The Last Widow: The latest new 2019 crime thriller from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author

by Karin Slaughter

  Only the Flunky didn’t seem interested in playing his part.

  He had stopped twenty yards away from them.

  Will could almost hear the gears clicking in the kid’s head. He had been told there would be one man near the bleachers. There were two men near the bleachers. Should he still make the exchange?

  The Flunky looked back at his car. Checked the parking lot. Checked the woods. He looked at the tennis courts. He looked up at the sky for—drones? Finally, the Flunky returned his attention to Beau and Will. His hand went into his pocket. He tapped the screen on his phone and put it to his ear.

  Will asked Beau, “What’s he doing?”

  “Ordering a pizza.” Beau had his hands out of his pockets, hanging loose at his sides. Ready to fight? Ready to run? Ready to signal?

  Will looked again for the van. He saw nothing, just the agents who were waiting to spring into action. Unless they were time travelers, none of them could reach him soon enough to do anything but call the coroner.

  Will tried to appear casual as he reached behind him. His fingers wrapped around the Sig Sauer P365. The gun was a micro-compact, designed for concealed carry, but held ten in the magazine and one in the chamber. Most cops trained on their service weapon. Will had spent hours at the firing range with the Sig. He was just as accurate with one as the other. The stock was short, but the purchase was like a glove. He could draw the weapon and fire in under one second.

  The Flunky ended his call. Will guessed he was still debating. Go or stay? Follow orders or take the consequences? He was skinny, this kid, with gangly arms and legs that were accustomed to lifting dumbbells and swinging bats, not fighting off two grown men or running for his life.

  He resumed his long walk toward the bleachers. He was trying to act normal, but his hand had gone into his pocket and he might as well have dangled a sign down from his balls that said GUN.

  “’Sup?” He lifted his chin at Will, because he assumed that Will was in charge.

  Beau said, “Tell Dash we need to talk.”

  The Flunky clearly didn’t want to work with another flunky. He asked Will, “Everything good, bro?”

  “He’s not your contact, dickslap.” Beau thumped the Flunky’s chest. “Tell Dash I want more money.”

  “For what?”

  “For fucking your mother.”

  Will was two seconds ahead of what happened next.

  The Flunky started to pull his gun out of his shorts. Beau’s hands were already up, because he was in the prediction business, too. He was prepared to take the gun and turn it on the Flunky.

  Except the Flunky’s shorts were too baggy. What was it with these guys stashing their guns in their pockets? He should’ve holstered the weapon, or stuck it inside the backpack or maybe the idiot should’ve just paid attention to his surroundings because he had no idea what was coming until Will kicked the ever-loving shit out of his knee.

  The crack was like a bat hitting a baseball.

  The kid dropped to the ground.

  “Fuck!” he screamed. He was rolling on his side, clutching his knee. He was clearly more concerned about the blood than the damaged cartilage. Understandable, because he wouldn’t really get that the cartilage was important until he heard it from an orthopedic surgeon in twenty years.

  “Good one, bro.” Beau was nodding his approval. He had the gun in his hand, a Glock 19, but not Will’s Glock 19. He wasn’t pointing it at Will, so Will let him keep it.

  Will told the Flunky, “Call your boss.”

  “I don’t—” The pain caught his breath. “Fuck, man, is my kneecap supposed to move around like this?”

  “Like you popped it off a can of Dinty Moore?” Beau was laughing. “No, bro, that’s some bad shit.”

  “Fuck!”

  Will dug around in the kid’s pocket until he found the phone. He pulled up the last dialed number. There was an initial beside it—the letter G.

  Will tapped the call button.

  There was no hello, just—

  “Kevin, what the hell? I told you to get it done. We need those pills. This is an infantry-level operation.”

  Will had to swallow before he could speak. Did the voice on the end of the line belong to Dash? He sounded irritated, the way you’d be if your kid dinged your car.

  Will said, “It’s not Kevin. Beau told me you were down a few men. I served with him in the sandpit, worked CSR.”

  Combat Search and Rescue.

  Will asked, “You interested or not?”

  The man was quiet, thinking. Then he let out a long stream of air. Not a sigh, but an indication of deepening frustration. A this is the last shit I need today kind of sigh.

  He said, “Put Beau on the horn.”

  Will gave Beau a hard look of warning before passing over the phone.

  Beau shoved the Glock into his waistband. He was still smiling. Will couldn’t tell if he was high from the pills or relishing the sudden violence. “It’s me,” he said into the phone. “Yeah, I’m an asshole. Yeah, I get that.” He looked at Will, eyebrows up like he was getting ragged by the teacher. “Yeah, I know, but—” He shook his head. “Listen, Gerald, I didn’t—” He stopped again. “Motherfucker, will you shut up a minute so I can tell you?”

  Gerald.

  Will’s lips parted. He let out his own frustrated breath. Then he told himself that Kevin was a flunky and Gerald was his boss, which meant the guy above Gerald could be Dash.

  Beau laughed into the phone. He told Gerald, “Dash said he’d take care of me if I could find him a couple of solid guys.” He smirked at Will, acknowledging that this wasn’t information he’d shared with Amanda. “His name is Jack Wolfe. Airborne, tough as shit. My word should be enough to vouch for him, and if it’s not, you can suck my fat dick.”

  Beau was grinning when he handed Will the phone.

  Will wanted to beat him with it. Instead, he got back on the line, telling Gerald, “It’s me.”

  “Wolfe.” Gerald paused, then asked, “How long you been out, son?”

  He didn’t sound old enough to be calling Will son. “Long enough to know it was all a bunch of bullshit.”

  Beau laughed.

  Gerald had gone quiet again. He was thinking. Again.

  Will did his own thinking. Beau was not acting right. He was too amped up, bouncing on his toes. There was nothing Will could do about him. Beau was going to do what Beau was going to do. Kevin was another matter. If Gerald said no deal, Will still had the Flunky. He would shove his Sig into the kid’s mouth and put his finger on the trigger if he had to.

  Gerald said, “I’ll call you back.”

  Will heard the line go dead. He clocked the time.

  4:03 p.m.

  If Gerald took more than two minutes, then he was making his way up the chain of command. If he took less than two minutes, he was calling Dash directly.

  The latter scenario would put Gerald as Dash’s right-hand man.

  Will pocketed the phone. He reached down to Kevin and grabbed the backpack.

  “What the fuck?” Kevin complained.

  Will motioned for Beau to walk with him to the bleachers. His hands were sweating. Every part of him wanted to stare at the phone until it rang and he found out whether or not he was one step closer to finding Sara or one step toward pounding Kevin into the ground.

  “Dude,” Kevin said, “come on, gimme that.”

  “Shut up.” Will unzipped the backpack. He pretended to examine the bricks of cash while he mumbled to Beau, “Dash told you to bring him a couple of guys, huh?”

  Beau’s mouth smirked up another notch.

  Will said, “I’m thinking a guy like Dash doesn’t trust many people, but he trusts you. Which means you lied about how well you know him.”

  Beau tucked his hands into his pockets. He wasn’t looking for a fight. He just wanted to fuck with Will. He said, “Gotta keep some cards hidden up my sleeve, right, bro?”

  Will told him, “Start thinking about wh
ere to hide things when the guards tell you to grab your ankles and cough.”

  Beau laughed.

  “Do I look like I’m joking?” Will counted the money. There was at least thirty grand in the backpack. “You pull that shit again—”

  Will’s threat was cut off by the phone ringing.

  4:04 p.m.

  He felt like he was going to throw up, but he let two more rings go by before answering, “Yeah?”

  Gerald said, “All right, Wolfe, you can thank your buddy for vouching for you. Captain Ragnersen’s word goes a long way with the boss.”

  Will opened his mouth and pulled in some air. “How much?”

  “I can give you ten grand for a small job I got going tonight. Little try-out to see if you’re the real deal.”

  Will made himself silently count to five. “How small?”

  “Not a lot of risk. In and out. We’ve done it before. There’s a guy on the inside.”

  “There’s always a risk,” Will said. In the silence, he counted off to five again. Ten grand was killing money. Or these guys had no idea what the street value was for a hired thug. He pressed, “Fifteen thousand.”

  “Deal,” Gerald said, which meant that Will should’ve asked for twenty. “Hand the phone to Kevin.”

  Will worked to hide his elation as he gave Kevin the phone. He was in. He was on the very edge, but he was in.

  “Yes, sir,” Kevin told Gerald. The whininess had drained from his voice. “Yeah, I know where that is. I can meet him there in fifteen or twenty—okay, but—”

  The call was ended.

  Kevin slid the phone into his pocket. He told Will, “Help me up, Slenderman.”

  Will grabbed his arm and lifted him up like a rag doll.

  “Damn, that hurts.” Kevin limped to the bleachers. Blood had pooled into his shoe. White showed at the tip of his kneecap. He fell onto the seat. He unzipped the duffle. There had been no way to hide a GPS tracker inside the medications. Beau had been very specific about how everything was supposed to be prepared. The pills had been transferred to labeled Ziploc bags. The ointments and creams were out of the boxes, wrapped together with rubber bands, and still sealed.

  Kevin exchanged the stacks of money from his backpack for the contents of the duffel. He said, “I need your phones and your IDs.”

  “Fuck you,” Beau said.

  Kevin shrugged. “You vouched for him. Gerald said either you and Wolfe go together or nobody goes.”

  “We’ll both go.” Will tossed his wallet onto the bleachers. “I don’t carry a phone. I’m not gonna let the government track me.”

  “No prob,” Kevin said. “I feel you, bro.”

  Will’s wallet had opened on the seat. The driver’s license and credit card were in his fake name, Jack Phineas Wolfe. Unless the IPA had access to the Pentagon’s servers, Wolfe’s military service, a restraining order and two DUIs would clear any background check.

  Will told Beau, “Come on, bro. Let’s do this.”

  “This is fucked up.” Beau started shaking his head, but he added his wallet and phone to the stash. Will studied his face. Nothing about Beau felt right. He had capitulated too easily. Even high as a kite, he had managed to arm himself with the Glock. Will hadn’t heard Gerald’s side of the conversation with Beau. For that matter, he didn’t know what Gerald had told Kevin.

  Will’s gut started screaming like a banshee.

  He told Kevin, “We’ll follow you in the truck.”

  “You’re not going with me. Gerald is in charge of the missions. Either one of you got outstanding warrants in North Carolina?”

  North Carolina?

  Will asked, “Who’s taking us to Gerald?”

  “Hold your horses.” Kevin transferred the wallets and Beau’s phone into his backpack. “He’ll send us a location.”

  Will fought the urge to look anywhere but the parking lot. Beau had told them that Dash sent a new flunky for every meet-up, but Beau hadn’t described the guy in the van. He obviously knew Gerald. He had lied about his relationship with Dash. Will had to think that both Beau and Gerald knew every single way out of this park. And neither of them would be worried about the kids at the school next door.

  Beau asked Kevin, “What about my money?”

  “Give me the keys to your truck. I’ll put it under the seat.”

  Beau capitulated again. He tossed Kevin the keys. His hands were loose at his sides. He was Zen again, ready to jump this thing off.

  Kevin’s phone chirped. Will could see a pin on a map. Gerald had sent him a location.

  “Thattaway.” Kevin pointed in exactly the direction Will thought he would, toward the woods. “When you get to the center of the field, take a right into the woods again. Go past the nursing home. A black van will meet you at the end of the driveway.”

  Beau asked, “What field?”

  He hadn’t studied the aerial map. He hadn’t worked for hours with a team of highly trained undercover agents who were searching for the best positions to monitor every single route in and out of the park.

  All of the routes but one.

  “The football field,” Kevin said. “It runs along the back of the elementary school.”

  Will sat in the back of the packed van sweating so hard that he felt like he was boiling in a pot of water. The windows were painted black. A partition separated the cab from the rear. The dome light was on, but the bulb was so weak that Will could only see outlines of his fellow passengers. One measly vent in the ceiling shot out a cool stream of air conditioning, but it was over one hundred degrees outside and they were in an aluminum box, so no amount of air was going to keep them from baking.

  They’d gone through the Gatorade in the cooler within the first two hours.

  Will looked at his watch.

  7:42 p.m.

  Over three hours of transit time. They could be deep into North Carolina by now. Or Kevin could be a more convincing liar than Will had guessed and they could be in Alabama or Tennessee.

  Beau grunted in his sleep. His shoulder was jammed into Will’s. His head had dropped down. He was snoring. Four young men were crammed together on the other side of the van. Their sweat smelled like raccoon musk if raccoons wore Axe Body Spray.

  No introductions had been made when Gerald told them to climb into the van. Will found the kids so similar that he thought of them as One, Two, Three and Four. Each young man had a sidearm on his hip. They were all no more than eighteen, all dressed in black, and their expressions kept ricocheting between boredom and terror. They must’ve been exhausted from keeping their knees tucked up to their chins. They were clearly scared that their feet or legs would accidentally brush the wrong person in the wrong way.

  Beau was that wrong person. Will was that wrong person. The two of them together took up as much space as One through Four.

  There was a kind of electricity coming off the kids. The quick glances they kept giving across the van, the nods they exchanged between themselves. Will could only describe it as a kind of awe. These kids were looking at genuine war heroes. They were going to do a mission alongside real soldiers. They had guns on their belts. They had dressed for the part. They were clearly eager to start the mission.

  Which made Will very worried. He assumed the fanboys would probably know more about the Army than he did. Every branch had its own lingo. All it took was one wrong phrase and Will would find himself on his knees with a gun pressed to his head.

  Gerald was clearly not convinced of Jack Wolfe’s usefulness, but Will had to think that being four men down had made Dash desperate for qualified fighters. Still, Gerald had appraised Will like he was a side of beef. He’d clocked the Sig Sauer at Will’s back. He’d taken Beau aside and rapid-fired some questions. If Beau was going to rat out Will, he was waiting for the right moment. Gerald had seemed satisfied with the answers he’d been given. He’d nodded once, and the young man Will thought of as Four had scanned Will with a wand. He was searching for a signal from a GPS tra
cker. Beau hadn’t been wanded. Which meant that Will still had a lot to prove.

  And that Beau was a fucking liar because these people clearly thought of him as part of the team.

  Will’s time in the van had given him ample opportunity to consider all the ways that Beau could fuck him over. But Beau was only part of the problem. Gaining Gerald’s trust was Will’s only path to finding Sara, but there were too many unknowns about their destination to generate a meaningful strategy.

  North Carolina.

  Were they going to rob a bank? It was too late in the day for that. Were they going to knock-off a quickie mart or a check-cashing place? Why go out of state when there were thousands of stores closer? Were they being driven into the mountains where Gerald would throw open the doors and shoot them all with his AR-15?

  Always possible, especially once they had finished the mission.

  Will assumed that Amanda was looking for him. She was probably spitting nails at the team. Faith was probably spitting just as many. She wasn’t much of a rule-follower. Will had seen her exploit the baby seat in the back of her car on more than one occasion. She would have set herself up somewhere in that school parking lot just in case.

  But she hadn’t, so the fake jogger, the pretend mother with the stroller, the couple in the parking lot, the chase cars—none of them would’ve seen Will disappear into the woods. Even if they had, there was no way they could predict where he would come out. The nursing home on the other side of the football field had not come up in the briefing.

  Faith would have figured it out in two seconds.

  Will leaned his head against the side of the van. The vibrations from the road drilled into his skull and tailbone. His headache had returned. He closed his eyes. He breathed in the thick, putrid air. He thought about getting Sara back. What he would say to her. How their lives would look after this.

  Here was the problem: Sara’s family was the most important thing in her life.