Her testimony against Donny Romero-the fraud case-would come first. The capital murder charges were likely still a long way from prosecution-a year or two-but he knew better than to mention it. One didn’t talk about the future with a protected witness, the reality far harsher, the adjustment far more difficult than they understood. In practice, breaking off all contact with one’s former life proved traumatic, invariably more difficult than the witness imagined.
“Seriously?” he asked. “Because I don’t see it that way at all. I wouldn’t trade one minute with you for something else.”
“You’re hopeless.”
“I’m hopeful,” he said, an intentional play on her name that he immediately congratulated himself for, though no doubt one she’d heard before.
His feeling for her had come on like a force of nature, as unavoidable and inexplicable. Together, they communicated well; she accepted teasing in the face of all the madness; they fit. And when you found that, you held on to it.
Nearly ten minutes had passed since he’d left the bus. Members of his small squad would be wondering why the delay. Ostensibly, he’d left the bus to settle the bill-with cash, always cash-but ten minutes was pushing it.
“My gut tells me we’ll work this out somehow,” he lied. He couldn’t see them ending this now-not before they tested the boundaries. He’d attended the seminars on avoiding emotional attachment with the witness. Brother bonding with the male witnesses was as dangerous as what he and Hope had stumbled into. It screwed up everything, risked everything, and he well knew it. It could not possibly have a happy ending. Still, he encouraged her to stay with him while he looked for some way around it all, a way that he suspected wasn’t there. At this moment, after what they’d been through together, letting her go was not an option.
“Lars,” she spoke, yet again in a hushed whisper, the crisp sibilance rolling off the s and causing a ripple of gooseflesh down his left side. It snaked into his groin and lodged there. But rerouted by a synapse, it suddenly sparked across a gate in his brain that translated it differently, albeit a beat too late: This was nothing short of the sound of panic.
“Hope?”
“Oh, my God.”
The line went dead.
The bus.
Larson dropped the receiver and ran, losing his balance as he took a corner too quickly on wet tile, ignoring the yellow sandwich board written in Spanish and English with an icon of a pail and mop and a splash of water. He went down hard. He scrambled to his feet, knocked over a corn chip display, and hurried out the truck stop’s main door, the cashier’s cry of complaint consumed by the high-pitched whine of highway traffic.
“Rolo?” This came from Trill Hampton, a member of his squad, a fellow deputy marshal. Approaching footfalls of shoes slapping blacktop came on fast. Larson’s running had sent a signal. Hampton was in full stride, already reaching for his piece.
Larson’s arrival into sunlight temporarily blinded him. They’d stopped at far too many truck stops over the past ten days for him to immediately recall the layout of this one. They’d parked out here somewhere. A spike of fear insinuated itself as he considered the possibility that the entire bus had been hijacked, for he didn’t see it anywhere.
But then, as Hampton caught up to him and edged left, and the two of them moved around the building, Larson spotted the rows of diesel pumps and the bus where they’d parked it, wedged amid a long line of eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers.
Hampton walked gracefully, even at double time.
Leading at a slight jog, Larson assessed the bus from a distance, seeing no indication of trouble and wondering if he’d misinterpreted Hope’s distress.
“What’s up?” Hampton asked, not a sheen of sweat on his black skin.
He wasn’t about to confess to phoning the witness from the truck stop. “A bad feeling is all.”
“A bad feeling?” Hampton questioned. “Since when?” He had a flat, wide nose, too big for his face, and a square, cleft chin that reminded Larson of a black Kirk Douglas.
Larson wasn’t exactly the touchy-feely type; Hampton saw through that.
Larson sought some plausible explanation for Hope hanging up on him. He seized upon the first thing he saw. “Why isn’t Benny stretching his legs?” The older of their two drivers had been complaining to anyone who would listen about a bad case of hemorrhoids. Larson saw Benny through the windshield, sitting behind the wheel.
“Yeah, so?”
They drew closer. Benny not only still occupied his driver’s seat, but his head was angled and tilted somewhat awkwardly toward his shoulder, as if dozing. This, too, seemed incongruous, as Benny rarely slept, much less napped.
“Rolo?” Hampton said cautiously. Now he, too, had sensed a problem with Benny. Hampton and Larson went back several years. Hampton had come out of one of New Haven’s worst neighborhoods, had won an academic scholarship to a blue blazer prep school, and had gone on to graduate from Howard University. He’d wanted to be a professional sports agent, but had become a U.S. marshal as an interim job, at the urging of an uncle. He’d never left the service.
“Radio Stubby,” Larson instructed.
Hampton attempted to raise Stubblefield, the third marshal, who remained inside the bus, but won only silence.
“Shit!” Hampton said, increasing his stride. The man could cover ground when he wanted to.
The two were twenty feet away from the bus now, Larson adjusting his approach in order to come from more of an angle to avoid being seen, his handgun, a Glock, carefully screened.
He instructed Hampton: “Hang back. Take cover. Lethal force if required.”
“Got it.” Hampton broke away from Larson, hurrying toward the adjacent tractor-trailer and taking a position that allowed him to use it as cover.
Larson found the bus door closed-standard procedure. Benny would typically open it for him as he approached, but that didn’t happen, sounding a secondary alarm in Larson’s head. He slipped his hand into the front pocket of his jeans, searching amid a wad of cash receipts for the cool, metallic feel of keys-the duplicate set to the bus that, as supervising deputy, Larson kept on his person.
Benny remained motionless, not responding; Stubby not answering a radio call. But who could storm a bus through its only door-a locked door, at that-and overcome two drivers and a deputy marshal?
Larson heard thumping from inside. Banging. Just as he turned the key, out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a state police car parked beyond the diesel pumps and he thought: Benny would open the door for a uniform.
As Larson opened the door and entered, the banging stopped abruptly. Larson both tasted and smelled the bitter air and knew its source from experience: a stun grenade-an explosive device that uses air pressure to blow out eardrums and sinuses and render the suspects temporarily deaf and semiconscious.
The narrow stairs that ascended to the driver prevented him from seeing into the main body of the bus. He saw only Benny, whose shirt held a red waterfall of spilled blood down the front. Larson’s first assessment was that the man’s nose was bleeding-typical with stun grenades. But then he saw a precise line below his jaw, like a surgical incision. His open eyes and frozen stare cinched it: Benny was dead.
Weapon still in hand, Larson kept low and climbed the bus stairs, ready for contact. The banging he’d heard had been someone attempting to breach the hardened door to Hope’s cabin. He saw Stubby, unconscious or dead, on the left side, behind a collapsible table. Clancy, the other driver, sat upright in a padded captain’s chair opposite Stubby, his head tilted back. A game of gin rummy between them had ended abruptly. No blood or ligature marks on Clancy.