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  twenty-six

  The bar’s windows were dark, its door shut, blocked by yellow crime scene tape. A police cruiser was parked directly in front of the entrance. Of course the place was guarded; the daylight massacre of a federal agent and his charge made it a red-ball case.

  As Julia drove past, she saw a single patrolman behind the wheel. The dome light was on and he was reading a paperback. Smart, she thought. Destroy your night vision and make it easy for perps to see you before you see them.

  She drove a few more blocks, turned left, and parked on a dark residential street behind an abused pickup. She popped the trunk lid and got out. From a metal bin in the trunk, she selected an assortment of rusty tools and a tire iron.

  Traffic on Brainerd Road was light; she darted across unnoticed. She made her way to the trash-strewn alley that ran behind the businesses and turned toward the bar. The grungy backs of buildings towered above her on the right; an alternating cycle of tall pine and chain-link fencing lined her left. Tree limbs leaned over the boards, and leafy shrubs pushed through the fence. Purple Dumpsters hulked like sleeping bison at regular intervals. Where it wasn’t pitch dark, it was deep gray. She trotted toward the bar.

  On the way over, she’d used a pay phone to call the Chattanooga homicide desk. She’d given them the name of another female federal agent. A Detective Fisher was lead on the case. The on-call detective had offered to patch her through to him, but she’d said her involvement was too preliminary to bug him. She’d needed only a few facts: primarily, location and a basic chronology of the crime: Yeah, I know our people are all over it, but I’m just typing up a summary for my boss, and you know how it is, trying to get a straight answer from a team of twenty hotshots.

  Two aspects of the crime were immediately intriguing. First, after Goody shot one of the assailants, the other was killed by a third assailant. The prevailing wisdom was that he had been a third member of the hit team who’d decided not to split the fee, though he could have been a separate hit man altogether, not associated with the first team, or some guy who’d stumbled onto the hit and acted to protect himself.

  Then why’d he take out Despesorio Vero, as witnesses said he did?

  That was the nature of crime investigations: anything goes, no matter how implausible, until other theories build more supportive tissue.

  The other interesting element was a set of handcuffs found near Vero’s body. According to the bartender, one of the first assailants had tossed them to Vero. You’ve got your target covered by a shotgun, and you tell him to cuff himself. You’re not trying to kill him; you’re trying to take him alive. Why?

  She’d considered asking for access but quickly rejected the idea. If anyone in law enforcement saw her retrieve evidence, they could confiscate it. Plus, if the people behind Donnelley’s murder had moles in law enforcement, could she trust any cop? No, she wanted to examine any evidence she found herself before turning it over to the investigative team—and only after she trusted the integrity of those involved.

  She had reached the parking lot that flanked the side of the bar. The moon illuminated a single car, closer to her than the bar. It appeared empty. She ran all out, staying as close to the fence as the litter and bushes allowed.

  The bar’s back door and jamb were metal. A heavy-metal plate, welded to the door, covered the latch and dead bolt. Even the hinges were not exposed. The nearest window was barred. She tried the tire iron on the door. It didn’t budge.

  She shook her head. No way she was getting through it. She pulled out her CDC-LED badge and identification and marched out of the alley and along the side of the bar toward the cruiser. She stepped off the curb and went around the back of the car. She rapped on the driver’s glass and leaned down.

  The cruiser was empty. The dash-mounted lamp burned brightly; a Dean Koontz novel lay tented on the bench seat. But no cop. She stood and looked over the roof at the bar. She noticed its open front door. Just then, the windows flashed with light, and the peal of three rapid gunshots ripped into the night.

  She ducked and withdrew her pistol. In the field, she kept a round chambered, saving the extra second it would take to pull the slide in an emergency. Still, she double-checked by pulling back on the slide a half inch. The brass casing of a .45-caliber bullet sparkled as it caught the streetlamp’s glow. She lowered the gun to her side and pulled back on the hammer with her thumb.

  She’d detected no impacts to the cruiser, so unless the shooter was an atrociously bad aim, the shots were not meant for her. She rushed to the door and slammed her back against the brick between the door and the huge front window. She threw her head around to look in the door and pulled it back in one quick motion. At the rear of the customer area the office door was half open. Weak light spilled out into the bar. Silhouettes of halogen lamps on tripods, left by the crime-scene techs. Had she noticed movement? She couldn’t be sure. She looked again. Saw nothing.

  Arms locked straight before her, pistol at chin-level, she swung around and stepped through the door. She panned her pistol to the right, toward the phone booth. Nothing. Back toward the rear of the bar. She smelled perspiration, her own, and the faint odor of blood and the much sharper tang of cordite. Now she saw the smoke, drifting lazily in the scant light from the office. She took another step. So dark.

  She stopped at the edge of the bar counter, leaned over. The darkness was complete: she could be looking right at someone hiding down there and not know it. She didn’t have a flashlight. She didn’t want to turn on the bar lights—even if she did know where the switch was located.

  Julia felt exposed. She put her gun and the palm of her other hand on the bar top, hoisted herself up, and dropped behind the counter. She felt shelves of glasses, cleaning supplies, bags of something, pretzels or nuts probably, then the thing she expected: a small refrigerator. She cracked the door open. White light burst from it, revealing an area behind the bar free of bad guys. She crouch-walked to the end of the bar and went around it.

  She heard the metallic chink of door locks, then hinges creaking, fast and high-pitched. Someone had swung open the back door, the one she had tried to jimmy. She stood and ran toward the office, then stopped and crouched again. A body lay sprawled on the floor. The cop from the cruiser. He was spread-eagle, facing up, eyes open. The chest of his blue uniform glistened in a way it shouldn’t have. He still clenched his gun in one hand; a flashlight had rolled several inches from the other. The dim office light caught the edges of the flashlight’s shattered lens and bulb.

  She squinted at the office door’s porthole window over the top of her pistol. She scanned past the booths, then back to the office door. Bathroom doors ahead, on the left. She pivoted around to assess the area behind her, then back again. Only then did she move up to the body. Keeping her vision on the hovering white dot of her gun’s front sight and the office door beyond, she reached down to feel his carotid artery. No pulse.

  She stepped over him and moved quietly to the office door. A small, green-shaded lamp sat on a cluttered desk, casting the room’s only light. The back door stood open.

  Outside, a car door slammed. She ran through the combination office-storage room, weaving around stacked boxes and unused equipment. When she entered the alley, she spun left into the parking lot. A sedan was squealing out onto Brainerd, tires smoking, engine revved to critical mass. Julia raised her gun and fired three rapid shots. The back window shattered and rained out onto the trunk and blacktop like the jeweled train of a wedding gown. She started to squeeze off another round when the car disappeared beyond a building.

  She dashed back through the back door, into the customer area, over the corpse, and directly to the phone booth. She holstered her weapon, stepped in, and shut the doors. The light flickered on. Not knowing what she was looking for, if it was breakable, she moved carefully. She stepped on the tiny seat and pushed her palms against the plastic light cover, raising it up. She contorted her hand up into the space between the panel and the
area above it, slowly feeling around its circumference. The panel gave up its hold and fell past her to the floor. Ceiling and lighting fixture exposed, she found nothing. Next she checked the phone itself: the coin-return slot, the outside edges where it mounted to the booth. She used a pocketknife to pry the instruction card out of its metal frame. Nothing stashed behind, no messages written on it.

  She was thinking about looking on the booth’s roof when she slipped her hand beneath the seat and felt wads of rock-hard gum and firm, angular ridges that could be anything. Her heart stepped up its pace. She fell to her knees, pushed her head against the wooden side panel, and looked under. Too dark. She felt along the edges, the brackets holding the seat. Then something moved. She dug at it, and it slid out from a bracket. A small square of plastic.

  A memory chip!

  The tracking device was on it. Goody, you sly fox, she thought. He had turned the transmitter off but kept it with the chip so that anyone looking for it—Julia, anyway—would know immediately that he had placed it there.

  With a tight grip on the chip, she opened the bifold doors, extinguishing the light. She made her way back to the rear door and stepped into the alley. She was halfway across the parking lot when she heard the first police sirens. The cop who’d been killed probably noticed a light or something inside, called for backup, then rushed to keep his appointment with death. She hurried into the alley on the other side, letting the shadows envelop her. When she reached the end of the block, she heard a chorus of sirens reach a crescendo, then drop off as tires screeched to a halt. She looked back to see red and blue lights splashing against the fence at the back of the parking lot— and something else.

  A shadow. It had moved quickly into the gloom against the fence a half block back. Concealing her fear, she stepped casually around the corner of the last building on the block. She slipped the chip into the wide back pocket of her pants. She removed her pistol and moved to look back down the alley.

  Shadows, just shadows.

  She stood, continuing to stare into the blackness. Nothing moved. The lights at the far end wavered like a psychedelic dream. Slowly she backed away from the building’s edge, turned quickly, and ran across the side street to the next dark alley.

  It was when she was almost at the end of that block that she heard a shoe scraping the asphalt directly behind her.

  twenty-seven

  The Chevy Vega hitched and sputtered as it came off I-153 and onto Shallowford Road. The houses here roosted close to the street, not large, but well built and warm.

  The car slowed as Stephen Parker tried to force the gearshift into second. The gears grinded in protest, then quieted as the lever slid into place. He popped the clutch, sending a plume of oily smoke out behind him, and the car lurched forward. He let up on the accelerator when he sensed he was traveling the posted speed; the speedometer needle had not budged from its peg at zero since Stephen could remember.

  He had crossed Missionary Ridge and was watching for Dodds Avenue, which would be coming up in another two blocks or—

  A ghostly figure bolted up in the headlights.

  Stephen slammed on the brakes, bracing himself against the wheel. The car shimmied to a stop. With startled eyes, Stephen glared out at the apparition in the street.

  It was Allen. Seeming as startled as Stephen, he tottered faintly in the whitewashed glare, clenching a filthy beige blanket around him. He came around the passenger side, yanked the door open, and climbed in.

  “You can close your mouth now,” he said.

  “What is this?” Stephen yelled, his voice trembling at the lower end of the chromatic scale. “I almost turned you into road pizza, man! I thought you said the Texaco!”

  Allen was unmoved. “I couldn’t risk staying there. Probably the first place they’d look. Let’s get this thing moving.”

  “They?”

  “Just go.”

  “Where?”

  “Back to your place.” Allen looked at him. “That okay?”

  “Fine by me.” Stephen shoved the stick shift into first, made a U-turn, and gunned it toward the highway. “Who’s they? What did you do, Allen? How serious is this, man?”

  Cranked around in the seat, Allen watched the pavement pay out behind them. He turned, scanning out the side windows, then glanced again through the back-hatch glass.

  “I have no idea who they are, except that one of them floats around like a shadow and has one big, honking gun. As far as I know, I didn’t do anything. And it’s as serious as life and death gets. Okay?”

  “But you … I just… Man!”

  They drove a few miles in silence, and Allen started to relax. He lifted his face upward, resting the top of his head on the seat back, and just breathed. After a few minutes, he lowered his head, looked around as if for the first time, and said, “Nice car.”

  “Cute blanket.”

  “Yeah. It was a seat cover in some old Buick. Did you bring the clothes?”

  ‘“Course,” Stephen affirmed, nodding toward the back.

  Allen pulled the paper bag into his lap and fished out the underwear. He pulled them on; they floated around his middle like bloomers.

  Stephen glanced at Allen. What he saw made him look twice. “You look like you just escaped the Chinese Torture of a Thousand Cuts.”

  “Feels like it.”

  “Care to share?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Allen. Here you are naked as a baby seal, cut to shreds, on the run from … who knows? Tell me something.”

  “I need to think it through first, all right? Everything happened so fast, I really don’t know what’s going on. I’ll try to—to be up-front with you. Really.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  A few more miles in silence. When Stephen had coaxed the Vega up to speed on I-153, Allen said softly, “Thanks for coming to get me.” He never took his eyes off the patch of road illuminated by the headlamps.

  twenty-eight

  There it was again.

  A shoe scuffing the ground. Just a few feet behind her.

  Julia lunged forward, tucking her upper body down and throwing her feet over in a somersault that lowered her profile, propelled her away from the attacker, and enabled her to draw her gun in one quick motion. She’d practiced it many times, but this was its first practical application. As her right foot touched ground again, she spun on it, raising her pistol, ready to fire from a squatting position.

  No one there.

  Just shadows—again.

  A Dumpster, fifteen feet away. Trash and weeds cluttered the ground around it. Everything was bathed in the absence of light. Nothing moved except the occasional leaf or corner of some crumpled paper in an unfelt breeze.

  But she’d heard it, the scrape. She’d even felt the presence of someone. No one could have hidden so quickly, vanished so completely. She was acting spooked. Acting? She was spooked. Her nerves were frazzled. Of course they were, but enough to make her see predators in the shadows, hear phantom footsteps? She didn’t think so.

  She rose and, holding the pistol close to her leg, traversed the rest of the block. Again she rounded the last building’s corner, as casually as her excited muscles would allow, then plastered herself against the brick. She waited, listening, gun at the ready. One minute. Not a sound. Two. Nothing. She peered around the corner. In the distance, two blocks away but seeming farther, the police lights performed their silent ballet. Otherwise nothing moved, nothing appeared out of place, though darkness shrouded most of the back street.

  Julia holstered her gun, turned, and walked away from the alley toward Brainerd and her car on the other side. An ambulance flew by in the direction of the bar, lights and siren blaring. She crossed Brainerd. At least a dozen cruisers were in front of the bar and around it into the parking lot. If a federal agent’s murder couldn’t light a fire under their investigative behinds, the death of one of their own would make them positively combust.

  She stepped up to her car and unlo
cked the door, moving quickly. Before anything could rush out of the shadows at her, she was in the car and gunning the engine. She cranked the wheel sharply to get around a pickup parked in front of her, then punched the gas. She turned left, intending to travel on Brainerd, away from the activity at the bar, and wind through the city to her motel.

  She had driven six blocks and had signaled to turn when a hand reached around from the backseat and gripped her throat. She jerked with surprise, and the car careened sharply as it turned the corner. She hit the curb. Two wheels rode on the sidewalk. She corrected the vehicle.

  Still the hand held firm—tight but not choking. Julia thought one of the tires was losing air, but that’s not what was making the sound.

  It was her assailant, his lips near her ear: “Shhhhhhhhh … Shhhhhhhhh …”

  She grabbed his forearm. It wasn’t flesh; it was hard as steel but … not steel, warmer, textured in a way steel wasn’t. A hard plastic maybe, and huge. It was some kind of … gauntlet. He applied more pressure, and she let go.

  “What—?”

  “Shhhhhhh …”

  At McBrian, she ignored the stoplight and made a wide arc to the left, into the westbound lane.

  Finally he spoke in whispered tones. His voice was gentle, pleasant.

  “Keep both hands on the wheel,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Pull over.”

  “No.”

  He squeezed harder.

  “Make a right up here and stop.” The consonants were sharper, the gentleness gone.

  “I said no,” she repeated, driving past the road he wanted.

  The grip contracted. She now found breathing difficult. Her pulse began to throb in her temple. Fragments of her assailant’s features floated in the rearview mirror: eyes that flashed green whenever they passed under a streetlamp, messy jet hair, glasses.