The Killing Season (17 page)

“What happened to not hurting me?” I yelled, covering the noise as I checked the magazine to confirm the Remington had been loaded with the Win Mag cartridges from the box inside.

“My finger slipped. Come on out.”

“If it’s okay with you, I’ll wait a few minutes.”

There was a pause, and I wondered if that meant the seed I’d tried to plant was taking root. I braced the butt of the Remington against my right shoulder and found the pickup in the scope. The angle it was parked, I could see three out of four tires. I took a bead on each and practiced sighting and firing. One, two, three.

When the voice returned, it was business as usual on the surface, but something was firming up beneath it. “You’re, uh . . . you’re starting to try my patience here a little, ­partner.”

I didn’t answer. Not with words, anyway.

One. Two. Three. All three visible tires on the pickup blew out. I put another round through the driver’s side of the windshield and two in the engine block, just for good measure. Six shots, all on target. I was no Caleb Wardell, but it wasn’t too shabby.

I hit the ground again and switched back to the Beretta as I heard a surprised curse and the sound of running feet. I swung out from the corner again to see Wardell coming around the side, opening up with the AK. He was expecting me to be higher up, so his first burst went high. I flinched and the five shots I squeezed off went wide too. I saw Wardell roll behind the porch of the neighboring cabin.

“Shit,” I said as quietly as I could manage. I was down to two bullets and one hope in hell. “Stick around,” I yelled. “I’m beginning to enjoy myself.”

No snappy comeback this time, just the still silence of a smart man considering his options. And then the sound of another magazine clicking into place. I flattened against the ground and braced myself. There was a sustained burst from the AK. It was difficult to be sure, but it sounded like it was moving right to left. The poor, abused cabin took a few dozen more hits, the siding splintering a good four feet above my head. He was making no effort to actually hit me, which meant it was covering fire. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, my ruse had worked.

By taking out Wardell’s vehicle, I’d turned the tables somewhat, made full use of an information deficit. Wardell had gone from a strong position to one of uncertainty. Without the pickup truck for a guaranteed getaway, he couldn’t afford to just wait me out, not when there was no way of telling how far away my backup might be. Maybe that’s what I had meant about waiting a few minutes. Maybe I was waiting
him
out.

With an effort of will, I slowed my breathing and kept still, listened. A minute, two, five. I kept listening.

I’m a pretty good listener. With a regular shooter, I’d be one hundred percent satisfied that the scene was clear, but with a Marine sniper, stealth is the name of the game. I started to wonder how long I was going to have to leave it, what it would take to convince me he’d bolted. And then, somewhere in the distance, I heard a starter motor catch and an engine roar to life. A familiar-sounding engine.

Good news, bad news. I was now pretty certain Caleb Wardell was no longer on the scene. I was pretty certain, because the son of a bitch had just stolen my car.

34

10:00 a.m.

Who in the hell was that?
The question rode alongside Wardell like a nagging bitch wife as he forced the elegant Cadillac to traverse the rutted country track as though it were a well-used Jeep.

The man in the cabin had been a white squall at the end of a long period of plain sailing. From the moment Wardell had departed Fort Dodge, everything had gone like a dream. Better, in fact. He’d expected that it might be a little difficult getting to Nebraska, that he might be expected when he got there. But no; the feds were apparently hundreds of miles away with their thumbs wedged firmly up their assholes.

So who in the hell was that, then?

Probably not
FBI
; that was Wardell’s first thought. Feds, like cops the world over, traveled in pairs. They tended not to move with such practiced ease under fire, either. Despite all the training, being fired upon just isn’t a common enough occurrence for a federal agent to get used to. This guy, though . . . this guy moved as though he had been born into a gunfight and hadn’t backed out of one since. Wardell had had everything on his side: the element of surprise, a choice of OPs, multiple weapons, and plenty of ammunition courtesy of Nolan. And yet this other man had held his own, put Wardell on the back foot, and achieved a stalemate. Not a fed or a cop, so who?

Wardell put the thought on hold again as he slowed on the approach to a larger road and swung out to the right, the Cadillac’s tires gratefully receiving the smooth asphalt. It seemed to Wardell that there were three possibilities.

One: The man in the cabin was completely unrelated to the manhunt. He was meeting with Nolan for his own purposes and just happened to get caught up in the execution of Wardell’s business.

Two: The man was a free agent. Some kind of bounty hunter looking to bag Wardell and claim the big reward. Was there a reward? Wardell hadn’t had time to check.

Three: The man in the cabin was not
FBI
, but he was working with them. And, by the looks of things, showing them up pretty handily.

Wardell glanced down at the speedometer, realized that this automobile was deceptively fast. He’d thought he’d been taking it reasonably slowly while he composed his thoughts, but the needle was way past sixty. He took his foot off the gas as he considered his three scenarios.

Option one was probably the most unlikely. He didn’t discount the possibility that a man with a gun might have wanted to pay Eddie Nolan a visit—besides himself, of course—but everything in Nolan’s life had been strictly small-time, and so he’d have expected a very low-echelon gangster at best. This man had not been that. Besides, how would anyone else have known precisely where to look for Nolan? During the brief call from the pay phone at the Kentucky truck stop, Wardell had suggested an out-of-the-way place for a reason. No, this was not a coincidence.

Option two: a bounty hunter. This was a possibility, but in Wardell’s experience, your average bounty hunter had a great deal in common with your average low-echelon gangster: a lot of guns, a lot of unresolved anger issues, not too much upstairs. But still, a possibility.

Wardell’s hunch, however, was the third option. An opera­tive working with the
FBI
, with enough knowledge of the investigation to be able to track Wardell, but without the fast ties to the Bureau that would have seen him dragged down to Missouri with the others. The fact that the man had been alone suggested that either he had kept his paymasters out of the loop, or more likely they hadn’t given credence to his line of inquiry. Their mistake, it would seem.

Wardell turned the radio on for some background noise. He found a news station, caught the tail end of a report from Missouri, where everyone seemed to think he was. Wardell hadn’t paid much heed to the messages purportedly from him in the media, but by the sounds of things, this red van business went way beyond a simple hoax. He mused on it for a while before deciding to let it lie for now. He’d stay cautious and wait and see what, if anything, developed from it.

A sign for US Route 34 appeared ahead, informing him of the distance to the destinations at either extremity of the highway: Berwyn, Illinois, at 760 miles, or Granby, Colorado, at 320. East or west.

Wardell slowed to a crawl to give himself time to think. The next name on his list wasn’t in either direction. The next name was a few hundred miles north. Up until an hour before, Wardell had planned on heading straight on up there. He had felt confident in his plan so far, reasoning that the feds would expect him to head for Chicago and keep picking random targets. While it appeared they hadn’t deviated from that expectation, the encounter at the cabin gave him pause. The man in the cabin had been a step ahead, had seen the Nolan hit coming and had managed to track the old man down. The next name on his list was even more obvious—the hunter would predict it easily. It would be rash to proceed. Safer to delay this mission, mix things up with some more randoms. Or maybe even forget about the list and jump straight to the finale, now that he had all of the necessary tools at his disposal.

But then again, he enjoyed a challenge. And if, as he anticipated, the man at the cabin predicted the next target, that would offer the chance of a rematch on Wardell’s terms. Only now did he realize that the farther west he’d traveled, the more a sense of disappointment had built. Disappointment at the lack of obstacles, of challenges. When he’d reached his destination back there in Allanton, he’d been downright depressed. Even when he’d squeezed the trigger to end the pathetic existence of his . . . of that man . . . it hadn’t felt like he’d thought it would.

But that cloud of despondency had lifted entirely during the ensuing firefight. And it hadn’t returned now, even though the adrenaline had mostly worked its way out of his system. With an alien feeling of surprise, Wardell put a hand to his mouth to confirm a suspicion. He was smiling. And he reckoned he’d been doing so since he’d fallen back from the cabin.

35

12:06 p.m.

The ride up from Missouri in the shiny black Bell 407 was smoother than Banner had anticipated. After she’d gotten off the phone with Blake and realized how she’d be filling the next couple of hours, she’d glanced up at the sky, seen the threatening clouds, and shivered. Banner was prone to airsickness and knew that even a moderately turbulent ride would reduce the chances of her keeping her breakfast down to around zero. But as the pilot upped the pitch of the main rotors and lifted them into the air, the sky brightened a little. It was almost as though the weather had had second thoughts. Banner set her jaw and willed the status quo to remain.
Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day. Or don’t.

The nausea meant she was grateful that Castle was in a reticent mood, barely exchanging four words with her throughout the two-hour flight. She used the time to look back over the Wardell file. She scanned the pictures and reports and interviews, wondering how Blake had gotten so far ahead of the rest of them. She wondered how the hell he—or anyone—was going to predict the bastard’s next move. She sighed and put the Wardell section to one side, then opened the victim profiles for the original nineteen.

Whenever a case threatened to overwhelm her, this is what she did: took it back to the basics. The crime and the victim. Just like their killer, every one of the nineteen had a backstory. The accountant celebrating a promotion. The alcoholic fresh out of completing her first successful stint in rehab. Stories cut short for no reason. Lives blacked out on a whim.

Victim number six hit her the hardest. Her name was Emma Durbin, a thirty-two-year-old corporate lawyer recently separated from her husband and raising a young daughter. Banner stopped reading the text and just stared long and hard at the picture of a smiling Durbin at the beach, hugging both arms around her kid’s neck as they posed for the camera.

Jesus, Annie.

She snapped the file shut and closed her eyes. Where had the time gone? Her daughter’s entire childhood was playing out in the background, drowned out by louder distractions: the fights with Mark, the punishing demands of her work. And then once Mark had gone, the demands of the job had increased to absorb any breathing space she might have expected.

She took out her phone to call Helen, but it went straight to voice mail. She left a message, asking how they both were and saying that she hoped she’d be home soon. As she hung up, she promised herself it would be different once they caught Wardell. She could take stock, start to prioritize better, focus on what was important. But that was the problem, wasn’t it?
Everything
was so goddamned important.

They touched down on the wide, flat plain that separated the line of hunters’ cabins from the lake. They were late­comers to the party, and the usual circus of law enforcement, forensics, and media were already entrenched in their trad­itional positions. Castle leapt from the side door as soon as the skids touched the earth, and Banner followed, ducking down instinctively to avoid the propeller wash.

The center of attention was a cabin that had probably once been fairly indistinguishable from its neighbors, but now looked like it had been transported there from some battleground in Afghanistan. Every window was shattered, lengths of guttering hung loose, large-caliber bullet holes pockmarked the surface like some weird decorative effect. How in the hell had Blake survived this? She wondered where he was now. A couple of states away, perhaps, doubtless hot on Wardell’s trail.

The earthly remains of Edward Nolan lay prostrate on the floor of the cabin, half visible through the open doorway. Castle had told the crime scene people that they could do what they like so long as nobody removed the body before he arrived. “Body” was perhaps too substantial a word for what was left of the man. Three-quarters of his head was gone. Wide blood blossoms adorned the rest of his body, evidently the result of getting in the way of automatic rifle fire. The left hand had been blown off at the wrist.

“So much for one shot, one kill,” Banner said to no one in particular.

“The kill probably
was
the first shot,” Castle said. “But he’s upping the tempo, no question.”

Banner looked around the sparsely furnished cabin, every piece of furniture and decoration entirely beyond repair. She knew the team would have gone over the place with a fine-tooth comb already and knew that it had likely yielded zilch in the way of intelligence on Wardell.

“The father was the only person close to a relative we knew about,” Banner said. “So where the hell is he going now?”

Castle was looking down at the body as though he were a Roman priest attempting to read the entrails of a fresh sacrifice. He breathed a long sigh out of his nose. “Blake.” He said the word like it was an admission of defeat. “We need to talk to Blake about where the hell this bastard is going.”