He squatted in the tall grass. To his right he saw the dim glow of the guardhouse four hundred yards away. The guard would come running when the shots were fired, as would the two security agents in the cottage, but nobody would reach the scene in time to save Kris.
Hickle set down the duffel bag and took out the shotgun, dumping extra shells into the pockets of his windbreaker. He wondered how long he would have to wait, how long Kris had left to live. He did not hate her now. He was past hate. He merely wanted to set things right, out of a sense of justice.
At the far end of Gateway—headlights. A car pulled up to the gate. He couldn’t tell if it was a Lincoln.
Hickle crouched low, the shotgun gripped in his cold, steady hands.
There was air in her lungs, and she was breathing. The smell of rotten eggs was leaving her nostrils. She felt a flicker of returning strength in her arms and legs.
These were the first reports that reached her as Abby swam upward out of bright light and found herself on the fire escape with Vic Wyatt bending over her.
“You’ll be all right, Abby,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”
She had no idea how he had come here. He might have been a dream. But the cold iron grillwork beneath her was real enough, and so was the pulsing pain in her head.
Later she would find out how he’d rescued her. Right now there was something else she needed to deal with. Something urgent, if only she could remember what it was.
An image flashed in her mind: Devin Corbal motionless on the asphalt outside the nightclub. Was it Corbal who was in danger? No, it was too late to save him. She saw the lake of blood spreading under his body. He was dead, and it was her fault, no matter what anyone said. She had to make up for it somehow. Couldn’t lose another one. Couldn’t lose Kris…
Kris.
And Hickle. Ambush in Malibu. Tonight.
With a jolt of panic she tried to sit up.
“Rest, Abby,” Wyatt said.
Couldn’t rest. Had to tell him. She tried to force out speech but produced only a dry cough that racked her abdomen with spasms.
“Abby, lie still, okay? You had a close call.”
She wouldn’t listen. She gulped air and found a way to make words.
“Phone,” she gasped. “Get me a phone…”
The car was a Lincoln. Hickle could see it clearly as the gate lifted and the guard waved the driver through.
Kris’s car. He was sure of it.
The Lincoln rolled forward, moving slowly, headlights fanning across the cracked macadam. Hickle sank lower on his haunches, tensing for the moment when he would leap upright and open fire.
Side windows first. Kris rode in the backseat. Kill her with multiple shots to the head and upper body. No need to aim, just point and shoot. He knew what shotshells could do to a human being at close range. Each disintegrating shell was like a miniature shrapnel bomb, flinging a cloud of lethal debris. Kris would be ripped apart. She would have no time to react, no chance to duck or hide, and even if she tried, there was no place for her to take cover in the Town Car’s rear compartment.
She was sealed in a box, and killing her would be, quite literally, like shooting fish in a barrel.
“You should’ve answered my letters, Kris,” Hickle whispered.
34
As soon as the Town Car stopped at the Reserve’s gate, Travis shifted into hypervigilance.
He was seated beside Kris in the backseat. Inside his jacket, strapped to his left shoulder, he carried his 9mm Walther. He unbuttoned the jacket and let his right hand rest on the lapel, ready to draw the gun if necessary.
When the gate rose, Kris seemed to relax a little. No doubt she felt safer inside the compound. She didn’t know about the photos in Hickle’s apartment, the ones that showed her running on the beach. She didn’t know there was no safety here. Quite the opposite. This was the time and place of maximum jeopardy. If Hickle planned to strike, this was where he would do it.
The Lincoln advanced along Gateway Road, Steve Drury driving at a cautious pace. In the rearview mirror his eyes were visible, ticking back and forth.
Halfway down Gateway now. The intersection with Malibu Reserve Drive was two hundred yards ahead.
“Almost home,” Kris breathed.
He glanced at her, silhouetted in profile against the foliage on the left side of the road. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that her face had the perfect bone structure. Probably she worried about getting old, losing her looks, but what she didn’t understand was that a beauty like hers was not a matter of smooth skin and ripe complexion, but of the underlying architecture of her strong frontal bone and well-defined zygomatic arches. She would be beautiful when she was eighty, if she lived that long.
One hundred fifty yards to the intersection. Still no trouble. Kris sighed, relaxing a little more—the amateur’s mistake. Proximity to home only increased the danger. Hickle would wait until the car had slowed to a crawl, as it would when it turned into the driveway.
Drury had not relaxed, Travis noted. Good man, well trained. He wore a Kevlar vest under his jacket; Travis had brought it for him. He had brought no vest for himself. He’d been afraid Kris would see it and panic. Sometimes it was necessary to take certain personal risks to maintain the client’s confidence. Anyway, Travis was fatalistic about such things. He always estimated the risks of any undertaking before proceeding with it. Once committed, he put all danger out of his mind. All danger to himself, at least. The threat to Kris was a different story. Nothing could be allowed to happen to her.
One hundred yards to Malibu Reserve Drive. The interior of the car was quiet except for the thrum of tires, the muffled vibration of the engine, and Kris’s breathing, slow and steady.
Then a new sound, startling—a loud, insistent chirp. His cell phone. Who would be calling him at midnight?
He whipped out the phone and held it to his ear, his gaze fixed on the dark roadside. “Travis,” he barked.
“Sir, it’s Hastings.” One of the TPS computer jocks tracking down Trendline Investments and its possible connection to Western Regional Resources. “You told us to call if we found anything definitive.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, sir. I’d say we did.”
“Give it to me fast,” Travis ordered, still watching the darkness. “I don’t have much time.”
Abby had propped herself to a sitting position on the fire escape when Wyatt returned, climbing through the bedroom window with her purse in his hand.
She took the cell phone from her purse and powered it on. In the glow of the liquid crystal display she found the menu button and navigated to the first number stored in memory, the number of Travis’s mobile phone. She speed-dialed it.
Wyatt crouched beside her, saying nothing. She knew he had many questions to ask, and she loved him just a little for not asking them yet.
Her call bounced to voice mail.
She hissed a curse and redialed.
Voice mail again, damn it.
“What’s the matter?” Wyatt whispered.
“Can’t get through.” She forced the words past gritted teeth.
“You can dial the operator, have the phone company break in on the call.”
“It’ll take too long.” She called again. Voice mail. “Come on, Paul, clear the line.”
“I’ll cut to the chase.” Hastings’s voice crackled in Travis’s ear. “We started with Trendline Investments. Trendline, as a corporate entity, sits on the board of directors of something called ProFuture Opportunities, also incorporated in the Netherlands Antilles. There are three other companies on ProFuture’s board—all dummy corporations, as far as we can tell. One of them is named GrayFoxx Financial. You following this?”
Travis nodded, his gaze never leaving the blur of shadows at the edge of the road, “Go on.”
“Here’s the link. GrayFoxx is the largest shareholder of Western Regional Resources.”
“Bang,” Travis said softly.<
br />
“You got it. Essentially, GrayFoxx owns Western Regional, and GrayFoxx and Trendline jointly own ProFuture. Our guess is that Mr. Barwood—”
“Owns all of them,” Travis finished.
“Right. He set it all up as shells within shells, very complicated, hard to trace. But we nailed him.” There was pride in Hastings’s voice. Travis supposed he was entitled to it.
“Good work. Now get some rest.” Travis ended the call.
Twenty yards to the intersection. The Town Car slowed in preparation for a sharp left turn.
“What was that about?” Kris asked.
Travis couldn’t tell her now. Later was the right time. Later, when she was safe.
“Some other case,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
She frowned at him, her reporter’s instincts evidently disputing his answer, but before she could ask anything further, the phone chirped again. Was it Hastings, calling with additional details? For a moment Travis considered shutting off the phone to silence it.
Ten yards.
Oh, hell. He took the call. “Travis,” he snapped. “This had better be—”
He didn’t finish. On the other end of the line was a hoarse, desperate, anguished voice, Abby’s voice, and she was screaming.
“Code Red, Paul, you hear me, Hickle is Code Red!”
35
The Town Car was turning onto Malibu Reserve Drive when its brakes squealed, and suddenly the car was reversing fast, and Hickle knew they were on to him.
He sprang out of the foliage, the twelve-gauge in both hands. From this angle he didn’t have a clear shot at the side windows so he opened fire on the windshield, hoping to take out the driver. The glass starred but didn’t shatter. Behind the web of fractures he saw the driver spinning the wheel as he backed onto Gateway. Once lined up, the Lincoln could reverse straight to the gate, where the guard must already be dialing 911.
Hickle fired two more shots at the windshield, emptying the Marlin, but although the glass buckled, it still did not give way. The shots distracted the driver long enough for the car to skid partially off the road at a crazy angle. For a moment the Lincoln was stuck, its right rear tire mired in dirt.
Hickle ditched his duffel bag and charged the car, reloading on the run. He saw movement in the backseat, two figures. One of them was Kris.
The driver shifted out of reverse and plowed forward, but by the time he was back on the road, Hickle had run alongside. He fired three shells at the car’s side panel, hoping to blow it apart. No good. The car absorbed the shots with only superficial damage.
Armor plating. Bulletproof glass. JackBNimble had never mentioned anything about that. Either he hadn’t known, or this was some kind of setup. Hickle had no time to puzzle it out. The Lincoln was executing a clumsy K-turn as the driver tried to orient the car toward the exit. Hickle fired one shot at the front tire, puncturing it, but it didn’t go flat. Even the tires were bullet-resistant.
He dug in the pocket of his windbreaker and reloaded. As the Lincoln completed its turn, he leaped onto the hood, face to face with the driver. Over the ringing in his ears he heard a male voice from the backseat shout, “Get down!”
Hickle pumped the Marlin and fired a shot into the windshield at point-blank range. Charred shell wadding blew back in his face. He shut his eyes against the debris. When he opened them, he saw a hole in the windshield, exposing the Lincoln’s interior. He swung the shotgun into the hole and fired twice, not aiming, hoping for a lucky hit or a ricochet.
The Lincoln slammed on its brakes. He thought he must have hit the driver until, with a scream of tires, the Town Car snapped into reverse. Inertia rolled him off the hood. He flopped onto the pavement, and the Lincoln stopped. One headlight was dark. The other pinned him in its glare.
He knew what was about to happen even before the car shot forward, trying to run him down.
Reflexes saved him. He plunged off the road, taking refuge in the trees. Behind him, the pursuing car slammed to a halt at the edge of the woods. Hickle threw himself prone on the ground, below the cone of glare from the one intact headlight. By a miracle the shotgun was still in his hand, and now he had a clear view of the Lincoln’s underbelly.
He fired a single shot, targeting the chassis.
Sparks and broken metal showered the earth, and he knew that one part of the vehicle was not armored.
The Town Car retreated onto the road, but Hickle was already scrambling after it, cramming more shells into the gun. He fired four times, aiming low. The Lincoln veered away, skidding on something wet and shiny, which was gasoline. He had ruptured the fuel tank.
“Fuck you,” Hickle gasped, “I got you now!”
He reloaded, tramping through pools of gasoline, and fired again and again, pursuing the wounded car as it reversed down Gateway. The sedan wobbled on damaged tires and bent wheels. It accelerated, still backing up, and for a moment he thought it would get away.
Then the gas caught fire.
Abruptly the entire front section of the Lincoln was burning—tires, chassis, gas-soaked chrome. The Town Car careened to a stop, and Hickle plucked the last shells from his pocket and loaded them as he loped toward his quarry with death in mind.
Inside the Lincoln there had been chaos and terror from the moment Travis heard Abby’s warning and shouted at Drury to back up. Kris had looked at him with an unvoiced question as the first shots crackled out of the darkness. Shotgun fire.
The TPS staff car was shielded by panels of aramid fibrous armor, lighter than steel and nearly as impenetrable, lining the doors, roof, quarter areas, and pillar posts. All the glass in the vehicle had been replaced by bullet-resistant sheets of multilayered transparent composite, a lamination of glass and polycarbonate. The tires were fitted with antiballistic runflat inserts that allowed them to hold their shape even when ruptured. The level of protection these features offered was moderately high, but there were points of weakness. The ballistic glass could stop handgun rounds and other small arms fire, but repeated blasts from a heavy-gauge shotgun might penetrate. The armor plating provided perimeter and roof protection, but the floor and the underside of the chassis were unshielded, vulnerable to attack from below. A fully armored vehicle offered greater protection but, because of the increased weight, less maneuverability. Tradeoffs had been made.
Travis wondered if those tradeoffs had been advisable as the first two shotshells chipped and splintered the Lincoln’s windshield.
After that, there was no time to wonder about anything. The range of his thinking narrowed to the immediate concern of keeping Kris alive. He told her to get down, but the words didn’t register with her. There was stark panic on her face, every muscle drawn taut. When the Town Car blundered partly off the road and was briefly stuck in the dirt, Travis actually felt the shiver of pure fear that rocked her in her seat. Then they were back on the road but no longer positioned to go either forward or back, and Drury had to spend a few desperate seconds hauling the car around in a ragged turn. That was when Hickle opened fire on the side of the car, trying to punch through the doors. Kris screamed. Travis saw the door panel cave inward a few inches under the impact of the multiple hits. But the armor held, and the Lincoln straightened out. As Drury accelerated, Hickle threw himself onto the hood.
Travis saw the shotgun kiss the weakened glass, and he knew the next blast would open up the car to a direct assault. He seized Kris and shoved her to the floor as two explosions from the shotgun echoed inside the car.
Exactly what happened next Travis didn’t know. Bending to cover Kris with his body, he was aware only of a succession of stops and starts, the car braking, then reversing, then flying forward and braking again, and then another shot, this one striking low, and more low hits as the Lincoln backed off and screamed in reverse toward the guardhouse four hundred yards away.
The low hits scared Travis most of all. He was thinking of the unshielded underside of the car. He was thinking of the fuel tank.
&
nbsp; He held Kris tight and heard her whispering the same words over and over in a hushed, urgent monotone: “God help us…God help us…God help us…”
Then there was fire.
Travis heard the whoosh of igniting gasoline even before the sudden orange glare lit up the front windows. By luck or skill Hickle had punctured the gas tank, and sparks from successive shots had set the gas ablaze.
The Lincoln would be enveloped in fire within seconds. The car might not blow up—gasoline was less combustible than Hollywood movies liked to pretend—but it would certainly burn to cinders, as would its occupants.
He pulled Kris upright and yelled at Drury to evacuate the vehicle. The car stopped at a crazy angle halfway down Gateway Road, and Drury got out, or at least Travis thought he did. He couldn’t be sure, not when his full attention was focused on prying open the rear door and dragging Kris out of the car and away from the spreading flames.
He pulled her into the bushes at the roadside, then drew his Walther and turned in a crouch, scanning the dark for Hickle, who had to be out there somewhere, because if anything was clear and obvious in the midst of this insanity, it was that Hickle would not give up until Kris was dead.
The car was a flaming pile. It threw off a moist heat that slapped Hickle in the face as he sprinted closer, the shotgun gripped with both hands. He became aware that he was favoring his left leg. Must have turned his ankle when he rolled off the hood onto the pavement. It didn’t matter. He was still mobile, and the car had been abandoned. Kris was outside, unprotected. Only one shot was needed to finish things.
Kris had been riding in the back of the Lincoln. The rear passenger door hung ajar. Hickle ran toward that side of the road and saw her on the roadside, a huddle of fear and shock. With her, a man Hickle didn’t recognize. Not her husband. A man with a gun.
Hickle saw the gun come up fast and flung himself to the ground, taking cover behind the wreckage of the Lincoln, then sensed movement nearby and turned in time to see the driver taking aim with a pistol from behind the open front door. Hickle fired the shotgun, and the man went down. Hit? Hard to tell. Hickle darted around the door, preparing to fire again, but it wasn’t necessary. The driver was alive but out of commission, writhing on the pavement, his pistol dropped and forgotten. Hickle ignored him. He had no interest in delivering a coup de grace. The man meant nothing to him. It was Kris he wanted.
The Shadow Hunter Page 23
