Persuader (33 page)

I looked up. It was a Taurus, plain blue paint, gray in the cloudy moonlight. A cone of white light ahead of it. Brake lights flaring red behind. Two guys in it. Their faces were lit by their lights bouncing back off the Saab. They held still for a second. Stared forward.

They recognized the Saab. They must have seen it a hundred times. I saw the driver move. Heard him shove the gearshift forward into Park. The brake lights died. The engine idled. I could smell exhaust fumes and the heat from under the hood.

The two guys opened their doors in unison. Got out and stood up, behind the doors. They had the Glocks in their hands. They waited. They came out from behind the doors.

Walked forward, slowly, with the guns held low. The headlight beams lit them brightly from the waist down. Their upper bodies were harder to see. But I could make out their features. Their shapes. They were the bodyguards. No doubt about it. They were young and heavy, tense and wary. They were dressed in dark suits, creased and crumpled and stained. They had no ties. Their shirts had turned from white to gray.

They squatted next to Villanueva. He was in their shadow. They moved a little and turned his face into the light. I knew they had seen him before. Just a brief glimpse as they passed him, outside the college gate, eighty-four hours ago. I didn’t expect them to remember him. And I don’t think they did. But they had been fooled once, and they didn’t want to get fooled again. They were very cautious. They didn’t start in with immediate first aid. They just squatted there and did nothing. Then the one nearest me stood up.

By then I was five feet from him. I had my right hand cupped around a rock. It was a little bigger than a softball. I swung my arm, wide and flat and fast, like I was going to slap him in the face. The momentum would have taken my arm off at the shoulder if I had missed. But I didn’t miss. The rock hit him square on the temple and he went straight down like a weight had fallen on him from above. The other guy was faster. He scrambled away and twisted to his feet. Villanueva flailed at his legs and missed them.

The guy danced away and whipped around. His Glock came up toward me. All I wanted to do was stop him firing it so I hurled the rock straight at his head. He spun away again and took it square in the back of his neck, right where his cranium curved in to meet his spine. It was like a ferocious punch. It pitched him straight forward. He dropped the Glock and went down on his face like a tree and lay still.

I stood there and watched the darkness in the east. Saw nothing. No lights. Heard nothing, except the distant sea. Villanueva crawled out of the upside-down car on his hands and knees and crouched over the first guy.

“This one’s dead,” he said.

I checked, and he was. Hard to survive a ten-pound rock sideways into the temple. His skull was neatly caved in and his eyes were wide open and there was nothing much happening behind them. I checked the pulses in his neck and his wrist and went to look at the second guy. Crouched down over him. He was dead, too. His neck was broken, but good. I wasn’t very surprised. The rock weighed ten pounds and I had pitched it like Nolan Ryan.

“Two birds, one stone,” Villanueva said.

I said nothing.

“What?” he said. “You wanted to take them back into custody? After what they did to us?

This was suicide by cop, plain and simple.”

I said nothing.

“You got a problem?” Villanueva said.

I wasn’t us. I wasn’t DEA, and I wasn’t a cop. But I thought about Powell’s private signal to me: My eyes only, 10-2, 10-28. These guys need to be dead, make no mistake about it.

And I was prepared to take Powell’s word for it. That’s what unit loyalties are for.

Villanueva had his, and I had mine.

“No problem,” I said.

I found the rock where it had come to rest and rolled it back to the shoulder. Then I got to my feet and walked away and leaned in and killed the Taurus’s lights. Waved Villanueva over toward me.

“We need to be real quick now,” I said. “Use your phone and get Duffy to bring Eliot down here. We need him to take this car back.”

Villanueva used a speed dial and started talking and I found the two Glocks on the road and stuffed them back into the dead guys’ pockets, one each. Then I stepped over to the Saab. Getting it the right way up again was going to be a whole lot harder than turning it over. For a second I worried that it was going to be impossible. The coats killed any friction against the road. If we shoved it, it was just going to slide on its roof. I closed the upside-down driver’s door and waited.

“They’re coming,” Villanueva called.

“Help me with this,” I called back.

We manhandled the Saab on the coats back toward the house as far as we could get it. It slid off Villanueva’s coat onto mine. Slid to the far edge of mine and then stopped dead when the metal caught against the road.

“It’s going to get scratched,” Villanueva said.

I nodded.

“It’s a risk,” I said. “Now get in their Taurus and bump it.”

He drove their Taurus forward until its front bumper touched the Saab. It connected just above the waistline, against the B-pillar between the doors. I signaled him for more gas and the Saab jerked sideways and the roof ground against the blacktop. I climbed up on the Taurus’s hood and pushed hard against the Saab’s sill. Villanueva kept the Taurus coming, slow and steady. The Saab jacked up on its side, forty degrees, fifty, sixty. I braced my feet against the base of the Taurus’s windshield and walked my hands down the Saab’s flank and then put them flat on its roof. Villanueva hit the gas and my spine compressed about an inch and the Saab rolled all the way over and landed on its wheels with a thump. It bounced once and Villanueva braked hard and I fell forward off the hood and banged my head on the Saab’s door. Ended up flat on the road under the Taurus’s front fender. Villanueva backed it away and stopped and hauled himself out.

“You OK?” he said.

I just lay there. My head hurt. I had hit it hard.

“How’s the car?” I said.

“Good news or bad news?”

“Good first,” I said.

“The side mirrors are OK,” he said. “They’ll spring back.”

“But?”

“Big gouges in the paint,” he said. “Small dent in the door. I think you did it with your head. The roof is a little caved-in, too.”

“I’ll say I hit a deer.”

“I’m not sure they have deer out here.”

“A bear, then,” I said. “Or whatever. A beached whale. A sea monster. A giant squid. A huge woolly mammoth recently released from a melting glacier.”

“You OK?” he said again.

“I’ll live,” I said.

I rolled over and got up on all fours. Pushed myself upright, slow and easy.

“Can you take the bodies?” he said. “Because we can’t.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to,” I said.

We opened the Saab’s rear hatch with difficulty. It was a little misaligned because the roof was a little distorted. We carried the dead guys one at a time and folded them into the load space. They almost filled it. I went back to the shoulder and retrieved my bundle and carried it over and put it in on top of them. There was a parcel shelf that would hide everything from view. It took both of us to close the hatch. We had to take a side each and lean down hard. Then we picked up our coats off the road and shook them out and put them on. They were damp and crushed and a little torn up in places.

“You OK?” he asked again.

“Get in the car,” I said.

We sprung the door mirrors back into place and climbed in together. I turned the key. It wouldn’t start. I tried again. No luck. In between the two tries I heard the fuel pump whining.

“Leave the ignition on for a moment,” Villanueva said. “The gasoline drained out of the engine. When it was upside down. Wait a moment, let it pump back in.”

I waited and it started on the third attempt. So I put it in gear and got it straight on the road and drove the mile back to where we had left the other Taurus. The one that Villanueva had arrived in. It was waiting right there for us on the shoulder, gray and ghostly in the moonlight.

“Now go back and wait for Duffy and Eliot,” I said. “Then I suggest you get the hell out of here. I’ll see you all later.”

He shook my hand.

“Old school,” he said.

“Ten-eighteen,” I said. 10-18 was MP radio code for assignment completed. But I guess he didn’t know that, because he just looked at me.

“Stay safe,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Voice mail,” he said.

“What about it?”

“When a cell phone is out of service you usually get routed to voice mail.”

“The whole tower was down.”

“But the cell network didn’t know that. Far as the machinery knew, Beck just had his individual phone switched off. So they’ll have gotten his voice mail. In a central server somewhere. They might have left him a message.”

“What would have been the point?”

Villanueva shrugged. “They might have told him they were on their way back. You know, maybe they expected him to check his messages right away. They might have left him the whole story. Or maybe they weren’t really thinking straight, and they figured it was like a regular answering machine, and they were saying, Hey, Mr. Beck, pick up, will you? ”

I said nothing.

“They might have left their voices on there,” he said. “Today. That’s the bottom line.”

“OK,” I said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Start shooting,” I said. “Shoes, voice mail, he’s one step away now.”

Villanueva shook his head.

“You can’t,” he said. “Duffy needs to bring him in. It’s the only way she can save her own ass now.”

I looked away. “Tell her I’ll do my best. But if it’s him or me, he goes down.”

Villanueva said nothing.

“What?” I said. “Now I’m a human sacrifice?”

“Just do your best,” he said. “Duffy’s a good kid.”

“I know she is,” I said.

He hauled himself out of the Saab, one hand on the door frame, the other on the seat back. He stepped across and got into his own car and drove away, slow and quiet, no lights. I saw him wave. I watched until he was lost to sight and then I backed up and turned and got the Saab straddling the middle of the road, facing west. I figured when Beck came out to find me he would think I was doing a good defensive job.

But either Beck wasn’t trying the phones very often or he wasn’t thinking very much about me because I sat there for ten minutes with no sign of him. I spent part of the time testing my earlier hypothesis that a person who hides a gun under the spare wheel might also hide notes under the carpets. The carpets were already loose and they hadn’t been helped by being turned upside down. But there was nothing at all under them, except for rust stains and a damp layer of acoustical padding that looked like it had been made out of old red and gray sweaters. No notes. Bad hypothesis. I put the carpets back in place as well as I could and kicked them around until they were reasonably flat.

Then I got out and checked the exterior damage. Nothing I could do about the scratches in the paint. They were bad, but not disastrous. Nothing I could do about the dent in the door either, unless I wanted to take it apart and press the panel out. The roof was a little caved in. I remembered it as having a definite dome shape. Now it was fairly flat. But I figured I could maybe do something about that from the inside. I climbed into the back seat and put both palms up flat on the headliner and pushed hard. I was rewarded by two sounds. One of them was the pop of sheet metal springing back into shape. The other was the crackle of paper.

It wasn’t a new car, so the headliner wasn’t the one-piece molded mouse-fur thing that everybody uses now. It was the old-fashioned cream vinyl thing with the side-to-side wire ribs that pleated it into three accordion sections. The edges were trapped under a black rubber gasket that ran all around the roof. The vinyl was a little puckered in the front corner, over the driver’s seat. The gasket looked a little loose there. I guessed a person could stress the vinyl by pushing up on it and then peel it out from under the gasket. Then tug on it until it pulled away all along its length. That would give sideways access into any one of the three pleated sections the person chose to use. Then it would take time and fingernails to get the vinyl back under the gasket. A little care would make the intrusion hard to see, in a car as worn as that one.