Restraints? I wondered. I looked at Alissa again, now leaning against the car, unable to look my way. "Please." She was speaking to our attacker. "My mother?" No, she wasn't stunned and wasn't hurt badly and I realized the reason she wasn't running: because she had no reason to.
She wasn't the target.
I was.
The whole terrible truth was obvious. The man standing over me had somehow gotten to Alissa several weeks before and threatened to hurt her mother--to force Alissa to make up a story about corruption at the government contractor. Because it involved an army base where I knew the commander, the perp bet that I'd be the shepherd to guard her. For the past week Alissa had been giving this man details about our security procedures. He wasn't a hitter; he was a lifter, hired to extract information from me. Of course: about the organized crime case I'd just worked. I knew the new identities of the five witnesses who'd testified at the trial. I knew where Witness Protection was placing them.
Gasping for breath through the tears, Alissa was saying, "You told me. . . ."
But the lifter was ignoring her, looking at his watch and placing a call, I deduced, to the man in the decoy car, followed by my protege, fifty miles away. He didn't get through. The decoy would have been pulled over, as soon as our crash registered through the mobile phone call.
This meant the lifter didn't have as much time as he would have liked. I wondered how long I could hold out against the torture.
"Please," Alissa whispered again. "My mother. You said if I did what you wanted . . . Please, is she all right?"
The lifter glanced toward her and, as an afterthought, it seemed, took a pistol from his belt and shot her twice in the head.
I grimaced, felt the sting of despair.
He took a battered manila envelope from his inside jacket and, opening it, knelt beside me and shook the contents onto the ground. I couldn't see what they were. He pulled off my shoes and socks.
In a soft voice he asked, "You know the information I need?"
I nodded yes.
"Will you tell me?"
If I could hold out for fifteen minutes there was a chance local police would get here while I was still alive. I shook my head no.
Impassive, as if my response were neither good or bad, he set to work.
Hold out for fifteen minutes, I told myself.
I gave my first scream thirty seconds later. Another followed shortly after that and from then on every exhalation was a shrill cry. Tears flowed and pain raged like fire throughout my body.
Thirteen minutes, I reflected. Twelve . . .
But, though I couldn't say for certain, probably no more than six or seven passed before I gasped, "Stop, stop!" He did. And I told him exactly what he wanted to know.
He jotted the information and stood. Keys to the truck dangled in his left hand. In his right was the pistol. He aimed the automatic toward the center of my forehead and what I felt was mostly relief, a terrible relief, that at least the pain would cease.
The man eased back and squinted slightly in anticipation of the gunshot, and I found myself w--