“At what?”
Graham’s peripheral vision caught sight of a uniformed cop just beyond his window, his gun drawn and pointed at Graham’s right ear.
The same voice as before boomed over the loudspeaker, “You are surrounded. We do not want to kill you, but we will not hesitate to do so. Do exactly as we say.”
Graham saw movement on his left now as another uniformed cop revealed himself. This one had a rifle pressed against his shoulder, with the muzzle leveled at Jolaine.
“Driver, do not move!” the voice of God commanded from behind. “Keep your hands where they are.”
Graham’s sense of fairness was offended by the fact that she got to rest her hands on the steering wheel while he had to hold his in the air.
“In the passenger seat, keep your right hand in the air, and reach with your left hand to open the door.”
It took Graham a few seconds to process the stage directions. “Okay,” he said aloud, “I can do this.” Keeping his right hand held aloft, he leaned to the left, across Jolaine, and reached for the driver’s door handle, which was at least five inches beyond his reach.
Jolaine pushed him away. “What are you doing?”
“Freeze!” He heard the command as a unison chorus from three different sides. “Sit up, asshole!” one of them yelled. “Sit up, or I swear to God I’ll shoot you in the head!”
Graham froze. What did they want him to do, freeze or sit up? Why were they yelling in the first place, when he was doing exactly what they’d told him to do?
“Good God, Graham,” Jolaine said.
“What? I’m doing—”
The passenger door opened, and a talon of a hand closed around Graham’s ankle. They pulled him feetfirst across the seat. The effect was to force him to fall back across the gearshift. As he felt himself sliding along on his side, he realized that very soon, his shoulders would be free of any support, and that gravity was quickly destined to become his enemy. He flopped over onto his back, figuring that having the back of his head flop down onto the concrete was a better option than going face-first. He’d spent too many years in braces to smash out all his teeth.
The impact to the back of his head wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, but it was hard enough to ignite stars behind his eyes. On his back now, on the ground — it felt like the street, actually — he held his hands up and splayed his fingers. “Dude, look,” he said. “I’m not fighting.”
“Gun!”
Someone must have seen the pistol on the floor. It was important enough for a kick into Graham’s ribs, propelling the air out of his lungs and launching a lightning bolt of pain from his pelvis to his jaw. He yelled.
“Shut up,” someone said as they rolled him onto his face and pulled his hands behind his back just a few clicks further than his shoulders were designed to accommodate. “You ain’t felt nothing yet.”
Something cold and hard impacted the sweet spot between his thumb and his wrist bone, the nerve that apparently connected his thumbnail to his elbow, because that was the path the lightning bolt took. He heard the ratcheting sound of the handcuffs, and he understood that Jolaine had been right on the money. Then he wondered how she could know such things. Had she been arrested before?
The process of shackling his left hand hurt less than his right, and fifteen seconds later, Graham Mitchell was completely immobilized. Despite his efforts to keep his head arched up away from the black pavement, he was certain that there’d be road rash on his cheeks, chin, and lips.
“On your feet, kid,” someone said, and his arms were pulled tight behind him. The pulling continued until he was leveraged up to his knees. From there, they gave him five seconds or so to find his balance and stand.
On the other side of the car, Jolaine lay pressed face-down over the hood, her arms behind her and cuffed. One of the beefier cops kept her pressed against the metal hood with the pressure of a horseshoe grip around the base of her skull. To his right, at the head of the vehicle, a cop — good God, where did they all come from? — displayed Jolaine’s pistol like a friggin’ Stanley Cup trophy, holding it aloft so that everyone could see it.
Graham heard light applause from somewhere, but he had no idea who it was or where it was coming from. All he knew was they were happy, and he was terrified.
When Jolaine looked up and made eye contact, she was crying.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Scorpion, Mother Hen.” Venice’s voice in his ear startled him.
“Go ahead.”
“We have a problem,” she said.
“Of course we do,” Jonathan quipped. Murphy — of Murphy’s Law — was a prophet. Whatever could go wrong would in fact go wrong at precisely the worst possible moment. “What is it?”
“I just got a hit on ICIS that Jolaine Cage has been arrested in Lambertville, Michigan.”
Jonathan’s stomach fell. The day had just become vastly more complicated. “What about the boy? About Graham?”
“Also in custody,” Venice said. “He’s at a police station, but that might only be until he can be transferred to a foster home.”
“That might be the case, or it is the case?”
“As of now, all we know is that he’s in custody at the police station.”
Jonathan was interested in dealing only with facts. Conjecture was the same thing as wild-ass guess, and soothsaying had never been his long suit. “What was the arresting agency?” Jonathan asked.
“Local police. No charges have been filed.”
“Stand by,” Jonathan said. He stepped into the elevator. The corpses would be just as dead three hours from now as they were right now. The arrests, on the other hand, were a dynamic, developing situation that needed immediate attention.
Plus, he could talk on the phone outside the doctor’s house, and avoid the stink.
“I don’t understand,” Jonathan said as he stepped into the foyer. “How can she be arrested but not charged?”
Venice explained, “At least no charge has been entered into the public record. Maybe because it was a federal warrant. Interstate flight to avoid prosecution.”
“Do we know yet what prosecution they’re allegedly avoiding?”
“No.”
Jonathan considered the moving parts. Since he wasn’t a cop, he didn’t have intimate knowledge of the procedures used for taking people into custody, but he knew when something didn’t feel right. In the context of people trying to kill other people, it was a feeling that often spelled tragedy.
“I don’t like this,” Jonathan said. “Download the coordinates of both locations to my GPS. We’re going to — where is it?”
“Lambertville, Michigan,” Venice said. “What are you going to do when you get there?”
“I have no idea,” he confessed. “But being closer is better than being farther away.” He leaned back into the elevator and yelled, “Yo, Big Guy! Finish up. We gotta go.” Back on the air, he said, “When you get the photos Big Guy is sending you, I’ll need you to process them quickly.”
“Is one of them Sarah Mitchell?”
“That’s what the smart money says, but I need you to verify and get the info back to me. And to Kit.”
Venice’s silence reiterated her displeasure at trusting Maryanne. She asked, “When you leave, do you want me to call the police to clean up the bodies?”
“Negative. If we can verify that one of our targets is among the dead, pass that along to Wolverine. She’ll want to use her own cleaners.” Corpses posed a difficult problem in the covert world. You couldn’t just let them fester and rot, but you also didn’t want to get local authorities spun up with a lot of difficult questions. Among the cadre of specialists who took care of things in that world were people who specialized in the removal and disposition of bodies.