by R. A. McGee
Clark lit a sealer-soaked rag on fire from the oven’s broiler. “You’re probably right. But if that’s the case, then none of this hurts to try. Besides, I’ve been blown up before. I’ve never been burned to a crisp. I’d rather not have my skin melt off my body while I’m dying.”
He looked around until he found a dirty towel, full of paint splashes and holes. He turned the faucet on, and it sputtered a weak stream out into the sink. Clark took the towel and sopped up all the moisture he could until the towel was soaked.
Lucy shook her head and said nothing.
Clark went from pile to pile, lighting them. The trash and wood started smoking, then broke out in full blaze. Clark tended the small fires and smoke rose, clouding the entire area.
Lucy coughed. “You know I have asthma, right?”
“I’ll get you an inhaler,” Clark said. Satisfied that the fires were burning sufficiently, he walked over to Lucy. “So, here’s the play. I’m going to go stand by the front door. On the count of three, I’m going to get a full head of steam and come tearing through here. I’m going to grab you and keep going, right out the back door. With any luck, we’ll get somewhere close to the door before we die.”
Lucy looked down at the box, then gingerly raised her arms. She slipped them around Clark’s neck, squeezing him tightly. “You don’t have to do this. You can just leave.”
“How can I? We’re family.”
Lucy let go of Clark and pulled back, wiping tears from her eyes.
“Don’t go getting all weepy on me,” Clark said.
“It’s the smoke,” Lucy said in a manner that would convince no one.
Retrieving the wet towel, he wrapped it around Lucy’s face and neck. If his plan even worked, that was where she’d be the most vulnerable.
“Gross,” she said in a muffled voice.
Clark stepped back over to the small fires, emptying the rest of the sealant into them, flames jumping anew from the smoldering piles of cinders.
Clark stepped back to the front door. He estimated it was thirty feet from where he was to where his friend stood, and another thirty feet from her to the back door of the house. Miri was the track star; he wasn’t as fast as she was. All he could hope for was that his momentum would carry the day.
The smoke stung his eyes and scratched at his throat. His vision blurred for a moment and he took a couple of low-oxygen breaths to right himself.
“Just close your eyes,” he said to Lucy. “When I grab you, go limp. I’ll do the rest. You ready?”
“No,” she said, voice muffled by the towel.
“Too damn bad.”
Clark trotted along the wall until he got to the front door, and curved his course towards Lucy and the bomb. His momentum already going, Clark sprinted, bearing down on Lucy like a linebacker chasing a quarterback.
A moment later he was in front of her. Standing on the slightly elevated platform, she was the perfect height, and he drove his shoulder into her midsection, doubling her over, ass facing the back door, head facing the front. She was light enough that she barely registered on his back.
He heard the wind knocked from her as he hit her and felt her body go limp as he drove through her midsection.
The device below them engaged with an audible click. Clark was at top speed, feet digging for purchase on the renovated flooring.
Another step and there was a whoosh behind him. He could hear it, but he couldn’t feel anything yet. He paused for nothing, screaming toward the open back door and safety.
Two steps later, he was almost at the threshold of the door. The heat was lapping at his back. He stepped out of the door and the concussion sent him sprawling over the deck’s railing. As he was launched, he shifted Lucy to his front and rolled toward his back, landing with a thud on the ground ten feet below.
Lucy landed squarely on his sternum.
She rolled off him, coughing and gagging, the white towel wrapped around her head smoldering from the heat. She tore at it and gasped fresh air.
Clark lay on his back, his hands holding his chest. He breathed, slow and shallow.
Lucy flopped over on top of him, burying herself in his chest.
“Lucy… I can’t…” Clark sputtered.
Lucy sat up and looked down at him. “I can’t believe that worked.”
“Aren’t you… a… doctor?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Good. I’m gonna need some Vicodin.”
Sixty-Five
Clark struggled to his feet, his entire body aching. On top of the injuries he already had, Lucy’s entire weight, however thin she was, had landed on his chest, and the rifle slung across his back was a hard way to break his fall.
“PhDs can’t write prescriptions,” Lucy said, pulling his arm over her shoulder in an attempt to support him. She was far too short to have provided effective help, but she wrapped her other arm around his waist anyway. “But I’m sure you knew that.”
“Well, it was worth a shot,” Clark said. He coughed for several seconds and spat on the ground. It was too dark to see, but he didn’t have to look to know there would be blood.
After a few moments to steady himself, Clark pointed Lucy toward the front of the house. “Let's go get in my car. Take you home.”
Lucy turned to look at Clark. “Home? Me? What the hell for?”
Clark breathed shallowly, as deep breaths hurt both his ribs and his chest. “Why not? What do you want to do, go for ice cream?”
“Keever,” Lucy said simply.
“What about him?”
“He’s still out there.”
“I’m sure he is.”
“So? Let’s go find him.”
Clark stopped hobbling for a moment. “Let’s agree for the moment that Keever needs a come-to-Jesus meeting. I have no idea where he is. He could be anywhere by now. There’s no telling what McHenry has him doing. Couple that with the fact that I feel like stir-fried shit right now, and I think it’s best we take you home and worry about Keever later.”
“No.”
“No?”
“He kidnapped me, tried to kill Miri, tried to blow us up. Keever gets it and he gets it now.”
Clark slowly exhaled, wondering what the clicking noise he heard every time he inhaled was. “I’m on board. It still doesn’t matter. We have no clue where he is.”
“He has to have another place. He kept me tied up there for hours. I remember things. A smell, like sweat and ammonia. It was loud, too. Really loud.”
“He was just messing with you,” Clark said. “Interrogation technique, make things loud and confuse the captive.”
“No, not loud like that. The noise seemed like it was further away. Not outside my door or anything; it was like it was below me somewhere.”
“I’m not sure how that helps,” Clark said.
With her arm tight around Clark’s waist, Lucy looked at him with determination in her face. Clark could just make out her features in the flickering light of the house fire raging behind them. “I think he’s going to do something else. Something else soon. He said something about going to ‘slay’ something when he left me. I was freaking out, so I didn’t get a chance to figure out what he was saying.”
“Slay something?”
Lucy nodded grimly. “Yes. And if we don’t find him and stop him when we both know we could, then I could never forgive myself.”
Clark swayed unsteadily. “I have an idea, but I need you to do something.”
“Anything.”
“In the woods a little ways back, there’s a guy. A body. No way in hell I’m climbing that hill in the shape I’m in. You go up there and find that guy, and search him. He has to have a phone. Maybe that’ll let us know something.”
“A dead body? You’re serious?”
“We can just go home if you want to,” Clark said, starting to hobble away.
“No. I got this.” Lucy led Clark to the edge of the townhouse and left him, leaning against the brick façade
. She pointed into the woods. “That way?”
“Yep. Probably should hurry. Response time for the FD around here is sub-ten-minutes.”
Lucy mumbled as she went out into the night. Clark could hear her struggle up the hill, then things were quiet.
He took stock of himself, wondering if he’d pass out again anytime soon. He hoped it came at an advantageous time if he did.
From the woods, he heard a retching noise, like a drunk on the tail end of a bender. Since it was dark, he didn’t try to suppress his smile.
Moments later, Lucy came traipsing out of the tree line. “Gross. Gross, gross, gross.”
“What do you mean?” Clark said, feigning ignorance.
“He was all gooey,” Lucy said, dry-heaving at the word. “So much goo everywhere.”
“They usually are when you gut them,” Clark said. “There isn’t anything special about that guy.”
“It’s just… I’ve never…”
It hit Clark like a ton of bricks. He’d been in his line of work for so long, he often forgot that not everyone had killed someone, or even seen a dead body. He usually worked with Miri or their teammate Bas, or even Terry Hakagawa. All experienced professionals. Lucy was the best at what she did, but what she did wasn’t killing people.
“Hey kid, I’m sorry. I didn’t even think before I sent you up there.”
“Why? Time for me to put my big-girl panties on. Besides,” she said, holding up her hands in the darkness, “I found these.”
Somewhere in the distance, the faint wail of a fire engine approached.
“Let’s get to the car and you can show me there. I can’t imagine it’ll be too much longer before we get some company.”
The pair moved to Clark’s stolen SUV at the end of the road. They shut the door just in time to see the lights from a fire truck pull onto the opposite end of the road. From Clark’s vantage point in the driver’s seat, he could see the flames lapping from the first level up the front of the house. The explosion the cartel had set was nothing compared to what Keever had come up with. Both were similar in terms of initial impact, but Keever’s was designed to burn.
Clark knew he’d never set foot in the townhome again.
In the next seat, the dome light flicked on. Lucy studied the phone she’d taken from the sniper, as well as a small green bound book, with the word “Memorandum” in gold writing on the cover.
“Phone’s locked up pretty good,” Lucy said.
“Can you break into it?”
“Sure, if you give me enough time. Not sitting at the scene of an arson. You have your phone?”
Clark fished his phone from his pocket, amazingly intact despite the fall from the back deck.
Lucy flipped through the book, passing phone numbers and settling on the page in the back, the scratch page which had an address scrawled on it. She put it into the map function of Clark’s smartphone and made a motion with her fingers to enlarge the screen. “That’s it.”
“How the hell can you be so sure?”
“How old are you?”
“What the hell does that have to do with—”
“Thirty-seven, right?”
“Yeah,” Clark said, looking at his friend in the dull dome light.
“So I’m ten years younger. We’re both pretty young, right?”
“I don’t feel it right now.”
“Provided you don’t do something stupid and get yourself killed, we’re going to work together for a long time.”
“What’s your point?”
“If you spend the next twenty years asking me every single time if I’m sure what I’m telling you is right, I’m eventually going to stab you in the face.”
“You really went the long way around for that one.”
Lucy smiled, proud of her retort.
“You’ve never steered me wrong.”
“Not on purpose, Clark. You know that.”
“You win. Navigate. Let’s go get Keever. It’ll save me the trouble of tracking him down later.”
“Now you’re talking.”
Clark drove away, driving right past the initial wave of first responders. He kept driving, following Lucy’s directions as she led him away from the place, hopeful they’d find Keever in time to stop whatever the psychopath had planned.
Sixty-Six
McHenry settled into the train for the ride. He’d had to change his ticket; his meeting with Butterfield had made him miss the first departure time. Still, McHenry knew it had been worth the extra expense.
Now that he had the information that Butterfield had been so ready to dangle over him, he realized there were fewer loose ends than he had believed. The only things he could think of now were Lucy and Clark. No one else would be able to connect him to the treachery in Costa Rica, or the giving up of his subordinates’ personal information.
McHenry looked out the window as the world began to slip by, into the lights illuminating the night. With any luck, that idiot Keever would be able to kill two birds with one stone.
McHenry’s smartphone rang. He glanced at it, surprised to see the number displayed. “Captain?”
“Mr. McHenry, sorry to disturb you this evening.”
“I’m just sorry you’ve had to call me, as opposed to saving people’s lives, pulling them from burning buildings, or whatever heroics you and your men have found yourself in for the day.”
Captain Chase Sullivan chuckled into the phone. “Nothing that dramatic, I’m afraid. I just wanted to make sure you were aware of something. Your information request is still active for several homes in the area. We’re supposed to call you if emergency services are called out?”
“Yes?” McHenry said cordially, but feeling impatient.
“That townhouse? The one that had the fire a couple months ago?”
“I remember.”
“It must have the worst luck, because it’s on fire again right now.”
McHenry sat up. “Are you sure?”
“Hell, I’m looking at it. My men already evacuated the rest of the houses in the unit and they’re dousing it. It’s under control, but I thought I’d give you a call and let you know.”
“I can’t believe it,” McHenry said hollowly. “Was anyone hurt?”
“That’s the weird thing…”
“Go on.”
“My men went through the house. There’s no one inside. No bodies or anything like that.”
“Thank heavens,” McHenry said, squeezing the phone so hard it groaned.
“Well, I wouldn’t be so quick.”
“Oh?” McHenry said, a glimmer of hope in his voice.
“My guys were walking around the house and found a little path that was trampled in the grass. They thought maybe it was someone injured in the fire who staggered away. They found a body in the woods. Guy’s dead, gutted like a fish.”
“Could you describe him for me?”
“Uh, sure. Lots of greasepaint on his face, like a hunter or something. Probably mid-forties, not too big. Caucasian under all the camouflage.”
McHenry slammed the phone against the tray in front of him. He brought it back to his mouth. “Are there any other bodies?”
“Nope. My guys checked pretty thoroughly. We think he’s the only one.”
“Thank you for calling, Captain Sullivan.”
“Sure thing. Hey, do you have any idea—”
McHenry hung up the phone, giving it another slam for good measure.
The passenger in the seat in front of him turned around, and McHenry glowered at him until his eyes went back toward the front of the train.
McHenry’s mind was racing. Keever had missed. If there were no bodies in the townhome, then Lucy Gordon was still alive. That there was a dead, gutted body in the woods told him Clark was still alive.
He breathed deeply, then scrolled through his outgoing calls, thumbing the green button. To his surprise, Keever answered.
“Keever?”
“Hey, boss man. What’s
the word? I got your message about the girl. I’ve already set things up to handle that. Good tip you gave me on using Clark’s old place. When he shows up, bang. All I had to do was rig a little—”
“You missed,” McHenry said.
“What the hell do you mean?”
McHenry exhaled. “You didn’t get either of them. Clark and the girl are both still alive. Even worse, we don’t even know where they are now.”
“You sure?”
“Positive,” McHenry said.
“Damn. Oh well.”
“What do you mean, ‘oh well’?”
“I’ll give it a couple days, then see what I can do.”
“You don’t have a couple of days. If Clark and the woman are both alive, then you need to handle it now,” McHenry said.
“I’m a little busy right now.”
“Busy? You realize Czerny Clark knows you set him up and tried to kill a friend of his. You’re in as much trouble as I am right now.”
“I don’t think so,” Keever said. “He doesn’t know where I am. That’s why it’s called a safe house. I figure I can hang out here for a couple days. Sample some of the fine women the area has to offer. Then I’ll get back on the clock.”
“Keever, you idiot, listen to wha—”
The phone clicked off as McHenry was speaking. He looked down and saw that the call had been terminated. He called back, but was sent straight to voicemail. He stuffed his phone in the bag next to him and immediately retrieved the burner flip phone he’d brought with him.
He’d sworn he’d only use it in a last-ditch effort, and only in the greatest of emergencies. McHenry couldn’t think of anything worse than Clark coming for him, especially after the idiot Keever had missed. He flipped the phone open and closed, staring out the window, wondering just how screwed he was.
Sixty-Seven
The drive across town was quick. The traffic in the DC metro area was enough to make a person lose their mind most of the time, but by now it was late enough that most people had made it home, so the traffic would be much lighter. Clark followed Lucy’s instructions and pulled off the main highway, onto a couple of surface streets in a part of the city that wasn’t entirely residential.
