Close Call (27 page)

Montoya struggled to push himself up on one elbow. “Jimmy. Jimmy can't be—I need … tell Katya. Is it true … Em's my daughter?” he asked, sounding woozy.

“Never!” Favier raised his gun and shot him point-blank in the forehead.

Sydney gasped and ducked involuntarily. She tried to crab-crawl away, but Favier was on her in an instant.

“You're what we call ‘collateral damage,'” Favier told her, yanking her to her feet with a hand clamped around her upper arm. “And I'm sorry that it has to be this way, but I can't afford loose ends. Maybe I'll make a large donation to Winning Ways in your memory, suggest Em put in some volunteer hours down there. Yeah.”

Sydney listened to him in shocked silence. The man was thinking at least three steps ahead. She tried to wrench her arm away as he dragged her to Montoya's side.

“A few bruises won't matter,” he said, punching her cheek so hard she saw stars. He moved behind her, gripping her left shoulder and right wrist and pulling her back against his body. Her shoulder blades rubbed against the unyielding bulletproof vest. “It'll just look like Montoya roughed you up a bit before you shot him and killed yourself. I wonder how long your affair has been going on? Surely the journalists—they're so creative—will hint that you killed Nygaard so you could be with Fidel. Maybe he tossed you aside—being associated with you didn't do much for Manley's political career, after all—and you decided to kill him. In remorse, you shot yourself. Your body draped over his will be a nice touch.”

Sydney found her voice. “No one will believe that. My mom—”

Favier laughed, his breath tickling her ear. “Oh, please. They'll lap it up. Now give me your hand.” He pried open her fingers and laid the butt of his gun on her palm, wrapping her fingers around it. “There. That should do the trick for fingerprints.”

Saying a quick prayer that her mother's grief wouldn't destroy her and that Reese would be okay, Sydney went limp, letting all her weight drop down so only Favier's hold on her left shoulder and right hand kept her from hitting the ground. Even if she couldn't save herself, she hoped to spoil the murder-suicide scene Favier was trying to create by making the bullet strike her at an angle that couldn't possibly be self-inflicted.

“Shit!”

Dangling in front of him, she had no leverage to wreak any damage with kicks, so she turned her head and sank her teeth into the fleshy part of his thumb where he gripped her hand that was holding the gun. With a yelp, he released her shoulder and smacked the back of her head with his left hand. She kept her teeth lodged in his flesh until a knee landed in her kidneys, the pain lightning bright, and jarred her loose. She sprawled across Montoya's body toward the hearth, screaming as a bone gave way in the wrist Favier still held in a grip of iron. The slick of light on glass caught her eye and before the thought was fully formed, she grabbed the neck of the broken Grey Goose bottle and twisted to slash the jagged edge back and up, burying it in the flesh of his upper arm. He released her hand and the gun fell to the floor between them.

“Hard to explain your … blood … at the scene,” she taunted him.

His labored breaths came from behind her and she risked a glance backward as she scrabbled with her good hand for the gun. Blood welled from his triceps where the bottle had sliced it, but it was the look on his face that terrified her. His mouth snarled back from his teeth and his eyes burned like sunken coals in their sockets. He looked like the mask of a half-man, half-jaguar god she'd seen in a South American museum. Inhuman. He wrenched the gun from her hand and leveled it at her just as the room went dark.

Sydney

“What the fuck?” Favier's
grip on Sydney's shoulder loosened and she twisted away from him as he fired. The bullet singed her cheek and ear, deafening her. Instin
ctively she went flat t
o the ground, rolling away. Two more shots rang out and a window shattered as she lodged against something. Her hand touched cooling flesh and viscous blood, and she recoiled. Montoya's body. She rolled again, toward the far side of the room and the window.

“Goddammit!” Favier's voice shook with fury and something else. Fear? “Who's there?”

Sydney felt it, too—another presence in the room. She couldn't hear the newcomer, who moved soundlessly as a hunting owl, but she felt a shift in the air and the flesh on her arms goose-pimpled in response. She bumped the far wall and pushed to her knees, careful not to jar her wrist any more than necessary.

“Who—?” Favier's voice, choked off mid-cry, asked the question in her mind.

Footsteps—surely more than one pair of feet?—and scuffling interspersed with grunts came to her ears as she felt her way along the wall in a half crouch until she came to a window. Her fingers fumbled with the latch and she shoved it open, letting in the scent of mown grass and a wisp of breeze.

She hooked one knee over the sill as a horrific gargling sound issued from behind her. Chancing a glance over her shoulder, she caught the dim outline of a mass swaying in the middle of the den. As she watched, her eyes now better adjusted to the darkness, the mass separated into two, part of it sliding to the ground like an iceberg calving. A stray moonbeam silvered a knife's blade and illuminated a man's pasty face, rigid with concentration. He looked up and caught her eye as she swung her other leg over the window ledge, rolled to her stomach, and slid out into the clutch of a forsythia bush.

Would he follow? Sydney tore free of the bush, stifling a cry as her broken wrist banged against a branch, and sprinted toward the front of the house and the road. The dark slowed her as she stumbled over a rock and clanged against metal trash cans, but it protected her, too. If the man in the den—was he the one who'd killed Jason?—had a gun, light would have made her exposed back an easy target. If she could just get to the road …

Footsteps pounded toward her from the road. “Sydney!”

She skidded to a halt and almost went down as the voice snagged her. Ben's voice. She caught her breath on a sob as he reached her and pulled her into his arms. She squeaked when pain jittered up her arm.

“Are you okay? Are you hurt?” His voice was urgent and she raised her eyes to his face, wondering at the anxiety she saw there.

“My wrist.” She held it out, startled to see it distended like an anaconda's belly after a rodent snack.

“The paramedics are on their way,” he said. “I radioed for back-up and medical fifteen minutes ago. When I got your call, I was already on my way here to tell Montoya about his son's death. I couldn't hear everything you were saying, but I heard the shots. I was afraid—”

“Montoya, Favier … they're dead.”

“Both of them?”

She nodded, impatiently swiping her hair off her face as it fell into her eyes. “Favier shot Montoya. He was going to shoot me, make it look like a murder-suicide, when the lights went out. Another man came in—”

“Who? Is he still there?” Ben's voice became clipped.

“I guess so.”

“Wait here. Signal the cops or the ambulance when they arrive.”

“No way.” She grabbed his arm as he turned back to the house. “I am not staying here by myself.”

After a single glance at her set face, he started forward again. “Stay behind me.”

They jogged back to the house, Sydney moving awkwardly as she cradled her wrist against her chest, holding it with her good hand. They slowed as they approached the front door, which gaped wide. “Did you leave it like that?” West whispered.

Sydney shook her head. “I came out the window.” She pointed.

“We need light. With an old house like this … ” West headed
around the side of the house and apparently found the junction box to flip the master breaker to on. The night exploded with light.

Sydney blinked at the brightness but stayed with him as they returned to the front door. West went through it in one swift move, sweeping his weapon from one side to the other. “Clear. Where're Montoya and Favier?”

“In there.” Sydney hung back as he eased open the door to the den, taking in the scene with one glance. Curiosity overcame her repulsion as he entered the room, and she followed him as far as the doorway.

“Don't come in.” He stopped her with an uplifted hand. “We don't want to compromise the scene any more than necessary. I need to make sure they're beyond help.”

The room was as she'd left it, except for a ghastly amount of blood spattered on the walls and soaked into the carpet. Favier's lifeless body stared up at her. A wide, red mouth gaped below his jaw.

“Oh my God.” Her hand crept to her mouth, whether to stop
herself from retching or block the coppery scent, she couldn't have said.

“Slit his throat,” West said, walking around the blood-soaked patches as best he could, careful not to touch anything. He leaned down to touch his fingers to Montoya's wrist. A useless gesture, Sydney thought.

“He's dead. The forensics guys will have a field day with this.” West spent one long moment staring at Montoya's corpse and returned to Sydney, who'd stayed in the doorway. He nudged her into the hall and looked around, then up the staircase, gun held at shoulder-height. Nothing moved. He motioned Sydney toward the door. “We'll wait outside for back-up before searching the house further. I'll bet this guy's fingerprints, if we find any, match up with a dead soldier's.”

“Huh?”

“Can you describe him? Would you recognize him?”

Sydney screwed up her face. “White. Not young. It was dark. I don't think so.” She wished she could describe the man, wished she could ID Jason's killer, but it had all happened so fast.

Paul

Hearing Sydney's words from
his vantage point in the kitchen, Paul let go a sigh. He'd opened the front door, planning to follow her, unsure whether to take her out or not. He would never see any money for it, but if she could ID him … When he heard the cop's voice mingling with hers, he'd retreated to the kitchen, jumping when the lights came on. Fucking cop must have found the junction box. He hovered, prepared for action, and listened as the cop and Ellison checked on the dead men. They left and he relaxed a notch. He had a few minutes. The kitchen smelled like musty pasta water and garlic and he took a quick moment to rinse his Ka-Bar in the sink. Favier's blood ran pinkly down the drain. Served him right.

Shortly after accepting the contract on Carrie Favier, Paul had deduced that John Favier was his client. It was always good insurance to know a little something about who he was working for, so whenever possible, he made some effort to ID the client. He always suspected spouses, and he'd followed Favier after accepting the job and called him while he was tailing him, knowing he'd guessed right as he watched the man answer the burner phone. Gotcha. He'd collected a little file on Favier, too, just in case. It was astonishing how many people thought they could cheat a contract killer they'd hired “anonymously” over the Internet and get away with it.

When Favier had threatened him that morning after his botched hit on Ellison, he'd extracted the newspaper clipping from the safe deposit box and planted it at Ellison's place, trusting she'd make a nuisance of herself with it like she'd been doing all week. He figured she might even take it to the police and give Favier some tense moments. A phone call to Favier would ensure his client knew where the photo had come from and encourage him to pay up and keep his mouth shut or face more dire consequences. He hadn't expected the woman to race out to Montoya's house with it, wasn't expecting to see her when he'd followed Favier there, but it had all turned out for the best. He'd shut Favier's mouth, discovered Ellison wasn't a threat, and gotten three-quarters of his fee—the half he'd been paid in advance and half of the remainder which Favier had wired him after he texted him the photo.

It was child's play to follow Favier. For a former cop, he took surprisingly few security precautions. The cushy political life had made him careless. Paul had positioned himself outside Favier's place before sending him the photo of a very dead Jimmy Montoya. Favier's flip response, a texted
Better late than never
, was followed almost immediately by a notification from the bank showing that Favier had deposited only half of the agreed-upon sum in his bank account. Bastard. Paul was prepared to encourage him to live up to his obligations. But before he could make a move, Favier's garage door went up and he backed out in his Mercedes sedan. Paul lost him on the dark Maryland lanes, but by then he knew exactly where he was heading. Letting the Merc get ahead of him, Paul parked the stolen car in the same spot he'd left it on Friday
when the poacher's shot had made him back away from killing Jimmy Montoya while his father was jogging, fearful that someone would call the police at the sound of the shot
.

He'd entered the house through the kitchen door while Favier rang the doorbell and had been surprised to hear Ellison's voice. Two birds with one stone, maybe, he'd thought, grimly pleased that he'd taken the time to follow him to ensure Favier was going to honor their contract. Then, Favier had mentioned his name and Paul knew that he'd have to kill him. As Favier listed his screw-ups, Paul's anger grew, against Favier and against himself. Maybe he
was
losing it. Maybe it was time to retire.

He filed that thought away for another time. Sydney's words to the detective about not recognizing him stung him to action. He was glad he didn't have to kill her after all; he actually kind of admired her. Maybe he'd donate a little something to her charity, anonymously of course, as a kind of apology for causing her so much trouble. Enough. He needed to get out of the house, get back to his car before the cops arrived en masse. Gripping the knife in his right hand, he eased open the kitchen door with his left and slipped onto the stoop. He stuck to the shadows at the side of the house until he reached the point closest to the road. Staying low, he dashed across the open yard and the road, feeling a sense of calm as he dove into the bushes on the far side. His shoulder wound hurt—if he hadn't torn it killing Jimmy Montoya, he'd damn sure ripped it open wrestling with Favier—but he ignored it and jogged toward his car.

While he was still a quarter mile away, sirens split the quiet night and he jolted to a stop, listening. At least four cars, maybe five. Cops and an ambulance. Red and blue lights swirled. Fuck. He couldn't risk returning to his car with so many cops in the vicinity. They might already have spotted it, have someone posted near it. No, he wasn't going to chance it. He pushed deeper into the woods, away from the road.

The gurgling shush of the river sounded from up ahead. Not far. He'd take a leaf from his in-country playbook and use the river as an escape route. It should be cleaner than the Mekong. If he stayed in the water for eight or ten miles, he should emerge well outside any dragnet the cops had set up. Going with the current, it wouldn't be too hard.

At the river's edge, he hesitated, then walked into the chilly water fully clothed. His clothes would drag in the water, but he'd need
clothes and shoes when he emerged. Naked men attracted a lot of
unwelcome attention. He grinned, remembering a similar night in Laos and the two-sizes-too-small pants he'd ended up with off some gook's clothesline. When the water reached his neck, he started to swim downstream, a bullfrog's croak encouraging him.