by Sam Sisavath
“You need to pay attention,” Tolbert said.
“Relax, they can’t hear us back here,” New Guy said. “You want a hand pulling that stick outta your ass?”
New Guy chuckled, and Tolbert had to exert every ounce of willpower not to turn around and punch him in the throat.
You had to take maternity leave, didn’t you, Lawrence? It’s your wife that gave birth, not you, moron.
Tolbert sighed instead.
New Guy wasn’t entirely wrong, though. They were far enough from the closest dinner guests—at least ten yards—that the chances of the couple in front of them overhearing was minimal. The man especially couldn’t hear anything behind him; he was in his eighties and was wearing slim headphones that broadcasted Taylor’s speech through a close-circuit system. The woman—she was about thirty years younger than her date—still had enough of her hearing that she didn’t have to resort to electronics, but Tolbert could tell she didn’t even know he existed back here.
“What’s with all the chatter?” a voice said inside Tolbert’s ear. Perry. He would be outside in the lobby right now with most of the staff. Once the ballroom was closed off, no one was allowed to enter or exit until the speech was over. “Keep the line clear of your shit and do your jobs.”
Next to Tolbert, New Guy reached down and flicked off his radio’s transmit switch. “Crap, forgot that was on.”
Idiot.
“That ever happen to you?” New Guy asked.
“No,” Tolbert said.
“Yeah, right.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
New Guy shrugged. “Just making conversation.”
“Less conversation, more paying attention.”
“Hey, that rhymes.”
Tolbert sighed again, and thought, Lawrence, I’m going to kill you for leaving me with this doofus.
He looked down the aisle and toward the podium. From here, Robert Taylor looked like a midget, even though the guy was almost as tall as Tolbert and surprisingly spry for someone pushing sixty. The American flag on his suit’s lapel glinted under the bright lights while he looked left, center, then right, before swiveling back around. He was reading the three teleprompters placed strategically around the room, but he did it so smoothly it was easy to think he might have been reciting the speech from memory.
Like their previous two stops, today’s speech was all about business, American jobs, and patriotism. There was a lot about patriotism. Maybe too much, according to a lot of the coverage of Taylor on the news that Tolbert had seen during his downtime. Except for one or two media outlets, the candidate’s rah-rah jingoism was a running gag on TV. Even the basic cable talk shows were starting to get in on the fun, and when that happened you knew you’d hit the zeitgeist.
No wonder he bans them. I would, too.
“Shit,” New Guy whispered next to him.
Now what?
“Cover me for a sec,” Tolbert’s partner said.
“What?” Tolbert said.
“My laces…”
Tolbert looked over, then down. One of New Guy’s laces had come undone.
Oh Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. You have got to be kidding me.
“One sec,” New Guy said, and casually lowered himself into a kneeling position and reached for his laces.
Tolbert had to grit his teeth to keep from screaming in frustration.
I’m going to kill you, Lawrence. I’m definitely going to kill you for this.
It took more than one sec for New Guy to redo his laces. It was more like five excruciating seconds, and Tolbert had to scan the left side of the room in addition to his own front and right sections. He had all but memorized the faces—and when he couldn’t see those, their suits and backs of heads—on his sides, but everything on his left was alien, even though he had seen them in flashes as the crowd first entered and settled in their assigned seats.
Tolbert picked up strange faces, unfamiliar backs of heads, and new brands of clothing. Suits and evening dresses, ten-thousand-and-up watches and the kind of jewelry he would never be able to buy his wife even if he worked this job for a thousand years.
“Okay, I’m good,” New Guy said as he straightened back up. “Thanks.”
“Yeah,” Tolbert said.
“I mean it. Thanks.”
“Yeah,” Tolbert said again. He didn’t trust himself to say more.
New Guy went quiet, and for a while there was just the candidate’s voice, booming from the front of the room. Not really booming, but it felt like it.
He’s got it, all right. He’s got it.
That last thought led Tolbert to think about what New Guy had asked him earlier: “Are you voting for him?”
Tolbert hadn’t responded because the truth was he didn’t know. He hadn’t voted in the last four presidential elections, not since college, when he was still young and stupid and thought his votes mattered.
“Are you voting for him?”
Maybe, Tolbert thought now, surprising even himself.
Shit. Maybe I just might vote for this guy. Go figure.
He might have been smiling to himself—or his mouth began the process of tugging upward into a smile—when a woman screamed. It was a loud shrill, like something out of a horror movie, and it pierced through the room and sliced its way into Tolbert’s soul.
Tolbert was spinning toward the source, one hand brushing back the flaps of his blazer and at the same time stabbing down for the Glock holstered at his right hip, but he hadn’t fully turned or gotten his weapon out when he heard one, then two gunshots.
Bang! bang!
Tolbert was half-turned toward the scream when he saw the lectern on the podium at the front of the room explode out of the corner of his right eye and a body falling.
Fuck!
He finished his turn just as his pistol came free and was already breaking out into a run when the shooter twisted and fired again—bang!—and a man in a suit standing next to a side door doubled over.
Bartlett!
Tolbert watched, helpless, as his fellow executive bodyguard disappeared behind a flood of suddenly frantic bodies, every single one of them jumping out of their seats instead of doing the obvious thing and hitting the floor. There were a few people smart enough to do just that, dropping and getting under their tables, but not nearly enough.
The spontaneous stampede of people surging toward the main entrance/exit where Tolbert and New Guy were standing made getting to the shooter difficult. The sight of Tolbert’s gun waving in the air only caused more panic, and some of the guests began falling to the ground where they vanished behind a forest of pistoning legs.
“Jesus Christ, secure Taylor!” Perry shouted through the device in Tolbert’s right ear. “Secure Taylor!”
There was a rush of air behind Tolbert as someone flung open the doors. A thick swath of lobby lights flooded the ballroom, but Tolbert was too busy fighting his way through the mass of bodies and horrified faces to look back. He struggled to keep his eyes focused on the left side of the room where he had last spotted the shooter—
There!
The man was moving toward the side door that Bartlett had been guarding. He was wearing the same black suit and tie as nearly all of the donors in the room, and Tolbert had only seen the back of the man’s head when he shot Bartlett. He should have easily become lost in the throng of fleeing bodies and screaming faces, except he didn’t because he was in no hurry. There was a casualness about the man as he walked toward the exit that made him stand out.
Tolbert moved even faster and harder, pushing men and women, young and old, out of his path while shouting into the mic clipped to his shirt sleeve, “Side exit! The shooter’s heading for the side exit!”
“What was that? Side exit?” Perry shouted in Tolbert’s ear.
“Side exit!”
“Bartlett! Are you there?”
“Bartlett’s down!” Tolbert shouted. “I repeat: Bartlett’s down!”
The shooter was a
lmost at the door when he fired into it—bang! bang!—before aiming slightly to the right and did it again—bang! bang!
What the hell? Tolbert thought as the shooter grabbed the lever and pushed the door open and—
Stopped.
The man glanced over his shoulder and right at Tolbert, and they locked eyes for a split second.
Then the assassin turned and slipped out into the bright hallway beyond.
“Tolbert!” someone screamed. This time it wasn’t coming from inside his ear, it was from his left and slightly behind him.
He glanced back, saw New Guy fighting to catch up to him. “Side door!”
New Guy nodded, and together they pushed and tossed and when they had to, shoved people out of their path. Someone fell, tables overturned, and chairs toppled, but Tolbert didn’t let any of that stop him. And New Guy, to his credit, didn’t either.
You’re not going anywhere, asshole! Tolbert thought. You’re dead meat!
Tolbert burst through the side door first—and nearly tripped over a black-suited body (Jesus, Astin!) lying on the tiled floor.
He managed to hop over the ten-year veteran at the last second, even as New Guy emerged behind him and did trip, but not on Astin. There was a second suited body in the hallway—this one a woman, Maureen—and New Guy spilled on top of her.
“Oh, Jesus,” New Guy said.
Tolbert didn’t have time to help him up; he was too busy covering the long hallway with his gun.
The corridor stretched at least fifty yards before ending in a three-way intersection. Tolbert knew from the hotel floor plans, that the hallway connected the ballroom to the kitchen via the right turn and the lobby on the left. It was brightly lit, and there was nothing in front of Tolbert even though he swore the shooter hadn’t gotten more than a few seconds of a head start on them. Ten seconds, at the most.
Ten seconds? Shit!
Ten seconds, in Tolbert’s experience, was more than enough time to make fifty yards on a full sprint. Tolbert had done it in six back in high school and a half second faster than that in college. And the shooter had a full ten seconds to do it.
Tolbert let out a frustrated sigh, then spent the next few moments getting his heartbeat to slow down. It continued hammering away anyway as all the years of training, waiting for a moment like this one, refused to yield so readily. It took everything Tolbert had to keep his legs upright and his weapon from slipping out of his sweat-slicked hand.
He’s gone. He’s gone…
Behind him, New Guy was scrambling up and making too much noise. “Jesus. Oh Jesus, it’s Maureen. He fucking shot Maureen and Astin through the door. Fuck.”
“Tolbert!” Perry shouted in his ear. “Where are you?”
“Side exit,” Tolbert said into his sleeve. His pulse was still racing, and he hoped it didn’t come through in his voice. “I’m with…the new guy.”
“What?” New Guy said. “You forgot my name, didn’t you?”
Tolbert ignored him, said into the mic, “Perry, he’s either heading right at you, or he’s on his way to the kitchen. He got a head start on us, but he couldn’t have gotten far.”
“Understood,” Perry said. Then, sounding like he was running, “Gamma team, stay in the lobby and control the chaos. No one leaves the building until I say so, understand? Alpha team, you’re with me!”
“What about us?” Tolbert asked.
“Get back into the ballroom and help secure the scene.”
“What about Taylor? Is he dead?”
“That’s being handled.”
“But is he dead?”
“Stop asking questions and do your job, goddammit!”
“Roger that,” Tolbert said. He holstered his weapon and turned around to New Guy. “You okay?”
New Guy was trying to brush blood from his palms on his pants legs. “I’ll live.” Then, “We lost him?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah,” Tolbert said again.
He walked over and crouched next to Astin, then glanced over at Maureen, whom he didn’t really know. At least Tolbert didn’t know her nearly as well as he did Astin, who was bleeding out from two bullet holes in his chest. Maureen had the same wounds, though slightly higher on the torso.
Then there was Bartlett, back in the ballroom.
Three. He got three of us.
And maybe Taylor, too…
Tolbert glanced back at the door and stared at the four holes the shooter had put into it.
Four holes.
Four perfectly-placed holes, right where two adults of average height would be standing. That explained why Maureen’s wounds were higher up, because she was two inches shorter than average. Even so, the shooter had fired from the other side as if he knew exactly where they were standing. How the hell did he know that?
“Man, I don’t even know their names,” New Guy said. He stood next to Tolbert while still brushing his bloody hands on his pants.
“Astin and Maureen.”
“You knew them well?”
Tolbert nodded. “I knew Astin. We came on the job at about the same time. He had two kids, eight and six. I went to one of their birthday parties just two months ago.”
There was a very soft noise, like someone had coughed, before New Guy collapsed next to Tolbert, his head landing on top of Maureen’s splayed legs. At the same time, a single brass casing dropped from the air and clinked against the polished floor tiles in front of Tolbert.
He looked up.
There was a man clinging to the ceiling where the hallway met the doorframe like some kind of goddamn insect. Or Tolbert thought it was a man, but he was suddenly not a hundred percent certain because there was something wrong with the face. He thought it was some kind of mask at first, but that couldn’t have been true because it was moving, blurring at impossibly fast speeds from side to side, up and down, and it was difficult to know where the eyes ended (if there were even eyes in the first place) and the mouth began.
“What…?” Tolbert said.
He heard that same sound, barely louder than a cough, and then he didn’t hear anything ever again.
Chapter 18
Quinn
“You’re Quinn Turner.”
“That’s what everyone keeps telling me.” Quinn gave the young man who helped her out of the fifteen-foot aluminum boat and onto the riverbank as genuine a smile as she could muster. “Are we good?”
Harrison nodded before throwing a quick look over his shoulder, as if he expected police cruisers to be swarming them at any second. There wasn’t anything back there but a dead-end street and two paved roads. There were also no businesses or street cameras to spy on them, which made this the perfect spot to climb out of the river, otherwise Aaron wouldn’t have chosen the location.
It would be a different story much farther down the bayou and around the large red brick building that was the Harris County Jail. The reporters would already be at the scene—most of them had been waiting to cover Zoe’s arrival at the nearby criminal courthouse—but it would take a while for law enforcement to gather all the information, piece together what had happened, and then launch a search party for them.
Let’s hope it takes them a while.
Behind Quinn, a second young man (God, why are they always so young?) was helping Zoe out of the boat.
“You,” Zoe said when she saw her helper, who, like Harrison, was wearing a sheriff’s deputy uniform.
“Yup, me,” Henley said.
The reporter was still shaking, her legs visibly wobbly as she climbed up the muddy side of the bayou. Owen gave her a hand from behind.
“That’s your car,” Harrison was saying, pointing at a white sedan parked next to a sheriff’s office cruiser. “The tag’s legit, so no one’s going to be looking for it.” He handed her a ring with a single key on it. “Tank’s topped off. You can reimburse me later, when this is over.”
She nodded, said, “Thanks,” but what she really wa
nted to say was, “What are you doing here? What did the Rhim do to you? And what are the chances you’re going to lose your life, just like Mary and Xiao and Trevor?”
But she didn’t say any of those things. This wasn’t the place or the time, and she didn’t know these people. Aaron was the one who had contacted them, had set this up, and if they failed to check in with him tomorrow, she probably wouldn’t know unless he told her.
She turned to Owen. “Ready?”
“I call shotgun,” Owen said.
“You’re driving.”
“Or that.”
She tossed him the key, and Owen went ahead of them.
Quinn walked over to Zoe, who stood looking back at the jail in the distance. It was just tall and red enough to stand out. “You okay?”
“No. I don’t think I’m okay,” Zoe said quietly.
“You’ll have to be, because you don’t have any choice.”
“I just escaped from custody…”
“You did more than that. You escaped from the Rhim.”
“A day ago, I wouldn’t know what that means, but now…” She shook her head, then shivered again. “Maybe I should have turned down Aaron’s offer after all.”
Quinn smiled. “Still not too late.”
Zoe looked like she was actually thinking about it, but Quinn had already turned to Harrison.
“Aaron says you guys might split town after this,” Harrison said.
“We don’t know yet,” Quinn said. “But it’s better if you don’t know.”
“Right, that’s probably for the best.”
“What about the boat?” she asked the deputy. “Our prints are all over it. Yours too, probably.”
“Don’t worry about the boat,” Henley said. “We’ll take care of it.”
“Good luck,” Harrison said.
Good luck to all of us. We’re gonna need it, she thought as she shook their hands.
Owen was behind the steering wheel, with Quinn in the front passenger seat as the sedan cruised at five miles over the speed limit on the highway. There had been no pursuits—nothing on the roads or in the skies. The news of the escape had already hit the Internet when she checked her phone and talked to Aaron; there were sporadic reports on the radio. The words “daring daylight prison break” kept coming up.
