The limo stopped, and Santos pulled the motorcycle up behind the car. He killed the siren, left the lights going, dismounted from the bike, and walked to the limo. The driver powered the window down.
“What’s the problem, Officer?” the driver asked.
In his best U.S. accent, Santos said, “You were going a little fast there, sir. Could I see your license and registration, please?”
“Aw, come on, you’re not gonna give me a ticket, are you? Out here in the middle of nowhere, no traffic?” The bodyguard opened his wallet and flashed a badge and ID card. “I’m Russell Rader, King Executive Protection Services. I’m a former LEO-FBI, retired, working a bodyguard assignment for Blue Whale. This is Mr. Ethan Dowling, the vice president.” He nodded at the passenger in back, who smiled. “Cut me a little slack, okay?”
Santos pretended to think about it for a couple of seconds. He closed the fake ticket book he held. “Retired FBI, huh? Well, I suppose I could let the speeding slide. But did you know your license plate was about to fall off?”
“What?”
“Screw must have fallen out, it’s barely hanging on. Have a look.”
Santos moved back, and the driver alighted. Both men walked around to the back of the car. “Looks all right to me,” Rader said.
Here was the tricky part. Santos squatted behind the car, put his right index finger on the plate holder. “No, sir, see, right here?”
As he expected, the bodyguard squatted next to him to get a closer look.
As soon as the car’s occupants couldn’t see them, Santos used his elbow.
Normally, a squatting man wouldn’t have particularly good balance or leverage for such a strike. But Capoeira was an art based on movement in odd positions. Santos’s balance was superb.
He slammed the bodyguard flush on the right temple. The man fell as if somebody had chopped off his lower half.
Santos stood. He walked around to the passenger side of the limo, leaned down.
The second bodyguard lowered his window.
“Your friend is trying to fix the license plate, but his knife isn’t going to do the job. Do you have a screwdriver in the car?”
As the bodyguard opened his mouth to speak, Santos drove his fist into the man’s throat with as much power as he could. He heard the voicebox break. The man clutched at his neck, and Santos fired a second strike, this one with the heel of his hand to the man’s forehead. A punch that hard likely would have broken his knuckles, but the heel of the hand was padded — you hit hard with soft, soft with hard, if you wanted to avoid damaging yourself.
The man’s head snapped back. Before he could move, Santos jerked the door open and grabbed the stunned guard’s neck with one hand and pinched his carotids shut. Ten seconds was more than enough. The man’s eyes rolled in his sockets, showing white. He was unconscious.
Santos released his grip. He didn’t want to kill him.
In the back, Mr. Dowling started sputtering: “What the—! Hey—!”
Santos could have pulled his pistol out and used it like a magic wand to silence the man, but he didn’t need it. He smiled, a broad, teeth-flashing grin. “This is a kidnapping, Ethan. You be quiet, or I’ll have to kill you.”
The man was terrified. He shut up.
Now, all Santos had to do was immobilize the bodyguards. He hauled the second one out of the car and dragged him to the back. He expertly tied both unconscious men, using the soft cloth ties he had tucked away in his pocket. He didn’t want any ligature marks on them. He placed a loop around each neck and to the wrists, so they wouldn’t struggle when they woke up. He opened the trunk and hoisted the tied pair inside, then carefully shut the lid. He walked back to the bike, glanced at Dowling as he did to see if he’d make a break for it — try to get into the front seat, get the car started, or maybe just open the door and run.
Dowling sat, not moving, and Santos smiled. He hadn’t thought the man had it in him. He was a good judge of such things.
He killed the motorcycle’s flashing lights, unclipped them and the siren and controls from the bike, then pushed the two-wheeler into a clump of bushes nearby, so it wasn’t visible from the road. Now it was just an ordinary motorcycle. By the time somebody found it, this would be all over. And there wouldn’t be any way to connect it to Dowling and his bodyguards anyway — the rest of the night’s business was going to happen thirty miles away on a different highway. The motorcycle wasn’t stolen; it had been bought under a fake name, and there was no reason to link it to the limo. It would be another of life’s little unsolved mysteries.
Santos walked to the car, opened the driver’s door, and sat behind the wheel. “Just sit there quietly,” he said. “We’ll go for a ride, then we’ll have a chat. Behave yourself, and all it costs you is a little inconvenience.”
A lie, that. Dowling and his two guards would be dead within an hour, all things going as planned. But no point in upsetting the man, was there?
It was the nightmare that had finally pushed Michaels into it. He’d awakened in a sweat, heart pounding, from a dream in which the psychotic doper Bershaw had come to his house and captured Toni. In this one, the would-be killer had Little Alex and was holding him by one ankle, getting ready to smash the baby against the kitchen counter.
Michaels hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after that horrific image.
John Howard had told him whenever he was ready to give him a call. As soon as it got late enough, he did just that.
Now, they were in Michaels’s office.
“I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time,” Michaels said. “Thanks, John.”
“No problem. Makes perfect sense to me,” Howard said. “In your place, I’d have done it a long time ago.”
“I mean, even with all of Toni’s expertise, and the knives and tasers and stuff we have laying around, somebody has twice shown up at my house with murderous intent.”
“I remember the last incident quite well,” Howard said. “It’s about time you got some more serious hardware.”
“Yeah. I want to be a little better prepared if it ever happens again.”
“I expect this will do the trick,” Howard said. “Let me show you what we have.”
Michaels nodded and looked at the gun case, which seemed to be some kind of brownish-gray canvas or oil- cloth, darkened here and there with splotches of lube.
He untied a string at the fat end of the cloth case and slid the weapon out.
“This belonged to my uncle,” he said. “It’s what they call a ‘coach gun,’ being the kind of weapon a lot of the stagecoach drivers used when they rode shotgun guard duty back in the Old West. This one is a European American Armory Bounty Hunter II, actually made in Russia for export. My uncle used to use it in cowboy action shooting.”
“Cowboy action shooting?”
“A competitive sport. Men and women get dressed up in pre1900 costumes like those that might have been worn in the Old West, give themselves names like ‘Doc’ or ‘Deadeye’ or ‘The Kid,’ and while in persona, shoot for scores using period weapons — single-action six-shooters, rifles, usually the lever-action kind, and shotguns.”
“Really?”
“Yep. A grown-up version of cowboys ’n’ Indians. Got Native Americans who wear period stuff and compete, too. Everybody wears hearing protectors and safety glasses and all, but otherwise the look is usually pretty authentic.”
“Huh.”
“My uncle used to love it. There were a fair number of black cowboys on the frontier. After slavery was abolished, and before Jim Crow got going, nobody much cared what color you were, long as you could ride, punch cattle okay, and could shoot snakes or rustlers if they showed up. At least that’s the story I heard growing up.”
“Interesting.”
