“Not possible. Remember? The taxi pulled right up. Instant witness.”
“I could have popped him too.”
“We didn’t have any time. And there were probably more witnesses than we can count.”
She said, “Who cares who saw us? They’re never going to catch us, never.”
He laughed. “No, I’m careful. I’m the brains, Lissy, since your ma died, remember? And you’re an invalid with a big mouth. Be quiet and go to sleep. Let me do the worrying. Get yourself well; you’re not fun like this.”
She smacked her fist against her palm and winced. “I couldn’t stand seeing that old dude wearing his ridiculous Bermuda shorts, whistling, happy as a clam on his way to the Caribbean. If we’d only caught him at the curb at the airport, I could have snuck right up behind him, popped him fast and clean.”
No way would that have happened, Victor thought, she was still too weak. But they’d both been caught up in it, both so revved up that all they wanted to do was find that plane and—well, the guy had seen them, and wasn’t that a kick in the butt? He’d looked more startled than scared, but Victor knew he wouldn’t forget. It was a start. Let them think they’d won. It was just a matter of time. “We’ll get him when he comes back from his hideaway. Do what I told you, Lissy, close your eyes and get some sleep.”
She closed her eyes and said, “I want to fly down to the Caribbean and find him, shoot his ass down there. My mom knew people who could make really good fake papers, driver’s license, passports, the works. We have the money at home to get the best.”
“No,” Victor said, shaking his head for emphasis. “That’s way too risky. Stop thinking about it. We’ll get the old man when he gets back, when you’re well again.”
She continued to rub her stomach, eyes still closed, but her voice was vicious. “He killed my mother, Victor. You didn’t see it. The bastard shot her in the neck and all her blood just burst out of her.” She smacked her fist on the glove compartment, moaned at the shock to her belly.
Victor leaned over, lightly slapped her face, then caressed her cheek. “Shut yourself down, you hear me? Take some slow, deep breaths.”
She settled into the seat, breathed deeply like he said. She felt the throbbing pain ease back. She knew it was still there, but it felt duller now. “We’ve got to get some more pain meds though. I’ve only got one more.”
“That’s ’cause you took so many you nearly croaked yourself. Don’t worry, we’ll get you some more.”
“It was sure nice of that nurse to leave her pill cart in the hall,” she said. “Dammit, Victor, we should have blown that old dude to hell and gone.” She turned her face to look at him. “But you insisted you could make his car break down. Talk about crappy information, and look what happened. Big fat zero.”
Victor shrugged, speeded up a bit. “It looked good on that website, but I’m no car expert.”
“That’s for sure.”
He raised his hand, then lowered it. “Shut your trap. I’m the one who found his damned house. Don’t you rag on me, Lissy, you know I don’t like it. I remember my dad always telling my mother to stop her nagging. I don’t remember that she did all that much, but he thought so.”
“That’s why you hit me sometimes, isn’t it?”
He looked at her. “Don’t you accuse me of being like my dad. He was dead-on mean. He’d clip me whenever it suited him. I told you how he smacked Mom more. I didn’t like him much. When I hit you, you deserve it, that’s all. When he and Mom went back to his beloved Jordan, I saw my chance to get away from him.”
She said, her voice dreamy, since she was beginning to fade out, “And you came to me, Victor. You thought I was a little girl, but I wasn’t.”
Victor remembered that long-ago night waking up with Lissy licking his belly. “Yeah, I came to you. Your mom is nothing like mine. Mine’s all soft and boring. You mom, well, she’d shoot the nuts off a squirrel if she felt like it.”
Lissy giggled. “She had to be tough, since it was just her. I thought Mama was going to shoot you when she found a pair of your shorts under my bed.”
Victor remembered that day, remembered how he’d protected Lissy, taking all responsibility—after all, he was five years older, which made Lissy only a kid—but her mom knew her daughter, and that was why, he was convinced, she didn’t shoot him and bury him in the deep woods behind the house. She just ordered him out, which was bad enough.
The three years he worked for that bush-league home-security company in Winnett had been boredom punctuated with bursts of huge happiness when Lissy e-mailed him. He said, his voice hoarse with the memory of her absence, “I didn’t see you for too long, Lissy. I nearly went crazy without you. Then your mom called me up to ask me if I’d like to rob banks.”
“Yeah, I talked her into it. I told her you could drive the car. She said that was fine since you were a pussy.”
“I’m not a pussy, dammit!”
“All right, all right,” she said, her voice soft, dreamy. “Do you remember how we’d get under a sheet and play, my flashlight on?”
The memory made him jerk the steering wheel. He thought about those horrible hours when he didn’t know if she was alive, deadening hours when he’d lurked on the surgical floor, listening to the FBI agents speaking to the nurses and doctors about her. He went to the men’s room and vomited when he heard she was going to be all right. He said, “No pussy could have gotten you out of that damned hospital. Don’t you remember that big FBI agent sitting outside your door? Well, I fooled him good, didn’t I?”
“You saved me,” she said, her eyes closed, her hands over her belly, gently kneading. “I love you, Victor.”
He felt a fist squeeze his heart. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s good, real good. Why don’t we just leave now? Why do we have to hang around? I’m thinking I’d like to visit Hollywood, maybe see Angelina, learn how to surf, make love on the beach.”
Her eyes popped open. “Victor, I’ve gotta kill that old man, blow his brains from here to Oregon. He murdered Mama. I can’t let that go. And that FBI agent, Dillon Savich.” She started rubbing her belly harder now, her hand jerking. “What he did to me, what he did, I can’t let him get away with that, I can’t.”
“All right, we’ll kill those two, then get out of here. Give your mouth a rest. I’ll wake you up when we get to Fort Pessel. Go to sleep.”
Four minutes later Victor heard a siren. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw a police car, lights flashing, closing fast. He felt a punch of panic, then rage. Why was this jerk on him? He hadn’t done anything wrong. No way did they know this was a stolen car. Too soon for that.
He took a deep breath and slowly pulled the Impala over to the side of the road. It simply wasn’t possible somebody had already discovered the old woman’s body and reported her frigging car stolen. His hands felt cold and clammy. He hated it. He rubbed his hands on his jeans, breathed deeply, calmed his pulsing heart.
Sheriff’s Deputy Davie Franks shined a flashlight into the young man’s face as Victor lowered the window. “Nice wheels you got,” he said. “I had me an old Impala like this when I was about your age. You got a driver’s license to show me?”
“What’s the problem, officer?”
“You’ve got a busted taillight.”
That old bitch had a busted taillight and she didn’t fix it? Stupid old cow. Victor swallowed his bile. “Thank you, Officer. I’ll get it fixed in Fort Pessel.”
Davie Franks shined his flashlight over on the girl, whose head was back against the lowered seat, her eyes closed. He said, “She sick?”
Victor said, “A case of the summer flu. She’s been puking, but she’ll be okay now.”
“May I see your driver’s license?”
Deputy Franks watched the young man hesitate, then reach for his wallet. He glanced again over at the young girl. Her eyes were open now and she was staring at him, her eyes sort of glazed. Was she really sick or high on drugs?
&nb
sp; As he took the driver’s license, he asked, “Where are you kids going?”
“I’m not a kid. I’m twenty-one,” said Victor. “My cousin and I were visiting relatives in Richmond and we’re going home now. Like I said, she’s got a touch of the flu.”
“Where’s home?”
“Fort Pessel. Look, Officer, I’ll get the taillight fixed as soon as I get home.”
Davie shined his flashlight on the license, read the name, checked the photo, then said aloud, “Victor Alessio Nesser. You from the Middle East?”
Now the jerkface thinks I’m a terrorist? He said, all stiff, desperate to get this guy out of his face, “I am an American. It is my father who is from the Middle East—Jordan, to be exact.”
“You don’t look Jordanian—I guess your mom was the blond, passed it on to you. Good thing for you. Always lots of trouble over there—” Davie glanced once again at the girl, then back down at the driver’s license photo; his eyes snapped alert with recognition and he jumped back, his hand going for his gun. “Get out of the car—”
But Davie didn’t have time to get his gun clear of its holster or to finish his sentence. Lissy brought her hand up smooth and fast and shot him between the eyes. He was grabbing for the door, but he was dead before his fingers touched the handle.
“Hey, what’s going on? Davie!”
“Well, look at this—another one,” Lissy said.
Victor opened the driver’s-side door, leaned down low, and waited for the female deputy to get close. She was talking into a cell phone, her voice urgent and her gun out. She saw his gun and yelled, “Stop!”
Victor shot her in the chest.
She dropped her gun and grabbed her chest, blood oozing out between her fingers, looked down at her partner staring back at her, a hole in his forehead, and said, “Why’d you shoot us?”
“You got in my face,” Victor said, and watched her collapse to the ground, maybe two feet from her partner.
“Check her, Victor. Make sure she’s dead.”
Victor got out of the car, looked down into the glazed eyes of the young freckle-faced woman who lay at his feet, her chest covered with her blood, blood snaking out of her mouth. Her cell phone was on the ground beside her, and he heard a man’s voice yelling, “What’s happening? Talk to me, Gail!”
Victor kicked the cell phone across the road.
“Is she dead?”
Deputy Gail Lynd tried to look for her gun but couldn’t move. She stared at the man—a boy, really—who’d shot her. She watched him turn and yell to someone in the car, “Shut your yap, Lissy. She’s not quite dead yet, but she will be soon.”
He looked back down at her, met her eyes, dumb with pain. She saw the buzz of excitement in him and doubted there was mercy there.
Lissy called out, “Pay attention, Victor. My mama said you gotta shoot ’em between the eyes, put their lights out right away. That way there’s no one hanging around, surviving, telling stories about you before they take their boat ride to hell. So stop your hee-hawing and put out her damned lights!”
“Yeah, yeah, all right.” Victor leaned down close and winked at the deputy as she whispered, “No, please, don’t kill—”
He fired. A chunk of concrete flew into the air not six inches from her face. She stared up at him.
He winked at her again.
Gail heard a mad cheer come from the car, then a yell: “Put a notch in that boy’s belt!”
22
VICTOR PULLED THE IMPALA into the Amesey gas station on High Street, just inside the Fort Pessel city limits, one he’d never used before because his aunt Jennifer hated Loony Old Amesey, as she called him. Some city, he thought, nothing but a dippy loser town that had nothing going for it except a long-ago dumb little Civil War battle that had passed over the grounds of city hall, an ugly gray stone heap built back in the thirties. He’d hated the place for the year and a half he’d had to plunk his butt down with his crazy Aunt Jennifer. He hated breathing the air that always smelled like old cigarette smoke. But it was better than traveling to Jordan with his parents, meeting his father’s family, who were probably just as crazy-mean as he was, maybe getting shot for just existing. You couldn’t even drink or smoke pot there, and they’d chop your hands or your nose off for selling drugs, or even your head.
There was an old geezer chewing on a stick of straw, sitting on a tilted-back chair against the side of the grungy little market, which was flashing a green neon sign that had only the letter R left glowing. It was Loony Old Amesey.
“Hey,” Victor called as he got out of the car. “I need a new taillight. Can you help me?”
“Nope,” the old coot called back, not even bothering to move. “We’re closed. Come back tomorrow. That’s Monday, ain’t it? Monday’s always a busy day, but my boys could maybe find time for you.”
Victor cursed, got back into the car, slammed his fist on the steering wheel. Lissy said, “I’m thinking maybe that female cop could have written down our license plate. I mean, she was sitting in the cop car with nothing else to do, right? And you said she was talking on her cell—no telling how close the cops are to us, Victor.”
He took a deep breath, nodded. He hated it when she told him what to do. It made him feel small and helpless. He looked over to see her eyes unfocused and knew she was in pain again. He hated that a lot more. He only nodded to her.
Thirty minutes later they were driving a little blue Corolla, the old Impala now tucked away behind a bowling alley next to an overflowing Dumpster that stank in the hot night air.
It was dark already; the few businesses in downtown Fort Pessel that opened on Sunday were shut down tight now. Victor pulled into the alley behind Kougar’s Pharmacy on Elm Street. He took her bottle of pills and quietly got out of the Corolla. “You stay still,” he whispered to Lissy. “Don’t come in after me, you hear me?”
He jimmied the back door, eased it open. The alarm didn’t go off, just as Victor knew it wouldn’t. Old Mrs. Kougar hadn’t ever had the alarm fixed after it burned out in the big storm of 2006, and everybody knew it.
Victor held his .22 in one hand, the bottle of pills in the other. All he had was a big flashlight, and he hated to use it, too much of a risk. He went behind the pharmacy counter, switched the flashlight on just long enough to find the narcotic pain meds, then off again. Thank God everything was labeled or he’d never find the right pills for her. He didn’t spot the same pills that were in Lissy’s bottle, but he did find Vicodin, and that was just fine. He filled up her bottle, and his pockets, put the nearly empty pharmacy bottle carefully back on the shelf. No one would know until morning that anyone had been here.
His heart nearly stopped when a light flashed toward him and a croaky old woman’s voice yelled, “Hey! Who are you? What do you want?”
Victor shot toward her voice without aiming. He heard her yell and run into something, heard boxes go flying. He fired again. It was either turn on the lights and nail the old biddy or get out of there. Somebody would have heard the shots, called 911. Old Lady Kougar would call the cops for sure, but she hadn’t seen him, at least he didn’t think she had. He was too afraid to think, so afraid he wanted to puke. He ran flat-out through the back door. He jumped into the car, cranked it hard, and rolled out of the alley.
Sweating, breathing hard, he threw the bottle of pills to Lissy, forced himself to take some deep breaths, and slowed down. He drove them out of town, telling her what happened in fits and starts until he calmed down again.
“You didn’t kill her?”
The disappointment in her voice steadied him. He even grinned a bit. “I don’t think so. It was dark as a pit in there. I didn’t hear her hit the floor or anything like a moan.”
“I never liked Old Lady Kougar. Always sticking her snout in everybody’s business.” She sat back, closed her eyes again, and said, “I’ll never forget the look she gave me when I bought condoms. Well, at least you shot at her. The bitch deserved it.”
Fifteen minutes later, the rush of adrenaline had eased off, and his blood slowed. Victor had already looped back toward town, and soon turned, slowly and carefully, onto Denver Lane. The Smiley house was on the end of the cul-de-sac, surrounded on three sides by thick oaks and maple woods that stretched behind the house a good quarter mile before a two-lane hardtop cut through them. They passed the closest neighbor a hundred feet down the street, Ms. Ellie at number 452. Not a single light was on in her house, since she always went to bed at seven-thirty. She’d cackle that she needed her beauty sleep, say that every single time she saw him. He and Lissy would slow down and stare at her shaky old hands when she waved to them, laughing about how they should send her to her reward. Lissy was serious, thought it would be fun to dump the old cow in the freezer in the garage, just another steak.
Suddenly, Lissy grabbed Victor’s hand. “Stop!”
He braked smoothly and pulled over to the side of the street. “Why? What’s wrong? The Vicodin hasn’t kicked in? You still feel bad?”
“No, no. You said the cops might be watching our house, waiting for us to come home. You’re too close.”
He wanted to tell her not to be stupid, he knew exactly what he was doing. He wished she’d learn to trust him. He shrugged. “Look, we talked about this, Lissy. You said they’d never find the bank money Aunt Jennifer stashed in the house, and you know where it is, right? I wasn’t just going to drive up. I was going to go around the back.”
Lissy felt mildly nauseated from the McDonald’s hamburger and fries she’d eaten an hour before. She shouldn’t have eaten them, but they tasted wonderful. But the spike of energy was long gone. She felt weak and shaky. And that made her angry again, angry at that big FBI guy who’d kicked her and that ridiculous old security guard who was probably sipping a rum punch somewhere in the Caribbean by now. She wanted to sleep, but first things first, that’s what her mother always said, her mother who’d bled to death on the beautiful marble bank floor, hundred-dollar bills fluttering down beside her.
The FBI Thrillers Collection: Vol 11-15 Page 77
