Rapid Fire (12 page)

The air
chilled in her viewing room, and goose bumps shivered to life on her arms. The
murderer’s eyes fixed far to the left of her, and when his lips curved
strangely, his attention was focused on…nothing.

“She
couldn’t make it,” Thorne said. “You’ll have to deal with me or nobody.” He
dropped into the chair opposite Barnes, and his voice warmed a notch. “Look,
Nevada, I’ve read your file. I can tell you’re not a bad guy. You’re a decent
man who had a rough childhood and fell in with the wrong sort of influences.
You were just doing what you were told, right? So why not let me help you?”

Maya saw
a muscle tic at the corner of Thorne’s jaw. Barnes was every inch the “bad
guy.” When childhood abuse had put him over the edge, he’d killed his father in
a staged hunting accident, and taken off with his stepmother, who had then
posed as the young man’s wife for several years before she, too, met an
untimely end. The Bear Claw PD was still trying to fill in where Barnes had
spent the next decade before he’d resurfaced in Bear Claw and started hunting
the prey dictated by the Mastermind.

Barnes’s
eyes slid away from the reflective glass and returned to Thorne. “No, cop. I’m
trying to help you, but I can’t. Not until you let me talk to her.”

Thorne
stared at him for a long minute, then pressed his palms flat to the table and
leaned toward the killer. “Look, here’s the deal. She’s been suspended. She’s
not on active duty anymore, and there’s no way I can bring her in on this. I’m
sorry, but you’re going to have to deal with me.”

“Then I
have nothing to say.” The words were suddenly deep and powerful, as though
they’d come from someone other than the hollowed-out killer sitting at the
table in a too-large orange jumpsuit.

Thorne
stood. “Let me know when you’re really ready to deal.” He slapped a button on
the wall beside the exit door, and the guards hustled through the prison-side
door to sweep Barnes from the room.

Halfway
out, the confessed murderer turned back and called, “Think about it, Coleridge.
You get me access to the woman and I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.”

Then he
was gone, taking his information with him.

Anger
rising, Maya slammed through the viewing room door and confronted Thorne in the
hallway. She didn’t touch him, but she got right in his face. “You should have
called me in. If he has information for us—”

“Not
here,” he snapped, and headed for the security check.

Fuming,
she hurried to catch up. Once they were outside, crossing the strip of concrete
that separated the main building from the outer wall, she said, “What the hell
has gotten in to you? If this is about what happened earlier, then get over it.
You’re acting unprofessionally.”

Thorne
spun in his tracks near a parked prison van. “Don’t you dare lecture me about
unprofessional behavior.” He leaned closer, until she saw the pulse throbbing
at the base of his throat and felt the spiky energy dance in the air that
separated them. Nearly whispering, he said, “And ask yourself this: how did he
know to ask for both of us by name? Why wasn’t he surprised to hear that you’d
been suspended?”

Maya
stilled as the data snippets lined up in her brain. “He’s getting information
from someone on the outside. Someone connected.”

Thorne
nodded. “Exactly.”

She spun
back toward the prison, where the guards were marching Barnes across the
courtyard, back to his cell. “Then I should talk to him. Now.”

“Wait.”
He reached out, but didn’t touch her. When she stopped beside the prison van,
he let his hand fall. His eyes were dark and enigmatic when he said, “You will
talk to him, I promise. We’ll be going back in there in a few minutes. That’ll
let him feel like he won, and it’ll give us time to go over a few things.”

“Why out
here?” she asked, gesturing at the open air and the guard towers that loomed
above them. “Not much in the way of ambiance.”

“Not much
in the way of opportunities for someone to overhear our conversation,” he countered.
He jerked his chin toward the curtain wall of the prison. “Think about it. If
the Mastermind has someone transmitting up-to-the-minute PD information to
Barnes, it could be—”

A shot
split the air, severing his words. The driver’s window in the prison van beside
Maya cracked with the impact of a bullet.

She heard
another shot. A shout of pain.

And
everything went to hell.

Chapter
Seven

Thorne
grabbed Maya as the van window shattered. Small fragments of glass peppered
them both, stinging his neck and the top of his right shoulder. He took two
running steps toward the security checkpoint, then stopped.

It was
too far. They’d never make it across the wide expanse of concrete. They’d be
sitting ducks. He reversed direction and shoved her behind the van as shots
three and four slammed into the vehicle.

He risked
a peek around the front grille and saw a glint of sunlight, a shadow of furtive
movement. He heard shouts and chaos from within the prison, and the pop of a
handgun as the guards returned fire.

“The
shots are coming from the northeast guard tower,” Thorne said tersely. A fifth
bullet sizzled over the top of the van, angling down to shatter on the cement
wall at their backs.

He winced
as shrapnel dug a fiery path into his shoulder. Maya grabbed on to the forearm
he’d crossed protectively over her chest, and tried to shove him away. “Why
aren’t you returning fire?”

“The
guards have it covered. We’ll just sit tight.” It went against his training and
his nature, but he’d long ago learned that each prison had its own hierarchy.

He heard
another shot from inside the curtain wall. Curses and a man’s cry of pain.
Damned if it didn’t sound like the sniper’s attack had moved into the
penitentiary itself.

What the
hell was going on? Maya was the target.

Wasn’t
she?

The
gunshot echoes died quickly, though the shouts and whistles increased. Someone
within the prison finally hit the general alarm, adding the whoop of a siren to
the din.

Thorne
heard running footsteps. He cursed and spun, grabbing for his weapon, then
relaxed his fighting stance when he saw one of the corrections officers jogging
toward them. Thorne raised his voice and called, “What’s the situation inside?”

The
corrections officer was in his mid-forties, fit and tough-looking like so many
of his breed. The tag clipped to his breast pocket identified him as Graves,
Samuel. He jerked his head toward the security checkpoint. “I think you’ll want
to see this.”

Maya
pushed ahead of Thorne. “Do you have an on-site medical staff?”

“Of course.
They’re with the injured man right now.” Graves had to stretch his legs to keep
up with her, leaving Thorne in their wake.

Thorne’s
back ached like fury and his legs wouldn’t carry him as fast as he wanted to
go. His feet felt like crumbling cement blocks he was being forced to drag
through thigh-deep water.

Reaction,
he told himself. It was an adrenaline backlash, nothing more. But by the time
they’d passed through the security checkpoint and reentered the prison, Thorne
knew it was more than that. The smell of blood filled his nostrils and suffused
his brain. The iron tang reminded him of rage and pain, and a man being
strangled to death high in the mountains.

Worse, he
saw the ghostly part-images of events he hadn’t lived yet. Blood. Death.

A woman’s
scream.

“Thorne?”
Maya’s voice seemed to come from far away. “Thorne, what’s wrong?”

He saw
her face at the end of a long tunnel, took a step toward her, but she seemed to
draw further away. He heard her say, “Oh hell, he’s bleeding. Grab him, he’s hurt.”

He wanted
to tell her it wasn’t the cuts on his back sapping his strength, it was the
wounds on his brain, the lesions created by the drugs Mason Falk had pumped
into him.

Were the
visions flashbacks or prescience? He’d never known, and he’d been glad when
he’d finally conquered them, when his brain had finally healed enough to free
him from the madness.

Or so
he’d thought.

The
darkness closed in, gripping his consciousness and squeezing tight until his
legs folded. Helping hands guided him to the ground. His senses cut out one by
one, smell and taste first, then sight. But he could still feel Maya’s gentle
touch.

And he
could still hear the corrections officer say, “Nevada Barnes took a bullet to
the brain. He’s dead.”

MAYA
WASN’T SURE WHICH was more shocking—that the Museum Murderer had been gunned
down not a hundred yards from her, or that Thorne had collapsed. Barnes’s
execution was a shock that she hadn’t yet fully grasped. But Thorne’s condition
was inexplicable.

He
remained in a semi-conscious, almost trancelike state as he sat cross-legged on
the pavement of the prison courtyard, some twenty yards from where a widening
pool of blood seeped from beneath Barnes’s body on the other side of a sturdy
wire fence. In the near distance, the shouts of the inmates diminished as the
corrections officers quelled the brief chaos within the penitentiary. Further
away, she heard the rising sound of sirens, heralding the arrival of
reinforcements for a scene that was already secure.

Or was
it? Maya straightened suddenly and looked toward the corner guard tower where
the shots had originated. She glanced at Samuel Graves, the corrections officer
who’d come running to tell them Barnes had been killed. “Please tell me you got
the shooter.”

Graves’s
lips drew tight in a thin line that answered her question even before he said,
“We got the gun, but by the time we reached the tower, the bastard was gone.”

“Impossible,”
Maya protested, though it was clearly more than possible. It had happened.
“This is a prison. How could the shooter simply walk out?”

“Maybe he
didn’t,” Thorne’s voice said from close beside her ear.

She
gasped and spun, shocked to find him standing beside her, clear-eyed, and
stunned by the sizzle that zapped through her at the touch of his breath at her
jaw, the low rasp of his voice in her ear.

Struggling
to cover her response, she said, “Sit down before you fall, Thorne.”

“I’m
fine,” he responded flatly, not even looking at her. His eyes were fixed on the
guard tower.

“You
should have those cuts looked at, seeing as you lost enough blood to drop you,
even for a few minutes.” But when she walked around him to get a better look at
the bloody streaks showing through his torn shirt, it didn’t seem as though
he’d lost much volume at all.

“It
wasn’t the—” He broke off and cursed. “The scratches are nothing. I’ll deal
with them later. Right now we need to figure out who shot at us and killed
Nevada Barnes.”

And why,
Maya almost said, but she didn’t bother because the answer was obvious. She and
Thorne hadn’t been the main focus of the attack. Barnes had been the target.
He’d been gunned down as he’d crossed the courtyard that separated the
interrogation area from the general population cells. Two shots to the brain
and poof, he was gone.

“The
Mastermind didn’t want him talking to us,” Maya said softly. “Didn’t want him
talking to me. Or did he?” She frowned, thinking. “Why tell Barnes to ask for
both of us, then prevent him from talking? It doesn’t make any sense.” She slid
a glance up at Thorne and saw a muscle pulse beside his jaw. “If you’d called
me into the room in the first place, we might have gotten something.”