IT WAS LATE afternoon when Del Rio turned off Lobo Canyon and parked his gray Land Rover off Lobo Vista Road.
The sky was as gray as the car, as gray as his clothes, camouflage he didn’t need because this was such a desolate spot.
Del Rio was thinking about Jack as he took his Remington 700, fitted with a ten-power scope, from the rear of the car.
He walked off-road, taking a deer path up an incline through the scrub.
The rise got steeper, and when the trail bore to the right, Del Rio broke a new path through the weeds, grabbing onto grasses and coyote brush and pulling himself up the hillside in places where his shoes slid on the slope.
When he reached the plateau, he took in the view of the farmhouse seventy-five yards below him, with its sun-bleached outbuildings and stretch of terrain that looked like a rumpled and dusty carpet had been tossed over the hills.
Del Rio assumed a prone position with the muzzle of the gun extended over the edge of the bluff.
Forty minutes crawled by before the back door of the farmhouse opened—and the man he was waiting for came out with a dog, a handsome Rhodesian ridgeback.
The guy had a rolling walk, wore a plaid shirt, jeans, a brown brimmed hat. He chained the dog to the porch post, patted its head, then picked up a bridle and saddle from a railing before heading to the paddock.
The guy with the hat saddled up a bay mare and rode it out to a bridle path that led into the hills, where trouble was waiting for him.
Del Rio lined up his shot where two lines of plaid intersected and squeezed the trigger.
The mare’s ears went back, and Del Rio saw the hole appear in the rider’s shirt just as the horse rounded a bend.
Del Rio stood and saw that the rider was still sitting upright, until, as if in slow motion, he tipped to the left and fell to the ground.
The mare stepped off the trail, dragging the rider by one boot until he fell free. Then the horse stopped and grazed on the dry grass.
Del Rio picked up his shell casing, put it in his shirt pocket, and walked down the bluff at a right angle to the trail.
When he reached the hit man’s body, he checked for a pulse. There was none.
He kicked the contract killer a couple times in the side to be sure he was dead, then said, “Hey, Bo Montgomery, you scum. Shelby didn’t see it coming either.”
Del Rio wiped down his gun with his shirttails and tossed it over the cliff, saw it bounce and get lost in the miles of unbroken scrub.
He polished the casing and hurled it after the gun, watched it disappear.
One shot. One kill.
Job done. Very professional. Very Private.
Very personal too, thought Del Rio.
Jack had loved Shelby—and he loved Jack.
Chapter 122
ALL OF OUR major cases were closed at the moment. At least that was true in the Los Angeles office.
London, Frankfurt, Chicago, and New York were busy, and they were fighting a war in Presti’s office in Rome—which was good for the bottom line, though I didn’t much care about that.
Our morning meeting in the war room had turned into an ad hoc, standing-room-only, hip-hip-hooray bash. Mo dished up cheesecake, Sci topped up coffee mugs with a jug-size bottle of Bailey’s, and Cruz stood close enough to Sci’s lab assistant Karen to see down her neckline and into her shoes.
Pressured into saying a few words, Justine took the floor and spoke three
syllables: “We got ’em.”
The group broke into whooping applause.