moved out, letting the doors click quietly closed behind them.
The earliness of the hour, the lack of an interior light, the quietly closed doors, the watchfulness…if these weren’t Horton’s men, they could only have been here to rob the motel. But thieves who moved as stealthily and professionally as these two typically have better uses for their talents than budget motels. They had to be here for us.
They moved silently along the row of parked cars, their heads swiveling, shining penlights into the interiors of the vehicles they passed. They swept their lights along the balcony of the motel’s second floor, too, but I saw the light coming my way and simply flattened myself against the ground beyond the angle of their vision.
They came to Treven’s position and checked the stairs, but I knew he would have melted away at their approach. I also knew he’d be back as soon as they had passed.
When they came to the van, they stopped. I knew what they were thinking.
They shone their lights through the front windows and then tried the side doors, which we had locked.
One of them stepped back, scanned, and took a notepad from one of the fleece pockets. He shone his light on the license plate and jotted down the number. Then he slipped the notepad back into his pocket and they circled to the rear of the van.
I was hoping they would give the door their simultaneous attention, but they were too good for that. One tried the door while the other one scanned behind them. I couldn’t see him, but I knew Larison would have moved out from concealment, up to the edge of the apartment building wall directly across the street. Either he or Treven could have shot them left-handed from this close, but we didn’t have suppressors, and couldn’t risk waking up the neighborhood with the sound of gunshots. Because of that, and because we had to assume they were armed, too, we had to be practically on top of them before they knew we were there if we were going to pull this off quietly.
One of them started to open the rear van door. The other was still watching behind them. Larison and Treven only needed a second, but they weren’t going to get it.
So I improvised. In ersatz sexual ecstasy, I moaned, “Oh, God, yes, don’t stop, don’t stop, fuck, yes, that’s so good, don’t stop…”
They both immediately oriented on the sudden disturbance. I knew the incongruity would cost them precious nanoseconds of processing time: they’d been attuned to a range of possible problems, including sounds of stealth and ambush. And now they were hearing sounds, but not ones they could quickly fit into the threat matrix through which they were approaching their current environment.
“Oh my God, yes!” I said. “Yes!”
For an instant, they were what-the-fuck paralyzed. Then they both reached inside their jackets.
Too late. Larison and Treven had already rushed up behind them, grabbed their gun arms, and jammed the muzzles of their own guns against the backs of their heads. I heard Larison say, “Freeze, or I’ll blow your brains through your face.” His voice had the kind of command authority that could stand down an attack dog.
I swung down off the balcony to the parking lot and circled around to the rear of the van. Before Horton’s men could overcome their surprise and make a tactical decision, I reached inside each of their jackets and extracted a suppressed Glock from a shoulder harness. Quiet enough, yes, but unfortunately for Horton’s men, a hell of a long draw.
I shoved one of the guns into my waistband and checked the load on the other. A round in the chamber, as expected, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure.
“Lean forward,” I told them. “Legs apart, knees straight, faces down, palms against the van. Or we’ll find out just how quiet these suppressers are.”
The threat was deliberate. I didn’t want them to count even a little on any hesitation we might have about the sound of gunshots.
They complied. I handed Larison the other suppressed pistol. He secured his own gun in his waistband and we covered the two of them while Treven searched for weapons. He came away with two folding knives, two mini-lights, two cell phones, two wallets, two notepads, and a set of car keys. He pocketed all of it, secured their wrists behind their backs with heavy plastic flex ties, opened the van doors, and got inside. The flex ties could be defeated by someone who knew what he was doing, but for now all we needed was to inhibit them and slow them down. Larison and I shoved them in, got in ourselves, pushed them face down onto the floor, and closed the doors behind us. Larison kept them covered while Treven moved to the driver’s seat. We’d punched peepholes in the van’s sides and back. I removed the duct tape covering them and looked through. Between Treven in front and the peepholes in back, we had three-hundred-sixty-degree coverage of the area around the van. So far, it seemed our brief interaction outside had attracted no attention.
One of Horton’s men said, “What are you going to do with us?”
Larison said, “The next one of you who talks without being asked a question first, I’m going to pistol whip.”
No one said anything after that. We watched the street for five minutes. It was getting lighter outside. Everything was quiet.
Treven stayed up front at the wheel, going through the items he’d taken from Horton’s men. I put the duct tape back in place over the peepholes and turned on the rear dome light. Larison and I sat Horton’s men up and pushed them back against the passenger-side wall, their legs splayed in front of them. I was going to ask them a few questions myself, but something about Larison’s body language-the confidence, and also the menace-made me realize he was going to handle it. And likely handle it well.
“Here’s how it’s going to work,” he said, placing the muzzle of the suppressed Glock first against one of their foreheads, and then against the other. “I’m going to ask you some questions. The first one who gives me useful, accurate information that tracks with what I already know, gets to live. Whoever loses the race to talk first gets an instant bullet in the head. That’s the game and there’s only one winner. You ready?”
The two men looked at him, then at each other. Sweat broke out on their foreheads. The inside of the van suddenly reeked of fear.
Larison pointed the ominously long suppressed barrel of the Glock at one, then the other. “Who sent you? Why? Where is he? How do we get to him? What else do you know? That’s it. Ready, set, go.”
Their eyes were bulging now and they were beginning to pant. They looked at Larison. They looked at each other. The one on the right shook his head, as though pleading or in disbelief. Suddenly, the one on the left turned his head and shouted, “Colonel Horton! To protect his daughter!”
The other guy screamed, “Shut the fuck up!” Larison instantly swung the pistol over. There was a crack about the loudness of someone snapping his fingers and the guy’s head smacked into the wall behind him. Then he lay suddenly slumped and still, a neat hole just above his left eye.
“Congratulations,” Larison said to the remaining guy. “You won the first round. But you have to keep going.”
“Jesus!” the guy spluttered. “Jesus Christ!”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Larison said. “I said, you have to keep going.”
The guy was starting to hyperventilate. “You’re just going to kill me, too!”
Larison shrugged. “Maybe not. Make me like you. Make me feel grateful to you. I’m as human as the next guy.”
“Oh, my God!” the guy wailed.
“Calm down,” Larison said. “I know it’s stressful. This is the most important moment of your life, and you don’t have much time. Because, and I think you know this now, I’m not very patient.”
“Horton…Horton sent us. What else do you want to know?”
“Who else did he send?”
“I don’t know of anyone else!”
“You sure?”
“Yes!”
“His name is Raymond Trent,” Treven called from the front. “North Carolina driver’s license. The dead guy was Carl Ryan. Virginia.”
“All right, Ray,” Larison said. “What’s your connection to Horton?”
