by Penny McCall
She’d find a method of neutralizng Treacher; she really couldn’t imagine any other possibility. She wasn’t without skills, and she wasn’t without resources. Mike had said he wouldn’t put his career on the line, but she knew him better than that. He talked a good line, but he was the human equivalent of a Tootsie Pop. It just took a little patience to work your way through the hard shell to find the soft center. Mike would be there if she needed him.
She kept on a circuitous route through the urban sprawl around St. Louis, on foot for a while longer, then briefly in a car she boosted, as much to create a diversion for Cole as anything else. Hopefully the cops would focus on the stolen vehicle and come after her, leaving Cole free and clear. He was a smart guy, but he was a computer geek, and his thought process was linear; it didn’t allow for the kind of quick adjustment necessary when the authorities were on your tail and a split-second decision was all that stood between you and iron bars.
She abandoned the car not far from a truck stop and hitched a ride with a long-distance trucker. Risky under normal circumstances. Having a couple of guns made it less dangerous. For her.
The truck driver looked a lot scarier than he turned out to be. He was a bear of a man with a lot of gray, bushy hair everywhere: face, arms, ears, and sticking out of the collar of his T-shirt. He didn’t watch the news, he preferred books on tape to the radio, and he had a soft spot for his daughter. Since Harmony reportedly resembled the aforementioned daughter, that worked for her. He’d told her to call him Bull, a nickname he said came from his tendency to spin a good yarn. And his hard head.
They pulled into Tulsa around daybreak, Harmony taking in the sunrise with bleary eyes. She hadn’t slept, worried about Cole and second-guessing her decision to split up. How much of it, she wondered now, had been anger?
“How ’bout I treat you to breakfast,” Bull said once he’d manhandled the big rig into a parking space behind the diner at the truck stop.
“I really need to be on my way.” She was hungry, Cole-level hungry, but she didn’t want to parade her face in front of a group of twenty-four-hour diner workers who probably spent the slow night hours watching television where no doubt she was starring on the morning news. “Thank you for the ride,” she said, smiling and waving as she slung the laptop case over her shoulder, hefted the duffel, and headed for the main road.
As soon as she got out of sight of the diner windows, she ducked between two parked big rigs and slipped into the motel parking lot next to the truck stop. She went to the farthest corner of the parking lot, hunkering down against a block retaining wall, with a minivan parked about five feet in front of her. Not the best scenery, and it was chilly in the shadows there, but it kept her out of sight.
She took out her official cell and called Mike, thanking providence when he picked up the phone.
“That explains a thing or two,” he said after she’d given him the high points of Cole’s run-in with Victor Treacher. “You know—”
“I know.”
“He’ll—”
“Want Cole dead. I’m on it.”
Mike whooshed out a breath, and she could almost see him scrubbing his hand back through his grizzled, marine-cut hair. “Gotta hand it to you, kid. You’re an emotional crackpot, but there’s nothing wrong with your brain. Just one thing, though. Hackett was arrested last night.”
“Oh, man!” Harmony shot to her feet, fighting the urge to do something. Anything. She wound up turning in a circle, caught between wanting to rescue Cole and knowing she’d never get the chance if she got arrested herself. She got a grip, mainly because she refused to give in to the picture that tried to form in her mind: Cole, behind bars again, miserable and blaming her. Like she was. “He’s not very good at this sort of thing. I never should have sent him off on his own.”
“Don’t apologize,” Mike snapped at her. “Splitting up was the right decision. Man can’t watch his own back—”
“He’s basically a computer geek, Mike. He was in prison for eight years, but there’s a big difference between watching your back inside and watching it out in the world.”
“You’re defending him.”
Mike was right. Shocking but true. “Not the point” was what she said out loud. “I need him to save Richard. Where is he?”
“I’m not sure I should tell you.”
“You wouldn’t have dropped the bomb if you didn’t want it to go off.”
“Treacher’s guys were in the area,” he said, not beating around the bush, giving her the bad news straight. “Hackett was his problem eight years ago, so he was allowed to handle the retrieval.”
“And?”
Mike heaved another windy sigh. “I can’t let Treacher have your geek killed.”
She might have protested the “your” part of that comment, if she wasn’t so busy being relieved to have Mike’s help.
“Treacher’s guys are going to get there first,” she said.
“I’ll call the sheriff’s office and make sure they don’t let Hackett go.”
“Long enough for me to show up and get him out.”
Mike was silent.
“Right?” she prompted.
He gave her a Springfield address, not sounding very happy about the situation. “There’ll be a car waiting for you there, with GPS. Hackett’s current location will be programmed in.”
“Any idea how I can spring him without getting arrested myself?”
“I figure history will repeat itself,” Mike said with a shrug in his voice.
“History included forged paperwork.”
“You’re not getting paperwork, forged or otherwise. It won’t do either of us any good if I get jammed up, too.”
“It’s not like I can get him out of jail without doing something you won’t like.”
“If you finish your operation, and it works out, I can explain it away. Just don’t shoot any good guys.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
Mike chuckled. Mike probably knew she was rolling her eyes. “You’re in over your head, kid, and there’s probably not a chance in hell you’ll be working at the Bureau when this is over, but I’m too old to start a new career.”
“Nice to know your priorities.”
“I shouldn’t even be talking to you, Swift.”
Yeah, she knew that, too, but she didn’t thank him. He wouldn’t expect it and he wouldn’t want it.
“Harmony?” he said. “I’d tell you not to do anything stupid, but it’s a little late for that. Just don’t do anything really stupid.”
chapter 17
COLE WAS LIVING HIS WORST NIGHTMARE, HANDCUFFED to a bench in the Shawville sheriff’s office, waiting for FBI agents to arrive and drag him back to Lewisburg. And that was the optimistic scenario. If Harmony was right—and she had a disturbingly accurate track record—he’d never make it back to prison alive.
He should have stuck with her. He should have argued when she suggested splitting up. His gut feeling had been “bad idea,” and then she’d hit him with logic, and he’d caved in, which was the really odd thing since logic was more his thing than hers. She’d been right, though, everyone would be on the lookout for a man and a woman traveling together, and even he had to admit they made an eye-catching couple. Problem was, his luck had run out eight years ago. And even if the last few days had seemed like a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel, he’d have been better off if Harmony had left him where he was. He could have survived another seventeen years in prison. He didn’t figure he’d make it to the Shawville city limits alive.
The sheriff’s office was a converted storefront, sitting at the end of Shawville’s main drag. The town itself was surrounded by corn and wheat farms with barns full of cows, pigs, and chickens, and houses inhabited by farmers and their extended families, none of them between the ages of eighteen and thirty because the minute they came of age, kids went to college or joined the army. Cole couldn’t blame them. Even inside the building it smelled faintly
of manure. He’d gotten used to that. It was the other occupants he found annoying, namely the current bane of his existence.
“I’m gonna get, like, a cert-certick—that whatchamacallit they give you for doing something good, right?” Ted Jasper said, hiking up his pants for the umpteenth time. No one was paying attention to him, but he never stopped talking, and he never stopped moving, pacing the floor, swinging his arms, checking out the Most Wanted board where Cole’s poster still hung with a big black X through his face. “I wanna be a real cop—I mean police officer—even if Granddaddy Jasper don’t approve. We got us a family trade, you know,” he said to Cole, “like the Bushes are politicians, the Jaspers do flea markets. My daddy says we both deal in garbage.” He laughed uproariously. “But I wanna be a cop. They won’t let me go to the academy without a college degree, and I’m not so good with, you know, learning stuff. I shouldn’t need to now, right? I should get a special, uh, something-or-other because I caught a fugitive.”
The deputy behind the front counter and the sheriff sitting at his desk on the other side of the room shared a look, eyes rolling, heads shaking.
“I mean he’s dangerous,” Ted said, doing a little shadow boxing in Cole’s general direction, bouncing on the balls of his feet then hitching his pants up over his Simpsons boxers a little too forcefully so he had to do a wedgie removal.
“What genius gave him a gun?” Cole wondered out loud when it fell out of the kid’s pocket and spun around in a circle on the floor.
“That’s a really good question,” the sheriff said. He came out from behind his desk and held out a hand.
Ted bobbled the gun, finally getting it turned around so he could show it to the sheriff. “It’s not even loaded, see?”
“Christ,” the sheriff said, “it’s just a BB gun.”
Cole let his head fall back to thump against the wall behind him. He’d been caught by a moron with a popgun. If any of his former cellmates found out, they’d make him hand in his tattoo.
“Feeling like an idiot?” the sheriff asked Cole.
“You have no idea.”
Stick to I-44, Harmony had said. That was the quickest route. She hadn’t factored in his bad luck, or a wet-behind-the-ears security guard with delusions of grandeur.
The phone rang, the deputy picked it up, and went through his greeting, then said, “Yes, ma’am, the sheriff’s here. Yes, we caught that escaped felon.”
“I caught him,” Ted said, outraged to be left out of the headlines. “Tell her I caught him.”
The deputy ignored him. “You gonna be around awhile?” he called to the sheriff over Ted’s continuing protests.
“ ’Cept for lunch,” the sheriff called back.
The deputy repeated that information into the phone, then said, “Hold on,” when the street door opened.
Two men walked in, looking like the guys in the Matrix, dark suits, perfect hair, and vaguely familiar faces. Cole had seen them before. Bobbing in Lake Erie. One of the agents glanced over at him, and Cole saw retribution in his eyes.
“Can I help you?” the deputy asked them.
They ignored him, walking around the counter to the desk where the sheriff sat. They flipped out wallets and flashed their badges, and even though they didn’t say a word the sheriff was already bristling before they gave their names, Special Agents Jones and Carter. Cole wondered if those were really their names.
The sheriff didn’t seem to care. He hardly glanced at their badges. “You have a warrant?” he asked them.
Agents Jones and Carter exchanged a look, appearing to communicate telepathically. Creepy. “We don’t need a warrant,” one of them said.
“Now that’s a real oddity, since I got a call from a Mike somebody or other a little while ago. Told me he was with the FBI and there’d be two agents coming to collect this yahoo.” The sheriff aimed a thumb in Cole’s general direction. “And we better turn him over or else. Said he didn’t know how a podunk outfit like ours had managed to catch him, but we better not think about hanging onto him so we could get ourselves some good press.”
The sheriff came out from around his desk and stopped a couple feet in front of the feds, resting his hand on his tool belt and putting an extra measure of “hick” into his voice. “Now, the idea of a press conference never occurred to me, but hanging onto him, why, poor fella ain’t even had lunch yet.”
Agent Jones, or maybe it was Agent Carter, started to say something. His partner stopped him with a hand. “We’ll be back,” he said.
Ted followed them to the door and watched them go through it. “You don’t think they’re going to drive a truck through the front of this building, do you? You know, like the Terminator? The police wouldn’t let him have Sarah Connor, so the Terminator said ‘I’ll be back’ and then he drove a truck into the police station and went in and killed all the cops. Can I have a real gun?” he asked the sheriff, “and some bullets, because, you know, if those guys are going to come in here blasting I want to shoot back.”
The sheriff and the deputy shared another eye roll. Cole was right there with them.
“You still got the phone in your hand,” the sheriff said to the deputy.
“Shit, you still there?” he said into the receiver, then shrugged. “Must’ve hung up. Probably just a reporter.”
“C’mon, Ted,” the sheriff said. “I can’t give you a commendation, but I’ll spring for lunch. We’ll bring you back a burger,” he said to the deputy on the way to the front door.
“Wife has me on a diet,” the deputy said back.
“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” The sheriff stopped at the front door and looked out. “The government stiffs are nowhere in sight, Ted, so it looks like we’re safe.” And they left.
Nobody thought to ask the dying man what he wanted for his last meal.
They couldn’t have been gone ten minutes when the door opened again. Cole’s bench was against the wall, opposite the front counter, and his hands were cuffed to the arm of the bench farthest from the front door. He twisted around, expecting to see Agents Jones and Carter coming back to try their luck now that the sheriff wasn’t around to give them a hard time.
Harmony came in instead. Cole almost swallowed his tongue, he was so surprised. It took a minute for his brain to kick in, and when it did, his thoughts were hardly comforting because what he was thinking was, Great, now we’re both going to die.
THE GPS LED HARMONY TO A SMALL, LOCAL COUNTY sheriff’s office in a town that must have been centrally located, since it had little else to recommend it as a hub for county law enforcement. There was a main street with a few businesses, surrounded by side streets with homes that looked to have been built in the late nineteenth century: wide front porches, dormer windows, white picket fences. There were absolutely no living souls in sight, as if no one wanted to be seen populating the place. Even the sign outside of town, welcoming visitors, had been so badly rusted the name was illegible.
She parked in front of the sheriff’s office and got out of the car immediately. No time to rethink or overplan—not a problem since the sum total of her preparation consisted of “go in when the fewest people are around, and do whatever it takes to get Cole out alive.”
She’d done all the reconnoitering she could from a distance, but she took a moment to familiarize herself with the building itself and its immediate environs.
The sheriff’s office had once been a storefront. Through the wide, street-facing windows she saw a long counter with a guy around her age in uniform behind it. She gave it a moment or two, but she saw no other signs of life. The deputy didn’t talk to anyone else, and since he’d answered the phone, she figured it was a safe bet there wasn’t a receptionist on duty at the moment.
She stepped through the door and paused just inside, surprised when she spied Cole on a bench in the corner, handcuffed. He jerked upright when he saw her, which got the deputy’s attention and gave her a few precious seconds to hide her own reaction,
which consisted mostly of elation that she didn’t have to spring him from a jail cell. Heck, she thought, managing not to pump a fist in the air, she might actually pull this off.
“Can I help you?”
Harmony stepped up to the counter, flashing her FBI badge in the deputy’s face. She looked the part, too, wearing her blue dress and jacket. And her guns. “Agent Smith,” she said, using a false name that was close to her own in case he’d gotten a better look at her ID than she’d intended. “I’m here to collect a prisoner. Paperwork is on its way.”
“Um, the sheriff is out to lunch right now. He told me not to ...”
Harmony took off her dark glasses and leaned in close. His eyes dropped to her cleavage, and his sentence trailed off. Cole’s cuffs rattled, but she didn’t spare him a glance.
“I know Mike Kovaleski called you,” she said, making it a confidence. “Just between you and me, he’s a real pain in the neck when it comes to interagency cooperation. Always worried the FBI isn’t getting the credit it should. There’s really no paperwork necessary in this case since there aren’t any local warrants. He’s only wanted by the FBI, so you can just turn him over to me, one law enforcement officer to another.”
“I, uh . . .”
She leaned both elbows on the counter and took a deep breath, making the most of what she had. “I’ll just take him into custody and walk him out quietly. It’s best that way.”
Cole did some more rattling, which broke the deputy’s fascination with her god-given endowments. He looked over and so did she, chagrined to find Cole scowling at the deputy, hands straining at the cuffs.
“What about those other two agents?” the deputy said.
Harmony glared at Cole for another second, giving her head the slightest shake. He was still pissed off for some reason she couldn’t fathom, but he subsided to a low simmer.
“The other two agents called me,” she said. She leaned in again, sharing more secrets.
His gaze didn’t budge off her face this time, though, and his eyes were narrowed. Not good. “Your voice sounds kind of familiar,” he said. “And now that I think about it, you look familiar, too. Have we met before?”
