by Jude Hardin
“It’s behind that building,” Benny said. “The one that says for lease.”
“Yeah. Did you see the pawnshop we passed a minute ago? I want you to walk over there and sell those diamonds in your pocket. Don’t take less than ten thousand for the pair. I’m pretty sure they’re worth a lot more than that. I want you to go over there and sell the diamonds, and then I want you to go to the bus station and buy a ticket to a place far, far away from here. California. Oregon. Somewhere on the west coast. Understand?”
“I already have a bus ticket. JR gave it to me.”
Benny reached into his pocket, pulled out a folded white envelope, handed it to Colt. The envelope was wrinkled and warm and a little damp. Colt unfolded it and lifted the flap and examined the contents.
“You need to go a lot further than this, Benny. Sell the diamonds and buy yourself a new ticket. You’ll have enough money to last you for a while. You can start a new life.”
“You’re letting me go?”
“Yes. You’re free. Get out of here before I change my mind.”
“I don’t like to be alone. What if somebody robs me?”
“You want to go back to jail?”
“No.”
“Then get out of the car. You’ll be all right.”
Benny clicked his seatbelt off, opened the door, climbed out to the sidewalk.
“I guess this is goodbye,” he said.
“Yeah. Get out of here.”
He closed the door and crossed the street and walked back toward the traffic light. When he turned the corner, Colt tossed the sweaty envelope on the floor and started the engine and drove up to the vacant video store and double parked beside a cargo van. From there he could see the entrance to Perk-U-Now, where two guys in long black coats were dragging a pretty young blonde out to a long black car.
39
Long black coats and fedoras. Like hoodlums who’d escaped from an old movie—you knew they were the bad guys, because they were wearing black. It appeared as though the meeting had gone well for them. It appeared as though they had gotten what they came for.
Felisa Cayenne.
It had to be her. Dark glasses, blonde wig. A cheap and obvious disguise. JR had brought her here and had traded her for the money, or at least part of it. No help from Benny, so he would have had to make some changes to the original plan. He would have had to improvise.
Felisa was being forced into the car against her will. These were not friends of hers who’d come to rescue her. These were not family members who’d paid a ransom. These were people who meant to do her harm.
Colt wondered if it had something to do with the murder trial. If the prosecution’s case depended on Felisa’s testimony, then it made sense that the opposing side would want that testimony never to happen. Maybe that was it. And maybe that was why JR and Clark and Benny had never contacted Felisa’s people with a ransom demand. They’d avoided the possibility of law enforcement intervention by dealing with criminals instead. Criminals with deep pockets and an agenda.
There was an alleyway that arced around the video store and led to what appeared to be a shared parking area. Perk-U-Now was positioned at an angle off to the left of the curve. Colt had driven right by the place earlier, and had missed it, but he had a good view from where he was sitting now.
The long black car was parked in front of the entrance. The bad guys shoved Felisa into the back seat, and then one of them reeled off some duct tape and wrapped her wrists and ankles and pressed a strip across her mouth. He slammed the door and then the two of them stood there by the car and started talking about something. Arguing, maybe. A lot of hand gestures. The guy with the duct tape seemed to be angry at the other one.
Colt thought about waiting for them to climb into the car and drive away, thought about tailing them. He thought about it, but then he decided to end this thing here and now.
He needed to know if JR was Jack Reacher. Following these guys wasn’t going to make that happen. Maybe JR was still in the coffee shop. Waiting for a cab or something. He could afford one now. Colt needed some kind of incriminating evidence against him—against Reacher—something of national or international significance, and the Felisa Cayenne kidnapping case was none of his business. Just leave it alone, he told himself. Let the guys drive off and then walk in and look for Reacher. Maybe jot down the license plate number and make an anonymous call to the FBI, and then forget about it.
That would have been the smart way to approach the problem. The prudent way. The Circle way.
But it wasn’t the Nicholas Colt way.
The Felisa Cayenne kidnapping case was none of Colt’s business, but he couldn’t just sit there and watch a couple of punks drive off with her. She was obviously in a state of terror, and she might be dead by the time the FBI traced the tags.
So Colt decided to make it his business, his good deed for the day.
He didn’t bother giving the bad guys any sort of warning. He climbed out of the SUV and pulled his revolver and started shooting. He squeezed off three quick rounds, and the guy on the left immediately fell to the pavement. Ping. Like a duck at a shooting gallery.
The guy on the right drew a pistol and started returning fire.
Probably a Glock 9mm, Colt thought. He could tell by the sound of the reports. He ducked down and ran to the front of the video store and backed up to the plate glass window. Using the brick façade on the side of the building as a shield, he stepped around the corner and fired once, stepping back quickly as a barrage of semi-automatic rounds crunched into the masonry.
The remaining bad guy was the one who’d used the duct tape to restrain Felisa’s wrists and ankles. He was not a handsome man. He could have played a heavy in a movie for real. His face was big and round and flat, as though someone might have smashed it with a skillet. Old Skilletface had taken a position behind the car, over toward the rear passenger’s side fender, which put Felisa at risk of being caught in the crossfire. He probably thought that Colt would be hesitant to shoot at him under those circumstances, and it might have been a decent strategy if Felisa had been strapped to the back seat in an upright position or something. But she wasn’t. Colt figured she had enough sense to be curled up on the floorboard by now, so he stepped around again and fired his last two rounds into the windshield, aiming toward the corner of the car where the top of Skilletface’s fedora was showing over the taillight.
Colt stepped back behind the brick wall and waited.
Silence.
He waited a few more seconds and then tested the waters, inching around the corner just enough to see the car across the alley and Skilletface sprawled out behind it. Colt holstered the .38 and headed that way, knowing he probably only had a couple of minutes before the police arrived, knowing that JR might have already found a back door to slither out of.
Colt was about three steps from the hood of the car when Skilletface quickly rolled over and aimed the pistol at his chest and said, “Now we’re going to have some real fun.”
The tip of the guy’s shoulder was bleeding, but it didn’t look bad. Colt’s bullet must have just grazed him.
“Looks like you got me,” Colt said. “Now what?”
Skilletface laughed. “What do you mean now what? Now you’re going to die.”
He pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. The gun didn’t fire. Either it jammed, or it was out of ammunition. Skilletface started slamming the butt against his palm, hoping to free the next round in the magazine, which gave Colt the opportunity to run forward and kick the pistol like a football. It went flipping high into the air, way off to the left. Before it hit the ground, Colt backed up and took another try at the field goal, this time with the bad guy’s chin. Skilletface fell backwards and his head hit the asphalt with a sickening thud.
It would have been enough to knock most people out, but apparently this guy had a really hard head. He rolled over and climbed to his feet and staggered toward Colt swinging both fists. Colt ducked and gave him a solid punch
to the ribcage and an elbow to the jaw, but Skilletface kept swinging. A set of bare knuckles caught Colt on the left temple and put him down on one knee.
Colt tried to shake it off, but his vision was blurry and he could barely breathe. He attempted to stand, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. He was weak and dizzy and he knew this might be the end. Through the hazy tunnel that was now his visual field, he saw the bad guy walk over to one of the vacant parking places and kick away a loose chunk of concrete from the precast stop. It was about two feet long and there was a rusty length of rebar sticking out of one end. It probably weighed fifty pounds. Maybe more. Skilletface grunted when he picked it up.
Colt felt the world slipping away. He teetered, fell over sideways and rolled onto his back, and the next thing he saw was the bad guy stumbling toward him with the heavy section of curb. Skilletface was going to drop it on Colt’s head and crush his skull, and there was nothing Colt could do about it.
40
Skilletface raised the section of reinforced concrete over and behind his head. Apparently just dropping it wasn’t going to be good enough for him. He was a perfectionist. No regular old cranium demolishing for this guy. He was going to slam it down and make sure Colt’s brain splattered out all over the pavement. Like a mallet smashing a raw egg. Like a rhino stepping on a can of soup.
“Now you die,” Skilletface said.
His neck muscles tensed as he started raising the dense and jagged length of rock and steel, intending to whip it down in a forceful arc, hard and fast and brutally final.
This is it, Colt thought, but just as the ugly gray thing reached its tipping point, a red dot appeared on the center of Skilletface’s forehead.
A red dot from a laser pointer.
Followed by a suppressed pistol report.
Followed by a shower of blood and bone and brain tissue.
Skilletface toppled backwards, the chunk of concrete hitting the pavement and rolling to a stop a few feet behind him.
Colt’s pulse throbbed all the way down to his toenails. He looked up and saw a very attractive woman standing over him with a smoking gun in her hand. Full lips, bright blue eyes, shoulder-length hair the color of chestnuts.
“Are there any more of them?” Diana Dawkins said.
“No. I think Jack Reacher might have been inside the coffee shop, but I’m sure he’s gone by now.”
“I’ll go check.”
“I’ll go with you,” Colt said.
“You don’t look like you’re fit to go anywhere.”
“I’ll be all right. Help me up.”
Diana extended her arm. Colt locked wrists with her and struggled to a standing position. He felt dizzy and nauseated, but his vision was better. He wasn’t seeing two of everything anymore.
A siren wailed in the distance.
“We need to hurry,” Diana said.
“Yeah.”
They walked from the bloodbath outside Perk-U-Now to the bloodbath inside. There was a man full of holes behind the counter and another sprawled out beside one of the tables. The man behind the counter looked to be in his mid-twenties. Sideburns, ponytail, wire-rimmed glasses. The kind of guy you might expect to see at an open mic poetry reading. Skinny, average height. A little shorter than average, maybe.
The guy on the floor by the four-top was another story. He was huge. Six-five, probably. Two hundred and thirty pounds or more. He wore jeans and a tight white t-shirt and a sturdy pair of work boots.
Six-pack abs, pecs like slabs of granite, biceps like bowling balls.
But he wasn’t Jack Reacher.
His face—the half that wasn’t missing—looked nothing like the pictures.
“This isn’t him,” Colt said.
“Obviously.”
Diana opened her backpack and pulled out a black plastic disk about the size of a drink coaster. She pushed a little button on one end, and it opened like a clam shell. There was an ink pad on one side and a blank circle of paper on the other. She pressed JR’s thumb on the ink and then on the paper. She closed the disk and stowed it, and then she collected a blood sample with a swab encased in a plastic tube, and a hair sample with a small pair of scissors and a zippered plastic evidence bag. She checked JR’s pockets, took his wallet and his cell phone. All this took about thirty seconds.
“That siren’s getting closer,” Colt said. “We better get out of here.”
“My car’s right around the corner.”
As they made their way toward the door, Colt suddenly remembered something.
“Felisa,” he said.
“What?”
“She’s in the car out there.”
“And you’re just now telling me this?”
“I got hit on the head. It’s been a rough day.”
“We need to take her with us,” Diana said.
“Why? The cops will be here any minute.”
“That’s exactly why we need to take her. That isn’t Jack Reacher lying on the floor over there, but he might be the guy who planted the van full of explosives. Felisa spent several days with him. She might know something. This is going to be our only chance to talk to her.”
“You’ve been tracking me all this time, haven’t you?”
“No.”
“Then how did you know—”
“I have my ways. You should know that by now.”
“Yeah.”
Diana stopped at the door. “You’re off the hook on the Valinger deal, by the way,” she said.
“I thought the tox screen was going to take a few weeks.”
“Do you know what a myocardial infarction is?”
“Yeah. It’s a heart attack.”
“The autopsy showed blockages in two coronary arteries from plaque that had been building up for years. There’s no poison in the world that can cause something like that. Valinger died of natural causes.”
“He was young.”
“Yeah. But he smoked a lot and drank a lot. Didn’t eat right.”
“So I’m in the clear now?”
“On Valinger. The Director still has a problem with the other stuff.”
“So why am I not dead yet?”
“We need to go,” Diana said, ignoring Colt’s last question.
They hurried outside and freed Felisa and ran around the corner to the black Dodge Charger parked at the curb. As Diana steered away from the meter, Colt checked the side-view mirror and saw a pair of police cruisers turning into the alleyway. Strobes flashing, sirens off.
“We made it out just in time,” he said.
“Would someone mind telling me what’s going on?”
Felisa was in the back seat. Colt turned around and saw her peeling the blonde wig off.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re the good guys. We just need to ask you a few questions.”
“Who are you?”
“We can’t tell you that,” Diana said. “Just know that we have your best interest in mind, and the best interest of the United States of America.”
Diana passed her a small bottle of drinking water and a tablet in a blister pack. The pill looked like an aspirin, but Colt knew that it wasn’t.
“What’s this?” Felisa said.
“You’ll wake up in a safe place,” Diana said. “But you won’t remember how you got there, and you won’t remember talking to us.”
“I don’t know who you are. I’m not taking this.”
“I promise it won’t hurt you.”
“Just take me home or to a police station or something.”
“If you don’t take the pill, I’ll have to give you an injection,” Diana said.
“You’re violating my constitutional rights.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, but you’re going to take the drug one way or another. The easy way or the hard way. The pill’s the easy way.”
“We just saved your life,” Colt said. “Try to trust us on this, and we’ll make sure you make it home safely.”
Felisa hesitated
for a few more seconds, and then she pressed the tablet through the paper side of the blister pack, popped it into her mouth and swallowed it.
“There,” she said. “Happy? Now what?”
“Who were the guys who kidnapped you?” Colt said.
“I don’t know. Just some guys. They came in to rob the diner, and I just happened to be sitting there eating a very late dinner with a United States Deputy Marshal. Wrong place, wrong time.”
“Clete Garrison didn’t make it,” Diana said.
“I didn’t think so. I feel so sorry for his family. Anyway, one of the kidnappers was pretty nice to me, but the other one was mean. He hit me sometimes. I think he got killed, though. I think that guy named JR shot him with a machinegun.”
“Tell me about that,” Colt said.
Felisa told them everything that had happened since the day she was abducted. It took her about ten minutes to get through it all. It had definitely been a terrifying experience for her, and Colt was impressed that she’d held up as well as she had.
“Can I just go home now?” she said.
“I assume you were in the coffee shop when JR was killed,” Colt said.
“Yes. That was horrible. I thought they were going to kill me too.”
“The guys in the long black coats?”
“Right.”
“When all four of you were in the coffee shop together, did anyone mention anything that might be construed as being a threat to national security?”
“No. Those guys never intended to give JR any money, though. I can tell you that. They were planning to kill him all along. They shot him, and I thought he was dead for sure, but then he started talking. It kind of freaked me out.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know. Just some random letters, like maybe his brain had started dying already or something. Like he didn’t know what he was saying. H-E-L-V-E. Is that even a word?”
Diana pulled to the side of the road and braked to a stop.
“It’s a word,” she said. “Helve. It’s the handle to a hammer or an ax or whatever. It’s also the name of a terrorist organization.”
“An acronym?” Colt said.
