True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(42)

The tiny details were convincing. Her nipples were erect, the imperfectly round areolas ringed with raised gooseflesh. Her skin was sparsely freckled, creased on her knuckles and lightly on her brow. Her teeth were slightly crooked and not overly whitened, perhaps even stained a bit by too much coffee. A tiny scar on her chin from a long-ago accident gave her a touch of character.

The giveaway that she wasn’t human, alive or dead, was her open eyes. They were blue, and a touch bloodshot, but there was a flatness to them that was beyond death and utterly inanimate. Even the eyes of a corpse had something in their texture that inexplicably conveyed that they’d once revealed an inner life. He’d learned that the other night when he looked into the assassin’s dead face. The other key missing element was moisture, in the mouth and eyes. Even a dead body conveys some sense of liquidity. Ian had learned that unpleasant fact, too, from the assassin.

“That’s Wanda,” Ronnie said with a big smile. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”

“I thought she was a corpse,” Margo said.

“She’s very much alive,” Ronnie said. “Her body temperature is ninety-eight point six and her cooch is motorized.”

“You’re disgusting,” Margo said.

“I’m practical, honey. We all have undeniable urges. After a year or two down here, with pestilence and plague raging up there, you’ll be glad to have her for comfort and release.”

She gave him a hard look. “What do you mean I would?”

Ian’s gaze drifted to a set of bookshelves bulging with paperbacks. He immediately spotted the spines of his six Clint Straker novels. Apparently, Ronnie hadn’t bought the seventh yet or he was waiting until it came out in paperback.

Ian pulled Death Has No Mercy off the shelf. On the cover, a resolute Clint Straker stood against the backdrop of an enormous fireball that contained the skyline of Dubai, a woman in a bikini holding an AK-47, and a speedboat.

He held the book up to Ronnie. “You’re waiting until the end of the world to read my books?”

“I’ve read them all, more than once,” Ronnie said. “I fucking love Clint Straker.”

“If you’ve already read them,” Margo said, “why are they down here?”

“Because I expect the End of Days will bring hardship and times when I doubt myself. Those books are here to give me strength in moments of despair, to remind me what one man can achieve with just guts and determination.”

It was the nicest, most meaningful thing anybody had ever said to Ian about his books.

“Really?” Ian asked. “You mean that?”

“You’re a badass,” Ronnie said. “A man of action who doesn’t give up.”

“You mean Straker is,” Margo said.

She was right about that. Clint Straker was everything that Ian wasn’t. Straker didn’t run from danger. He ran toward it. Straker was a born warrior, a samurai in blue jeans. That was never clearer to Ian than right now, hiding in a hole from his enemies, holding that book. And as Ian accepted that, he felt a strong, familiar urge, as real and desperate a need as hunger, thirst, or lust, one that made no sense, not in this place, not at this time.

He wanted to write another Straker novel.

Right now.





CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Cross looked down on the Mustang from the drone flying overhead. The dusty green car was parked outside of a cinder-block ranch house and a small corral. From what Cross could tell from structures and equipment on the ground, the ranch existed solely to sustain somebody who wanted to live off the grid. But whoever that was, he was fooling himself. There was nowhere a person could hide if the right people wanted him found.

“The Mustang matches the description of the stolen car,” Seth said. “However, the plates are registered to a 1998 Ford F-150 pickup in Seattle. Ludlow must have swapped the plates before he left the city.”

“He did,” Victoria said, excitement in her voice. “We have a match on all of the RFIDs from the groceries purchased in Klamath Falls. They’re still in the trunk of the Mustang. We also have hits on Ludlow and French’s credit cards coming from inside the house, along with three active heat signatures.”

She hit some keys on her keyboard and the heat signatures showed up as red pulses in the house on the screen. The people in the house were moving around.

“That must be Ludlow, French, and whoever lives there,” Cross said. “Do we have any idea who the owner is?”

“The property is owned through various shell corporations,” Seth said. “It’ll take some time to find the real person.”

It would be nice to know who else he was killing but it wasn’t a priority. Removing Ludlow and French from the playing field was all that mattered to Cross right now.

“It can wait,” Cross said. “Rain hell upon them.”

Victoria tapped a key. A Hellfire missile shot out from the drone and hit the house dead center. The house exploded, spitting flaming debris in all directions and igniting the nearby propane tank, which erupted in an enormous fireball.



The explosions were deafening and rocked the underground shelter hard, nearly knocking Ian, Margo, and Ronnie off their feet. It was like they were on rough water. Actually, more like underwater. The sense of being in a submarine was so strong that Ian’s first, irrational thought was that torpedoes had just missed them and hit the ocean floor. He suspected that he wasn’t far from the truth.