“You’ll never know how much I wanted to nail you, Donovan,” Sherman growled, his fear masked by anger and embarrassment.
Jake said nothing. Instead, he took the cop’s portable radio out of his belt and smashed it against a larger tree, thus putting the finishing touch on the worst crime of his life. Thank you, God.
“Come on up here, Jake,” Carolyn urged. Her voice sounded a little shaky. “It’s dangerous down there.”
“I’m okay,” Jake replied. She was right, of course; at least in absolute terms. The inverse square rule applied here-halving the distance quadrupled the hazard. In relative terms, though, Jake didn’t think he was in too much trouble. He needed to tell Nick that everything was okay, but when he turned to wave the all-clear, the other man was gone.
“Where’d Nick go?” Jake asked, glancing back to Carolyn over his shoulder.
“No idea,” she said. “But come on up here. I don’t want you down that close.”
“I’ll be there in a second.” He stooped down to speak man-to-man with the cop.
“There he is!” Carolyn announced.
Jake looked up to see Nick dragging the remains of one of their old coworkers outside. “What’s he doing?” Jake wondered aloud, watching as Nick went back inside again.
“The right thing,” Carolyn answered. Her tone was one of total approval. “They’ll have to bury them now. With the bodies visible to the news choppers, they’ll have no choice.”
Jake watched for a moment, then turned back to his captive, kneeling until they were eye-to-eye. “Look, Deputy, uh…” He glanced at the name tag. “Quill. My name is Jake Donovan. You know the name, I gather?”
Sherman glared and said nothing.
Jake smiled. “Look, I want you to deliver a message for me when whoever sent you comes to find you.”
“I’m not delivering anything.”
Jake sighed. This wasn’t going to be easy. “Okay, fine, Deputy. Don’t deliver anything. Remember something, then. I could have killed you this afternoon, and you never would have known a thing. But I didn’t, did I?”
“Only because I-”
Jake cut him off. “Look, I don’t want to argue with you here. Fact is, I didn’t kill you. My motivations can be whatever you’d like, but I’m telling you that you’re alive because I don’t kill people. Never have, hopefully never will. People don’t want to believe that, but there you go.”
Sherman broke eye contact and looked at the sky. By all appearances, if he could have stuck his fingers in his ears to keep from listening, he’d have done just that.
“When you write your report-and I’m sure you’ll be writing a lot of them in the next couple of days-I want you to remember this: we’re here to prove that we never did any of the things they accuse us of doing.”
“Yeah, right,” Sherman snorted.
Jake felt himself flush with anger and fought the urge to strike out at the man. He wanted to explain everything in detail; to tell Deputy Quill about the bodies on the inside and about just how miserable their lives had been. But he didn’t. This cop was just a cop. At the end of the day, his opinion wouldn’t mean a thing, anyway.
Jake stood again, intentionally towering over his prisoner, who now, finally, was beginning to look frightened. “Okay, Deputy,” he said at last. “Don’t believe anything. Just be sure to report it accurately, because what I’m about to give you is evidence: We didn’t kill those people back in 1983. We didn’t blow anything up. In fact, we damn near got blown up ourselves. Now, when your bosses ask you what we had to say for ourselves, you tell them that we didn’t do a damn thing wrong. And we mean to prove it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Travis felt the first stab of pain about an hour into their drive back toward Little Rock. It wasn’t much, really; just a slight pinprick in his chest, deep down. He’d felt twinges of it earlier, back when he was wrapping himself up in that policeman’s pants, but he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t speaking to either of his parents. He was too pissed off about being stripped naked and nearly drowned. He’d saved their lives, dammit, and that was the thanks he got! As it was, he felt thoroughly humiliated. The pants might as well have been a dress, they were so huge, and he didn’t even have a shirt. With the cop tied to the tree, there was no way to get his off of him, and he’d refused his father’s offer to give him his own shirt, just on principle. As for the work of the day, Travis had retired. He didn’t even lift a finger to help as his parents and Nick loaded stuff into the trunk of the Cadillac. His resolve to stay sullen and disinterested nearly broke when they built the bonfire to burn their protective clothing and equipment- everything that might carry a fingerprint-but in the end, he remained silent.
So he just sat there, pressed up against the back door, sulking and feeling stupid. And pretending not to feel the pain delivered by every breath. If his parents hadn’t been asking him every five seconds how he felt, maybe he’d have spoken up and told them something, but right now he didn’t want to hear the lecture again about how stupid he was to go in there and to save their sorry butts.
He’d be okay. He was sure of it.
Ow!
That breath really hurt, and on both sides, too, making him want to cough. But as he drew in his breath to do just that, the pinpricks grew to razor blades, and the air made a rumbling sound deep down inside of him. When he finally coughed, it felt like it was in slow motion, as if something were blocking the air from escaping.
He looked over to his mom, just as she looked over to him from the other end of the backseat, and the look that twisted her face scared him more than the pain in his chest ever could.
“Travis!” she yelled. “Oh, my God, Jake. Travis!”
Jake whirled around to look at him from the front passenger seat and showed a look that terrified Travis even more. He said, “Oh, no,” then scrambled over the seat back to join them in the rear.
What is it? Travis tried to ask. What’s wrong? But his voice wouldn’t work. The pain in his chest was worse than ever, and his heart raced at three times its normal rate. This time when he coughed, he could imagine someone ripping a piece of super-sticky tape off the lining of his lungs.
“Oh, my God! My baby! Jake!”
There was blood in his mouth now. And on his hands, too. Where did that come from? He needed to take a breath, but when he tried, he coughed again, and then he bled some more. He’d never seen his mother look so frightened. Or his dad.
Travis felt like he should be afraid. In fact, he remembered being afraid just a moment before. That was today, wasn’t it? He wanted to talk, but suddenly, he didn’t know how. And even if he did, he couldn’t remember what it was that he wanted to say. He needed air. He forced himself to draw in a huge breath, and the pain came again, worse than ever, but, curiously, he didn’t care much about it anymore.
His dad was in the backseat with him now, and from the look on his face, he was shouting something, but for the life of him, Travis couldn’t hear a word of it. He tried for a second or two to watch his father’s lips, to figure out what he was saying, but he became distracted by the way everything on the periphery of his vision had begun to sparkle.
Once the colors drained from the world, it was time to go to sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Irene was surprised to see George Sparks waiting for her as she stepped off the jetway and into the lobby of the airport. As supervisory agent in charge of the Little Rock field office, he should have had more important things to do than greet arriving passengers. Historically rail-thin, he looked like he’d put on a few pounds over the years, and what had once been a headful of flaming-red hair had receded to little more than a graying ring encircling a freckled pate.
Irene shifted the load of her garment bag to her left shoulder and extended her hand as she approached. “Hello, George,” she said cheerily. “It’s been a long time.”
Sparks shot her a knowing smirk. “Yeah, I know,” he said, reading her look for what it was. “But you haven’t
