False Witness (16 page)

Clark couldn't do it. In the moment of truth, his hand froze on the phone, the Durango barreling down the interstate, Jessica staring in shell-shocked silence. He couldn't make himself push the button. Could not. It was one thing to make bold and heartless plans; it was another to kill an innocent man.

“God help him,” Clark said. He closed the Nokia and put it down. He wanted to cry. “I can't do it, Jess. I just can't.”

She reached over and put a hand on his leg. “It's okay,” she said, her words soft and reassuring. “Maybe you're not supposed to.”

In response, as if her words had soared to the very halls of heaven and ricocheted as an order to the triads, the tiny dot on the GPS device began to move. At first it wiggled and then it started heading north, away from the city, covering ground faster than any automobile could travel. “He's probably out of cell phone range now, anyway,” Jessica said.

The decision, Clark knew, had just been taken out of his hands.

He checked the mirrors again. Nobody was gaining on them; that much was certain. But instead of feeling relief, the knot in his stomach only tightened.

How much pain has my cowardice caused my friend?
he wondered.

“It's okay,” Jessica said. “It's okay.”

As Clark worked his own cell phone, trying to contact the U.S. attorney's office and the FBI after hours, he kept one eye on the GPS device. It tracked Kumari about thirty miles north of Apex and eventually came to rest somewhere in the middle of the desert. A mob hideout, Clark assumed. He realized now why they hadn't seen the Lincoln since they left the blasting area. Xu had probably headed straight to the hideout in order to torture the algorithm out of Kumari.

He would send someone else to finish the job with Clark and Jessica.

28

Twenty minutes later, twelve blocks from the North Vegas police station, Clark heard the distant whir of blades, like the return of a demon whispering threats from the sky. “Did you hear that?” Clark asked Jessica.

“No.”

Clark laid on the horn at the next busy intersection, slowing down only slightly for a red light. Tires squealed and angry drivers found their own horns.

“You're going to get us killed!” Jess yelled.

“Check for helicopters,” Clark shot back, breathless. He had already hit the button to roll down Jessica's window.

She stuck her head out, twisting in her seat.

“Hang on!” Clark swerved around a slow driver, jerking Jessica and banging her head against the window frame. She swore at him, and it almost made him smile.
She's back.

She pulled her head inside, her face pale. “They're coming.”

“Fasten your seat belt!” Clark yelled.

As Jessica fumbled with her belt, Clark approached another intersection. The light was red . . . of course. This time, the oncoming traffic didn't stop. He laid on the horn again, waited for the smallest opening, and shot the Durango through.

“How far away are they?” he asked.

“I don't know. Half a mile?”

Jessica still had the Glock in her right hand, and she knew how to use it—but what good would it do? A person couldn't shoot helicopters out of the sky with a 9mm Glock.

Traffic snarled and the helicopter closed in, the engine noise and roar of the blades growing ever closer.
Thwack, thwack, thwack.
Through Jessica's open window, it seemed like the bird was directly overhead.

Clark pulled partially onto the sidewalk and shot around some vehicles blocking his way.

“They're on top of us, Clark!”

As soon as the words left Jessica's mouth, a hailstorm of bullets rained on the front windshield. Jessica instinctively curled away from the glass, and Clark lurched back in his seat. The shattered glass, though riddled with bullet holes, held in place. “Give me the gun!” Clark shouted. They were firing large rounds from the helicopter, semiautomatics.

Instead of giving him the gun, Jess pulled her shoulder restraint behind her back, grabbed the hand grip on the door frame, and stuck her head out the side window, gun in her right hand.

“What are you doing?” Clark yanked the steering wheel hard to the right, jerking Jess back inside. Bullets bounced off the pavement beside him as the heavy Durango squealed around a corner, sliding onto a side street, narrowly missing another vehicle.

How did they find us?

Clark caught a glimpse of the copter's underbelly out his own side window as the pilot regrouped and swooped in for another run. Clark drove like a man possessed, erratically swerving left and right. He caught a glimpse of the gunman on the passenger side of the helicopter, sighting them in. The next second, Clark lost him again as the helicopter moved directly overhead.
Pang! Pang!
The bullets ripped into the roof of the Durango.

In a last desperate act, Clark pulled the wheel hard to the left, sending the Durango into an out-of-control spin, bouncing Jessica's shoulder against the passenger door. The wheels hit the curb, and the vehicle rolled, wiping out a mailbox, skidding across a front lawn. Clark's head banged against something, and his world turned fuzzy, spinning wildly. Abruptly, the spinning stopped and the Durango jerked to a halt, lodged partially on its roof, pinned against the front stoop of somebody's house.

Clark's door was crushed, wedged against the ground. Jessica's side of the Durango stuck up at a forty-five-degree angle, making his wife an easy target.

If
she was still alive.

Dazed, Clark realized that the copter was circling back again. The smoky residue from his air bag made it seem like the car was on fire. He thought about the gas tank—exposed to the assassins' bullets.

Quickly, he took a mental inventory. His left shoulder blazed with pain, and he tasted blood in his mouth, but otherwise he seemed to be okay. He could move both legs and hands. But that was not his immediate concern. The helicopter had descended to treetop level, a black widow ready to devour the fly caught in its web. Clark heard Jessica groan.

“Can you move?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“Crawl toward me, Jess. Get away from that window!”

He could hear the blades beating the air above them.

“I can't!” She frantically worked on her seat belt but couldn't get it loose . . . and he couldn't reach her.

They had come so far—how could he lose her now?

His eyes searched for the Glock, but everything was out of sorts, like some giant had picked up the Durango and shaken all of its contents loose. Shots rang out. He heard Jess scream, and his heart stopped. There! A black object! He reached for it. Grabbed it. More shots. He saw Jess frenetically pulling on the belt, trying to slide away from the window.

“Clark!” she screamed. She turned to him with pleading eyes, not willing to look at the barrel of death pointing down from the helicopter. She couldn't squirm loose. She quit trying. Taking Clark in, her face turned from panic to calm. He would never forget that look.

He flipped the phone open and pressed 2. Held it. Waited for an interminable second.
God, if this doesn't work . . .

The fury of the explosion rocked the sky.

29

Events bled together in the aftermath of the explosion. The shoulder pain numbed Clark, distorting his sense of time and place. His head throbbed and felt like it might explode. Some bystanders came running to the car. They knocked the shards of glass out of the windshield and cut Jessica's seat belt loose. Jess had blood streaming down her face from a cut on her forehead. When Clark saw her move and realized she couldn't put any pressure on her left leg, he was pretty certain it was broken.

Clark could hear sirens in the distance as the Good Samaritans helped pull Clark from the car. He couldn't use his left arm at all. “Agh.” Clark winced as a helper pulled on his left shoulder. “Easy.”

“Lucky you're not dead, buddy,” a man said. Clark realized how right he was.

They helped Clark and Jessica to a spot on a neighbor's lawn, a safe distance from the car, while tending to their cuts. Clark thought he heard one of the women say she was a nurse, but for some reason he didn't really care anymore. He felt his body shutting down, the cumulative stress and searing pain taking its toll. It was as if he had gone into another dimension; events swirling around him were now taking place at the end of a long tunnel back to reality.

“I think he's going into shock,” he heard someone say.

Helicopter debris littered the area while curious neighbors and motorists streamed to the accident site. For Clark, the scene became surreal. Sirens, questions, his wife's bloodied face, and the residue from the air bags all blurred together like a Monet painting, colors and hues with no distinct boundaries.

On the edge of consciousness, Clark fought against the growing sense that he wasn't part of this scene anymore. He tried working his way back to reality by sheer force of will. But the pain seared through his shoulder, pounded in his head, and overwhelmed his resistance. The Monet colors faded into a maddening collage, the pain in his shoulder dulled, and the last thing he remembered was a uniformed police officer asking him what happened. . . .

Clark briefly emerged from the fog during the ambulance ride, floating in and out as Jessica answered questions from a Vegas cop sitting between Jessica's gurney and Clark's. Clark tried to contribute with his own fragmented thoughts, urging the officer to get the feds involved, but was interrupted by both the paramedic—“Take it easy, Mr. Shealy”—and the officer—“Mr. Shealy, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you . . .” The rest of the Miranda warning was lost in a tirade from Jessica, protesting how ridiculous this all was.

“We're the victims,” she insisted. “Can't you see that?”

“I'm sorry, ma'am, but your husband has three separate warrants for his arrest on eleven different charges.” The officer consulted a list. “Kidnapping, assault and battery, assault with intent to maim, assault with a deadly weapon, grand theft auto . . .” It was enough to send a guy back into shock, rendering him unconscious.

And it did.

Later, it took nearly thirty frustrating minutes of answering questions from the locals before Clark talked to his first federal law enforcement official. The cops had separated him and Jessica. Clark's doctor had pumped just enough Darvocet into him to dull the pain without causing Clark to lose his sense of time and place. The doc had immobilized Clark's left arm and then, at Clark's request, deferred X-rays until the questioning was over.

“Looks like a broken collarbone to me,” the doctor said, rushing off to the next emergency room patient.

Struggling to remain coherent, Clark fumbled with his answers and eventually turned cynical on the agents as they treated him like the accused felon he was. They couldn't seem to get past the fact that he had attempted to rescue Jessica alone, without help from the authorities.

Even in his drug-induced stupor, their bureaucratic questions made him realize he had made the right decision after all. Jessica was safe and being treated for her injuries. Preliminary reports indicated a broken ankle, a possible bone chip in her shoulder, the usual whiplash stuff, and the possibility of a closed-head injury. Basically, she would have a killer lawsuit against her own husband based on reckless driving.

Considering where she had been that morning, Clark should have been turning emotional cartwheels. Instead, he felt an impending sense of doom as he sat in his private, curtained-off section of the emergency room, answering questions and fretting over what was happening to Professor Kumari. Every minute of delay lessened the already-slim chances that his new friend could be rescued alive.

Relief came in the form of an FBI agent who introduced himself as Sam Parcelli, the first person who seemed more focused on catching the mob than grilling Clark. He was a middle-aged agent with leathery, pockmarked skin that probably resulted from a bad complexion early in life. Even in a sports coat and tie, he looked bony, with sunken eyes, long spindly fingers, and an Ironman Triathlon watch. He slouched next to Clark's bed, his mouth turned down in a been-there-done-that scowl, and took notes on his PDA even as the tape recorder spun away on Clark's bedside table.