Lethal (41 page)

She continued on.

Finally she reached the tracks. They were overgrown with weeds, but the steel rails reflected some ambient light and made the going a little easier, although her heart felt on the verge of bursting. Her lungs labored. The cramp in her side was causing her to gasp with pain.

But she ran on because Coburn’s life could very well depend on her reaching him. She didn’t want him to die.

When she finally spotted the old train near the water tower, she would have cried out in relief, had she had enough breath to make a sound. Seeing her goal gave her additional strength, and she pumped her legs even faster.

She made out the automobile parked near the train. She saw the two figures standing in front of the hood. As she watched, they separated. Coburn went around to the passenger side. The driver got in and closed his car door.

A heartbeat later a ball of flame bloomed into the night sky, illuminating everything around it in the red glow of hell.

The concussive blast of the explosion knocked Honor to the ground.

D
oral had the dubious pleasure of informing The Bookkeeper.

“My guy in the FBI office had just enough time to plant the bomb on the car and program in the cell phone number. But it worked exactly like it was supposed to. Bam! They never had a chance.”

The silence on the other end was palpable.

Doral continued. “I witnessed it myself from the top of the water tower. All of us got the hell away from the area immediately. Nobody ever knew we were there.”

Still silence.

Doral cleared his throat. “There is one thing, though.”

The Bookkeeper waited in stony silence.

“It wasn’t Honor who showed up. It was Coburn.” Unsure how The Bookkeeper would receive that piece of news, he hastily added, “Which is better when you think about it. It’ll be easier to track down Honor than it would have been to deal with him.”

“But those weren’t your instructions. That wasn’t my plan for Coburn.”

Doral understood The Bookkeeper’s letdown. Between Coburn and Honor, the undercover agent was naturally the bigger trophy. For personal reasons, Doral would have enjoyed killing him in a manner that was painful and protracted. Instead, the son of a bitch had gotten off light. He’d gotten the instantaneous death planned for Honor and Tom VanAllen.

When given his orders a few hours earlier, Doral had diplomatically questioned the necessity of killing the FBI agent. “He really doesn’t know anything.”

To which the Bookkeeper had said, “He’s in a perfect position to ruin things, if unintentionally. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. And it will look good to the Mexicans that we killed a federal agent.”

“We got two FBI guys tonight,” Doral said now. “That should really impress that cartel.”

But The Bookkeeper didn’t seem all that impressed.

Jesus, what did he have to do to make up for letting Coburn escape the warehouse? Now that Coburn and VanAllen were dead, the only remaining threat was Honor. She was just a pawn, but she was a dangerous one who had to be eliminated. Doral accepted that. Just as he’d accepted having to kill Eddie.

He and Fred had tried to persuade The Bookkeeper to rethink that mandate. They’d bargained for his life to be spared. Did Eddie, their boyhood friend, really have to
die
? Maybe just a stern warning or a threat either real or implied would work.

No loose ends. No mercy
. The Bookkeeper hadn’t made an exception even for Eddie. He’d crossed a line. He had to go. The order had been issued in language that a one-year-
old could understand, but for the sake of all concerned, he and Fred had made it as quick and painless as possible, while still making it look like an accident.

Doral hoped he could devise something that easy for Honor.

But if she died badly, she had only that friggin’ Coburn to blame, first for involving her—because Doral was convinced that she didn’t know Eddie’s secret—and then for stealing the quick death she should have had.

Of course before Doral could do anything, he had to find her.

With the mind-reading skills that often gave Doral gooseflesh, The Bookkeeper said, “Coburn’s dead, and he was the only person who knew where Honor is. How do you plan to find her?”

“Well, now that Coburn is ashes, she may come out of hiding.”

“You’re willing to wait on that?”

The implication being that waiting would be a bad idea. “No, of course not. I’m going to focus on Tori Shirah. Because I’m convinced that when we find her, we find Honor and Emily.”

“For your sake, I sincerely hope you’re right, Doral. For once.”

The Bookkeeper hung up without saying more. Doral closed his phone and realized as he started his pickup truck that his hand was shaking.

He hadn’t even been congratulated for getting Coburn, the asshole who was to blame for this whole fiasco. Instead, he’d received another veiled threat. He was still on The Bookkeeper’s shit list, where nobody wanted to be.

He drove his pickup out of the crowded parking lot of a tavern, where, even before calling The Bookkeeper, he’d
stopped to toast his success with the car bomb. He joined the stream of vehicles that were homing in on the area near the train tracks where Tom VanAllen’s car had been blown to hell and back and was still smoldering. It was attracting gawkers like moths to a giant light bulb.

It did his smarting ego some good to know that he had caused all this commotion. Too bad he couldn’t crow about it.

Some of the curious had felt the impact of the blast, others had heard it, a few had actually seen the fireball that had lit up that side of town. Doral had to park two blocks from the tracks and go the rest of the way on foot… for the second time that night.

The area had been cordoned off by first responders. Uniformed police officers were still needed to keep the gathering crowd back and to make way for arriving emergency vehicles. The flashing strobes gave the whole scene a surreal aspect.

New arrivals asked questions of those already there.

Doral heard a dozen different versions of what had taken place and who was responsible, none of which were right. It was al Qaeda, it was dope dealers running a meth lab out of the trunk of their car, it was two lovesick teenagers with a suicide pact. Doral was amused by all the hypotheses.

He received condolences for the loss of his twin, who had been a victim of this crime wave. A mass murder on Sunday. A kidnapping on Tuesday. Now a car bomb. Concerned citizens wanted to know, what had happened to their peaceful little town?

Playing the role of city manager, Doral somberly pledged that the city government and local law enforcement
were doing all they could to catch those responsible and put a stop to the series of violent crimes.

He’d been glad-handing for about an hour when he saw the coroner backing his van away from the burned-out car. Doral positioned himself to be on the driver’s side when the van stopped while officers cleared a path for it through the crowd.

Doral motioned for the coroner to lower his window. He obliged and said, “Hey, Doral. Had some excitement tonight, huh?”

Doral tilted his head in the direction of VanAllen’s car. “Any guess who it was?”

“The driver?” He shook his head. “No idea. Wasn’t enough to make a positive ID just by looking.” Lowering his voice, he said, “But don’t quote me on that. License plates were destroyed, too. They’re trying to get the car’s VIN number, but the metal is so hot—”

“What about the other one?”

“What other one?”

“The other person. On the passenger side.” He hitched his thumb over his shoulder. “Somebody said there were two.”

“Then somebody said wrong. There was just the one.”

“What?”

“There wasn’t anybody on the passenger side.”

Doral reached through the open window and grabbed the man by the collar.

Stunned by the sudden move, the coroner pushed Doral’s hand aside. “Hey, what’s with you?”

“Are you sure? There was only one body?”

“Like I said, only one.”

The earth dropped out from under Doral.

Coburn had been partially beneath the train when the bomb detonated, which is what had saved him. Triggered when VanAllen answered his cell phone, the explosion had instantly vaporized most of VanAllen and demolished the car.

When Coburn crawled out from under the boxcar on the other side, burning debris showered him, scorching his skin, hair, and clothing. With no time to drop and roll, he batted out the most dangerous of the burning patches as he ran like hell the length of the train.

The man in the caboose had saved his life. Had it not been for his running away, Coburn would have been standing in the open passenger door when VanAllen answered his phone. He rounded the caboose and ran in a crouch along the weed-choked tracks, trying to keep a low profile against the fiery glow of the burning car.

He was almost on top of Honor before he saw her, and even then it took him a second to process that the huddled form on the tracks was a body, a woman, Honor.

With full-blown panic, he thought,
Oh, Jesus, she’s hurt. She dead? No!

He bent over her and dug his fingers into her neck, looking for a pulse. She reacted by slapping at his hands and screaming bloody murder. He was glad she was alive, but at the same time furious with her for endangering herself. He hooked one arm around her waist, scooped her off the ground and up against him.

“Stop screaming! It’s me.”

Her legs gave way and she slumped.

“Are you hurt?”

He turned her and, holding her upright by her shoulders, looked her over. She didn’t have any wounds that
he could see, nothing grisly like shards of glass protruding from her torso, or shattered bones poking through her skin, no deep gashes. Her eyes were open and staring at him, but unfocused.

“Honor!” He shook her slightly. “We’ve got to get away from here. Now come on!”

He jerked hard on her hand as he struck out running, trusting her to come along. She did, although she stumbled several times before gaining her footing. When they reached the garage, he opened the door, shoved her inside, then rolled the door shut. He didn’t even wait for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but guided her by feel to the car. He secured her in the passenger seat, then went around and got in on the driver’s side.

He pulled off his T-shirt and used it to wipe off the grease camouflaging his face and arms. The shirt came away blood-smeared. He checked his reflection in the rearview mirror. He looked exactly like what he was: a man who had barely escaped becoming a human Roman candle by clambering beneath a freight train.

He reached into the backseat and retrieved the ball cap that he’d found in the pickup truck. It helped some to conceal his face. But he figured that anyone on the streets of Tambour in the next half hour would be curious about the explosion, not about a man in a ball cap driving an old sedan.

He looked over at Honor. Her teeth were chattering, and she was hugging herself tightly as though to hold herself together against the violent shudders that seized her. He didn’t even attempt to snap her out of her daze. For the time being it was just as well that she had shut down.

He got out of the car and opened the garage door. Once in the car again, he placed his hand on the top of Honor’s head and pushed it down below the level of the window.
“Stay out of sight.” He started the engine and drove out of the garage, his destination the only place he knew to go.

This job sucked.

By now, Diego should have been washing Coburn’s blood off his razor.

Instead, the whole day, wasted.

He could have spent it with Isobel. He’d even thought it was safe enough now to take her out into the open. They could have gone to a park, sat on a bench and fed ducks, shared a blanket under a tree. Something like that.

He’d seen people doing things like that, and he’d scorned such unproductive pastimes. But he realized now why people enjoyed them. It was all about being close to another person and letting nothing distract you from the joy of simply being near them.