Gateways (42 page)

Noah hadn’t bothered to dress, just placed a towel across his groin and balanced a plate on top. He liked his hamburgers rare and Jason did his best to avoid looking at the blood.

“Emmy will have some coffee ready in a minute. Coffee okay?” Jason nodded and Noah let out a contented sign. “Weekends like this don’t come often enough.”

Lights had started to appear a good mile down the beach and light laughter and shouts floated over the water.

“I hope they don’t come too close to us,” Emmy said.

Noah sniffed. “Not likely. Smells like it might rain in another hour or so and then they’ll hole up inside.” He glanced at Jason, curious. “How’d you ever get into the religion business?”

“My stepfather was a street preacher.”

“And you helped him out?” Noah was fascinated. Emmy looked more than interested and the two kids stared at him openmouthed. “You pass the hat?” Noah asked. “Beat on a drum to gather a crowd?”

“My stepmother did that,” Jason said. He was easy with it now, there was nothing incriminating about it.

“You ever get to do any preaching?” Forrest asked, once again googgle-eyed.

“Sometimes,” Jason said.

“What are you doing out here?” Noah asked.

Jason smiled. “I came out here for the same reason you did. Get away from things for a while.”

Noah nodded. “You came to the right spot. We try and hit it twice a year—like to think it’s our private beach.”

Forrest had been rooting around in the picnic hamper and cried, “You forgot to bring any ice cream!”

“It’d be soup by now if I had,” Noah said. He stood up and put on his pants. “I’ll drive down to the 7-Eleven and get some.”

“Chunky Monkey!” Dot insisted.

“Strawberry cheesecake!” Forrest added.

Jason pushed out of beach chair and said, “Let me go—I owe you something for the food.”

Noah was tempted. “Hell, you’re the guest but if you want to go . . .”

Jason’s Honda coughed once but wouldn’t start. Jason walked back to
Noah and said, “I’m not going anyplace after all. The Honda just crapped out.”

Noah fished in his pocket and pulled out a key fob. “Take the SUV, I’ll give you a jump in the morning. No problem—we’ve got a spare sleeping bag and another air mattress.” He grinned. “Always bring along spares for strangers who might show up.”

Jason climbed into Noah’s car, put the keys in the ignition, then hesitated. He walked back to the Honda and grabbed his backpack off the front seat. He’d come this far babysitting it, he wasn’t going to leave it now . . .

Once inside the crowded 7-Eleven, he couldn’t remember the flavors that Dot and Forrest had wanted. Not that it made any difference, all that was left was old-fashioned strawberry and butter pecan. He bought a pint of each, then started back in the SUV. The meeting with Noah and his family was . . . pure pleasure.

Then Jason began to feel uneasy. Liking them was too dangerous for him . . . When he got back he’d give them the ice cream, then ask Noah for a jump start and get the hell out of there. When he got a hundred yards away and turned to look back, would they still be there? Or would they have vanished, like some sort of mirage? Maybe the whole encounter had been a test, like the Third Temptation of Christ. . .

He rolled the windows down to catch any errant breeze. When he was still a quarter mile away, he heard a muffled sound like small firecrackers going off. He’d heard it often enough in the Middle East training camps and in the action that followed.

He cut the motor and drifted to a stop just behind his Honda. There was another car on the shoulder, parked a hundred yards farther down.

Noah and his family had visitors.

The popping sound had cut off abruptly and he sat in the car for a long moment, smelling the night air. Mixed in with the faint nauseating stink of frying hamburgers and the smells of beer and spilled wine from the beach parties down the road was the faint, acrid odor of human blood. A lot of it.

He got out of the SUV, careful not to slam the door, and walked silently over to the other car. The empty car was unlocked but on the backseat were two styrofoam containers of half-eaten dinners. He wrinkled his nose, the usual menu at the camps.

Nothing else was in the car or in the glove compartment. Somebody else had to be in charge.

He found the other car around a bend in the road, where it couldn’t be seen. Clean interior, the keys still in the ignition. A small plastic ID tag
hanging from them was stamped
USDC—M. MELLORS
. #35. The number had to be the number of the car in the company fleet.

He studied it for a long moment. Contractor group, action agency. He remembered them vaguely from Iraq. Somebody stateside had hired them and now they were local, operating in the United States.

Looking for him.

No surprise, every security agency in the country was probably looking for him by now.

He walked back and looked down at Noah’s tent. There was a lantern on the inside and he could see the shadow of somebody moving around. One person.

He opened the door of his Honda, loosened his belt and placed it on the backseat. He took off his shirt and pants and when he was naked, folded his clothes neatly and placed them on the seat with his belt. They were his only clothes and didn’t want to get them bloody.

He looked again at the tent below, then opened the Honda’s glove compartment, took out a small roll of fine nylon twine and slipped it over his arm. The bread knife he took from beneath the front seat and strapped to his bare leg.

He was now ready for wet work.

It was a long time since Mellors had hid in a ditch—not since Iraq. But it was a warm night and he didn’t have to worry about roadside bombs or ragheads crawling up behind him, though two domesticated ones had been assigned to him.

He’d watched the movement around the little tent close to the ocean for an hour. Two men, a woman, and a couple of kids. One of the men had to be Hendrix; for sure it was his Honda parked this side of the road.

He had been lucky as shit. The FBI guys would never have found Hendrix and his Honda. Too little money to work with. They tried to appeal to the patriotism of the people they talked to but money always spoke louder than words.

He had finally tailed Hendrix to this neck of the woods but this “neck of the woods” wasn’t small. The dirtbag who ran a used car lot had said yes, the FBI photograph of Hendrix looked like the guy who’d just bought an old blue Honda.

Where was he going? The owner shrugged. “He didn’t tell me. Last I saw of him he was taking the beach road up north.”

Mellors copied down the license number and he and the Arabs trolled along the road for an hour looking for an old blue Honda. Just as he was driving out of a Denny’s lot, Mellors got lucky. An old blue Honda was leaving and turning out on the coast road heading north. Mellors followed, staying a few hundred yards behind. He was surprised when Hendrix—he was absolutely sure it was him, the car matched and so did the plates—pulled over and stopped on the shoulder. Then Hendrix got out to walk down to the beach and crap out in a battered beach chair.

There was a bend in the road and Mellors parked several hundred feet up where he couldn’t be seen from the Honda. It was dusk and clouds and fog were rolling in, which was as much cover as he would have unless he waited until midnight.

He finally noticed what he should have seen immediately—an SUV parked on the sand a few hundred feet down from the road. It was dark-colored and blended in with the drifting shadows. A little ways away was a small, khaki-colored tent. Mellors lay flat on the road and watched the people around it. A man and his wife and two kids. The boy hit a ball toward the seated Hendrix, then he and a little girl—his sister?—walked up and started talking. A moment later the man joined them and they all walked over to the tent. Mellors swore to himself. Father, mother, two kids, and now they had a houseguest.

It was going to be a long night. The clouds were thicker now and it was getting a little chilly. Mellors pulled his jacket up around his face and watched the tent in disgust. Five million Euros of bounty money, dead or alive, was down there and he couldn’t touch it. What was Hendrix going to do—spend the night?

Mellors huddled in the shadows of the ditch and yawned once, then again. He woke suddenly when he heard a car start and looked up to see the SUV pull over on the road and head north toward the next town. The family had left, probably to see a movie. But the Honda was still there and there was still a light on in the tent.

Hendrix was all alone.

Mellors was wide awake now. He nudged the two Arabs and told them to go down to the beach and if they saw any college kids walking along the oceanfront with their girlfriends and a case of beer to chase them away. A mile up the beach, the parties were in full swing and the college types who didn’t have a room would be looking for a spot on the sands to shed their
Speedos and ball their brains out. The Arabs would look like two bodyguards for some rich bastard who’d claimed a chunk of the beach for his own.

The Arabs squirmed down the ditch for a hundred yards, then padded quickly across the road to disappear into the shadows from the clouds scudding across the moon. Mellors wasn’t even sure they had actually been in the Pakistan camps with Hendrix, they’d probably heard about the reward money and would have sworn they’d spent months trekking across the sands with Muhammad.

Mellors give them time enough to get to the beach, then figured this was it. The SUV hadn’t returned. He took his automatic and a duffel bag full of camera equipment and walked silently across the sands. He stopped a few feet away from the tent, watching the moving shadow within.

He was ready to crash through the tent flap when it occurred to him there was an easier way to do this. He lifted his pistol, got off one shot and watched the shadow fall. Anybody hear anything in the parties down the beach, it was just an early Fourth of July firecracker.

He waited a moment but the shadow didn’t move. He whistled to himself, pushed the tent flap to one side and walked in. The body was lying on its side, a pool of red flowing around its face. Damn good shot, one bullet through the tent wall and he’d caught Hendrix right in the temple. He hadn’t lost his touch; his years in Iraq had been great training.

He put down the bag and pulled out the camera equipment so he could take photographs to confirm the kill. A battery lantern to highlight the face, a Nikon with a tripod and zoom lens for a sharp-focus head shot. Hendrix’s hair was a little lighter and he looked several pounds heavier than in the FBI photograph but hell, the photograph was a couple of years old by now. Mellors was sweating and took off his jacket and gunbelt and tossed them to the side of the tent. He finished setting up for the shot and moved the body so its face was turned toward the camera, then took a rag and wiped away some of the blood.

Oh, Jesus . . .

He crouched on one knee for a good minute, trying to catch his breath and control his heartbeat.

He’d just killed a stranger.

He was still staring at the body when he heard a soft,
“Oh, my God. . .”

He whirled. The rest of the family. The wife and the two kids, both about six years old, both of them staring first at him and then down at the body and both of them peeing in their shorts.

It was a thirty-second tableau, then the little girl started to scream. They were witnesses, Mellors thought, and scrambled for his gunbelt.

He’d have to cover, he thought a few moments later, he had to think of something . . . And then: who the hell were these people?

He rummaged through the tent and found a purse and a man’s fanny pack. The purse held a driver’s license—Emmy Weinberg. The man’s pack had a matching license for her husband, Noah. The kids. He didn’t know their names, then spotted a small pile of children’s dirty underwear in the corner. Name tags were stitched into the waistbands. Willow and Dot. Cute.

Hendrix had gone swimming with them, he’d eaten dinner with them. Since he wasn’t there and the family was, chances were he had taken the SUV into town—probably because his junker of a Honda had coughed its last. Pick up some marshmallows for roasting in a campfire, something like that.

And there he was, sitting in a tent in the middle of a circle of bodies like he’d never left Iraq. How could he explain what happened?

Then he decided it was really simple.

Tell the USDC and the DOD the truth. He’d had every reason to think that the family had taken the SUV into town and Hendrix had been left behind alone. Mellors had seen somebody moving around in the tent and fired through the tent wall, shooting Noah Weinberg by mistake. What was he supposed to do, walk up and introduce himself? Hendrix was a homicidal maniac, you took as few risks as possible.

He’d shot Weinberg in error and when the rest of the family showed up a few moments later, he’d panicked and shot them as well.

Murder one.

But Hendrix was probably due to return any moment, Mellors thought. He’d call the two Arabs back and wait. When Hendrix walked in, he’d terminate him and become a hero in the eyes of the USDC and the DOD. Plus he’d be five million euros richer.

The Weinbergs?

Collateral damage. It happened in every war.

He was intent on his camera work and never heard the SUV coast to a stop on the road above.

Jason walked along the shoulder of the road nearest the ocean—the sandy side—searching for where Mellors and the two Arabs must have crossed.
Almost directly opposite the small tent, he found three sets of footprints in the sand. A hundred feet farther down, the footprints diverged and headed for the beach, flanking the tent. There were none returning.

The third set of footprints led directly to the tent. Again, there were none returning. Mellors. The man from USDC, the man in charge.

Jason felt the cold growing in his chest again. Emmy and the two kids had been treasure-hunting on the beach and Noah had been in the tent arranging the sleeping bags.

How many shots had he heard? First one muffled shot, followed a few minutes later by three more.