47
Valentine followed the cruisers down I-15 doing a hundred miles an hour. Whiskey Pete’s was an old-fashioned casino about a mile from the state line. Gerry had said the gas station was twenty miles before Whiskey Pete’s. By his estimation, that put the gas station twenty miles from Las Vegas.
He watched the miles fly by on his odometer. The desert landscape was flat and unforgiving, and he looked for any break on the horizon. Then he saw a Shell station sitting off the road. It had a car wash and a convenience store, and he made his brakes screech pulling up to the front door. Through the front window he saw a big guy behind the register give him a mean look.
He ran inside. There was a line at the checkout, and everyone on it was staring at him. For the first time, he became conscious of how he looked. Unshaven, his shirt stained, his mouth hanging open.
“You can’t park there,” the guy at the register said.
He took the picture of Amin out of his pocket, unfolded it, and held it up between his hands. He showed it to the guy, and those on line.
“Any of you seen him?”
“Earl, ain’t that the guy gave you the hunnert?” a man on line asked.
Earl reached across the counter, took the photograph out of Valentine’s hands, looked it over, handed it back. “Yeah. He was just in here. You looking for him?”
Valentine felt his heart going faster than the engine of his car. Outside, another police cruiser passed, and he said, “Yes. So is everyone else. Including the helicopters.”
Earl gave him a no-nonsense stare. “Who is he?”
“He’s a terrorist,” Valentine said.
Earl came around the register. Normally, guys who stood behind registers stood on phone books to make themselves look taller. Earl didn’t need a phone book. He placed a giant paw on Valentine’s shoulder.
“You ain’t bullshitting me, are you? I got a brother over in Iraq.”
“I’m not bullshitting you,” Valentine said.
Earl led him outside, pointed at I-15. “Guy pulled out a few minutes before you pulled in. Green car, I think it was a Taurus. Went thataway.”
Earl was pointing east, back toward Las Vegas.
“Are you sure?” Valentine asked.
“Positive. You probably passed him on the road.”
The police cruisers and army helicopters were going the wrong way, and Amin had been sitting here, watching them pass by. Valentine thought about the crowds of tourists he’d seen walking the Strip earlier. Men, women, and kids. Thousands of them. He grabbed Earl by the arm.
“I need a gun,” he said.
Earl had a hunting rifle and a four-ton pickup truck. He drove like a bat out of hell down I-15 toward town. Valentine sat in the passenger’s seat with the rifle in his lap. He tried 911 on his cell phone and got a frantic busy signal. In disgust, he threw the phone on the floor and examined the rifle. It was a Remington Model 700 .270 with a Leupold scope. He’d gone hunting once in the Catskills and used the same gun. It was a good open-range weapon, known for long-distance, flat-trajectory hits. Half a mile up ahead, he saw a police roadblock made up of several cruisers, and guessed the police were doing the smart thing and cordoning off the city. Earl slowed the truck.
“You see the car?” Valentine asked.
The big man looked in both directions. “Nope.”
“If they wanted to get to downtown, is there another way?”
“Not on pavement,” Earl said.
“How about dirt roads?”
“Sure. They could take a dirt road and loop around.”
“Show me.”
Earl got on a street with a DEAD END sign, and Valentine saw him flip a switch that put the pickup into four-wheel drive. At the street’s end, he jumped the curb, crossed someone’s private property, and was soon driving across the bumpy desert.
The midday sun was blinding, and Valentine strained his eyes looking for the vehicle Earl had described to him. He remembered Bill saying that the explosives found in New Orleans were fitted inside a car.
Earl was asking him a question, wanting confirmation.
“Is that the way you’d go?” Valentine asked him.
“Yeah, it’s the quickest.”
“Then take it.”
Earl floored the accelerator, and the pickup shot into the air like an animal released from a cage. They hurtled across the desert, Valentine grabbing the oh-shit bar by his head and holding on for dear life. A bad thought flashed through his head. He had not asked Earl if the rifle was loaded.
The Model 700 had an internal box magazine and could hold four bullets, plus one in the chamber. If the gun was fully loaded, that gave him five chances to take Amin down.
As they neared the bluff, Earl slowed down, and Valentine pulled the bolt back and checked. Only three bullets in the magazine, none in the chamber. He felt his body lurch forward as Earl slammed on the brakes.
They both jumped out of the pickup. The elevation was no more than thirty feet. Nothing but sagebrush and half-ugly land that would someday probably hold lots of identical-looking houses. Earl grabbed him by the arm and pointed.
“There. Over there.”
Valentine cupped his hand over his eyes. A quarter mile away, a car matching Earl’s description was driving through a half-finished housing development. The car’s wheels were caked in brownish red dirt. He lifted the Model 700 to shoulder height and got the occupants in the crosshairs of the rifle’s telescopic lenses.
“That’s them?” Earl asked breathlessly.
Valentine stared at the driver, then his passenger. Both Middle Eastern males. He lowered his line of vision and looked at the trunk. He imagined Gerry lying in back.
“Is it?” Earl demanded.
“Yes.”
Earl banged the side of the pickup with his fist. “Shoot the bastard!”
Valentine found the back of Amin’s head. He knew that the rifle’s bullet was going to do more than kill Amin. It would go straight through him and hit the engine or, worse, hit the plastic explosives lining the interior. The bullet was going to make the car explode, killing his son. He lowered the rifle.
“What the hell you doing?” Earl bellowed. “You’re letting them get away.”
“My son’s in the trunk,” he whispered.
Earl wrestled the rifle from his hands, aimed, and let off a round.
“Fucking shit,” he screamed.
The gun’s retort echoed across the desert. Amin veered off the road and jumped a curb. He knew he was being hunted, and drove the Taurus toward a finished development filled with prefab houses and Japanese imports in the driveways.
Earl let off another round. Dirt flew up around the Taurus.
“Shit,” he screamed.
Valentine thought of Yolanda back in Tampa, about to give birth, and remembered it like it was yesterday, his son’s head popping out of his wife’s womb, screaming at the world. The greatest moment in his life, for sure.
“I love you, Gerry,” he whispered.
Then he grabbed the rifle out of Earl’s hands, aimed at the back of Amin’s head through the telescopic lenses, and fired the last bullet.
