i went down, hard, and as Jerry managed to recover being hit in the face with the backpack, Santos i in and slapped the man, slinging his arm around ; the twisting of his hips like popping a whip to de; the power. The heel of his hand connected with fs temple and sent a shock up Santos’s arm. A good
r sprawled, and Santos would bet gold against saws man was out of it.
came up, clawing for his pistol, but Santos got grabbed his wrist and wrenched it, turned the gun : muzzle faced Rich’s belly, then grabbed Rich’s fist i his own free hand hard enough to trigger the weapon.
: explosion was very loud in the quiet afternoon. |;The empty shell ejected in a lazy, slow-motion arc, glit- 1 in the sunshine, and fell, bounced from a flat rock, I tumbled from sight.
shocked the hell out of Rich as the bullet hit him in [belly, you could see that.
i wounded man released his grip on the gun and fell ibis knees, trying to stop the blood flow with his hands, didn’t work. Red seeped through his fingers, drip
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ping to the ground. It smelled like warm copper.
Santos grabbed the pistol, pointed it at Rich’s head.
“No, please, don’t-!”
Santos grinned. “Vaya con Dios,” he said. “That’s Spicko, right?”
“Don’t-!”
He shot the man right between the eyes.
Jerry was still down, feet twitching. Must have knocked him cold.
Santos took two steps, aimed, and put a round into Jerry’s head. The man spasmed, then went limp.
Two men, armed, and too easy. He sighed. In his country, the women fought better.
Santos tucked the gun into his belt. He would get rid of it later, where it wouldn’t be found. His prints weren’t on record in the United States, but he didn’t want this coming back to bite him twenty years from now. The authorities had long memories when you killed any of their own. Fingerprints, DNA, whatever they could get, these things stayed in the system forever. He had heard about guys picked up thirty years after they did a murder when something that had been sitting in a refrigerator at some lab for all that time matched with new crime scene evidence. He didn’t want that, always to be looking over his shoulder.
He went to the bodies and squatted. He already had his gloves on so there was little risk as he went through the dead men’s pockets.
He found two wallets on each man, which puzzled him. A look at the contents brought a big smile to his face. Huh. What do you know about that?
He dropped the wallets, collected his backpack, and headed back toward his target. He’d be done in an hour, long gone by nightfall… This high up, cold as it was, if the animals didn’t get them, they would keep a long time, turning to dessicated mummies. But the authorities would discover what the scavengers left when they came to find the broken cable, which would be sooner rather than later.
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he was far enough away, maybe he’d use a owaway phone to call the authorities about these two. t to make sure they didn’t go undiscovered. That would
nusing, no? fes. Most amusing.
came into Michaels’s office looking at a computer at. “Here’s something that will probably make the happy,” she said, it?”
“You know those two federal fugitives, the militia s? Ones suspected in the killings of a couple of game
us in Colorado a few weeks back?” |”Bank robbers and armored car hijackers, right? Num- i five and six on the Ten Most Wanted? The ones the FBI has been combing the mountains looking for ^the last three months?”
at’s them. Seems some anonymous call tipped off ities about where to find the pair. And sure enough, had the game wardens’ ID and some of their clothing i them when they were located.”
alive? I seem to recall they swore they’d be taken that way.” l*They were right. But they were both cold when the
sheriff’s deputies got there. Shot to death.” |?Who shot them?” he asked.
H^Nobody knows. I’d venture to guess nobody really either. Somebody who saved the state and the fed- i government the costs of a couple of trials.” “*Life is strange sometimes, isn’t it?” f”Isn’t it just? The local cops also found a major trans- nental fiber-optic phone cable nearby had been cut.” f**Maybe the phone company shot them. Hear anything
i home?” tvTes, I just talked to Guru. Little Alex is sleeping. Has
no problem at all.” “Ask her if she wants to move up here permanently, be 1-time nanny. Just for, oh, fifteen or so years?”
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‘You think you’re joking,” she said. “I’m considering
it.”
“Now you’re joking.”
“Nope. She’s an old lady and I love her. I owe her a lot-what she taught me helped make me who I am. She’s all alone in New York. Her own family doesn’t pay much attention to her. And she’s really good with the baby. Would it be so awful if she lived in the spare bedroom and helped take care of him?”
Michaels blinked. The idea was something of a shock. “Uh. Urn.”
“Think about it.”
He nodded. “Okay. I will.”
14
General Hospital , D.C.
lay in a restless, Demerol-induced sleep. His was mostly slow and heavy, but now and then uld moan softly and breathe faster, and try to turn (:’!he bed. When he did that, Howard would reach out put his hand on the boy’s head, speaking soft reas- until his son calmed down.
had gone to the cafeteria to get some sand- and coffee. Howard expected her back in a few s. She was a wreck, had seldom left this room since y’d gotten here. He had tried to send her home to rest, she wasn’t having any of that, ave her baby here, in a hospital, alone? Veil. He was fourteen, and hardly a baby, but she had with such fierceness that he hadn’t brought it up
he understood her feelings. Even though he was much out of the woods, one or the other of them i going to be right here until they let Tyrone go home.
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u
Tyrone’s left leg was supported in a sling. A titanium pin the size of a big nail had been driven through his leg just below the knee, skewering his shin bone. The pin was connected on both ends by a looped cord to a cable, which was in turn attached to a big sandbag, supported by a pulley on the steel frame over the bed. They needed to keep things a certain way until they could do the rest of the surgery with plates and screws, an open reduction, they called it, and even then, the boy was going to wear a fiberglass cast for a couple of months, from his hip to his ankle.
It hurt Howard to look at it. The doctor had assured him that there weren’t any nerves in the bone, and that the pain where the traction device pierced the skin was minimal. Where Tyrone hurt the most was where his muscles had been torn and bruised in his upper leg when the thigh-the femur-had snapped. This had happened when a half-ton pickup truck, driven by a forty-three-year- old construction worker, had crossed the center line and plowed head-on into the car in which Tyrone had been a passenger in the rear seat. His seat belt had held, but the car had compacted and accordioned enough so that the seat in front of him had been thrust back into his leg, breaking it just above the knee.
Tyrone’s friend, a fourteen-year-old girl named Jessie Corvos, who had been riding in that front seat was in Intensive Care with massive internal injuries, and her prognosis was poor. The car’s driver, the girl’s older brother, Rafael, had three broken ribs, a punctured lung, shattered right arm, broken ankle, and had undergone surgery to remove a ruptured spleen, but was expected to recover.
The man who’d been driving the truck had a tiny cut on his forehead that had taken three stitches to close; otherwise, not a mark on him. The man had been playing pool and downing pitchers of beer with friends at a bar. He had been arrested for driving under the influence and released on bail. His blood alcohol level was 0.21 percent,
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three times the legal limit when they’d tested it. vard had met Jessie and Rafael’s father, Raymond, . ER. The older Corvos had been pale and shaking, >ly in shock, but there had also been in him a tightly I rage. Howard had caught only a glimpse of it. like seeing a nuclear fireball through a pinhole distance away from the aperture: only a speck of ely bright light was visible, but to move your eye would guarantee instant blindness. Raymond Cor- i was an accountant, a slightly built, balding man, and -looking, save for that hint of white-hot anger. F Jessie or Rafael Corvos died, then Howard would not to be the driver who had killed them-he had the sion their father would come for the killer, and would not wish to be standing in his way when