He paid in cash, left a big tip. As he turned to walk away, he said, “Have fun out there.”
“Have a good one,” she said as she smiled at the next customer.
Zack Hightower left without Cara noticing him, which was another win for him.
Five minutes later he sat across the street, the grille of his truck facing the café, and he sipped his coffee, ate his Danish, and stared through the window, lost in his thoughts. He had to fly back to Vah Beach tonight, wassure the doctor would sign off on his full recovery today after the MRI, especially if he could hide the big purple bruise on his knee from where he banged it during the first D.C. shoot-out three nights ago.
Once the doctor told him he was good, then he had no real reason to ever come back here again.
He was needed elsewhere; people were dying back east, and he was part of the group that was killing the killers, but he honestly just wanted to come here every day, have ten seconds of conversation with that kid across the street, and then sit right here in his truck and enjoy his breakfast.
Part of him was angry that he would settle for this, and another part of him felt like this didn’t seem like such a bad life at all.
—
Eighty yards away, a dark blue Jeep Wagoneer with Utah plates was parked between a couple of smaller vehicles, and inside the Jeep, three men used the zooms on their iPhones to filter out the water on their windows and to enlarge the distant image of the man in the truck.
They watched him eat a bite of food, drink from a paper cup, and stare across the street, through the rain and into the café.
“The fuck does he keep looking at?” The comment was made by the twenty-seven-year-old behind the wheel. Todd Voorhies was tall, broad, and muscular; he had his razor-short hair covered by a knit cap, but the tats running up his neck revealed to any who knew the signs that he was a member of a white nationalist group based in Ogden, Utah. The man in back, a twenty-two-year-old with similar tats, was his younger brother, though at six-four, he was an inch taller than his sibling.
“Something in that restaurant,” Lee Voorhies answered.
“That’s not a restaurant. It’s a café,” Todd corrected.
“What’s the difference?”
“Dumbass.”
Another man sat in the front passenger seat; he was older, head to toe in the camouflage gear of a hunter, and he’d been silent while the brothers jawed back and forth, but now he turned his head a little to the right, focused on Cara’s Bakehouse.
“Bennett’s sure as shit taking his time.”
“He’s probably eatin’ a donut,” Todd said. Then, “Hey, Kincaid. Why don’t we just do it right now? I’ll walk right over there and pop that old motherfucker in his truck, three in the back of the head, and we can be out of here before it starts snowin’. Back to Utah by this afternoon.”
“Not yet,” Scott Kincaid, code name Lancer, said in the front passenger seat. “This guy’s trained like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Yeah,” the younger Voorhies brother said from the back. “But he’s sure as shit not payin’ attention right now.”
Lancer looked back to him. “He’snot? Really? What are you, a fucking genius? Right now he is sitting behind the wheel of a parked vehicle. Do you even understand what that means when you’re talking about a guy like that?”
The man in the backseat looked to the truck, then back to Lancer. “Doesn’t mean shit other than the fact that I can walk over there and—”
“It means, not only does he have windows that look out in all directions, but he’s got three mirrors that are showing him angles other than the direction his head is facing. He’s more situationally aware than in almost any other setting. Sneaking up on someone behind the wheel of a parked car is harder than it fucking looks, and I should know, because motherfuckers have tried it on me.
“Now, what do we know about this fuck? We know he’s spent about thirty years fighting people or training to fight people a hell of a lot more impressive than the fuckin’ Voorhies brothers from Ogden, Utah. You walk up on his car and he’s going to know it, and no matter what he’s got in his hands right now, he’s going to have a pistol in them before you can get close enough to shoot him.”
Todd muttered, “I’ve also got my hunting rifle in the back. I can pop that dude from here, no big—”
“I don’t give a shit if you have a Javelin missile system,” Kincaid said. “Everybody just calm down and wait for my instructions.”
No one spoke for half a minute, and then Lancer let out a sigh. “He’s distracted. I’ll give you that. Might not be checking his mirrors, but normally, a dude like him? Former DEVGRU operator, former CIA paramilitary. No chance in hell you big motherfuckers are gonna catch him napping behind the wheel. And you fire from this vehicle, and this vehicleis gonna get stopped as soon as we get back on the highway. We have to catch him at a time that’s to our advantage.”
The three of them watched a man step out of Cara’s Bakehouse with a paper cup of coffee in his hand, cross the street in front of them, then move to the back right door of the Wagoneer. The driver unlocked it, and he climbed in, dripping with cold rain.
Lancer said, “Target is eighty yards off to our left. He pulled in there after he left the café. He’s looking at the café now. Why?”
The new man in the Jeep was in his thirties, burly, burlier still with his camo-green cold-weather hunting gear on. He was bearded, and his black ball cap dripped icy rainwater. No tattoos showed on his neck, but if he’d not been wearing the coat, the ink would have been evident on his arms. He said, “The little chick behind the register. Young kid. They knew each other somehow. She remembered his order, she said something about Eldora Mountain and snowboarding, I couldn’t pick it all up, but they acted like family or something.”
