Then we were past the residences and on a road bisecting more fields. I noted the cotton plants, shedding their growth like popcorn, and I thought of how this same land 170 years ago would have been carpeted with an identical crop; the Civil War, and the people for whom it was fought, were never far from one's mind when you were in the South.
My phone rang and I answered.
My protege's voice was urgent. "Abe."
My shoulders tensed. "Has he turned off the highway?" I wasn't too concerned; we'd exited over a half hour ago. The hitter would be forty miles away by now.
"No, still following the decoy. But something just happened. He made a call on his mobile. When he disconnected, it was odd: He was wiping his face. I moved up two car lengths. It looked like he'd been crying."
My breath came quickly as I considered possible reasons for this. One credible, disturbing scenario rose to the top: What if the hitter had suspected we'd try a decoy and had used one of his own? He'd forced somebody who resembled him--just like the elfin man in our decoy car--to follow us. The call my protege had just witnessed might have been between the driver and the real perp, who was perhaps holding the man's wife or child hostage.
But this, then, meant that the real hitter could be somewhere else and--
A flash of white streaked toward us as a Ford pickup truck appeared from the driveway of a sagging, deserted gas station to the left and bounded over the highway. The truck, its front protected by push bars, slammed into our driver's side and shoved us neatly through a tall stand of weeds into a shallow ravine. Alissa screamed and I grunted in pain and heard my protege calling my name, then the mobile and the hands-free flew into the car, propelled by the deploying air bag.
We crashed down a five-foot descent and came to an undramatic stop at the soupy bottom of a shallow creek.
Oh, he'd planned his attack perfectly and before I could even click the seat belt to get to my gun, he'd swung a mallet through the driver's window, shattering it and stunning me with the same blow. My Glock was ripped off my belt and pocketed. Dislocated shoulder, I thought, not much blood. I spat broken glass from my mouth and looked to Alissa. She too was stunned but didn't seem hurt badly. The hitter wasn't holding his gun, only the mallet, and I thought that if she fled now she'd have a chance to tumble through the underbrush and escape. Not much of a chance but something. She had to move immediately, though. "Alissa, run, to the left! You can do it! Now!"
She yanked the door open and rolled out.
I looked back at the road. All I could see was the white truck parked on the shoulder near a creek where you might hunt frogs for bait, like a dozen other trucks I'd seen en route. It perfectly blocked anyone's view from the road. Just like I'd used a truck to mask my escape, I reflected grimly.
The hitter was now reaching in to unlatch my door. I squinted in pain, grateful for the man's delay. It meant that Alissa could gain more distance. My people would know our exact position through GPS and could have police here in fifteen or twenty minutes. She might make it. Please, I thought, turning toward the path she'd be escaping down, the shallow creekbed.
Except that she wasn't running anywhere.
Tears rolling down her cheeks, she was standing next to the car with her head down, arms crossed over her round chest. Was she hurt more badly than I'd thought?
My door was opened and the hitter dragged me out onto the ground, where he expertly slipped nylon restraints on my hands. He released me and I sagged into the sour-scented mud, beside busy crickets.
Restraints? I wondered. I looked at Alissa again, now leaning against the car, unable to look my way. "Please." She was speaking to our attacker. "My mother?" No, she wasn't stunned and wasn't hurt badly and I realized the reason she wasn't running: because she had no reason to.
She wasn't the target.
I was.
The whole terrible truth was obvious. The man standing over me had somehow gotten to Alissa several weeks before and threatened to hurt her mother--to force Alissa to make up a story about corruption at the government contractor. Because it involved an army base where I knew the commander, the perp bet that I'd be the shepherd to guard her. For the past week Alissa had been giving this man details about our security procedures. He wasn't a hitter; he was a lifter, hired to extract information from me. Of course: about the organized crime case I'd just worked. I knew the new identities of the five witnesses who'd testified at the trial. I knew where Witness Protection was placing them.
Gasping for breath through the tears, Alissa was saying, "You told me. . . ."
But the lifter was ignoring her, looking at his watch and placing a call, I deduced, to the man in the decoy car, followed by my protege, fifty miles away. He didn't get through. The decoy would have been pulled over, as soon as our crash registered through the mobile phone call.
This meant the lifter didn't have as much time as he would have liked. I wondered how long I could hold out against the torture.
"Please," Alissa whispered again. "My mother. You said if I did what you wanted . . . Please, is she all right?"
The lifter glanced toward her and, as an afterthought, it seemed, took a pistol from his belt and shot her twice in the head.
I grimaced, felt the sting of despair.
He took a battered manila envelope from his inside jacket and, opening it, knelt beside me and shook the contents onto the ground. I couldn't see what they were. He pulled off my shoes and socks.
In a soft voice he asked, "You know the information I need?"
I nodded yes.
"Will you tell me?"
If I could hold out for fifteen minutes there was a chance local police would get here while I was still alive. I shook my head no.
Impassive, as if my response were neither good or bad, he set to work.
Hold out for fifteen minutes, I told myself.
I gave my first scream thirty seconds later. Another followed shortly after that and from then on every exhalation was a shrill cry. Tears flowed and pain raged like fire throughout my body.
Thirteen minutes, I reflected. Twelve . . .
But, though I couldn't say for certain, probably no more than six or seven passed before I gasped, "Stop, stop!" He did. And I told him exactly what he wanted to know.
He jotted the information and stood. Keys to the truck dangled in his left hand. In his right was the pistol. He aimed the automatic toward the center of my forehead and what I felt was mostly relief, a terrible relief, that at least the pain would cease.
The man eased back and squinted slightly in anticipation of the gunshot, and I found myself w--
JEFFERY DEAVER, a former attorney and the New York Times bestselling author internationally hailed as "the best psychological thriller writer around" (The Times, London), is the originator of the acclaimed detective hero Lincoln Rhyme, featured in The Burning Wire, The Broken Window, The Cold Moon, The Twelfth Card, The Vanished Man, The Stone Monkey, The Empty Chair, The Coffin Dancer, and The Bone Collector--which became a Universal Pictures feature film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. He featured investigative agent Kathryn Dance in Roadside Crosses and The Sleeping Doll; and sheriff's deputy Brynn McKenzie debuted in The Bodies Left Behind, winner of the 2009 Best Novel of the Year award from the International Thriller Writers organization. As William Jefferies, he is the author of Shallow Graves, Bloody River Blues, and Hell's Kitchen. His short fiction is anthologized in two volumes: Twisted and More Twisted.
He's been nominated for six Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony Award, and a Gumshoe Award, and was recently short-listed for the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Best International Author. He is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year, and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. He has also won a Steel Dagger for best thriller of the year for Garden of Beasts and a Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers' Association. The Cold Moon won a Grand Prix from the Japanese Adventure F
iction Association and was named Book of the Year by the Mystery Writers Association of Japan.
Visit www.jefferydeaver.com.
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Carte Blanche
Edge
The Burning Wire*
Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (Editor) The Watch List (The Copper Bracelet and The Chopin Manuscript) (Contributor) Roadside Crosses**
The Bodies Left Behind
The Broken Window*
The Sleeping Doll**
More Twisted: Collected Stories, Volume Two The Cold Moon*/**
The Twelfth Card*
Garden of Beasts
Twisted: Collected Stories The Vanished Man*
The Stone Monkey*
The Blue Nowhere
The Empty Chair*
Speaking in Tongues
The Devil's Teardrop
The Coffin Dancer*
The Bone Collector*
Deave_Edge_3p_jdh.indd 4 5/24/11 10:05 AM
A Maiden's Grave Praying for Sleep
The Lesson of Her Death
Mistress of Justice
Hard News
Death of a Blue Movie Star Manhattan Is My Beat
Hell's Kitchen
Bloody River Blues
Shallow Graves
A Century of Great Suspense Stories (Editor) A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime (Editor) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Introduction) *Featuring Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs **Featuring Kathryn Dance
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 2010 by Jeffery Deaver All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
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Cover design and imaging by Jae Song ISBN 978-1-4391-5634-6
ISBN 978-1-4391-5896-8 (eBook)
Jeffery Deaver, The Burning Wire
(Series: Lincoln Rhyme # 9)
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