He saw the woman’s purse that the guy was trying to stuff under his bulky jacket, though.
What sort of dumb-ass would try to snatch a woman’s purse in the middle of a huge crowd like this? That was Burke’s first thought. But maybe it wasn’t such a stupid move after all. Nobody was trying to stop the guy, despite the black woman’s screams. Burke figured the purse belonged to her. The crowd was so thick that if nobody did anything, within moments the thief would be swallowed up by the mob. Yeah, he was pretty distinctive-looking, but surely he wasn’t the only Goth kid here this morning, and if he passed the purse off to a more normal-looking confederate, there wouldn’t be any way to prove that he’d done anything wrong. All it took to pull off something like this was steady nerves and a certain amount of slick daring.
And a bunch of sheep who didn’t give a damn, didn’t want to be involved, just wanted to get in the store and turn over more of their money to a modern-day robber baron like Hiram Stackhouse.
Well, it was somebody else’s lookout, thought Burke, not his.
Then some hot, soccer-mom blonde had to go and step in front of the purse snatcher and say in a loud, clear voice, “Hold it! What do you think you’re doing?” She reached for the purse and tried to drag it out from under the thief’s leather jacket.
“Hey, lady!” he yelled. He gave the blonde a hard shove. “Bug off!”
A pretty, brown-haired teenager got in the guy’s face. “Leave my mom alone!” she told him as she shoved him right back.
Crazy rednecks, Burke thought. Always looking for a fight.
Then the guy popped the teenager with a backhand, grabbed the hot blond mom and slung her out of the way, and tried to force his way into the crowd again.
That put him right in Burke’s face. Burke didn’t think about what he was doing. He just drew back his right fist at his side and planted it in the thief’s midsection as hard as he could.
The guy’s eyes widened and bulged out in surprise and pain. One of his eyebrows was pierced, too. Idiot. Burke hit him again, putting the second shot right where the first one had landed. These were the first punches he had thrown since grade school. His parents had been firm believers in nonviolence and had taken little Ellis along to all of their protests and sit-ins, making sure he was raised to know how important it was to fight the Man, but to do it peacefully.
Nobody had ever told him how good it would feel to hit some scuzzball in the belly.
The thief whined a little and dropped to his knees. The blonde and her daughter both started walloping him from behind, driving him the rest of the way to the asphalt. He curled up in a ball and put his arms over his head, even though nobody was trying to kick him. In fact, the crowd stepped back and gave him some room. Burke leaned down and took the stolen purse from him. As he was straightening, a couple of uniformed security guards shouldered through the press of people.
“Hey!” one of them shouted at Burke. “Drop that purse, mister!”
“He’s not the thief,” the blonde said. She pointed to the Goth kid. “There’s the one who stole the purse.”
“That’s right, officer,” Burke said as other people began to nod in support of the blonde’s statement. “I’m an attorney. I was just recovering the stolen property.”
“He stopped that man,” the black woman said excitedly as she came up, dragging the little boy with her. “Just hauled off and gave him what for.”
“You apprehended the thief, sir?” one of the rent-a-cops asked Burke.
He shrugged and nodded toward the blonde and her daughter. “It was really more these ladies—”
“No,” the mom said, “I’m afraid he would have gotten away from us. He would have gotten away with that purse if you hadn’t stopped him.”
Burke didn’t mind being the center of attention in a courtroom; in fact, he’d always liked that. But he didn’t care for the feeling of having a whole horde of Texas yahoos staring at him in admiration like he was Chuck Norris or the Lone frickin’ Ranger, stepping in to stop the bad guy. He wasn’t even sure why he had done what he did. It hadn’t been any of his business.
And now he just wanted to get on into the store and buy the damn toy for his daughter and get the hell out of here.
With that in mind, he turned to the black woman and held the purse out to her, saying, “Here you go, ma’am. No need to thank me—”
“That’s not my purse,” she said.
Burke frowned. “It’s not? But I thought—”
“I just started hollerin’ when I saw that man grab it away from another woman. Looked like it hurt her, too, the way her arm got jerked around by the strap. That ugly fella wasn’t just about to let it go, though.”
The security guards had lifted the thief to his feet and were ready to haul him into the store. That was one way to get in ahead of everybody else, Burke thought fleetingly as looked at the black woman.
“But if the purse isn’t yours,” he said, “then who does it belong to?”
“It’s mine,” a voice said from behind him. He turned and saw the prettiest woman he had run across in a long time, standing there with her hand out for the purse.
Well, Burke thought, maybe it was a good thing he had intervened after all, instead of letting the thief scurry on past him. After all, he was an officer of the court. It was his civic duty to uphold the law.
Especially when that included making the acquaintance of a beautiful—and grateful—young woman.
CHAPTER 27
Allison had been taken totally by surprise when she felt the hard tug on the purse strap that wrenched her arm around behind her back. She had cried out, a short, sharp exclamation that hadn’t carried very far in the hubbub of the throng moving slowly into the UltraMegaMart. She made a desperate grab at the strap, but she was too late.
The purse was gone, and with it the money she had saved for her son’s Christmas.
A mixture of despair and outrage had exploded in Allison’s brain at that moment of realization. It was so powerful that it froze her in place for a second.
But only for a second. Then she began fighting to push her way through the crowd after the thief. She yelled for help, but nobody seemed to hear her. At least, nobody tried to stop the man who’d stolen her purse.
Then the black woman who had witnessed the theft added her voice to the outcry, and it carried a lot better than Allison’s did. A couple of women got in the thief’s way and slowed him down, and then a man hit him, knocking him to the ground. Because of the crowd, Allison couldn’t see the man that well at first…
Now she was standing in front of him as he held the purse out toward her, and she saw that he was considerably older than her, around forty, she guessed. He was better dressed than most of the people waiting to get into the UltraMegaMart, in a conservative dark suit, a white shirt, and what Allison guessed was called a power tie; she wasn’t sure about that. He wasn’t fat, just big and solidly built, with some streaks of gray in his dark hair and the slightly flushed face of a man who liked to take a drink—or three or four—on a fairly regular basis. She reminded Allison of her dad.
The look in his eyes as he smiled at her wasn’t particularly paternal, though, or even avuncular. He said, “Here’s your purse, miss. Are you all right? Did he hurt you when he grabbed it?”
Allison took the purse and then rubbed her arm. “No, he just jerked me around a little. I thought the way I had the purse strap wrapped around my arm that nobody could get it loose, but obviously I was wrong.”
“Well, if you’re injured, you can file suit against the guy. I’d be glad to represent you. We’d win, I guarantee it.” He grinned as the security guards led the thief off through the crowd. “I’m not sure you’d ever be able to collect any judgment, though. Not unless you were willing to accept nose rings and eyebrow rings in lieu of cash.”
Allison had to laugh. This man was older than her, old enough to be…well, her older brother anyway…and from what he’d just said he was a lawye
r to boot. Allison wasn’t too fond of lawyers, having had a crappy one during her divorce. But at least this one seemed to have a sense of humor.
“I’m Ellis Burke,” by the way,” he said.
“Allison Sawyer,” she replied. She took the hand he held out to her and shook it, letting go quickly so that his grip couldn’t linger. She was used to guys hitting on her, especially once they found out she was divorced, and while she was grateful to Ellis Burke for helping her, she didn’t want him getting any ideas. Keeping her voice brisk but polite, she said, “Thank you, Mr. Burke.”
“Please, call me Ellis. Ellis, Allison…kind of goes together, don’t you think?”
Before she could respond to that blatant come-on, the older blond woman who had also helped stop the thief introduced herself. “I’m Terry McCabe,” she said, “and this is my daughter Ronnie.”
Allison smiled at them. “I’m pleased to meet both of you.” Her gaze took in the two women and Burke. “I’d offer you a reward for helping me, but all I have is the money I’ve saved up for my son’s Christmas presents—”
“A reward?” Burke broke in. “Nonsense! You don’t owe us a thing.”
“Really, we were happy to help,” Terry McCabe said. “I’m just glad we were able to stop that man, so your son’s Christmas won’t be ruined.”
Allison nodded. “You and me both, Mrs. McCabe.”
“So,” Burke said, “how old is your son? And do you and your husband have any more children?”
Allison knew what he was angling for, but she didn’t see any way out of providing the information without being rude. She didn’t want to do that. After all, Burke had stopped the thief and saved her money.
“Nate’s eight years old,” she said, “and he’s my only child.” There. She had neatly avoided having to tell Burke that she was divorced, she thought.
But she could tell he hadn’t missed the fact that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, so that must have emboldened him. “I know it’s very difficult being a single mother these days,” he said. “It’s hard to make ends meet and still devote enough time to raising your child. I see it all the time in my practice.”
“You’re a divorce lawyer?” Terry McCabe asked.
“Personal injury.” Burke laughed. “That’s right, I’m one of those ambulance-chasing shysters. There, I’ve said what we’re all thinking, so we don’t have to worry about it anymore, do we?”
The uproar over the attempted purse-snatching had subsided. The lines were moving toward the doors again, and people’s attention had returned to the thing that had brought them here: the desire to grab up as many bargains as possible during the grand opening of the UltraMegaMart.
The press of the crowd kept Allison from thanking Burke again and moving on. She was sort of stuck there with him and Terry and Ronnie McCabe, as well as the black woman, who introduced herself as Judy Winston. The little boy was her son Darius.
To make small talk, Allison said to Burke, “What brings you here before dawn on a chilly morning, Mr. Burke? Shouldn’t you be getting ready for court?”
“The courts are all in recess until after the Thanksgiving weekend,” he told her. “No judge would dare interfere with the biggest shopping day of the year. And I guess I’m here for the same reason you are…because of my kid.”
“Boy or girl?”
“A little girl. She’s twelve.” Burke supplied the information about his daughter’s age before Allison could ask the standard question.
She turned the tables on him, though, by asking, “Do you and your wife have any other children?”
“No, just the one. But she’s not my wife anymore. I’m divorced.”
He didn’t seem to mind saying it. Allison still had a little bit of a hard time with that sometimes.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was for the best. If someone doesn’t want to be with a certain person anymore, than no amount of rationalizing or denial will ever make them happy again. Once whatever it was between two people that drew them together is gone, they’re both better off moving on.”
“That’s sort of a cynical way to look at it, isn’t it? If there’s something wrong with a marriage, isn’t it better to try to fix it?”
“Did you try to fix yours before you and your husband split up?”
Allison wanted to tell him that was none of his business, but instead she said, “As a matter of fact, I did. I couldn’t do it by myself, though. He wasn’t willing to stop drinking or cheating on me.”
“Then he was a damned fool. And the fewer damned fools in your life, the better. That’s the law. Burke’s law.” Then he laughed.
Allison didn’t see what was funny.
He must have seen the puzzled look on her face, because he said, “It was a TV show. Burke’s Law. About this millionaire who was a cop…Never mind, you’re too young.”
Allison felt slightly offended at that, but tried not to show it. She changed the subject, sort of, by saying, “That’s all right, by the time we actually get into the store I’m going to be old.”
Burke laughed, and so did Terry and Ronnie McCabe. “Let’s just hope that when we get in there, it was worth waiting for,” the lawyer said.
CHAPTER 28
At first Hamed had felt panic shoot through him when the shouting started near his position in line. Even though he knew the two Heckler & Koch machine pistols he carried were well concealed under the bulky fatigue jacket he wore, for a second he thought that someone had somehow spotted the weapons. It was enough of a drawback that the Americans were nearly all suspicious of every Middle Eastern–looking man that they saw. The infidels’ paranoia was one of the main dangers to the plan laid out by Sheikh al-Mukhari.
And, of course, in this case the unbelieving dogs would have been right to be paranoid. Scattered through the huge crowd jammed in front of the store were twenty fighters for Islamic freedom, all of them carrying weapons and explosives. Sheikh al-Mukhari was there, too, carrying the briefcase that contained the dirty bomb Hizb ut-Tahrir had purchased from a supplier in the former Soviet Union. This bomb had, in fact, once belonged to Saddam Hussein before he had disposed of it, along with his other nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, by either smuggling them out of Iraq to sympathetic parties, or in some cases simply selling them back—at a loss, of course—to the dealers who had supplied them in the first place, getting rid of them before the American invasion. Without enough such weapons to actually stop the infidels, Saddam had opted to try to get world opinion on his side by appearing to be the helpless victim of American aggression.
Part of that plan had worked. Always eager to believe the worst of everything their nation did, a significant number of foolish Americans had accepted without any trouble the notion that simply because Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction at the time of the invasion, it followed that Iraq had never had any such weapons and that the American President had lied, lied, lied. The Europeans had been quick to jump on that bandwagon.
While that strategy had worked for Saddam on a global public relations level, it hadn’t done a thing for him personally, as he found out at the wrong end of a rope. Ever since, the always-worried-about-their-image Americans had tried not to rush to judgment about anything, and of course they would never do anything on an official level as sane and reasonable as racial profiling, since such a thing was heinous in their eyes.
But that didn’t stop the everyday Americans from being at least a little suspicious of every dark-skinned, dark-eyed, dark-haired man between the ages of eighteen and fifty, especially if he had a beard. Hamed had grown accustomed to their wary stares, which was why he thought for a harrowing moment that he had been discovered.
But it was just a petty crime going on, he realized within moments, the attempted theft of a purse from an American slut, with her tight jeans and her bright, fair hair uncovered. There was a brief outbreak of violence, during which bystanders prevented the thief from fleeing. A pair of security g
uards arrived to take him away. The ridiculous-looking young man would be arrested, probably fined and given a suspended sentence, and would be committing crimes again with barely a break in his routine. If Americans were more sensible, they would realize that a thief with his hands chopped off would have a much more difficult time stealing in the future.
Hamed was glad the incident had occurred. It had given him a chance to observe the security guards in action, and he saw nothing in their manner or their behavior to cause him any worry. Both uniformed men were out of shape and lackadaisical.
Even if the Americans somehow received advance warning of the plan—and that seemed unlikely to Hamed, since no one knew of it except loyal members of Hizb ut-Tahrir—events were already in motion.
Before this day was over, infidel blood would be spilled by the gallon, and it was too late for the foolish Americans to do anything about it.
CHAPTER 29
Ford hit the doors of the ICU in the hospital in Islamabad at a dead run. It was a dumb thing to do and he knew it, but he didn’t have time to scope out the situation first. Sometimes you just had to bust in with all guns a-blazin’ and hope for the best.
Sometimes that got you in deep shit, too.
Like now.
He hit the floor and rolled as bullets chewed up a cart full of medical equipment right beside him. The ICU was relatively small, with a nurses’ station to the left and a row of curtained alcoves, each with a bed in it, to the right. There were half a dozen of the alcoves, and Brad Parker was in the one at the far end, the farthest away from the door. At least he had been when Ford left the hospital earlier, and Ford assumed he still was because the assassins who had invaded the hospital were directing their gunfire in that direction—except for the one who was doing his damnedest to kill Ford.
Jackknife Page 12
