prepared to casually waste him, or that, if given no other choice, the
guy had the ability to utterly destroy them without working up a sweat.
Peake had last been to bed yesterday afternoon, almost twenty-two hours
ago, and he badly needed sleep, but his grainy eyes were open wide and
his mind was alert as he contemplated the wealth of bad news that he had
just received.
Sharp leaned forward suddenly, as if he’d spotted Shadway coming up from
the south, but it must have been nothing, for he leaned back in his seat
again and let out his pent-up breath.
He’s as scared as he is angry, Peake thought.
Peake steeled himself to ask a question that would most likely anger or
at least irritate Sharp. “You know him, sir?”
“Yeah,” Sharp said sourly, unwilling to elaborate.
“From where?”
“Another place.”
“When?”
“Way back,” Sharp said in a tone of voice that made it clear there were
to be no more questions.
From the beginning of this investigation yesterday evening, Peake had
been surprised that someone as high as the deputy director would plunge
right into the fieldwork, shoulder to shoulder with junior agents,
instead of coordinating things from an office. This was an important
case. But Peake had been involved in other important cases, and he had
never seen any of the agency’s titled officers actually getting their
hands dirty. Now he understood, Sharp had chosen to wade into the muddy
center of this one because he had discovered that his old enemy,
Shadway, was involved, and because only in the field would he have an
opportunity to kill Shadway and stage the shooting to look legitimate.
“Way back,” Sharp said, more to himself this time than to Jerry Peake.
“Way back.”
The interior of the Mercedes-Benz trunk was warm because it was heated
by the sun. But Eric Leben, curled on his side in the darkness, felt
another and greater warmth, the peculiar and almost pleasant fire that
burned in his blood, flesh, and bones, a fire that seemed to be melting
him down into. . . something other than a man.
The inner and outer heat, the darkness, the motion of the car, and the
hypnotic humming of the tires had lulled him into a trancelike state.
For a time he had forgotten who he was, where he was, and why he had put
himself in this place. Thoughts eddied lazily through his mind, like
opalescent films of oil drifting, rippling, intertwining, and forming
slow-motion whirlpools on the surface of a lake.
At times his thoughts were light and pleasant, the sweet body curves and
skin textures of Rachael, Sarah, and other women with whom he had made
love, the favorite teddy bear he had slept with as a child, fragments of
movies he had seen, lines of favorite songs. But sometimes the mental
images grew dark and frightening, Uncle Barry grinning and beckoning, an
unknown dead woman in a dumpster, another woman nailed to a wall-naked,
dead, staring, the hooded figure of Death looming out of shadows, a
deformed face in a mirror, strange and monstrous hands somehow attached
to his own wrists…
Once, the car stopped, and the cessation of movement caused him to float
up from the trance. He quickly reoriented himself, and that icy
reptilian rage flooded back into him. He eagerly flexed and unflexed
his strong, elongated, sharp-nailed hands in anticipation of choking the
life out of Rachael-she who had denied him, she who had rejected him,
she who had sent him into the path of death. He almost burst out of the
trunk, then heard a man’s voice, hesitated. Judging by the bits of
inane conversation he was able to overhear, and because of the noise of
a gas-pump nozzle being inserted into the fuel tank, Eric realized that
Rachael had stopped at a service station, where there were sure to be a
fewand perhaps a lot of-people. He had to wait for a better
opportunity.
Earlier, back at the cabin, when he had opened the trunk, he had
immediately noted that the rear wall was a solid metal panel, making it
impossible for him to simply kick the car’s rear seat off its pins and