by Chris Holm
The agent in front of him stood with the index finger of her writing hand held to the earpiece in her ear as though straining to hear what was being said—or perhaps simply not believing it. As Hendricks watched, she dropped her clipboard and her pen. Her left hand went to her neck and worried at the gold cross she wore around it.
“What happened?” Hendricks asked.
“There’s been some kind of accident,” she said. “One of the ambulances leaving the scene. They were escorting a patient, when...” She trailed off, her sentence lost somewhere in the middle distance with her gaze.
“An accident,” Hendricks echoed. It was clear to him from her reaction that whatever happened had been anything but.
“They...they didn’t make it to the hospital. Two officers, the driver, and an EMT.”
“And the patient?” Hendricks prompted, afraid he already knew the answer. “What happened to the patient?”
“He’s gone,” she said, anger strengthening her tone. “But he won’t stay that way. Not for long.”
About that, Hendricks thought, she was right—but not in the way that she meant.
He was sure the man in question was the one who’d tried to kill him. That Hendricks had failed to finish him as he’d so foolishly hoped. That he’d somehow bluffed his way onto that ambulance and then murdered his way out of it.
And that now that this man had Hendricks’s scent, he wouldn’t stay gone for long.
31
“Jesus Christ,” breathed Garfield. “This was no fucking accident.” The intersection of Campbell and East 22nd was a mess of pebbled glass and sundered metal, with splashes of crimson all around. Local PD had set up a wide perimeter around the scene—a small act of kindness to any pedestrians who might happen by. Not many did. Campbell and East 22nd crossed in the short stretch between the highway overpass to the east, and the gentle rise of Hospital Hill to the west—a squat, unattractive no-man’s-land of overgrown, chain-linked vacant lots, low-slung yellow-brick commercial buildings, and satellite parking for the rambling medical complex that sprawled across ten city blocks.
The ambulance lay on its side in the center of the intersection, resting at a diagonal to the right angles of the streets. The driver was facedown in a pool of his own blood some twenty yards from where it sat—thrown by the force of the crash, Garfield thought at first. But the windshield, though fractured, was intact, and when he examined the man, he found his back riddled with bullet holes, as if he’d run and been gunned down.
Garfield circled the ambulance, its undercarriage still warm enough to raise a sweat on his brow as he passed. As he reached the back, he saw the left-hand—now bottommost—rear door was open, gravity keeping its right-hand mate closed. Across it lay the remains of the pretty young EMT Garfield had tried to flirt with—Sofia, he recalled. “You’d do well to remember it,” she’d told him, though looking at her now—arms extended, fingernails split against the sun-bleached blacktop as though she’d tried desperately to escape, her head a pulpy mess thanks to a couple close-range gunshots—he failed to see how the knowledge did him any good.
Garfield crouched beside her. One glassy eye devoid of life stared vaguely in his direction. He resisted the urge to close it. Doing so would only serve to contaminate the crime scene. A glance past her into the ambulance showed a mess of upturned medical equipment amid which lay two crumpled uniformed officers. One’s face was gone—shot clean through, a hollow concave like a gore-filled watermelon left behind. The other took two to the chest, but must have kept on ticking, because he’d also been choked with what looked to be some kind of handmade garrote— his face gray-blue, his lolling tongue purple, his eyes bulging and splotched red from burst vessels.
There was no sign of the patient they’d been transporting. Of Garfield’s witness.
Garfield cursed again. Looked away.
A black-and-white stopped alongside him. The back door opened. A haggard-looking Charlie Thompson stepped out. “What’ve we got?” she asked, her voice suggesting exhaustion so profound, she was beyond the capacity of registering any further surprise.
“A fucking mess is what we’ve got. Both cops and EMTs are dead, and our witness is missing. Guess your ghost just jumped a couple spots on our Most Wanted list.”
“How do you figure?” she asked.
“Ain’t it obvious? We had a witness who’d laid eyes on the guy—tangled with him, even—and he knew it. So he somehow gave our boys the slip at the casino and came here to take our witness out.”
Thompson shook her head. “Doesn’t track,” she said. “Witness or not, we had eyes on my ghost already—my eyes. He could have killed me in the banquet hall and didn’t. And I can’t have been the only other soul to see him—once our questioning of the casino patrons is complete, there’ll be a few more folks who did. Not to mention, the whole damn building’s wired for video, which means some camera somewhere must’ve captured him. So going to all this effort just to kill one witness of many doesn’t make a load of sense. Besides, even if he wanted to, how’d he beat them here to make his play? They were in an emergency vehicle traveling at speed with the benefit of lights and sirens. No way he could have gotten here ahead of them.”
“Okay, then, Matlock—what do you think happened here?”
“Matlock was a lawyer, dumbass—if you wanna play all snide, at least get your reference right.” Her comeback was a reflex, and she regretted it as soon as she said it. Garfield’s prick-mode was a defense mechanism, nothing more, and she should know better than to rise to the bait. Particularly when she was about to make his day a whole lot worse.
“I think your so-called witness did this,” she said. Garfield made to object, but Thompson overrode him. “We know he tangled with my ghost and lived. And we know my ghost’s job didn’t go as planned. He meant to get to Leonwood before Leonwood got to Palomera—that much he made clear in the banquet hall. So my guess is, your witness was, in fact, here to get my ghost—to kill him, I mean. Only my ghost got away.”
Garfield paled. “No—it had to be your guy. It had to.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, not unkindly, “but it wasn’t.”
“You can’t know that for sure,” he said. He looked away from her, toward the lights of the medical complex.
“I can, Hank,” she said. “I do. And you would, too, if you weren’t so blinded by what you’d prefer to see.”
“The hell’re you talking about?”
“The shots,” said Thompson, nodding toward the upturned vehicle. “They came from inside the ambulance.”
As her words sunk in, Garfield sat down hard on the pavement. He felt dizzy. Sick. Worthless. He was complicit in these deaths—an accessory, an accomplice. He’d given the bastard an escape route. Practically marched him past the barricades. He knew he’d never forgive himself for what he’d done.
The bass-drum thud of an approaching helicopter roused him slightly. A news chopper, likely peeling off from the swarm that hovered over Pendleton’s like blowflies over carrion when they caught wind on their scanner of yet another juicy morsel for their never-ending misery buffet just down the road.
“Hey!” Garfield called to one of the uniforms manning the cordon. “Get them out of here, would you? This is a crime scene.”
“Actually, sir, dispatch just patched them through—they said there’s something the agent in charge should see!”
Thompson and Garfield exchanged a glance, and then both took off at a run for the officer. Garfield’s legs were longer, his soul more desperate in that moment for a win, and he beat his partner there. When he grabbed the radio, he didn’t bother to identify himself, instead saying: “Tell me you people have eyes on the guy who did this.”
“Wish we did!” came the shouted, radio-garbled reply.
“Then why’re you calling?”
But their answer didn’t make any damned sense. Garfield asked them to repeat it, assuming he’d simply misheard, but he hadn’t. They’d said, “There’s something wri
tten on the ambulance.”
Garfield and Thompson trotted back over to the upturned wreck. After a moment’s hesitation while she considered scaling it herself, Thompson laced her hands together and offered them to Garfield. He placed a foot inside, and Thompson hoisted him up. He clambered awkwardly onto the skyward-facing side panel of the ambulance and was faced with letters, upside down and three feet high—letters scrawled in blood.
He tilted his head. The message resolved. Garfield read it along with several hundred thousand viewers at home— to say nothing of the millions who’d see it that night when the story of the day’s events went national:
BE SEEING YOU, COWBOY.
32
Michael Hendricks crouched in darkness beside a red-brick foursquare on a quiet suburban street, hidden between its porch and an azalea bush. The night sky was full of stars. The air had taken on the sort of chill that always struck Hendricks as summer’s death knell. His breath plumed. His muscles ached. His shoulder throbbed dully in time with his heartbeat.
The metal cover on the outdoor electrical outlet clacked loudly when he opened it. He winced and glanced toward the window to his left. But no one inside noticed. The children suggested by the swing set out back had long since gone to bed. The couple who owned the place were glued to CNN, which was broadcasting helicopter footage of the message left for him in blood. But although it held their interest, it was nothing for them to worry about. It had happened almost four hundred miles away.
Once the call about the ambulance came in, the Feds were forced to reallocate their resources to search both the hotel and the neighborhood surrounding the crash site, which left local PD and Pendleton’s security in charge of wrangling the frightened casino patrons. It was easy enough to slip past the barricades.
Hendricks knew he’d be likelier to escape suspicion if he weren’t traveling alone, so he’d cozied up to an octogenarian gambler who’d been separated from the rest of her senior-center tour group. He bummed a Windbreaker from a kind stranger on her behalf, which, once zipped, hid her neon-yellow Gamblin’ Grannies T-shirt. She was grateful for it, because the temperature was dropping, but when he offered to help her find her friends, she balked.
“Son,” she said, “I’m old, not stupid—and you don’t want no such thing.” Her tone was sharp enough to chastise, but she was smiling when she said it, and her suspicion was of a benign sort. It was clear she wasn’t afraid of him— why would she be, when he’d already been cleared by the agent at the gate?
Hendricks smiled, too. “You got me,” he said. “I’m just tired of standing around. Plus, my girlfriend must’ve seen the news by now, and I’ve got no way to tell her I’m okay. You wanna help me get outta here so I can let her know I’m not dead?”
“Sure,” she said, “but it’ll cost you.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me, young man. I left eighty bucks in chips on the table when they made me leave, and Lord knows these yahoos ain’t gonna give it back. So if you can make it right, I’ll help you get back to your little lady-friend.”
“You want me to pay you?”
“Damn right I do. You’re lucky I didn’t ask you for double. I expect I-ain’t-dead whoopee’s great. And if you want some, you’re gonna hafta pay the piper.”
Hendricks laughed and took his bankroll from his pocket. The old lady’s eyes went wide. He peeled off two hundred even and handed it over.
“Shit,” she said—though it came out more SHEE-it—“I shoulda gone higher. You must be one lucky sumbitch.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Hendricks said.
But as sarcastically as he’d intended that, he was lucky in one respect: Lorraine—this was the woman’s name— went from mark to coconspirator in the time it took her to pocket Hendricks’s payoff.
She’s the one who hatched the plan. She’d toddle, addled, up to the greenest officer they could find. Hendricks—the doting grandson—would follow close behind, apologizing for her sorry state; she gets confused when she hasn’t had her medicine. It’s at home, and hours past due. No, they wouldn’t need a ride: Hendricks’s car was in the garage at the edge of the lot. That part was true, not that it mattered—Hendricks had no intention of returning to his rental car, for fear it had been burned.
Lorraine played it to the hilt, and the kid bit so hard he might’ve cracked a tooth. Hendricks had to suppress a laugh when the officer slid aside a panel of steel barricade just wide enough to let them pass, and Lorraine shuffled through, arms out like a blind man’s, headed back toward Pendleton’s.
Hendricks trotted after and, with affection not entirely faked, gently turned her around so that they faced the outer lots and the parking garage beyond. Then they strolled arm-in-arm into the distance.
They entered the parking garage just for show and exited the other side, out of sight of the casino. It was there they parted ways. “You sure you’ll be all right?” Hendricks asked her. He was reluctant to strand her so far from her group, in the vast commercial stretch that surrounded the Pendleton’s grounds.
“I ain’t an invalid,” she replied. “I’ve got a cell phone, and thanks to you some spending money, too. I’m gonna call a cab, and I’m gonna have him take me to Winstead’s for a bacon cheeseburger and a chocolate malt. I’m convinced that low-fat crap they feed us at the home don’t actually make you live longer—all those years of not being able to taste your food just makes it feel that way. I’ll cab it back when I’m good and ready.”
Hendricks smiled and peeled another hundred off his roll for her. “In case you ever feel the need to break out for a decent meal again.”
“You’re a dear. You care to split that cab?”
“That’s all right,” he said.
She looked appraisingly at him a moment. “Take care of yourself, would you?”
“I will try.”
Lorraine pecked him on the cheek, and Hendricks set out walking, heading south until he hit the Missouri River, then following its lazy eastward arc until he disappeared from Lorraine’s sight.
Hendricks walked for miles in Norm Gunderson’s god-awful, pinching boat shoes before he came across a set of railroad tracks. He knew the Feds would be covering all passenger rails out of town, as well as airports and rental-car companies, but that was fine by him, since he didn’t plan on availing himself of any of those. He followed the tracks until they crossed a roadway, then waited for a freight train to roll by. It wouldn’t take long, he reasoned— Kansas City was a major shipping hub, servicing freight carriers both local and national—and he knew that trains crossing streets were required to slow. He waited just beyond the intersection in a shallow ditch, shielded from view of the street by a stand of trees. An hour later, his waiting paid off, and he climbed onto an empty cargo car headed for Peoria—not that Hendricks knew that until he’d arrived.
The last thing he wanted was to tangle with a railroad cop, so when the squeal of brakes indicated they were approaching their destination, he hopped off the train, rolling as he landed to cushion the blow. Then he walked—filthy, stiff, exhausted—into town.
Hendricks’s first priority was to call Lester. He hadn’t dared from Kansas City, because he assumed the Feds were monitoring traffic through all the local cell towers—and by the time the train had taken him far enough away to chance it, his burner phone was dead.
His charger was in the rental car he’d left behind. That was okay—cell-phone chargers were easy to obtain; the lost-and-found bins in every coffee shop in the country were full of them. He made three stops before he found one that fit his burner. The girl behind the counter eyed his filthy clothes suspiciously and seemed dubious when he said he’d been in earlier, so he decided not to stay to charge his phone. Instead, he wandered around the adjacent neighborhood until he found a spot with an outlet private enough to suit his needs.
Hendricks plugged in the phone. It booted up. Lester answered on the first ring.
“Jesus, Mikey, ar
e you all right? I’ve been going outta my head!”
“I’m all right,” Hendricks said, his voice just above a whisper. “Barely.”
“What the hell happened out there? The news says Leonwood went on a rampage.”
“I fucked up, Les. I didn’t get to him in time. I was jumped before I got the chance.”
“By who?”
Hendricks sighed. “I wish I knew.”
“This the guy who left the message on the ambulance?”
“Yeah,” Hendricks replied.
“I thought that mighta been directed at you,” Les said. “Gave me hope you were still kicking.”
“What’s the press saying about the guy?”
“Nada. Official story is, he’s an accomplice of Leonwood’s.”
“I don’t think Leonwood knew any more about him being there than I did.”
“You want me to do some digging? Maybe poke around the Feds’ system? I could see how much they’ve got on you, while I’m at it.”
“No,” Hendricks said. “It’s not worth the risk. As good as you are, Les, you can’t make me disappear from Pendleton’s security-cam footage, and it’s too late for that anyway. By now, my picture’s probably been circulated to every airport, train station, bus terminal, and rental car agency from Colorado to Kentucky. But there’s no way they’ve got my name, since as far as Uncle Sam knows, I’m dead and buried. Which means right now, there’s nothing that connects this fucking mess to you; the last thing you should do is stick your neck out and change that.”
“Let me hook you up with a new ID, at least.”
“What’s the point? My face will still be the same. Don’t worry about me—I can make my own way home. I’ve been through worse than this.”
“But this dude’s still out there, hunting you.”
“All the more reason for you to keep clear. Whoever this guy is, Les, he’s bad news—I don’t want you on his radar. Promise me you’ll lie low until I get back.”
