So she drove slowly and carefully, and got to Partin’s Country Market four minutes before the appointed time. The sun was shining and it was cool, maybe forty degrees or so. Bracing . . .
Carruth arrived three minutes later.
She had been breathing slowly and deeply, but even so, her belly was roiling and her heart pumping faster than normal. It wasn’t every day you cold-bloodedly shot somebody to death. That thing in New Orleans hadn’t been planned, it had just happened, and yeah, she had been prepared, but she had not really expected, nor wanted, it to go down that way.
This was different. She was gonna smile at Carruth, a guy she had worked with for months, and knew, and then punch holes in his skull,
As she stepped out of her rented car, she looked up to see a state police patrol cruiser coming along the country road. And slowing down.
She went cold, but let none of her reactions show.
Unless she was willing to kill a state cop, Carruth was going to live to see another day.
She considered it.
Carruth was armed and he was good with a gun. She didn’t know how good the trooper might be. If she pulled her piece and blasted Carruth, the cop might be a danger before she could do him. Carruth certainly would be if she shot the cop first, though he would hesitate, trying to figure what she was doing, and she could nail him while he was trying to work it out. . . .
No. She didn’t need any complications—somebody might spot the dead police officer before she was out of range, and they would certainly throw up roadblocks every which way. Maybe he had already called in their license plates. Dead police officers were a major glitch, to be avoided if at all possible. She could screw up Jay Gridley’s search for a little while longer, and take care of Carruth later.
“Follow my lead,” she said to Carruth as the trooper pulled into the lot. “We’re thinking about buying this place,” she said.
The gravel crunched under the trooper’s tires. The cop eased closer and rolled his window down. “You folks okay?”
Carruth stepped of his car with a notepad. He looked at the for-sale sign and began writing on the pad. He smiled at the trooper and raised a hand in greeting.
“Yes, sir,” Lewis said. “My friend and I came out to look at the store. We heard it was for sale.”
“You live around here?”
“No, in the District. But we’re tired of the city,” she said. “And we’re thinking maybe about getting married and starting a business away from all the noise and traffic.”
The cop, who was maybe twenty-five, smiled. “Really nice country.”
“It is. We figured we’d get the Realtor’s number and see if we can set up a meeting.”
She smiled at the trooper, who grinned back. “Shame you had to come in two cars.”
Cops never just took anything at face value, the good ones. She leaned down closer to the cop. “My friend and I, we’re, uh, married to . . . other people right now. We’re going to, uh, take care of that, but we kind of don’t want to be seen together just yet.”
“Ah. I understand.”
She nodded. Give them a story they like, they’ll buy it.
“Well, you all have a nice day.”
Carruth turned and ambled over to where Lewis stood. He put his arm around her and smiled at the trooper. Pressed the tips of his fingers against her breast so the cop could see that.
The trooper pulled out of the lot and drove slowly away.
“Bet he turns into a driveway a mile down the road and waits to see what we are going to do,” Carruth said.
“If you don’t get your hand off my boob, he’s going to see me kick you in the balls.”
Carruth laughed. He moved his hand away. “I had to help sell it, didn’t I?”
“We need to leave,” she said.
“Why? We can talk for a couple minutes, walk around the place. Even if the cop can see us, it’s not like we’re trying to break into the place. We can hold hands, make out, give him something to tell the boys back at the station.” He grinned.
“Forget it.”
She hadn’t planned on having to lay out another base incursion, since she’d expected he’d be dead by now. She didn’t have anything to tell him. A mistake. “No, we’ll do it later. I’ll call and set it up.”
“Why’d you want to meet way the hell out here anyway?”
“I wanted a quiet drive in the country. What do you care?”
He shrugged. “I don’t.
“Go. I’ll call.”
He shrugged again and ambled to his car.
Well—damn. This certainly hadn’t gone the way she’d visualized it. A reminder that RW was messier than VR. She needed to keep that in mind. If that trooper had chosen to play it differently, maybe been in a bad mood and needing to feel powerful, if he’d wanted to see ID, maybe decided he needed to pat them down, it would have really been a bad scene. She supposed she ought to consider herself lucky it hadn’t gone that way. Carruth killing cops was why they were here—they didn’t need another dead one calling attention their way.
She climbed back into her car and started the engine.
As she did, she had a sudden inspiration. A way to get rid of Carruth without doing it herself. She smiled. It was perfect. She should have thought of it before.
Better late than never.
29
Thorn sat at the head of the conference table, with Jay Gridley and Abe Kent sitting across from each other to his left and right. Thorn said, “All right, Jay, if you’ll update us, please?”
Jay nodded. “Not a whole lot new. Most of what I’ve been chasing has run to dead ends. I haven’t been able to chase the game-maker down.”
He paused, taking a moment to make eye contact with General Kent as well. “There are two lines of inquiry that I can see might still pay off, though there is a possibility they lead to the same place. First, there’s the gun that killed the Army guy and the Metro cops. I’ve narrowed down the possibilities to one good one, but I haven’t been able to pin it to the wall yet. The gun was bought under a phony name and ID and I’m working on that.”
Thorn nodded. “Go on.”
“Second, there’s the dead terrorist found in the burning truck down in Kentucky. We have an ID on him, including his name and CV. He was a Special Forces guy, an Army Ranger, by the name of Dallas R. Stark. He was doing soldier-of-fortune and security work in the Middle East two years ago when State lost track of him. I am running down his old military unit, guys he worked with in the Middle East, family and childhood friends, all the usual stuff. Since we know he was using a phony passport, otherwise he couldn’t have gotten back into the U.S., it could be that he was the guy who bought the gun and shot people with it. That wouldn’t be real helpful. If I can pin the Alien Cowboy—sorry, that’s a characterization from my search-scenario—I should be able to figure it out. If he matches Stark, then that line ends. If he doesn’t, we have another player. Stark has been somewhere for the last two years, and since he wasn’t alone when the terrorists hit Braverman, if we can link him to anybody in that group,
