The Shadow Hunter (30 page)

Twenty yards to the intersection. The Town Car slowed in preparation for a sharp left turn.

“What was that about?” Kris asked.

Travis couldn’t tell her now. Later was the right time. Later, when she was safe.

“Some other case,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

She frowned at him, her reporter’s instincts evidently disputing his answer, but before she could ask anything further, the phone chirped again. Was it Hastings, calling with additional details? For a moment Travis considered shutting off the phone to silence it.

Ten yards.

Oh, hell. He took the call.

“Travis,” he snapped.

“This had better be—” He didn’t finish. On the other end of the line was a hoarse, desperate, anguished voice, Abby’s voice, and.

she was screaming.

“Code Red, Paul, you hear me, Hickle is Code Red!”

The Town Car was turning onto Malibu Reserve Drive when its brakes squealed, and suddenly the car was reversing fast, and Hickle knew they were on to him.

He sprang out of the foliage, the twelve-gauge in both hands. From this angle he didn’t have a clear shot at the side windows so he opened fire on the windshield, hoping to take out the driver. The glass starred but didn’t shatter. Behind the web of fractures he saw the driver spinning the wheel as he backed onto Gateway.

Once lined up, the Lincoln could reverse straight to the gate, where the guard must already be dialing 911.

Hickle fired two more shots at the windshield, emptying the Marlin, but although the glass buckled, it still did not give way. The shots distracted the driver long enough for the car to skid partially off the road at a crazy angle. For a moment the Lincoln was stuck, its right rear tire mired in dirt.

Hickle ditched his duffel bag and charged the car, reloading on the run. He saw movement in the backseat, two figures. One of them was Kris.

The driver shifted out of reverse and plowed forward, but by the time he was back on the road, Hickle had run alongside. He fired three shells at the car’s side panel, hoping to blow it apart. No good. The car absorbed the shots with only superficial damage.

Armor plating. Bulletproof glass. Jackbnimble had never mentioned anything about that. Either he hadn’t known, or this was some kind of setup. Hickle had no time to puzzle it out. The Lincoln was executing a clumsy K-turn as the driver tried to orient the car toward the exit.

Hickle fired one shot at the front tire, puncturing it, but it didn’t go flat. Even the tires were bullet-resistant.

He dug in the pocket of his windbreaker and reloaded.

As the Lincoln completed its turn, he leaped onto the hood, face to face with the driver. Over the ringing in his ears he heard a male voice from the backseat shout, “Get down!”

Hickle pumped the Marlin and fired a shot into the windshield at pointblank range. Charred shell wadding blew back in his face. He shut his eyes against the debris. When he opened them, he saw a hole in the windshield, exposing the Lincoln’s interior.

He swung the shotgun into the hole and fired twice, not aiming, hoping for a lucky hit or a ricochet.

The Lincoln slammed on its brakes. He thought he must have hit the driver until, with a scream of tires, the Town Car snapped into reverse. Inertia rolled him off the hood. He flopped onto the pavement, and the Lincoln stopped. One headlight was dark. The other pinned him in its glare.

He knew what was about to happen even before the car shot forward, trying to run him down.

Reflexes saved him. He plunged off the road, taking refuge in the trees. Behind him, the pursuing car slammed to a halt at the edge of the woods. Hickle threw himself prone on the ground, below the cone of glare from the one intact headlight. By a miracle the shotgun was still in his hand, and now he had a clear view of the Lincoln’s underbelly.

He fired a single shot, targeting the chassis.

Sparks and broken metal showered the earth, and he knew that one part of the vehicle was not armored.

The Town Car retreated onto the road, but Hickle was already scrambling after it, cramming more shells into the gun. He fired four times, aiming low. The Lincoln veered away, skidding on something wet and shiny, which was gasoline. He had ruptured the fuel tank.

“Fuck you,” Hickle gasped, “I got you now!”

He reloaded, tramping through pools of gasoline, and fired again and again, pursuing the wounded car as it reversed down Gateway. The sedan wobbled on damaged tires and bent wheels. It accelerated, still backing up, and for a moment he thought it would get away.

Then the gas caught fire.

Abruptly the entire front section of the Lincoln was burning—tires, chassis, gas-soaked chrome. The Town Car careened to a stop, and Hickle plucked the last shells from his pocket and loaded them as he loped toward his quarry with death in mind.

Inside the Lincoln there had been chaos and terror from the moment Travis heard Abby’s warning and shouted at Drury to back up. Kris had looked at him with an unvoiced question as the first shots crackled out of the darkness. Shotgun fire.

The TPS staff car was shielded by panels of aramid fibrous armor, lighter than steel and nearly as impenetrable, lining the doors, roof, quarter areas, and pillar posts. All the glass in the vehicle had been replaced by bullet-resistant sheets of multilayered transparent composite, a lamination of glass and polycarbonate.

The tires were fitted with antiballistic run flat inserts that allowed them to hold their shape even when ruptured.

The level of protection these features offered was moderately high, but there were points of weakness.

The ballistic glass could stop handgun rounds and other small arms fire, but repeated blasts from a heavy-gauge shotgun might penetrate.

The armor plating provided perimeter and roof protection, but the floor and the underside of the chassis were unshielded, vulnerable to attack from below. A fully armored vehicle offered greater protection but, because of the increased weight, less maneuverability. Tradeoffs had been made.

Travis wondered if those tradeoffs had been advisable as the first two shot shells chipped and splintered the Lincoln’s windshield.

After that, there was no time to wonder about anything.

The range of his thinking narrowed to the immediate concern of keeping Kris alive. He told her to get down, but the words didn’t register with her. There was stark panic on her face, every muscle drawn taut.

When the Town Car blundered partly off the road and was briefly stuck in the dirt, Travis actually felt the shiver of pure fear that rocked her in her seat. Then they were back on the road but no longer positioned to go either forward or back, and Drury had to spend a few desperate seconds hauling the car around in a ragged turn. That was when Hickle opened fire on the side of the car, trying to punch through the doors. Kris screamed. Travis saw the door panel cave inward a few inches under the impact of the multiple hits. But the armor held, and the Lincoln straightened out. As Drury accelerated, Hickle threw himself onto the hood.

Travis saw the shotgun kiss the weakened glass, and he knew the next blast would open up the car to a direct assault. He seized Kris and shoved her to the floor as two explosions from the shotgun echoed inside the car.

Exactly what happened next Travis didn’t know.

Bending to cover Kris with his body, he was aware only of a succession of stops and starts, the car braking, then reversing, then flying forward and braking again, and then another shot, this one striking low, and more low hits as the Lincoln backed off and screamed in reverse toward the guardhouse four hundred yards away.

The low hits scared Travis most of all. He was thinking of the unshielded underside of the car. He was thinking of the fuel tank.

He held Kris tight and heard her whispering the same words over and over in a hushed, urgent monotone:

“God help us… God help us… God help us…”

Then there was fire.

Travis heard the whoosh of igniting gasoline even before the sudden orange glare lit up the front windows.

By luck or skill Hickle had punctured the gas tank, and sparks from successive shots had set the gas ablaze.

The Lincoln would be enveloped in fire within seconds.

The car might not blow up—gasoline was less combustible than Hollywood movies liked to pretend—but it would certainly burn to cinders, as would its occupants.

He pulled Kris upright and yelled at Drury to evacuate the vehicle.

The car stopped at a crazy angle halfway down Gateway Road, and Drury got out, or at least Travis thought he did. He couldn’t be sure, not when his full attention was focused on prying open the rear door and dragging Kris out of the car and away from the spreading flames.

He pulled her into the bushes at the roadside, then drew his Walther and turned in a crouch, scanning the dark for Hickle, who had to be out there somewhere, because if anything was clear and obvious in the midst of this insanity, it was that Hickle would not give up until Kris was dead.

The car was a flaming pile. It threw off a moist heat that slapped Hickle in the face as he sprinted closer, the shotgun gripped with both hands. He became aware that he was favoring his left leg. Must have turned his ankle when he rolled off the hood onto the pavement. It didn’t matter. He was still mobile, and the car had been abandoned.

Kris was outside, unprotected.

Only one shot was needed to finish things.

Kris had been riding in the back of the Lincoln. The rear passenger door hung ajar. Hickle ran toward that side of the road and saw her on the roadside, a huddle of fear and shock. With her, a man Hickle didn’t recognize.

Not her husband. A man with a gun.

Hickle saw the gun come up fast and flung himself to the ground, taking cover behind the wreckage of the Lincoln, then sensed movement nearby and turned in time to see the driver taking aim with a pistol from behind the open front door. Hickle fired the shotgun, and the man went down. Hit? Hard to tell. Hickle darted around the door, preparing to fire again, but it wasn’t necessary. The driver was alive but out of commission, writhing on the pavement, his pistol dropped and forgotten.

Hickle ignored him. He had no interest in delivering a coup de grace.

The man meant nothing to him. It was Kris he wanted.

He scrambled to the rear of the Lincoln, staying low.

The air was brutally hot. Alongside the rear bumper he peered out and saw Kris and her defender retreating farther into the foliage. He jerked the Marlin’s trigger twice, blowing sprays of shot at them, and saw them go down, but he didn’t think they’d been hit. They had dived for cover.

Muzzle flashes from the foliage. Kris’s bodyguard was shooting back.

Hickle snapped off another shot, then retreated to the front of the Lincoln, moving fast.

He had a plan now. They thought he was positioned at the rear of the car. They wouldn’t expect him to charge from the front.

He sprang out from behind the car and instantly collided with something—somebody—who fell in a heap at his feet.

Kris.

She had panicked and run. Run right into him.

She looked up and saw him, and the look on her face was the most priceless gift he had ever received. It was a look of stark fear, of total resignation and final submission.

It told him that he had won and she had lost, that he was the master and she the victim.

All of this lasted less than a second, no longer than it took for him to swing the shotgun toward her, the muzzle stamping its cold kiss on her brow. He pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

The gun was empty.

He registered this fact, and then a pistol’s report rang out from the roadside, the bullet slicing past him, inches away.

The man with the handgun. Coming.

Hickle turned and fled.

He had no choice. There were no more shells in his pockets.

Another crack of pistol fire behind him. He reached the far side of the road and dived into the woods, stumbling over something that got caught up in his feet. His duffel bag.

There might be more shells in the bag, but he had no time to dig for them. There was the rifle, fully loaded, but he couldn’t pull it out and take aim, not with an armed man pursuing him.

Anyway, he had lost his chance. Even if he could kill Kris’s protector, the other TPS agents must already be rushing to the scene, and so was the guard, and the police too—everybody.

It was finished.

Hickle slung the duffel over his shoulder and charged through the trees, head down, panting hard.

He tried not to think about what had happened, how close he had come, how badly he had failed. He knew that if he thought about it, he would simply stop running and fall on his face and cry like a child, because the world had cheated him and life was so terribly unfair.

Travis pursued Hickle a few yards into the woods and saw him disappear among the eucalyptus trees and the deep drifts of weeds. Briefly he considered following, but looking after Kris was his highest priority.

He doubled back and found her kneeling, dazed, on the pavement, her face streaked with tears, eyes wide and unblinking.

“God damn it,” he snapped, anger overcoming compassion, “why the hell did you leave cover? What made you do that?”

She didn’t answer, and of course she didn’t have to.

He knew what had made her scramble away from him when the bullets started flying. She had lost her nerve.

She had heeded the blind impulse to put distance between herself and gunfire. In consequence she had blundered into Hickle and had nearly gotten killed.

Travis steadied himself. Gently he clasped her shoulder.

“You okay, Kris?” he asked in a softer voice.

She looked at him.

“I thought I was strong,” she whispered.

He understood. She was a veteran of the news business.

She had covered earthquakes, gang wars, sadistic slayings. She had believed she could handle anything.

But tonight when the gunshots were aimed at her, when she was at the center of the story, she had cut and run like a panicky child. She wasn’t as tough as she’d imagined. It was a painful lesson, but she would survive, and to Travis her survival was all that mattered.