Page 119 of Hellbent

She typed, her smile growing broader as she warmed to the idea. “And prison escapees.”

“Who are also wanted for killing a police officer.”

“That is so the best hat trick,” she said. “It’s like making a list for Santa.”

She finished filling out the arrest warrant, issued a statewide BOLO, and fed the forms into the legal and law-enforcement machinery of greater Richmond.

Then she held up her palm.

He slapped it.

51

Push a Little More

Candy’s back was on fire, but she granted her skin no concessions when on a mission. She refused to scratch it, even resisted tugging at her shirt so the fabric would rub against the ruinous flesh and soothe the burn. Candy had pulled Van Sciver into the hall of the safe house to talk to him privately.

Van Sciver was as unyielding a man as she’d ever encountered, but he was still a man, which meant she had a shot at getting what she wanted from him. He’d pulled his pistol out of his underarm tension holster.

An FNX-45 with a threaded barrel and holographic red-dot sights.

A lot of firepower for the skull of a thirteen-year-old.

“The hard part’s over,” Van Sciver said. “We have him now. X knows it or will soon enough. The kid’s served his purpose.”

Van Sciver’s eyes twitched across the threshold to where David Smith sat on the decline bench, a pillowcase cinched over his head, hands pressed between his knees. He hadn’t made a noise since Delmonico and Shea had delivered him. The two men stood by the rear door, guarding it with M4s in case the skinny thirteen-year-old kid went Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on them. The other pair patrolled the front of the house as if working perimeter duty at a presidential inauguration.

L’s corpse had been removed, the spillage from his body more or less cleaned up, though the smell of vomit lingered.

Over in the kitchen, Thornhill stirred something in a pot, humming to himself. It smelled delicious and spicy, and Candy wondered where Thornhill was from, how he’d learned to cook and who for. It brought back a memory from high-altitude SERE training in her seventeenth year. She’d summited a tree-blanketed rise in the Rockies, nearly stumbling onto a family of four picnicking out of the back of their Range Rover. The mom had laid down a blanket, and there were sliced apples in bowls and cold fried chicken and thermoses of hot cider. The daughter was around Candy’s age. Candy had hidden behind the tree line, staring down at the exotic sight before her, scarcely breathing lest she spook them. She’d remained long after they’d driven off, her boots embedded in a film of snow, trying to loose the tangle of emotions that had knotted up her throat.

Thornhill lifted the wooden spoon for a taste, smacked his lips at a job well done. In a holster snugged to his hip, he had an FNX-45 that matched Van Sciver’s. He was so disarming that it was easy to forget how lethal he was. With Thornhill it was a pleasant conversation right up until the minute the bullet entered your brain.

Candy refocused on Van Sciver, keeping her voice low. “I’m saying let’s not have a failure of imagination here.”

“Which means what, precisely?”

“L took the kid out of circulation. And Jack kept him off the books after that. David Smith has got no real record—no files, no fingerprints, nothing. Aside from a few kids in a loony ward, no one knows his face.” She paused for dramatic effect. Pursed her distractingly plump lips. “Which means he’s a blank check.”

Van Sciver’s fair-complected face was mottled from the exertion of the past twenty-four hours, splotches of red creeping up from his shirt collar. That blown pupil was like a void. Candy felt that if she stared long enough, she might fall into it and keep tumbling.

She thought of the beautiful young woman locked in a car trunk in an alley outside Sevastopol. The rattle of her fists against the metal as she bled out. The scraping of her nails.

Candy shuddered off the thought, looked away from Van Sciver’s lopsided gaze so he couldn’t read anything in her face. The pillowcase fluttered in the spot where the boy’s mouth was, the fabric pulsing like a heartbeat, surprisingly steady.

“L acquired him for you initially,” she said. “Now you have your asset back.”

“What if Jack Johns turned him?”

“Jack Johns only had him a few months before dumping him at that facility. Not enough to fully indoctrinate him. But the kid did get the benefit of Johns’s training. Johns is good at that. Maybe the best.”

Van Sciver gritted his teeth, neither confirming nor denying. “What are you suggesting?”

“After we get X, we pick up with the kid where L and Jack left off.”

“I don’t have the time or interest to train some boy myself.”

“I’ll do it. Assuming he’s the right material.”