rise and shine and let me escort you to jail.” Then he spoke into his radio “Hey, Ben, Tommy, I’ve got them, a hundred yards southwest of the house. Get over here!”
Victor moaned where he lay and twitched. But didn’t move. He turned his body slightly away.
“Come on, let’s go,” Cawley said, and nudged him with his toe He raised his head, shouted, “Tommy, Ben, get yourselves over here.”
Victor moaned again, turned fast, brought up his .22, and shot Cawley in his right arm. Cawley’s gun went flying. He yelled out and kicked at Victor, but Victor was already rolling, twisting around to shoot again. “Stay out of the way, Lissy! Do you see his gun?”
Cawley ducked behind a tree and kept yelling for Tommy and Ben.
“Victor, we’ve got to get out of here!” Lissy was scrambling around, looking at the ground. “He kicked my gun away, I can’t find it. I don’t see his either, it’s still too dark. We’ve got to go.”
Victor cursed, fired the rest of his clip toward where the cop was hiding, then jerked Lissy into the woods. They ran, branches cutting theirs arms and faces, not stopping until they drew up, panting, to jump into the Corolla he’d left sheltered beneath the full-leafed branches of an oak tree just off the two-lane road.
They heard male voices yelling, heard them crashing through the trees. The Corolla screeched off in two seconds, Lissy leaning out the open window, dry-heaving, Victor’s empty .22 loose in her hand.
Victor looked in the rearview mirror, saw the men burst out of the trees, guns in their hands, one of them on a cell phone. They were a long way from their cars.
But they didn’t have much time. Lissy spotted an old black Trail-blazer in the driveway of a house at the end of Miller Avenue, eight twisting, blocks from Denver Lane. It took Victor three seconds to hot-wire it. Lissy stayed in the Corolla, Victor on her bumper in the Trailblazer, to the woods outside of Fort Pessel, then he drove it into the trees.
“We’re going to Winnett,” Victor said. “Maybe they don’t know about me yet, and I know that place, know where we can hang low. If they do know about me, it won’t matter. We’ll trade out this piece of junk in another fifty miles. We’ll stay there until it’s safe to come back here and get the money.”
“Okay, let’s do it,” Lissy said, her face tight with pain. He handed her a couple of pain pills, watched her pop them right down with half a bottle of water.
“I just wish we could have taken a couple of those jerks down.” Victor said, “Who knows? Maybe you’ll have your chance. I’m going to see to it things turn out different in Winnett. You rest, Lissy that was a crazy run through the woods. Hey, we’re okay, and that’s all that matters.”
23
RANDALL COUNTY HOSPITAL
FORT PESSEL, VIRGINIA
Holiday morning
Special Agent Cawley James’s arm hurt bad. On the bright side, the bullet hadn’t hit an artery and he hadn’t bled to death. He stared at the morphine drip machine they’d hooked up just a minute ago, willing it to kick in. His arm was cleaned, stitched, and bandaged, and the anesthetic had worn off. Now his arm was screaming at him.
“It’s only been one single lonely minute since the nurse started the drip,” said Galen Markey, SAC of the Richmond field office. “She said it was faster than a shot. Stop whining, you’re going to live. You should be thankful, the doc said you won’t end up with any movement or rotation problems. No thanks to your pitiful brain.”
“Yeah, yeah, kick me while I’m down,” Cawley said between grit-ted teeth. “Listen, Galen, I’ve a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch for you if nobody calls my mom. She’ll fly here on her private jet, her doctor in tow, and demand you let her take me to her villa in Cancun. I can see you’re pissed, ready to tell me I’m a screwup. All right, so I should have waited for Ben and Tommy, but I stumbled over them, and she was just a teenager, after all.” He sighed. “Then she woke up and tried to shoot me. What was I supposed to do? I told you, she wasn’t the problem. I mean, she could have been if she’d been faster.”
“If she’d been faster, you’d be stone-cold dead.”
“Maybe. Look on the bright side. It was that damned guy, he faked me out. I’ll admit it. Why didn’t I just shoot him? But I thought the scrawny little dude was asleep. He was fast, Galen. Holy mother, my arm feels like it’s burning off.”
The ER nurse called out in a chipper voice as she hurried by his cubicle, “Another minute, tops. Suck it up, Agent.”
Sure enough, only a few more seconds passed before he felt the monster fangs pulling out of his arm.
Galen said, “I should cut off the morphine, you being such a Senor Nacho hot dog. Either or both of those lunatic kids could have killed you, Cawley. What didn’t you understand about ‘armed and dangerous’? And don’t forget crazy.”
Cawley said, “Don’t you mean Senor
Galen stared him down.
“Okay, yeah, so you’re right, pull the morphine. I should suffer. Too late. Ah, I’m basking right now in the total absence of pain.”
Galen said, “I doubt it’ll blunt the pain you’re going to feel when our brothers from Washington show up. Ah, speaking of brothers, here he is right now. And we’ve got one sister.”
Galen stood up as Savich and Sherlock came into the room. “You might have lucked out, Cawley,” he said over his shoulder. “Look who it is.”
Cawley brightened when he saw Sherlock. He didn’t know the woman, had never seen her before, but she was something. His brain swam happily in the morphine, and he hummed looking at her.
Savich said, “No, he hasn’t lucked out. Hello, Galen.” He turned to Cawley. “Are you the brain-dead yahoo who let them get away?” Cawley moaned.
Galen said, “Yep, in all his wounded glory.”
Sherlock only nodded to Galen Markey, walked up to Cawley, and got right in his face. “You jackass!. I’m the one you should be afraid of, the one who’s going to kick your butt into your backbone when you’re back on your feet, not Dillon. Do you hear me? I am royally pissed. You could be stretched out on the autopsy table, like that”— she snapped her fingers—”with all of us standing over you, shaking our heads. How could you let this happen? Uncontrolled testoster-one? Because you didn’t wait for backup, those two young psycho-paths are in the wind again and you’ve got a bum arm.” And she jabbed him hard in his good arm.
Her punch didn’t hurt him because morphine was still the main ingredient in his bloodstream. He looked up at her, gave her a dopey grin. “I don’t know who you are, but I love your hair and all those soft, wild curls around your face. Would you go to dinner with me when I’m able to cut my meat again?”
“Go out with a birdbrain like you?” She nodded toward Savich. “Don’t you know who he is?”
“Well, yeah, that’s Agent Dillon Savich. I aced one of his computer refreshers courses at Quantico last year. He likes me, he thinks I’m smart.”
Savich said, “I have revised my opinion of you, Agent James. I’m beginning to see you in a new light, one that doesn’t have that many watts.”
Sherlock said, “No, I won’t go out to dinner with you. I happen to be married to that guy, who, at this moment, would probably enjoy throwing you out the window. What floor are we on?”
Cawley said, “The ground floor.”
Sherlock knuckle-tapped him on the head. “Your lucky day, bozo. You will now begin at the beginning and tell us everything. Please, feel free not to spare yourself. Trust me, self-mortification is the way to go here.”
Cawley cleared his throat, one eye on Savich. It was difficult for him to reconcile that he was in deep trouble, since he felt so very nice. He cleared his throat again. “The sun was just coming up. Tommy was checking the other side of the house, Ben was inside making coffee, and I was making rounds through the woods and all around the cul-de-sac.
“I couldn’t believe it when I practically walked over the two of them leaning against a big oak tree, snoozing
