Only to Die Again

by Patrick Lee

  Chapter Nine

  ‘You see flashers ahead, get off the road,’ the man in the passenger seat said. ‘Kill the lights and get out into the scrub – slow, no dust trail.’

  ‘I know.’

  Tension in their voices. From his viewpoint down behind the driver’s seat, Dryden could see the passenger looking forward and backward every few seconds, watching for distant police units, but also watching Dryden, his eyes dropping to take stock of him on every pass from front to back.

  Dryden still had his bound wrists under the bench seat behind him. He kept his shoulders dead still, except for the rhythmic movement of his breathing, which he exaggerated. The best things to project now were fear and defeat. He let his head sag to the carpet and clenched his teeth. He blinked rapidly. He made his breath hiss in and out, just perceptibly shuddering. I’m cowed. I’m not going to be any trouble. Go ahead and relax.

  Some of this stuff was pretty basic – psy-ops 101. The man in the passenger seat seemed to eat it up. The evidence was subtle, but it was there. Longer glances out the front and back windows, shorter glances down at Dryden. On some passes he didn’t look down at all. The guy was relaxing.

  Maybe thirty seconds had gone by since they’d left the scene – maybe ninety since the Jeep with Claire in it had departed. Two vehicles doing 60 or 70 in opposite directions. The math got uglier by the second.

  Dryden kept his shoulders moving steadily with his breathing. Kept his head sagging. And moved his wrists.

  His hands could feel plenty of things beneath the bench seat. A slip of paper that was probably a Home Depot receipt. One end of a short length of two-by-four lying sideways under the seat. A six-inch scrap of wire sheathing he’d stripped from a cable, last week when he rewired the cottage.

  And the trailing edge of a plastic bag. Again, from Home Depot.

  Not an empty bag. What was in it? He thought he could remember stowing it here, a few weeks back, before the wiring and before the plumbing, too. Back when he’d still been doing framing work, putting in the new closet in the master bedroom.

  He got his fingertips around the plastic and pulled it closer, the crinkling sound lost under the roar of the engine and the drone of the tires.

  Something heavy in the bag. He knew what it was – a tight stack of one particular item he’d bought in bulk: framing brackets. Little L-shaped pieces of galvanized steel, stamped out and press-bent and sold with the factory grease and metal shavings still clinging to them. They were practical and unfancy and cheap. And sharp, at least to a degree. Dryden could think of a dozen things that would have been better to find under the seat – a drywall knife would have been nice. But the brackets might do.

  He worked the stack out of the bag. Contorted his wrists, gripping the stack, feeling for how best to position the thing to slide it against the zip-tie.

  There was no good angle. No way to work the stack against the plastic band without also cutting the hell out of his skin.

  So be it.

  ‘I think this thing’s on,’ the passenger said.

  Two minutes now, since they’d left the scene. Three since Claire had been taken south.

  Dryden could feel blood slicking his wrists. He thought he could feel the zip-tie beginning to give, too. He hoped.

  ‘Don’t open it,’ the driver said.

  The passenger was no longer sparing any attention for Dryden. The guy was glancing up occasionally through the windshield, but mostly his focus was on something down near his own feet.

  ‘It’s on,’ the passenger said. ‘I can hear something. Static, I think.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Don’t open it.’

  The zip-tie broke with a snick – louder than Dryden had wanted. He tensed and watched the passenger for a reaction.

  Nothing.

  He separated his hands. Groped in the dark again, beneath the seat, and got hold of the two-by-four. It was at least two feet long; he could feel the far end of it resting against the back of his knee.

  He glanced up at the passenger. The man was only staring forward now, chewing on his lower lip. Maybe he was stewing about being shut down by the driver. Maybe there was an ongoing dynamic between them, alpha and beta, aggressive and passive-aggressive. No doubt it was fascinating.

  Dryden pulled the two-by-four tight against himself, then raised his hip upward just an inch or two, his body forming a long, shallow arch with his feet at one end and his shoulder at the other. He eased the two-by-four through the gap until it lay in front of him, then brought his hands around to his front side.

  His head was still resting on the floor. He directed his gaze forward, at the space beneath the driver’s seat. The Explorer was fairly new, just two years old, but it was the base model for the most part. No special electronics under the seat cushions. No motorized adjustments, no warming coils. Nothing but steel supports set in glide tracks, and a release bar to let the driver scoot the seat forward or back.

  And empty space. Four vertical inches of it. Enough to admit the two-by-four, along with his forearm. Dryden could see all the way through to the footwell in front of the driver. Could see the man’s foot on the gas, and the brake pedal beside it.

  The man at the wheel was named Richard Conklin, at least as far as his current employer was concerned. It was not his real name, but he’d used it often enough that he sometimes slipped into thinking of it as a kind of alter ego. Under his real identity, he was twice divorced and paying out a great deal of money in child support for kids who hated him, and toward whom the feeling was very nearly mutual.

  Richard Conklin, though. Richard Conklin was a killer.

  He was a killer when the job called for it, anyway.

  Other times, the job might be to break into a house and steal something – some piece of paperwork, say – or simply drive a vehicle from one location to another and not look in the trunk. Above all, Richard Conklin did precisely what he was paid to do, and never asked why. He never even knew who he was actually working for. There were always go-betweens. Double-blind connections. One-time-use phones and carefully couched language for instructions. Paranoia was everybody’s friend. That was how Richard Conklin had always done business.

  Until last month. Until the meeting up in Silicon Valley, with the people he was working for now. The people who wanted what they called a rapid response team, a term that sounded like private army to Richard Conklin’s ears.

  The work had begun right away, sometimes solo jobs, other times team efforts like tonight. It was steady work, which was nice, and the pay was excellent, which was even nicer.

  Richard Conklin was thinking that very thing when something collided with the side of his foot – not painfully, more like a solid thump from a mallet. It smacked his foot sideways, right off the accelerator; he jerked his head down to see what was happening. He never got the chance.

  In the next instant the vehicle’s brakes locked up as if he’d jammed his heel on them. The tires bit the road and shrieked, the whole chassis dipping at the nose as if its back end had lifted half a foot off the pavement. He and the passenger were slammed forward against their seat belts. He felt the air compress out of his lungs, and then the awful rubber screech finally halted and the world went still.

  He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t get the air back into his chest. Couldn’t –

  Movement, a blur of it, right between the front seats. The guy they’d tied up. Richard turned in time to see the stranger throw a hard punch into the passenger’s temple, about as savage a hit as he’d ever seen. The passenger’s head snapped sideways and cracked against the side window – unconscious, just like that. Richard forgot about getting his breath back; his focus jumped to the two Berettas he’d taken from the wrecked Land Rover. One of the handguns was tucked into his partner’s waistband, the other in his own. Richard’s hand darted for it even as the stranger turned to him.

  Dryden saw the hand moving. Saw what it was moving toward. In the fraction of a second he had to work with,
he considered what he had seen in the previous instant: The now-unconscious passenger had Claire’s other Beretta, and the man’s rifle was leaning upright in the footwell, against the door. Neither gun was a useful option – not in the time it would take the driver to draw his own gun, at which point everything was going to get messy. Grappling for a firearm, especially in a confined space, was clumsy as hell at the best of times. Too many variables. Too much luck involved.

  The driver’s hand reached the Beretta. Closed around it. Dryden gave up on grabbing for it himself.

  He reached for the driver’s head instead. He looped his left arm around it and got a grip on the guy’s chin. He braced his other hand on the back of the skull. He twisted the head counterclockwise, facing it toward the driver’s-side window, as far as it would turn before the neck stopped it. He tightened his grip, locked his elbows to his own sides, and pivoted explosively at the waist, wrenching the head through another forty-five degrees of turn. He heard a vertebra crack like a walnut shell, and the man’s hand went slack around the Beretta. Dead, or within seconds of it. Good enough.

  Dryden thought of the Jeep Wrangler, probably five miles south now, doing 70. He could feel the seconds draining away. There were no more to spare.

  He swept the Beretta forward off the seat, into the footwell, then unclipped the driver’s seat belt. He grabbed the guy by the waistband of his pants and hauled the body over the console into the middle bench seat. A second later he’d clambered behind the wheel himself. The engine was still running; the Explorer was, in fact, rolling gently forward at idle.

  Ten seconds since he’d stopped the vehicle.

  Dryden glanced at the passenger. The man was still breathing but showed no sign of waking anytime soon. Dryden took the second Beretta from the man’s waistband, then cranked the wheel and made a tight U-turn. When the Explorer was pointing south, he floored it, pushing the speed up through 50, 70, 90. The needle edged past 110 and hovered there, the engine screaming like it might blow something if he pushed it any harder.

  The man in the passenger seat shuddered. Dryden glanced at him again, considering the layout of the situation.

  He had a decent chance of catching the Jeep. The desert was big and mostly flat, and still mostly dark – he would see the Jeep’s taillights if he got within even a couple of miles.

  But if he didn’t …

  Dryden kept one hand on the wheel and kept the other poised to backhand the passenger if he woke. If he didn’t catch the Jeep, he would need the man alive for questioning.

  He kept the speedometer near 110 and divided his attention between the passenger and the road blurring by.

  He passed the shot-up police cruiser ninety seconds later. The eastern sky was just bright enough now to cast a bit of light over the desert. The cruiser was still steaming, hunkered in the dark like a smashed insect.

  He watched the road to the south, though he didn’t expect to see the Jeep’s taillights for another couple of minutes at best.

  The needle wavered up and down near 110. The yellow lines on the highway looked unnatural, sliding by at this speed. Like a bad special effect in a movie.

  Thirty seconds past the cruiser.

  Sixty.

  Nothing ahead but darkness.

  Ninety seconds.

  Then he topped a rise and saw a light. Not red. Pale yellow, a single pinpoint in the black landscape.

  Half a mile later he knew what it was. He felt his chest tighten. He let off the accelerator.

  The keening whine of the Explorer’s engine cycled down – 80 miles per hour, 60, 40.

  He rolled to a stop twenty feet shy of the white light. It hung high above the roadbed on a rusty arm sticking out from a wooden post. In its glow, a second paved road bisected 395, running east and west into the desert.

  The men in the Jeep Wrangler would have had every reason to get off 395 as soon as possible. There were sure to be police coming up the highway any time now, closing in on the stricken cruiser with the unresponsive driver.

  The Jeep could have gone east or west from here.

  West seemed more likely. It would lead toward the coast, and eventually Silicon Valley, several hours north, if that was where they were going.

  But the men in the Jeep weren’t necessarily going straight back to wherever they’d been sent out from. They were taking Claire to the interrogation site, wherever that was.

  Dryden put the Explorer in park and shoved open his door. He reached across the unconscious passenger and took hold of the man’s rifle, a Remington 700 with a scope the size of a small coffee can.

  A night-vision scope.

  Dryden got out and clambered onto the Explorer’s hood, then onto its roof. He stood upright and first scanned the three directions with his own eyes. East. South. West. Nothing out there. Just black country under a brightening sky.

  He found the power switch for the scope and turned it on. It was a Zeiss, a little newer than the hardware he’d used back in the day, but familiar enough in its operation.

  He found the selector switch for its thermal-vision setting, and the optical magnification ring. He twisted the ring to its most powerful zoom, 12x, then shouldered the rifle and put his eye to the lens.

  He glassed the southern route first – 395 running down toward Barstow.

  The landscape looked ghostly in the blue-white false-color image. Even now, after hours of night air, the road held a different temperature than the surrounding land. Maybe an effect of humidity or soil acidity. Whatever the case, Dryden could see the road easily, snaking away for miles.

  There was no vehicle to be seen on it.

  He turned in place and studied the western stretch of the crossroad.

  Nothing there.

  And nothing to the east.

  He’d just lowered the rifle when he felt the Explorer rock lightly on its shocks – movement in the cab, beneath his feet.

  ‘Goddammit,’ he hissed.

  He slung the weapon on his shoulder, vaulted down to the hood and then the asphalt, and drew the Beretta from his waistband.

  But he saw at once there would be no need for it.

  The man in the passenger seat wasn’t coming around. He was seizing. His shoulders jerked forward and back; his head hung to one side, a pencil-thick line of blood coming from his nose and one ear.

  Dryden thought of the punch he had hit the man with, seconds after freeing himself and locking up the brakes.

  He had thrown the punch too hard. Had centered the impact too much on the temple. In that moment, he had been in no frame of mind for restraint. His only thought had been to immobilize both men as quickly as possible.

  Careless. Too many years past his training – even a couple of years back, he would’ve reined in his emotions better than that.

  All at once the seizure stopped. Dryden was pretty sure he knew why. He tracked around to the open driver’s-side door, leaned in, and pressed a finger to the man’s carotid artery pulse point. For a second or two he thought he felt something, weak and fluttering. Then nothing.

  He withdrew his hand. Stared at the dead man in front, and the dead man in back, and then at the darkness and the three roads leading into it.

  Three choices. A shell game.

  He slid behind the wheel again, slammed the door, and shoved the selector into drive. He turned hard right and floored it, skidding and then accelerating west on the crossroad – the best bet of the three, though not by much.

  For the next four minutes he kept the vehicle’s speed above 100 miles per hour. He passed another crossroad but didn’t stop. A mile farther on, he passed another. He crested a rise and at last saw a pair of taillights far ahead, like cat’s eyes in the near-dark. He overtook the vehicle within sixty seconds: an old pickup with a gray-haired man at the wheel. Nothing ahead of it but wide open miles of nothing.

  He kept the needle over 100 for another five miles. Until long after the math had become undeniable. He denied it anyway and kept going, mile up
on mile.

  Nothing. Just empty road and empty land. Nothing else to see.

  Dryden let off the gas. He coasted to a stop on the shoulder. He rolled the window down and sat gripping the wheel, his palms slick and his breath coming in fast surges. He could hear the low, rhythmic chorus of insect noises in the desert scrub.

  And beneath that, another sound: the hiss of static from the passenger footwell.

  Chapter Ten

  It was twenty minutes later. Dryden was parked at an overlook in the foothills; he had come to it by way of a two-track that probably hadn’t seen traffic in weeks.

  The overlook faced east across the desert, into the sunrise. Ten miles out on the plain, Highway 395 gleamed dully in the light. There had been a steady procession of emergency vehicles moving north on it, the whole time Dryden had been watching. Farther up in that direction, he could see them clustered at the place where he and Claire had been attacked.

  He opened his door and got out. He went around to the passenger side, opened both doors there, and dragged the dead men into the weeds. He went through their clothes and found three wallets – one of them his own. In the other two he found a combined two hundred thirty-one dollars in cash, and no IDs. He pocketed the money, wiped his prints from the wallets, and tossed them after their owners.

  Each dead man had a phone on him, the models identical and cheap. Throwaways, for sure, though they’d been modified with some add-on software. When Dryden pulled up the recent call logs, all the phone numbers were simply lines of asterisks. Only the time stamps remained visible. Neither man had made or received a call in more than an hour – long before the attack on Claire and himself.

  Dryden pulled the phones’ batteries, wiped his prints as he’d done with the wallets, and left the phones with the dead men. He got back behind the wheel but left the engine off. He sat staring at the distant crime scene, thinking.

  What kept coming back to him was Claire’s behavior right before the shooting started. The way she had suddenly scrutinized the darkness around them, seconds before the first shots were fired. She had somehow known those men were out there – had known someone was out there, anyway – but she had only known it once the cop arrived.