Lethal

Chapter 34

Hamilton had been very specific about timing. “If you’re already there when Coburn arrives, he’ll be suspicious. If you come late, he’ll probably scotch the plan altogether, and you’ll never even see him or Mrs. Gillette. So get there with only a couple minutes to spare.”

Tom VanAllen had arrived at the designated place at exactly two minutes before ten o’clock. He’d turned off the motor of his car, and after the popping of the cooling engine had stopped, the silence was complete except for the sound of his own breathing and the intermittent screech of a cricket.

He wasn’t cut out for this cloak-and-dagger stuff. He knew it. Hamilton knew it. But Coburn had set the terms, and they’d been given no other choice except to agree.

The rusting train was to Tom’s right, a darker bulk against the surrounding darkness. It crossed his mind that Coburn might be hiding somewhere on the train, watching and waiting, assuring himself that his conditions had been met before producing Mrs. Gillette.

Praying to God he wouldn’t screw up, Tom slid back his cuff and checked the lighted hands on his wristwatch. Only thirty seconds had elapsed since his arrival. He wondered if his heart could withstand the pounding for an additional minute and a half.

He watched the second hand tick off another few seconds, marking more time since he’d called home.

He made an involuntary sound of utter despair when his mind tracked back to the scene that had played out this afternoon when he’d caught his wife on her cell phone. Caught her in the act, so to speak.

He lunged and snatched the phone from her hand.

“Tom?” she cried in shock.

Then angrily, “Tom!”

And finally, “Tom,” on a soft, plaintive, remorseful groan as he read what was on the screen.

Some of the words were so blatantly sexual, they seemed to jump out and strike him. But he couldn’t associate them with Janice. His wife. With whom he hadn’t had marital sex in… He couldn’t even remember when the last time had been.

But whenever it was, the words he was reading off her cell phone screen hadn’t been part of their foreplay or whispered in the heat of passion. In fact, before today he would have bet a month’s wages that language like this had never crossed her lips, that she would abhor it. Beyond bawdy, it was the dirtiest vernacular of the English language.

He scrolled up to the last text that someone—who?—had sent her. It was a salacious invitation, outlining in explicit detail what the sender would like to do with her. The reply she’d been so busily composing was an equally graphic acceptance.

“Tom—”

“Who is it?” When she just looked at him, her mouth moving but no words coming out, he repeated the question, stressing each word.

“It’s no one… I don’t know… he’s just a name. Everybody uses code names. Nobody knows—”

“ ‘Everybody’?”

He tapped on the word “Messages” at the upper left-hand corner of the screen in order to display the index of senders from whom she’d received text messages. He tapped on one and several exchanges appeared. Then he accessed those sent by another sender with an equally suggestive code name. The names were different, but the content of the messages was nauseatingly similar.

He tossed the phone onto the sofa and looked at her with a kind of horrified wonderment.

Her head dropped forward, but only for a moment, then she flung it back and met him eye to eye. “I refuse to be ashamed or to apologize.” She didn’t so much speak the words as hurl them at him. “What I have to live with day in, day out,” she shouted, “God knows I need something to amuse myself. It’s a pastime! Rather pathetic and lowbrow, I’ll grant you. But harmless. It doesn’t mean anything.”

He stared at her, wondering who this person was. She wore Janice’s face, her hair, her clothes. But she was a total stranger.

“It means something to me.” He picked up his car keys and stalked from the room, leaving her chasing after him, calling his name.

She must have sensed something in his tone of voice, or read something in his expression that frightened her and took the starch out of her defiance. Because the last thing he heard her say was, “Don’t leave me!”

He slammed the front door on his way out.

Now, hours later, the sound of the slamming door and her plea echoed inside his head.

He’d been so damned angry. First Hamilton’s machinations. Then to discover his own wife was exchanging filthy text messages with God knew who. Perverts. Sex addicts. It turned his stomach to think about it.

But leave her? Leave her to cope with Lanny alone when she couldn’t handle more than a few hours without assistance? He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t simply walk out of their situation and leave her to cope with it alone. And even if he was inclined to abandon her, he couldn’t desert Lanny.

Actually he didn’t know what he would do about this. Probably nothing.

Doing nothing seemed to be the way in which he and Janice handled most of their problems. They were without friends, without sex, without any happiness whatsoever simply because neither of them had done anything to stop the erosion of it. Her “sexting” would be just another aspect of their lives that they would pretend wasn’t there.

They were strangers who lived in the same house, a man and a woman who’d known one another a long time ago, who had laughed and loved, and who now were forged together by a responsibility that neither could forsake.

Jesus, they were pitiful.

He scrubbed his face with his hands and ordered himself to focus on the job at hand. He checked the time. Straight up ten o’clock.

Make yourself seen, Hamilton had told him.

He opened the car door, got out, and walked forward, stopping several yards beyond the hood of the car.

He held his hands loosely at his sides, slightly away from his body, also as Hamilton had directed. The cricket continued to fill the night air with its grating racket, but above it Tom could hear his own heartbeat, his own staggered respiration.

He didn’t hear the man. Not at all.

He had no forewarning that he was there until the barrel of a pistol was jammed into the base of his skull.

When Coburn had told Honor what she was to do, she’d protested. “That goes against your own plan.”

“It goes against the plan I gave to Hamilton.”

“You never intended to send me to meet VanAllen?”

“Hell no. Somebody in this op is working for The Bookkeeper. Whether or not it’s VanAllen, somebody is dirty. Probably lots of somebodies. The Bookkeeper will be afraid of what you know, or at least suspect, and will want you taken out as bad as he does me.”

“He can’t just have me shot.”

“Of course he can. I told you, situations like this, hostage exchanges in particular, get fucked up real easy. Sometimes on purpose. You could become an ‘accidental’ casualty.”

It was a sobering thought that had silenced her for several moments. He had parked their stolen car in the garage of a defunct paint and body shop, where the gutted chassis of other cars had been left to the mercy of the elements. When she’d asked him how he knew about these hiding places, he’d said, “I make it my business to know.”

He hadn’t elaborated, but she reasoned that he had mapped out several escape routes, planning against the time when he would need one. Like tonight.

They had waited in the stifling garage for more than an hour before he began giving her instructions. “Stay here,” he’d said. “Either I’ll come back within a few minutes after ten o’clock, or I won’t. If I don’t, drive away. Collect Emily and—”

“And what?” she’d asked when he stopped talking.

“Depends on you. You either call your father-in-law or Doral. You tell them where you are, and you get welcomed back into the fold. For a while anyway.”

“Or?”

“Or you keep driving and get as far away from here as this car will take you. Then you call Hamilton. You tell him you won’t come in to anybody except him. He’ll come pick you up.”

“Why does it have to be one way or the other?”

“Because I came to your house on Monday morning. I wish now that I hadn’t. But I did. So thanks to me, The Bookkeeper and everyone on his payroll will assume you know something. The good guys will assume the same. You’ve got to decide which team you’re on.”

She looked at him meaningfully. “I already have, haven’t I?”

He’d held her gaze, then said, “Okay, good. Listen up.” He gave her his cell phone, recited a telephone number, and told her to memorize it.

“Hamilton’s? Won’t it be on the phone?”

He shook his head. “I clear the log after each call. You should, too. Got the number?”

She had repeated it back to him.

Then he’d gone through it all again, stressing to her that she couldn’t trust anyone, except possibly Tori. “I got a good vibe from her. I don’t think she would betray you, but she might give you up unintentionally.”

“How?”

“These aren’t imbeciles we’re dealing with. Tori pegged it this morning. They’re gonna get suspicious when they discover she’s split. They’ll try to pick up her trail in the hope of it leading to you.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because that’s what I would do.”

She smiled faintly, but her mind was busy trying to assimilate everything he was telling her. “How do you think VanAllen will react when you show up in my place?”

“I have no idea. But I’ll find out soon enough. Remember, if I don’t come back within a reasonable period of time, that means things went to shit. Get away from here.”

When he’d said all he had to say, he got out of the car, rubbed his fingers over a spot in the garage floor where dirt had collected in a pool of motor oil, and then spread the gritty residue over his face and arms.

Then he’d gotten back into the car, checked the clip of his pistol to make certain there was a bullet in the chamber, and tucked it back into his waistband. He passed her Fred’s revolver. It was huge and heavy and sinister.

Coburn must have sensed her repugnance. “It sounds like a cannon and spits flames when it fires. You may not hit your target, but you’ll scare him. Don’t talk yourself out of pulling the trigger, or you’ll be dead. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Honor.”

She shifted her gaze from the pistol to him.

“You’ll be dead,” he repeated, emphasizing it.

She nodded.

“Don’t let your guard down for a second, for a nanosecond. Remember me telling you this. When you feel the safest, you’ll be the most vulnerable.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Good.” He took a deep breath, let it out in a gust, then said the words that Honor had dreaded to hear. “Time to go.”

“It’s not even nine o’clock yet.”

“If there are snipers in place—”

“Snipers?”

“—I need to know where they are.”

“You made it clear to Hamilton that VanAllen must come alone.”

“I wish VanAllen was the only one I had to worry about.”

He’d put his left foot on the garage floor and was about to step out of the car when he stopped. For several seconds he stayed like that, then he turned his head and looked over his shoulder at her.

“As kids go, yours is okay.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but found she couldn’t, and wound up merely nodding.

“And the football? It was a rotten thing to do. I’m sorry.”

Then he was gone, his shadow moving swiftly across the littered garage floor and slipping through a narrow opening in the corrugated tin door. The wheels squeaked on the rusty track as he rolled the door shut behind himself. She’d been left alone in the darkness.

And here she had remained for more than an hour now, sitting in a stolen car in an abandoned cavern of a building, her only company the mice she occasionally heard scratching through trash, her thoughts in turmoil.

She was worried about Emily and Tori. Coburn had allowed her to call the house. After she let the phone ring once and dialed again, Tori had answered, assured her that they had safely arrived and that all was well. But that had been hours ago. Something could have happened since then and she wouldn’t know about it.

She thought of Stan, and how worried for them he must be, and how bad she felt about turning his home inside out. For all his sternness, his affection for her and Emily was genuine. She didn’t doubt that for an instant.

Would he ever understand that what she had done, she’d done strictly in order to preserve Eddie’s reputation? In the final analysis, wasn’t that much more important than saving a box of track-and-field medals from his school days?

But she feared Stan wouldn’t see it that way and would never forgive her for invading the sanctity of Eddie’s room. He would look upon her actions as a betrayal not only of him, but of Eddie and their marriage. The relationship with Stan would suffer irreparably.

And her thoughts frequently returned to Coburn and the last things he’d said to her. For him, what he’d said about Emily had been very sweet. His apologies for involving her in the first place, for ruining the football, were significant because he rarely explained or excused anything he did. When he’d apologized to Emily for making her cry, he’d done so clumsily.

It was a rotten thing to do. It might not have been the most eloquent of apologies, but Honor didn’t question its sincerity. His eyes, their startling qualities emphasized even more by the makeshift camouflage on his face, had conveyed his regret as well as his words. I’m sorry. She believed he was.

His harsh childhood had made him cynical, and the things he’d seen and done while in service to his country had hardened his heart even more. He was often cruel, possibly because he’d witnessed how effective cruelty could be toward getting results. Whatever he said or did was unfiltered and straightforward because he knew that hesitation could be fatal. He didn’t worry about future regret because he didn’t expect to live to a ripe old age when one typically reexamined the pivotal decisions and actions of his life.

Everything he did, he did as though his life depended on it.

The way he did everything—ate, apologized… kissed—was like it was for the last time.

That thought brought Honor’s mental meandering to a complete standstill, and she experienced a jarring realization.

“Oh, God.” It was a whimper, spoken in the quietness, spoken from the heart.

Suddenly flying into motion, she pushed open the car door and scrambled out. She stumbled over debris in her path as she made her way toward the door of the garage. It took all her strength to push the heavy door along its unoiled track far enough to create a space that she could squeeze through, which she did, not even considering what dangers might be lurking beyond that door.

She paused for only a second to get her bearings, then struck out in a dead run in the direction of the railroad tracks.

Why hadn’t she realized it before now? Coburn’s instructions to her had been a farewell. He didn’t expect to return from this meeting with VanAllen, and in his own untutored and unsentimental way, he had been telling her goodbye.

He’d said all along that he didn’t expect to survive, and tonight he’d gone in her place, probably sacrificing himself to save her.

But his thinking was flawed. No one was going to shoot her. If The Bookkeeper believed she had something that would incriminate him, she wouldn’t be killed until he had discovered what that something was and had taken possession of it.

She was indispensable to the criminals the same way she was to Coburn, and Hamilton, and to the Department of Justice. What The Bookkeeper perceived her to know or to have was as good as a bulletproof vest.

But Coburn had no such protection.

She was his protection.