Ли Чайлд - Persuader

I looked up. It was a Taurus, plain blue paint, gray in the cloudy moonlight. A cone of white light ahead of it. Brake lights flaring red behind. Two guys in it. Their faces were lit by their lights bouncing back off the Saab. They held still for a second. Stared forward. They recognized the Saab. They must have seen it a hundred times. I saw the driver move. Heard him shove the gearshift forward into Park. The brake lights died. The engine idled. I could smell exhaust fumes and the heat from under the hood.

The two guys opened their doors in unison. Got out and stood up, behind the doors. They had the Glocks in their hands. They waited. They came out from behind the doors. Walked forward, slowly, with the guns held low. The headlight beams lit them brightly from the waist down. Their upper bodies were harder to see. But I could make out their features. Their shapes. They were the bodyguards. No doubt about it. They were young and heavy, tense and wary. They were dressed in dark suits, creased and crumpled and stained. They had no ties. Their shirts had turned from white to gray.

They squatted next to Villanueva. He was in their shadow. They moved a little and turned his face into the light. I knew they had seen him before. Just a brief glimpse as they passed him, outside the college gate, eighty-four hours ago. I didn’t expect them to remember him. And I don’t think they did. But they had been fooled once, and they didn’t want to get fooled again. They were very cautious. They didn’t start in with immediate first aid. They just squatted there and did nothing. Then the one nearest me stood up.

By then I was five feet from him. I had my right hand cupped around a rock. It was a little bigger than a softball. I swung my arm, wide and flat and fast, like I was going to slap him in the face. The momentum would have taken my arm off at the shoulder if I had missed. But I didn’t miss. The rock hit him square on the temple and he went straight down like a weight had fallen on him from above. The other guy was faster. He scrambled away and twisted to his feet. Villanueva flailed at his legs and missed them. The guy danced away and whipped around. His Glock came up toward me. All I wanted to do was stop him firing it so I hurled the rock straight at his head. He spun away again and took it square in the back of his neck, right where his cranium curved in to meet his spine. It was like a ferocious punch. It pitched him straight forward. He dropped the Glock and went down on his face like a tree and lay still.

I stood there and watched the darkness in the east. Saw nothing. No lights. Heard nothing, except the distant sea. Villanueva crawled out of the upside-down car on his hands and knees and crouched over the first guy.

“This one’s dead,” he said.

I checked, and he was. Hard to survive a ten-pound rock sideways into the temple. His skull was neatly caved in and his eyes were wide open and there was nothing much happening behind them. I checked the pulses in his neck and his wrist and went to look at the second guy. Crouched down over him. He was dead, too. His neck was broken, but good. I wasn’t very surprised. The rock weighed ten pounds and I had pitched it like Nolan Ryan.

“Two birds, one stone,” Villanueva said.

I said nothing.

“What?” he said. “You wanted to take them back into custody? After what they did to us? This was suicide by cop, plain and simple.”

I said nothing.

“You got a problem?” Villanueva said.

I wasn’t us. I wasn’t DEA, and I wasn’t a cop. But I thought about Powell’s private signal to me: My eyes only, 10-2, 10–28. These guys need to be dead, make no mistake about it. And I was prepared to take Powell’s word for it. That’s what unit loyalties are for. Villanueva had his, and I had mine.

“No problem,” I said.

I found the rock where it had come to rest and rolled it back to the shoulder. Then I got to my feet and walked away and leaned in and killed the Taurus’s lights. Waved Villanueva over toward me.

“We need to be real quick now,” I said. “Use your phone and get Duffy to bring Eliot down here. We need him to take this car back.”

Villanueva used a speed dial and started talking and I found the two Glocks on the road and stuffed them back into the dead guys’ pockets, one each. Then I stepped over to the Saab. Getting it the right way up again was going to be a whole lot harder than turning it over. For a second I worried that it was going to be impossible. The coats killed any friction against the road. If we shoved it, it was just going to slide on its roof. I closed the upside-down driver’s door and waited.

“They’re coming,” Villanueva called.

“Help me with this,” I called back.

We manhandled the Saab on the coats back toward the house as far as we could get it. It slid off Villanueva’s coat onto mine. Slid to the far edge of mine and then stopped dead when the metal caught against the road.

“It’s going to get scratched,” Villanueva said.

I nodded.

“It’s a risk,” I said. “Now get in their Taurus and bump it.”

He drove their Taurus forward until its front bumper touched the Saab. It connected just above the waistline, against the B-pillar between the doors. I signaled him for more gas and the Saab jerked sideways and the roof ground against the blacktop. I climbed up on the Taurus’s hood and pushed hard against the Saab’s sill. Villanueva kept the Taurus coming, slow and steady. The Saab jacked up on its side, forty degrees, fifty, sixty. I braced my feet against the base of the Taurus’s windshield and walked my hands down the Saab’s flank and then put them flat on its roof. Villanueva hit the gas and my spine compressed about an inch and the Saab rolled all the way over and landed on its wheels with a thump. It bounced once and Villanueva braked hard and I fell forward off the hood and banged my head on the Saab’s door. Ended up flat on the road under the Taurus’s front fender. Villanueva backed it away and stopped and hauled himself out.

“You OK?” he said.

I just lay there. My head hurt. I had hit it hard.

“How’s the car?” I said.

“Good news or bad news?”

“Good first,” I said.

“The side mirrors are OK,” he said. “They’ll spring back.”

“But?”

“Big gouges in the paint,” he said. “Small dent in the door. I think you did it with your head. The roof is a little caved-in, too.”

“I’ll say I hit a deer.”

“I’m not sure they have deer out here.”

“A bear, then,” I said. “Or whatever. A beached whale. A sea monster. A giant squid. A huge woolly mammoth recently released from a melting glacier.”

“You OK?” he said again.

“I’ll live,” I said.

I rolled over and got up on all fours. Pushed myself upright, slow and easy.

“Can you take the bodies?” he said. “Because we can’t.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to,” I said.

We opened the Saab’s rear hatch with difficulty. It was a little misaligned because the roof was a little distorted. We carried the dead guys one at a time and folded them into the load space. They almost filled it. I went back to the shoulder and retrieved my bundle and carried it over and put it in on top of them. There was a parcel shelf that would hide everything from view. It took both of us to close the hatch. We had to take a side each and lean down hard. Then we picked up our coats off the road and shook them out and put them on. They were damp and crushed and a little torn up in places.

“You OK?” he asked again.

“Get in the car,” I said.

We sprung the door mirrors back into place and climbed in together. I turned the key. It wouldn’t start. I tried again. No luck. In between the two tries I heard the fuel pump whining.