They were going to punish General Hackett for sending Ethan on that mission in the first place. For assuring him, and his editor, that he would be safe. Protected. “It’s an easy mission,” Hackett had said. “In and out.”
Where was that woman?
Ethan got out of the truck. The sun burned and he began to sweat as he started toward the bathrooms. A semi with insignia from Arkansas or Alabama-Ethan couldn’t tell from the distance-was parked on the far side. Fear clawed at him, constricting his throat. He went back to the truck and reached under the passenger seat for the gun the woman kept there. It snagged on the metal wires and he pulled hard.
Bartleton’s dog tag fell to the ground.
Dammit, he’d told her not to do it again. He didn’t know she’d grabbed it, but there was the proof, wrapped around her gun. Lying bitch.
He picked up the tag, tossed it into the cab, and slammed the door shut.
Behind the restrooms were half a dozen picnic tables. The woman-Kate? Christina? Carmen? — hadn’t seen him. She was sitting at one of the tables. Was that her? She’d changed; he remembered now. She’d cut her hair in the motel. All of it, off. Put a different color on. Told him it was part of her disguise. But he knew her now from her build, the way she moved, her eyes. She couldn’t change her eyes.
He skirted the building and walked around to the far side where she couldn’t see him approach. He’d scare her. Serve her right.
Then he heard the voices. For a minute he thought they were in his head. They weren’t. It was Karin, and she was talking to a man. The trucker? Ethan peered around the side of the building. Looked like a trucker. Jeans. T-shirt. Skinny kid. Twenty, twenty-two maybe. The building shielded Ethan, but he could hear their conversation.
“Are you okay?” the trucker asked Karin.
She didn’t say anything, just shrugged.
“Are you here alone?”
“Yes.”
She glanced toward the truck and Ethan smirked.
“Are you sure? You’re looking kind of skittish. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I know.”
“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Do you want me to call someone?”
“I’m just getting a breath of fresh air.”
“Do you have a name? I’m Thomas. Let’s pray, okay?”
What was this kid doing? Praying for Karin? Did he know how many men she’d killed? Didn’t he know that she wanted to kill him? Ethan could see it. She’d fuck him and kill him. She’d done it before, had told Ethan all about it. Why couldn’t this kid see that?
“Thomas?”
A woman’s voice from behind him startled Ethan. When he whirled around the woman screamed.
Panic spread to every nerve in his body. He pressed the trigger. A reflex. He didn’t plan it.
The woman fell to the ground.
“Loretta! Dear Lord, Loretta!” Ethan heard the shouts from the picnic table, but the noise barely registered.
He stared at the woman. She was dead. It was obvious from her eyes that he had killed her. Her hands were on her stomach. A large, round stomach.
An agony-filled cry bellowed from behind Ethan. He turned and saw the praying Thomas now rageful. He was running toward Ethan. Ethan fired again. Then two more times. Thomas dropped to the ground, his chest a bloody mess.
“What have you done?!?”
Roxanne? Rachel? Regina? Whatever her name was- Ethan couldn’t remember-she panicked. She screamed at him. Her eyes were wild. Maybe she had changed her eyes. He couldn’t remember her name. He should know it. He frowned. It was right there minutes ago.
“Shit! Shit! Oh fuck, Ethan, you’re crazy!”
She snatched the gun from his hand. He let her. Why didn’t he shoot her, too? Why didn’t he just stop it all now? Shoot her, then himself. But now he had no gun.
She pushed Ethan. He stumbled backward. “Dammit, Ethan, why? Why did you kill them?”
“I don’t know.”
She screamed in rage and slapped him, then grabbed his wrist and pulled him toward the truck. “Get in, I’m driving. We have to get out of here right now. You’re ruining everything. You fucked up again, Ethan. How am I going to get out of this?”
He opened the passenger door and clamored in, slammed it shut, and she drove off, yelling at him. Then she stopped and the silence was bliss. Then it was Hell. Total silence, just the purr of the truck and the woman’s sniffles. She was crying. Why was she crying? They didn’t talk about what happened. He didn’t know whether to be worried, scared, or elated.
He didn’t feel guilty.
Thirty minutes later he asked, “How long until Santa Barbara?”
Megan and Hans listened to Jack go over yesterday’s events. The more she listened, the more she realized she would have done almost the exact same things, except she wouldn’t have tackled a known drug smuggler in public, nor would she have broken into a secure crime scene to look around. The former action was all testos-trone; the latter could jeopardize the legal case.
Scout’s missing dog tag was an important bit of information that was not in Perez’s reports, and something that easily could have been overlooked. But that was not the case with the mysterious brunette who may have been at both El Gato and Father Francis’s St. Ignatius. If Perez had been doing his job right, he should have made the connection, and not gone off on the wild theory that some rebels in Guatemala crossed the border for retribution against Jack and his team.
“Are you certain it’s the same woman?” Megan asked.
“Almost certain,” Jack said. “From Padre’s description and two people at the bar, she appears to be the same. There’re not a lot of non-Hispanic women in town. She’d stick out whether she was white, black, or Asian.”
“Could be completely unrelated,” Hans said. “But it’s a good idea that you called in your men to stick by Father Francis for the time being, until we have better intel about the motives of the killers.”
“We need to get a sketch artist here,” Megan said. “Have Padre describe the woman while she’s still fresh in his mind. We can call her a potential witness, nothing about being a possible suspect.”
“And it may have nothing to do with this case,” Hans said.
“And it may have everything to do with this case!” Megan shot back. “It’s the only thing we have right now. There’s no forensic evidence to help us narrow down a suspect. We have a stranger in town, a woman who shows up at a known hangout for two men who were on the same Delta Force team, a team that is systematically being slaughtered.”
“Father Francis is alive,” Hans said.
“And that means what?” Jack said, his voice low with anger. “That he’s involved?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“But you thought it.”
“He has an alibi for the first three-”
Jack pushed back from the table. “Don’t.”
“It’s part of our job,” Hans said. He was uncomfortable, but he held Jack’s glare. “We have to rule out everyone. Including you.”
Hans’s BlackBerry vibrated on the table and he picked it up. A few seconds later he said, “First Lieutenant Jerome ‘Jerry’ Jefferson is confirmed in Afghanistan. Last leave was four months ago, which he spent in Hawaii.”
“Which means what?” Megan asked.
