Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross the Line

“I’ve got him,” Fender whispered in Brown’s earbud. “He’s leaning forward in a chair. Just changed the channel.”

“Kill him if you can,” Brown said, buckling the saddlebag.

Fender’s ultralight rifle produced a sound similar to the air pistol’s. The bullet made a small tinkling noise as it passed through the screen, the blinds, and the window, and then there was the sound of lead hitting flesh and bone.

“Done,” Fender said.

“Done,” Brown said; he spun away from the Harley and took off in a low crouch across the yard.

Inside the house, a woman began to scream.

“Shit,” Hobbes said. “He wasn’t alone.”

“Too late,” Brown said. “Get to the car.”

They sprinted into the pines, through them, and across the clearing. When they entered the woodlot close to the road, Brown thought they were going to get away clean. The woman had stopped screaming. She was probably calling 911, but they were less than one hundred yards from the car. Nothing could—

A form hurtled out of the woods to Brown’s right and sprang at him with a guttural snarl. The second dog got hold of his upper right arm and bit down viciously.

“Ahhh!” Brown cried out, feeling his flesh rip as the dog shook its head and dragged him down. Brown sprawled on his side, but he still had his pistol in his right hand.

The dog released its hold and bit again, harder this time.

Before Hobbes or Fender could do a thing to help him, Brown let go of the pistol, grabbed it with his left hand, and, at point-blank range, fired a tranquilizer dart into the attack dog’s stomach.

It yelped and scratched the back of Brown’s head getting off him. It didn’t make it six more feet before flopping over and panting.

An hour after sunrise, Ned Mahoney, John Sampson, and I were looking into an open saddlebag attached to Nicholas Condon’s Harley-Davidson. There was a rectangular package inside, wrapped in dark cloth.

“What’s in it?” Mahoney asked.

“Haven’t looked,” Condon said. “Soon as I saw it, I called Dr. Cross.”

“Before or after someone shot at you?” Mahoney said.

“You mean before or after someone head-shot my dummy,” Condon said. “That’s exactly why I’ve got a little winch on a timer in there. Makes the mannequin move every four or five minutes throughout the night. Handy gadget.”

I didn’t comment on the fact that the sniper had to have a decoy in order to sleep soundly; I just focused on the package.

“No indication of a bomb?” Sampson asked.

“No,” Condon said. “After Azore woke up, I had him sniff it.”

“Could the lingering effects of the drug throw off the dog’s sense of smell?” I asked.

“I’d be glad to take the package out for you if you’re not up to the job.”

“I’ll do it,” Mahoney said, and he stuck a gloved hand into the saddlebag and came out with the package. “Heavy.”

He set it down and started to work at the knot that held the fabric together.

“You said they were scared off by a woman screaming,” Sampson said.

“I said they were scared off by a woman’s scream,” Condon said. “An app on my iPhone. Goes to Bluetooth and my speakers. You’d swear she was right there, screaming her head off.”

“How’s the other dog?” I asked. “The one you said bit one of them?”

“Denni. She’s resting inside.”

“We didn’t find any blood out on the road yet,” Mahoney said, finally getting the knot undone.

“There’s blood there somewhere,” Condon said. “I could hear the guy yelling. She got into him good before he knocked her out.”

“You wash her?”

“No, but I caught Azore licking her muzzle, so I don’t know what you’ll get from her.”

“Okay,” Mahoney said, folding back the fabric, revealing something silkscreened on the other side and a cardboard box.

He lifted the box up. We could see now that the fabric was a piece of a T-shirt featuring artwork for Reggae Sunsplash, a Jamaican music festival.

“I wondered where that went,” Condon said.

“Stolen?”

“Or I left it at the gym. Either way, my DNA will be all over it.”

Mahoney opened the cardboard box. There was a large envelope inside and a .45-caliber Remington model 1911.

“That yours?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Nice gun, though I prefer a Glock in a forty caliber.”

“Me too, actually,” Mahoney said, opening the envelope.

He pulled out several pages of architectural drawings and diagrams.

“Yours?” Sampson asked.

Condon looked them over and shook his head. “No. What are they?”

Mahoney shrugged and gave them to me. I studied them and almost handed them off to Sampson before it dawned on me what they were.

“These are drawings of the attack locations,” I said. “This one’s the factory where they killed the meth makers. And this one shows an aerial view of the tobacco-drying sheds and the road coming down the middle.”

Condon said, “Before you say anything, there is no way those are mine. This was supposed to be a diversion. Kill me and plant evidence. Keep you guys off the trail of the real vigilante crew.”

The more I thought about it, the more I thought Condon was right — unless, of course, he’d shot his dummy-on-a-rope and put the evidence in his saddlebag to keep us from suspecting he was part of the vigilante group.

For the time being, however, I was going to trust him.

“So whoever they are, they think you’re dead,” Sampson said.

“A fair assumption,” Condon said.

“Let’s let them think it,” I said.

Mahoney looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “What for?”

“Make them believe that they’ve succeeded and the investigation has shifted to looking at Condon’s circle of mercenary friends.”

“And we start quietly looking for a victim of a dog bite,” Sampson said.

“Among other things,” I said, trying to wrap my head around this entire incident. Why implicate Condon? Why not someone else? Why attempt to kill him?

The only solid answer I came up with was that they knew of Condon’s past and had decided he would be the perfect fall guy.

“I thought of that while I was waiting for you to get here,” Condon replied. “But maybe it was more than that. Maybe they were trying to kill me because I do know something about your vigilantes. Two of them, anyway.”

That morning, as Alex, Sampson, and Mahoney were talking to Condon, Bree was struggling to make connections between the late chief of detectives Tom McGrath, Edita Kravic, and a competition pistol shooter.

She had the late Terry Howard’s service records up on her computer screen. Four times during Howard’s career, he’d failed his annual shooting qualification test. On his best day, he was evaluated as an average shot.

Hardly the competitor, Bree thought and shut the file.

But lots of police officers did compete. It kept their marks-manship sharp. So she couldn’t discount the possibility of a cop or a former cop or a former military guy, perhaps someone McGrath and Howard knew, being the shooter.

Her desk phone rang.

“Stone,” she said.

“Michaels,” the police chief said. “I’m not happy.”

“Chief?”

“I’m hearing rumors that you’ve reopened the McGrath case.”

“True,” she said, her heart starting to race.

“Goddamn it, Stone, I’m going to get crucified over this. Howard’s our guy. You said so yourself.”

“I believed it then, Chief,” she said. “But not now.”

She recounted her visit to the FBI lab and finished by saying, “So I think the way we look at this is, we take some lumps for jumping to the wrong conclusion, but we’ll get applauded when it comes out we were dogged enough to recognize our mistake and find the real killer.”