Author: Steven James
Category: Suspense
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“Drop the gun!” hollered one of the officers. “Now. Drop it!”
“They’ve got her,” Hunter yelled. “They’re gonna kill her.”
I whipped out my ID, showed it to a sergeant who seemed to be the site commander. “We’re federal agents,” I said. “Stand down.”
Hunter swiveled and looked at me, the gun still aimed at his own head. “They made me do it. I didn’t want to. I need to find her.”
I heard another officer shout, “Put down the gun!”
“They’re gonna kill her,” Hunter yelled.
“Relax, Austin,” I said. “We’re here to help.”
The sergeant, whose badge read “Newson,” was hesitating. Something you can’t do at a time like that. This was rolling downhill fast, and there was only one outcome in sight.
Think fast. Think fast.
“Drop the gun!” someone hollered.
“Sergeant Newson,” I said. “The field office sent us.” I pointed to Lien-hua. “She’s a negotiator.” It wasn’t quite true, but she was the best hope we had of reining this in. “Let her talk to him, now, before someone gets trigger-happy.”
“FBI field office sent you?” Newson asked.
“Lieutenant Graysmith requested it,” said Lien-hua.
Yes. Good thinking, Lien-hua.
“Graysmith?” Then he shrugged. “OK. It’s his butt, not mine.” He seemed relieved to hand the situation off to us. “Hold your fire,” he shouted into his vehicle’s built-in PA system. “Hold positions, but hold your fire.”
“OK,” I said to Lien-hua. “You’re on.”
In the tense silence, Hunter scrutinized Lien-hua and then me. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
She slowly set her gun on the pavement. “I know.”
“I just want to save her. We don’t have much time. She dies at eight o’clock.”
She stepped toward him. “We know about Cassandra,” she said. “We want to help. Do you have any idea where she is?” Lien-hua had wisely kept the conversation on Cassandra’s situation, rather than Hunter’s, focusing on the one thing that mattered most to him.
He shook his head, the gun still aimed at his temple. “They’re gonna kill her. Drake is gonna kill her.”
Drake?
Victor Drake?
Lien-hua raised her hands, palms up, and took a gentle step toward him. “How will you get in touch with them, Austin? Can we contact them—”
“No. It has to be me. They contact me. They’re watching. They’ll kill her.”
“Drop the gun!” blared one of the cops.
“Quiet,” Lien-hua yelled. She took another step toward Hunter, her hands still open, showing she meant no harm.
He moved the gun closer to his head. “Stop. Stay there.”
She paused. “Please, Austin. We want to save her. We know she’s in danger. We saw the video.”
He stared at her. “I didn’t kill them. I swear.” His voice cracked. “I didn’t even know.”
“No. You cleared the building. You saved them. No one was killed.” She took another small step.
“Not them.”
“No one died in the fire,” she said. Then another step.
And another.
“No, no. Of course not. I made sure—for all of them, I made sure. All fourteen.” He twisted to the right to see if any of the officers were creeping up on him. “But I didn’t start the fire last night, and I had nothing to do with that homeless guy.”
“Homeless guy?” She was only a meter from him.
And then he stared past Lien-hua toward me. “Her abductors want it. They said we could exchange. It’s over—”
And then Austin Hunter made his fatal mistake.
He might have survived the night if he hadn’t pointed the knife at Lien-hua as he said those last two words.
52
As soon as Austin tipped the knife toward Lien-hua, the shooting began. “Stand down!” I yelled.
Austin’s body jerked uncontrollably as the bullets slammed into him. “Stand down. Hold your fire!” A bullet blazed past my face and punctured the windshield of one of the patrol cars near me, sending dark splinters of glass mushrooming into the vehicle. I ducked. “Stand down!” I stooped low. Rushed through the gunfire toward Lien-hua who’d dropped to the pavement and lay prone on the ground.
A moment later the shooting stopped, but with the number of bullets Austin took, even the Kevlar suit couldn’t save him.
But my attention wasn’t focused on him. I was kneeling beside Lien-hua’s motionless body, reaching my hand toward the blood on her neck. “Get a paramedic over here, now!”
Austin Hunter knew he was dying. He tried to point to the device. Tried. Tried. It was Cassandra’s only chance. He tried to move his hand but couldn’t.
As his consciousness began to dim, he softly begged Cassandra and the negotiator woman who’d been shot and looked like she was dying—her too—he begged them both to forgive him. He’d failed Cassandra. And it was his fault the cops had shot the Asian woman. He’d been too slow getting to the rendezvous point.
Too slow. And now both of those women were going to die.
I feared the worst, touched Lien-hua’s shoulder with a trembling hand, prayed that she would be all right.
Please, O God, please.
“Lien-hua.” I pressed my hand against the wound on her neck to stop the bleeding.
She stirred.
“Lien-hua, are you . . .”
Then she rolled to face me and opened her mouth. My heart was racing. “I think,” she murmured. “I think I’m OK.”
“You were hit. Your neck is bleeding.” I turned to the officers beside me. “Where’s that paramedic!”
The last thing Austin Hunter saw before the final darkness chewed across his vision was a man walking toward him grinning, the very man he’d seen the night before aiming the device at that homeless man.
And the grinning guy was a cop.
As I pulled my hand away, I could see that Lien-hua’s wound didn’t appear serious or life-threatening. Maybe the bullet had only grazed her.
I hoped so. I prayed so.
As the paramedics helped her, I looked at Austin Hunter. A trickle of blood seeped from his half-open mouth, his body twitched one last time as he tried but failed to say something, and then Austin Hunter died.
53
One of the officers stepped into the pool of blood beside Austin’s body and kicked the gun away from his motionless hand. “Suicide by cop,” he mumbled. “Always hate to see that.”
I knew it was standard operating procedure to use lethal force in a situation like this, especially for a suspected terrorist. And I knew it wasn’t uncommon in a gunfight to have dozens of rounds fired, especially with this many officers. It’s called survival stress reaction, it’s just the way your body reacts, especially if you’re inexperienced. You just keep firing. But still, I hated that it had happened. I hated that Austin Hunter had been killed.
Another tragedy. Another death.
I checked my watch.
7:16 p.m.
In less than forty-five minutes, Cassandra would be joining her boyfriend. I felt the screws of anger and grief tighten around my heart. “This man wasn’t trying to commit suicide,” I exploded. “He wanted to live.”
A paramedic leaned over Lien-hua. Two other EMTs knelt to attend to Austin, but nothing could help him now.
“He didn’t want to live,” the cop said. “He had a gun to his head.”
I felt like decking this idiot. “That was to stop you from killing him. Couldn’t you even see that? He just snuck onto the Navy SEALs’ training base and burned down a secure military installation to save the woman he loves. A man like that doesn’t kill himself before he can finish the job.”
“You saw the guy,” the officer responded. “You heard what he said: ‘It’s over!’ This was his endgame.”
I couldn’t believe how stupid this guy was. I read his name tag. “Liste
n to me, Officer Rickman, he wasn’t going to shoot anyone. He was scared. He was trying to—”
“Pat,” Lien-hua called from where she sat beside me on the pavement.
I knelt beside her. “What? Are you OK?” I saw that the paramedic had wrapped a gauze bandage around her neck.
“We need to focus on Cassandra, now,” she said. “Please. Let it be. Don’t get tangled up in this. Let’s not lose her too.” Lien-hua began to stand up.
“Take it easy,” I said, placing a hand on her arm.
“I’m OK. Really. It’s just a scratch.”
“Lien-hua, I think you should—”
“Patrick.” Steel eyes. Steel will. “Stop it. I’m OK. Let’s go find Cassandra.” Yes, this was the woman I knew. The one who never failed to impress me. I offered my hand, and she let me help her to her feet.
I looked at the ground. The officer who’d been arguing with me had stepped back, leaving a bloody imprint of his shoe’s sole on the road.
Then Detective Dunn appeared and strode across the street. He stared at Austin Hunter’s body. “Who shot first?” Dunn scanned the faces of his men. No one replied. “Who fired the first shot!” he roared.
No one responded. Lien-hua asked for my latex gloves, I pulled some out of my pocket and after she’d tugged them on, she picked up Austin’s gun, ejected the magazine. It was full. “He didn’t even have a chance to fire his weapon.”
I was still staring at a bloody shoe print next to Austin’s body. “You work many fires, Officer Rickman?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“Fires. Arsons. Did you work the one this morning?”
“I’m a cop, not a firefighter.” He spit out the words.
“Hunter was trying to tell us something,” Lien-hua said to Dunn, interrupting my exchange with Officer Geoff Rickman.
Dunn leaned over, felt Austin’s pulse. Unnecessary, but symbolic. “This man could have helped us find a missing woman,” he said. “And now he’s dead.”
Rickman muttered something indecipherable as he started back to his car. I had some suspicions about Rickman, but they were still vague and unsupported, and right now I needed to lean on evidence rather than instinct. We needed something solid, and we were running out of time.
“All right,” said Dunn. “We sort it out at headquarters. Let’s get this mess cleaned up.” He gazed at an abandoned car beside me, and then, in a burst of rage, kicked the tire and yanked out a pile of parking tickets stuffed under its windshield wipers. His reaction might have been fierce compassion, or maybe anger that he hadn’t been the one to fire first. It was impossible to tell. “Get this freakin’ piece of crap out of here. Take it to impound.” Then he stared at me. “You two really get around for a couple of federal agents.” He kept his words flat; I couldn’t tell if they were spoken with respect or disdain.
“And you really get around for a homicide detective,” said Lien-hua.
“That I do,” he said. “That I do.”
“Detective,” I said. “Send some men to talk to Victor Drake right away. Hunter mentioned his name. He might know something about Cassandra’s abduction.”
Dunn didn’t look happy about it, but he agreed and then walked away.
While everyone else drifted around the scene, seeming to breathe a collective sigh of relief, I thought of Cassandra and of Austin Hunter’s last words: “It’s over.”
I could only hope he wasn’t right.
I took a moment to kneel beside his body. It shouldn’t have ended like this. He didn’t need to die tonight. “I’m sorry, Austin,” I whispered, and I really was sorry. Sorry he died for no reason. Sorry he’d been coerced into committing another crime. Sorry we hadn’t found him earlier in the day so we could have stopped this. Sorry about so many things.
Despite the mistakes Austin had made, despite the laws he’d broken, he had served faithfully in the special forces for fourteen years. I laid my hand on his shoulder in honor of the service he’d given our country. He was just like so many people I know—a hero in one area of life, flawed and all too human in another. In the end, though, he’d died doing the noblest thing of all, trying to save another person’s life. And though I might not have taken the same steps he did, I respected the value he seemed to place on human life—clearing Building B-14 before starting the fire, planning his fires to avoid casualties. I wondered how I would have reacted if someone had sent me a video like that of Lien-hua chained in a tank. I could only imagine the things I would have been willing to do to save her.
As I was rising to leave, I saw the end of a cheap, prepaid cell phone jammed beneath the strap of his shoulder holster.
What?
“They contact me,” he’d said. This phone must be how!
Everyone else had left me alone with the body, so nobody was close by. No one else had seen the phone.
I slid my hand down, cupped the phone, and then slipped it into my pocket. Maybe, just maybe, this could lead us to Cassandra.
“I’ll find her, Austin,” I said, even though the corpse beside me couldn’t hear the words. “I’ll save Cassandra. I promise.”
I looked at my watch. I had only forty minutes to keep my promise.
Then I stood up to find Lien-hua.
54
During a short break, while Lachlan and Riker grabbed a smoke outside the studio, Tessa noticed the time and sent Patrick a text message that she wasn’t feeling the greatest, which was true, and that she would just grab supper on her own and then go to bed early, but that she’d see him in the morning for their walk with Dr. W. at 10:30.
Then Lachlan returned to the tattoo room to finish inking her arm.
He alternated between two different tattoo needles attached to two different machines. He used the narrow needle with his machine cranked to its highest speed to do the outlining, and then he used the wider needle to color in the main body of the tattoo. All Tessa knew was that the wider needle hurt way worse than the outlining needle.
He’d laid out a set of tiny caps beside the sink, a different color in each cap.
Blue. Black. Silver. Gray.
Dip the needle in the water. Then the ink.
Then against her skin.
Repeat.
When he’d first started, every time he touched the needle to her skin it felt like a hot scratch. But as he worked on her arm, her skin must have started to swell or get numb because she couldn’t feel the needle anymore, just a dot of tight pressure.
“Now,” he told her, “I gotta go back and fill in the rest of the color on the tail feathers. The skin on the inside of your arm isn’t gonna be numb anymore. It’ll be even more sensitive than ever, plus with that scar . . . well, just be ready.”
She nodded.
Then Lachlan began to fill in the color, and she realized he hadn’t been lying about the tenderness of her skin.
No, he hadn’t been. Not one little bit.
After a minute or two of etching her arm, Lachlan said, “Hey, listen. I got a puzzle for you. This one usually takes people like a half hour or so to figure out. Should take you through to the end.”
“I like puzzles,” she said, trying to sound casual.
“Me too,” said Riker, who was pulling up a new playlist on the stereo’s digital display.
“OK,” Lachlan said. “So there’s these two guys rob a bank and they’re figuring out the cut, right? And the first guy says, ‘Hey, it’s not fair. You got way more money than me’—you know this one, Riker?”
“Naw, go ahead.”
“OK, why don’t we see who figures it out first, you or Serial-Killer-Stabber-Girl.”
“Right on,” he said.
“I suppose I can give it a shot,” said Tessa.
“So,” Lachlan continued. “Like I was saying, the first guy says, ‘You got way more than me. If I gave you one of these stacks of bills, you’d have twice as much as I have.’ But the other guy is like, ‘Dude, check it out. I planned the job, so quit complaining, it�
��s a fair cut. Besides, if I gave you one of my stacks, we’d have the exact same amount.’ So, question is, how many stacks of bills does each of the—”
“Got it,” said Tessa.
“—guys have.” Lachlan stared at her. “You didn’t figure it out already. There’s no way.”
“Give me a sheet of paper.”
Lachlan dug a pen and a yellowing sheet of paper out of a drawer and handed them to Tessa. She wrote something on the page, then folded the paper in half, gave it to Riker, and then set down the pen. “After you figure out your answer,” she said, “look at mine. Then ask Lachlan which is right.”
“You heard it before,” Lachlan said.
“Puh-lease.”
“So you never heard it before?” said Riker.
“No.”
“You figured it out that fast?”
“You’ll have to wait until you unfold that piece of paper to find out.”
Riker looked at her slyly. “But what if I don’t figure it out until after your tattoo is done and you take off?”
Tessa felt her heart beating like a rabbit as she said the words, “Then we’ll have to compare answers the next time we see each other.”
“Deal.”
55
7:25 p.m.
With his television tuned to Channel 11 news, Victor Drake watched Building B-14 crumble to the ground.
Hunter. It had to be Hunter.
But how did he know which building to torch?
Maybe Hunter had followed Geoff and the doctor last night, after they left the fire site and were returning the device to the base.
Victor could feel a migraine coming on. Not just any migraine either, a big one. Half an hour ago he’d gotten a message from Biscayne’s cronies that the Project Rukh Oversight Committee meeting was moved from Thursday at 2:00 p.m. to tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. A major league migraine.
His cell phone rang.
He answered it. “Yeah?”
Geoff’s voice. “Hunter’s dead.”
A glint of hope. “What?”