Джеффри Дивер - The Goodbye Man

Shaw feinted to the right, then veered the opposite way and sprinted fast, tackling Eli. He went down hard. The man’s eyes turned from expressions of fury to fear. Shaw realized that his thoughts earlier were right. The otherworldly color of his pupils came from contact lenses. The shade now was everyday blue.

“Oh, Jesus Christ! Lose the gun. Toss it.” Hugh’s voice was thick with disgust. Maybe he was upset that Shaw wasn’t playing fair and participating in a mano-a-mano battle to the death.

Eli tried to pitch the Glock but Shaw ripped it from his hand, and rolled away. He racked the slide, making sure a round was chambered and he aimed between the two men.

Hugh held up his hands, palms out. “Look. We can get you a lot of money. I mean, a lot.” He nodded toward the grocery bag. “Just leave the documents, the evidence, whatever you stole. We can give you cash right now. Fifty thousand. A hundred.”

Involuntarily, into Shaw’s mind came some images: Samuel’s face of sorrow as he threw himself off the cliff.

Master Eli truly saved my bacon when it came to Mom and Dad...

Adelle’s expression as she sat, slumped on the bench.

I lost my baby two years ago...

And he heard Victoria’s voice as she told him of Gretta’s suicide.

The muzzle of the Glock strayed toward Eli, who cringed and held up a palm. “No, please... no.”

Shaw reflected on another of his father’s rules.

Never point a firearm at anyone unless you intend to pull the trigger.

Colter Shaw pulled the trigger.

As he bounded over the dirt road in his rental SUV, Colter Shaw learned a fact.

The men had another gun.

As they pursued him in an SUV of their own, Eli behind the wheel of the dark gray vehicle, Hugh would fire in Shaw’s direction.

This was because of the gunshot back at the motel. As tempted as Shaw was to kill Eli on the spot, he hadn’t in fact aimed for the cult leader. Instead, he’d shot Hugh in the calf, flung the gun into the lake and, snagging the grocery bag, sprinted back to his vehicle. Eli had apparently ducked into the motel cabin and got the second gun, and together they’d sped after Shaw.

Another crack of gunshot.

Handguns are relatively inaccurate under the best of conditions and the combination of the unpaved surface and Shaw’s evasive driving meant that none of the slugs fired his way hit the Land Cruiser.

As he barreled down the dark road, Shaw clocked the miles from the cabin: two, three, four... The vehicles were hitting sixty and seventy miles per hour, and Hugh and Eli’s — piloted by the desperate cult leader — was slowly gaining.

A glance at the GPS map. Ahead, a mile or so, was a sharp bend in the road. He wondered at what speed he should take it.

He ducked as, finally, a bullet hit the rear of his rental. No injury, no damage — other than a hole, of course. He began to swerve even more severely, though.

Which is when he came to the jog.

It was more pronounced than the Google map had suggested, and with a solid crack of something within the vehicle breaking, his SUV crashed into and through a low berm of dirt and brush and sandy mulch. It plowed into a field on the far side, the front wheels trapped in a bed of sand and loose earth. The airbag exploded. It was an impressive experience.

Shaw heard Eli’s vehicle squeal to a stop and, grabbing the grocery bag, he leapt out, taking cover under a rise topped with a stand of forsythia and holly.

“Carter... whatever your name is, listen to us.” Eli was standing at the roadside, while Hugh leaned against the hood, sweaty, wincing.

“Drop the bag. We’ll let you go. Just throw it here. That’s all you need to do. It’ll all be good.”

Shaw hefted the bag by the handle and swung it into the clearing. It flashed as it flew through the headlights of the SUV at the top of the hill.

With the gun now in his hand, Eli made his way over the berm and down into the field, looking about carefully. Peering, of course, for his target. His intent was to murder Shaw the minute he spotted him.

Shaw dug his phone out and sent a text.

No more than five seconds later, the entire field lit up like a football stadium on game night.

A voice over the loudspeaker: “David Ellis, Hugh Garner! This is the FBI. Drop any weapons, lie down on the ground! Do it now, or you will be fired upon.”

The speaker was Special Agent Robert Slay.

“Drop your weapons. Down! Now, now! Or we will fire.”

Eli hesitated only a moment and dropped the gun. However, he remained standing. “You don’t have jurisdiction here! This is illegal. You can’t...” His voice faded, as his eyes followed Hugh’s. The security man was looking back along the road and did as ordered.

“No,” Hugh whispered in disgust.

Eli muttered, “Oh, Jesus Christ...” Shaw couldn’t help note the irony: those words came from the man who made his living selling resurrection.

A hundred feet behind them was a small stone marker, delineating the Canada/U.S. border. Eli and Hugh had been concentrating so hard on catching Shaw that they’d failed to stop before entering the United States.

Agents ran forward and cuffed them, easing Hugh to the ground carefully because of his gunshot.

An ambulance sped up and the technicians tended to the wounded leg. Both men were read their rights.

Shaw climbed to the road and, pulling off the gloves and pocketing them, joined Slay. Another law enforcer was present too: Detective Laurent Etoile from the San Francisco Police Department, the man with the resonant baritone. Shaw was surprised he hadn’t given the loudspeaker commands; maybe it was a federal vs. state jurisdiction thing.

Eli raged, “This is entrapment!”

Slay, searching the men’s SUV, looked up. “What?” he asked, distracted.

“This is entrapment.”

“No, it’s not,” the agent said, blasé, and continued with his search.

Eli and Hugh had entered Canada illegally so they had no right to any protections in that country. Anyway, they’d recrossed the border of their own volition and were once again subject to U.S. criminal jurisdiction.

That Shaw had shot an unarmed man in the leg added a wrinkle but he’d had no choice. He needed to get both Eli and Hugh back to the States and if he’d merely fled with the bag it might have been only Hugh who pursued him. The gunshot in the AU’s leg guaranteed that Eli himself would have to man the pursuit vehicle.

Eli muttered, “Well, you can’t use that as evidence. It’s stolen. Illegal!”

Shaw looked him over, thinking of a rule of his own, one hardly up to the level of Ashton, who was, after all, the King of Never. Shaw’s was:

Never be dramatic.

But sometimes you needed to indulge yourself. Shaw made a grand show of upending the bag and pouring the contents on the ground. In the light of the headlamps, Eli stared at the newspapers, menus and promotional flyers from the motel room: The Canadian Pacific Railway Museum. Visit the Hogworth Maple Syrup Company! The Untold Story of Moody, British Columbia.

Not a single piece of paper that the men had carted away from the Osiris Foundation camp with them — presumably what remained of the incriminating evidence; the rest would have been dumped. It would in fact have been illegal for Shaw to steal the documents.

“We don’t need anything more for the prosecution,” Detective Etoile said.

From Slay: “All we needed was your asses back in the U. S. of A.”

“Oh, fuck,” Hugh snarled.

The case might have gone a bit easier if they had some of the evidence, but in fact the authorities had plenty to put Hugh and Eli away for a long, long time. Witnesses like Anja, betrayed Inner Circle personnel, Assistance Unit men willing to spill. Steve’s notebook was a bombshell.