Chapter 56: Stitches for Monsters

We let them go, giving them a five-mile head start before we started rolling again, our headlights off, driving by moonlight and memory. Maddie had already picked the spot from the satellite maps. A narrow S-curve where the road was carved into the side of a mesa. No shoulder, no room to maneuver. A perfect shooting gallery.

We planted the welcoming presents Lynn had provided. Two shaped charges, slapped onto the rock face on either side of the curve. They weren't powerful enough to cause a landslide, just enough to turn the lead and rear cars into scrap metal coffins, trapping the big rigs in the middle.

Then we waited. The silence in the desert at night isn't really silent. It's full of whispers. The skittering of unseen things, the sigh of the wind over rock, the hum of your own blood in your ears. It’s the kind of quiet that makes you think too much. I thought about Sarah, about the Stones, about the string of bodies that had led me to this exact spot. And I thought about the woman sitting next to me, her face a pale, beautiful mask in the starlight, and the impossible promise in my pocket.

The rumble came first, a vibration in the soles of my boots. Then the headlights, cutting through the dark.

"Now," Maddie said, her voice calm as a frozen lake.

I hit the detonator.

The world ripped open in a flash of white light and a deafening, crumping boom that punched me in the chest. The lead sedan disappeared in a blossom of fire and twisted metal. Brakes shrieked, horns blared. The second charge went off a second later, turning the rear car into a roadblock of flaming wreckage. It was beautiful, horrible, and over in an instant.

We moved in the echoes, coming down the scree slope like ghosts, guns up. The men who'd survived the initial blasts were scrambling out of the trucks, disoriented, shouting. They were professionals, but nobody's prepared for the sky to fall on them.

That's when you learn that no plan, no matter how good, survives contact with a bullet. One of them, a guy with a face like a roadmap of bad decisions, got his bearings faster than the others. He brought his shotgun up just as Maddie was moving to flank the cab of the first truck.

"Maddie!" I yelled, but it was too late.

The shotgun roared, a brutal, ugly sound. She cried out, a sharp, bitten-off sound of pain, and went down. My world went red. I didn't even aim, just brought my rifle up and stitched a line of fire across the guy's chest, sending him sprawling back into the dirt.

The rest was a blur of muzzle flashes and screaming. When the shooting stopped, the only sounds were the crackle of the burning cars and the ragged sound of my own breathing. I ran to her. She was on one knee, clutching her left arm. Blood, black in the moonlight, was soaking through the sleeve of her jacket.

"It's okay," she grunted, her teeth clenched. "Ricochet. Piece of the door. It's deep, but it missed the bone."

We didn't have time. We grabbed a briefcase from the cab of the lead truck and a satellite phone that was still blinking on the dead driver's lap. Then we were gone, melting back into the desert as sirens began to wail in the far, far distance.

Back at the Stardust Inn, under the flickering fluorescent light of the bathroom, the real damage was clear. The gash in her arm was long and nasty, bleeding like a son of a bitch. While she pressed a wad of clean towels against it, I dumped the contents of the briefcase onto the bedspread with the cigarette burns. The manifests were just as we expected: Chiron Corp logos all over them, with Sheriff Brody's signature providing the rubber stamp. We had him. We had the proof.

But we also had a problem. A big, bleeding one.

"This needs stitches, Mads. Real ones."

"No hospital," she said, her voice tight with pain. "And we sure as hell can't go to Finch. He'd probably poison the sutures."

She was right. Finch was the devil we knew, a snake working his own angle for Chiron. We couldn't trust him to fix a hangnail. That left one option. The emergency number Lynn had given us. The one for her "discreet medical professional."

I pulled out the burner phone. My thumb hovered over the call button. You get a feel for things in this life. A low hum in your bones when things are about to go sideways. My bones were humming now.

"Who is this guy, anyway?" Maddie asked, her voice a little weaker now.

"Lynn just said he was the best," I said, trying to reassure both of us. "Said she knew him through her charity work. The Phoenix Foundation."

I hit the button. The phone rang twice. A voice answered, and the world dropped out from under my feet.