Hendricks’s heart pounded in his chest. His mouth went dry. A ripple of unease spread through the crowd. He wondered if its source was Patty Gunderson. If she’d just told the folks around her the man at the gate was an impostor.
“Gunderson,” he repeated. He felt his fight-or-flight response kick in and readied himself to make a run for it if it proved necessary.
Then he realized the guard’s distraction and the crowd’s unease had nothing to do with him. All the nearby emergency responders’ radios had crackled to life at the same time-the gate agent’s included. Seconds later, half the cop cars on the security perimeter lit up and took off at once.
The agent in front of him stood with the index finger of her writing hand held to the earpiece in her ear as though straining to hear what was being said-or perhaps simply not believing it. As Hendricks watched, she dropped her clipboard and her pen. Her left hand went to her neck and worried at the gold cross she wore around it.
“What happened?” Hendricks asked.
“There’s been some kind of accident,” she said. “One of the ambulances leaving the scene. They were escorting a patient, when…” She trailed off, her sentence lost somewhere in the middle distance with her gaze.
“An accident,” Hendricks echoed. It was clear to him from her reaction that whatever happened had been anything but.
“They…they didn’t make it to the hospital. Two officers, the driver, and an EMT.”
“And the patient?” Hendricks prompted, afraid he already knew the answer. “What happened to the patient?”
“He’s gone,” she said, anger strengthening her tone. “But he won’t stay that way. Not for long.”
About that, Hendricks thought, she was right-but not in the way that she meant.
He was sure the man in question was the one who’d tried to kill him. That Hendricks had failed to finish him as he’d so foolishly hoped. That he’d somehow bluffed his way onto that ambulance and then murdered his way out of it.
And that now that this man had Hendricks’s scent, he wouldn’t stay gone for long.
31
“Jesus Christ,” breathed Garfield. “This was no fucking accident.” The intersection of Campbell and East 22nd was a mess of pebbled glass and sundered metal, with splashes of crimson all around. Local PD had set up a wide perimeter around the scene-a small act of kindness to any pedestrians who might happen by. Not many did. Campbell and East 22nd crossed in the short stretch between the highway overpass to the east, and the gentle rise of Hospital Hill to the west-a squat, unattractive no-man’s-land of overgrown, chain-linked vacant lots, low-slung yellow-brick commercial buildings, and satellite parking for the rambling medical complex that sprawled across ten city blocks.
The ambulance lay on its side in the center of the intersection, resting at a diagonal to the right angles of the streets. The driver was facedown in a pool of his own blood some twenty yards from where it sat-thrown by the force of the crash, Garfield thought at first. But the windshield, though fractured, was intact, and when he examined the man, he found his back riddled with bullet holes, as if he’d run and been gunned down.
Garfield circled the ambulance, its undercarriage still warm enough to raise a sweat on his brow as he passed. As he reached the back, he saw the left-hand-now bottommost-rear door was open, gravity keeping its right-hand mate closed. Across it lay the remains of the pretty young EMT Garfield had tried to flirt with-Sofia, he recalled. “You’d do well to remember it,” she’d told him, though looking at her now-arms extended, fingernails split against the sun-bleached blacktop as though she’d tried desperately to escape, her head a pulpy mess thanks to a couple close-range gunshots-he failed to see how the knowledge did him any good.
Garfield crouched beside her. One glassy eye devoid of life stared vaguely in his direction. He resisted the urge to close it. Doing so would only serve to contaminate the crime scene. A glance past her into the ambulance showed a mess of upturned medical equipment amid which lay two crumpled uniformed officers. One’s face was gone-shot clean through, a hollow concave like a gore-filled watermelon left behind. The other took two to the chest, but must have kept on ticking, because he’d also been choked with what looked to be some kind of handmade garrote- his face gray-blue, his lolling tongue purple, his eyes bulging and splotched red from burst vessels.
There was no sign of the patient they’d been transporting. Of Garfield’s witness.
Garfield cursed again. Looked away.
A black-and-white stopped alongside him. The back door opened. A haggard-looking Charlie Thompson stepped out. “What’ve we got?” she asked, her voice suggesting exhaustion so profound, she was beyond the capacity of registering any further surprise.
“A fucking mess is what we’ve got. Both cops and EMTs are dead, and our witness is missing. Guess your ghost just jumped a couple spots on our Most Wanted list.”
“How do you figure?” she asked.
“Ain’t it obvious? We had a witness who’d laid eyes on the guy-tangled with him, even-and he knew it. So he somehow gave our boys the slip at the casino and came here to take our witness out.”
Thompson shook her head. “Doesn’t track,” she said. “Witness or not, we had eyes on my ghost already-my eyes. He could have killed me in the banquet hall and didn’t. And I can’t have been the only other soul to see him-once our questioning of the casino patrons is complete, there’ll be a few more folks who did. Not to mention, the whole damn building’s wired for video, which means some camera somewhere must’ve captured him. So going to all this effort just to kill one witness of many doesn’t make a load of sense. Besides, even if he wanted to, how’d he beat them here to make his play? They were in an emergency vehicle traveling at speed with the benefit of lights and sirens. No way he could have gotten here ahead of them.”
“Okay, then, Matlock-what do you think happened here?”
“Matlock was a lawyer, dumbass-if you wanna play all snide, at least get your reference right.” Her comeback was a reflex, and she regretted it as soon as she said it. Garfield’s prick-mode was a defense mechanism, nothing more, and she should know better than to rise to the bait. Particularly when she was about to make his day a whole lot worse.
“I think your so-called witness did this,” she said. Garfield made to object, but Thompson overrode him. “We know he tangled with my ghost and lived. And we know my ghost’s job didn’t go as planned. He meant to get to Leonwood before Leonwood got to Palomera-that much he made clear in the banquet hall. So my guess is, your witness was, in fact, here to get my ghost-to kill him, I mean. Only my ghost got away.”
Garfield paled. “No-it had to be your guy. It had to.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, not unkindly, “but it wasn’t.”
“You can’t know that for sure,” he said. He looked away from her, toward the lights of the medical complex.
“I can, Hank,” she said. “I do. And you would, too, if you weren’t so blinded by what you’d prefer to see.”
“The hell’re you talking about?”
“The shots,” said Thompson, nodding toward the upturned vehicle. “They came from inside the ambulance.”
As her words sunk in, Garfield sat down hard on the pavement. He felt dizzy. Sick. Worthless. He was complicit in these deaths-an accessory, an accomplice. He’d given the bastard an escape route. Practically marched him past the barricades. He knew he’d never forgive himself for what he’d done.
The bass-drum thud of an approaching helicopter roused him slightly. A news chopper, likely peeling off from the swarm that hovered over Pendleton’s like blowflies over carrion when they caught wind on their scanner of yet another juicy morsel for their never-ending misery buffet just down the road.