The Prophet (Ryan Archer #2) (13 page)

“HMI, Ltd.”

“How much was Ving able to dig up about it?”

“A little less than nothing. It’s the equivalent of an unmarked mailbox in the middle of nowhere.”

Archer envisioned an ancient aluminum mailbox on a wood post standing among the weeds along a lonely stretch of dirt road. Archer believed in patterns, logical rhythms that made the universe make sense. And he was starting to sense a pattern taking shape amid the haphazard clues originating from a shipping warehouse near the mountains outside Salt Lake. He didn’t have the answer yet, but he could feel it breathing on him.

Archer walked to the desk and stared down at the spread of color photographs for a beat, shook his head, and walked out. Rosemary was retrieving papers from a laser printer. She was dressed in a skirt and five-inch heels. She looked up and saw him. Normally she might have winked, but today he got nothing. Archer was unfazed.

“Do you still take kickboxing?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered in a clipped business-like tone.
 

“Do you think you could kick my ass?”

Rosemary dropped the printouts on her desk and marched to a tall metal filing cabinet, heaving a drawer open.

“Yes,” she said at last. Same tone.

She stood with her back to him. The skirt looked amazing on her. Her legs were fabulous. He would have loved to sit and watch her in that class, pounding the shit out a heavy bag.

“Do they ever bring some poor schlub in there dressed in padding and let all you angry women beat the hell out of him? You know, for practice?”

She ignored him.

“I’d love to be that guy sometime,” Archer said. “I mean, how bad could it be, right?”

She cut him a look out of the corner of her eye that could have cooled the core of a nuclear reactor. But she didn’t say a word. Rosemary adored him, but she wasn’t budging an inch today.

Archer smiled. “Tell Tom I’ll be around,” he said.

He went out through the glass door with Webb & Associates etched to one side and pressed the button for the elevator. There was a tall guy in a FedEx uniform and sunglasses standing at the opposite end of the hall. Archer waited. The FedEx guy had a shipping carton under one arm and seemed like he might be lost. The door opened and Archer walked inside. He held the door for a beat, anticipating the FedEx guy to rush in, but the guy never appeared. So Archer released the door and took the elevator to the lobby of the building.

He was still thinking about the Salt Lake City phone number and the tags on the mysterious Mercedes. Webb had shown him the satellite image of the warehouse with the dusty access road leading in from the highway. The image had not shown any distinguishing features. The most obvious questions were 1) what was warehoused inside that building, 2) what was a Mercedes registered to that corporation doing in Los Angeles, and 3) why had Cecile Espinoza, the girlfriend of a pothead, been having telephone communication with the cell phone number linked to that same company?
 

Archer’s aviator sunglasses were hooked on the front of his T-shirt and as he came out into the brightness of the day he pushed them onto his face. There was another ticket trapped under the wiper on his truck. He peeled it off and dropped it on the floor beneath the passenger seat. He put the key in the ignition and glanced at the rearview. The FedEx guy had exited the building and appeared to be following in Archer’s footsteps. The shipping carton was still trapped under his arm. Archer glanced around, eyeballing the parking lot for a FedEx truck. He didn’t see one. It should have been idling near the entrance to the building.

Archer turned the key. The engine rumbled. Archer could feel the vibration coming up through his seat. He dropped the stick into reverse and eased his foot off the brake. The FedEx guy was still heading directly toward the Land Cruiser. Archer reached a hand under his seat, released a strip of Velcro, and put his hand on his 9mm Beretta strapped to the underside of the seat cushion. His eyes remained on the mirror. The man in the FedEx uniform had closed to within fifty feet. Archer saw him reach a hand into the shipping carton, then drop the carton to the ground. He was now holding what appeared to be a compact automatic rifle. Then a second man appeared in the mirror alongside the first, and suddenly the situation came clearly into focus. He recognized them.

Archer lowered his head, punched the gas to the floor, and released the clutch. The tires smoked. The Land Cruiser surged backward, Archer’s left arm braced against the wheel as he clutched the Beretta in his right hand. The men scattered, splitting to opposite sides. Walvoord, the man clothed in the FedEx disguise, shouldered the Uzi and squeezed the trigger.
 

Archer heard the gunfire, and heard the clang of bullets stitching across the back of the truck, pocking the metal and shredding the spare tire. He kept his foot on the gas. Bullets whistled past his head and shattered the windshield. He didn’t look up, just wheeled hard left, dropped the transmission into second, and smoked the tires again, fishtailing for twenty feet as he dodged incoming traffic.

Markovich stepped up into the cloud of smoke, brought up his .45 and fired several rounds before returning to their Mercedes to give pursuit. Walvoord had fired until the magazine in the Uzi ran dry, then waited for Markovich to pick him up.

The Mercedes caught up quickly, and Walvoord leaned out his window to continue the assault. Archer saw them. He drew the seatbelt across his lap and heard the click. It was useless to make this a race, because his ancient Land Cruiser didn’t stand a chance in a battle of horsepower. So he waited until they were right on his tail. Waited until the one with the Uzi had leaned out and they were only a few feet behind him. Then he punched the brakes.

The Land Cruiser shuddered to a hard stop in the middle of the street. There was no time or space for the driver of the Mercedes to react. Markovich dropped his foot to the brake pedal purely out of reflex but it was a pointless exercise at this moment. The tires squealed for half a second then smashed squarely into the rear of the Toyota. The rear of the truck was momentarily lifted off the ground by the impact. Neither of the two men had buckled in and were instantly thrown against the dash, Walvoord’s shoulder crushed against the bulletproof Plexiglas of the windshield. The force of the collision pushed Archer’s truck through a red light at an intersection, oncoming traffic from a cross street honking and swerving to avoid a major pileup.

Archer dropped the stick into neutral, letting the truck roll forward. He had braced against the wheel with one arm, but had still taken impact against his upper chest. It would bruise, and it felt like he might have broken at least one rib. But he was certainly in better shape than the boys in black. He released the seatbelt, kicked open his door, and dropped to the street, rolling free of the path of the two vehicles.
 

The hood of the Mercedes had crumpled, but there didn’t appear to be much other exterior damage. The vehicles separated and the Land Cruiser continued a slow roll forward as the Mercedes veered right and the front tires hopped the curb and the car bumped to a stop. Archer fired four rounds, each of the bullets making contact but unable to pierce the skin of the car. He fired at the glass but inflicted no noticeable damage. He didn’t sense any movement from inside.

Archer glanced at his truck. The driver’s door had swung open and swayed limply like a bird’s wounded wing. He was standing in the middle of the intersection. Traffic had come to a standstill. Motorists took cover at the sounds of gunfire. Archer gestured at onlookers to get down and take cover.
 

The Mercedes was hung on the curb and didn’t move. He approached from the blind spot, like a cop making a routine traffic stop. The window glass was smoked so he couldn’t see inside. He eased around to the passenger side where the gunman had been hanging out the window with the Uzi. He heard a groan.

Archer heard police sirens in the distance. The passenger window was still down. Still no sign of movement. He followed the Beretta up alongside the Mercedes and ducked around so that he could see the man in the FedEx uniform. The guy was crumpled against the dash. Out of commission. There was blood visible on the dash. Suddenly the driver’s door opened and the driver rose up and fired a round across the roof of the car at Archer.
 

Archer ducked down against the side of the car, then glanced through the open window and saw the driver making a run for it. Cars were still sliding to a stop as they approached the intersection, unaware of the unfolding drama.

Archer came around the front of the car and fired two rounds at Markovich’s back, hitting him once in the shoulder. Markovich lurched forward, went down on one knee, then stood back up and continued to run. Archer was walking forward, firing as he moved. He again hit Markovich in the back, and Markovich stiffened, then spun and returned fire, the bullets throwing sparks off the hood of the Mercedes. Archer didn’t flinch at the incoming fire. He sighted down the Beretta and squeezed the trigger. The bullet caught Markovich between the eyes and all the circuitry in his brain instantly ceased activity. He dropped to his knees in the center of the turn lane, dropped his Glock, and toppled over facedown.
 

Archer lowered the Beretta and had taken two steps toward the body lying in the road when he sensed movement behind him. But his awareness was a beat too slow. The blow to the back of his head sent a cascade of white light spinning through his brain. His ears filled with ringing, and he instantly lost all sense of equilibrium. His knees wobbled and he stumbled forward. He righted himself and nearly recovered but then felt an arm hook around his throat.

Walvoord had regained consciousness and extracted himself from the car. His face was covered in blood from the busted nose and a nasty gash where his forehead disappeared into his hairline. The blood was still streaming, stinging his eyes and dripping from his chin. He had come to with the Uzi still in hand. He had used the Uzi to crack Archer across the back of the skull. He was prepared to drill Archer full of holes with the automatic weapon but Archer suddenly turned and pushed the barrel of a 9mm in his face. A thought occurred to Walvoord the millisecond before he died, but then it was gone, lost for all of eternity, as his brain exited his cranium in the form of a grayish-pink mist.

Archer watched Walvoord backpedal and collapse against the front quarter panel of the Mercedes, sliding down the side of the car until he was seated on the asphalt. The sirens were closer. The cops would be at the scene in less than a minute. He collected a cell phone from each of the dead men and stowed them in the glove compartment of his truck, then steered it out of the way so that traffic could flow. He noted the car tag was different than before, so this was a new car. He assigned the tag to memory for future reference. The car was an identical model to the previous one.

He touched the back of his head and inspected the blood on his hand. His ears were still ringing. Part of him wished he hadn’t killed that son of a bitch, so he could kick his ass.

NINETEEN

Dire Straits was playing over the speakers. The music was turned up too loud, same as any at any bar at any time of day. Archer loved Mark Knopfler but could have lived without the sound of his voice at that volume at that moment. He had gone straight to the men’s room and pulled a paper towel from the dispenser bolted to the wall and wet it at the grimy faucet. For the past half an hour he’d sat perched on a barstool pressing the damp towel to the back of his head where the jackass had whacked him with the Uzi.

“Asshole,” he groaned, staring at his friend’s beer.

Jason Eckhart was seated beside him, busy at work on a laptop computer. Eckhart had agreed to meet him there on short notice. Archer didn’t drink anymore but would have happily used the alcohol to help the pain radiating from his skull.

Both cell phones from the gunmen were placed side by side on the bar. Eckhart had collected both telephone and serial numbers and was running them through several different databases. Eckhart was on his second beer. Archer was paying for the beer but not Eckhart’s time. The laptop was using the bar’s Wi-Fi.

The bartender was an ex-con, ex-MMA fighter named Dewey. He was covered it tats from the neck down and was married to a former Miss June from the mid-80s. Dewey didn’t like taking Archer’s money, but Archer didn’t give him much of a choice. There was a pool table in the back and flat screen over the bar. The Dodgers were playing and were largely ignored by the late afternoon crowd. Dewey had a hundred bucks riding on the game and couldn’t stand to watch.

“HMI again,” Eckhart said, the screen of the laptop filled with columns of data.

Neither phone pulled from the bodies matched the cell number that had communicated with Cecile Espinoza early in the week.
 

“So, we’ve got two new numbers and a new car linked to the same dummy corp in Utah,” Archer said.

“That’s right, boss,” Eckhart said, tipping his beer to his lips.

“Before you stand up and walk outside to see daylight again, you are going to tell me everything I need to know about this phantom HMI, Ltd,” Archer said.

Eckhart ran his tongue over his upper lip as he set the beer glass back down on the bar. “I’m digging and digging,” he said, “but so far the well is dry.”

Archer dropped the damp paper towel on the bar. It was stained pink. His hair was sticky where the blood had oozed. He asked Dewey for pain meds and tossed back four Advil, washing them down with water from a drinking glass.

“Asshole,” he said again.

“He’s dead, you can let it go,” Eckhart said.

“I’m lucky he didn’t crack my skull.”

“Very true.”

A lively game of billiards was in progress in the back. Archer glanced up at the baseball game, then down at the bloody paper towel. He folded it neatly into fourths. The gash in his head was shaped like a fishhook. There was swelling. He wanted another handful of Advil.

Tom Webb found a seat at the bar next to Archer. He looked like he’d come straight from the gym. He was sweating and the veins stood out from his neck. Dewey set a beer on the bar in front of him.