The Devil's Elixir ts-3

by Raymond Khoury

  We flew out of the lobby and skittered to a stop in the hotel’s forecourt. It gave onto a medium-size lot where guests parked their own cars, as the hotel didn’t offer a valet service. I knew we couldn’t afford to stop for longer than a heartbeat. I swung my gaze across the lot, breathing hard, my heart kicking and screaming furiously against my rib cage, and to our left, I spotted what I’d expected—a white van, parked facing the hotel’s entrance, one silhouette inside it, that of another shooter who flung its door open and climbed out the instant he saw us.

  “That way,” I blurted as I herded Michelle away from the van—then I saw a car drive into the lot and head for an empty parking spot.

  “Over there,” I told Michelle, pointing at the blue sedan. “That car. Go.”

  We raced toward it with me keeping our rear covered, and we were flying past a row of parked cars when a new volley of bullets erupted, crunching into body panels around us and taking out a windshield we’d just streaked past.

  “Don’t stop,” I yelled to Michelle as I spun around and fired back at the two shooters rushing toward us.

  We reached the Ford just as its driver, a paunchy, bald man in a suit, had pulled in and was getting out of his car.

  “Give me your keys,” I barked, shoving my gun in his face and leaving him no room for indecision. The poor guy held them out with two fingers. I snatched them from him and pulled him out of the car and pushed him away, ordering him, “Stay down.”

  The man hit the ground. I yelled out to Michelle, “Get in,” flinging the rear door open for her before loosing a few more rounds at the shooters.

  Michelle hustled Alex into the car and was flying in behind me when I saw one of the crew raise his head and put a bead on us. I lined him up, but just as I pulled the trigger, I saw the man fire and heard a sharp unnnh coming from my right.

  A stab of dread ripped through me as I flicked my head sideways and caught sight of Michelle staggering into the rear seat after Alex.

  I also spotted a small, dark patch at the base of her chest.

  “Meesh?!”

  She didn’t reply and just disappeared into the car.

  I cursed inwardly, knowing what had just happened, knowing it wasn’t good, not in that spot, not where you’ve got lungs and a heart and all kinds of other soft, crucial bits all packed in tight next to each other, but I couldn’t do anything about it right now, couldn’t do anything other than get them the hell out of there. I jumped in, punched the ignition key in, and threw the car into reverse, twisting around to look over my shoulder as I blasted the car out of its parking spot.

  I couldn’t manage more than a quick glance at Michelle, but the sight of her sent an ice pick through my gut. Her eyes were wild with fear and anguish, and her face had burst into sweat.

  “Jesus, Meesh,” I rasped.

  She glanced down at her wound, then looked up and just held my gaze, her face flooded with confusion. She tried to say something, and her mouth just couldn’t form the words at first, then she said, “I’m—fuck, Sean, I’m hit.”

  Behind her, through the windshield, I could see the two shooters still coming at us. One of them, the bastard who’d shot her, was moving with more difficulty and I saw that he had a dark patch on his shoulder. I figured that was where my bullet went, though it had obviously got there a split second too late.

  I wasn’t about to give him a second chance.

  “Hang on,” I told Meesh, keeping my foot down, flooring the pedal, hard, like I was trying to ram it through the foot well, sending the Ford rocketing backward and straight into the shooters’ path.

  One of them managed to avoid it by taking a flying leap over the hood of a parked car, but the guy I really wanted wasn’t as light-footed. I just plowed into him and pushed him along before crushing him against the side of another car, obliterating the lower half of his body in a sickening, wet crunch that sounded damn good to me. Then I threw the car back into gear and we flew out of the hotel’s lot, hanging a squealing right before tearing down the seafront, my head snapping back and forth as my eyes searched for any kind of reassurance about Michelle and the bullet that had found her.

  8

  “Meesh, stay with me, okay? Just hang in there,” I yelled, breathless, all kinds of expletives coming out thick and fast inside my head as I threw quick glances behind me to see how she was while I pulled out my phone.

  As I hit the green button twice to redial the last called number, I caught a glimpse of her looking up at me, and it wasn’t good. Her eyes were half-closed, her mouth was twisted with pain, and the sheen of sweat on her face had turned into a full-on drench. Her chest was now soaked in blood, and she had her right arm around Alex, squeezing him tight against her. Her eyes widened and hooked mine, and she started to say something, but it was cut short as she coughed and blood spurted out of her mouth.

  My gorge shot up into my neck.

  “Hang in there, baby,” I repeated as Villaverde picked up the call.

  “Reilly?”

  “I’m with Michelle, she’s been shot, we need help,” I told him. “I’m in the car with her and her kid and—” I scanned the area around us, looking for markers to give him. “I’m on the seafront, heading west, away from the hotel.”

  “You being pursued?”

  I glanced in the mirror, but couldn’t see any sign of the goon squad.

  “No. But I need to get her to a hospital, fast.”

  I heard Villaverde call out to one of his men, then he said, “Okay, you must be on Harbor Drive, which means the nearest hospital to you is . . .” He paused, thinking about it.

  “Come on,” I hollered, “she’s bleeding out”—and just then, something caught my eye, in the sky, to my left. An airliner, coming in to land.

  My pulse tripped. “Forget the hospital. I’m by the airport.” My eyes scanned the road ahead and, sure enough, I spotted a big overhead sign for the airport, announcing an exit for Terminal Two. “Get them to send an ambulance to meet me outside Terminal Two. I’m in a blue Ford sedan.”

  “Hang on.”

  I heard him yell out the order to get onto the airport’s EMS dispatcher, then Villaverde came back.

  “What about the shooters?”

  “I got one of them in the parking lot, some of him might still be there when your people get there, but the others’ll be long gone.”

  “All right, I’ll keep you posted. And good luck with her.”

  I chucked the phone onto the seat next to me and crunched the pedal. As we blew past some slower vehicles, I adjusted the mirror and locked it onto Michelle’s face.

  “Almost there, Meesh, you hear me?” I urged her, “We’re almost there.”

  Her eyes were struggling to stay open.

  Fear swamped my heart as I guided the Ford past a blur of cars before veering off the six-lane road and throwing the car onto the winding ramp that led to the terminal. Less than a minute later, we were pulling up to the curb by a startled traffic cop.

  I leapt out of the car and threw a quick glance up and down the ramp, looking for the EMS van. There was no sign of it.

  “There’s an ambulance on its way,” I shouted to the cop as I flung open the rear door to get to Michelle. “See if you can find out where it is. We’ve got an emergency here.”

  I leaned in, and the sight that greeted me froze me stiff. Michelle wasn’t moving. Her breathing was shallow and when it did come, it wasn’t much more than a feeble wheeze. There was a messy streak of blood and saliva running down from the side of her mouth, and the car seat was drenched.

  Softly, I reached out and pulled up her shirt, looking for the wound. There was a dark crevasse just under her left breast, and thick blood was seeping out of it. I put my hand on it and applied some pressure, trying to stem the bleeding, anticipating the pain I’d be causing Michelle, and sure enough, she flinched hard as my hand pressed harder. I moved my other hand up to her face, giving her pale, clammy cheek a caress, unsure about whether or not s
he could even feel it. As I did, my eyes drifted off her face and down to find Alex, who was tucked in under her arm, his face down, his eyes shut tight. He was shivering wildly.

  “Hey,” I said, softly. I reached over, then hesitated and pulled my hand back before it settled on the boy’s head. “It’s gonna be okay,” I told him in that annoying, desperate way that we sprout out these platitudes. “She’s gonna be fine.”

  Alex didn’t look up. Instead, he remained still for a moment, still coiled up tight and trembling, then he gave me a minuscule nod before going back to his shell-like seclusion.

  I felt my heart stall as Michelle’s warm blood kept seeping through my fingers—then I heard a faint siren growing in the distance.

  “They’re here, Meesh, you hear that? The ambulance is here.”

  Her eyelids flickered half open, allowing her eyes to connect with mine momentarily. Her face scrunched up as she tried to say something, but she couldn’t manage it and just coughed up some more blood.

  I leaned in closer. “Don’t talk, sweetie. Just hang in there, we’ll have you in the ambulance in no time.”

  She seemed insistent and tried again, but the words shriveled up in her throat.

  “What is it, baby?” I asked as I heard the siren’s shriek grow louder, almost with us now.

  Her eyes widened briefly, like it was the result of some superhuman effort, and she met my gaze again, even though it seemed to be taking a huge toll on her. “Alex,” she wheezed. “Keep . . . keep him . . . safe.”

  “Of course. Hey, I’m not going anywhere,” I said, managing some feeble attempt at a reassuring smile, stroking her cheek while keeping my other hand pressed down on the entry wound. “We’re both right here with you,” I told her as I glimpsed the ambulance pulling up behind us.

  Within seconds, the paramedics were in the car, checking her out. My gut twisted as I read the look on their faces when they first saw how pale and weak she was and when they saw the amount of blood that she’d lost. With more and more curious onlookers congregating around the car, I helped them lift her out of it and onto a stretcher, keeping Alex close and hanging onto his hand before doing my best to shield Michelle from his view as the paramedics tended to her on the curb.

  The sound bites coming from them weren’t reassuring.

  “She’s got massive internal bleeding,” one of them finally told me while struggling to set up a second intravenous line into her arm. “I can’t tell what’s been hit, but we can’t do anything about it here. She needs surgery.”

  Just then, some sensors started beeping wildly and the other paramedic blurted, “She’s crashing.” The first paramedic sprang to action and they both went frantic, hands and mouths moving at lightning speed as one of them started on the CPR while the other looked into her mouth to secure an airway for intubation. I stood back and watched in numb silence as they worked on her, feeling my whole body seize up every time she convulsed under the paramedic’s compresses, holding Alex tight against me, making sure the kid couldn’t see what was going on, hoping against hope that they’d be able to save her, but somehow knowing it wasn’t going to work out, feeling impotent and helpless at not being able to step in and make things right and bring her back to her vibrant, mesmeric self, feeling a surge of fury converging in my temples and making them feel like they were going to erupt, then the beeping stopped and the flatline took over and the lead paramedic turned to me with a tenebrous look and a small shake of the head that reached deep into my very core and shredded everything in its path.

  9

  “How the hell did they find her?”

  We were back at the ranch, the ranch in this case being the FBI’s San Diego field office, a squat, glass-and-concrete three-story structure a couple of miles east of Montgomery Field. Villaverde and I were in his top-floor office. Besides everything that had happened, I’d spent ages briefing a couple of homicide detectives on what had gone down and describing the shooters as best as I could, and right now, I was tired and angry as hell, and my head felt all heavy and clogged up, like someone had pumped molasses into my skull.

  “Maybe they followed her from the house,” Villaverde speculated, leaning against the edge of his desk. He was tall and lean and with the clear olive skin and the combed-back onyx-black hair, a walking, talking ad for the bureau. I imagined the suits loved him, and to be fair, from what I’d seen so far, he was a straight-shooting, efficient guy.

  “She said she wasn’t followed,” I fired back, more testily than I should have. “Michelle was good. She would have spotted a tail. Especially after what happened. She was looking out for one.”

  “What about her phone?”

  “She killed the battery after calling me.”

  “Maybe she called someone else from the hotel?”

  My head snapped left and right. “No way. Michelle was a pro. She wouldn’t take that risk, not after what she’d been through.”

  Villaverde shrugged. “Well, we’ll know soon enough. If she did call anyone, it’ll show up on her room’s phone records.”

  Another possibility was clawing away at me.

  “How many hotels and motels do you think there are out there, by the airport?”

  “I don’t know. Not that many. Why? You think that’s how they found her? Trawling them?”

  “When she called me from the mall, Michelle said she’d find somewhere to hole up by the airport. If they hacked her phone and were in on that call . . . they’d be looking for a woman and a kid with no luggage and no credit card. Maybe they got lucky.”

  “Well if that’s what happened, and depending on how they did it, there might a cloning trail on her phone.” He picked up his desk phone and punched in a couple of buttons. “I’ll get the lab to check it out.”

  I stood by the large window as Villaverde made his call and stared out in silence, seething with rage. The sun was long gone, and darkness was now firmly in control, gloomy and oppressive. The streetlamps in the almost empty parking lot were low and subdued, and there was no moon or stars in the sky that I could see, no beacon, no light at the end of the harrowing tunnel that this day had turned into. It was as if nature itself was conspiring to accentuate my sense of loss.

  “I don’t get it,” I fumed. “She said they weren’t after a kill. She said one of the shooters had her in his sights back at the house, but didn’t take the shot.”

  “Maybe one of them screwed up,” Villaverde offered as he hung up. “You said it yourself, bullets were flying all over the place.” He hesitated, his expression uncertain, then added, “Maybe the one that got her was meant for you.”

  My stomach flooded with acid. It was something I’d been wondering about, along with second-guessing everything I’d done, every decision I’d made from the moment Michelle had called.

  “Yeah, that’s a great feeling right there,” I grumbled. I tried to shake away the anger and the remorse and focus on what had to be done. “Okay, so what have we got to go on besides her phone? CCTV footage from the hotel, ballistics from the hotel and from the house . . . what else? Fingerprints? Blood from the shooters?”

  Villaverde nodded. “We’ve got lots of DNA to work with, from the house and from the mess you left behind in the parking lot. I don’t know what the score is on the camera footage, but forensics are running what they got through NCIC.”

  “What about neighbors?”

  “Homicide’s had people out there since her nine-one-one call, but I can’t see much coming out of that. What are they going to get? The van’s plates?”

  I remembered seeing the shooters’ van in the hotel’s parking lot, but in the heat of the moment, my eyes hadn’t registered its plate. It was irrelevant, anyway. Stolen, rented with a fake ID—either usually did the trick.

  “I need you to go downtown and look at some faces,” Villaverde said, referring to the monster database of mug shots on tap. Not something I was relishing.

  I nodded grudgingly, wondering about who these guys were and go
ing over what I’d seen, what their faces and their moves told me. They were tough and committed, and they moved well together, like they’d had a lot of practice doing it. It made me wonder what else we’d find out when we finally did track them down.

  “They’ve got two guys down, either seriously hurt or more probably dead,” I said.

  “They’re not about to roll them to any ER,” Villaverde replied. “Best case, we’ll find their bodies dumped somewhere sometime soon, but I’m not holding my breath. More likely they’ll end up as worm food in one of the canyons or out in the desert.”

  Which is what I would have done, if I were them. The thing is, you’ve still got to cover all possible angles, in case the bastards who killed Michelle and whoever was calling the shots for them slipped up—which, luckily for us, they sometimes did.

  “They lost two guys in one morning. You know of many crews that can take that kind of damage without blinking?” Before Villaverde could answer, I added, “We need to reach out to the DEA.”

  “Why?”

  “Michelle couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to come after her. The only thing she could think of was that maybe it was some kind of blowback from her years on the job. We need to ask them about that.”

  Villaverde’s face contorted, like this was news to him. “I know the ASAC who runs their local office. I’ll give him a call.” He thought about it for a moment, then asked, “Was she based back east with you?”

  I shook my head. “No. Mexico City.”

  “Mexico? Is that where you were posted, too?”

  “No, I was Chicago.”

  “So how’d you guys hook up?”

  “I was down there as part of a multi-agency task force. We were chasing down a new outfit that was cooking up some seriously pure crank that was hitting the street. I’d been backtracking the trail through some Latin Kings gangbangers they were supplying.”

  “Operation Sidewinder?” Villaverde asked.

  “Right. Anyway, Meesh was already there, working out of the DEA’s main digs at the embassy, hitting the kingpins where it hurt most—in their wallets. It didn’t take long for our paths to cross.”