“To the snipers who’ve got me in their crosshairs.”
“Who would want to shoot you?”
Coburn frowned at him. “Come on, VanAllen. You know who. And the only reason they haven’t taken me out already is because they still wouldn’t know where Honor Gillette is. You and I will get in the car and drive away.”
“Then what?”
“At some point between here and your office in Lafayette, I’ll get out. When you arrive, surprise! I’m no longer in the car with you. Whoever balks first is the person you arrest immediately, because that’s the person who had the snipers in place. Got it?”
VanAllen nodded, but Coburn hoped he felt more certainty than his nod demonstrated.
Coburn said, “Let’s go.”
VanAllen turned and walked to the driver’s side of the car and opened the door. The dome light came on, convincing Coburn yet again that the agent had no field experience. But he was glad of the light because it afforded him a check of the backseat. There was no one crouched between the seats.
He opened the passenger-side door and was about to get in when he sensed motion in his peripheral vision. He turned toward the train. A shadow streaked past the gap between two of the freight cars. Coburn dropped to look beneath the train and saw a pair of legs on the other side of it sprinting away. He started crawling in that direction and was almost under the train when a cell phone rang.
Coburn swiveled his head, caught VanAllen as he reached for the ringing telephone attached to his belt.
Coburn looked beneath the train and at the man fleeing from it.
Then to VanAllen, he shouted, “No!”
Honor was winded and her left side was cramping, but she continued to run at full tilt. She hadn’t thought the train tracks were that far from the paint and body shop garage until she began covering the distance. Running in darkness over unfamiliar ground made it even more difficult.
This was an industrial area of town comprised of warehouses, machine shops, and small manufacturing plants, all of which had been deserted for the night. Twice she plunged down blind alleys and had to retrace her steps, which became slower the farther she ran.
Only once did she allow herself a few moments to try and catch her breath. She put her back to a crumbling brick wall that formed one side of an alley. She gulped air. She pressed both hands into her side to try and ease the cramp.
She didn’t linger there for long, however. Rats scuttled nearby. She couldn’t see the dog that snarled at her from behind a cyclone fence at the dark end of the alley, but the sound conjured up menacing images.
She continued on.
Finally she reached the tracks. They were overgrown with weeds, but the steel rails reflected some ambient light and made the going a little easier, although her heart felt on the verge of bursting. Her lungs labored. The cramp in her side was causing her to gasp with pain.
But she ran on because Coburn’s life could very well depend on her reaching him. She didn’t want him to die.
When she finally spotted the old train near the water tower, she would have cried out in relief, had she had enough breath to make a sound. Seeing her goal gave her additional strength, and she pumped her legs even faster.
She made out the automobile parked near the train. She saw the two figures standing in front of the hood. As she watched, they separated. Coburn went around to the passenger side. The driver got in and closed his car door.
A heartbeat later a ball of flame bloomed into the night sky, illuminating everything around it in the red glow of hell.
The concussive blast of the explosion knocked Honor to the ground.
Chapter 36
Doral had the dubious pleasure of informing The Bookkeeper.
“My guy in the FBI office had just enough time to plant the bomb on the car and program in the cell phone number. But it worked exactly like it was supposed to. Bam! They never had a chance.”
The silence on the other end was palpable.
Doral continued. “I witnessed it myself from the top of the water tower. All of us got the hell away from the area immediately. Nobody ever knew we were there.”
Still silence.
Doral cleared his throat. “There is one thing, though.”
The Bookkeeper waited in stony silence.
“It wasn’t Honor who showed up. It was Coburn.” Unsure how The Bookkeeper would receive that piece of news, he hastily added, “Which is better when you think about it. It’ll be easier to track down Honor than it would have been to deal with him.”
“But those weren’t your instructions. That wasn’t my plan for Coburn.”
Doral understood The Bookkeeper’s letdown. Between Coburn and Honor, the undercover agent was naturally the bigger trophy. For personal reasons, Doral would have enjoyed killing him in a manner that was painful and protracted. Instead, the son of a bitch had gotten off light. He’d gotten the instantaneous death planned for Honor and Tom VanAllen.
When given his orders a few hours earlier, Doral had diplomatically questioned the necessity of killing the FBI agent. “He really doesn’t know anything.”
To which the Bookkeeper had said, “He’s in a perfect position to ruin things, if unintentionally. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. And it will look good to the Mexicans that we killed a federal agent.”
“We got two FBI guys tonight,” Doral said now. “That should really impress that cartel.”
But The Bookkeeper didn’t seem all that impressed.
Jesus, what did he have to do to make up for letting Coburn escape the warehouse? Now that Coburn and VanAllen were dead, the only remaining threat was Honor. She was just a pawn, but she was a dangerous one who had to be eliminated. Doral accepted that. Just as he’d accepted having to kill Eddie.
He and Fred had tried to persuade The Bookkeeper to rethink that mandate. They’d bargained for his life to be spared. Did Eddie, their boyhood friend, really have to die? Maybe just a stern warning or a threat either real or implied would work.
No loose ends. No mercy. The Bookkeeper hadn’t made an exception even for Eddie. He’d crossed a line. He had to go. The order had been issued in language that a one-year-old could understand, but for the sake of all concerned, he and Fred had made it as quick and painless as possible, while still making it look like an accident.
Doral hoped he could devise something that easy for Honor.
But if she died badly, she had only that friggin’ Coburn to blame, first for involving her—because Doral was convinced that she didn’t know Eddie’s secret—and then for stealing the quick death she should have had.
Of course before Doral could do anything, he had to find her.
With the mind-reading skills that often gave Doral gooseflesh, The Bookkeeper said, “Coburn’s dead, and he was the only person who knew where Honor is. How do you plan to find her?”
“Well, now that Coburn is ashes, she may come out of hiding.”
“You’re willing to wait on that?”
The implication being that waiting would be a bad idea. “No, of course not. I’m going to focus on Tori Shirah. Because I’m convinced that when we find her, we find Honor and Emily.”
“For your sake, I sincerely hope you’re right, Doral. For once.”
The Bookkeeper hung up without saying more. Doral closed his phone and realized as he started his pickup truck that his hand was shaking.
He hadn’t even been congratulated for getting Coburn, the asshole who was to blame for this whole fiasco. Instead, he’d received another veiled threat. He was still on The Bookkeeper’s shit list, where nobody wanted to be.
He drove his pickup out of the crowded parking lot of a tavern, where, even before calling The Bookkeeper, he’d stopped to toast his success with the car bomb. He joined the stream of vehicles that were homing in on the area near the train tracks where Tom VanAllen’s car had been blown to hell and back and was still smoldering. It was attracting gawkers like moths to a giant light bulb.