Don't Know Jack (21 page)

What is she up to?

Gaspar yawned, stretched, lay down on the cushy bench and closed his eyes. “Wake me up when we get there.”

Within seconds he was breathing evenly and his face was relaxed. Kim thought he’d actually fallen asleep. Maybe he was fresh out of amphetamines. Maybe they were what he kept pulling out of his pocket and sticking in his mouth when he thought she wouldn’t notice.

“Now what?” Kim asked Roscoe. “Are we going to the crime scene, or did you have something else in mind?”

Roscoe said, “We’ll continue on our way as soon as you tell me what you know.”

Kim shrugged. Tried a new tactic. “OK, I’ll play along, Beverly. I’m guessing Jack Reacher killed Harry Black and cleaned up the mess, and the tall guy impersonating the U.S. Marshall on your video tape was Jack Reacher, too. We already called it in. It won’t help you to shoot us.”

Roscoe’s mouth fell open. Kind of comical really, Kim thought. She watched until Roscoe realized where her jaw bone was and clamped her mouth shut, holding her lips in a stiff line.

Kim poked her again. “Oh, come on. It’s got to be him. That’s what Reacher does, right?  Rescues damsels in distress?  Sleeps with them?  Saves their lives?”

A red flush crept up Roscoe’s neck and over her face. “So that’s the way it’s going to be?”  Then her cell phone rang. She answered and listened and said, “Can he wait ten minutes?  I can be there in five, and I need five to look. Tell him I appreciate it.”

She ended the call and buckled up again and pulled the heavy slow Town Car onto the road.

“Don’t think we’re finished this conversation, Agent Otto,” she said. She put the bubble light on top of the car this time and turned on the siren before she hit the gas. The big Lincoln accelerated faster than Kim expected. Gaspar didn’t sit up. Maybe he really had fallen asleep, as unlikely as that seemed. The ride was smooth and quiet. Even at high speeds it felt like they were gliding over the bumpy old road wearing ear muffs.

Roscoe said, “They’ve got to move the body. Crowd control is becoming a problem. They’ve closed the interstate both ways and there’s four miles of traffic already. Two fender benders so far and more to come if they don’t get unsnarled before rush hour. Coroner’s arrived and he’s got another case after this one.”  Roscoe covered the remaining miles to the cloverleaf in less than four minutes and then slowed half a mile out. She didn’t know the Chevy’s precise location. Kim could have helped with that, but she didn’t. Fifteen hundred feet from the east side of the cloverleaf, Roscoe slowed to a crawl, searching for the best place to park amid the official vehicles already present.

A rainbow of pulsing hazard lights were flashing in uncoordinated rhythms. Interstate traffic was backed up as far as Kim could see in both directions. GHP cruisers were blocking entrances and exits at each point of the cloverleaf. Officers were directing vehicles to move along instead of gawking, but drivers weren’t complying.

Kim counted two fire department vehicles, a truck and a paramedic bus, and three GHP vans with “Crime Scene Technicians” stenciled on their sides, and two tow trucks, and an unmarked black sedan which must have belonged to the coroner. Three Crime Scene techs were working on the car. They had the trunk open, and they had cameras and markers and other equipment running. Then two techs left and walked back to their van while the third waited to document the body’s removal. Most of the remaining work would be done when they examined the car later.

Uniformed first responders stood near their vehicles waiting their turn to work. No one seemed to mind the delay. It was a nice fall day. Warm enough. Slight breeze. No urgency.

Two news helicopters circled wide above the chaos. Three news satellite vans parked on the opposite side of the road. Two sets of photo-journalists and stand-up reporters were taping live shots.

“What a circus,” Roscoe said, quietly.

Kim saw three men, two wearing GHP uniforms and the third in a dark suit, approaching the Chevy. One Leach brother stood five feet southwest of the car; legs braced wide apart, arms folded, holding his shotgun precisely as he’d pointed it at her yesterday. He noticed the men, too, and walked to meet them.

Roscoe found a strip of grassy land off the shoulder a short hike from the focal point. She said, “I could get closer, but we’d get blocked in. If we park here, we can leave when we’re ready.”

The three men met up with the Leach brother and all four stopped next to the Chevy, exactly where Gaspar had collected the hound dog earlier.

Roscoe settled her Town Car into the place she’d selected.

Leach lowered his shotgun and extended his arm toward the Chevy’s door handle.

Roscoe reached toward her keys.

Leach opened the Chevy’s door exactly as Roscoe clicked off the ignition.

The click triggered Kim’s reptilian brain and the training memories embedded there.

Instantly, she saw, heard and understood.

“Get down!” she screamed.

And the Chevy exploded.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

The high pressure blast wave hurled the Leach brother and the coroner and the two GHP officers across the weedy grass like boneless scarecrows, dead before they hit the ground, and then a monstrous orange fireball filled the sky. White flames swallowed the Chevy in a blinding hot flash. Black smoke plumed up, then out, erasing normal daylight.

Kim closed her eyes, covered her ears and ducked her head. Smaller shock waves bounced Roscoe’s Town Car on the grassy shoulder and squeezed Kim’s breath from her chest. Pain seared as if her lungs had collapsed.

Muffled sound far away.

Kim squeezed her eyes tighter and curled as far into the foot-well as the shoulder harness would let her. Her chest hurt. She gulped shallow breaths.

Another explosion, smaller, followed quickly by a third.

Unnatural silence.

Kim waited, struggled to breathe, finally felt her lungs working again. She gulped air, hungry for it.

How much time had passed?

She opened her eyes again. Saw Roscoe still belted in her seat, conscious. OK. Kim struggled upright in her own seat. Took her hands off her ears.

There were fires outside the Town Car. There were muffled noises. There were pieces, chunks, slabs of things scattered everywhere. There were burning vehicles. There was smoke too thick to see through.

The Chevy was still burning.

Kim’s brain was processing data like slow-falling dominoes, one thing leading to the next. Both tow trucks were covered in flames. Tow trucks usually carried extra gasoline. Hence the second and third explosions?  Two GHP cruisers also burning. One rested on its roof, the other in the ditch, lying on its side. Thrown there by the initial pressure wave?

Several uniformed personnel were down, injured, but likely alive. Gawkers might be hurt, too, inside vehicles closer to the Chevy than Roscoe’s Town Car.

On site rescue workers mobbed the scene. Firefighters rushed to put out the flames. Helicopter blades fought to disperse the blackness. The noise must have been outrageous, but everything remained muted by the Town Car’s body and the cotton that filled Kim’s head.

Behind the wheel, Roscoe seemed dazed, too, but conscious and not bleeding.

“Gaspar?” Kim asked. But how loud was her voice?  She couldn’t tell. And she heard no answer. “ Gaspar?” she called, louder. No response.

She unhooked her seatbelt. She took stock of her body, which seemed to be unhurt and functioning. She turned in her seat but couldn’t see him over the high seatback.

“Gaspar?” she said again. She raised up as far as she could without kneeling, craned her neck and looked down into the deep foot well.

She saw him, face down, prone.

She remembered he’d been lying on the bench seat, not wearing his seatbelt. Had he been thrown to the floor when the car bounced?  Was he hurt?

Kim scrambled out of the sedan and pulled open the back door.

“Are you OK?” she screamed, reaching in to him.

He didn’t scream back. Instead, he nodded, lifted himself onto his hands and knees, and crawled backward out of the floor well onto the grassy red ground. He leaned against the door to steady himself upright. Kim thought he looked unharmed. But percussion injuries could manifest hours or days later, hard to detect and potentially devastating. They patted themselves down, checked for broken bones, or blood. Found none.

Kim and Gaspar moved away from the vehicle. Roscoe stared forward, pale, rigid, horrified. Kim understood. The dead, the injured, were Roscoe’s friends and colleagues. She could have been among them. All three of them could have been standing at the Chevy when it exploded, had Roscoe not stopped back there on the county road.

And then the shaking started. Kim felt it, but was powerless to stop it.

Gaspar wrapped his arms around her, holding her close to his body.

“What is it?  Are you hurt?” he yelled, patting her down, looking for anything, everything.

Kim shook her head and mouthed without sound, “No, I’m fine.”

Then she thought:
Gaspar might have opened the Chevy’s door this morning when he first found the body
. And her shaking intensified. Her teeth chattered. She couldn’t stop.

But she had to stop.

She had to help those people. She knew combat first aid. They all did. She was fine. She wasn’t hurt. She had to go help.

She pushed Gaspar away and walked three steps on spaghetti legs toward the carnage. Gaspar grabbed her arm, pulled her around to face him.

“They’ve got enough help,” he said. “There’s more coming. Better that we stay out of the way.”

Kim heard him as if he was at the end of a very long tunnel. She looked ahead at the scene. Medical personnel, first responders, firefighters, sirens, helicopters. She shook Gaspar’s hand away, put one foot in front of the other, determination as wobbly as her steps, but she kept on going. Her next thought was foolish nonsense. She said, “No way to keep the media away now, Roscoe. No way in hell.”

She smiled. How silly was that?  She giggled. She covered her mouth with her hand, pressed hard until only stifled silence remained.

Hysteria was the last thing anyone needed.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Kim felt Gaspar’s hand on her shoulder again after she’d walked only twenty feet. She glanced at him, noticed his limping, and slowed her pace. Maybe he was hurt after all?  Roscoe had stayed behind. She’d moved the Town Car and parked it across the county road, bubble light flashing. Kim saw her talking on the cell, probably calling Brent for roadblocks. Preventing more chaos was a good plan.

Gaspar put weight in his grip on her shoulder. She turned her head toward him. He leaned closer, squeezed her shoulder tighter, stopped their forward momentum. He tapped his watch and spoke slowly to make her understand words she was unable to hear.

“We can’t stay too long,” he said. “We need to get out before our presence is recorded or questioned. Keep your head down. Talk to no one.”

She nodded agreement. He squeezed her shoulder once more before they moved deeper into scenes resembling a war zone. Roscoe jogged over and met them at the outer perimeter of most serious damage.

The November air was now blackened with sooty pollution. Kim tasted the stench; smoke burned her eyes. Explosion debris blocked all normal paths. Hot spots glowed in weed patches, threatening to reignite. Noise levels continued to rise around her as vehicles and personnel overwhelmed.