Zafir glanced up in the rearview mirror of his rental sedan, scanning as he merged into the heavy traffic of Loop 820. He headed south, toward the highway that would bisect Fort Worth and take him to Carrie Navarro. His instincts told him there was someone behind him, someone who followed him like a jackal follows the lion — plodding just far enough behind to be out of danger. Such instincts had never failed him before. But this time, he had to be mistaken. If the Americans knew where he was, they would surely kill him before he drove another mile. He’d heard the reports. They had shot Kalil in the back of the head without ever trying to arrest him. He had no idea what had happened to Hamid, but assumed he also was out of the game. The Americans could not know everything, but they surely had some idea of the risk these men had posed. They had no reason to follow him and every reason in the world to want him dead.
He moved to the fast lane, and then slowed to fifty miles an hour. Angry drivers honked and shouted obscenities out their windows as traffic stacked up behind him, and then merged into other lanes to pass. If there was anyone following him, he was extremely good at his job.
Zafir shrugged off the feeling and checked the GPS mounted on his windshield. The numbers showed he would arrive at Navarro’s in thirty-one minutes. He smiled, leaning back against the headrest to savor the thought.
What he’d done to Gail Taylor was nothing but an enjoyable diversion. A frolic. He’d been easy on her, made her death come relatively quick. Carrie Navarro had to atone for the things she’d said to him — for the humiliation she’d put him through in the eyes of his subordinates.
And Zafir would make certain that her atonement would be slow and painful.
CHAPTER 44
Mahoney sat on the carpet of the empty house, knees drawn up to her chin, her back against the peeling robin’s-egg blue paint on the living-room wall. The house smelled vaguely of cinnamon, mildew, and motor oil. Four dead roaches and a twitching cricket formed a pile of sweepings on the linoleum floor beneath Quinn’s chair in the vacant dining room fifteen feet away.
Bo Quinn and four other bikers from his “club” had roared up on their Harleys at the TCU helipad and followed the team in the early-morning darkness to Carrie Navarro’s quiet tree-lined street west of Trinity Park. All the men looked like the sort Mahoney’s father had warned her about, the kind you didn’t want to meet in an alley on a dark night. She had smiled inside when Bo had dismounted his bike, and yanked his brother toward him in a back-slapping embrace. Jericho appeared to know the other members of the club as well, shaking their hands and hugging each of them in turn.
Bo’s sandy hair was cut short, though it was still long enough to cover his ears. While his companions all sported full beards or goatees, the younger Quinn had only a healthy growth of stubble, which, if he was anything like his brother, he could have sprouted in less than a day. Like the others, he wore faded jeans and a denim vest over a dark T-shirt. An indigo rocker under the angry-looking black octopus on the back of the vest was emblazoned with the word DENIZENS in embroidered red letters four inches high.
Bo was the only member of his group not completely sleeved in tattoos. While the other men’s muscular arms were covered in multicolored images of big-breasted women, eyeless skulls, and blazing guns, Bo Quinn had only one visible piece of ink. Occupying the entire inside of his veined right forearm was a jet-black octopus, identical to the one on his vest, eight arms trailing around a single angry eye.
Bo’s second in command appeared to be a tall Viking of a man with a scar that ran from his right eyebrow across his nose and to the bottom of his opposite jaw. Called Ugly by the others, he was bald but for the shoulder-length patch of hair on the back of his scalp, which he pulled back into a blond ponytail. A green jailhouse tattoo of a spiderweb covered the left side of his face, drawing attention to the jagged scar. The man had hugged Jericho, grinning as if they were long lost cousins. Caught up in the reunion, he’d embraced Megan as well. She’d been surprised that he’d smelled faintly of cookie dough along with the lingering odor of pipe tobacco. When she closed her eyes, she could picture a kindly old uncle. When she opened them, she saw a bloodthirsty pirate. At first, Megan had found it disconcerting the way the men, who were the type her mother would mention in the same sentence as the phrase “gang rape,” exchanged pleasantries as if meeting at a family reunion over a plate of slaw and barbecued ribs.
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Ugly had said, his face a picture of earnestness behind the green web of prison ink. A diamond stud adorned the scarified cauliflower nub of what was once his left ear. “I’ll lead the way,” he’d said, climbing back aboard his bike. “Y’all follow me…”
Carrie Navarro had gone to her mother’s home nearly sixty miles away. Palmer pulled some strings and got the Bureau to stand up a protective detail out of an abundance of caution, though none of her protectors knew exactly who she was or why they were guarding her.
The vacant house Jericho and his friends were using for surveillance was directly across the street from Navarro’s now-empty nest. Hidden in the trees at the far corner behind Navarro’s modest white frame home, Thibodaux was able to maintain a visual along the south and east sides of the house. From their position across the street, Mahoney and the Quinn brothers could watch the front as well as the west side. Both Jericho and Bo had agreed that it provided an excellent location that would give them a “tactically superior advantage” when Zafir arrived. Megan listened to the men and wondered what it must have been like growing up in the Quinn home.
Bo Quinn had insisted on pulling his new Harley-Davidson Night Rod inside the vacant house, unwilling to leave it outside to be caught in the cross fire if things “went rodeo” on them. The low-slung motorcycle now sat like a flat black locomotive in the middle of the living room.
Despite the urgency of capturing Zafir Jawad, the Quinn brothers chatted calmly about Bo’s new bike, how fast it was for a Harley — Jericho had plenty to say concerning this — and how much horsepower Bo had been able to milk out with a few modifications.
“She’s American and she scoots, Jer,” Bo had said, nodding smugly. “A hundred and fifty miles an hour, right out of the box. I’d like to see your German bike do that…”
Over time, Mahoney noticed a smoldering intensity about the two men that began to make her feel a little light-headed. At first she blamed it on fatigue, but realized it was much more basic than that. Though they shared the same strong jaw and propensity to grow a quick beard, the brothers were like night and day. Where Jericho was dark, Bo was blond, with the sun-bleached look of a surfer. Four years Jericho’s junior, Bo was much more flamboyant in his manner, strutting his muscles as he moved like a body builder in the middle of a contest. Jericho was more subtle. He looked every bit as strong, and, for all Megan knew, might have a couple of tattoos of his own hidden somewhere under his polo shirt or 5.11 Tactical khakis. Whatever he had, he didn’t flash it.
By the time they’d been waiting five hours, boredom and the men’s easy banter had worn away any semblance of inhibitions in Megan.
“You two are so different,” she heard herself say. “You grew up together, and you seem to like the same things, and yet you appear to have ended up on polar opposite sides of the law.”