by Zoe Sharp
‘Really?’ I said, trying not to let the doubt show in my voice. I took another half-dozen strides. ‘Why?’
‘He’s big on this whole mind-and-body thing,’ Sagar said. ‘I mean, I hated getting out of bed in the morning to go run, but I did it because he always made me feel like I’d be letting myself down if I didn’t. And I always swore I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to.’
‘And now you don’t have to?’
‘Yeah,’ he grumbled. ‘I do it just about every day. That’s the trouble with Bane. He spouts all this crap about you finding your own path, but you kinda get the feeling he’s always there pulling your strings, y’know?’
‘Like the book he’d lent to Witney, you mean – Catcher in the Rye?’
Sagar’s stride faltered. ‘You got that, huh?’ he said and the sheepish look was back in full swing. ‘I didn’t want to bring it up, in case you guys thought I was making something out of nothing, but—’
‘I know Hinckley was obsessed with the book before he tried to knock off President Reagan, and Mark Chapman had a copy on him when he shot John Lennon,’ I said with a sideways glance. ‘They do teach us how to watch out for loony stalkers in this business, you know.’
‘Sorry, yeah,’ Sagar said, flashing a quick smile. ‘And there was this other guy – somebody Bardo – killed an actress called Rebecca Schaeffer,’ he went on. ‘He was carrying the book when he shot her.’
‘Interesting, but hardly conclusive,’ I pointed out, altering my stride as the incline steepened towards a left-hand hairpin, feeling my muscles begin to tighten. ‘The thing sells in its hundreds of thousands. Not everybody who reads it is a lone assassin. Next you’ll be telling me Bane had you listening to heavy metal so you could absorb the hidden satanic messages.’
‘You can mock,’ Sagar protested quietly, starting to lose his breath now. ‘But you saw what he was like yesterday, Charlie. You felt it, just like I did. And you could tell he was lying about Witney being afraid, couldn’t you?’
Denying it would have meant lying to him myself, and I wasn’t prepared to do that just for the hell of it. I saved my breath for the hill.
Just before we hit the blind corner, I glanced back casually over my shoulder, as if checking for traffic. Three hundred metres behind us was a dusty Chevy Astro van in a self-consciously nondescript shade of beige. It hadn’t been there the last time I’d checked.
I couldn’t remember if it was a requirement to have a front licence plate in California but, if so, the van was in violation of the code. I caught a glimpse of two men in the front seat. They were wearing those hunting hats with a peak and ear flaps you can tie off under your chin. Technically, it might be winter but that was overkill unless your aim was concealment.
Uh-oh.
‘Come on, Chris, enough slacking,’ I said, keeping any alarm out of my voice. ‘Time to pick up the pace, hmm?’ and lengthened my stride.
Sagar’s pride had him putting on a spurt alongside me, so we pounded through the turn in step. As soon as the van lost sight of us, I grabbed his elbow and flung him sideways towards the edge of the roadside. A sand-pitted steel crash barrier was all that separated us from the steeply sloping canyon side.
‘Hey!’ he yelped, baulking. ‘What the—?’
I didn’t answer. One look over the precipice was enough to tell me there was no escape that way. The ground was made up of loose earth and landslide gravel. It was punctuated by tenacious spiky vegetation and rocks big enough to cause serious injury if you lost your footing, but no use as decent cover. It was a long way down.
Swearing under my breath, I checked the road ahead. It ran straight for probably another five hundred metres before the next winding corner. The gradient would slow and tire us before we reached it. If this really was an ambush, they’d picked their location well.
I felt the reassuring weight of the SIG in the small of my back, debated for maybe half a second then reached under my shirt and drew it. Below us, the van’s engine revved as the driver accelerated towards the corner, abandoning the stealthy approach.
Sagar yanked his arm free and stumbled to a halt, eyes on the gun a little wildly.
‘Charlie—’
‘For God’s sake, Chris, keep moving!’ I jerked my head to the far side of the road. ‘If they make a run at us, get over the barrier there and back down onto the lower stretch of road.’ It might be just as treacherous but at least it wasn’t far to fall on that side, and from there the gradient was all downhill. It would take them time to turn the van around, or force them to continue the pursuit on foot. Anything to even up the game.
I swallowed down the shiver of tension invading my system. Everyone is afraid in a situation like this. Being afraid is normal. It’s what you do with your fear that defines you.
‘I’ll hold them as long as I can,’ I told him, hoping he’d get past the landed-fish stage long enough to take action. The image of Thomas Witney’s tortured body bloomed large and ugly at the front of my mind. ‘Go!’ I snapped. ‘Run like hell and do not come back for me.’
He might have been about to argue but then the van lurched into view, leaning hard as it loaded up the suspension through the turn, and the time for talk was over. There was no doubt in my mind now, even before the nose dipped under heavy braking, the front doors already opening.
I brought the SIG up, double-handed, and took two quick sideways steps to put Sagar at my back. My finger curved around the trigger, beginning to take up the mechanism, but I held my fire. Contrary to popular belief, taking potshots at a moving vehicle is a very hit-and-miss affair, especially with something as small as a 9 mm pistol, but our current threat assessment had come up minimal at best. A fact I now cursed silently.
I had thirteen rounds and no spare magazine.
When I glanced back, Sagar remained frozen to the spot for a moment longer, staring at the rapidly approaching vehicle with disconnected fascination. I shoved my shoulder against his, knocking him sideways, and that finally broke him out of it. He gave a kind of strangled cry and bolted for the edge of the road, but the van driver swung across after him. Panicked by the pursuit, Sagar tripped over his own feet and went sprawling messily to his knees on the stony surface of the road.
I just had time to consider that, whatever his role had been inside Bane’s organisation, field agent wasn’t it.
The van jolted to a halt with its front corner about three metres away from us. I hesitated only long enough to identify my first target. Then the rear sliding door flew open, and the decision was made for me.
A man crouched in the opening. His face was half-hidden beneath a woollen cap and his shoulders spoke of well-muscled bulk. As he opened the door with his left hand, he brought a weapon up to firing position in front of him with his right. Whatever fear that plagued me finally evaporated at that point. Now the waiting was over, I surrendered to experience and sheer survival instinct almost with relief.
I aimed without thinking about it, a reflex action, and put my first two rounds into the centre of the man’s body mass before he had a chance to fire.
He folded with a surprised grunt and dropped the weapon, which clattered somewhere onto the metal floor of the van. That same instinct told me to keep firing until he went down, but I was only too aware of my limited supplies and he was already falling away backwards, beginning to cough. I let him go.
Maintaining a sense of open spatial awareness is one of the hardest things in a firefight. Adrenaline constricts your field of focus until all you can see is the object immediately in front of your sights. Avoiding that tunnelling-down takes countless hours of training. Being regularly shot at for real helps, though. If you survive, you learn.
As it was, while I was dealing with the guy in the back of the van, I was minutely conscious of the front-seat passenger jumping down onto the road, the thump of his boots hitting the surface, the way he brought his arms up around the trailing edge of the door, hands clasped together as he swung towards me
. A big black guy. As well as the hunting hat, he had on a bulky tan canvas jacket and jeans. Could have been a construction worker on his way to site.
Without a pause, I snapped my aim across and fired through the door glass, putting the first round into his upper arm and the second into his chest as he spun. He let go of the weapon in his hands, which landed on the asphalt amid a shower of broken window fragments. Then his legs went from under him. He slid down the bodywork with the blood gleaming dark against the tan of his jacket and shock in his face.
The driver should have been on me by now, but the cab was empty, the door standing open. I crabbed sideways round the front end of the van, keeping below the level of the glass, eyes everywhere. He might have seen his comrades go down and decided to scarper, but I wasn’t betting on it.
I glanced at Sagar again as I edged past him. He was still on the ground, floundering, defenceless.
‘Charlie, what the—?’ he began, his voice high and loud, buzzing. I waved him sharply into silence, but it was too late.
The wheelman reared out from behind the van and charged us. He was wearing a dusty green bomber jacket and was slighter than the other two, carrying less obvious muscle.
As he appeared, he flung his right arm up and back and, at the same time, I heard a shell being racked into the chamber of a pump-action shotgun.
It was deliberate misdirection, that noise. It was exactly how an extendable baton is designed to sound as its telescopic segments unfurl and lock instantly into place. To paralyse by noise association and give the wielder time to deploy the weapon to full and devastating effect.
I shot the wheelman before he’d time to get within striking distance, knowing I had to take him down fast. Two groups of two rounds, body shots, fired as fast as I could work the trigger. Even so, momentum kept him coming, almost lurching into my arms as he stumbled and went to his knees at my feet. I jumped back, tracking him with the SIG all the way down. His face, contorted, was close enough for me to smell cigarettes and spice on his breath.
It was only as he fell, gasping, that I realised he wasn’t dead. That none of them were dead and all of them should have been. I was using hollow point Hydra-Shok rounds that flared on impact to deliver maximum internal damage as they shed velocity. They’d all been on target. So…
Ignoring his yelp of protest, I punted the wheelman over onto his back and dragged open the zip on the bomber jacket. Underneath it, strands of yellow Kevlar tufted through the four holes I’d put in his lower chest.
Body armour.
There was no heavy-duty ceramic trauma plate in the pocket at the front of the vest, and if the way the wheelman groaned when I dug the heel of my hand into the centre of the grouping was anything to go by, he’d cracked a couple of ribs as a result of the multiple close-quarter hits.
I straightened, keeping hold of him, and kicked the baton out of reach. It hadn’t been fitted with a baton cap and skittered happily off the edge of the roadway under the barrier.
‘Come on, up!’ I commanded, wrapping my fist into the back of the man’s collar and hauling him to his knees. He resisted until I jabbed the business end of the SIG close up against his right eye. The end of the barrel was still hot enough to brand him where it briefly touched his skin. He double-flinched – first from the burn and second in case I shot him because of it.
‘The next one,’ I murmured, ‘goes somewhere it won’t grow back.’
He made a flutter of capitulation with his hands, allowed me to half-drag him round the nose of the van. When I let go he rolled onto his side, clutching his chest, and stayed there.
Yeah, sunshine, they don’t warn you how much it hurts, do they?
The guy from the passenger seat was still sitting with his back up against the bodywork. Blood was seeping down his left arm but he made a flimsy attempt to block me as I checked under the canvas jacket. Sure enough, he was also wearing armour. I looked for the gun he’d dropped among the mess of glass, found it nearly concealed beneath his thigh.
But when I lifted it out, I found he hadn’t been carrying a gun at all. The weapon was a TASER, capable of delivering a fifty thousand-volt charge at anything up to ten metres. I’d had the misfortune to be hit with one only a few months previously and it wasn’t pleasant – plenty nasty enough to put you on the ground and keep you there. It didn’t compete with being shot, but in my personal experience there wasn’t all that much to choose between them.
I hefted the TASER for a moment, considering, then flung the stun gun out sideways, saw the passenger’s eyes follow its looping trajectory over the crash barrier. Saw the fear jerk in them.
Then I heard a slight scrape from the rear of the van and took two quick sidesteps, bringing the SIG up again.
The first guy I’d shot was sitting up, legs splayed, rubbing uneasily at his chest. As I moved into view, he reached automatically towards his own fallen weapon on the floor of the van. Now I had the chance to look at it properly, I could see it was another TASER. If the lack of blood was anything to go by, he too had a vest. He was enough of a pro to freeze when he saw the gun in my hands and the intent with which it was being pointed in his direction. I’d already shot him once without hesitation, but still he weighed up the odds.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said. ‘Confucius say, “Man who wears bulletproof vest should not complain if shot in bollocks,”’ and deliberately lowered my aim. His questing hand froze again, allowing me to edge forwards and pluck the stun gun out of reach. It quickly followed the baton and the other TASER over the edge of the road.
And, gradually, I became aware of the warm breeze coming up the canyon, stirring the desultory grasses that had sprouted by the shoulder. Above the ringing in my ears I heard the van’s engine ticking as it cooled. The guy I’d winged in the arm was breathing more heavily than the others. Somewhere higher up, the gunshots had set a dog barking. The sweat that pooled suddenly at the base of my spine had very little to do with exercise, but I noted almost remotely that my hands were steady.
I backed up far enough to keep the three of them covered and pulled my mobile phone out of the zip pocket of my sweatshirt with my left hand, flipping it open and stabbing the speed-dial number for Sean’s phone with my thumb.
As it rang out, I glanced across at my reluctant principal, still on the ground in front of the van.
‘Do you want to ask them, or should I?’ I said with a measure of calm.
‘Ask them what?’ His own voice was rough.
I jerked my head towards our attackers. ‘Which of them reads JD Salinger.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Detective Gardner arrived twenty minutes after the first of the black-and-whites. She climbed out of her car and stood, hands on hips, surveying the taped-off scene with barely contained annoyance. She was wearing jeans today, boots with Cuban heels and a loose lightweight jacket that did a reasonable job of hiding the 9 mm on her belt.
Considering the possible connection to Thomas Witney’s murder, I shouldn’t have been surprised that she got the call-out on this one, but that didn’t mean any of us had to be pleased about it, least of all her.
She glanced over to where I stood, leaning against the front wing of our remaining Suburban, Sean alongside me. I half-expected her to come charging over, but she was too much of a pro for that.
Instead, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, she ducked under the tape and did a brisk walk-round of the Chevy van, still abandoned in the middle of the road with the doors flung wide. The crime scene techs had carefully marked the position of every piece of ejected brass from my SIG, and were now busy photographing the bloodstains from the passenger’s flesh wound.
Gardner seemed in no hurry to get to us. She spoke to the uniforms who’d been first on scene, was shown an evidence bag containing my surrendered gun, and others containing the TASERs and the extendable baton, which they’d recovered after I’d helpfully pointed out their existence and location. The baton had rolled as far as the gutte
r of the lower stretch of road before it had snagged in the scrub.
I shifted my weight, risked a look to Sean, but his eyes were on the detective as she leaned into the rear of both cars where the uniforms had cuffed and separated the suspects, spoke to them briefly. The front-seat passenger, watched over by a burly cop, was still being patched up by the paramedic crew.
They’d cut away his jacket to treat the arm wound, and the hole in his covert body armour was plain to see. He’d been turning, and my second shot landed slightly high and right of centre because of that. Without the vest, the trajectory of the round would have carved through his chest cavity on a lethal diagonal course.
He’d be dead, I thought. They’d all be dead…
Gardner looked closely at the hole I’d left and made some offhand remark to the paramedic, who laughed. We were too far away to hear, but it brought a scowl to the injured man’s face.
Only then did she discard the gloves and stroll over towards us, stuffing her hands into her front pockets so the jacket was pulled back to reveal both gun and badge. She halted a couple of metres away and subjected the pair of us to a hard stare, head tilted.
‘You people just cannot stay out of trouble, can you?’
‘They came after us,’ I said mildly. ‘Not the other way round.’
She grunted, then asked with reluctance, ‘Your guy OK?’
Sean jerked his head towards the rear of the Suburban and I opened the door. Chris Sagar was sitting hunched down nervously in the back seat and he looked up with a hunted expression, cringing away until he recognised the face peering in.
‘You promised me Bane wouldn’t know I was there,’ he said to her, mournfully reproachful. ‘What the hell am I gonna do now, huh?’
She stared a moment longer without expression, nodded and shut the door again.
‘Lucky he had you,’ was all she said, peeling the silver paper from a stick of gum and folding it into her mouth. ‘So, you wanna let me have your side of it?’
