The Big Bad Wolf (Alex Cross 9)

I didn’t say anything.

“What? What are you thinking?” Mahoney asked as we watched the house from a thick stand of woods less than fifty yards away.

“You said he has a girlfriend in the house? That doesn’t sound right, does it?”

“I don’t know, Alex. According to surveillance, the girlfriend’s been there all night. I guess they could be the couple. We’re here. My job is to take Rafe Farley down. Let’s do it. . . . This is HRT One. I have control. Ready! Five, four, three, two, one. Go. Go!”

Chapter 38

MAHONEY AND I WATCHED as the breach team moved quickly on the small inconsequential-looking house. The six agents were outfitted in black-on-black flight suits and body armor. The side yard was littered with two more junked vehicles, a small car and a Dodge truck, and a lot of spare parts for appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners. There was a standing urinal out back that looked as if it had come from a tavern.

The house windows were dark even though it was midday. Was Audrey Meek in there? Was she alive? I hoped that she was. It was a huge break if we got her back now. Especially since everybody thought she was probably dead.

But something about the raid bothered me.

Not that it mattered now.

There is no “knock and announce” protocol when HRT is involved. No talking, no negotiating, no political correctness. I watched two agents breach the front door. They started to go inside the suspect’s house.

Suddenly, a muffled boom. The agents at the front door went down. One of them didn’t get up. The other got up and stumbled away from the house. It was awful to witness, a complete shock.

“Bomb,” said Mahoney in surprise and anger. “He musta booby-trapped the door.”

By then, the four other agents were inside the house. They had gone in through the back and side doors. There were no more explosions, so the other doors hadn’t been booby-trapped. Two HRT agents approached the wounded pair at the front of the house. They pulled away the agent who hadn’t moved since the blast.

Mahoney and I ran as fast as we could toward the house. He kept repeating “fuck” over and over. There were no gunshots coming from inside.

I was suddenly afraid Farley wasn’t even in the house. I prayed that Audrey Meek wasn’t already dead in there. Everything was feeling so wrong to me. This wasn’t how I would have done the raid. The FBI! I had always hated and distrusted these bastards, and now I was one of them.

Then I heard, “Secure! Secure!” And “We have a suspect! We’ve got him! It’s Farley. There’s a woman here too!”

What woman? Mahoney and I barged in through the side door. I saw thick smoke everywhere. The house reeked of the explosive, but also of marijuana and greasy cooking. We made our way back to a bedroom off a small living room.

A naked man and woman were spread-eagled on the bare wooden floor of the bedroom. The woman on the floor wasn’t Audrey Meek. She was heavy, at least forty or fifty pounds overweight. Rafe Farley looked to be close to three hundred pounds and had hideous clumps of red hair not only on his head but all over his body.

An old poster for the movie Cool Hand Luke was taped over a king-size bed that had no sheets or covers. Nothing else caught my eye.

Farley was screaming at us, his face deep crimson. “I have rights! I have goddamn legal rights! You bastards are in real trouble.”

I had a feeling that he might be right, and that if this screaming man had kidnapped Mrs. Meek, she was already dead.

“You’re the one in trouble, fat boy!” an HRT agent barked in the suspect’s face. “You too, girlfriend!”

Could this possibly be the couple who had taken Audrey Meek and Elizabeth Connolly?

I didn’t see how.

So who in hell were they?

Chapter 39

NED MAHONEY AND I were stuck in a close, dark pigsty of a bedroom with the suspect, Rafe Farley. The woman, who assured us she was his girlfriend, had put on a filthy bathrobe and been taken into the kitchen to be questioned.

We were all angry about what had happened outside. Two agents had been wounded by a booby trap. Rafe Farley was the closest thing we had to a break in the case, or a suspect.

Things kept getting weirder. For starters, Farley spit at Mahoney and me until his mouth went dry. It was so strange and crazy that at one point, Ned and I just looked at each other and started to laugh.

“Think this is fucking funny?” Farley rasped from the edge of the bed, where he was lodged like a beached whale. We’d made him put on clothes, blue jeans and a work shirt, mostly because we couldn’t stand the sight of his flaccid rolls of fat and his tattoos of naked women and a purple dragon eating a child.