The Collected - Страница 3

Доступ к книге ограничен фрагменом по требованию правообладателя.

Directly across the street was a small dirt field, and on the other side of it were several cinderblock homes. There were no fences around the properties, just more dirt and the occasional patch of grass or brush.

So, go for the roof or take the chance?

Hell, the roof was a chance, too. Perhaps even a bigger one, because he could easily get trapped there.

He glanced at the road again. Nothing.

Option two, then.

He slipped out of the gap, and scooted along the front of the building to his left, alert for any movement. Reaching the end without incident, he snuck a look around the corner, down another road that led back toward the rear of the buildings. There were two cops, fifty feet away. Each had a gun drawn, but their attention was focused in the other direction, as if they expected Nate to come barreling around the back.

Nate glanced toward the highway, intending to pick the best path across the field on the other side, but his gaze strayed to the nearby police car. It was vibrating, its engine idling.

Like coincidences, there was no such thing as luck. “Opportunity, yes,” Quinn had once said. “It’s up to you whether you take it or not. But no luck.”

Consider it taken, Nate thought as he moved silently over to the car and around to the driver’s side. He carefully lifted the handle, and eased the door open.

No yells. No one heading in his direction.

So far, so good.

Staying low, he slipped inside, and positioned his foot above the accelerator while grabbing the transmission lever with his right hand.

On three. One. Two.

The moment three passed through his head, he sat up, dropped the shift into Drive, and jammed the gas pedal to the floor. As the car jumped forward, he whipped the wheel around and pulled a quick U-turn so he would be heading toward the safety of the city.

The door was still partially open as he finished the turn, so he had no problems hearing the shouts of alarm. He reached out and pulled the door closed just as the crack of a gun echoed behind him, but wherever the bullet went, it didn’t hit the car.

He checked his mirror in time to see the men run out onto the highway. They were small and getting smaller fast, but that didn’t stop them from firing several more rounds in his direction. Again, none of the bullets hit their mark.

Then the road curved to the right, and the men dropped out of sight.

Nate knew it would only be moments before the other police cars took up chase. He needed to get off the highway and into an area where it would be next to impossible for them to find him.

The good news was that the city was starting to rear up around him. At the first major intersection he reached, he turned right, drove down four blocks, and made a quick left in front of oncoming traffic.

Two more turns, and he was confident there was no way the others would know where he was. A few minutes later, he pulled into an alleyway behind a clothing store and parked the car tight to the wall.

His gloved hands made doing a wipe down of the interior unnecessary, but he still did a check for any hair he might have left behind. Once he was sure the car was clean, he tossed the keys onto the dash so they’d be visible to anyone interested in taking a joy ride, and walked down the alley to the far street.

For the first time since things had gone sideways, he allowed a thought that had been pecking away at the back of his mind to come forward.

The police had been waiting at the turnoff for his dump site.

How had they found it? And how had they known what time to be there?

It seemed unlikely that someone had discovered the hole in the ground and reported it. But even if that were the case, the hole wasn’t long and narrow like a grave. It was a five-foot-deep square. Odd, perhaps, and they might be curiosity about who had dug it, but jumping to the conclusion that it was criminal in nature was a giant leap.

There really was only one possibility. The cops had been tipped off.

But by whom? The only ones who knew about the pending death of the target were Pullman, the ops team, and Nate and Burke. Well, the client, too, of course, whoever that was. But he or she was unlikely to know any of the operation details. In fact, the only ones who knew about the dump site were Nate and Burke.

That son of a bitch sold me out.

As anger began to build in his chest, Nate fought it back down. He did not have time to worry about the whos and whys right now. What he had to worry about were the hows, as in how he’d get out of town. Given the gigantic fiasco the operation had become, there was no question Monterrey should already have been in his rear window.

Once he was safely away, the next thing he’d need to do was get in touch with Pullman so the broker could handle any damage control that needed to happen. Hopefully the fire in the van had taken care of the body. It wouldn’t be the most satisfactory conclusion to the assignment, but the target was dead, and Nate had followed procedure, doing all he could to make identification of the body difficult.

Then, and only then, could he start thinking about Burke.

The closest entrance to the US from his current location was along the Texas border. There were several small crossings, but the busy one at Reynosa would be easiest. Busy was good. He could lose himself if he had to. And if anything looked screwy there, he could head east to Matamoros and cross over into Brownsville. Worst case, he could continue over to the Gulf Coast and hire a fishing vessel and work his way north.

The one thing he couldn’t do in a timely manner was walk the one hundred and forty miles from Monterrey to the border. But most of the traditional transportation options-planes, buses, rental cars-were out, too. Cops would be watching those. Even if they didn’t know exactly what Nate looked like, if they’d been tipped off about the operation, they probably knew he was a gringo, too, and would question any Caucasian male traveling alone.

A taxi? Same problem. A quick warning broadcast over their radio, and suddenly the driver would start to wonder about his passenger. Nate could just steal a vehicle, but most of the cars he was passing looked liked they’d be unlikely to make it halfway to the border before giving out.

At the end of the block, a delivery truck turned onto the street, grinded its gears for a moment, and drove right by Nate.

He smiled. That was the solution he was looking for.

There would be hundreds of trucks running between Monterrey and Reynosa, carrying goods bound for the US. If he could get to where the highway started-find the Mexican equivalent of a truck stop, perhaps-he should be able to bum a ride, or, even better, stow away and then hop out when the rig reached the border town.

He consulted a map of the city on this phone, walked four blocks over to a main road, and took a chance on flagging down a taxi for a short ride.

“La Condesa,” he told the driver. It was on the outskirts of the city, along the highway to Texas. “Metele velocidad.”

Nate wasted no time picking out his target. It was a tractor-trailer rig with license plates for both Mexico and Texas, parked in a big lot beside a Pemex station on the side of the road headed toward the border. The trailer was locked up, but there was an area behind the cab surrounded by metal partitions just wide enough for Nate to sit between if he drew his legs up to his chest. It certainly wasn’t the safest place to ride, but there were several things he could brace himself against, and as long as he didn’t fall asleep or the driver didn’t get into an accident, he’d be fine.

He went inside the store attached to the station and picked up some water, all the while keeping an eye out the window in case the driver returned. When he was done, he hung around the side of the building until the trucker finally showed up. As the man was doing a walk around his rig, Nate made his way over to the semi parked in the adjacent spot. He waited there, out of sight, until the driver started to climb into his cab.

As Nate heard the door open, he scooted out of his hiding spot, rushed into the space between the truck and the trailer, and took his self-assigned seat. The engine rumbled and the truck pulled out.

Nate was on his way toward Reynosa.

The ride was hot and windy. Nate kept his head tucked down most of the time. With nothing else to occupy his mind, he allowed himself to go over the possibilities of why the job had gone wrong. No matter which scenario he considered, his thoughts always circled back to Burke. There was just no other solution.

His motivation?

Money?

It was the root of all evil, right? And the easiest answer. But even that brought a set of unknowns. Who had paid Burke for the information? And what was that person’s motivation?

Was it a friend of the dead man? No, that wouldn’t make sense. The person would have wanted to stop the operation from happening at all.

The police? Wouldn’t they have been more interested in catching the ops team in the act of killing the target?

Neither choice satisfied Nate. But if not them, then who?

Nate wondered what Quinn would have thought, but immediately knew the answer. Quinn would have never taken the job in the first place.

Pullman hadn’t been on Quinn’s Preferred Clients list, and Quinn had reached a point in his career where if a job were offered by someone he didn’t know, he would have just passed. Nate was not in the position to be as picky. So when the gig coincided with a hole in his schedule, he’d done some due diligence, and found out that Pullman was a mid-level fixer with a decent enough reputation. Nate had seen no reason to turn the job down. It was all experience, he’d told himself. The more he had, the better he would be.