Lethal(95)

Chapter 36





Doral had the dubious pleasure of informing The Bookkeeper.

“My guy in the FBI office had just enough time to plant the bomb on the car and program in the cell phone number. But it worked exactly like it was supposed to. Bam! They never had a chance.”

The silence on the other end was palpable.

Doral continued. “I witnessed it myself from the top of the water tower. All of us got the hell away from the area immediately. Nobody ever knew we were there.”

Still silence.

Doral cleared his throat. “There is one thing, though.”

The Bookkeeper waited in stony silence.

“It wasn’t Honor who showed up. It was Coburn.” Unsure how The Bookkeeper would receive that piece of news, he hastily added, “Which is better when you think about it. It’ll be easier to track down Honor than it would have been to deal with him.”

“But those weren’t your instructions. That wasn’t my plan for Coburn.”

Doral understood The Bookkeeper’s letdown. Between Coburn and Honor, the undercover agent was naturally the bigger trophy. For personal reasons, Doral would have enjoyed killing him in a manner that was painful and protracted. Instead, the son of a bitch had gotten off light. He’d gotten the instantaneous death planned for Honor and Tom VanAllen.

When given his orders a few hours earlier, Doral had diplomatically questioned the necessity of killing the FBI agent. “He really doesn’t know anything.”

To which the Bookkeeper had said, “He’s in a perfect position to ruin things, if unintentionally. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. And it will look good to the Mexicans that we killed a federal agent.”

“We got two FBI guys tonight,” Doral said now. “That should really impress that cartel.”

But The Bookkeeper didn’t seem all that impressed.

Jesus, what did he have to do to make up for letting Coburn escape the warehouse? Now that Coburn and VanAllen were dead, the only remaining threat was Honor. She was just a pawn, but she was a dangerous one who had to be eliminated. Doral accepted that. Just as he’d accepted having to kill Eddie.

He and Fred had tried to persuade The Bookkeeper to rethink that mandate. They’d bargained for his life to be spared. Did Eddie, their boyhood friend, really have to die? Maybe just a stern warning or a threat either real or implied would work.

No loose ends. No mercy. The Bookkeeper hadn’t made an exception even for Eddie. He’d crossed a line. He had to go. The order had been issued in language that a one-year-old could understand, but for the sake of all concerned, he and Fred had made it as quick and painless as possible, while still making it look like an accident.

Doral hoped he could devise something that easy for Honor.

But if she died badly, she had only that friggin’ Coburn to blame, first for involving her—because Doral was convinced that she didn’t know Eddie’s secret—and then for stealing the quick death she should have had.

Of course before Doral could do anything, he had to find her.

With the mind-reading skills that often gave Doral gooseflesh, The Bookkeeper said, “Coburn’s dead, and he was the only person who knew where Honor is. How do you plan to find her?”

“Well, now that Coburn is ashes, she may come out of hiding.”

“You’re willing to wait on that?”

The implication being that waiting would be a bad idea. “No, of course not. I’m going to focus on Tori Shirah. Because I’m convinced that when we find her, we find Honor and Emily.”

“For your sake, I sincerely hope you’re right, Doral. For once.”

The Bookkeeper hung up without saying more. Doral closed his phone and realized as he started his pickup truck that his hand was shaking.

He hadn’t even been congratulated for getting Coburn, the * who was to blame for this whole fiasco. Instead, he’d received another veiled threat. He was still on The Bookkeeper’s shit list, where nobody wanted to be.

He drove his pickup out of the crowded parking lot of a tavern, where, even before calling The Bookkeeper, he’d stopped to toast his success with the car bomb. He joined the stream of vehicles that were homing in on the area near the train tracks where Tom VanAllen’s car had been blown to hell and back and was still smoldering. It was attracting gawkers like moths to a giant light bulb.

It did his smarting ego some good to know that he had caused all this commotion. Too bad he couldn’t crow about it.

Some of the curious had felt the impact of the blast, others had heard it, a few had actually seen the fireball that had lit up that side of town. Doral had to park two blocks from the tracks and go the rest of the way on foot… for the second time that night.

The area had been cordoned off by first responders. Uniformed police officers were still needed to keep the gathering crowd back and to make way for arriving emergency vehicles. The flashing strobes gave the whole scene a surreal aspect.

New arrivals asked questions of those already there.

Doral heard a dozen different versions of what had taken place and who was responsible, none of which were right. It was al Qaeda, it was dope dealers running a meth lab out of the trunk of their car, it was two lovesick teenagers with a suicide pact. Doral was amused by all the hypotheses.