DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3) (14 page)

“This is crazy,” Jennifer said. “This is crazy, this is crazy.”

“I know,” said Bostrom. He was gripping the steering wheel with both hands, cutting the cruiser through a curtain of rain, really hitting the gas. Jennifer saw they were doing almost eighty miles an hour. The road rose and fell beneath them, shivering corn stalks blurred past on either side.

“My God. Did he just kill her? Would he have? Oh God.” She felt the tide of emotion rising within her, the numbness of shock wearing off, everything threatening to spill loose, the twists of the past hour, the horror of the past few seconds. She tried to get away from it, to swim away from the undertow. She focused her mind on Bostrom. Could she trust him?

His eyes found her in the rear-view mirror for a split second and then he returned his attention to the road. The windshield wipers wicked back and forth at high speed. The rain was an unending dump of gray water.

“I’ve known about Delaney for a while,” Bostrom said.

Jennifer felt a tingling at the base of her spine, a tremble of rawboned hope. The thrall of the undertow lessened just a little.

Bostrom went on. “Delaney has been a part of one shady deal after another.
He was all over the Heilshorn investigation, trying to throw it one way or the other, looking to stick everything on the girl’s brother.”

Jennifer was still processing the events of the past few minutes, but a name surfaced. “You’re talking about Kevin Heilshorn.”

“Yeah. Him. Rumor has it Delaney was even sleeping with Olivia Jane at one point. He’s a shit bag.”

She could hardly process it all. Delaney turning the gun on Stemp’s wife. State troopers and sheriff’s deputies firing on her own security. Employees of the Department of Justice, for God’s sake. How did they expect to get away with it? To reconcile it? Everything was mixed up. Nothing made any sense.

“What are we doing? Where are we going? Are you arresting me?”

They were coming to a stop sign and Jennifer could feel the brakes thudding beneath the car. Bostrom made a right turn. The corn fell away and they passed a large elm tree drooping in the rainstorm; and a teenager in a red raincoat, watching them from the driveway of a small house.

“I’m not arresting you,” he said after they got up to speed again. “We need to get further away and then I’ll take the bracelets off.”

She shifted her weight at their mention, felt the steel of the handcuffs biting into her flesh. “Why are you doing this?”

Bostrom was silent for a moment. “I told him to run.”

“Who?” But she thought she knew. She remembered watching Bostrom say something to Davis that she hadn’t been able to hear over the rain and the ringing in her ears.

“Your bodyguard. I told him to get out of there. I didn’t think . . . fuck, at this point, Delaney is operating completely outside of the department. He’s insane, only hanging on there by a thread. Taber tried to have him removed from duty, but then Taber went on a so-called vacation, and he never came back.”

“Who’s running the department now?”

“The undersheriff. Usually runs the COs at the jail for Taber. Robertson’s alright, but he’s out of his league. Delaney walks all over him. Does whatever he wants.”

Jennifer’s head ached from the blow with the cuffs. Her hands were falling asleep and her arms hurt from being pinned behind her. Yet she felt alert, more alive than she had in days, maybe months. Maybe since she’d been abducted by Staryles.

She had to keep the thought of Stemp’s wife pushed far away.

“Is he on the payroll? Heilshorn’s payroll?” She took the next logical step. “Titan’s payroll?”

Once more his eyes gauged her through the reflection of the rear-view mirror and then snapped back to the road. “Three years ago,” he said, “A man named Seamus Argon met with me. You know who that is?”

“I do.”

“He came up here to help Brendan Healy out. Healy was the detective on the Heilshorn case, but I’m sure you know that. I guess it was rough on him, and he relapsed; had a drinking problem or something. I’ll never understand how someone can’t stop drinking. I have one or two, I’m good.”

“And you met Argon?”

“He found me. I didn’t know who he was. But man . . . that guy was something else. Too bad what happened to him, but, his legacy lives on. You know what I mean?”

“Not exactly.”

“I mean, maybe he wasn’t the first, but he was really committed. He started paying attention years ago before anyone really realized the kind of corruption and cronyism going on. Before multinationals like Titan were basically buying politicians.”

They went straight through the next intersection. Where was he taking her? She didn’t know this area in great detail, but even in the rain she had a basic sense of geography. They weren’t driving towards Oriskany, the headquarters of the Sheriff’s Department. They were going the other way.

Bostrom’s radio gurgled and a voice came over. He pressed a few buttons, silencing it.

“We have to ditch the vehicle. It’s GPS tracked. They’re going to come after us.”

He slowed and turned into a driveway to a small, double-wide trailer home. It looked like any more rain would cave in the roof. Luckily, for the moment, the rain was tapering off.

“This is my house.”

He put the cruiser in park. In the gloom, she discerned a pickup truck. “Don’t worry, that’s mine.”

He got out, came back around and got her out of the rear of the vehicle. She met his eyes and looked up at him. All of the pain, adrenaline and rushed activity unbottled something she’d been carrying for quite a while.

“You’re talking about some kind of revolution? Is that what Argon started? Some sort of an American resistance movement?”

She realized the idea scared her: the idea of a revolution, even if the cancer of corruption in her own government had metastasized beyond treatment. Not scared for herself, but for others.

He frowned and lifted a hand, twirled his finger in the air indicating for her to turn around. He removed the handcuffs. She spun back around, rubbing her wrists, trying to get some feeling back into them.

“What do you think?” he said.

“I think we have problems, okay. But that there are always peaceful solutions. Creating this kind of guerilla army — if that’s what you’re talking about, what Argon was doing — it won’t achieve anything.”

“You saw what just happened back there,” he said somberly. “You don’t want to resist that?”

She didn’t answer. Her head was spinning with the new information. If Titan was funding Nonsystem, then Titan and Seamus Argon were linked. That didn’t add up. Whatever it was, though, this resistance, this answer to the politico-military complex, she was being pulled right into it.

Bostrom stared at her. He stood nearly six feet tall. Built out of marble. Where was his family? Did he have one? Did she know anything about him other than a name associated with the Rebecca Heilshorn case? He’d been the first cop on the scene. A footnote in the investigation. And now here he was, whisking her away from the scene of more violence, going against his own department, like some kind of vigilante. Was he really her guide into this underground world, into Nonsystem?

She blinked in the drizzle. “I need to make a phone call.”

“We need to keep moving. Call from the vehicle.”

“And I need to pee. Is that alright with you, Deputy Bostrom? Or are you imposing on me the same fascist controls you’re talking about fighting?”

He stared back at her for another moment. He held out his arm towards his house with the sagging roof. “I’m just trying to keep us alive. But, right this way, miss.” Then his expression changed and he looked at her with a sudden compassion, his eyes roving as he evaluated her expression. “Maybe . . . yeah. You’re going to want to wash that off, too.”

In the bathroom she peed and rinsed the sticky blood from her face and ran her fingers through her mop of wet hair. She looked to see where the bleeding was coming from and found the gash just below the hairline, from where Delaney had whacked her with the handcuffs.

She left the water running in the sink and took out her phone, glancing at the bathroom door. The call to 911 had ended a while ago, but in her log she saw that it had been connected for almost fifteen minutes. She dialed John Rascher. As the phone rang, she looked around at the tiny bathroom with its stained cabinetry, warped flooring, and bathtub in need of a fresh grout. She took out her pain meds and shook two into her palm and swallowed them with a gulp of water from the tap.

“Where are you?” Rascher sounded more annoyed than worried.

“Where are
you
? Where was the follow unit? I was at that house for an hour. The thing exploded into a shootout, John . . .” She looked at her hand and saw that it was shaking. There were cuts on her knuckles, and her wrists were bruised from the handcuffs.
Calm down. Calm down.
“They shot at the security detail, John. They need to be arrested. All of them. A mother and her children were there. You need to pounce on Delaney right now. You hear me? It’s all recorded. My phone was connected to 911. It was a mother, Rascher, a mother and—”

“Easy, okay, I hear you. Give me your location, Jennifer. Do you know your location?”

“I’m at a deputy’s house. About ten miles from Stemp’s. Deputy Bostrom. I don’t know, we drove straight for about three miles, took a right, five, six miles, turned into a driveway. It’s pouring with rain. I didn’t stop to check the address on the mailbox.”

She could hear the fear in her voice, masked by sarcasm. She didn’t care. Rascher surely heard it, too.

“Why?” Rascher asked. “What the hell is the deputy doing pulling you out on his own?”

“Why do you think?”

He was silent. She realized it was sinking in. “Jen, I know this is bad. Okay? I know. I couldn’t bring the Follow Unit into it. Not right now. We’re not ready for that. We’re still building this. We take Delaney in now — what? We get him for ripping off the department, cheating on his wife, maybe murder, if any of the other cops talk, and my money says they won’t. Neither will Delaney. He’s not going to give us anything.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Get the call from 911. Just listen to what happened, John.”

Rascher sighed. She could heard the rain still coming down where he was, drumming on a metal roof. “Come on, you know how this works. Now we come get you.”

She said nothing for a moment, her heart beating a steady rhythm as she sat on the toilet seat. A runnel of rainwater made its way down her neck, slipped beneath her shirt. She was bait again. They had anticipated this explosive scene at Stemp’s farm. Maybe even hoped for it.

There was a knock on the door that made her heart jump. “You okay in there?”

“Yup,” she called out. “One second.”

“Jen,” Rascher said. His voice struck a familiar chord. Like the way he sounded when he was going to explain himself, how his bitter medicine was really for the best. “Stay put, help is on the way.”

“No.”

Silence. Then, Rascher, incredulous, “No?”

“This is what you wanted? Okay. Fine. Then I’m going to follow this where it goes. Maybe this takes us right where we want to be.” She felt like a kidnapping victim negotiating with her captors. It wasn’t exactly unfamiliar territory, but it had a fresh twist. She felt like she was going to vomit.

He was quiet again. She could almost hear him calculating the risk, considering the liabilities. “No,” he said at last. And she heard something in his voice she hadn’t expected. Or maybe wasn’t ready yet to believe. Fear. “Let Oneida County pick you up. We still don’t want to risk sticking our heads out to—”

She hung up. She slipped the phone into her pocket and then shut the water off and walked out of the bathroom.
They knew
, she thought.

They knew Eddie Stemp would jump out of pocket, and when he did, all the snakes would come out, like Delaney, worried old God-fearing Stemp would talk, shine the light on them. They sent me in to rile him up. Scare him. They never intended for me to get any closer to Nonsystem than that. Because of what I might find.

She knew that was the truth. The FBI was hiding something. She’d suspected it since they’d pulled her out of that building seven months before. They didn’t actually want her getting close to Nonsystem. There was something they didn’t want her to find.

Bostrom yanked her out of the bathroom a moment after she opened the door. Holding her by her arm, they passed through his kitchen, with a peeling linoleum floor, a lingering odor of burnt eggs in the air. He was holding a duffel bag in his other hand.

He shoved open the front door and the two of them headed for his truck, running through the overcast afternoon. She could hear the sirens rising in the distance. They were coming.

“Stop it,” Laruso gagged. “Stop it stop it, motherfucker.”

Brendan was straddling the convict. Tony Laruso’s punished eye was red with burst capillaries. There was a dark gash near his eyebrow where the skin had split, glistening with blood. He’d gotten his hands in front of his face, where the fingers shook, feebly warding off further blows.

“I didn’t want to do this,” Brendan said. His voice sounded like it was coming from someone else. He felt wetness on his face and he took his hand — trembling just as badly and wiped at his skin and then examined his fingertips. No blood. Just moisture. For God’s sake. Crying.

His other hand was suspended above Laruso’s face. The knuckles were already swelling, fine drops of blood dotting them like freckles. He tried to open his hand, but it resisted. It was someone else’s hand. He pushed himself off Laruso and backed towards the corner.

He watched, impassive, in shock, as Laruso rolled himself over, groaning. The convict got to his knees and up on his palms so that he was on all fours, his head lowered between his shoulder blades.

Brendan took an unsteady breath, exhaled, and fought to get himself under control, to return to his senses. If Laruso came at him now, it would be the end. One of them would wind up dead.

“You don’t have to go down with this place, Tony. I can keep you out of it.”

Laruso dragged himself away in the other direction, his knees shushing across the hard, bare floor, his palms slapping and pulling his large, muscular body along. He reached the corner and sat up against the wall. He kept his head lowered, brought his knees up and hung his forearms over the top of them. His tattoo-free skin was dirty and grazed.

“How?”

Brendan felt a flush of relief through his body.

“Grimm doesn’t know you’re involved; he’ll never have to.”

“I mean, how?” Head still down. “What do I have to do?”

“Just one thing. Just one thing for me and you have my word I’ll keep you out of all of it.”

Now the head came up. Laruso glared across the space with one good eye, the other already puffing up, the blood from the wound running down his face in a single rivulet, like a red tear, the eye itself filigreed with so many erupted vessels it was like a crimson ball in his head. “Motherfucker, I think you just blinded me. How am I supposed to trust you?”

“Because I stopped hitting you.”

Laruso continued to stare at him, the rage mercifully draining from his features. Then he dropped his head into the palm of his hand.

“There are no cameras in this room, Tony. Nothing recorded. No one knows what’s going on in here. So I’m telling you right now, you do one thing for me, and I won’t name you. You’ll be kept out of the probe that’s going to turn this place inside out, and you’ll get out on time. Or, this thing sweeps through tomorrow and you’re going to do a long stretch. Real long.”

Silence. Laruso unmoving, his head in his hand. Surely it was throbbing as much as Brendan’s hand. That hand was held in a loose fist, the tendons reluctant to release.

“Okay,” Laruso said.