“Bastard!” he uselessly shouted while flipping his own brights on and off-another useless gesture.
The brights hitting his eyes conspired with the thumping headache to make him feel a creeping nausea rising within him. He tried to concentrate on the importance of the trip, the big merger with ASCAN, and how best to break it to the people at the plant, put the most positive spin on it. Hell, he wasn't getting any younger. And if something should happen to him, God forbid, say a heart attack? Where would it leave the company? If he sold out, and if ASCAN followed through on its promises, everyone-not just him-would benefit in the long run. It would mean more overtime, more money for everyone all around, and he could retire, begin to enjoy the fruits of all the years of intensive labor he'd put in.
He felt good about himself and the direction his life had taken him. Thought briefly about Lenore back in California, waiting for his call, no doubt. They had had another argument about money. He had wanted to, as they say, “give some back,” and Lenore had always supported him in his charitable donations in the past, but for some reason she had had a strange and urgent dislike for an old acquaintance from college who had contacted him for a donation, suggesting that he leave part of his estate to the religious organization his old friend now represented.
Timothy and Lenore Little were of the same faith, after all, and so why shouldn't he be charitable toward his church? Lenore simply didn't like the approach his college friend had taken.
Without telling Lenore, he'd gone ahead and made the donation, along with others to organizations he believed in and supported. For his old friend, he had gone a step further, signing over one of his many life insurance policies to the friend, who was now a Jesuit priest in Texas. His friend had contacted him via computer modem to tell him of their needs in Texas.
The dusk of evening was giving way to that twilight moment when visibility was at its worst. Timothy Little kept his eyes on the road, popped a cassette of relaxing, old-time piano music by Billy Vaughn into the player, and took a deep, long breath of air. On his left, on the grass median between the divided high way, he noticed a silver-gray van that might be in trouble. But what next caught his attention was the man atop the van on his belly. He was dressed all in black, like someone out of a Bruce Willis Die Hard film, like someone wanting to blend in with the night.
“My God, if he doesn't look like some sort of commando sniper preparing to fire,” Little said to himself.
Then Timothy saw movement at the base of the van on either side, two additional black-clad men. They truly did look like bloody assassins out of a Hollywood action-hero movie or something. Each man was holding up some sort of telescope or weapon; he could not tell for sure. He was moving sixty miles per hour, the car on cruise control, careful at all times to obey the traffic laws and speed limits, but now for some insane reason, he thought these strange, alien-looking creatures on the grassy knoll ahead were going to fire high-powered rifles at him. So he instantly forced the gas pedal to the floor.
The speedometer on the Olds Cutlass immediately rose to sixty-five, then seventy. Suddenly the windshield shattered in front of Timothy, glass and blood showering his line of vision, his right arm throbbing, but a second powerful blow, like a fist to his chest negated all sight and feeling, save the cold numbness and dark blindness that spread through him like a moving current. My God, he thought, they've killed me… but who… who are they?
He didn't know that his car was skidding off the road or that he'd blacked out all in the space of a nanosecond.
One of two arrows pierced his heart, which sprayed forth blood across the wheel and dash as the car careened out of control, first veering into the median, heading straight for the van, just barely missing it and sheering off before bumping back up onto the shoulder tarmac from which it had come, decelerating as it went into the right-hand ditch, bumping along this trench for another forty yards before coming to an abrupt, dead standstill, thanks to a tree. The impact sent Timothy Little's body lurching forward, but the body was saved any meeting with the jagged, shattered windshield not by the air bag or the seat belt but by the two steel arrows that had pinned him in place like a marionette.
The assassins brought the van around behind the wrecked vehicle, and like dark vultures they descended on Timothy Little. They had to wrench him from the car seat, where both his chest and an arm were pinned to the cushions by the steel shafts of the arrows that'd killed him. His heart was still pumping blood, but he was in such a state of shock and dying that he didn't feel a thing when they tore him from the cab, laid him out across the hood, and efficiently went to work on removing his extremities.
One of the assassins worked to decapitate Little's head, with its bulging eyes and grimacing teeth, necessarily causing a great gout of blood in the process. The blood ran in many small rivers over contours of the rental car, and several unusual dents across the hood of the car were left where the meat cleavers had done their work.
A passing motorist's lights momentarily shone on them, but the driver, speeding at well over sixty-five, didn't give them a thought beyond the minimal, Car trouble… glad it's not me…
Meanwhile, Timothy Little's feet, hands and head were bagged in two separate large plastic Hefty bags. These were thrown into the back of the van as one of the assassins climbed in.
The other two climbed into the cab, the engine still running. Cigarettes were lit, great breaths of relief were taken, and finally a cheer went up among them. It had been a job well-timed and well-executed. Helsinger I would be proud.
With a last look at Little's now limbless torso sprawled across the hood of his midnight-blue, regal-looking rental, a shining steel shaft sticking straight up into the air from his chest, the other shaft still in the car, the black-hooded killers congratulated one another, one taking credit for the direct hit on Timothy's heart.
They then disappeared down the highway toward Rogue River, leaving the silence of night and the body behind them. Only the absolute stillness and Timothy's mangled remains, sliding down the hood now, were left when the raccoons came to investigate the pungent odor left in the wake of the passing humans.
TEN
Lucas Stonecoat looked up, thinking he had heard someone quietly snooping at the door to the Cold Room, but there was no one there. The room had filled with dark men, hunched forms, gargoyles-all shadows. He glanced across the room at the cubed and barred single window, finding it had been painted vermilion on this side, black on the other.
Night had come on and he hadn't been aware of it, so enthralled had he become in some of the other files Dr. Meredyth Sanger had checked out of the Cold Room over the past two weeks. Apparently, she had already run a computer check on cases involving arrows and had done the research, casting out many an archery accident to find these cases where an arrow was used with deadly intent.
He hadn't gotten very far into the other files Meredyth had logged out when he realized he'd put in overtime. Neither Kelton nor Lawrence would appreciate him putting in for overtime his first day on the job, not after all the paperwork he'd already cost them with his field trip to the Texaco station.
Lucas had lost track of time, and his black coffee had turned to cold mud while he had scanned the month's roster to locate the ID numbers of other files borrowed on Meredyth Sanger's name. Except for the dust kicked up and the allergy itch running along the canals of his nose, he effortlessly found these ancient files as well, long forgotten by all but a lone police shrink, and now him.