Suicide Mission (13 page)

She was afraid she was going to have to hurt him to get away. She was reaching for the little knife she carried in her bag when more men rushed into the suite from the hallway. They had guns, and they leveled the weapons at her as they shouted for her to surrender.

She looked at Keegan, who was staring along the sleek lines of her legs as he clung to her ankle. He had to have triggered some sort of alarm when he came to. She said, “You damn fool, look what you've done.”

“It's a . . . soddin' shame . . . innit?” he forced out.

Then he lost consciousness again, his forehead thudding against the floor, but too late to keep her from being captured.

 

Braden Cole watched from his van, parked up the block from the motel. It was one of the budget places, and Cole thought that if it were him planning to cheat on his wife, he would have taken his girlfriend to a better rendezvous than this. He would have been ashamed to ask a woman to sneak around in such a low-class fashion.

Of course, he thought as he pushed his glasses up, he wasn't married and never had been. His relationships with women had all been of the commercial variety, and not just the obvious sort. So he didn't really know what he would do under the same circumstances, now, did he? He told himself that he shouldn't be judgmental about his targets.

After all, it was enough that he killed them. He didn't have to look down on them, too.

It was hard not to get a little judgmental, though, when you dealt with the dregs of humanity for the most part. Adulterers, embezzlers, blackmailers, abusers . . . You had to have done
something
pretty bad for somebody to want you dead badly enough to pay a total stranger to do the job. Now and then a client hired Cole's services strictly for reasons of profit, but usually there was a personal angle to it as well.

Well, without all the pissed-off people in the world, he wouldn't have a job, would he?

The door of the unit he was watching opened. The woman came out first. Her name was Holly McAleer. She was blond, thirty-five, reasonably attractive. She worked at the same federal office building as the man who followed her out of the motel room, Allan Dubbert, who was as bland and unappealing as his name. In Cole's opinion, Dubbert was batting out of his league as far as Holly was concerned.

But there was no accounting for the taste of a woman looking for an affair, was there?

Even though there were layers of cut-outs and intermediaries between him and the client, Cole felt relatively certain that Margaret Dubbert was the one who had hired him to a) make sure her husband really was cheating on her, and b) kill the son of a bitch and the slut who was sleeping with him. Although it was possible that Holly McAleer's husband Todd was the client.

Either way, somebody was both suspicious and vindictive, and it hadn't taken Cole long to determine that the suspicions had merit. At one point in his life he had been a licensed private investigator, and a skilled one, at that. He could have stayed in that line of work, but branching out had proven to be so much more lucrative.

Dubbert and Holly went to his car. It would have complicated things if she had brought her car, too, but as was their habit, they had left it in the vast parking lot of the office building four miles away. They really were careless, as if they believed that nobody would ever catch them.

They paused outside the car. Holly leaned in for a kiss, which Dubbert gave her with one arm around her. Then he opened her door—chivalrous bastard, wasn't he, thought Cole—and went around to get behind the wheel.

Cole hadn't done anything so crude as to rig the detonator to the ignition switch. That took the control out of his hands. He liked to choose the precise moment himself. He waited until Dubbert turned to Holly and smiled and she smiled back at him and he opened his mouth to say something . . .

That
was when Cole pushed the button.

The blast that engulfed the car in a fireball shook the ground. Cole felt it a block away in the van. He smiled faintly as he set the remote on the seat beside him and started the engine. Most people wouldn't drive away from the scene of an explosion like that one. They would want to see what had happened. Somebody might notice him leaving and get suspicious, but it didn't really matter. The van was completely nondescript, the license plates were smeared with mud so as to be unreadable, and anyway, it was stolen and he would dump it in the airport's long-term parking lot later tonight. Nor did he have to worry about fingerprints, since his had been surgically altered so as to not be on file anywhere in the world.

He drove away at a leisurely pace as the bombed car burned furiously in the night behind him. Like any other law-abiding citizen, he even stopped at a red light a couple of blocks away and didn't go on until the light turned green again.

He had just started across the intersection when a pickup with a drunk driver at the wheel ran the light, rammed into the passenger door of Cole's van, and knocked the vehicle on its side. Cole was so shocked by the unexpectedness of it all that for a long moment after the grinding crash all he could do was lie there, not even thinking about trying to get out.

Then he smelled smoke and heard the crackle of flames and knew that he had to climb up the now-vertical seat and squirm through the crumpled, shattered window before the fire hit the gas tank. He reached for the seat belt release.

Jammed.

No matter how hard he tried, it wouldn't come loose.

He had a knife in his pocket. He could cut the seat belt with it. Trying to stay calm as he worked his fingers into his pocket, he searched for the knife.

He couldn't find it. How could it have slipped out while he was being thrown around? It should be there.

But it wasn't, and the seat belt release still wouldn't work, and Braden Cole started to laugh as he listened to the fire burning around him. If that didn't beat all. The detonator remote was still somewhere in the van, more than likely, and other things he wouldn't want the cops to find, but none of that mattered anymore.

Nothing mattered except the sheer irony that made Cole laugh.

Then the windshield, which had somehow survived the impact, shattered only a few feet away, spraying him with glass, and hands reached through, groping for him.

Help had arrived.

Maybe he wouldn't die here after all.

 

 

Jackie Thornton pushed the curtain aside a little, just enough to glance out across the front yard of his ex-wife's house. He stepped quickly to the side and let the curtain drop. He was sure the police had a SWAT team out there with snipers covering all the windows. He didn't want to give them time to line up a shot at him. If he was being honest with himself, he would have had to admit that he didn't much care if he lived or died, but he didn't want to go out until he was good and ready.

And he wouldn't be ready until Maggie Louise Redmond had paid for her sins.

Maggie Louise Thornton, he amended. She had taken his name when she married him, and it was hers for life, no matter whether she'd divorced him or not. It sure didn't matter that she had married that fella Greg Redmond.
He
was the one sinning, sleeping with another man's wife the way he was.

Well, he wouldn't do it anymore, because he was lying on the floor under the arched entrance from the living room into the dining room, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The blood had stopped leaking from the red-rimmed hole in his forehead where Jackie had shot him. There really hadn't been much blood, probably because Redmond had died so fast.

A quiet moan came from Maggie. She was regaining consciousness. Jackie hadn't meant to hit her so hard, and he felt bad about that. He'd just been trying to get her attention. He wanted her to die, but he didn't necessarily want her to suffer.

“What . . . what have you . . .” The words trailed off into a gasp. “Oh, my God! Greg!”

Jackie looked over his shoulder and saw her crawling toward the corpse.

“Might as well save your breath,” he told her. “He's dead, like he deserves to be for takin' another man's woman.”

She ignored him—that was no surprise; when they'd been married she had ignored him most of the time—and threw herself on her husband's body as sobs shook her. Jackie just shook his head. She oughtn't be carrying on so. Redmond had had it coming.

The phone rang.

Jackie looked at it. It was a cordless phone, sitting with its base on a little table next to Redmond's chair where he watched TV. The shrill rings got on Jackie's nerves in a hurry, and it didn't seem like the damn thing was going to stop ringing, so with a sigh he went over to it and picked it up with the hand that wasn't holding a gun.

“Yeah?”

“Is that you, Jackie Thornton?”

Jackie recognized the voice. It belonged to Caleb McBurney, the chief of police of this small town that sat on the vast plains. McBurney had arrested him more than once for this, that, and the other. The charges usually involved drunk and disorderly, disturbing the peace, and bodily assault. McBurney had hauled him in on armed robbery charges, too, when Jackie learned the painful lesson that if you live in a town of less than a thousand people and everybody knows everybody else, it's probably not a good idea to hold up the local grocery store.

But that was all in the past. They had thought he was just a cheap crook, but now they knew better. Now he was a killer. A mad-dog killer.

He liked the sound of that.

Those thoughts flashed through his mind as he said into the phone, “What is it you want, Chief McBurney?”

“You know what I want, Jackie. I want you to come out of there with your hands empty and in the air where we can see 'em. Once you've done that, then we can talk about whatever's happened in there and see if we can straighten this mess out.”

“Ain't nothin' to straighten out, Chief,” Jackie said. “Greg Redmond's dead. I shot him, the damn homewrecker.”

“Ohhhh, hell,” McBurney said with a long, weary sigh. “Blast it, Jackie, why'd you have to go and do that?”

“I told you. He stole my wife. Man's got a right to defend what's his, don't he?”

“Greg Redmond didn't even live here when Maggie Louise left you, Jackie! She didn't meet him until later, and you know it. He didn't have anything to do with your marriage breaking up.”

“Well, that's not the way I see it,” Jackie said calmly.

“Maggie Louise left you because you couldn't stay out of trouble,” McBurney went on as if he hadn't heard what Jackie said. “She didn't want to stay married to a man who couldn't hold a job, couldn't stay out of jail, and spent most of his time hanging around with a couple of crazy, meth-cooking skinheads!”

“Now, don't you be talkin' bad about the Franklin brothers, Chief. Those boys have been good friends to me.”

“Good friends, hell! I know about how they've got you delivering that junk all over the county. Damn it, Jackie—!” The chief's voice softened slightly as he went on, “I knew your mama and daddy. I knew you when you were in school, playing ball. We all hoped you'd go to college, and when you went in the Army instead, we thought that might do you some good, but you can't . . . you just can't seem to settle down!”

Jackie sighed again and said, “I tried, Chief. I surely did. But there's just somethin' wild in me, I guess. There's only one way this is gonna end.”

“Jackie, don't—”

He set the phone down without disconnecting the call, then turned and pointed the gun at Maggie Louise, who was watching him with a look of sheer terror on her face.

“You should've been faithful to me,” he said.

She screamed.

Jackie heard glass break somewhere to his left, then a thud and a soft pop. Suddenly the room was full of blinding, choking smoke. Tear gas! The bastards had shot tear gas through the window.

He started pulling the trigger, but he couldn't see where he was aiming anymore. He just shot blindly, hoping that one of the shots would connect with Maggie Louise. It didn't matter if he emptied the gun. He'd still wave it at the officers when they broke into the house, and that would be enough. He'd never leave here alive. Suicide by cop, some called it. As good a way as any to go out. He didn't want to hurt anybody who didn't have it coming.

He heard the crash as they used a battering ram on the door and broke it open. He turned toward the sound as the gun's hammer clicked on an empty chamber.

“I'll kill you all!” he bellowed, even though he had no intention of killing anybody else. “I'll—”

Something hit him in the back of the knees and knocked his legs out from under him. His face bounced on the carpet as he landed on it. A weight landed on his back, and fists rained down on his head.

“You crazy son of a bitch!” Maggie Louise screamed as she battered him. “You crazy son of a bitch!”

“Don't shoot!” a man yelled. “Hold your fire!”

No!
They were supposed to kill him. This was all going wrong, Jackie thought as the weight went away and somebody grabbed his hands and jerked them behind his back. He felt handcuffs go around his wrists and snap into place.

He couldn't see anything because his eyes were stinging so bad from the tear gas, and he could barely talk because it made him cough and choke so much. But as he was hauled to his feet he managed to say, “No, no . . . this ain't right . . . this ain't the way it was supposed to be!”

There was no getting around it. He had screwed up again.