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Julissa took out her phone and called Chris. She was too focused to feel fear.

“And if you get behind him?”

“I’ll tell him to drop the gun and put his hands in the air.”

“Okay.” She dialed his cell number.

Chris left the room and trotted quietly down the stairs. He answered her call and whispered to her.

“I’m at the back door, going out now,” he said. “See me?”

“Yeah. And the guy’s still on your doorstep.”

She saw Chris from above the back door. He walked along the wall of the house, stepping between the flowers in a bed. He turned the corner, disappeared from the frame, and appeared again on the edge of the next camera’s shot. There were ginger plants growing along that wall of the house, so he moved farther out and walked in the grass. He was at a low crouch and had the gun in front of him, both hands on its grip.

“You’re doing fine,” Julissa said. “He hasn’t moved.”

Chris came to the next corner. Julissa was pretty sure when he turned this corner, he’d be on the same side of the house as the gunman. She saw Chris pause, peering around the corner. Then he ran forward, low to the ground. He disappeared from the shot. She could hear him breathing as he ran.

“You’re off the screens,” Julissa said. “But he hasn’t moved.”

“I’m fifty feet from him. I’ve got some cover behind the banyan tree. You’ll see me when I move in.”

“Be careful,” she said.

“Anything goes wrong, call 9-1-1 and don’t leave the house.”

“Unless I can help you,” Julissa said. She did not intend to cower in the house.

“He still facing the door?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going now.”

She saw Chris running in from behind the banyan tree. There was no cover for him at all. He had the gun out and was twenty-five paces from the man when he stopped. When he spoke to the man, she could hear it through the cell phone.

“I got a gun on your back and I could drop you. Toss the gun and put your hands in the air.”

Julissa watched. The man was still staring at the door. His grin disappeared. She could see Chris over the man’s left shoulder.

“I’m not even going to count to three,” Chris said. “Drop the gun now!”

Julissa had no warning. The man’s face didn’t change at all. He just spun around, raising his gun as he went. She didn’t hear a shot, but the pistol was silenced, so she didn’t expect to. She had no idea how many times he fired. Chris’s gun came through loud and clear. One shot. Julissa threw down her phone, held her gun out in front of her, and ran for the stairs.

Chapter Twenty

You have got to be kidding me
, Westfield thought.

He was sitting on his bed, looking at his phone. There was no visible damage, but the goddamned thing wouldn’t turn on. It must have gotten crushed between the floor and his hip when got shot in the knee. On top of that, the bullet that had gone through his knee without hitting any bones had hit his laptop computer, which had been sitting on the floor next to his duffel bag.

Un-fucking-believable
, Westfield thought.

The TV was tuned to CNN, which was still showing the Intelligene fire in Foxborough. He’d first turned it on so anyone who overheard the fight in his room would think he’d just been watching a movie. But then he saw the banner headlines on the screen and stopped what he was doing to watch. He’d taken his eyes off the screen only long enough to pull the trash bag out of the waste basket and put it around the dead man’s head. Best to keep as much blood off the carpet as he could. The room was already going to be a disaster. There were two bullet holes in the carpet, blood near the entryway and thick pools of blood under the man’s head. One pillow had a hole all the way through it and was soaked with blood. He had opened the window and turned the air conditioner up full blast to try to clear the room of gun smoke before someone noticed the smell in the hallway.

With his phone and laptop destroyed, he had no immediate way to contact Chris, Julissa, or Mike. He’d only stored their numbers on his phone and he had no idea what they were.

He hopped on his good leg to the nightstand next to the bed and pulled out the drawer. The Galveston yellow pages sat on top of the Gideon bible. He found a taxi company’s number, and picked up the phone on the nightstand.

The first dispatcher listened to his request and told him no way. They didn’t do jobs like that. He hung up, then picked another company. This time he was talking to an independent cab driver. The man repeated Westfield’s request back at him. Could he stop at a drugstore, buy a pair of aluminum crutches, some hydrogen peroxide, some gauze and a couple of ace bandages, and deliver them to a room at the Hotel Galvez for two hundred in cash? Hell yes, he could, and he could do it in thirty minutes. Westfield hung up and hobbled back to the end of the bed. At least he’d solved one problem.

He rested a minute and then set about dragging the dead man into the bathroom. The man probably weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. Westfield’s right knee wasn’t any help. He dragged the man by his ankles while hopping on his left leg. He got him into the bathroom, kicked his arms until the door would close, and then turned to look at the room. It still looked pretty much like a murder scene. He decided for the short term, the easiest way to deal with it would be to just make it messier. He pulled the bedspread off the mattress and dropped it on the floor at the foot of the bed to hide the biggest blood stain and the splattered pillow. He dropped a bath towel over his own blood stains nearer the doorway. Then he opened the door, checked that the hallway was empty, and spent a moment staring at the hall carpet until he found the shell casing from the bullet the man had put through his knee. It was about five feet away from the door. He picked it up and went back into his room. There were four other shell casings to find.

The taxi driver was true to his word and knocked almost exactly thirty minutes after Westfield’s call. By then Westfield had changed into clean pants and a T-shirt. He pulled on a pair of socks to cover the blood that had dripped down his leg onto his foot, and then went to the door. On the way over he tucked the silenced pistol in the waistband of his pants and pulled his shirt over the bulge. He checked through the peep hole. The cab driver was an old man in a John Deere gimme cap and a sweat-stained plaid shirt. He was leaning on the crutches and holding a plastic shopping bag from Walgreens. Westfield opened the door with the cash in his hand.

The cab driver looked at him and saw the folded twenties.

“Guess this is the right door.”

“Thanks, buddy.”

Westfield took the crutches and the bag, then handed over the cash. He looked in the bag and saw that the driver had bought everything he’d asked for.

“Thanks again.”

He shut the door before the driver could ask any questions or get another look at the room behind him. Then he hobbled into the room on his crutches and sat on the bed. Normally he’d have gone to the bathroom to patch up a wound, but the corpse occupied most of the space. He’d feel weird about that. He hadn’t decided how he was going to handle that problem. He had until eleven the next morning to figure that out—unless the dead man was supposed to report to someone, which seemed likely enough. As long as the man’s handler wasn’t waiting in the lobby, he’d probably have a few hours to sort this out before he had to worry about reinforcements.

The more immediate problem was to figure out a way to contact Chris, Julissa and Mike. If he were planning an operation like this, he’d take everyone down at the same time. Otherwise the targets would figure it out, and then why bother? But he wouldn’t be able to warn anybody until he could get himself in a condition to leave the hotel room. He took off his pants and spent the next half hour working on his knee. He used the entire bottle of hydrogen peroxide, all the gauze, and two ace bandages. Then he dug into his duffel bag, found his toiletry kit, and dry-swallowed a couple of Excedrin tablets. He dressed again and checked himself in the mirror on the closet door. He didn’t see any blood. He took another look around the room and almost laughed when he realized it had been reserved in Chris Wilcox’s name, with his credit card.

No matter how well he cleaned, Chris was probably going to be paying for a new carpet.

It wasn’t too bad moving on the crutches, at least not at first. He made sure his room’s
Do Not Disturb
sign was well fixed to the door handle, and then crutched his way to the elevator lobby. He saw a sign for the business center behind the concierge desk, and he went through a set of glass doors to a small room with three desktop PCs set up on tables. He ran his credit card and logged into his webmail.

Julissa, Chris and Mike—

If you get this, get out of your houses or your hotel rooms. Now. Make sure no one’s following you and find someplace safe to hole up. DO NOT USE YOUR CREDIT CARD TO PAY FOR A HOTEL. He can track you that way. That’s how he found me. That’s all I’m going to say about that in writing. My cell phone got broken in the scuffle, but I’m okay. Mostly, I was just lucky. I’ll contact you again in a bit. Right now I’ve got things to take care of.

If you haven’t seen the news out of Foxborough, you need to check it. Then you’ll understand what we’re up against.

A.W.

This would have to do, though after he sent the email, he spent five minutes using Google to see if he could find home numbers for Chris or Mike. He wasn’t too surprised that neither of them had a listed number.

He left the computer room and hobbled outside. A bellboy hit a switch that automatically opened the door. Then, outside, a uniformed valet left his kiosk and came up to him. He looked like a high school kid with his first summer job.

“Sir, you need some help?”

He shook his head. “No thanks, son. I’m doing okay.”

That was going to be a problem, later, when he was taking certain items out of his room and to the van. An enthusiastic kid might insist. He’d have to think of a way to deal with that. For now, he just hobbled to the parking lot across the street and got in his van. It was two in the afternoon; the inside of the van was holding steady at a hundred and thirty degrees. He settled into the seat, cranked down the window and drove onto Seawall Boulevard going south. For a moment, the heat and the pain in his leg had him seeing swarms of black specks. He held the wheel with both hands and drove straight ahead until the wave of dizziness passed. After that, he was okay.

At WalMart, he thought about taking a handicapped space close to the entrance, but he didn’t have a sticker and he figured today probably wasn’t the best day to attract any kind of attention at all. He found a spot near the back of the lot. By the time he got into the store, his leg was pulsing in pain and he was seeing the black spots again. At least it was air conditioned inside. Along the back wall, next to a coin-operated gumball machine and a vending machine that sold generic Cokes, he saw a row of three-wheeled shopping scooters for handicapped people.

Fuck it
.

People used those things in WalMart all the time. He’d bring more attention to himself if he passed out, or if all the jostling broke open his bandages and his knee started bleeding again. He got on one of the scooters, balanced his crutches between his thighs, and took off.
This is going to be a really weird shopping trip
, he thought. He headed to the sporting goods section.

It turned out the largest suitcase WalMart sold was only twenty-nine inches high and twenty-four inches across, hardly large enough to solve Westfield’s problem unless he also bought a hacksaw. He knew he didn’t have the stomach for that, plus there was the mess to consider. He already had enough on his hands. He had to get the body out of his tenth-floor hotel room and across the street to his van, and he had to leave the room looking like something other than a slaughterhouse. In the end, he spent half an hour rolling his shopping scooter up and down the aisles until he thought of a solution. He went through the beauty aisle and the business supplies section to pick up the small items he’d need. Then he went back to the home furnishings department and found a clerk.

“I was wondering if you could give me a hand, because I need to buy that futon and I threw out my knee,” he said. He was pointing at a folding bed that doubled as a couch. It had a metal frame and a black mattress. The important thing was that it was packed into a cardboard box that was six feet long, three feet wide and two feet deep. The clerk disappeared and eventually came back with a large dolly and told Westfield to meet him up front.

In the end, Westfield tipped the clerk ten dollars to load the futon into the back of his van.

Once he was in the van, he had to talk himself into going back to the hotel. With the
Do Not Disturb
sign in place, it would be nearly twenty hours before the maids found the body. He could be out of Texas by then. But his fingerprints were all over the room, and the room was irretrievably linked to Chris. And he’d used his credit card to pay for room service his first night. So he had to go back and finish this. Shooting the guy was the right thing to have done. It didn’t put him any closer to getting the thing that had gotten Tara, but he felt better. That was something. He told himself he would only regret this if he got caught. And he’d only regret getting caught because then he’d have come so far for nothing.