Shadows Reel (Joe Pickett #22)(47)

“He’s alive,” Nate said. Then to Prentice, “Bob? Can you hear me?”

Prentice was long and thin with wavy ginger hair and a tattoo of a falcon on his neck. He was extremely pale from lack of blood.

He opened his eyes and they settled on Nate’s face above him.

“What happened here, Bob?” Nate asked.

Prentice worked his mouth, but no sounds came out. The bright red blood on his mouth looked like lipstick.

“Remember me, Bob?” Nate asked.

Prentice tried again to speak. He croaked, “Nate Romanowski.”

“That’s right. What happened here, Bob? Did Ken and you get into a fight?”

Prentice closed his eyes and shook his head in slow motion. His lips moved again, but all he could do was wheeze.

“Bob, was it Axel Soledad?” Nate asked. “Did he stage this? Did he clean you out of guns?”

Prentice’s eyes widened. “Axel,” he whispered.

“Man, we gotta do something,” Geronimo said. “The guy in the chair is long gone. But maybe we can call someone. Or take him into Baker City . . .”

Nate looked up at Geronimo and shook his head. Prentice had nearly bled out. It was a miracle that he’d even made it this long.

And as if on cue, Prentice shuddered and emitted his last communication: a death rattle. His head flopped over to the side.

Nate reached down and closed his eyes.

“Why did he do this?” Geronimo asked. “Why would he murder the guys he needs to sell his birds?”

“Maybe they wouldn’t pay him what he wanted,” Nate said. “But I think he decided to eliminate the middlemen. There’s no commission to pay this way.”

Geronimo whistled. “So what do you think happened here? He shot the guy on the floor and then forced the other one to shoot himself?”

Nate got to his feet. “My guess is the other way around. Axel shoved that revolver under Ken’s chin and pulled the trigger, then turned and shot Bob. He positioned the Ruger to make it look like a lover’s quarrel that went bad.”

“Jesus.”

Nate nodded. He said, “Soledad had a partner in Wyoming for a while. Another antifa. When the partner got injured and was of no good to him, Soledad broke his neck and left him in an old ranch house. And now this. That’s the kind of psycho we’re after.”

“He needs to be put down,” Geronimo said.

Nate agreed and looked around the house. He said, “Make sure to wipe down anything you touched. Let’s back out of here. We can make an anonymous 911 call to the Baker City cops once we’re clear. I hate to just leave these two bodies here for who knows how long before someone finds them.”

“How far is he ahead of us, do you reckon?” Geronimo asked.

“The blood’s congealed, but it isn’t dry,” Nate said. “Just like the gravy. I’d say couple of hours at most.”

“We’re closing in on him,” Geronimo said. “He’s not going to know what hit him.”





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


    The Shaman


“Hit me again,” Axel Soledad said to Randy Daniels.

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Yeah, it hurts. But it gets the GSR off me.”

Gunshot residue. Randy knew that much.

He raised the wand inside the car wash and squeezed the trigger. Hot water and steam shot out of the nozzle in a V with enough force to make the wand kick like a gun. He pointed it at Soledad’s naked flesh and swept it across his body. Soledad stood with his legs spread and his arms held out away from his body. The hot spray turned his skin red with force and heat. It didn’t seem to bother him.

They had stopped at a manual car wash on the outskirts of Pendleton, Oregon. The car wash was coin-operated, so it was one of the few businesses open on Thanksgiving Day.

It wouldn’t be that far before they crossed over into Washington State. They’d washed down not only the exterior of the Mercedes transport, but now Axel as well.

Soledad had stripped to his boxer briefs and had crumpled his clothing and stuffed it into a dumpster on the side of the facility. He now stood inside the bay in a pose that looked like Jesus on the cross. He’d asked Randy to do the honors. Which Randy did.

Randy had never seen Axel Soledad out of his tactical gear or black bloc before. Axel was wiry and fit and very white. There were angry-looking scars on his back and across his shoulders, as if he’d once been whipped.

“That’s good,” Soledad said after Randy had circled him once again with the high-pressure wand. “Now clean yourself up. You stink of blood.”



* * *



—

While Randy did his best to clean himself with the wand—unlike Soledad, he avoided the center mass of the hot water and used the periphery of the cone instead—Soledad dressed in a set of clean clothes in the corner of the bay.

Randy was a pale twenty-six-year-old ginger with a concave chest and a smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks. Unlike Soledad, Randy didn’t have human blood or gunshot residue to wash away. But he did have bloodstains on his cargo pants, his shirtsleeves, and beneath his fingernails. It had been his job over the length of the trip to get out on the highway and gather roadkill in various stages of decomposition and bring the carcasses back to the transport to show to Soledad for inspection. If the roadkill was fresh and not putrid, Soledad gave a thumbs-up.