"Good try," he said quietly as he replaced the baseball cap on his head and adjusted the pitch, rotation, and yaw a degree here and there until he got it precisely where he liked it. "But not good enough to lose me."
It was a process of elimination, and from the data he'd gathered and from what he knew about the two, there would be only one place they'd go. He smiled as he walked back to his truck.
CHAPTER 62
The muddy, leaf-matted clearing in front of Jasmine Thompson's sharecropper's shack looked like an all-night doughnut stand at 3:00 A.M. Four sheriff's cruisers were jammed fender to fender with a highway patrol car, two boxy ambulances, the coroners personal car, a crime scene van, and a hearse.
John Myers stood at the center of the circus, playing ringmaster and repeatedly telling paramedics he wouldn't leave until he was damn well ready. From the moment they'd arrived, they'd poked and prodded at him, attached an EKG, pumped the blood pressure cuff on his good arm time and again, and seemed awfully disappointed to find his blood pressure normal, his EKG solid and healthy, and his heartbeat right at seventy (ten beats faster than normal, but he wasn't about to tell them that).
He allowed them to give him an antibiotic but refused the pain medicine. He needed a clear head, for a while at least.
"Yo! Don't walk over there! Evidence." Myers's voice was as deep, loud, and commanding as ever, and no one at the scene was inclined to mess with his authority.
Before the first vehicles had arrived, Myers had used the camera function on his new cell phone to document the scene. He took close-ups and long shots. He took a picture from the sniper's position, then he walked over and took a picture toward the dead sniper from the spot he had been hit, easy enough to spot by the blood on the ground.
He had taken a lot of shots of the dead blond woman, including close-ups of her face, tattoo, and the curious pharmaceutical patch.
Then he had e-mailed all of the photos to himself and his usual cc: list, including a secret Yahoo! mail account he had used since his wife's death to surf Internet chat rooms as a younger, hipper version of himself.
Myers had also taken good shots of the rifle and the scope and, with a great deal of pain, had written down the serial numbers of both. These he had laboriously entered with one hand into an e-mail along with the data off the dog tag and sent to himself and the same recipients as the photos.
Now, Myers watched with satisfaction as the forensics team shot the same images from the same angles with professional, high-resolution cameras, close-up lenses, and tripods. A videographer walked the scene.
With every photo, note, and foot of tape shot by his own people, Myers relaxed. But as the sustaining tide of adrenaline ebbed, the throbbing in his shoulder surged like a red-hot rod. He tried to keep the pain from his face, but instants later an overachieving paramedic appeared at Myers's side.
"You okay, Sarge?"
"Just fine." Myers tried to wave him off, but the sandy-haired young man with pink skin and freckles didn't walk away as earlier.
"Sarge, even if you feel okay right now, the chemicals thrown off from the injury can come hack to bite you in the ass. Shock might not be out of the question."
"I'm gonna shock you, son, if you don't leave me alone." But Myers noted his own lack of conviction. Then right when John had decided to sit down, a new sound popped his adrenaline level up a notch. The distent thwack of a helicopter drifted in among the work sounds. As it grew louder, Myers focused on the sound: too deep for the little old bubblecockpit Sikorskys used for crop dusting. Wrong pitch for the Sheriff Department's Bell JetRanger.
When Myers realized the helicopter sound was growing loud way too fast for any civilian chopper in his memory, the dread settled in on top of his heart. He'd known this would happen even as he'd prayed it would not. An instant later he looked up as an Army Blackhawk helicopter thundered over the clearing.
Faces turned upward as one. Mouths open to the sky. Myers looked around and thought of hatchlings in a nest expecting to be fed.
The Blackhawk returned and hovered over the clearing. Armed men hung out the side door. One of them held what looked like a video camera. Myers palmed his phone and held it unobtrusively at his side, taking photos as fast as his phone would allow.
Everything else happened in a blur. As soon as Myers looked around, he saw a Humvee come around the curve and into the clearing, the growl of its motor covered by the Blackhawk's powerful engine. The Humvee was the genuine military-issue article, not one of those fake Hot Wheels Hummers favored by wannabes with too much money. Myers took more photos, hit his speed dial, and took more.
Another Humvee followed, and behind them two dark green Suburbans with tinted windows and the all-too-familiar white-and-blue license plates that screamed, "Feds!"
Four combat-ready soldiers complete with body armor and kraut helmets piled out of each Humvee. Simultaneously, the Suburbans disgorged six or seven SWAT-ready Feds each. Myers lost interest in counting.
The soldiers and the Feds fanned out. The Feds pushed their way through Myers's men and shoved them aside. One of them snatched the videographer's camera away. Myers snapped that photo then e-mailed it and all the others. Then he shoved the phone in his pocket and strode to the Fed with the video camera- his damned video camera.
"What the hell you think you're doing?" Myers yelled, and reached over with his good hand.
The hand never got close.
A crushing blow whacked the breath out of his lungs and dropped Myers to the ground. He landed on his wounded shoulder and managed to hear his own scream of pain over the drone of the Blackhawk's rotors. He rolled off the wounded shoulder and saw the Feds, with soldiers covering their backs, as they relieved all of the law enforcement officers present of their firearms, batons, Mace, and pepper spray.
Then, before Myers could focus the pain away from his eyes, a set of knee-length, olive-green rubber boots filled his entire field of vision. He looked up at a tall, lean man with close-cropped gray hair and a birthmark on his left forehead. David Brown, the man from Homeland Security.
Swift as blur, Brown raised one of the muddy boots and planted it right on the wounded shoulder and kicked Myers flat on his back and held it there. John saw the smile on the man's face and was determined not to show any pain. He glared up at Brown. The man's lips moved, but his words were stillborn in the rotor din. The man from Homeland Security took note of this, then moved his foot and bent over.
Myers tried to sit and quickly learned David Brown was as strong as he was tall. The gray-haired man launched a flat-handed sledgehammer blow at John's sternum and slammed the wounded deputy into the ground.
"You are a lot dumber than you look," the man from Homeland Security said as he bent over close to Myers's ear and yelled above the Blackhawk. "Wise up, pal, the Patriot Act allows me to grab your sorry ass and throw you in a fucking cell that few people know about and even fewer could find. I don't have to charge you and I don't need to give you a lawyer or a fucking phone call. I can own your butt if I choose to."
Myers glared up at him and noticed something he had not seen on the man at the courthouse meeting: a small pin with the Customs Service seal on it. That did not bode well. Customs had earned a deserved reputation as a wild posse of loose-cannon cowboys who tried to use force and aggression to make up for what they lacked in intelligence and competence.
"Do you understand me, you worthless cocksucker?" the gray-haired man yelled so loudly his spittle showered Myers's face. Myers shook his head. A brief angry mask played over the gray-haired man's face, and that was reward enough for Myers.