Cut and Run (2 page)

“Lars,” she spoke, yet again in a hushed whisper, the crisp sibilance rolling off the
s
and causing a ripple of gooseflesh down his left side. It snaked into his groin and lodged there. But rerouted by a synapse, it suddenly sparked across a gate in his brain that translated it differently, albeit a beat too late: This was nothing short of the sound of panic.

“Hope?”

“Oh, my God.”

The line went dead.

The bus.

Larson dropped the receiver and ran, losing his balance as he took a corner too quickly on wet tile, ignoring the yellow sandwich board written in Spanish and English with an icon of a pail and mop and a splash of water. He went down hard. He scrambled to his feet, knocked over a corn chip display, and hurried out the truck stop's main door, the cashier's cry of complaint consumed by the high-pitched whine of highway traffic.

“Rolo?” This came from Trill Hampton, a member of his squad, a fellow deputy marshal. Approaching footfalls of shoes slapping blacktop came on fast. Larson's running had sent a signal. Hampton was in full stride, already reaching for his piece.

Larson's arrival into sunlight temporarily blinded him. They'd stopped at far too many truck stops over the past ten days for him to immediately recall the layout of this one. They'd parked out here somewhere. A spike of fear insinuated itself as he considered the possibility that the entire bus had been hijacked, for he didn't see it anywhere.

But then, as Hampton caught up to him and edged left, and the two of them moved around the building, Larson spotted the rows of diesel pumps and the bus where they'd parked it, wedged amid a long line of eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers.

Hampton walked gracefully, even at double time.

Leading at a slight jog, Larson assessed the bus from a distance, seeing no indication of trouble and wondering if he'd misinterpreted Hope's distress.

“What's up?” Hampton asked, not a sheen of sweat on his black skin.

He wasn't about to confess to phoning the witness from the truck stop. “A bad feeling is all.”

“A bad
feeling
?” Hampton questioned. “Since when?” He had a flat, wide nose, too big for his face, and a square, cleft chin that reminded Larson of a black Kirk Douglas.

Larson wasn't exactly the touchy-feely type; Hampton saw through that.

Larson sought some plausible explanation for Hope hanging up on him. He seized upon the first thing he saw. “Why isn't Benny stretching his legs?” The older of their two drivers had been complaining to anyone who would listen about a bad case of hemorrhoids. Larson saw Benny through the windshield, sitting behind the wheel.

“Yeah, so?”

They drew closer. Benny not only still occupied his driver's seat, but his head was angled and tilted somewhat awkwardly toward his shoulder, as if dozing. This, too, seemed incongruous, as Benny rarely slept, much less napped.

“Rolo?” Hampton said cautiously. Now he, too, had sensed a problem with Benny. Hampton and Larson went back several years. Hampton had come out of one of New Haven's worst neighborhoods, had won an academic scholarship to a blue blazer prep school, and had gone on to graduate from Howard University. He'd wanted to be a professional sports agent, but had become a U.S. marshal as an interim job, at the urging of an uncle. He'd never left the service.

“Radio Stubby,” Larson instructed.

Hampton attempted to raise Stubblefield, the third marshal, who remained inside the bus, but won only silence.

“Shit!” Hampton said, increasing his stride. The man could cover ground when he wanted to.

The two were twenty feet away from the bus now, Larson adjusting his approach in order to come from more of an angle to avoid being seen, his handgun, a Glock, carefully screened.

He instructed Hampton: “Hang back. Take cover. Lethal force if required.”

“Got it.” Hampton broke away from Larson, hurrying toward the adjacent tractor-trailer and taking a position that allowed him to use it as cover.

Larson found the bus door closed—standard procedure. Benny would typically open it for him as he approached, but that didn't happen, sounding a secondary alarm in Larson's head. He slipped his hand into the front pocket of his jeans, searching amid a wad of cash receipts for the cool, metallic feel of keys—the duplicate set to the bus that, as supervising deputy, Larson kept on his person.

Benny remained motionless, not responding; Stubby not answering a radio call. But who could storm a bus through its only door—a
locked
door, at that—and overcome two drivers and a deputy marshal?

Larson heard thumping from inside. Banging. Just as he turned the key, out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a state police car parked beyond the diesel pumps and he thought:
Benny would open the door for a uniform.

As Larson opened the door and entered, the banging stopped abruptly. Larson both tasted and smelled the bitter air and knew its source from experience: a stun grenade—an explosive device that uses air pressure to blow out eardrums and sinuses and render the suspects temporarily deaf and semiconscious.

The narrow stairs that ascended to the driver prevented him from seeing into the main body of the bus. He saw only Benny, whose shirt held a red waterfall of spilled blood down the front. Larson's first assessment was that the man's nose was bleeding—typical with stun grenades. But then he saw a precise line below his jaw, like a surgical incision. His open eyes and frozen stare cinched it: Benny was dead.

Weapon still in hand, Larson kept low and climbed the bus stairs, ready for contact. The banging he'd heard had been someone attempting to breach the hardened door to Hope's cabin. He saw Stubby, unconscious or dead, on the left side, behind a collapsible table. Clancy, the other driver, sat upright in a padded captain's chair opposite Stubby, his head tilted back. A game of gin rummy between them had ended abruptly. No blood or ligature marks on Clancy.

No sign of a state trooper either, the aisle empty, a sleeping cabin on either side.

One of Stubby's golf clubs lay broken in front of the rear cabin's door, which appeared intact and suggested Hope remained safe, a source of great relief. The intruder had been trying to use a club to pry the door open.

There was only one key to that door, hidden in a Hide A Key in the rear engine bay. Larson edged forward.

He went down hard as a strong hand gripped his ankle and pulled from behind. The gun hit the carpet and bounced loose. The wind knocked out of him, Larson reeled.

The intruder was a stringy guy with frog-tongue reactions. He seized Larson's hair from behind and pulled. But Larson rolled left and the razor blade, intended for his throat, missed and caught the front of his right shoulder instead. Larson broke loose, dived forward, and grabbed for the gun. He spun and squeezed off three rounds. Two went into the mirrored ceiling, raining down cubes of tempered glass, and blinding him in a silver snow.

A crushing force caught Larson in the jaw, snapping his head back. He inadvertently let go of the gun for a second time. The intruder had fallen onto him, and Larson realized he'd hit him with one of the three shots. Larson grabbed for the man and felt fabric rip.

A uniform
. Larson fought back, the wounded man keeping him from the gun. Larson bucked him off, but his cut shoulder caused his arm to flap around uselessly, refusing all of Larson's instructions. Tangled up with the man, Larson drove his left elbow back and felt the crunch of soft bone and tissue, like an eggshell breaking.

He then heard a series of quick footfalls and looked in time to see the intruder hurry off the bus.

Landing out on the parking lot's pavement, the uniformed man's voice shouted, “Someone call for help!”

Larson came to his knees. His head swooned. He looked around for his gun through blurry eyes.

Hampton saw the slender state trooper throw his hands in the air as he called for help. He was bleeding. The man sank to his knees in front of the door to the bus.

Hampton held his weapon extended and stepped out from behind the tractor-trailer. “Hands behind your head,” he called out, not feeling great holding a gun on a man in uniform.

As the trooper sat up, Hampton saw a yellow-white muzzle flash. He took the first round in the thigh, driven back by the impact and losing his balance. He sprawled back onto the hot blacktop, rocking his head to the right and watching the suspect run off. He fired two rounds from his side.

As Larson dragged himself toward the front of the bus, he tried to lock down anything he remembered about the intruder: thin and wiry; strong; the uniform; a scar. He focused on the scar. The lines of pink, beaded skin crossed, forming a stylized infinity sign on the inside of his forearm. Larson's vision filled with a purple fringe, the dark, throbbing color coming at him from all sides. His shoulder was cut badly. Sticky down to his waist. He felt faint. Sounds echoed. Again he smelled the tangy air, laced with black powder and sulfur. Bitter with blood. His stomach retched. He felt as if he were being pushed and held underwater—dark water—by a strong, determined hand. He resisted, but felt himself going. Deeper.

His last conscious thought was more of a vision: not an infinity sign at all, but two triangles facing inward, touching, point-to-point.

Like a bow tie.

CHAPTER ONE

THE PRESENT

Of all things, Larson thought he recognized her laugh.
Here, where he least expected it. It carried like a shot, well past his ears and spilling down into the audience where it ran into a waterfall of others—though none exactly like it—and broke to pieces before the footlights and spots that made the dust in the air look like snow. It might as well have lodged in his chest, the way it stole his breath.

He'd started the day perfectly, the way he wished he could start every day, busting his body into a sweat while pulling on twin sticks of composite carbon painted on the scoop in a diagonal of rich burgundy and black, the owner's college colors no doubt, driving the borrowed scull through swirls of no-see-ums and gnats so thick he clenched his teeth to filter them out, the occasional dragonfly darting swiftly alongside as if challenging him to a race. He'd been up before the birds, and would be done—put away and showered, Creve Coeur Lake behind him—before the rush-hour traffic made the city's famous arch stand still.

He'd taken in the play on a whim, calling the box office to see if there were any singles available, a guilty pleasure he wouldn't have told anyone about if he hadn't engaged the receptionist, Lokisha, in a discussion of Shakespeare on the way out the door.

The fact was that in over five years of secretly searching for Hope at Shakespeare festivals and performances—in places as far away as Ashland, Oregon, and Cedar City, Utah—he'd become passionate about the Bard himself: the violence, the romance, the lies and deceptions, the cunning, the manipulation, the
symmetry
of the plays. It had never occurred to him that he might find her here in his own backyard. The belief in coincidence had been trained out of Larson in the way a dog could be made to lie by the dinner table and not look up to beg.

He'd felt his BlackBerry purr silently at his side several times over the past ten minutes, but it was after hours and it did that for any incoming e-mail, spam or legitimate, and he wasn't about to bother the people sitting next to him by lighting up a pale blue electronic screen in his lap while they tried to remain firmly in the sixteenth century. The intermission was fast approaching. He'd check e-mail and messages then.

This city was the last place—the absolute last place—he might have expected to hear her laugh: a combination of wild monkey and a Slinky going down a set of stairs. Even almost six years later he would have known her musical cackle anywhere. But St. Louis, in the Fox Theatre? Not on your life. Not on hers, either.

But it was Shakespeare, which he knew to be in her blood. If he were to find her, it would be at a performance like this—and so a part of him was tempted, even convinced, that he'd finally found her.

The balcony
. He imagined her selecting a seat that offered the strategic advantage of elevation, because that was just the kind of thing he'd taught her.

Onstage, Benedick, having dived into a horse trough, addressed the audience, his black leather riding pants and billowing shirtsleeves leaking water. Another volley of laughter rippled through the crowd, and there it was again. Larson felt like a birder identifying a particular species solely by its song.

He was no longer laughing along with the others. Instead, driven by curiosity, he was turned and straining to look up into the balcony.

Being too large for the closely crowded seats, his temperature spiked and his skin prickled. Or was that the possibility running through him? He represented Hope's past, her former self. Would she want that as badly as he did? Had she somehow found out about his transfer? Through all his training, coincidence nipped at his heels. Baffled, unsure what to do, he stayed in his seat.

The Fox Theatre, a renovated throwback to a bygone era, dwarfed its audience. Its combination of art deco, gilded Asian, quasi-Egyptian splendor, with anachronistic icons, like a twenty-foot-tall cross-legged Buddha, lit in a garish purple light, looked intentionally overwhelming. Despite the vastness of the hall, Larson felt impossible to miss. At well over six feet, and with shoulders that impeded both the theater-goers on either side of him, he would stick out if he stood. It seemed doubtful she might spot him, might recognize him from the back at such a distance, but he hoped she would. He glanced around once more, amused and concerned, intrigued and feeling foolish, his muscles tense. His shoulder ached, as it had ached for the past six years every time a storm drew near. He'd carried the same badge all these years, though now his credentials wallet showed a different title, Larson having been reassigned, along with Hampton and Stubblefield, to the Marshals Service's elite Fugitive Apprehension Task Force. Part bounty hunter, part bloodhound, part con man and actor, FATF marshals pursued escaped convicts and wanted felons in an effort to return them to their predetermined incarceration.