…
It was too risky. After what happened to Ben, she had to be absolutely sure.
That was the problem. Ben had been with the Bureau for decades and would have built up friendships with a lot of people over the years, people whom he could rely on when the chips were down and who would not be a part of the unit. There were a lot of men and women who had climbed the ranks alongside Ben, or had even advanced further ahead of him. Ben was a field guy, and he wouldn’t have wanted a desk job if he could help it.
“Let’s just say there is the official dossier on Porter, and the unofficial one that the public doesn’t get to see. Real eyes-only stuff.”
So who would have access to files that the public didn’t even know existed?
People in very high places.
That narrowed down the numbers but also introduced a new wrinkle: What if Ben had trusted the wrong person? What if he had asked the wrong “friend” to dig into Porter’s real files?
“It was his own damn fault,” Ringo had said. “He was being nosy. Asking too many questions, going into places he wasn’t supposed to.”
One of those questions might have been directed at the wrong people. All it would have taken was one wrong pair of ears.
Whatever had happened—however Ringo had gotten onto Ben—it all led to the same place: Ben was gone, and she was on her own.
That somber realization stayed with her long after the bus began to thin out and Quinn prepared to leave at the next stop. It didn’t pay to stay on the same ride for too long. Sooner or later the driver would notice, and the last thing she wanted was someone to pay attention to the lone passenger in the hoodie sitting in the back—
“Crazy day,” a woman said as she sat down on the seat next to her.
Quinn scooted closer to the window even as alarms sounded in her head. There was no reason for someone to have sat down in the same bench as hers; there were four others open immediately around them and even more closer to the front of the bus.
But she didn’t let that knowledge show on her face. Or, at least, she didn’t think she let it through.
“What’s that?” Quinn said.
“Crazy day,” the woman repeated. She was Asian, with long straight hair pulled back in a severe ponytail that flopped over a black leather jacket. The fabric of her tight slacks stretched noticeably as she picked up her right leg and laid it across her left knee, the sole of her ankle-high boots moving casually up and down in the open aisle.
Quinn’s right hand, already in her lap, slipped into her jacket and touched the grip of the Glock stuffed in her front waistband. Ben’s birthday gift. Ringo’s gun, with the bigger magazine, was in the backpack sitting on the floor between her feet.
“Tough day at work?” Quinn asked.
“At work, after work, you name it,” the woman said. She had taken out a pack of gum and was chewing on two sticks before offering some to Quinn. “Wanna chew?”
Quinn shook her head. “No thanks.”
“It’s peppermint.” The woman smiled. She had clear green eyes and an impossibly flawless complexion, tipped with an almost impish nose. Eurasian, most likely.
“Just ate.” Quinn smiled back, even as she tried to figure out when the woman had gotten on the bus.
Had it been at the last stop? The one before? Or was the woman sitting somewhere else all this time and only now decided to move to the back when the vehicle started to thin out?
Where the hell did she come from?
“More for me,”
the woman said, and put the gum away. “You saw them?”
“Who?”
“Cops,” the woman said. “They were all over my work. I think they were looking for someone.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Guys in suits, too. Probably FBI agents. Or at least they looked like FBI agents.”
“You don’t say.”
“I wouldn’t want to be whoever they’re looking for. The poor bastards are never going to make it out of the city.”
“Where do you work?”
“Huh?”
“You said you saw them at work.”
“Yeah I did, didn’t I?” She flashed Quinn another smile. “Downtown.”
“Where downtown?”
The woman shrugged. She looked in her late twenties, maybe early thirties. But then most Asian women always looked younger than their real age, in Quinn’s experience.
“You don’t know the place,” the woman said.
“Maybe I do. Where downtown?”
“You don’t know the place,” the woman repeated.
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“No offense, but I don’t really know you.”
“Fair enough. When did you get on?”
“Hmm?”
“The bus. I didn’t see you get on.”
“A few stops back.”
“And you said you just came from work?”
“Uh huh.”
“Wearing that?”
One corner of the woman’s mouth curved into an amused grin. “My workplace has a very liberal dressing policy.”
“I can see that.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
The woman turned and looked her up and down. “You look like you’ve been through a fight.”
“Just a little domestic dispute,” Quinn said. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No need.”
“I would have called the police.”
“You look like you could take care of yourself.”
“Don’t let the outfit fool you. I’m actually a pussycat.” She flashed another easy smile before reaching into her jacket pocket.
Quinn tightened her grip around the Glock and prepared to pull it.