I was still shaking, my deafened ears ringing, when the two guys grabbed me and dragged me out of the smoking, burned metal ruins of the trailer. Out onto the cool grass of the range I was dragged and dropped.
A hunting boot hit me in the face, the little metal lace hooks opening my lip like a razor.
“That’s for killing my friend, you son of a bitch,” I heard one of the three camo-clad bozos say through the ringing of my ears. “And crippling the other one. He’ll never walk again because of what you did.”
“My pleasure,” I yelled as I thumbed at my lip. “Anytime.”
“Hey,” Justin said, looking around. “The girl and the old man. Where the hell did they go?”
“Girl?”
“Yeah, the damn girl who was with him. She has a gun.”
“We’ll find her in a second,” said the slimmest of them.
“You must be Paul Haber,” I said. “The leader of this band of merry asswipes.”
“Now, now, Detective. I have a mission to run, and chasing you all the hell around these mountains has been quite a delay. Good-bye now. You can shoot him, Devine, any time you’re ready. We need to get going.”
Chapter 32
That’s when I came out and said it.
“Your coordinates are wrong,” I said calmly. “I have them.”
“What?” Haber said, turning back to me.
“Eardley had them in his stomach. In a condom. Twenty-four numbers. He must have known you guys were close, so he
swallowed them. You don’t have the right ones. I do.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“Am I?” I said, forcing a laugh. “Fine. Go over there and get your head chopped off for nothing.”
“You gotta be shitting me, boss,” said the guy who had kicked me. “This mission is doomed, sir. I told you.”
“This mission is not doomed,” Haber said, as a high-pitched beep came through on their radios.
“Come in, you dummies. Dummies, come in. Over.”
I smiled. It was Rosalind.
“What the—?” Haber said.
“Listen up. My grandpa’s got your friend’s gun, and he’s got a bead on your head, mister. Now drop your gun or he’ll blast your head off.”
The sound of the silenced bullet that hit Haber’s head as he swung up with his rifle for the tree line beyond the range was insignificant, but what it did to his head was very significant. Half headless, he toppled over backward as if it were a trust team-building exercise. Not surprisingly, no one caught him.
“Now my grandpa’s got the bead on you other guys,” the girl’s voice said over the radio. “Drop your guns if you don’t want to get shot, too.”
They dropped their guns.
I stood and picked one up.
“Mr. Walke, I thought I told you to leave,” I said into Haber’s radio, as I saw the good old man emerge from the trees with his granddaughter and dog.
“Yeah, well, I don’t hear so well sometimes,” he radioed back.