Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(79)

McCoy shook his head. “Wouldn’t do that. If he takes out Davenport, he takes his chances. But I won’t frame some innocent guy who spent years over in the sand.”

Moore held up a hand, and McCoy slapped it.

Claxson shook his head and left—from the hallway beyond the door, he called back, “I’ll talk to the colonel.”



* * *



—

WHEN HE WAS GONE, Moore stood up and went to the door, looked down the hall to make sure Claxson was gone, closed the door and sat down again. He leaned across the table to McCoy, and said, “Man, we gotta get out of here. This ain’t gonna work out, no way, no how.”

“I think we got some time . . .”

Moore shook his head. “No we don’t. If we kill that cop, everything is gonna get worse. If the colonel kills the cop, we’ll still get blamed. We’re tied up in the biggest clusterfuck in the world.”

“If we can make it through, though, the reward—the White House . . .” McCoy began.

Moore interrupted: “If we disappear, and she makes president, we can come back for the reward. With what we know—”

“You’d try blackmailing the fuckin’ President, and fuckin’ Heracles, and the fuckin’ guy who was Army and CIA and would have an office in the White House? Are you fuckin’ nuts?” McCoy asked.

“We could. We’d have time to figure out how to make it work.” Moore leaned forward across the table, got right in McCoy’s face, dropped his voice to a barely discernible whisper, and asked, “You want to know the worst of it? What I think I figured out?”

“Do I want to know?” McCoy asked quietly.

Moore stayed with the whisper. “I don’t think that marshal killed Jim. I think somebody here did. Maybe Claxson. Maybe Parrish. You know how they’re always talking about guns, how they did something here, did something there? When they don’t have any more use for us . . .”

“Ah, man.”

“I’ll tell you something else. I spent the morning packing up,” Moore whispered. “I got couple of good passports and bought a ticket to Bogotá. From there, I’m flying to Rio, and from there to South Africa, and I’m gonna grow a beard along the way, and then I’m going north. Niger, Nigeria, Libya—there’s a couple of mining companies up in the Congo would take us on . . . there’s a shipping company outta Perth that hires security guys to ride their ships up the east coast of Africa, to protect them from pirates. The money’s okay, you don’t spend a nickel aboard the ships, and you don’t walk through any passport controls with facial recog.”

“Ricky did that, the ship thing. He said it bored his brains out,” McCoy said.

“Ricky didn’t have our problem,” Moore said.

McCoy tilted his head back, looked at the ceiling. “Let me think about it.”

“I’m leaving tonight,” Moore said. “I’m inviting you to go along. There are some empty seats on the plane; I looked. We could get your ticket on the way. I got a long drive, and you could help out on that.”

“Where you driving to?”

“Won’t tell you that until you’re in the car,” Moore said.

McCoy got pissed, and he snapped, “You think I’d turn on you?”

Moore said, “Keep your voice down. Man, you’re not diggin’ what I’m saying. I’m sayin’ that if things go wrong—and they’ve been doing that since we took the run at Smalls—we could go down for murder. That’s bullshit. With everything that happened, it could be a federal case, and the feds got the needle. I’ve trusted you with my life, but if they said, ‘Tell us about Moore or we’re gonna strap you to the table and give you the shot,’ I’m not one hundred percent sure what you’d do.”

“Thanks a lot, good buddy,” McCoy said.

Moore exhaled in exasperation, and said, “I’ll trust you with one important fact. I’m rolling out of my driveway at eight o’clock tonight. I can’t wait any longer than that if I’m gonna make the drive. I’m leaving all the furniture and everything else I can’t get in my safe-deposit box. If you don’t want to come, set up a new Gmail address, and when I land where I’m going, I’ll drop you a note—if you’re still walking around free.”

“Let me think about it,” McCoy said.





22


Lucas, Bob, and Rae spent the evening in Bob’s room, plowing through the Xerox copies of the documents found in Ritter’s safe-deposit box, as well as the encrypted documents found on his laptop. The docs mostly consisted of bills of lading, along with handwritten notes by McCoy about the contents of the shipments and their recipients. There were also photographs of these people, men in military dress, or partial military dress, which appeared to have been taken surreptitiously with cell phones.

They quit at ten o’clock, and Lucas hadn’t been back in his room for more than the time needed to pee, take off his shoes, and turn on the television, when he heard a knock, but across the stub hall, the room he’d had the first night.

He picked up the PPQ on his way across the room, eased up to the door, plucked the spitball out of the peephole, and peeked out. A dark-haired woman was facing the other door. He couldn’t see much of her because she was short, no more than five-four.