Covenant (12 page)

            “I doubt it.”

            She frowned.  “Come on, Tony.”

            “Listen, if it’s someone we know and it’s urgent, they can reach us on our cells.”

            “You think it’s those people Bob warned you about?”

            “It’s the only thing that makes sense to me right now.”

            “But our number is unlisted.”  For the first time, a hint of true anxiety glinted in her eyes.

            “That’s exactly why I’m worried.  Let’s go.”

            Outside in the garage, while she waited in the truck, he stored the duffel bag and carry-on in the cargo space.  As he slammed the liftgate, he heard a vehicle rumbling at the mouth of the driveway.

            He spun, hand on the pistol.

            A black Chevy Suburban crawled past the house.  The driver might have been innocently searching for a friend’s residence, but he doubted it.  It moved too slowly, too deliberately.  He scrambled behind the wheel.

            “What’s wrong?” Lisa asked.

            “A black Suburban drove by, real slowly, like the driver was casing the place.”

            “How could they know where we live?”  She looked in the side mirror.

            “I think they got my plates when I was at The Varsity, ran them against a database, got our street address.”

            “They can do that?”  Her eyes were wide, disbelieving.

            “Later.”  He gunned the engine and strapped the seat harness across his chest.  “Later, I promise, I’ll tell you everything I know.  But first, I need you to buckle up.  This might get rough.”

            She muttered under her breath, but did as he asked. 

            He shifted into Reverse and hit the gas pedal, and they rocketed out of the garage.  He spun the steering wheel, backing into the turnaround, and straightened out.  Then hit the gas.

            Apparently having doubled back, the Suburban rolled across the driveway, blocking their escape.

            “Oh, shit,” she said. 

            “Hang on.”  He kept his foot on the gas pedal. 

            The Suburban’s driver’s side window slid down.  The pale, stout man from The Varsity was perched behind the wheel, though he no longer wore the tinted glasses.  Surrounded by the darkness of the vehicle’s cabin, his face looked as if it had been carved from ice.

            He had a large pistol, and he was aiming it at them.

            “I order you to stop!” he shouted.

            Screaming, Lisa ducked in her seat.

            “Hold on!” Anthony said.

            He roared through the open gate and wrestled the wheel to the right.  They tore across the front yard, divots of grass flying, narrowly avoided an oak tree, and catapulted over the curb and banged onto the street, the undercarriage crashing against the pavement.  

            “Jesus,” Lisa was saying over and over, as she huddled on the seat.  “Oh, Jesus, Jesus.”

            Anthony twisted the wheel, floored the accelerator.  They surged down the dark street.         

            Behind them, gunfire erupted. 

            Lisa shrieked.  Anthony glanced in the rearview mirror, saw that the guy had gotten out of the Suburban and was shooting at them.  He wore a black tracksuit, as did his partner, the Latina woman.  She was out of the vehicle, too, gun in her hands.

            Sometimes, he hated when his instincts were right.

            A bullet twanged off the rear bumper.  Another round hit them, and something shattered.  It sounded like a taillight.

            “Stay down,” he said to Lisa, but he hadn’t needed to say it.  She lay nearly flat against the seat, the harness twisted around her chest.  Her eyes were squeezed shut, as if she were wishing this was all a nightmare that would soon end.

            At a four-way intersection, he ran the Stop sign and swerved around the corner, tires wailing.  He checked behind them.

            The guy and the woman had climbed back in their truck, and were coming.

17

            Lying low against the seat, half-wishing she could be absorbed like oil into the leather, Lisa braced herself for a bullet plowing into her spine, for the SUV to tip over and hurtle her through the windshield, for a car driven by an innocent to strike them head-on and crush them inside.  The night, already troubling since Anthony had shared his account of his communications with the enigmatic Bob, had become more terrifying than anything she had ever imagined, a menacing new world where worst-case scenarios seemed not only plausible, but likely.

            How could this be happening to them?  They were ordinary people.  They lived quiet lives.  How had they gotten sucked into this?

            Anthony handled the Tahoe with cool intensity, spinning the wheel with authority, hitting the gas and the brakes crisply, as if being shot at by maniacs was an everyday occurrence.  Although he rarely spoke of it, she knew he’d completed combat missions in the Marines, had been in situations where his life was on the line and the lives of others rested in his hands, but she had never seen this side of him.  The Anthony she’d fallen in love with was gentle--strong, too, yes—but mostly gentle and thoughtful, with an acute awareness of the frailty of life and a quiet commitment to making the most of each day, never taking his loved ones for granted.   

            But this man so weirdly calm in the face of peril was foreign to her—and she was, she had to admit, thankful that he was around.

            He shifted the truck into Reverse, and the tires chewed through dirt and rocks and climbed a slight, bumpy hill.  She turned her face to the windshield, and from her vantage point, saw only leafy trees against a black sky. 

            “Where are we?” she whispered.

            “You can pop up and look.”

            The truck rocked to a stop.  He shut off the lights and the engine. 

            Heart knocking so loudly it seemed to rattle the windows, she rose in the seat.  They were at the terminus of a driveway crowded with weeds and shrubbery.  The cracked, canted lane curved around a gigantic maple and a spray of tall weeds, and emptied into the quiet street beyond.

            Behind them stood a Craftsman-style home in disrepair, shingles faded and draped in kudzu, windows boarded over with plywood.  A chain-link fence festooned in vines bordered the yard, holes torn through the link fabric.

            “We’re only about five or six blocks away from home,” he said.  “I figured we could lie low here for a few minutes, till the coast is clear.”

            “What the hell is going on, Tony?  Who were those people?  Why were they shooting at us?”

            “They saw me with Bob.  Bob betrayed them, I think, and they probably figure that he and I are working together.”

            “Working together on what?”

            “Bringing them down.”

            “Bringing down whom?  Who
are
they?”

            “Sorry, I don’t have many answers, Lisa.  Bob was vague.  But this group after us—they’re powerful, well-connected.”

            “You mentioned they might be some kind of cult?”

            “That’s what Bob said.”

            More questions stormed through her thoughts, but hard shudders suddenly wracked her, and she hugged herself.  The night was warm, but she was drenched in perspiration, freezing. 

            Anthony took one of her hands in his.  His steady strength and his warmth were what she needed.

            “I feel like I’m about to fall to pieces, but you’re so composed,” she said.  “I guess you’ve been in situations like this before.”

            He laughed softly.  “Not quite like this.”

            “These people after us . . . you think they murdered your dad?”

            “That’s what I’m going to find out,” he said, eyes hard as gunmetal.

            “But how—“

            He brought his finger to his lips, and she left the question unfinished.  He pointed toward the street.

            Through the trees and shrubbery, she glimpsed the Suburban.  It lurked past the driveway like a panther sniffing for prey.

            Involuntarily, she held her breath.    

            “There’s only the one vehicle,” Anthony whispered.  “I’d worried that they might have dispatched a whole squad after us.”

            Past the driveway, the truck halted. 

            She let out a rush of air, swallowed.  “They know we’re back here.”

            Nodding, Anthony gripped his pistol. 

            “You may want to duck again,” he said. 

18

            Cutty had commanded Valdez to stop the Suburban in the middle of the street.

            “Thorne’s around here somewhere, Valdez,” he said.  “I can feel him.”

            Cutty perched on the edge of the passenger seat, clasping the Glock.  After their failed attempt at preventing Thorne from leaving his residence, he had ordered Valdez to drive so he could have his hands free to shoot. 

            En route to Thorne’s residence, he had used Gen to dig up Thorne’s home phone number.  The number was unlisted, but the system spat it back to Cutty within seconds of his request.  He’d hoped to get Thorne on the phone, to confirm his presence at home and talk to him for a few minutes—until he arrived and put a gun to Thorne’s head and demand he explain his role in the Judas’ treachery. 

            By running, Thorne gave Cutty license to kill him.  Only a man guilty of sin sought to avoid God’s justice, and the wages of sin is death.

            Gloved fingers clenching the steering wheel, Valdez was silent, rosy lips pressed together.  In the pursuit, she’d handled the big truck with considerable, unexpected finesse, and he wondered what other skills she possessed.
 

            He opened the glove box and removed a pair of night vision binoculars. 

            He hadn’t received the results of the background check on Thorne, but he was growing antsy to get it.  Thorne wasn’t behaving like the typical gutless sinner who rolled over at the first sign of violence.  The guy had an unusual amount of daring.

            “Make a U-turn and go by the driveway we just passed,” Cutty said.  “I want to get a closer look at what was in all that thick undergrowth.”

            “Okay.” 

            She executed a textbook U-turn.  A handful of houses stood along the street, homes that appeared to have been built decades ago, with trimmed shrubbery and well-tended lawns.  The homes were in good condition except for the one on his right, a lot so overgrown with weeds, shrubs, and trees that the residence itself was almost completely concealed. 

            A crumbling driveway gave access to the back of the property, and that was where he wanted to inspect more closely. 

            He lifted the binoculars to his eyes. 

            Like a chariot commandeered by the devil himself, Thorne’s SUV thundered out of the darkness.  The high-beams flashed on, searing the interior of the Suburban.

            Blinded, Cutty dropped the binoculars and fumbled for the Glock.

            “He has gun!” Valdez shouted. 

            She slammed into Reverse, flinging Cutty forward in the seat.

            Although disoriented by the sudden glare, Cutty saw it, too.  Thorne had opened the driver’s side door and popped around the side, and he was gripping a gun in both hands and holding a stance like he knew what he was doing.

            Who was this guy?

            Gunfire shattered the night.  Rounds hammered the grille and windshield, and thank God, the vehicle was equipped with bulletproof glass, or else Cutty knew he would have taken one in the head.

            But he thought he heard a tire blow.  When he felt the truck veer hard to the right and heard Valdez’s anguished cry, he knew his suspicions were correct.

            They hurtled across the street, vaulted the curb, and sideswiped an elm.  Valdez brought the truck to a stop before they mowed down a picket fence in someone’s front yard.  

            The commotion alerted the neighbors.  Porch lights switched on at a few residences, and a house-robed old woman with wild hair wandered onto her front porch with a phone pressed to her ear.

            The prospect of nosy neighbors calling police didn’t concern him.  The understaffed and overworked Atlanta Police Department typically took nearly an hour to respond to emergency calls.  Cutty

would need only to notify his dispatcher, and the dispatcher would see to it that law enforcement’s response would be further delayed.  When you were doing God’s work, all obstacles were removed from your path.   

            Ahead, Thorne climbed back into his vehicle and exploded down the street.    

            “Go, go, go!” Cutty said. 

            She mashed the gas, and the Suburban leaped forward.  

            Cutty opened the sun roof.  He rose through it, planted his arms on the roof, and fired at the truck from a distance of about fifty yards.  His first shot grazed the vehicle’s rear bumper, and his second and third shots missed entirely.

            The Tahoe hauled around the corner, tires screeching.

            Cutty dropped back into his seat.  “Stay on him, Valdez!”

            “But the tire—“

            “Forget the tire!  Keep driving!”

            “
Si
,” she said, voice taut. 

            Rubber flapping from the ruined tire, the exposed steel rim ringing as it ground against the pavement, Valdez gave chase.   

            “I need more firepower,” he said.  He reached into the back seat and snagged his rifle, stored in a black nylon case.

            Before his current assignment, he had been a member of the sniper unit, and like he was everywhere else, he’d been the best.  He’d once nailed a target between the eyes from half a mile away, a record in the division that still stood.