Chapter 34
June
Still waiting for Peter and Lewis to return, June got back online to finish digging up contact information for KT’s three interview subjects.
Place of employment, home address, phone numbers, automobiles, it was all easy enough to find using her subscription databases.
Then she mapped out a plan of attack for the morning, trying to calm her nerves.
Ever since KT had been killed, she’d been on edge.
Yes, her friend had died, but it was more than that.
Someone had assassinated a journalist for reporting the wrong story.
That was the kind of thing they did in Russia, or China, or the cartel-controlled parts of Mexico. Not in America. Not until now.
June glanced again at the clock on the wall. It was two in the morning. Where the hell were Peter and Lewis? She wasn’t the kind of girlfriend that wanted to know where her boyfriend was at all times, but an illegal gun buy qualified as special circumstances. Too much could go wrong.
Knowing he’d have his burner silenced if he was in the middle of something, she sent a text. “Where r u?”
The reply came immediately. “Almost back. All good.”
She went to the living room and pulled aside one of the curtains to peer out at the street. No headlights yet. The rain was coming down in buckets.
She opened the front door and walked onto the small porch, her breath steaming in the cool night air. She’d always liked the sound of a heavy rain. It rattled on the porch roof and pummeled the rhododendrons in the yard. Fat droplets splashed off the wet pavement like a river learning to levitate.
Then her eye caught a faint movement across the street, where a good-sized madrone tree grew.
The unpruned branches hung low, the glossy green leaves blocking out the streetlights, leaving a deep shadow below.
Beside the trunk with the distinctive peeling bark, she saw a faint pale flash.
She focused harder. It was a face, now fading from view as its owner eased himself deeper into the darkness.
She felt abruptly cold. What kind of freakazoid would stand out in the rain at two o’clock in the fucking morning?
Oh, she thought. That kind of freakazoid. The kind that might arrange for the death of a journalist and her daughter. Somehow Circuit Rider, or someone connected to him, had found Stella’s house.
Trying to look casual, she glanced left and right, hoping for Peter’s headlights and seeing none.
The street was empty of parked cars. If the freakazoid had a ride nearby, she didn’t see it.
She backed inside, closed and locked the door, then worked her way to the kitchen, turning off lights as she went. Hoping he’d think she was going to bed.
Peter had told her about Stella’s pistol. She went into the darkened office, pulled it from the drawer, and checked the magazine. The SIG was bigger than the .22 target pistols she practiced with at the range, but it fit her hand well enough.
She had waterproof trail shoes on her feet. Her gray raincoat was hanging on a hook. She put it on, unlocked the back door, and stepped out into the darkness.
If she’d learned anything from Peter, it was that the best defense was a good offense.
Fuck you, freakazoid.
KT was her friend.
—
The madrone tree was across from the driveway apron, so June walked the other direction, around the rear of the house toward the privacy fence blocking the back yard from the neighbor’s driveway.
She’d been a rock climber since she was a teenager, so the six-foot fence was no obstacle, even one-handed. She held the SIG ready in the other.
Staying close to the house, she crept toward the street, sheltered from the rain by the roof overhang. If he hadn’t moved, she’d be hidden from his position until she cleared the big evergreen rhododendron bushes by the porch, when she’d be fifty or sixty feet away from him.
At fifty feet, she could put nine rounds into the center circle of a target.
She wouldn’t shoot first. She wasn’t an assassin. Besides, it might just be a local perv or an insomniac walking his dog. If that was the case, she’d tell him to put his hands up and step out where she could see him, and wait for Peter and Lewis.
But if he pointed a gun at her, she’d put a bullet in him.
She scanned ahead and to her left, knowing he might have relocated, but she didn’t see him. There were other plantings to shelter him on either side of the madrone. Or he could have crossed the street and was now tucked behind the rhododendrons, waiting for her.
She felt her heart beat, the blood pulsing through her veins.
She’d always been an adrenaline junkie, but she never would have done something like this before meeting Peter.
She’d have hidden under a desk and hoped the freakazoid would go away.
But her adventures with Peter had sparked something in her.
Not fearlessness or aggression, but a powerful desire to take ownership of her life and safety in a whole new way.
She approached the corner of the house. He wasn’t behind the bushes.
A wash of light came up the street, followed by the sound of tires on wet pavement and a big engine softened by the rain.
Peter’s Tahoe. Shit. She stepped out past the big bush with her weapon at the ready, still looking for the freakazoid, hoping Peter and Lewis would recognize her when the headlights caught her.
The Tahoe turned to enter the driveway, then braked abruptly. Peter popped out of the driver’s seat, a pistol in his hand. “What’s the problem?”
She gestured with the SIG. “A man behind that tree. Watching the house.”
Peter pivoted immediately toward the madrone and began to approach it, gun up and ready. She did the same. She heard the passenger door close and knew Lewis was with them, too.
Behind the tree, the darkness shifted. There was a faint liquid shimmer as the fractured rays of the streetlight caught something, the retreating wet surface of a hooded jacket.
“Don’t move,” Peter shouted.
The shimmer broke and ran for the space between the neighbors’ houses.
Peter went after him, shouting, “Lewis, take the car and meet me.”
Lewis sprinted around the rear of the SUV to the driver’s door. “June, come on.”
He pulled the back door open as he passed.
She dove inside as he threw the big SUV into drive, stomped on the gas, and bounced over the parking strip to the street, the motion slamming the door shut behind her.
She crawled forward to the front passenger seat as they flew into the darkness, the wipers slapping fast but the rain still too heavy for decent visibility.
Then he doused the headlights, making the night even darker.
He braked hard, turned left, goosed it, then turned left again, rounding the block. Past the next intersection was a set of streamlined taillights, receding. Lewis ghosted forward at speed, flicking on his headlights. Peter stood panting at the curb, hands on his knees.
Lewis slowed just long enough for him to pop the back door and slide inside. Then Lewis put his foot down again and began to pick up speed.
The taillights were a block ahead, then a block and a half. Despite his acceleration, Lewis was losing ground. The speedometer was at sixty, then seventy, the big SUV bucking wildly as the road camber changed at the intersections. With cars parked on both sides, it was essentially a one-lane road.
Peter reached into the cargo bay, came back with a pair of antique-looking assault rifles, and handed one over the seat to her. She said, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” She was good with a pistol, but was not a fan of heavy hardware.
“Hopefully nothing.” Peter leaned forward and his fingers found the controls for the sunroof. As the glass peeled back, he stood up in the back seat with his upper body out of the car, the rifle raised. His voice filtered down from the night. “Where’d he go?”
“Turned left,” Lewis said. “Hold on.”
June grabbed Peter’s leg as Lewis braked hard, shedding enough speed to make the turn without fishtailing or plowing into a parked car.
Between Peter’s body and their speed, not much rain fell through the open sunroof.
She saw the taillights two blocks ahead, angling left onto Twenty-Fourth NW without slowing.
Lewis jammed the accelerator to the floor and the Tahoe leapt to follow.
Twenty-Fourth NW was two lanes with a third in the center, and he made the turn without braking, the heavy SUV sliding on the wet pavement.
The only other moving vehicle was the same set of taillights, now at least six blocks ahead, appearing and disappearing as the wipers slapped across the windshield, struggling to clear the rain.
The speedometer was at eighty, then ninety. The other driver was still adding distance. Peter called down, “Lewis, punch it.”
“I am,” Lewis called back. “This thing is a boat. That car up there is a rocket.”
Eight blocks ahead, or ten, the brake lights flashed bright for a moment, then the taillights vanished around a corner.
A stoplight was coming up fast. Lewis braked hard to follow, Peter still banging around in the open sunroof.
June unbuckled her belt and knelt on the seat with one arm around his waist to help stabilize him.
If they wrecked at this speed, they’d both be dead.
Lewis cranked the wheel and the Tahoe slewed sideways, Lewis correcting for the skid. They were on Eighty-Fifth now, a two-lane flanked by single-family houses and older apartments and parked cars.
Lewis hit the gas and the engine roared. They were at the crest of a gentle hill. Ahead, June saw only empty road. “Lewis,” she said.
Lewis growled and bared his teeth at the windshield, then took his foot off the accelerator and the big SUV began to slow.
Peter dropped down and reached forward to close the sunroof. His face and coat were wet but his pants were mostly dry. “Whatever that car was, we never had a chance of catching it.”
“No,” Lewis said. At the next intersection he made a U-turn, then began to head back the way they’d come. “How’d he find the house?”
June thought of the burner phone in her pocket and cursed.
Now she knew why Google Maps was the only app loaded.
She hadn’t thought to check it. Now she opened it to Location Sharing and saw that the app was sharing location data with another number.
But that number wasn’t reciprocating. She cursed again, turned off sharing, deleted the app, then threw the phone down, disgusted with herself.
“It’s my fault.” She should have known better.
They drove in silence toward Stella’s little bungalow. The rain unrelenting. All of them knowing the house was no longer safe.
June really didn’t want to sleep in the Tahoe. “I’ll start looking for hotels.”
“No need,” Lewis said. “I already got a spot.”
June elbowed him. “What, you’re too good for us?”
He flashed her that tilted grin. “Habit from the bad old days. Always have a backup. Your place gets blown, you got another hole to hide in.”
“I don’t like to think of it as hiding,” June said.
Lewis snorted. “I bet you don’t.”
Peter leaned forward into the gap between the front seats. “That’s twice that guy has run from me.”
Lewis nodded. “First time, at KT’s place, he wasn’t there for you and Ellie.
He was looking for that tape. You startled him, he ran.
I get that. Second time, he’d locked in on the burner.
The only people who could have it were the cops and you, and the cops wouldn’t have taken it to that little house in Ballard.
So he was targeting you specifically. But why not go inside? ”
“I think he was scouting us,” Peter said. “Even testing us, seeing how we’d react. Getting a sense of our strength.”
“Maybe waiting for reinforcements,” Lewis asked. “Man seems to like using other folks to do his dirty work.”
Peter nodded. “My guess is, the next time we see him, he won’t be holding back.”