“Joe!” she said into his coat. “Goddamnit, what—”
The two buildings exploded.
Two buildings but one big blast, the first concussion wave from the right hitting the car and shaking it like a brat before the wave from their left struck them, flopping them back against the driver’s side door; they slid down as blasting heat came from both sides at once, Reeder doing his best to protect Rogers as fiery debris rained down on them.
The main blasts were over in seconds that felt much longer, and when he finally uncovered his head, orange and blue flames were dancing madly in both buildings, mirror-image conflagrations, flickering limbs reaching skyward through blown-off roofs.
He rolled off her and she sat up, leaning on her gloved palms.
“You okay?” he asked. With his ears ringing like that, he must have been shouting, but she’d be experiencing the same temporary hearing loss.
“Yeah,” she said, just as loud, getting to her feet, brushing off snow and debris.
The all-encompassing sound of buildings on fire always struck Reeder as oddly similar to a rainstorm, even generating its own thunder.
Wild-eyed, she asked him, “How did you know that was going to happen? You’re not a damn building reader.”
He brushed himself off. “I didn’t know, and I could have been wrong, and God knows how I would have explained jumping you like that. But it came to me that car I saw could’ve been the Nissan at Bryson’s office that night.”
“The missing rental?”
He nodded. “The BOLO we sent out didn’t turn it up, so he must have switched plates.”
“You think he made us and waited till we were close before hitting a detonator?”
“I do. Or else the explosives had been set shortly before we got here, and we were just in the wrong place at the right time.”
But halfway through that she stopped looking at him, in fact staring past him, and he was about to turn and see for himself when she took off at a dead run for the building on their left.
They’d both survived twin explosions, and now she was running into one of the burning buildings? Was she crazy? Was he crazy, too?
Because he found himself instinctively dashing right behind her...
Covering his mouth and nose with his bent, Burberry-clad arm, he followed her through what was left of glass doors that were only a scorched framework with not even the shattered remains of their panes in sight. Smoke rushed to greet them as they stepped into a furnace at least equal to the explosion’s heat waves.
While what remained of the post-blast concrete structure itself wouldn’t burn, plenty of flammable material had been in here, judging from the flames licking all around them. Despite thickening smoke, he could make out the twisted remains of a sort of lab-cum-machine shop. That meant chemicals in here might any moment ignite into secondary explosions; he shoved that thought away as he went to Rogers’s side, just a few feet into the hellish sauna that had been a building.
Covering her face with her coat sleeve, Rogers knelt over a body on the floor. If it hadn’t been near the exploded doorway, neither of them would have noticed it from the parking lot. The blackened thing that had been a person lay on its stomach, and the only way Reeder could tell this had been a male was the body’s size and its work boots.
Rogers gripped a hand under one arm of the charred victim, and Reeder grabbed the other one by the forearm. The blackened limb came off at the elbow. That sent both Reeder and Rogers off balance, almost falling, but then Reeder discarded the limb and got a better hold on the body’s shoulder and dragged the remains well out into the middle of the parking lot, next to the Fusion, where an oasis of air existed between where plumes of black and gray smoke surged into the sky and met each other, creating a terrible roiling storm cloud that held no moisture at all. Both Rogers and Reeder were coughing now, and the corpse fell from their grasp, onto its side.
Reeder looked toward the service road, but the tree line blocked his view — not that the Nissan was likely still around.
Breathing hard, intermittently coughing, Rogers plopped down, sitting in the snow, her back against the driver’s side door. Reeder’s own breathing was labored, too, smoke mingling with cold air to burn his lungs.
Reeder asked, “What were you thinking?”
“I knew he was probably dead, but with him there, on the floor... just inside the door? Had to try. If you’d seen him first, you’d have done the same thing.”
“Hell I would.”
“Oh, you didn’t follow me in there?”
“You weren’t dead. Yet.” His breath was beginning to slow. “Those two SUVs? Guys in them set the bombs. Their leader was in that Nissan, giving them time to get well away before he detonated the charges.”
“Then... then we showed up.”
“If he recognized me as we drove past — this was likely our blond perp — he knew he’d scored a bonus round. If you and I hadn’t chatted a while in the car, we’d have already been inside when he hit the detonator.”
“We... we’d have been... scattered all over this parking lot... with the rest of the debris.”
Sirens sang their distant song. This was the boonies, but somebody had seen the flames rising into the sky, and/or heard the big boom.
Their breathing slowing, the air clearing some, the smoke on its upward trajectory, the two got up and had a look at their rescued corpse. Only the figure’s back was charred black, the front of him appearing relatively normal — his expression almost serene, as if he’d slept through the other side of him getting cooked.
“Dead before the explosion,” Rogers said.
Reeder pointed out the two punctures in the blackened back of his neck — barely visible but the indentations were there, all right.
“Double-tapped,” Rogers said.
Reeder nodded and looked back toward the trees on the other side of which was the service road. Just then flames illuminated something over that way, and glass winked and blinked at him.
A sniper scope.
“Gun!” he said, and then came the muzzle flash.
They both hit the snowy cement, sending up puffs of white, then each scrambled around behind the car, Reeder around front, Rogers around back. The shooter had seen that action through his scope, because two more rounds slammed into the car, and then another took the back left tire, which hissed as if a villain had come on stage, and hadn’t he?
Each sat with their backs to the passenger side of the Fusion. Breathing hard again, Reeder said, “You got extra magazines?”
“Yeah. Two.”
“Good. Keep him busy.”
“What do you mean, keep him busy?”
“Do it.”
From around the rear of the car, Rogers threw shots into the line of trees. She had a handgun and the shooter had a rifle and the advantage of firepower and distance were his. But she kept it up, the sharp cracks of her Glock rising over the rumbling murmur of the burning buildings.
She was shooting as Reeder took off, very low, right toward the facing fires, running between them and skirting around the building at left and staying parallel to it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d run on snow. He was trying to be careful in the dark, trying not to trip over any chunks of debris, and was grateful for the minimal moonlight and even fire glow, assuming it didn’t give him away.
As he reached where the building ended and concrete parking lot yawned to a strip of snowy landscape with the line of trees waiting, he climbed out of his Burberry and left it behind, his dark suit better suited for his purpose.