“Not at this time,” Edwards said.
Donaldson smiled coldly, wordlessly signaling that the meeting was over.
“Then he’s right,” Banner said. “We’re wasting time. Let’s get moving on this.”
As if to underline the point, Donaldson’s phone rang — a brief businesslike chirrup. It was an almost retro tone, like the way cell phones sounded in the nineties.
Donaldson tapped the screen and held the phone to his ear. He said his name and paused while the caller spoke. Then he took a sharp breath. He stood up slowly, turned around to face the plate-glass windows overlooking West Roosevelt Road, ten floors below. “When?” He paused again and swallowed after hearing the response. “How many?”
Edwards’s jaw tensed as he watched Donaldson’s face. Banner and Castle shared a glance. Donaldson cut the call off without saying anything else.
“There’s a mall in a town called Cairo, about twenty miles south of the crime scene. Somebody just shot a deliveryman in the parking lot. Witnesses didn’t see anyone approach him. They say he just fell down.”
6
Too soon, that was the problem. Too soon, or too early.
Wardell glanced at the sign as he passed it by at a scrupulously legal fifty-five miles per hour. Truck stop five miles, bus station seven, it told him, which meant that the truck stop was five and a half minutes away, give or take. Good. He needed to make a phone call, and he needed to change. Wardell was hardly slight in build, but the Russian’s clothes were almost comically big on him.
A white car emerged from behind a bend in the road ahead and sped past. White, but not a police car. That reminded him that he should probably change the car as well, come to think of it. A pity — the Ford Taurus had only fifty thousand miles on the clock. It was a smooth ride and had reasonable trunk space. He even liked the color.
What had he been thinking about before the sign for the truck stop had distracted him? There were so many distractions on the outside, so many colors and lights and signs and… variations. It would take some getting used to. Oh yes—too soon, that was it. That was what he’d been thinking: He had broken his long fast too soon.
Wardell regarded the killing of the fat delivery driver as an embarrassing failure. It had taken two shots to kill the man. Two. The first shot to the chest had missed the heart, catching the driver midway between that point and the left shoulder. Luckily, the guy had been too confused to fall down, giving Wardell the opportunity to place the second bullet on target and finish the job.
Two shots.
Sure, he could make excuses. He was out of practice, naturally, and firing an unfamiliar weapon cold-bore, but still… he’d jumped back in too soon, acted too early. That had to be the problem. He ought to have bided his time, put a few hundred miles between himself and that field where he’d left dead men like unharvested crops. The PSG1 from the prisoner transport van had come with a full twenty-round detachable box magazine. Not a lot of ammunition in the scheme of things, but for a former United States Marine Scout sniper it was plenty. He ought to have hunkered down in the woods somewhere, spent a while investing some of those rounds using deer or squirrels for target practice, gotten properly acquainted with the weapon.
But then again, that’s exactly what they’d have expected him to do: play it safe, lie low, slink away like a chastised schoolboy smarting from a punishment. No, that didn’t figure into his plans.
He thought back to that first shot. Visualized the rituaclass="underline" breathing in and out, regulating his heartbeat, selecting the target, taking aim, squeezing the trigger. In the mental reconstruction, he finally found himself able to admit what it was that had made him miss. It hadn’t been a lack of practice, or even the new weapon. It had been something that Wardell had not encountered in a long, long time: fear. Fear that he’d lost it, that he wouldn’t be able to make the shot.
Fear was the cold sweat that had prevented him from blanking his mind, the nagging voice that had whispered in his ear and broken the ritual.
But when that first round had gone a little wide of perfect, something had clicked back into place. All of a sudden, there was an urgent, time-sensitive task before him. A job to be finished. And so his mind had cleared and he’d waited for the next space between breaths, made a microscopic, instinctive adjustment, and put the second bullet where the first should have gone: right through the fat man’s overworked heart.
He still had it; of that there was no doubt. The next one would prove it.
Wardell flicked his blinkers on and slowed to make the turn into the truck stop. It was a small, down-at-the-heels operation. An expanse of cracked and pitted concrete surrounding a series of squat, one-story buildings: a diner, a gas station, a convenience store. The buildings looked like they’d been thrown up in the midsixties and left to their own devices ever since, the only cosmetic update the rising gas prices on the sign. Wardell’s eyes scanned the lot and the buildings, surveying the location for warning signs. He saw none, but still, he’d seen more inviting premises in Baghdad, post-shock and awe.
He made a wide, slow circuit of the lot. It was all but empty: three big rigs, a smattering of cars, no people in evidence. He parked the Ford at the far end facing a grassy slope and a line of trees. Almost, but not quite, the farthest point from the main buildings. He twisted the ignition key, cutting off both the engine and the radio midway through a local news report.
He’d been listening all the way down, flitting from station to station, looking for news. The death of the fat man hadn’t made any of the bulletins yet, not even the local ones. That was no surprise. In Wardell’s experience — and he had a lot — it generally took two, three hours minimum for a one-off murder to make the news. Less for the latest in an established series of killings, of course.
But there was no mention either of his escape, and given that more than seven hours had elapsed, that was a surprise. He should have been the lead story on every channel by now. His prison mug shot should have been flashed across the morning papers and on the news channels and the Web since the early hours. The fact that it hadn’t been indicated that the cops or the feds or whoever were sitting on the information. They probably thought they could run him down before anybody noticed.
Wardell smiled, musing that his freshest kill would most likely cost some middle-echelon public servant his job. Not the guy who’d actually decided to cover up the escape, of course, but probably the next link down the chain of command.
“Hoping I’d keep out of trouble for a day or two?” he said aloud, adjusting the rearview mirror to examine his reflection. He shook his head slowly. “Sorry, boys.”
Looking into his own cold blue eyes, it occurred to Wardell that this was the first real mirror he’d seen in half a decade. It was less forgiving than the shiny plastic in the prison. It showed the new wrinkles, the occasional lines of gray in his straggly beard. The eyes had stayed the same, though. He’d never picked up the glaze of defeat and regret that he’d seen in the other long-term inmates.
The media blackout wouldn’t last much longer; he was certain of that. And so a change in appearance was necessary. He fumbled in the glove box and came out with a pair of sunglasses. They were feminine in style, but not overtly so. The frames were dark brown and conservative. They would pass. He’d have liked there to have been some kind of hat, too, but he was out of luck on that score.
Not that it particularly mattered, of course. Covering his tracks had once been a necessity. Now it was more like good practice, something that would allow him to operate more freely. He’d be traced to this place — Lord knew his current appearance was memorable enough — but he knew how to make the trail go cold from this point. Until the next kill, of course.