The Guardian (29 page)

Jeffers told Beth to name Janine’s favorite vacation.

“Disney World.” Beth had taken her there with Amy and her mother last year, and Janine talked about the trip constantly.

“Wrong.”
Jeffers said it with a nasal, talk-show-host tone.

“It is!” Beth said desperately. “For God’s sake, I’m her mother—you’ve got to believe me!”

“Yeah, yeah. She told me about Disney World, but she’s picked the trip to the Grand Canyon as her favorite now … said it was the best because it was just you, her, and her
daddy.”

Beth was shaking. “You bastard.”

“Careful now. Unless you want to do your vacations
all
alone in the future, get back on Storrow, go south on 93, head to the airport.”

Traffic was light, so much so that as Ross and Beth started down the one-way through the Callahan Tunnel, the following FBI cars had to stay quite a distance back, leaving only another car and a truck between them.

The lead FBI car with Peters and another man was only a dozen lengths ahead.

“Do you think it’s going to happen at the airport?” Beth raked her hair away from her face. “He couldn’t intend for us to fly someplace, could he?”

“God knows.”

The car behind them swung alongside to pass. Ross put the revolver in his lap.

“What?” Beth said.

The car swept by, and Ross began to relax when he saw it wasn’t Jeffers. The tunnel was fairly well lit, and Ross saw the young man’s face in profile. It took Ross a second to realize who it was—for a moment he’d thought the young man was one of the FBI agents.

But it was the kid. The red-haired kid. The kid who was crazy enough to do anything.

The walkie-talkie crackled, Byrne calling on to the other cars, “That’s a fuel oil truck behind Ross! They’re not allowed in the tunnel.”

Ross grabbed for the walkie-talkie and yelled, “Peters, watch out for the car coming at you!”

Beth screamed as they clearly saw a man rise up from the backseat of the car with a big handgun—a machine pistol. Glass from the FBI car flew as the gun began to chatter, and Ross saw the flash of returning gunfire as the FBI car bounced off the tunnel wall in a shower of sparks.

The kid hit the brakes and swung his car in front of Ross’s pickup truck to block the road. Ross hit the brakes. Behind them, the fuel oil truck swung in, cutting them off from Byrne and the FBI agents. Ross shoved Beth to the floor and threw himself on top of her just as the back window of his own truck shattered. He risked a fast look up and saw who was standing in the open doorway of the truck now, a big machine gun leveled at them.

T.S.

Ross ducked down again as bullets punched through the cab. He instinctively pulled the case of money in front of himself and Beth. Once the second burst was over, he said, “Stay behind this,” and slipped out his door into the tunnel.

He was so intent on keeping the truck between him and T.S. he almost didn’t hear the kid until it was too late.

The kid’s shotgun belched flame, and Ross ducked behind the open door. He cried out as a slashing pain cut across his left calf and he fell to the asphalt. He hadn’t even realized that the revolver Byrne had given him was in his hand until that moment, and he rolled onto his belly and braced himself as the kid kept coming. Ross fired three times in fast succession. Two of the shots missed, but the third caught the kid under the chin.

Ross staggered to his feet and saw T.S. had left the truck and was running up to them with the machine gun.

Ross pulled himself into the idling truck and dropped the gearshift into reverse. He stood on the gas and aimed for the big man, both with the truck and with his gun out the shattered back window. He emptied his gun and one round apparently grazed T.S. The big man stopped his charge, looking surprised with the blossom of red on his arm, and then he cut loose with the machine gun. Bullets pocked the tailgate until T.S. elevated the barrel, sending the slugs whistling past Ross’s face.

T.S. glanced once to the left as Ross sent the truck hurtling toward him, and Ross jabbed the wheel in that direction just as the truck was upon the man.

Ross had read T.S. correctly.

As he jumped left, the truck was there to meet him.

The sickening thud of metal against flesh and bone made Ross cry out as if he’d dealt the blow with his own fist. T.S. was thrown a dozen feet before hitting the tunnel wall. Ross braked to kill the last of the truck’s momentum. He could see from the angle of T.S.’s neck that the man was dead.

“Ross!” Beth screamed.

Jeffers was a dozen yards in front of them and closing in fast, a machine pistol in his hand. Ross dropped the truck into gear, knowing his own gun was empty.

Ross headed straight for Jeffers. But unlike T.S., Jeffers showed no indecision. He stood stock-still in the middle of the tunnel, and poured the magazine into the cab. Ross had no choice but to duck down with Beth, knowing that he was driving blind and that Jeffers could step aside like a matador taunting a wounded bull.

When the impact came, it was a glancing blow along the wall. Ross jammed his foot onto the brake, and the truck slid to a halt, sheet metal screeching alongside the tiles.

Ross reached blindly through the cab for something, a tire iron, maybe. Anything to use as a weapon. Knowing their options were gone. Expecting to have the door wrenched open behind him, for the burst of flame into his back.

But when the gunfire sounded again it was farther away. A mere dozen feet, but miles in terms of Ross and Beth still being alive. Ross looked over the sill and saw Jeffers was firing back toward the fuel truck. Byrne and several of the agents had crawled underneath it. One of them had been hit; the others were laying down enough fire to drive Jeffers back behind his own car.

From his angle, Ross could see Jeffers clearly as he slid in another magazine. “Get down! Get down!” Ross yelled.

Jeffers stood and braced the machine pistol against the roof of his car.

Flame seemed to burst from his hands. “Come on!” he yelled. “I’m right here!” Bullets slammed into the fuel truck, streaking the belly of it with oil.

When the gun at last fell silent, Jeffers swung inside his car and took off, the tires spinning. The back end clipped the stalled FBI car and then Jeffers straightened out and headed for the tunnel exit.

Ross got the truck away from the wall and took off after him. In the rearview mirror, he could see Byrne and the agents crowding into Peters’s car.

Ross kept his foot to the floor, but still Jeffers pulled away.

“Faster!” Beth said.

“This is the best it’ll do.”

As Jeffers left the tunnel, Ross saw him reach out the window with something. Ross’s first reaction was that it was a gun, and he pulled farther to the right. But he could still see the device in Jeffers’s hand, and for a moment Ross thought it was a walkie-talkie.

But then there was a crumping sound, and a flash of yellow from behind. A blast of heat swept through the broken back window as a ball of flame roared up the tunnel.

Jeffers had detonated the fuel truck.

Chapter 50

The flames only scorched the back of the truck. The agents following weren’t so lucky. Ross saw their car emerge from the tunnel, the tires melted to the rims. Ross slowed before rounding the first corner, staring back over his shoulder until he was certain he’d seen someone moving inside the agents’ car.

Ross hit the gas. By the time he and Beth reached the next straightaway, Jeffers’s car was just a distant set of tail lights.

Ross brought their own speed up to where the vehicle began to shake before he eased off. Wind beat through the broken window, and he felt the sting of flying glass. Ross switched the plow lights on and cut the head and the roof lights. “Maybe that’ll make us look a little different in Jeffers’s mirror.”

“What’re you going to do?” Beth asked.

“Damned if I know.” Ross felt through the broken glass on the dashboard and floor until his hand closed around a shattered piece of plastic and metal that had once been their walkie-talkie. “Damn it. The gun’s empty and we’ve got no way to communicate.”

Beth closed her fingers around Ross’s arm tightly. “Run him off the road.”

Ross was tempted. But Jeffers was driving a big Ford that could walk away from Ross’s truck. And Jeffers still had that gun. It’d be too easy for them to end up by the side of the road, with the truck damaged and Jeffers riding off.

“No.”

“What?” He could read the incredulity in her voice even over the rushing wind and engine noise.

“We’d risk losing him altogether. Better to see if he takes us to Janine.”

After he turned onto Route 128 North, Jeffers settled down to a steady sixty-two.

“He’s not running anymore,” Beth said. “He must not recognize us.”

“Maybe.” Ross considered it. “Or maybe he does, and he figures he’ll still have a chance at the money here.”

“Either way, it’ll give the FBI a chance to catch up.”

“Those
agents certainly won’t, not soon,” Ross said. In the rearview mirror, the road was empty. He hoped Byrne had made it through all right. “We do have the transmitter in the case. The question is whether there’s anyone back there in any shape to follow it.”

“Maybe Jeffers just doesn’t want to attract highway patrols to pull him over for speeding.”

“I think that’s likely,” Ross said, thinking back to Greg’s instructions to take it slow himself, back when the whole thing had started, when Ross had driven the opposite direction from the Sands, knotted up with worry about his niece.

Thinking about that ride set him up.

When Jeffers turned off two exits ahead, Ross said softly, “Will you look at that.”

The exit was the one leading to the road where Greg had been shot. The road Beth and Ross had taken a million times before.

The road to the Sands.

It hit Beth at the same time. “My God. It’s Geiler’s now.”

Ross pulled off at the very next exit.

“What’re you doing?” Beth cried.

“I’m going to try to beat him there.”

“We can’t be positive that’s where he’s going!”

“It makes sense,” Ross said as he began to push the truck through the tight corners. He’d raced these very roads as a kid, and as long as Jeffers continued to stay close to the speed limit, Ross thought he could outstrip him. He said, “Jeffers needs to take off. Maybe he’s stopping by for some money. Maybe he intends to kill Geiler. I know he’s not willing to leave witnesses talking—I know that much about him.”

When they got to the intersection where the two roads converged, Ross hesitated briefly, expecting to see the headlights of the Ford. But the road to his left remained dark.

Beth said, “Let’s keep going. Let’s go get her.”

The driveway was only a mile away. Neither spoke while hurrying down the twisting dirt road, pebbles knocking up into the wheel wells. Ross’s mouth was dry and his heart was pounding hard. The last time he’d felt that way driving down that particular stretch of road had been when he was a teenager coming home late and hoping that his father had already passed out.

Ross doused the lights and traveled the road on memory and the faint illumination of the moon.

Beth peered out into the darkness until they could see the outline of the house against the moonlit cove. Ross pulled the truck over and killed the engine. Faint light glowed through the drawn shades of the main room downstairs. “Nobody pulls the shades with those views,” she said.

“Wait behind the wheel.” Under the seat Ross found the tire iron that had eluded him before. His head told him to go back for the police, but if Jeffers was indeed headed to the house, there simply wasn’t time. “If I’m not back in five minutes, get out of here and call the police.”

Beth nodded, her face grim in the moonlight. Ross jogged quietly alongside the road until he was closer. He edged around the house, but all the shades were down on the three sides accessible to him, and he knew the angle would’ve been impossible from the shore side. Ross eased his way around to the front door and listened carefully. There was something … the sound of movement, of a chair scraping, perhaps. Then he heard a woman’s voice, too low for him to understand what was being said.

He opened the door and stepped into the living area. Stepped into a place where he’d spent years of his life, where he’d battled with his father and created a friendship with his brother that had lasted.

He didn’t know how to react.

Literally, did not know.

For Janine was there, bound to a chair like before, alive and apparently unhurt. Crying out to him past her gag. The woman, Natalie, was there. So was Geiler, bound like the others—but not gagged.

It was Allie who shocked him.

Allie who was tied down, placed beside Geiler. Allie who also wasn’t gagged, and who looked not with relief to Ross, but with despair to Geiler.