“Okay, let’s do it,” Lissy said, her face tight with pain. He handed her a couple of pain pills, watched her pop them right down with half a bottle of water.
“I just wish we could have taken a couple of those jerks down.” Victor said, “Who knows? Maybe you’ll have your chance. I’m going to see to it things turn out different in Winnett. You rest, Lissy that was a crazy run through the woods. Hey, we’re okay, and that’s all that matters.”
23
RANDALL COUNTY HOSPITAL
FORT PESSEL, VIRGINIA
Holiday morning
Special Agent Cawley James’s arm hurt bad. On the bright side, the bullet hadn’t hit an artery and he hadn’t bled to death. He stared at the morphine drip machine they’d hooked up just a minute ago, willing it to kick in. His arm was cleaned, stitched, and bandaged, and the anesthetic had worn off. Now his arm was screaming at him.
“It’s only been one single lonely minute since the nurse started the drip,” said Galen Markey, SAC of the Richmond field office. “She said it was faster than a shot. Stop whining, you’re going to live. You should be thankful, the doc said you won’t end up with any movement or rotation problems. No thanks to your pitiful brain.”
“Yeah, yeah, kick me while I’m down,” Cawley said between grit-ted teeth. “Listen, Galen, I’ve a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch for you if nobody calls my mom. She’ll fly here on her private jet, her doctor in tow, and demand you let her take me to her villa in Cancun. I can see you’re pissed, ready to tell me I’m a screwup. All right, so I should have waited for Ben and Tommy, but I stumbled over them, and she was just a teenager, after all.” He sighed. “Then she woke up and tried to shoot me. What was I supposed to do? I told you, she wasn’t the problem. I mean, she could have been if she’d been faster.”
“If she’d been faster, you’d be stone-cold dead.”
“Maybe. Look on the bright side. It was that damned guy, he faked me out. I’ll admit it. Why didn’t I just shoot him? But I thought the scrawny little dude was asleep. He was fast, Galen. Holy mother, my arm feels like it’s burning off.”
The ER nurse called out in a chipper voice as she hurried by his cubicle, “Another minute, tops. Suck it up, Agent.”
Sure enough, only a few more seconds passed before he felt the monster fangs pulling out of his arm.
Galen said, “I should cut off the morphine, you being such a Señor Nacho hot dog. Either or both of those lunatic kids could have killed you, Cawley. What didn’t you understand about ‘armed and dangerous’? And don’t forget crazy.”
Cawley said, “Don’t you mean Senor Macho hot dog?”
Galen stared him down.
“Okay, yeah, so you’re right, pull the morphine. I should suffer. Too late. Ah, I’m basking right now in the total absence of pain.”
Galen said, “I doubt it’ll blunt the pain you’re going to feel when our brothers from Washington show up. Ah, speaking of brothers, here he is right now. And we’ve got one sister.”
Galen stood up as Savich and Sherlock came into the room. “You might have lucked out, Cawley,” he said over his shoulder. “Look who it is.”
Cawley brightened when he saw Sherlock. He didn’t know the woman, had never seen her before, but she was something. His brain swam happily in the morphine, and he hummed looking at her.
Savich said, “No, he hasn’t lucked out. Hello, Galen.” He turned to Cawley. “Are you the brain-dead yahoo who let them get away?” Cawley moaned.
Galen said, “Yep, in all his wounded glory.”
Sherlock only nodded to Galen Markey, walked up to Cawley, and got right in his face. “You jackass!. I’m the one you should be afraid of, the one who’s going to kick your butt into your backbone when you’re back on your feet, not Dillon. Do you hear me? I am royally pissed. You could be stretched out on the autopsy table, like that”— she snapped her fingers—”with all of us standing over you, shaking our heads. How could you let this happen? Uncontrolled testoster-one? Because you didn’t wait for backup, those two young psycho-paths are in the wind again and you’ve got a bum arm.” And she jabbed him hard in his good arm.
Her punch didn’t hurt him because morphine was still the main ingredient in his bloodstream. He looked up at her, gave her a dopey grin. “I don’t know who you are, but I love your hair and all those soft, wild curls around your face. Would you go to dinner with me when I’m able to cut my meat again?”
“Go out with a birdbrain like you?” She nodded toward Savich. “Don’t you know who he is?”
“Well, yeah, that’s Agent Dillon Savich. I aced one of his computer refreshers courses at Quantico last year. He likes me, he thinks I’m smart.”
Savich said, “I have revised my opinion of you, Agent James. I’m beginning to see you in a new light, one that doesn’t have that many watts.”
Sherlock said, “No, I won’t go out to dinner with you. I happen to be married to that guy, who, at this moment, would probably enjoy throwing you out the window. What floor are we on?”
Cawley said, “The ground floor.”
Sherlock knuckle-tapped him on the head. “Your lucky day, bozo. You will now begin at the beginning and tell us everything. Please, feel free not to spare yourself. Trust me, self-mortification is the way to go here.”
Cawley cleared his throat, one eye on Savich. It was difficult for him to reconcile that he was in deep trouble, since he felt so very nice. He cleared his throat again. “The sun was just coming up. Tommy was checking the other side of the house, Ben was inside making coffee, and I was making rounds through the woods and all around the cul-de-sac.
“I couldn’t believe it when I practically walked over the two of them leaning against a big oak tree, snoozing away. They looked so innocent, so young—well, until she opened her eyes and my nerve endings started screaming. She brought up a gun real fast, a big old whopper Bren Ten, probably a ten-millimeter auto. I kicked the gun out of her hand.”
Sherlock said to him, “Good thing you did. If she’d shot you in the arm with that sucker, you’d probably have bled to death, or at least lost your arm and have to learn to tie your shoes with your teeth. Lucky for you Victor shot you with a twenty-two.”
Galen said, “I wonder where Lissy Smiley got hold of a Bren Ten?”
Sherlock said, “Maybe a granddad in World War Two? You may continue now, Cawley.”
Cawley shuddered. “The other one, the young blond guy—Victor Nesser—he didn’t move, like he was asleep. I wasn’t about to shoot him in mid-snore but then the little creep came up with that gun so fast I—”
“Mortification of the self, Agent James,” Sherlock repeated. “It’s best in this situation, trust me.”
When he finished, Savich had to admit he hadn’t spared himself— very difficult, since all of them knew he felt very fine, what with the morphine on board. When he finished, Savich said, “Okay, they dumped the Corolla and stole an ancient black Trailblazer. I’m betting they dumped it once they got maybe fifty miles from Fort Pessel.”
Galen said, “I’ve got state and local law enforcement out looking for them. They didn’t get much of a head start, but if Savich is right and the Trailblazer’s hidden somewhere and they’re driving some-thing if else now, it won’t be easy to spot them until we get a stolen-car call.”
Savich asked, “What were they wearing, Agent James?”
“The girl was wearing a loose white man’s shirt, skinny-legged blue jeans and black sneakers. The boy, he was in a pale blue T-shirt with a John Deere tractor on the front, baggy blue jeans, and white sneakers. He had a nondescript ball cap pulled low, no writing on it.”