Even Steven (38 page)

A woman Logan recognized as the director shouted something as he entered the room, and the sharpness of her tone startled him. His hand tensed on the weapon in his pocket, but in an instant, he realized that she was yelling not at him, but at the kids.

Ortega stood across the room with his wife and his human bulldog, watching his bitch kid putting her stuff away. As Logan entered the room, Ortega actually turned and looked right at him, but then looked away, back to his little girl. Pena looked, too, but he wasn't so easily distracted. The bulldog's brow knitted as Logan held his gaze just a second too long.

Logan's mind screamed, Now!

His hand found the pistol grip, but as he moved to pull it from his coat, he found that he'd grabbed the plastic bag as well. He looked down long enough to yank the pistol clear of the bag, and by the time he brought the weapon up to fire, Pena was already moving.

"Get down!"

Pena barked the words with explosive force as he rammed his beefy hand like a piston between his boss's shoulder blades, sending him stumbling forward.

All Carlos knew was that he'd been punched hard, and as he tried to catch his balance, his foot caught the leading edge of a riser. He dove face-first into a group of children, who yelled and tried to get their hands up to protect themselves. A cello gave way under his weight, its strings thrumming a painfully dissonant chord that was nearly lost in the sound of splintering wood.

Instinctively, he knew this was a hit, and he desperately tried to decipher the swirl of activity. He watched in horror as Pena charged forward, his hand disappearing under his coat and emerging with a gun. Who the hell was he going to shoot?

"Tio Jesus!" Christa yelled from Carlos's left. "Look out!"

Carlos grabbed his daughter's wrist and pulled her down to the ground with him. "Stay down!"

From somewhere out in the gathered crowd, he heard Consuela shout, "Oh, my God, no!" But Carlos still didn't get it.

A gunshot fractured the air, sounding more like a grenade in the acoustically enhanced practice room, and the crowd panicked. Carlos just heard screaming. No words or meaningful instructions to get down or to run, just screaming. Shrieking. It was the sound of raw terror.

A second shot seemed somehow even louder than the first, and out of the corner of his eye, Carlos saw Pena's gait wobble.

Oh, shit, this is it! He gathered his daughter closer to him and rolled on top of her, shielding her body with his own, even as he craned his neck to see what happened next.

A third shot launched a horrific fountain of brains through the top of Pena's head and sent a two-inch disk of bald scalp spinning into the air as his body just dropped where he stood.

Carlos's head rushed to make sense of this. Why was Pena exchanging gunfire with a priest?

Not that it mattered. He knew that this would be the night when he died, and the best he could hope for was to save his family. His instincts, honed by years on the street, told him that he needed to rush this prick. He needed to charge him at full speed, shove that pistol of his down his gullet, and blast his heart from the inside. But in the instant that he needed to make that decision, he felt Christa move beneath him, and he hesitated. If he got up, he'd leave her exposed. He waited.

Logan didn't. As a swarm of students panicked and ran, the tall man with the fake mustache and the imitation priest suit closed the distance to his target in five strides, leading with his giant Glock. As Carlos moved to defend himself, Logan fired.

The bullet disintegrated his target's knee, nearly severing the limb at its joint. Carlos felt as if his whole body had been slammed with a hammer, forcing the air from his lungs in a croupy bark.

Consuela screamed. "Carlos! Oh, God!" She darted forward to help, but froze in place as Logan wrapped his fist in Christa's hair and dragged her to her feet.

"Daddy!"

Carlos tried to form words, but the best he could produce was a growl.

Logan held the girl in front of him, his left hand gripping her throat, his thumb and first two fingers turning white as they squeezed the pressure points below her ears.

"Take a step, lady," he hissed to Consuela, "and I'll shoot you first and then your little bitch daughter." Christa's face contorted grotesquely as he forced the muzzle into her cheek and the skin gathered up before it. "Do you understand me?"

Consuela nodded, her eyes huge.

"Say it!"

"I-I understand. Please don't hurt her."

Logan wasn't listening anymore. He turned to face Carlos again, whose hands were clamped above his knee in a futile effort to stanch the flow of blood.

Christa's terrified eyes pleaded and her lips formed the words Daddy, help but the sound came out only as a terrible gurgle.

"You son of a bitch!" Carlos growled.

The room exploded as his other knee erupted into a flowery display of blood and tendons. Carlos yelled as the searing pain shot all the way to his neck, but when he saw the look on his daughter's face, he swallowed the noise and locked his jaw tight. If she had to watch her father die, she could watch him die with dignity.

"You know who I am now, don't you, Ortega?" Logan asked, returning the hot muzzle to the little girl's face. The faint odor of burning flesh energized him. "Say my name, though, and I'll blow her fucking head off. Just nod. You know who I am."

Carlos hadn't until just that moment, but once he put the priest's size together with his voice, Carlos recognized Patrick Logan. He nodded.

"Good," Logan said. "It's important that you know that. Because I want you to beg me not to kill you."

"Fuck you."

Logan savagely smacked the bridge of Christa's nose with the Glock's barrel, launching a fountain of blood that cascaded over the girl's lips and chin and down across Logan's hand.

"Stop that!" Consuela yelled, and he fired a shot into the ceiling over her head.

"I told you to shut up, bitch." Logan turned back to face Ortega.

"Beg me not to kill you."

Carlos didn't see his own blood anymore; didn't even feel his own pain. He just saw what this animal was doing to his daughter, and suddenly he cared about nothing else. "Please don't hurt her," he moaned.

This time, he didn't even hear the gunshot. A bullet slammed through his right shoulder, spinning him in place on the blood-soaked carpet. This one was bad. Carlos could tell from the way his breath didn't want to come that this bullet had hit more than just a joint. He fought to keep consciousness from slipping away.

"Look at me, goddammit!" Logan yelled.

With his arm and legs ruined, Carlos couldn't find the leverage to push himself up.

"Beg for your life, asshole. Not hers. By the count of three, or I swear to God I'll blow her head off. One . . ."

"I'm trying, goddammit," Carlos yelled. But there was no volume to it. His words made a whistling sound as they passed through his throat.

"Two ..."

Logan would do it. Carlos knew he'd do it. Not a doubt in his mind. Grunting against unspeakable agony, he used his good left arm to push off the carpet, forcing the momentum to flop him the rest of the way. The mechanism to make his right arm follow no longer existed, however, and he howled as ligaments became entwined with severed bone.

"Beg me, asshole," Logan said again, pressing the gun even harder into the side of Christa's face. "Let me hear you whine a little."

Carlos looked into his daughter's desperate features and saw nothing but fear. He found himself weeping as he choked out the words, "Please don't kill me."

"Fuck you." Logan laughed.

Carlos refused to look away as the muzzle took aim at his face.

He saw a flash.

AFTER TWO HOURS with Horner at the wheel, Tim Burrows couldn't wait to put his feet on the ground again. A farm boy at heart, Lieutenant Homer LaRue rejected the notion of speed limits and seemed to believe that every tire rut and pothole was a target to be rammed at not less than thirty-five miles per hour. The more nervous Tim became, the more Homer seemed to enjoy it.

This was often the case with backwater police departments, Tim thought. After a few hours of feigned cooperation, their pride got the better of them and they succumbed to this petty my-dick's-longer-than-yours bullshit. On days when he was in good humor, Tim found it annoying. After a day like today, he just wanted to shoot the son of a bitch.

The Stanns place turned out to be about three miles past nowhere, way the hell out in the wilds of West Virginia, where the architecture seemed to predate the Civil War, and even the farm machinery looked like something out of the Depression. But for the mailbox at the end of the driveway, they'd have missed the house entirely. Even at that, they had to extrapolate that "St n s" really meant "Stanns."

Even in the sparseness of late winter, the woods still owned the driveway. Unpaved and still muddy from rains that had fallen days ago, the impossibly narrow road bore tire ruts deep enough to prompt even Homer to slow his approach to a crawl, lest he separate his cruiser from its undercarriage. Branches and dangling vines slapped and screeched along the windows on both sides of the vehicle.

"How spooky is this?" Homer mused aloud.

The road went on like this for a good two hundred yards, up hills and through gulleys. At one point they even had to ford a stream.

"How sure are you that there's a house at the end of this?" Tim asked.

Homer shrugged. "You saw the same sign I did. We keep going as long as the road does, though. Ain't no turnin' around in here,"

Interesting point. Tim rarely approached a building anymore without giving at least passing consideration to the tactical challenges of staging a raid. Even when he visited friends' houses for dinner or a football game, his mind casually calculated fields of fire and routes of approach. Such were the casualties of effective training, such as the weeks following his surveillance-avoidance and evasion training when he'd found himself watching the rearview mirror as much as the wind-shield.

Given a savvy, intelligent bad guy, a driveway such as this would be a nightmare in a hostage-rescue situation. The terrorist would merely have to wait until all of the law enforcement assets were committed to the road, then attack with impunity. If Tim were the bad guy, he'd probably choose claymores placed at ten- or fifteen-yard intervals, rigged to detonate together once the lead element tripped a trigger at the three-quarter mark on the approach. In less than a second, the entire team would be shredded by tens of thousands of high-velocity BBs.

Ordinarily, such strategic musings didn't bother him, but tonight, as the tree limbs and bushes loomed white under the assault of Homer's high beams, only to disappear like so many ghosts, the thoughts unnerved him. What exactly did they know about this Samuel Stanns? That he was "slow." And what the hell did that mean?

They did know that his older brother got himself killed while impersonating a police officer, and that said brother was the chief suspect in the murder of his own father.

Beyond that, they knew nothing, and it occurred to him now that this was precisely the kind of knowledge vacuum that could get you in trouble. With incomplete intelligence data, bad guys and the cops were on equal ground, and that was always a problem. Law enforcement wasn't about equality-it was about force and superiority. To win, you had to guarantee yourself the upper hand at all times, in every element from intelligence to firepower. That way, you always negotiated from a position of strength. And if negotiations broke down, you could still blast the hell out of them. The cop knew it, and so did the bad guy, keeping the rules of engagement clear for all parties involved.

"You're looking pretty stressed there, Agent Burrows," Homer said, taking his eyes away from the road for longer than he should. "You got something you're not telling me?"

Tim glanced across the seat and said nothing for a long moment as he weighed his driver's motives. It wouldn't do to admit even an ounce of fear to a yokel like this. Why give the guy bragging rights when he went back to his buddies at the state police barracks?

"No, I've told you everything I know."

"Kinda makes you wish we had backup, doesn't it?"

Tim snorted, forcing a chuckle. "I'm not sure how the West Virginia State Police handles things, Lieutenant LaRue, but at the FBI we don't bring an army to ask a few questions." Whose is bigger now, asshole?

Homer laughed. "I gotta tell you, Special Agent Timothy Burrows, I've met a lot of people in my time on this planet, some of them not all that pleasant to be around. But being a prick comes easier to you than any five people I've ever met." Homer turned his eyes back to the road.

Tim glared at LaRue, who never gave the satisfaction of a return glance. "Thanks for sharing that, Lieutenant. I'll be sure to pass your sentiments on to your commander."

Homer's smile grew even bigger. "I appreciate that. Just make sure you spell my name right on the report, okay? Because I assure you I've got yours down."

The cruiser climbed another hill, and suddenly the trees disappeared. They found themselves at the edge of a wide-open field, and in the light of the crescent moon, they saw the dark outline of a one-story farmhouse at the crest of a long, gradual slope. Hundreds of feet off to the left of the house-it was hard to judge distances in this light-stood the classic silhouette of a barn.