by Lee Child
But it got even worse. Before that very, very bad time in her life was over, a man threatened to end her life. And not just any man, but a man she believed to be a good man.
And who got her out of that fix? Well, sure, her dad was there just in time, but it was Kelly herself who took action. It was Kelly who thought of a way to disable that man just long enough for the scales to tip in her favor.
In a split second, too.
Kelly wondered whether a similar opportunity existed now. Something that might give her an edge, buy her enough time for her dad and the policeman to help her out.
That was when her eyes landed on the cup of hot coffee sitting in the center console.
“GREAT PLAN!” GARBER SHOUTED. “RAM the truck! Is that right out of the FBI playbook?”
Reilly had to admit to a level of frustration. He had no backup, and he had no weapon. (If there was any good news, he knew Faustus had no weapon, either. He’d checked him for one just before the man got the jump on him.) What he needed was a frickin’ helicopter with lasers, but this wasn’t James Bond.
This was real life.
What he needed now was some kind of break. For the truck to have a flat tire. For it to run out of gas, but based on what Garber’d told him, that was unlikely. A goddamn moose trying to run across the highway right about now would be a blessing.
At least the cruiser was topped up. He needed to get Garber to make some calls, try to get a roadblock established farther up the interstate, or maybe—
What the hell?
The pickup was swerving all over the road.
KELLY SAID, “CATCH.”
She was perched on the front of her seat, leaning down into the footwell. She had her right hand on the canister and tossed it underhand and to the left, aiming it right toward Kristoff’s face.
“Jesus!” he shouted.
He took his left hand off the wheel to catch the cylinder before it flew out his window, batted it down into his lap. Then it started to roll toward his knees. He wanted to catch it before it dropped by his legs, where it would be rolling around his feet, interfering with his operation of the pedals.
It was during this moment of distraction that Kelly pried the plastic lid off the coffee cup and wrapped her hand around it.
Her dad was right. It would have stayed hot all the way to their destination. How did anyone drink this stuff?
As she whipped it out of the cup holder, some coffee slipped over the edge and onto her fingers, scalding them. It hurt like hell, as her father would be inclined to say, but Kelly didn’t have time to whine about it, because she only had about a tenth of a second to throw this too-hot-to-drink coffee in this bad man’s face.
Which is exactly what she did.
The black liquid arced through the air, splashing across Kristoff’s right cheek and neck and, judging by the way he was throwing his right hand over his eye, that, too.
Kristoff screamed. Not “Jesus!” this time. Just a cry of intense pain and anguish. Primal.
He tried to maintain steering with his left hand, and was still attempting to see the road with his left eye, but the truck was pitching all over the place, and the canister had hit the floor, rolling side to side in time with Kristoff’s erratic steering.
Kristoff took his right hand off his face long enough to make a wild, retaliatory swing in Kelly’s direction, but she had pushed herself up against the door, out of reach, and was thinking about whether to hop over the seat and hide in the narrow space behind them. But she decided against that, figuring that if the truck came to a stop, or even slowed, she needed to be by the door so she could hop out.
Indeed, the truck was slowing. Kristoff had taken his foot off the gas. And given that the truck was heading up a slight grade, it was going to lose speed even more quickly. He hadn’t hit the brake yet, but he couldn’t keep up his recent pace when he couldn’t see where he was going.
After another couple of futile swings at Kelly, the man put his hand back to his face, but then he realized the wounds hurt too much to touch. His right eye remained closed.
He screamed: “You blinded me! You fried my eye, you little bitch!”
Kelly was probably more scared right now than she’d ever been in her life—even more than when that man threatened her a few years ago—but she also felt pretty good. For half a second, she’d wondered whether she’d get in trouble for making a man lose one of his eyes, but then thought her dad would probably be okay with it.
He could be pretty cool about things.
She glanced back through the window, saw the police car still there. Waved at her dad again as the truck lurched from left to right.
Then she heard the familiar sound of gravel under the tires. She whirled around, saw that they were veering off the pavement onto the shoulder. Kristoff had his foot on the brake. He hung his head low, moved it languidly back and forth, trying to deal with the pain.
When the truck was nearly stopped, Kelly pulled on the door handle, let the door swing wide, and jumped.
“KELLY!”
Glen Garber screamed when he saw his daughter leap from the passenger’s door of the nearly stopped truck. He bolted from the police cruiser before Reilly had thrown it into park.
Kelly landed in the tall grasses just beyond the shoulder. Her knees buckled, forcing her into a roll, her body tumbling out of view.
Glen ran. “Kelly! Kelly!”
Before he could get to her, her head popped up above the grass. An arm went into the air. “Here!”
Behind him, Garber heard Reilly shout at the top of his lungs: “Run!”
IT WASN’T THAT REILLY DIDN’T care about Garber and his kid, but he had a more pressing matter to deal with.
Like the man he knew as Faustus, who had thrown open the driver’s door of the pickup and was stumbling out. But not before reaching for something on the floor ahead of the seat. He emerged, standing there a couple of steps in front of the open door, clutching the cylinder. Raising it above his head.
Whoa.
Reilly didn’t know what the hell had happened in that truck, but half of the man’s face was red and blotchy and blistered and some of the skin looked like it was ready to fall off. His right eye was shut.
Reilly told Garber and his daughter to run.
“I’ll do it!” the man yelled. “I’ll smash it right into the road! I’ll crack this thing wide open. You want that?”
Reilly raised an unthreatening palm.
“Come on,” the FBI agent said. “You’ll take yourself out, too. You’ll never have the fun of seeing your handiwork.”
“Doesn’t much matter now,” he said.
Behind them, other motorists on the highway slowed. A couple honked their horns.
Reilly ignored them, instead staying focused on Faustus. He couldn’t stop himself from asking, “What the hell happened to your face?”
“Hot coffee,” Faustus said. “Maybe I’ll sue.”
Reilly noticed that the truck was moving, ever so gradually. They’d all stopped on a very slight, uphill grade, and the Ford was starting to roll back. Faustus had bailed out of it so quickly he must not have put the shift solidly into park.
By the time Faustus noticed, it was too late to react.
The open driver’s door caught him on the back and threw him down onto the highway like he’d been tackled. The bottom edge of the door hit the back of his head hard enough that he did a face-plant on the pavement, arms outstretched.
He wasn’t moving. Only his fingers, twitching, releasing their grip on the cylinder, which started to roll along the asphalt toward Reilly, bumping over small stones and irregularities in the surface.
Please don’t have opened, please don’t have opened.
Reilly bolted forward, threw his body over the cylinder, trapped it below his torso, smothering it like it was a grenade. Even though it was not going to explode, it had the potential to do more damage than a thousand grenades. The truck rolled past him to his right, the f
ront wheels turning slightly, angling the truck’s back end toward the ditch.
As it rolled by, Reilly saw Garber and his daughter a good fifty yards away, heading for a wooded area beyond the highway’s edge. Garber glanced back, saw Reilly on the ground, grabbed Kelly by the elbow to stop her.
Reilly could just barely hear him tell her, “Stay here.”
And then he came running.
“Are you hit?” Garber shouted.
“No!”
“What about him?”
“I’m guessing dead. That door hit him hard, and then his head hit the pavement. He hasn’t moved.”
“Why are you lying on—?”
“Have you got a bag in your truck? A plastic bag? A couple of them? Anything airtight?” A thought hit him. “Evidence bags in the cruiser!”
Garber stopped, ran for the police car, grabbed the keys and ran around back to pop the trunk. It took him about fifteen seconds to find what he was looking for. Clear plastic, sealable bags, like oversized sandwich bags. He grabbed a handful and ran back to Reilly as his truck slowly backed into the ditch, the engine still running.
The agent, still keeping his body pressed to the pavement, reached up for a bag. “Give it to me.”
Garber had some sense of how serious the situation was.
“Should I start running again?” he asked.
Reilly grimaced. “Probably not much point. We’re either safe, or we’re not. You couldn’t run fast enough to save yourself.”
He worked the bag under his torso, then, in one swift motion, got up on his knees, shoved the cylinder into it, and sealed the top.
Garber realized he was holding his breath.
“You’ve got the end of the world in that bag, don’t you?”
“Pretty much,” Reilly replied. “Hand me another. I’m going to double bag it. Maybe even triple.”
“Did anything leak out?”
“If we’re still standing a minute from now, I’d say no.”
He reached out a hand to Garber, and he took it. He helped the agent to his feet, and they regarded each other for a moment. Garber kept glancing at his watch.
“Thirty seconds.”
“Give it a little longer,” Reilly said.
“If it happens, what, exactly, will happen?”
“You don’t want to know. The good news is, it’ll be quick.”
Garber kept his eye on his watch. “That’s a minute and a half now.”
“I’d say we’re going to live.” Reilly smiled. “Your kid threw hot coffee in his face?”
Garber nodded.
The smile turned into a grin. “Get her over here.”
Garber waved Kelly in. She arrived, nearly breathless, several seconds later. Shaken, but relieved, too.
Reilly rested his hands on her shoulders. “You are something else.”
Kelly smiled weakly.
“Really, you are,” Sean Reilly said. “You ever need anything, you just name it.”
Kelly thought a moment. She said, “I never did get my chicken nuggets.”
JOHN LESCROART
VS. T. JEFFERSON PARKER
The genesis of this story goes all the way back to 2009 when John and Jeff discovered a shared love of fishing, while contributing a short story to an anthology called Hook, Line & Sinister. Then, in 2011, the two hung out together on a deepwater fly-fishing trip to East Cape and Cerralvo Island in Baja California. Every day for a week the anglers set out at dawn in pangas (Mexican fishing boats) seeking tuna, dorado, roosterfish, amberjack, pompano, or whatever else might be biting. Their guides were a fantastic and personable collection of skilled pilots and fishermen, mostly from one extended family who lived in the nearby village of Agua Amarga.
When they were approached with the concept for FaceOff, both immediately glommed on to the idea of John’s Wyatt Hunt (The Hunt Club, Treasure Hunt, and The Hunter) and Jeff’s Joe Trona (Silent Joe) teaming together. Both characters were close to the same age, athletic, and were more or less involved with law enforcement, so putting them together on a fishing trip to Baja was a no-brainer. As soon as the two characters showed up on the page together, the chemistry was clear and palpable. John and Jeff quickly discovered that if those two characters actually existed in real life, they would probably be buds. Friendship aside, though, this is a thriller anthology, so the story needed an adventure that would place the heroes in danger.
Jeff had done quite a lot of research into Mexico’s narcotrafficantes. Headlines from around the world attest every day that there is a serious problem with drug trafficking in that part of the world. So what could be better, fiction-wise, than to have these gangsters threaten a tightly knit extended family of hardworking fishermen? And what would poor fishermen possess that could possibly lure the local narcotrafficantes out to their village so that they could steal it? These good people don’t do drugs. They’re not political. They fish and play baseball. But there is one other little-known, and only partially explored, commodity in Baja California that would draw the attention of gangsters.
Gold.
A hidden stash that could rejuvenate a little fishing town, providing money for a new electric generator to make ice and run refrigerators, to power streetlights, and buy new motors for the pangas. But the narcotrafficantes have also heard rumors of gold. Where it’s hidden. Who’s hiding it. They won’t hesitate to torture and kill to get their hands on it.
What’s to stop them?
Just two Americans, Wyatt Hunt and Joe Trona, down in Mexico on a fishing vacation.
Silent Hunt
WYATT HUNT MADE IT TO his gate in the International Terminal of LAX with an hour to spare before boarding would begin for his noon connecting flight to La Paz. He was traveling light, with one brand-new light-brown-on-dark-brown carry-on duffel bag into which he’d stuffed nearly two grand’s worth of new fly-fishing gear, his toilet kit, and two changes of clothes, long pants of good wicking material that with a zip converted into shorts and two long-sleeved shirts, the latter items newly purchased from REI against what was forecast to be debilitating heat—eight hours a day on the water, no shade, average temperature around 110.
It was September and his party of ten, all unknown to him, were going after dorado, roosterfish, various tuna, and the occasional marlin, sailfish, or shark. None of these fish would weigh less than ten pounds, and some might go to a hundred or more. Hunt, a lifelong fly-fisherman in streams for trout in the half-pound range, was skeptical about the ability of his new gear to handle fighting fish of this size and caliber, but he was game to try.
In any event, he was a gear freak and the new stuff—ten-weight and twelve-weight rods, reels holding over a hundred yards of sixty- and eighty-pound test backing, barbed and artistically feathered hooks the length of his fingers—was undoubtedly cool. He’d gone out with a fishing pro at San Francisco’s Baker Beach four times over the past month, trying to master the casting technique known as double-hauling, essential if you wanted to reach surface targets in salt water. He was still far from expert, but at least felt he wouldn’t completely embarrass himself.
With time to kill and slumping a bit after his five AM wake-up, he grabbed an open chair at the end of the bar, stuffed his duffel down under his feet, and ordered a large cup of coffee. When he’d finished about half of it, he turned to the guy next to him—a portly, pale, bald guy in a bright red and green Hawaiian shirt. “You mind watching my duffel a minute?” he asked. “I’ve got to hit the head.”
The older gentleman, already drinking something with an umbrella in it, looked down at Hunt’s duffel and broke an easy smile. “We are urged not to leave our baggage with strangers, are we not?”
“Constantly.” Hunt had covered his half cup with a napkin and was already on his feet, now suddenly in a bit of a hurry. He lowered his voice. “I promise it’s not a bomb. You can look if you want.”
“I’m going to trust you,” the gentleman said. “Go already.”
On the way
to the men’s room, Hunt not for the first time found himself reflecting on the fact that in many ways, and despite his own demise, Osama bin Laden had basically won the first round of the War on Terror. Already that morning, Hunt not once but twice had to take off his shoes and belt, empty his pockets, and assume the position in the TSA’s X-ray machine. A victim of his early-morning fatigue in San Fran, if they hadn’t just changed the rules again, he’d also have donated to the cause the Swiss Army knife he’d forgotten in his pocket—which would have been the third time that had happened.
Even if he acknowledged the general reason for it, the whole thing pissed him off.
As if the geezer next to him was going to steal his duffel bag. He didn’t look like he could even lift the thing. As if anybody, for that matter, in the secured area for boarding, was an actual threat to take anybody else’s luggage.
Caught up in his internal rave, Hunt ran with it. Let’s see: first, your potential thief needs a valid boarding pass with photo ID, then he’s half stripped and X-rayed, and he’s going along with this runaround because of the very off chance that some random person will leave their baggage “unattended”—Hunt loved that word!—and that he would then have an opportunity to steal it. And then what? Leave the building with his loot? When had that happened? Had it ever happened? Could it ever happen? Who thought of these things? What was the average IQ of a TSA employee anyway? Or of the goddamned director of the Department of Homeland Security, for that matter?
Room temp at best, Hunt was thinking as he exited the men’s room . . .
. . . just in time to see a guy about his own age and size, in jeans, a work shirt, and a San Diego Padres baseball hat pulled down low over his eyes, strolling toward the security gates with Hunt’s pretty damn distinctive duffel bag slung under his left shoulder. Jesus Christ!
“Hey!” Hunt yelled after him. “Hey! Wait up, there!”
The guy kept walking.
Hunt broke into a trot.
The other man was at least sixty feet away from Hunt and now almost to the exit. The thief moved with an easy grace, taking long strides, neither slowing down in the least nor speeding up, but moving, moving, moving. He would be at the exit within seconds.
