Davis stopped in his tracks. Everyone froze, and the rain beat down on them. The air was dark and thundering.
“Let her go,” Davis called.
“Arrest him, too,” Delaney called out.
Bostrom started over to the security guard holding his pistol out, gripped in both hands. He took his cuffs out as he walked. Davis watched Jennifer through the downpour.
“Drop your weapon!” Bostrom shouted. Davis didn’t so much as look at the deputy, but did as he was told, leaning forward and tossing his gun into the muddy yard. Bostrom reached Davis and took out his cuffs. Jennifer saw his lips move as Bostrom said something to the bodyguard she couldn’t hear. As the cuffs were about to go on, a car slowed in the road and turned into the driveway, headlights shining and wipers whacking back and forth.
“Oh fuck,” said Delaney.
The troopers, three of them, all turned and pointed their weapons at the vehicle. Delaney called out to them. “Stand down, stand down a minute, that’s Stemp’s family.”
Jennifer could just see their faces through the windows, despite the rainwater streaking down the glass. Two pie-eyed children and one mortified-looking woman. Just back from church, coming home to this. All of the cops in the yard were looking at them, including Bostrom, who’d yet to wrap the cuffs around Davis. And Davis seized the moment. In one quick move he bent, scooped up his gun, and took off running, aiming to squeeze in between the ambulance and a trooper vehicle.
“Runner!” Delaney cried out. He aimed and fired his weapon. The explosion beside Jennifer’s head was deafening. Davis was just about to slip between the two vehicles when the bullet took him in the shoulder. It threw him forward, and Davis stumbled and almost pitched all the way down onto the ground. Somehow he stayed upright and kept running. A second later and he was on the other side of the driveway, concealed behind the ambulance. All the troopers took cover. They shielded themselves behind the cruiser and the ambulance on the yard side of the vehicles and threw cautious looks over the hoods.
Delaney shoved Jennifer forward to get her moving again. He was cursing under his breath. When the gun came back to gouge her in the side, the barrel burned her. She cried out and jumped away from it. As she stumbled through the silver rain she saw her life flashing forward. Delaney was going to shoot her. She was going to fall to her knees and die here in the middle of this farm, just like Eddie, his wife and kids looking on.
And then she felt arms grabbing her, and she looked up and saw Deputy Bostrom.
“I’ve got her, I’ve got her,” Bostrom said to Delaney. Her ears felt wadded with cotton, but she heard him. “I’ll take her in.”
Delaney hesitated for a moment. Then one of the troopers shouted. “There he is!”
Jennifer saw Davis, just a sketch of his shape, running into the corn near the barn. The troopers opened fire. The explosions sounded like depth charges. Davis disappeared into the corn stalks a second later. One of the troopers left the cruiser behind and started running after him. Delaney had edged in that direction too, and the last Jennifer saw of him was his back as he stood watching the corn, his trench coat dark with the rain, and then Bostrom grabbed her head and shoved her into the back of his vehicle.
Bostrom slid into the driver’s seat, sparked the ignition and backed out. Jennifer looked out the window as they reversed past Stemp’s family. The little girl had her face to the window, taking everything in as the mother got out of the car.
Jennifer saw Delaney turn his gun on Eddie Stemp’s wife.
“Oh my God,” Jennifer breathed.
Then they were on the road, and the tires spun on the oily asphalt as Bostrom threw it in drive and they sped away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE / THURSDAY, 3:22 PM
Tick. Tick-tock.
Tony Laruso jumped up onto the desk. The entire thing shook beneath Brendan’s feet. It was a desk meant for coercion and coffee mugs — for criminals to bargain with prosecutors; for lawyers to bullshit their clients into thinking there was light at the end of the tunnel, in order to stay on the payroll. It wasn’t meant for two-hundred-pound, convicted identity-thieves squaring shoulders with damaged ex-scientists/ex-cops.
“Tony, the only reason Grimm let you in here is because he knew you’d tear me apart. That’s what he wants.”
“That’s what he’s gonna get.”
“But I’m the one who suggested it.”
Laruso swiped at the air in front of Brendan with both hands — like a bear — and he smiled. He was enjoying himself now, and completely missing the irony. Brendan tried to drive it home. “Why would I ask for this, Tony?”
The convict shrugged, cocked his head and stuck out his lower lip. “Cuz you’re a freak, man. Anybody can see that. You probably get off on this shit. You probably liked it when I was on top of you. You probably wanted me to do more than give you that little spanking. Huh?”
“I’m not a terrorist. That was a rumor Grimm started to get me working for him. Because of what’s going on in this place.”
That got Laruso’s attention. He lowered his hands and his grin faltered. Brendan rushed on.
“I know you’re a part of it, Tony. I know how the liquor comes in with the cleaning supplies, so the dogs can’t smell it. I know how the drugs come in with the food, and with the COs. I know how the kitchen is the main distribution center. And I know how you’re one of the distributors.”
Now Tony Laruso’s face, which had been slack while he listened, built into a rictus of anger. “You’re fucking snitching to the cops?” He leaned close and the table trembled beneath them.
“Like it or not, there’s an investigation pending; a probe that’s going to come through here with a fine-toothed fucking comb, Tony, and take down every single person involved. And yeah, I made that happen.”
Laruso paused, considering this, his expression vacillating between anger and confusion. Maybe he was starting to get it. Brendan drove it home.
“I can either retract my statement, stay in here, branded a terrorist, look forward to monthly beatings, and go on trial for a murder I didn’t commit; or I can let Grimm and this whole place go down while I walk away.” He paused for effect. “Which one do you think I want, Tony?”
Laruso, for just a moment, looked like he was back in the fourth grade, put on the spot by his social-studies teacher about some historical event he knew nothing about. Brendan could almost see him sitting at his little desk back by the window, this kid from the Bronx with a few ounces of innocence still left in him, just a year or two away from the gangs that would initiate and corrupt him with their coarse mimicry of corporate structure. Then his forehead creased with a scowl and his eyes glinted fierce. “You want to see it burn,” he said.
“Tell the man what he’s won,” said Brendan softly, adrenaline corkscrewing through him.
Laruso, instead of backing down, as Brendan had hoped, finally launched himself into a full tackle. Brendan saw him coming, just a blur of teeth and slashing arms and open fingers ready to rip him apart, and at the last second as his hands closed around Brendan’s face and neck (he’s going to pop my head off like a bottle cap) their combined weight flipped the table.
The end where Brendan stood collapsed, the legs cracking and folding beneath them in a flat drop that made his stomach float for a fraction of a second before the hard, unforgiving ground shocked his legs. But for Laruso, the momentum of his lunge flung him past Brendan and catapulted him into the wall. Laruso hit the wall and fell to the ground after catching a handful of Brendan’s fatigues, pulling Brendan on top of him on the floor.
It was just possible for Brendan to get his leg up, to bring it in between himself and the raging convict. He brought his kneecap down squarely on Laruso’s neck, and as their two bodies fully impacted the floor together, Laruso expelled the air from his mashed throat in a wheeze, and his eyelids flew open.
Brendan wasted no time. He’d wanted to reason with the man. He’d wanted to hatch a deal with him, but Tony La
ruso was either too stupid or too conditioned to not hear reason. And now, after this tumbling turn of events, he would be even more livid. He would be unstoppable. He’d been on top of Brendan in the middle of Motchan Center. He’d had his knee gouging into Brendan’s body just like Brendan now speared into his. He’d whispered death threats in Brendan’s ear, he’d ripped his pants down, for God’s sake. He’d been let into segregation with other cons who took turns taunting and cat-calling to Brendan in his isolated cell, pledging his destruction, pledging themselves to a lifetime of his torture. And then his door had been opened by unseen hands, and they’d entered his cell to carry out their threats.
Laruso had scraped him up, beaten him up, pulped his already ruined face, knocked out his tooth. But worse than any of the physical harm, he had made Brendan live in fear.
Brendan was tired of living in fear.
Striking Laruso was like hitting stone. The man’s skull a bowling ball, and there was, in fact, concrete just behind the round shape of it. There was no give, and pain crackled up through Brendan’s arm, the bones vibrating from the impact, the nerves like singed wires. His whole arm tingling and throbbed at the same time, he drew back to strike again. Laruso’s stricken eye was shut and the lid fluttering. His other eye somehow remained wide and staring and filled with enmity.
One more punch would do it.
Yes, beyond corruption and greed there was human frailty, addiction, at work, but as Brendan raised his fist in the air and brought it down again, he felt justified.
Tick, anyway, tick-tock.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO / THURSDAY, 3:27 PM
“This is crazy,” Jennifer said. “This is crazy, this is crazy.”
“I know,” said Bostrom. He was gripping the steering wheel with both hands, cutting the cruiser through a curtain of rain, really hitting the gas. Jennifer saw they were doing almost eighty miles an hour. The road rose and fell beneath them, shivering corn stalks blurred past on either side.
“My God. Did he just kill her? Would he have? Oh God.” She felt the tide of emotion rising within her, the numbness of shock wearing off, everything threatening to spill loose, the twists of the past hour, the horror of the past few seconds. She tried to get away from it, to swim away from the undertow. She focused her mind on Bostrom. Could she trust him?
His eyes found her in the rear-view mirror for a split second and then he returned his attention to the road. The windshield wipers wicked back and forth at high speed. The rain was an unending dump of gray water.
“I’ve known about Delaney for a while,” Bostrom said.
Jennifer felt a tingling at the base of her spine, a tremble of rawboned hope. The thrall of the undertow lessened just a little.
Bostrom went on. “Delaney has been a part of one shady deal after another. He was all over the Heilshorn investigation, trying to throw it one way or the other, looking to stick everything on the girl’s brother.”
Jennifer was still processing the events of the past few minutes, but a name surfaced. “You’re talking about Kevin Heilshorn.”
“Yeah. Him. Rumor has it Delaney was even sleeping with Olivia Jane at one point. He’s a shit bag.”
She could hardly process it all. Delaney turning the gun on Stemp’s wife. State troopers and sheriff’s deputies firing on her own security. Employees of the Department of Justice, for God’s sake. How did they expect to get away with it? To reconcile it? Everything was mixed up. Nothing made any sense.
“What are we doing? Where are we going? Are you arresting me?”
They were coming to a stop sign and Jennifer could feel the brakes thudding beneath the car. Bostrom made a right turn. The corn fell away and they passed a large elm tree drooping in the rainstorm; and a teenager in a red raincoat, watching them from the driveway of a small house.
“I’m not arresting you,” he said after they got up to speed again. “We need to get further away and then I’ll take the bracelets off.”
She shifted her weight at their mention, felt the steel of the handcuffs biting into her flesh. “Why are you doing this?”
Bostrom was silent for a moment. “I told him to run.”
“Who?” But she thought she knew. She remembered watching Bostrom say something to Davis that she hadn’t been able to hear over the rain and the ringing in her ears.
“Your bodyguard. I told him to get out of there. I didn’t think . . . fuck, at this point, Delaney is operating completely outside of the department. He’s insane, only hanging on there by a thread. Taber tried to have him removed from duty, but then Taber went on a so-called vacation, and he never came back.”
“Who’s running the department now?”
“The undersheriff. Usually runs the COs at the jail for Taber. Robertson’s alright, but he’s out of his league. Delaney walks all over him. Does whatever he wants.”
Jennifer’s head ached from the blow with the cuffs. Her hands were falling asleep and her arms hurt from being pinned behind her. Yet she felt alert, more alive than she had in days, maybe months. Maybe since she’d been abducted by Staryles.
She had to keep the thought of Stemp’s wife pushed far away.
“Is he on the payroll? Heilshorn’s payroll?” She took the next logical step. “Titan’s payroll?”
Once more his eyes gauged her through the reflection of the rear-view mirror and then snapped back to the road. “Three years ago,” he said, “A man named Seamus Argon met with me. You know who that is?”
“I do.”
“He came up here to help Brendan Healy out. Healy was the detective on the Heilshorn case, but I’m sure you know that. I guess it was rough on him, and he relapsed; had a drinking problem or something. I’ll never understand how someone can’t stop drinking. I have one or two, I’m good.”
“And you met Argon?”
“He found me. I didn’t know who he was. But man . . . that guy was something else. Too bad what happened to him, but, his legacy lives on. You know what I mean?”
“Not exactly.”
“I mean, maybe he wasn’t the first, but he was really committed. He started paying attention years ago before anyone really realized the kind of corruption and cronyism going on. Before multinationals like Titan were basically buying politicians.”
They went straight through the next intersection. Where was he taking her? She didn’t know this area in great detail, but even in the rain she had a basic sense of geography. They weren’t driving towards Oriskany, the headquarters of the Sheriff’s Department. They were going the other way.
Bostrom’s radio gurgled and a voice came over. He pressed a few buttons, silencing it.
“We have to ditch the vehicle. It’s GPS tracked. They’re going to come after us.”
He slowed and turned into a driveway to a small, double-wide trailer home. It looked like any more rain would cave in the roof. Luckily, for the moment, the rain was tapering off.
“This is my house.”
He put the cruiser in park. In the gloom, she discerned a pickup truck. “Don’t worry, that’s mine.”
He got out, came back around and got her out of the rear of the vehicle. She met his eyes and looked up at him. All of the pain, adrenaline and rushed activity unbottled something she’d been carrying for quite a while.
“You’re talking about some kind of revolution? Is that what Argon started? Some sort of an American resistance movement?”
She realized the idea scared her: the idea of a revolution, even if the cancer of corruption in her own government had metastasized beyond treatment. Not scared for herself, but for others.
He frowned and lifted a hand, twirled his finger in the air indicating for her to turn around. He removed the handcuffs. She spun back around, rubbing her wrists, trying to get some feeling back into them.
“What do you think?” he said.
“I think we have problems, okay. But that there are always peaceful solutions. Creating this kind of guerilla army — if that’s what you’re tal
king about, what Argon was doing — it won’t achieve anything.”
“You saw what just happened back there,” he said somberly. “You don’t want to resist that?”
She didn’t answer. Her head was spinning with the new information. If Titan was funding Nonsystem, then Titan and Seamus Argon were linked. That didn’t add up. Whatever it was, though, this resistance, this answer to the politico-military complex, she was being pulled right into it.
Bostrom stared at her. He stood nearly six feet tall. Built out of marble. Where was his family? Did he have one? Did she know anything about him other than a name associated with the Rebecca Heilshorn case? He’d been the first cop on the scene. A footnote in the investigation. And now here he was, whisking her away from the scene of more violence, going against his own department, like some kind of vigilante. Was he really her guide into this underground world, into Nonsystem?
She blinked in the drizzle. “I need to make a phone call.”
“We need to keep moving. Call from the vehicle.”
“And I need to pee. Is that alright with you, Deputy Bostrom? Or are you imposing on me the same fascist controls you’re talking about fighting?”
He stared back at her for another moment. He held out his arm towards his house with the sagging roof. “I’m just trying to keep us alive. But, right this way, miss.” Then his expression changed and he looked at her with a sudden compassion, his eyes roving as he evaluated her expression. “Maybe . . . yeah. You’re going to want to wash that off, too.”
In the bathroom she peed and rinsed the sticky blood from her face and ran her fingers through her mop of wet hair. She looked to see where the bleeding was coming from and found the gash just below the hairline, from where Delaney had whacked her with the handcuffs.
She left the water running in the sink and took out her phone, glancing at the bathroom door. The call to 911 had ended a while ago, but in her log she saw that it had been connected for almost fifteen minutes. She dialed John Rascher. As the phone rang, she looked around at the tiny bathroom with its stained cabinetry, warped flooring, and bathtub in need of a fresh grout. She took out her pain meds and shook two into her palm and swallowed them with a gulp of water from the tap.
DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3) Page 14
