Page 77

CHAPTER 77

A MAN I DIDN’T recognize was pointing a gun at me. He was tall and had bony shoulders that made his T-shirt look like it was on a coat hanger. He had close-cropped dark hair, and his skinny arms were covered in track marks. My instincts rammed into each other, causing a skidding, screeching pileup of vastly different inclinations.

Something told me that I had seen this man before. Still, he seemed so dark and dangerous, it was like he had stepped out of another world, a shadow dweller arrived to end me. I had the stomach-churning sense that whoever had hired him to come after me had dug deep into the well of hatred and pulled out an unhinged man with nothing to lose. I knew I was about to be shot dead right there on the deserted highway. The man’s eyes told me so.

“Get in the car,” he said.

“Hell no,” I replied.

The man with the bony shoulders lowered the gun and shot me in the leg.

There was no hesitation. No warning look. He was sending me a message — he would tell me what to do once and once only, and if I didn’t comply, there would be pain.

The bullet had smashed into my shin, slipped past the bone, and left through the back of my calf. My leg was knocked out from under me. I didn’t have the breath or the time to scream before he marched over and grabbed a fistful of my hair.

“I know why you’re following me,” he growled. “And it ain’t happening. You should know that by now. You’ve been listening in on me for months. Years, probably. Through the Wi-Fi. Through the phones. I know everything. I know what you people do . And I’m not going to come home and join you. Mom and Dad and Uncle Ollie, they can all throw their lot in with the CIA if they want. But I’m not coming ba — ”

I’d raked the tire iron up from the asphalt with the tips of my fingers and now I swung it upward as hard as I could into the man’s crotch.

His words died on his lips. He collapsed inward like a folding chair and flopped to the ground. He dropped the gun. We both fumbled for it, sending it skidding across the loose gravel at the edge of the road and beneath my car. I saw in a flash that I would have to seriously incapacitate my attacker to buy enough time to get the gun from under the car or to get my own weapon from inside my car. Trouble was, he had a similar thought. I swung the tire iron again but missed, and I caught an elbow in the nose for my efforts.

I’d been hit in the nose by a man once before. A teenage client’s father had wanted to smack his son for getting arrested but smacked me instead when I stepped in to protect him. I felt then as I did now — like a giant wasp had wrapped its legs around my skull, jammed its massive stinger into the center of my face, and skewered my brain with its upcurved barb. I was momentarily blinded. I heard my attacker drop to his belly and slide under my car. When the explosions of color cleared and the road stopped spinning, I looked up and saw him staring down at me with the pistol pointed right at my face.

A big, dead tree made a halo around his head as he stood there. The dying leaves looked like dark curls. That’s the only reason it finally clicked and I recognized him.

My mouth fell open as shock consumed the terror inside me.

“Are you Jarrod?” I asked. “Jarrod Maloof?”

The tired, world-weary, and emaciated version of Jarrod Maloof cocked his head, his jaw tight and mean. I recognized the shell of the bright-faced boy I’d seen in the article in the box Troy had given me. It was hard to believe that this skeletal and crazy-eyed man gripping the gun was the same teenage boy.

Jarrod bared his yellowed teeth at me.

“You know who I am, Rhonda Bird,” he said. “Don’t play dumb. You’re part of the organization.”

“What organization?”

“Well, guess what, bitch?” He wasn’t even listening now. “ You’re going back. You’re going back in a body bag. That’s what happens when they send agents after me.”

“Jarrod.” I put my hand out. It was covered in blood from my nose or my calf, I didn’t know which. “You’re unwell. You’re not thinking straight. I can explain everything.”

There was a noise, and his eyes lifted away from me. He flinched sharply. I thought it was a reaction to what I had said. Then my mind registered the blood on his shirt, dark purple and then red as it soaked through the fabric from a gunshot wound to his heart.

He fell against my car, then dropped, unmoving, onto the asphalt.

I looked up and saw Detective Will Brogan on the other side of the road. He holstered his gun and came running over. My breath caught in my throat as he helped me to my feet.

“Jesus,” I said. The shock was hitting me now, wrapping its warm, numbing arms around me. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

“Come on, Rhonda,” Brogan said. “It’s okay. Let’s get you in my car.”

He helped me limp across the island and the north-traveling lanes to his vehicle. I got into the passenger seat, watching Brogan go back across the empty highway to retrieve my phone and gun from my car, then jog over and climb into the driver’s seat beside me.

But even as I sat and breathed, the rational part of my brain was telling me that this wasn’t right. That you didn’t shoot a man and leave him for dead in the middle of the highway without trying to render aid. Without even checking his pulse. Without even moving his body out of the middle of the road.

As Brogan tucked my phone and gun under his seat, my brain screamed that he was doing that because he didn’t want me to be able to reach them. And as he started the engine, I knew, with every piece of me, that he couldn’t have been in Los Angeles when I called him for help. He’d arrived at the scene of my attack far too quickly. Most likely, he’d been on his way to Ukiah to find me.

But I couldn’t react to any of that, not then. My body was frozen. I’d just seen a man murdered, coldly and brutally, in the bright light of the afternoon.

And I knew that was what I was going to have to do to Brogan if I was going to get out of this car alive.