A cop car. A fucking cop car.
“Fucking Kolarich,” Cahill said. “I’m going to rip out your eyes and piss in the sockets.”
“You’re stopping?” Dwyer asked.
“Do we take our chances?” Cahill wondered. He had to make a quick decision here. He looked over at Dwyer, draped in black oil and brown sand. He looked like a fudge sundae.
“Let’s do it,” he decided. He gunned the engine and started flying west down the street.
Then another cop car, with flashing lights, turned onto the street from the other direction and came toward them.
“Fuck.” Cahill hit the brakes and threw the car angrily into Park. He was cut off. This was a narrow street with parked cars lining each side, and now he had squad cars at his front and rear. Could he and Dwyer win a shootout with the police? It was possible. They were surely better shots than these mutts. But backup would be called in, hell, neighbors would call 911, and even if they managed to take out the four officers, there was no physical way they could get their car free and drive off. They’d have to leave it behind, and they’d be the most wanted men in the state. They’d be drawing all kinds of attention to themselves and, more important, to the Circle.
He had to keep his eye on the prize here. He was needed a week from now. He’d trained for more than a year and he wasn’t going to miss it.
“Fuck,” he said again.
From both the front and rear, the squad cars activated their searchlights into his vehicle.
“Turn off your engine and put your hands on your head,” one of the officers called out through his speaker.
“Do it,” Cahill said, gritting his teeth so hard he felt physical pain. He killed the engine and put his hands on top of his greasy, grimy head.
He looked over at Dwyer, who was fitting his fingers around his gun.
“Don’t be an idiot, Dwyer. We have a job to do on December seventh. Just let this happen and Manning will bail us out.”
Dwyer thought a moment, then complied. He reached down and placed his weapon on the floorboard, like Cahill had done previously when he started driving. Then he put his hands on his head.
A pair of cops from each direction approached the vehicle, their weapons drawn, Maglites directed toward the interior of the vehicle. They took their time, walking around each side of the vehicle.
“Do you have firearms in the vehicle?” called out one of them, his own weapon trained on Cahill. “Do you have firearms in the vehicle?”
“Why would you say that, Officer?” Cahill said in a less than respectful tone. Cahill was not a big fan of law enforcement, or government in general.
“Well, for one thing, it’s scratched on the rear panel of your vehicle. It says, ‘We have guns in here.’ Right next to ‘Fuck you, cops.’”
Cahill closed his eyes. Fucking Kolarich. He was going to rip out his tongue and feed it to him.
“You’re going to keep those hands on your head, and you’re going to slide out of the vehicle.” An officer on each side opened the car doors. “Slide out right now, each of you.”
They complied, though it wasn’t easy with their hands on their heads.
“What is that you got on you?” the cop asked. “What the hell have you boys been doing?”
Cahill put his hands against the car and spread his legs.
“Sightseeing,” he said. “I love this city.”
With the car bathed in light from every fucking direction, Cahill could now read what had been scratched on the driver’s side paneclass="underline" We are assassins.
“Weapon on the floorboard, driver’s side,” said one of the cops.
“Weapon on the passenger floor, too,” said another.
An officer pulled Cahill’s hands behind him and slipped cuffs over his wrists.
“You look like you’ve been tarred and feathered,” one of them said.
“You look like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon,” another opined. The threat now contained, the two suspects now in handcuffs, the cops began to enjoy themselves.
“‘Die… fucking… pigs.’ ‘Cops… suck… dick.’” One of the cops was doing a walk-around with his flashlight, reading all the messages scratched into the Explorer’s paint.
“Someone stole the car,” said Cahill.
“And then gave it back to you? They must be nice car thieves.”
They popped the rear of the car. Cahill already knew what they would find. There were rifles and knives and rope and a body bag.
One of the cops got close to Cahill’s ear. “Whatever the hell you boys have been up to,” he said, “you’re in a lot of trouble.”
62
We watched it all from the front bedroom window on the third floor of Ross Vander Way’s townhouse.
“Can’t thank you enough,” I said to Ross.
“No prob, man. It was pretty freakin’ twisted.”
And I was pretty freakin’ sure that Ross was pretty freakin’ stoned.
Ross was a trust-fund baby. His parents owned a cruise line, and Ross had never worked a day in his life. He was partying his way through a master’s degree in business and living in this townhouse, which he’d converted into the best bachelor pad I’d ever seen.
Lightner was talking on the phone with one of his employees, the one who had been assigned to covertly watch my house after the first attempt on my life. It had been Joel’s idea, a pretty obvious security measure in hindsight, to have someone watch my house, and it had paid off for us. Joel’s associate had seen these two guys staking out the place earlier today, then head over to their Ford Explorer and leave for several hours, then return around seven tonight, setting up shop on the side of my garage, awaiting my return.
I’d considered just calling the cops, but these two would have gotten away. So Lightner and I came up with some thoughts at lunch, and he’d gone shopping for motor oil and a pound of sand. We wanted to make sure that a getaway would be tough for them, so in addition to the oil and sand, we did some work on the Explorer ahead of time, too, with a couple of screwdrivers.
Bradley had volunteered to drive the vehicle onto the driveway. That was nice of him. Normally I would have insisted on doing it myself-there was an element of risk at that point-but I couldn’t run to save my life right now with the bum knee.
“Shauna, you play a great nagging wife,” I said.
“And you the shitbag husband.”
I thanked Ross again and Joel, Shauna and I left the same way we came in-surreptitiously out the back door of Ross’s place. We found my car and picked up Bradley John on the corner.
“They won’t get before a judge until Monday,” I said. “I’ll bet they add resisting for driving away before they got cut off. And rifles and a body bag? That’s going to be an interesting bond hearing.”
Everyone was buzzing from what had just happened. It was great fun, no doubt, and a welcome release from the long hours we’d worked. But we all realized that for the second time in two days, somebody had been concerned enough about this case to attempt murder.
“Okay, screw this,” I said. “From here on out until this trial is over, we have to stay away from our homes. And we hire bodyguards. Shauna, Bradley-go home and pack. We’re not making ourselves an easy target. Joel, you got someone we could use for personal security?”
He did. His company had done some of it, too.
“We stay at different hotels and always with a security escort. Okay, you two? You can say no, but then you’re off the case. No fooling.”
Shauna asked, “Who might be funding this endeavor, Counselor? Last I checked, we had a client who didn’t pay.”
“I am,” I said. I still had a little money tied over from when I was a big-firm lawyer. My wife and I had been saving every penny for a single-family home that I now didn’t need.
“Then Ritz-Carlton, here I come,” Shauna announced.
“I’ll make some calls right away,” said Joel.
“Here’s a question,” Shauna informed us. “If we figured out that they might try to kill you a second time, why didn’t they figure out that we might be waiting for them?”