Bad Ending (Agent Juliet Book 5) Read online

  Still no one.

  The wind picked up. With the adrenaline worn off, I could feel the cold again. I shivered. The wet parts of my shirt and jeans were icing over. I tried not to think about the girls, huddled in that water. If they caught pneumonia or something—if they were even able to catch pneumonia—that could be treated later.

  I tried touching my thumb one at a time to my other fingers to see if I was getting hypothermia. I could reach them all but the pinky. I stuck the Sig back in my waistband and put my hands in my armpits.

  Too bad I’d had to ditch that hoodie. And that I didn’t have gloves. And that we hadn’t run to some non-extradition country with white sand beaches.

  What was it Romeo had said about being a sniper? Something like, It’s all just a waiting game. Whoever’s the least patient gets the most dead.

  Just a waiting game. A freezing cold waiting game.

  I was fantasizing about falling asleep in front of a nice, hot woodstove when I smelled something. Not quite as obvious as body spray, but definitely not natural. Soap?

  I scanned the area, moving my head as little as possible.

  No one. But the smell kept getting stronger. The wind was coming from my left. I turned my upper body a fraction of an inch.

  A gunshot. I saw the muzzle flash a split-second before I felt the bullet tear into my shoulder.

  *****

  The fiery pressure in my shoulder brought me screaming back to consciousness. The operative standing on my bullet wound picked up his foot.

  “Where are the girls?” he asked.

  “What girls?”

  He ground his boot into the wound. I couldn’t hold back the yell.

  “Where are the girls?”

  “Whatever Command told you about me ain’t true,” I said. “The girls are my niece—”

  He stomped and I screamed. Except this time he didn’t let up.

  “Where are the girls?” he asked over my yelling.

  I thrashed around like a stepped-on copperhead, but I couldn’t get away from the pain.

  “Judo! Chop!”

  The boot lifted off my shoulder.

  My vision was still blurry from the pain, but I saw a big shadow that I knew was the operative grab the small shadow—Della.

  “Let go of my hair,” she screeched.

  He picked her up.

  I grabbed for him. Missed. Floundered around until I made it to my feet.

  “Della?” I scrubbed at my eyes.

  “Uncle Ja—” The rest of the yell was muffled.

  I reached for the Sig. Gone. I could feel where the .22’s ankle holster had been. The empty sheath from the boot knife. The operative must’ve searched me while I was out.

  All I had left was a bunch of useless ammo and that set of brass knuckles.

  A growl—male, off to my right. The sound of a struggle. Little fists and feet smacking muscle.

  I jammed the brass knuckles onto my fingers and ran toward the racket.

  They hadn’t made it far, just a few yards. The operative was choking Della. She kicked and scratched, but she was slowing down. Passing out. The operative didn’t hear me coming. I slugged him in the side of the head. When the brass knuckles connected with his skull, bone cracked.

  He fell on top of Della. I rolled him off with my boot, then helped her up. She jerked out of my hands and went after him again, stomping on his face.

  “Quit that!” I grabbed her and dragged her away from him. “What the hell? I told you to stay put. Where’s Eva?”

  “She’s in the secret hideout.”

  “You don’t just leave your little sister, Della. That’s—”

  “You did a good job, Uncle Jamie. You knocked out a prefab soldier all by yourself. Now we can kill him.”

  “Stop talking about killing people!”

  She was grinning. “I can only hurt a prefab sometimes when we’re practicing. Nobody can beat one. You’re very impressive and unique, Uncle Jamie.”

  I started to say something, but a wave of dizziness almost knocked me over. I grabbed my shoulder and leaned against the closest tree, waiting for it to pass.

  Jesus, Della was a psycho.

  Run now, freak out later.

  “We got to get out of here,” I said. “Before everybody else shows up.”

  “Nobody else is coming,” Della said. “Prefabs work alone or in pairs. They can’t be in big groups or they’ll kill each other.”

  I could hear water rushing in my ears. I put my face against the tree trunk.

  “No more talking, D,” I said. “Let’s just go get Eva before I pass out.”

  Something rustled behind us. I started to reach for the Sig before I remembered it was gone.

  “There was snakes in that hole, I think,” Eva said.

  “So, nobody in this family knows what ‘stay put’ means?” I said. “Great. Glad we cleared that up before there was an emergency or something.”

  The burner phone in my pocket buzzed and rattled against the extra magazines. The ones I didn’t need anymore because I’d lost the fucking gun. I needed to get the rifle away from that prefab-whatever operative guy in case he woke up.

  The phone buzzed again, forcing me to focus. I dug it out. No number, just the word “Private.”

  I hit the answer button, but didn’t say anything.

  “Hello?” a woman’s voice said. “Is this Jamie Kendrick or one of the girls?”

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “Dr. White.”

  I made myself ask—“Is Bravo dead?”

  “Not as far as I know,” she said. “Why? Should he be?”

  “How’d you get this number?”

  “By triangulating the closest cell phone signal to the girls’ chips,” she said.

  Tracking chips. That hadn’t even occurred to me. No wonder everybody thought I was as stupid as I looked.

  “I want the girls back, Jamie,” Dr. White said.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Your girlfriend told me you’d say that.”

  Every muscle in my body bunched up.

  “Not so funny when someone takes something of yours, is it?” Dr. White said. “Is your phone able to receive picture messages?”

  “I—” I cleared my throat. “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m showing a signal that one of my prefabricated soldiers is nearby,” she said. “I assume since you’re still alive that he’s dead. Now, there should be a smartphone in his vest.”

  I walked over on legs that felt like mismatched stilts. Got down on one knee and searched the operative. The phone was in a pocket. The Message icon was flashing. I thumbed it open.

  It was a picture of Romeo. Black eye, busted lip, swelling jaw. Blood everywhere. I couldn’t tell if she was alive or not. Someone else was holding her up by her hair.

  “Did you get it?” Dr. White asked.

  I forced out the word “Yeah.”

  “Good. Listen carefully, Jamie. Clinton National Airport out of Little Rock, eight a.m. That gives you plenty of time to arrange for transportation. There will be three boarding passes waiting for you, all you have to do is go to the e-ticket kiosk and print them off. I’ll text you the confirmation number, so don’t throw away your phone.”

  She waited.

  “A’ight,” I said.

  “Jamie—” Dr. White said it like a teacher giving a kid a warning. “—if you don’t get on that plane, I’ll know and Romeo will die.”

  *****

  After I sent Bravo a blank text to let him know the phone was compromised, I grabbed the M16, put it against the prefab guy’s head and pulled the trigger. Then I patted him down. Found a set of keys, an LED headlamp, and a knife.

  I put the keys in my pocket and ran the knife blade along my thumb. It sliced a clean line into the pad. Damn thing was so sharp that I barely bled.

  “Did Dr. White or Gramma put anything in you guys?” I asked. “Like cut you open and stick something metal in? Or poke you wi
th one of those injector guns? Like they do with hunting dogs?”

  Neither of the girls said anything.

  “Something really little,” I said. “It’s called a tracking chip.”

  Still nothing.

  “We have to get it out,” I said. “That’s how Dr. White found us.”

  Della bit her lips together and looked down at the ground.

  Eva started sniffling.

  “Just show me, Babygirl. It’ll be over fast, I promise.”

  “Me don’t want to,” she yelled.

  “Here,” Della said. She raised her hand and poked at her armpit. “Right there.”

  “Yours, too?” I asked Eva.

  She sat down, put her face in her hands, and wailed.

  *****

  The walk back to the highway seemed to take forever. I was lightheaded, nauseous, numb. Della kept complaining about being cold. My shoulder had stopped bleeding, but I couldn’t pack Eva and she wouldn’t stop crying. Both of the girls’ armpits had healed less than a minute after I dug the tracking chips out, but Eva wouldn’t talk to me or hold my hand.

  We came out of the trees a couple hundred yards from the wreck site. I stepped out first and waited for somebody to open fire. No one did. The truck was empty. Maybe Della had been right about those prefab guys only working in pairs.

  I put the girls in the backseat and buckled them up, then climbed into the driver’s seat.

  For a second, I just sat there. Then I caught a whiff of blood. I leaned out the door and puked.

  “Jesus.” I spit. Wiped my mouth. Shut the door.

  “Are you sick, Uncle Jamie?” Della asked.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “You threw up.”

  “I know, D, I was there,” I said. “Let’s all just be quiet for the rest of the trip, a’ight?”

  *****

  Ouachita Hollow was a pretty small town, only about four hundred residents spread out over ten-thousand acres. Everybody knew everybody else. Nobody locked their house up at night. And even if a murderer did walk in the front door, pretty much everybody in the Holler had a gun big enough to make sure he didn’t walk back out.

  I flashed the brights and tapped the horn a couple times as we drove up the lane to Officer Mary Harris’s farmhouse. The porch light came on. Just to be safe, though, I parked the truck beside her squad car and waited.

  The front door opened. Harris stood just inside the screen, looking out. Curlers, a housedress the size of a circus tent, and a sawed-off shotgun.

  “Who is it?” she yelled.

  I got out, hands in the air. “Jamie Kendrick.”

  Harris kicked the screen door open and started shooting.

  I ducked back into the driver’s seat.

  “Get down, girls,” I told them, but they already had. Fast learners. I turned back around and yelled at Harris, “I’m unarmed and I got Della and Eva in the truck. Stop fucking shooting at me!”

  “You’re dead,” Harris yelled back. “They killed you trying to escape.”

  “If I was dead, I wouldn’t care about guns and shit,” I yelled.

  Silence.

  “I ain’t a ghost,” I said. “I swear.”

  “Prove it.”

  “How?”

  “Step out from behind there so I can get a clear shot?” she said.

  “Come on, Harris,” I said. “You know anybody else it could be?”

  A couple seconds passed. I heard footsteps on the porch. I peeked over the edge of the window guard.

  Harris was coming across the yard, shotgun at her side. She squinted at me.

  “That body they brought in didn’t look nothing like you,” she said. “Even with the face blown off.”

  “It wasn’t me,” I said.

  “Yeah, I gathered.” She craned her neck so she could see Della and Eva in the backseat. “That their blood?”

  My stomach lurched again. I swallowed the bile and nodded.

  Harris pointed at my shoulder. “That yours?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Well, better come in, get these girls warmed up.”

  *****

  Harris brought a pan of grits into the dining room and filled our bowls. At first, I thought I was too sick to eat, but once I smelled it, I was starving. I scarfed mine down while the grits were still hot enough to melt skin. Della and Eva weren’t far behind.

  “It was all pretty suspicious, if you ask me,” Harris said. “Your record, files, everything—up and gone the next day. There wasn’t any way we could prove that body wasn’t you. We looked for the girls high and low, but never found anything. Obviously.”

  Harris scooped some more grits into my bowl and I mentally took back everything bad I’d ever said about her and her wispy mustache.

  “Nobody wanted to call it quits on the search,” she said. “Your brother and Talia, they were good, decent people. Felt like the least we could do was find the girls, but…” She nodded at Della and Eva. “It made a lot of folk sick not knowing. Imagining them lost and scared out in the mountains or worse.”

  “You mean imagining me cutting them up or molesting them or some shit.”

  “Jesus, Kendrick—”

  “What? That’s what you’re implying. That everybody thought I was some kind of psycho pervert.”

  “Nobody thought that.”

  “You said it to my face. You asked me if I was hiding the girls’ bodies for later.”

  “I was trying to shake you up, get you to confess!”

  “To killing my only family? What the fuck?”

  “What were we supposed to think?” Harris snapped. “Generally, when an ankle monitor says a known druggie was someplace while a murder was being committed, he was there. That’s why they put GPS in those things.”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek. Tried to remember that there was a time I didn’t know any more than she did. So, I told her. Delgado killing Owen and Talia, NOC-Unit framing me so they would have somebody around who could get Della and Eva to mind, the girls walking away from the helicopter crash without a scratch on them, me joining Whiskey’s team to keep an eye on the girls, Della’s creepy-ass child soldier preschool, the trip back to Arkansas, Dr. White’s call—even the KiloT-4 stuff.

  “Kind of farfetched,” Harris said.

  “Well, it happened,” I said.

  She leaned her elbow on the table. After a few minutes of consideration, she said, “What we need to do is call somebody. The FBI.”

  “Remember those state troopers who supposedly shot me dead on the way to lockup?” I pointed at the hole in my shoulder. “And this? That’s from an M16. Standard issue for the United States military—and NOC-Unit operatives. We did jobs for the CIA, the government, pretty much everybody. If you think you’re just going to call up the FBI and they’ll fix everything, you’re fucking crazy.”

  “Can you stop with the language for five seconds?” Harris snapped. “There’s two little kids sitting right there.”

  My kneejerk reaction was to tell her to go to hell and that the girls weren’t even paying attention to me. But Harris did have a point.

  “Girls, don’t say ‘fuck,’” I said. “It’s a bad word and Jesus don’t like it.”

  Harris rolled her eyes.

  “You know what?” I said. “Fu—forget you. You ain’t their mama.”

  Della looked up from her grits. “My mama’s dead.”

  Harris glared at me like that proved some kind of point.

  I tossed my spoon into my bowl and rubbed my hands across my face. “Getting back to the nationwide manhunt…”

  “If not the FBI, then who do we go to?” Harris asked. “What do we do?”

  I thought about it.

  “Awful quiet over there,” Harris said. “I thought you were the big man with all the answers.”

  “I got one idea,” I said.

  “Well, let’s hear it.”

  “If I don’t get on the plane, she’ll kill Romeo,” I said.
“So, I get on the plane.”

  “That’s your idea?” Harris said.

  “Obviously, I don’t take the girls with me. I leave them here with you. Y’all hide out. If you don’t hear out of me in two days, you disappear.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Harris sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “And then what, genius? What happens when you get there? When this Dr. White person finds out where the girls are? You think I got enough firepower in this little shack to hold off a bunch of soldiers with M16s?”

  I sucked my teeth. All I could think about was Romeo, beat up and bloody. Why the hell was she even in the US? The team wasn’t supposed to be back from Thailand until eighteen hundred hours tonight.

  “This ain’t the way to go about it,” Harris said.

  Maybe NOC-Unit had found out somehow and sent another team after them, right after Bravo and I left. Maybe Whiskey, Mike, and Fox were already dead.

  Harris leaned forward until I had to look her in the eyes. “Look, Kendrick, I don’t want anybody to hurt these girls any more than you do. You might’ve been too busy breaking the law and mouthing off to cops to respect the concept of ‘serve and protect,’ but I stand by it. I’m telling you, this ain’t the way to go. You don’t do something like this on your own. You call in backup.”

  “I don’t got any backup left,” I said. “I mean, shit, I came here.”

  *****

  “Come on, Babygirl,” I said, holding my arms open. “Just give me a hug so’s I can go.”

  Eva glared down at the porch.

  Della came over and hugged me again.

  “That’s two,” Della said. “One from me and one from Eva. She can hug me later to pay me back.”

  “I’m glad I don’t owe you money, D.” I let her go and stood up. “Y’all be good for Officer Harris. Do what she says when she says and don’t sass her. Love you, girls.”

  Della said, “I love you.”

  Eva turned around and hid her face against Harris’s thigh. I wanted to go over there and grab the kid and make her hug me and swear to her I was sorry for cutting that thing out of her and for letting people hurt her for so long and ask her why the hell she never told me.

  I started backing away, toward the truck.

  “Take care of them,” I told Harris. “And thanks for the clean clothes.”

  I didn’t say anything about us wearing the same size, which I thought was pretty mature of me.