The Killing Kind (27 page)

When they reached the penned-in area, they were greeted by an FBI agent in an agency windbreaker and aviator sunglasses, her dirty-blond hair pulled through the back of her matching agency baseball cap. She and DeShaun exchanged a solemn nod, after which DeShaun placed his hand briefly on Hendricks’s shoulder—a simple if heartbreakingly kind gesture of goodwill and reassurance.

Hendricks’s eyes met the agent’s, or tried. Proper eye contact is key to selling any con—too little and the mark reads the swindler as shifty, too much and he comes off overeager and creepily intense. But with the woman’s eyes hidden behind two reflective slabs of glass, her stare was cold and alien and gave up nothing of her receptiveness or her intentions. Hendricks felt exposed, uncertain—a feeling only bolstered by the three dozen sets of eyes amid the milling, haggard crowd that turned hopefully toward him, only to drop away, disappointed, as they realized the new arrival was not the one they waited for.

“Name?” the agent asked, her pen hovering above the clipboard in her hand. Hendricks glanced down at it and saw two lists: one printed and dotted with check marks— no doubt the hotel registry; one scrawled on a scrap of loose leaf—the day-trippers for whose visit there was no record, Hendricks supposed. He wished his cover allowed him to claim membership in the latter camp, whose identities were harder to confirm—but DeShaun still lingered within earshot.

“Gunderson,” Hendricks said quietly—hoping neither Patty nor Norman was close enough to hear.

The woman scanned her list. Her earpiece crackled loudly. Then she looked at him as if for the first time, her glasses bouncing his own image back at him in duplicate. “I’m sorry,” she said, frowning—distracted or suspicious, he wasn’t sure. “What was the name again?”

Hendricks’s heart pounded in his chest. His mouth went dry. A ripple of unease spread through the crowd. He wondered if its source was Patty Gunderson. If she’d just told the folks around her the man at the gate was an impostor.

“Gunderson,” he repeated. He felt his fight-or-flight response kick in and readied himself to make a run for it if it proved necessary.

Then he realized the guard’s distraction and the crowd’s unease had nothing to do with him. All the nearby emergency responders’ radios had crackled to life at the same time—the gate agent’s included. Seconds later, half the cop cars on the security perimeter lit up and took off at once.

The agent in front of him stood with the index finger of her writing hand held to the earpiece in her ear as though straining to hear what was being said—or perhaps simply not believing it. As Hendricks watched, she dropped her clipboard and her pen. Her left hand went to her neck and worried at the gold cross she wore around it.

“What happened?” Hendricks asked.

“There’s been some kind of accident,” she said. “One of the ambulances leaving the scene. They were escorting a patient, when...” She trailed off, her sentence lost somewhere in the middle distance with her gaze.

“An accident,” Hendricks echoed. It was clear to him from her reaction that whatever happened had been anything but.

“They...they didn’t make it to the hospital. Two officers, the driver, and an EMT.”

“And the patient?” Hendricks prompted, afraid he already knew the answer. “What happened to the patient?”

“He’s gone,” she said, anger strengthening her tone. “But he won’t stay that way. Not for long.”

About that, Hendricks thought, she was right—but not in the way that she meant.

He was sure the man in question was the one who’d tried to kill him. That Hendricks had failed to finish him as he’d so foolishly hoped. That he’d somehow bluffed his way onto that ambulance and then murdered his way out of it.

And that now that this man had Hendricks’s scent, he wouldn’t stay gone for long.

31

“Jesus Christ,” breathed Garfield. “This was no fucking accident.” The intersection of Campbell and East 22nd was a mess of pebbled glass and sundered metal, with splashes of crimson all around. Local PD had set up a wide perimeter around the scene—a small act of kindness to any pedestrians who might happen by. Not many did. Campbell and East 22nd crossed in the short stretch between the highway overpass to the east, and the gentle rise of Hospital Hill to the west—a squat, unattractive no-man’s-land of overgrown, chain-linked vacant lots, low-slung yellow-brick commercial buildings, and satellite parking for the rambling medical complex that sprawled across ten city blocks.

The ambulance lay on its side in the center of the intersection, resting at a diagonal to the right angles of the streets. The driver was facedown in a pool of his own blood some twenty yards from where it sat—thrown by the force of the crash, Garfield thought at first. But the windshield, though fractured, was intact, and when he examined the man, he found his back riddled with bullet holes, as if he’d run and been gunned down.

Garfield circled the ambulance, its undercarriage still warm enough to raise a sweat on his brow as he passed. As he reached the back, he saw the left-hand—now bottommost—rear door was open, gravity keeping its right-hand mate closed. Across it lay the remains of the pretty young EMT Garfield had tried to flirt with—Sofia, he recalled. “You’d do well to remember it,” she’d told him, though looking at her now—arms extended, fingernails split against the sun-bleached blacktop as though she’d tried desperately to escape, her head a pulpy mess thanks to a couple close-range gunshots—he failed to see how the knowledge did him any good.

Garfield crouched beside her. One glassy eye devoid of life stared vaguely in his direction. He resisted the urge to close it. Doing so would only serve to contaminate the crime scene. A glance past her into the ambulance showed a mess of upturned medical equipment amid which lay two crumpled uniformed officers. One’s face was gone—shot clean through, a hollow concave like a gore-filled watermelon left behind. The other took two to the chest, but must have kept on ticking, because he’d also been choked with what looked to be some kind of handmade garrote— his face gray-blue, his lolling tongue purple, his eyes bulging and splotched red from burst vessels.

There was no sign of the patient they’d been transporting. Of Garfield’s witness.

Garfield cursed again. Looked away.

A black-and-white stopped alongside him. The back door opened. A haggard-looking Charlie Thompson stepped out. “What’ve we got?” she asked, her voice suggesting exhaustion so profound, she was beyond the capacity of registering any further surprise.

“A fucking mess is what we’ve got. Both cops and EMTs are dead, and our witness is missing. Guess your ghost just jumped a couple spots on our Most Wanted list.”

“How do you figure?” she asked.

“Ain’t it obvious? We had a witness who’d laid eyes on the guy—tangled with him, even—and he knew it. So he somehow gave our boys the slip at the casino and came here to take our witness out.”

Thompson shook her head. “Doesn’t track,” she said. “Witness or not, we had eyes on my ghost already—
my
eyes. He could have killed me in the banquet hall and didn’t. And I can’t have been the only other soul to see him—once our questioning of the casino patrons is complete, there’ll be a few more folks who did. Not to mention, the whole damn building’s wired for video, which means some camera somewhere must’ve captured him. So going to all this effort just to kill one witness of many doesn’t make a load of sense. Besides, even if he wanted to, how’d he beat them here to make his play? They were in an emergency vehicle traveling at speed with the benefit of lights and sirens. No way he could have gotten here ahead of them.”

“Okay, then, Matlock—what do
you
think happened here?”

“Matlock was a lawyer, dumbass—if you wanna play all snide, at least get your reference right.” Her comeback was a reflex, and she regretted it as soon as she said it. Garfield’s prick-mode was a defense mechanism, nothing more, and she should know better than to rise to the bait. Particularly when she was about to make his day a whole lot worse.

“I think your so-called witness did this,” she said. Garfield made to object, but Thompson overrode him. “We know he tangled with my ghost and lived. And we know my ghost’s job didn’t go as planned. He meant to get to Leonwood before Leonwood got to Palomera—that much he made clear in the banquet hall. So my guess is, your witness was, in fact, here to get my ghost—to kill him, I mean. Only my ghost got away.”

Garfield paled. “No—it had to be your guy. It
had
to.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, not unkindly, “but it wasn’t.”

“You can’t know that for sure,” he said. He looked away from her, toward the lights of the medical complex.

“I can, Hank,” she said. “I do. And you would, too, if you weren’t so blinded by what you’d prefer to see.”

“The hell’re you talking about?”

“The shots,” said Thompson, nodding toward the upturned vehicle. “They came from inside the ambulance.”

As her words sunk in, Garfield sat down hard on the pavement. He felt dizzy. Sick. Worthless. He was complicit in these deaths—an accessory, an accomplice. He’d given the bastard an escape route. Practically marched him past the barricades. He knew he’d never forgive himself for what he’d done.

The bass-drum thud of an approaching helicopter roused him slightly. A news chopper, likely peeling off from the swarm that hovered over Pendleton’s like blowflies over carrion when they caught wind on their scanner of yet another juicy morsel for their never-ending misery buffet just down the road.

“Hey!” Garfield called to one of the uniforms manning the cordon. “Get them out of here, would you? This is a crime scene.”

“Actually, sir, dispatch just patched them through—they said there’s something the agent in charge should see!”

Thompson and Garfield exchanged a glance, and then both took off at a run for the officer. Garfield’s legs were longer, his soul more desperate in that moment for a win, and he beat his partner there. When he grabbed the radio, he didn’t bother to identify himself, instead saying: “Tell me you people have eyes on the guy who did this.”

“Wish we did!” came the shouted, radio-garbled reply.

“Then why’re you calling?”

But their answer didn’t make any damned sense. Garfield asked them to repeat it, assuming he’d simply misheard, but he hadn’t. They’d said, “There’s something written on the ambulance.”

Garfield and Thompson trotted back over to the upturned wreck. After a moment’s hesitation while she considered scaling it herself, Thompson laced her hands together and offered them to Garfield. He placed a foot inside, and Thompson hoisted him up. He clambered awkwardly onto the skyward-facing side panel of the ambulance and was faced with letters, upside down and three feet high—letters scrawled in blood.

He tilted his head. The message resolved. Garfield read it along with several hundred thousand viewers at home— to say nothing of the millions who’d see it that night when the story of the day’s events went national:

BE SEEING YOU, COWBOY.

32

Michael Hendricks crouched in darkness beside a red-brick foursquare on a quiet suburban street, hidden between its porch and an azalea bush. The night sky was full of stars. The air had taken on the sort of chill that always struck Hendricks as summer’s death knell. His breath plumed. His muscles ached. His shoulder throbbed dully in time with his heartbeat.

The metal cover on the outdoor electrical outlet clacked loudly when he opened it. He winced and glanced toward the window to his left. But no one inside noticed. The children suggested by the swing set out back had long since gone to bed. The couple who owned the place were glued to CNN, which was broadcasting helicopter footage of the message left for him in blood. But although it held their interest, it was nothing for them to worry about. It had happened almost four hundred miles away.

Once the call about the ambulance came in, the Feds were forced to reallocate their resources to search both the hotel and the neighborhood surrounding the crash site, which left local PD and Pendleton’s security in charge of wrangling the frightened casino patrons. It was easy enough to slip past the barricades.

Hendricks knew he’d be likelier to escape suspicion if he weren’t traveling alone, so he’d cozied up to an octogenarian gambler who’d been separated from the rest of her senior-center tour group. He bummed a Windbreaker from a kind stranger on her behalf, which, once zipped, hid her neon-yellow Gamblin’ Grannies T-shirt. She was grateful for it, because the temperature was dropping, but when he offered to help her find her friends, she balked.