John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

But the other man grabbed Billy’s wrist and spoiled his aim. “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

“We’ve got to.”

“Not yet,” his partner repeated.

“Sean-”

“I said no.”

So the other guy’s name was Sean. It was always nice to know the names of the people who were going to kill you. Harvey’s heart continued to pound, but he was surprised how clear his head felt. “Yeah, Billy, he said no,” Harvey said.

“Christ, now he knows our names,” Billy spat.

Harvey had thought that a little levity might defuse things. He’d been wrong.

Sean let go of his partner’s wrist and allowed him to reacquire his target. “This would be a good time for you to do some explaining,” he said.

Harvey had been moving left the entire time, never closing an inch, but continuing to draw their aim away from the campsite. He stopped now. “I’m not a threat to you,” he said. “It’s like you said earlier. If I’d wanted to bring the police into my life, this place would be alive with them. Do you see any cops?”

Billy and Sean exchanged confused glances.

Harvey used the brief silence to design a lie that would buy him some time. “I was here night before last,” he said. “I saw them drag that boy out here and shoot him. Then I heard the chopper. Scared me to death.” He let the news settle on them. “If I was going to call somebody, that would have been the time, don’t you think?”

He could almost hear Sean’s brain trying to process it. He knew what the inevitable question would be, so he moved ahead with the scary-big lie. “Fact is, you’re about three hours too late.”

It registered on the visitors like a slap. As they recoiled with another shared look, Harvey noted movement behind them and off to the right. It was two men, one huge, the other average. He didn’t allow himself to look directly at them because they appeared to be armed, and through his peripheral vision, Harvey would swear that their aim was trained on the men who would kill him.

“Two guys came and took the body away,” Harvey went on, thankful that the new additions to the cast gave him more inspiration. “One was really big, and the other one just normal.”

“He’s lying,” Billy said. “You can see it in his face.”

Sean regarded him for a moment, then nodded. “I think you’re right.” Then to Harvey, “You’d suck as a poker player.”

Harvey couldn’t help himself. He shot a look directly at the new arrivals, a silent plea for help.

It came instantly. “Drop your weapons!” one of them yelled. The rest of it unraveled in mere seconds, but Harvey was too busy dropping for cover to see a thing.

Boxers drove the Batmobile while Jonathan rode shotgun. Boxers had christened the heavily armored and electronically enhanced Hummer H2 with its nickname due to the impressive technology it carried, and it stuck. Jonathan had finally shed his Leon Harris makeup and changed out of the suit that might have linked him to the breakout. He’d left them and their rental van at the farm with every confidence that everything would be properly disposed of, sanitized, or returned. During their ride back from the George Washington Memorial, he and Boxers had been generous in praising each other for the brilliance of their plan to return Jimmy Henry to jail.

The U-Lockit franchise in Kinsale had been the next logical stop in their quest to pick up the trail. Given the early hour, he didn’t know what he might find, but experience taught that delaying the inevitable rarely paid dividends in the long run. Besides, it had already been twenty-eight hours since the assault on the school.

“You know,” Boxers said as they closed within a mile of the place, “you’re gonna get your ass in a crack keeping the FBI out of this.”

“Let them collect their own evidence,” Jonathan said. “They don’t appreciate our methods.”

“Don’t you think this one’s a little close to home for pissing contests?”

Jonathan shot the big guy a curious glance. Boxers didn’t often push back like this. “They couldn’t use what we gave them even if we gave it to them,” he explained. “Fruit from the poisonous tree and all that.” Jonathan considered it one of the great weaknesses of the United States’s system of jurisprudence that even in egregious cases like this one, the process used to obtain evidence was given equal weight to the evidence itself.

“Besides,” he continued, “I’ll tip our hand to Doug when we get back to the Cove.” Doug Kramer was the chief of police in Fisherman’s Cove, and a childhood friend of Jonathan’s. Whether by accident or intrepid investigation, Doug had connected enough dots over the years to know the basic outlines of the illicit side of Jonathan’s firm, Security Solutions, and he’d made it very clear that badge notwithstanding, he saw no reason to interfere.

A moment later, Boxers pointed ahead through the windshield. “What have we here?”

An unremarkable black Chrysler sedan sat parked in front of the U-Lockit office, which was dark and appeared empty. The storage units themselves ran in parallel blocks behind it.

Jonathan checked his watch. Five forty-five. “Go in quietly,” he said, instantly on alert. Never a believer in coincidences, he concluded that this car had to belong to a bad guy.

Boxers coasted to a halt just inside the driveway and turned off the ignition. “How do you want to handle it?”

Jonathan said, “Let’s keep it light. Weapons holstered but ready.” He opened the door and slid to the ground.

Boxers joined him at the front bumper. “Who are you expecting them to be?”

It was a good question. As Jonathan thought through Jimmy Henry’s story, it could be anyone from a bad guy returning to the scene of the crime to a cop investigating a lead. “I just want to be ready for the worst,” he said.

As they approached the Chrysler, Jonathan noticed that the engine was still ticking as it cooled under the hood.

“Sounds like they just got here,” Boxers said, speaking his boss’s thoughts.

Jonathan cocked his head, listening. Something wasn’t right about this. “Who just parks in a storage lot at this hour? If you’re retrieving something from storage, you park in front of your unit. Whoever drove this car isn’t here for what’s in the units. They want something else.”

“Like what?”

That was the million-dollar question. Jonathan beckoned with his chin for Boxers to follow as he walked toward the woods at the edge of the lot. As the approached the grassy patch at the edge of the woods, he pointed to the ground. “Look here,” he said.

Clearly, people had recently walked this way. They drew their weapons and started into the woods.

Jonathan heard voices. On a still, humid morning like this, sounds traveled easily. He could clearly make out the hum of men’s voices in the distance, but a career of firearms, helicopter insertions, and explosives had made it impossible for his abused ears to decipher individual words.

Three minutes later, they were on top of what looked to be a mugging in process. Two clean-cut guys in T-shirts had drawn down on a gangly Latino hippie who appeared to have established a campsite near the edge of the water. From the look of the place, Jonathan guessed that the guy had been living there for a long time. The body language of all three men telegraphed an urgency that told Jonathan he’d arrived in the proverbial nick of time.

Moving with a choreographed unison that came from years of cooperation, Jonathan and Boxers spread out slightly to create a more difficult target, and they both brought their weapons to bear. As they approached to within twenty yards, Jonathan made brief eye contact with the bearded victim, and noted with interest how cool the guy remained as he continued to pivot in a wide circle away from the campsite. To Jonathan, that meant that there was something worth hiding in the camp.