Dead Wrong (32 page)

Sikes answered, “Roger that. I’m downtown. Will redeploy immediately.”

Womack was out of the car, running across the street, and inside McCarthy’s front door in less than sixty seconds.

M
CCARTHY GLANCED AROUND the bedroom, mentally running the checklist he’d made earlier. Was he forgetting anything? He checked his watch again and saw it’d been twenty minutes since he left Sarah. He’d told her fifteen. Well, it couldn’t be helped. But he’d have to move more quickly now.

Just then a soft click came downstairs.

He froze.

What was it? Suddenly, the sound registered: the front door. Someone just came in.

He slipped past the bed, picked up the baseball bat, positioned himself to the right of the hall door, and listened.

Silence.

Then came a muted creak from the stairs.

He wound up the bat and fixed his eyes on the darkened doorway. Enough city light was coming in from the hall windows to see someone enter the bedroom.

He waited.

A moment later a hand holding a gun poked past the jamb and swept the room from right to left. Tom brought the bat down with all his weight, connecting solidly against the wrist with a sickening crack. A man cried out in pain as the gun fell from his hand.

McCarthy stepped forward, wound up again, and swung, catching Womack squarely in the solar plexus, doubling him over, crumpling him to the ground, gasping. McCarthy picked up the gun, stepped out of reach, and flicked on the bedside light. Womack didn’t look too interested in carrying on the fight, so McCarthy did a quick inspection of the weapon. Exactly the same as Washington’s, complete with sound suppressor.

The man stayed on the floor, holding his right arm with his left, the forearm at a weird enough angle for Tom to know the wrist was broken. McCarthy said, “Get up.”

Splinting his broken right arm against his chest, Womack struggled to his knees, then slowly to his feet, eyes burning with hatred for McCarthy.

McCarthy said, “Downstairs. Move.”

Bat in his left hand, gun in his right, Tom followed Womack down into the basement.

“Down on the floor.” McCarthy slipped the gun under his waistband.

Womack took one glance at the cement floor and shook his head. “Fuck you, asshole.”

Without warning, Tom swung the bat into Womack’s kneecap. Not as much force as the arm, but enough to make the point. “No, fuck
you
. Down. On. The. Floor.”

Teeth clenched, face crimson, Womack awkwardly worked into a sitting position on the concrete. Using a roll of duct tape, McCarthy bound his wrists and ankles, then secured his ankles to his wrists in a hogtie. Finally, he taped shut Womack’s mouth. He stood back and inspected the job. With a broken arm, only a flaming masochist could work the duct tape loose in a few hours.

“Can you breathe okay?”

He heard muffled words that sounded suspiciously like another “Fuck you.”

“Good.”

McCarthy slid the gun in the small of his back, returned to the first floor and made sure the front door wasn’t unlocked. Then he was back in the basement, ready to leave. Before opening the back door, he looked Womack in the eye. “The ironic twist to this is now you better pray I live. ’Cause if I don’t come back, chances are you’ll rot here. Appreciate the beauty in the symmetry?”

As he locked the basement, McCarthy heard a car door slam in front. He suspected Womack called for backup before entering the house. The disturbing thing was how quickly it arrived. He ran to the retaining wall, checked to make sure the fence was directly below him before lowering himself feet first. Just as his feet touched the top of the fence, he thought he heard pounding on his front door.

S
ECONDS LATER MCCARTHY tapped the side window of the rental. Sarah jumped and spun around, her eyes wide with fright. He motioned for her to hurry up and unlock the door.

“Gawd, you just scared the bejesus out of me. Why’d you sneak up on me like that?” Hand over her heart, she inhaled a deep breath.

He slid into the passenger seat. “Trying to stay hidden. Sorry.” He glanced back at the shadows he’d just came from.

“What took you so long? I was really getting worried.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

She fired the ignition. “Is there a problem?”

He locked his door, pulled the gun from his belt and stowed it in the glove compartment. “Yeah. One of Sikes’s men was there.”

“Why are you surprised?” She pulled away from the curb and headed toward the corner. “I’m glad to get out of there. That place creeped me out. Where now?”

McCarthy turned to look out the back window again, saw the Space Needle framed with downtown Seattle in the distance. Not a soul in sight. “Head toward town. I’ll make sure no one follows.”

S
IKES FOUND WOMACK’S rental car unlocked with two empty water bottles and a couple of sandwich wrappers strewn over the front passenger seat and an ashtray overflowing Marlborough butts. A fucking pigpen. He studied McCarthy’s house, but it was completely dark with no sign of life.

No sign of life
. Not good.

The front door was locked, and no one answered after he rang the bell two separate times. Using his cell, he called McCarthy’s landline and heard the faint sound of a phone ring inside. The call went into an answering service so he hung up. He glanced across the street at the neighboring houses. Someone watching him might call the metro police. So, the back door would be a better place to break in.

That door he simply kicked in. No finesse—just braced his back against a deck pylon and rammed his shoe into the basement door where the deadbolt latched. Took a couple tough slams but he quickly splintered the bolt from the frame, stepped inside, and turned on his flashlight.

And looked straight at Womack duct-taped like a trussed hog.

A
S SARAH BRAKED for a red light at the bottom of Queen Anne Hill, McCarthy became aware of gnawing hollowness in his stomach. “I’m starved; how about you?” He couldn’t remember the last time he ate. Or, for that matter, what he’d eaten. Then it came back to him, that lousy Caesar salad and lasagna at the lunch buffet. “Come to think of it, I didn’t have much lunch.”

“I could go for a big breakfast myself,” she said. “Any places around here you know of open this time of night?”

By now he was paying more attention to the surrounding buildings rather than if someone was following them. Most restaurants were shut down by now. Two taverns were open, but he wanted a place with real food. Then he remembered a diner a half mile away, a dive where he’d grabbed early morning meals a few times on the way home from the hospital.

“Matter of fact, I do. There’s one over on First and Denny. They’re open around the clock.” He wondered if having breakfast with Sarah qualified as a date. When they were trapped in the call room, he’d fantasized about dating her, but under very different circumstances.

“Yeah, sure, I know it.”

T
HEY DUMPED THE rental car along the curb on First Avenue, crossed the empty street, and pushed through the glass door of a triangular building formed from the angle of intersecting streets. The smell of chronic grease and chlorine hit before he noticed a busboy mopping the floor. More customers here than he expected at this hour. Then again, what did he know? This could be the hotbed of Seattle’s early-morning social life.

They chose a table furthest from the others, but this also put them near a huge plate glass window, making them easily to be spotted from the street. But what were the chances of Sikes driving by and looking in? Not high, but it still made him tense.

A pale, skinny waiter with a tongue piercing, tank top, and shoulder-to-fingernail tattoos plunked plastic water glasses and napkin wrapped flatware in front of them. “Coffee?”

McCarthy nodded. “Black.”

Sarah asked, “What kind of tea you have?”

The waiter tossed two plasticized menus on the table while rattling off a surprising number of choices. As soon as she picked one the waiter vanished.

McCarthy watched Sarah unwrap her flatware, inspect the knife before polishing away a few water marks with the napkin. Satisfied, she positioned the knife on the table just so, before spreading the napkin on her lap. Her precision reminded him of something Caroline might do. But not in an irritating way. And made him wonder what kind of a lover she’d be. Of if she’d even be interested.

He leaned forward, took her hand, and, in a lowered voice, said, “I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am for your help, but soon as we get some food in us we need to split up. Every minute you’re with me, you’re at risk.”

She squeezed his hand. “Don’t be silly. You still need my help.”

True. But he couldn’t very well justify having the authorities prosecute her as an accomplice. Which made him wonder if they already knew about her. That could be something easily learned by checking with Cassera. If anyone outside of the police force would know, it’d be him. And while he was at it, he could ask him to find out if Sarah’s car was what tipped the cops to search the park for him.

“I worry about the risk I’m putting you in. If something happened … Tony can help me at this point. So far, no one knows for sure if you’re involved in this. I can’t allow either Sikes or the police to come after you too.”

Her eyes hardened. “Do I have a say in this?”

He started to say no, realized how that would sound.

She didn’t give him time to think any further. “Then it’s settled. We didn’t know it at the time, but we both became involved when we started working up Bobbie Baker. We’ll finish this together.”

Her tone of voice left no room for negotiation. Besides, he could still use her help. “Thanks.”

For a long moment they held eye contact in one of those nonverbal moments when you hope the other person is thinking what you are. Finally, Sarah nodded at the menu in front of her. “What’d you decide to have? An omelet sounds good to me.”

To him too, but he scanned a menu anyway. Choices spanned breakfast through dinner without consideration of the hour. He liked places like this, where you could get ham and eggs mid-afternoon if that’s what you wanted. A Denver omelet maybe? His stomach growled in approval.