The Searcher (9 page)

M
ULCAHY
'
S EYES NEVER LEFT THE
J
EEP.

The angle of the sun and the tinted windows turned the two men inside into dark shapes. It was impossible to see if anyone else was in back. There could be two or three more guys in there, but he doubted it. One maybe: two to do the job, one to stay in the car, ready to roll when it was done. He had a pretty good idea what the job was too. He guessed they were on the phone right now, talking to whoever had sent them. He had a pretty good idea about that too.

They were staring over in his direction, toward the parked Jeep. He wondered if they could see the movement of the curtain and thought about shutting the air-con off. If he did, Javier would pick up on it and he didn't want him to know what was unfolding outside. He'd freak out most likely, start shooting, and they'd end up in a siege situation that no one would walk away from.

The passenger door of the Jeep opened and a short, solid Mexican man slid out. He had a Mike Tyson–style tattoo curling around his left eye and rolled his neck like a boxer preparing to spar as he sauntered over to the reception building, no doubt to ask the clerk about
the Jeep parked over by G block. Mulcahy imagined him walking up to the desk now and flashing some fake ID—FBI or Border Patrol. The clerk was probably illegal anyway and likely to freeze in the face of anything official. He would do whatever the guy asked, tell him whatever he wanted, even give him a master key. Except that wasn't what happened.

Tyson reappeared, walking fast, tucking something into his jacket, and Mulcahy knew he had been wrong. All wrong. There had been no fake ID because there had been no need for one. He hadn't heard a gunshot, but over this distance and with the TV noise he might have missed it. More likely they were carrying suppressed weapons. Assassination pieces.

Tyson climbed back into the Jeep and leaned over to talk to the driver. Then the Jeep started to move.

“Anyone want ice?” he said, moving toward the door, forcing himself not to hurry. “I'm going to get a bucket and stick it on this shitty unit. Might cool us all down a little. Who knows how long we're going to be stuck here, right?” He placed the car keys down on the counter by the door and made sure Javier saw him do it.

Javier stared at them. “Yeah, ice,” he said, like it was his idea. He sounded guarded, all the strut ground out of him by the flow of bad news from the TV, his face rippling with drug-tweaked tics and suspicion. He knew that being third cousin—or whatever the hell he was—was going to cut him zero slack in their current situation. Tío's relatives might get a leg up in the organization, but if they messed up, they paid the same price as anyone else. “Don't be long,” he said, like he was in charge.

“Be right back,” Mulcahy said, looking out through the window in the door. He watched the Jeep make a right past the reception building and disappear from sight, then he opened the door in a
burst of heat and sunlight, stepped outside, and closed it quickly behind him.

He forced himself to saunter past the window because he knew Javier would be watching, his amphetamine-sharpened paranoia ready to catch the slightest whiff of haste. It would take ten seconds for the Jeep to clear the east side of the complex and swing back into view; he knew because he'd spent a whole afternoon on a previous stay timing cars, watching the sedans peel off the highway and work their tired way around the one-way system. But if the guys in the Jeep had left a body back at reception, they'd be in more of a hurry to get this done and get out.

Call it five seconds.

The moment he cleared the window he took off, running smoothly and keeping low, past the ice machine in the shadow of the stairwell, feeling in his pocket for a second set of keys.

Four seconds.

The lights flashed on a two-year-old white Chevy Cruze sedan parked near the end of the block, the backup vehicle he had intended to drive away in—the one he
still
intended to drive away in. It was America's third most popular car, painted in its favorite color—utterly unremarkable, totally unmemorable, perfect. He glanced back toward C block, at the spot where the Jeep would reappear. Still no sign.

Three seconds.

He reached the Chevy and moved along the passenger side, squeezing alongside a Pontiac that had parked too tightly against it.

Two.

He grabbed the handle, opened the door, and squeezed through the narrow gap and into the car.

One.

He fell into the seat and pulled the door shut, reached down to the side, found the adjustment lever and tugged hard.

Zero.

He leaned back, throwing the seat almost flat and dropping from view just as the black shadow of the Cherokee appeared around the edge of the far building.

He lay there, taking deep breaths. Calming himself. Sweating. The Chevy had been parked out front for most of the day, soaking up the heat until the inside felt like a pizza oven.

The throaty rumble of the Cherokee's V8 engine drew closer. He could hear it through the thump of his heartbeat and the low whisper of the cars out on the highway. He tried to think himself into the minds of the two men, assuming it was only two. Tyson had already killed the desk clerk, so they were not about stealth and finesse, they were about speed and surprise, which meant they would most likely storm the room. Javier and Carlos would be dead before they even knew what was going down, but they would know they were looking for three men so would think he was in the bathroom. One of them would move fast through the smoke-filled room toward it, past the still figures of Carlos and Javier, leading with his gun, maybe firing to keep him pinned down while the other guy—or guys—covered. And that was when he would move. That was his best chance of getting out of this alive.

The Cherokee's wide wheels swept into a space seven or eight spots short of where he was lying. The engine cut out and there was the muffled clunk of doors opening then the double thud of them closing again at almost the same time.

Two doors. Two men. Maybe one still in the Jeep.

Mulcahy glanced down at the glove compartment. His Beretta 96 was stashed inside, along with loaded magazines and a sound
suppressor. He dearly wanted to feel the comforting weight of it in his hand but he didn't dare reach for it in case the car moved and someone saw it.

He pictured them outside, walking toward the gray door of room 22. They would be reaching into their jackets, pulling their hands out high to clear the long barrels of their silenced weapons. The lead man would take the key, stolen from the front desk, and fit it in the lock. The other would stay high, checking behind before taking a step away from the wall to get a better angle. He would level his gun at the door, give a nod—then . . .

There was a loud bang as the room door flew open, then a shout cut short by the staccato taps of rounds hitting thin walls and furniture and everything else in the room.

Mulcahy reached forward, keeping his head below the window. He yanked open the glove compartment, grabbed the sunglasses case and the duster the gun was wrapped in, then popped his door open and rolled out onto the narrow strip of hot tarmac between the Chevy and the Pontiac.

The popping of suppressed gunfire stopped and he heard the sound of the TV drift out through the open door. He tipped the gun and a spare magazine from the duster into his hand, stuffed the clip in his back pocket, then took the suppressor out of the sunglasses case and fixed it to the barrel of the gun.

The men would be checking the room now, making sure the two men were down. Then they would start searching for the third.

He checked that the suppressor was secure, flipped the safety off with his thumb, and started making his way around the back of the Chevy, keeping low, heading toward the Jeep the Mexicans had arrived in. The blackened glass made it hard to see inside but there was no one in the driver's seat and the engine wasn't running. Two then.
You always left the driver behind in a three-man team. He reached the dusty Buick, peered around the edge of it.

The driver was standing inside the open door to the room. He had his back to him, the material of his jacket stretched tight across his shoulders, suggesting he was holding a pistol in a double grip. Mulcahy moved forward, keeping low, aiming for center mass, the best percentage shot given the distance and added inaccuracy of a silenced weapon. He couldn't see into the room but he imagined Tyson would be at the bathroom door now, ready to kick it in and spray rounds into the room. He kept on moving, increasing his odds of a clean shot with every step. Then he heard a voice from inside, a voice he recognized.

“He went that way.” Carlos pushed past the driver and pointed along the block where Mulcahy had headed. “Said he was gettin' ice.”

He had a gun in his hand, an unsilenced Glock. It was a three-man team after all.

Mulcahy resighted on Carlos's chest just as his eyes swung around and spotted him. The Glock rose fast but not fast enough. Mulcahy squeezed off two rounds and Carlos twitched twice and spiraled to the ground.

The driver spun around, swinging the long barrel of his pistol to where the shots had come from. Mulcahy hit him with two shots in the chest that knocked him backward into the room, leaving him half in and half out of the door.

Mulcahy was already moving forward, firing as he went, spreading his shots left, right, level and low, hoping to clip Tyson with at least one of them, or keep him pinned down until he was in the room. He passed through the doorway, stepping over the driver, and opened his eyes wide to adjust for the dark interior.

Javier was lying dead in the far corner, a smear of blood on the
wall behind him. No sign of Tyson. Mulcahy dropped down to the side, behind the bed, making use of its limited cover. He kept his gun and eyes on the bathroom door.

The TV cast a flickering light into the dark of the room and the modulated tones of the news report filled the silence. Mulcahy listened through it for breathing, or the
snick
of a gun being reloaded. He thought about shooting out the TV so he could hear better but he had already used ten rounds and his Beretta held only eleven. He needed to reload but Tyson might know that and be waiting in the bathroom, listening out for the
snick
of a magazine release, ready to capitalize on the few seconds Mulcahy would be unarmed.

He glanced at the two men sprawled in the doorway: Carlos on his back, his eyes open and staring up at the water-stained ceiling; the driver lying across him, legs sticking out the door where anyone could see them. He needed to get him inside and out of sight but wouldn't risk it until Tyson was dealt with. He reached for the spare magazine and switched his attention back to the far end of the room.

There was no blood around the bathroom door or on the white tiles of the kitchenette, and if he'd clipped him there should be. He would expect to hear something too, the labored breathing of someone fighting pain and going into shock. There was always the chance he had killed him outright and the impact had spun him into the bathroom, but he didn't believe in luck and he knew better than to rely on it. He'd seen too many people lying dead with looks of surprise on their faces.

He held the spare magazine up in front of him and sighted on a spot by the bathroom door, four feet up and a foot away from the wall. He took a deep breath to steady his breathing, blew it out slowly, then moved his thumb across to the magazine release button and pressed it.

The magazine slid cleanly out with a distinctive
snicking
sound,
a blur of movement appeared in his sights, and Mulcahy fired his last bullet. He dropped down, rolled onto his side, jammed the fresh magazine into the empty slot then flicked the safety off and peered through the gap between the base of the bed and the floor. Through the twisted condom wrappers and dust bunnies he could make out a dark shape over by the bathroom door, dragging itself across the floor toward a gun lying on the tiles a few feet away.

Mulcahy sprang up, swinging the Beretta around as he cleared the top of the mattress. He fired two rounds. The first caught Tyson between his shoulders in a puff of white padding and pink mist. The second hit him in the back of the head and sent a small section of his skull spinning across the tile to the far wall. Mulcahy waited until it stopped spinning then moved to the center of the room. He grabbed the remote from the bed and muted the sound on the TV so he could hear sirens or anything else heading his way. He tossed his gun on the bed and hauled Carlos inside first, dumping him next to Javier before grabbing the arms of the driver. He was heavier than Carlos and he had to tug hard to get him moving. Something cracked in the man's chest and a yelp of pain squeaked out of him.

Mulcahy dropped the man's arms like they were snakes, grabbed his Beretta from the bed, and pointed it down at the driver. Blood was leaking out of a chest wound that was gently rising and falling. He was breathing.

The driver was still alive.

T
HE AMBULANCE SCREAMED TO A HALT IN THE SHADE OF THE BILLBOARD
and medics and doctors swarmed around it. Everyone else stood back, grimly fascinated by what would emerge from inside and frightened at the same time.

Solomon knew what was coming. The strangely familiar smell of charred flesh had already told him. It warned him of exactly how bad it was going to be too. The siren cut out and was replaced by a howl that came from inside the ambulance.

“Here—” Billy Walker appeared at his side and handed Solomon a baseball cap, his attention fixed on the ambulance. “Best I could do. Got you some boots too.”

“Thank you.” Solomon took them and inspected the cap. It had a red flower logo and the name of a weed killer on it. He pulled it over his head, folding the peak around with his hands until he was looking at the ambulance through an arc of shadow.

“You should use this too—” Walker handed him a tube of heavy-duty sunscreen squeezed almost empty.

The howl doubled in volume with the opening doors and there
was a clatter of tubular steel as a man, or what remained of one, was pulled from the ambulance. He lay twisted and charred on starched white sheets, his whole body shaking, his hands baked to talons by furnace heat and clawing at the smoke-filled air above him while the inhuman noise howled from the seared ruin of his throat.

“Jesus,” Walker said, his voice flat with horror. “I think that's Bobby Gallagher. He was driving the grader.” The medics wheeled the gurney to a covered area and doctors clustered around him. “You reckon they can save him?”

Solomon squeezed sunscreen from the tube and rubbed some onto his neck and the back of his hands, disliking the greasy feel of it but disliking the growing itch of sunburn even more. “Not a chance,” he said.

Bobby Gallagher stared up at the ring of faces crowding over him. Worried eyes stared down.

A doctor leaned in, his face filling his vision. His mouth was moving but he couldn't hear what he was saying. Too much noise. Someone screaming, close by. Someone in pain. At least he didn't feel nothin'. That was good, wasn't it? Surely that was a good thing.

A penlight snapped on, shining in his eye and making the world turn bright and milky, like everyone was wrapped in white smoke . . . smoke . . .

The fire . . .

He had seen the flames curling toward him, the desert writhing in heat like the surface of the sun. The fire running alongside him, chased by the wind, leaping from shrub to shrub like a living thing. Never seen fire race so fast, faster than that old grader, that was for sure, but not as fast as that Dodge he'd had his eye on, the silver-gray one with
the smoked windows and the V8 under the hood. That would have evened the race out some. Would have bought it too, taken the hit on the finance and all, if he hadn't been saving for something else. He wanted to see Old Man Tucker's face at summer's end when he cashed in all the extra shift hours he was pulling and slipped that big ole ring onto Ellie's finger. Eighteen-carat yellow-gold band with a one-carat, heart-cut diamond right in the center: three and a half grand cold, every cent he had in the world and all of it for Ellie—fuck Old Man Tucker, the way he treated him, like he wasn't good enough to even speak his daughter's name.

The penlight snapped off and the doctor leaned in, his mouth moving again, everything slow, like he was underwater. Still couldn't hear a damn thing, what with that howling. He'd heard something like it before and the memory of it needled into him shaking with more than cold.

When he was eight his daddy had taken him hunting. They'd tracked a big old mule deer out into the desert for almost three hours and when they caught up with it, his daddy had handed him the rifle. It was that old Remington, the one that hung above the fire, with the walnut stock worn smooth at the neck by the bristled cheeks of his daddy and his daddy before that: beautiful rifle, but heavy, and tight on the trigger.

Maybe it had been the weight of it or the excitement of being handed something he'd only ever seen in a man's hand before, but when he beaded up on that big old bull his heart had pounded so hard he felt sure the deer must be able to hear it even with him two hundred yards away. It had lifted its head and sniffed the air, its haunches tightening as it readied to run. He snatched the shot just as it moved, missed the heart, and punched a hole right through its belly. Gut shot or not, that thing took off, blood pumping out all over the desert, in
nards flyin' out behind it like streamers. His daddy said nothing, just grabbed that rifle back and took off after it, carrying it as easy in his hand as it had sat so heavy in his.

The blood trail was wet and bright against the dry orange earth. And the deer howled as it ran, a great bellowing noise, like fury and pain mixed together. Ever after, when he sat on the hard wooden pews in the cool dark of the church and heard the reverend deliver his hell and damnation sermons, he would remember that noise. It was like he imagined hell must sound, the echoing tormented howl of a soul trapped deep underground—the same thing he was hearing now.

The doctor leaned in again, swimming down through the milky air. He still couldn't catch what he was saying. He tried to tell him he couldn't hear above the howling, managed to snatch a ragged breath and the noise stopped. He made to speak and it started up again even louder than before, so loud he could feel it deep within his chest. Then he realized where the sound was coming from, and began to cry.

They had caught up with the deer not so far up the track from where he'd shot it. It was down on its front knees like it was praying. He wanted to shoot it and put it out of its pain, but his daddy had the gun and he daren't ask him for it. They stood a ways back, watching it trying to get up and run, eyes rolling in its skull, and that awful sound coming out of it. He had turned his head to look away but his daddy put his hand on the top of his head and twisted it back around again.

You need to watch this
, he'd said.
You need to watch this and remember. This is what happens when you don't do a thing right. This is what happens when you fuck somethin'
up
.

The jolt of him cussing like that, his best-suit-on-a-Sunday daddy who he'd never even heard say damn before that day had been more shocking than the sight of the dying deer or the noise it made while it was about it.

I'm sorry, Daddy
, he whispered now, and the faces moved closer as the howl took the rough form of his words.

I think he's calling for his daddy
, the doctor said.

Bobby, we're doing everything we can for you, okay? Just hang in there.

He had been trying to steer away from the fire but the damn grader could only run over the flat land and the contours had kept him too close. He'd seen a place to turn ahead of him and he'd kept his eyes focused on it, too focused to notice the wall of flame sweeping in from his left. He could have jumped and run but he didn't. He knew they needed the grader to draw the fire line and help save the town. Might be Old Man Tucker would show him some respect if he came out of this a hero.

The heat had closed around him like a fist, the skin on his knuckles bubbling where they curled around the wheel. He'd kept his eyes ahead of him and his foot on the gas, holding his breath like he was deep underwater and kicking for the surface. He'd known that if he breathed in the flames would get inside him and he would drown in that fire, so he had held on, thoughts of Ellie and diamond rings running through his head until he reached the turn and steered the grader away and out of the fire. He didn't remember much else.

He looked up into the doctor's face now and realized that the fact he could feel no pain was actually a very bad thing. He didn't care for himself. It was Ellie he felt bad for. Maybe Old Man Tucker was right, maybe she was better off without him. He had spent his life running away from that sound, the sound of failure and pain, and now it was coming out of him.

I'm sorry
, he said,
I messed up. I messed it all up
.

Then the pale man stepped into view.