Thr3e, Page 2

  “What? What’s—”

  “Three minutes, Kevin. Starting . . . now. Let the games begin.”

  The phone went dead.

  For a moment, Kevin stared ahead, phone still plastered to his ear.

  A horn blared.

  The cars ahead were moving. The Mercedes was impatient again. Kevin pressed the accelerator, and the Sable surged forward. He set the phone down on the passenger seat and swallowed, throat dry. He glanced at the clock. 12:03.

  Okay, process. Stay calm and process. Did this really just happen? Of course it just happened! Some madman who called himself Slater just called my cell phone and threatened to blow up my car. Kevin grabbed the cell phone and stared at its face: “Unavailable, 00:39.”

  But was the threat real? Who would really blow up a car in the middle of a busy street over a riddle? Someone was trying to scare the snot out of him for some maniacal reason. Or some sicko had randomly chosen him as his next victim, someone who hated seminary students instead of prostitutes and really intended to kill him.

  His thoughts spun crazily. What sin? He had committed his sins, of course, but none that stood out immediately. What falls but never breaks? What breaks but never falls?

  His pulse pounded in his ears. Maybe he should get off the road. Of course he should get off the road! If there was even a remote chance that Slater meant to carry out his threat . . .

  For the first time, Kevin imagined the car actually filling with a blast of fire. A shaft of panic ripped down his spine. He had to get out! He had to call the police!

  Not now. Now he had to get out. Out!

  Kevin jerked his foot off the accelerator and slammed it down on the brake. The Sable’s tires squealed. A horn shrieked. The Mercedes.

  Kevin twisted his head and glanced through the rear window. Too many cars. He had to find a vacant spot, where flying shrapnel would do the least damage. He gunned the motor and shot forward. 12:05. But how many seconds? He had to assume three minutes would end at 12:06.

  A dozen thoughts crowded his mind: thoughts of a sudden explosion, thoughts of the voice on the phone, thoughts of how the cars around him were reacting to the Sable jerking along the road. What falls but never breaks? What breaks but never falls?

  Kevin looked around, frantic. He had to dump the car without blowing up the neighborhood. It’s not even going to blow, Kevin. Slow down and think. He ran his fingers through his hair several times in quick succession.

  He swung into the right lane, ignoring another horn. A Texaco station loomed on his right—not a good choice. Beyond the gas station, Dr. Won’s Chinese Cuisine—hardly better. There were no parks along this section of road; residences packed the side streets. Ahead, lunch crowds bustled at McDonald’s and Taco Bell. The clock still read 12:05. It had been 12:05 for too long.

  Now true panic muddled his thinking. What if it really does go off? It’s going to, isn’t it? God, help me! I’ve got to get out of this thing! He grabbed at his seat belt buckle with a trembling hand. Released the shoulder strap. Both hands back on the wheel.

  A Wal-Mart sat back from the street a hundred yards to his left. The huge parking lot was only half-filled. A wide greenway that dipped at its center, like a natural ditch, surrounded the entire lot. He made a critical decision: Wal-Mart or nothing.

  Kevin leaned on his horn and cut back into the center lane with a cursory glance in his mirror. A metallic screech made him duck— he’d clipped a car. Now he was committed.

  “Get out of my way! Get out!”

  He motioned frantically with his left hand, succeeding only in smashing his knuckles into the window. He grunted and swerved into the far left lane. With a tremendous thump he crashed over a six-inch-high median and then into oncoming traffic. It occurred to him that being rammed head-on might be no better than blowing up, but he was already in the path of a dozen oncoming cars.

  Tires squealed and horns blared. The Sable took only one hit in its right rear fender before shooting out the other side of the gauntlet. Something from his car was dragging on the asphalt. He cut off a pickup that was trying to exit the lot.

  “Watch out! Get out of my way!”

  Kevin roared into the Wal-Mart lot and glanced down at the clock. Somewhere back there it had turned. 12:06.

  To his right, traffic on Long Beach Boulevard had come to a screeching halt. It wasn’t every day that a car blasted through oncoming traffic like a bowling ball.

  Kevin sped past several gaping customers and zeroed in on the greenway. Not until he was on top of it did he see the curb. The Sable blew a tire when it connected; this time Kevin’s head struck the ceiling. A dull pain spread down his neck.

  Out, out, out!

  The car flew into the ditch and Kevin crammed the brake pedal to the floor. For a fleeting moment he thought he might roll. But the car slid to a jolting halt, its nose planted firmly in the opposite slope.

  He grabbed at the door latch, shoved the door open, and dove to the turf, rolling on impact. He scrambled to his feet and raced up the slope toward the lot. At least a dozen onlookers headed his way from the sea of parked cars.

  “Back! Get back!” Kevin waved his arms at them. “There’s a bomb in the car. Get back!”

  They stared at him for one moment of fixed horror. Then all but three turned and fled, screaming his warning.

  Kevin swung his arms furiously at the others. “Get back, you idiots! There’s a bomb!”

  They ran. A siren wailed through the air. Someone had already called the cops.

  Kevin had run a good fifty paces from the greenway before it occurred to him that the bomb hadn’t gone off. What if there wasn’t a bomb after all? He pulled up and whipped around, panting and trembling. Surely three minutes had come and gone.

  Nothing.

  Was it a practical joke after all? Whoever this caller was, he’d done almost as much damage through the threat alone as he would have by detonating an actual bomb.

  Kevin glanced around. A gawking crowd had gathered on the street at a safe distance. The traffic had stalled and was backing up as far as he could see. Steam hissed from a blue Honda—presumably the one that had hit his right rear fender. There had to be a few hundred people staring at the nut who’d driven his car into the ditch. Except for the growing wail of sirens, the scene had grown eerily silent. He took a step back toward the car.

  At least there was no bomb. A few angry motorists and some bent fenders, so what? He’d done the only thing he could do. And really, there still could be a bomb. He’d leave that for the police once he explained his story. Surely they would believe him. Kevin stopped. The car tipped into the dirt with its left rear tire off the ground. From here it all looked kind of stupid.

  “You said bomb?” someone yelled.

  Kevin looked back at a middle-aged man with white hair and a Cardinals baseball cap. The man stared at him. “Did you say there was a bomb?”

  Kevin looked back at the car, feeling suddenly foolish. “I thought there—”

  A deafening explosion shook the ground. Kevin instinctively crouched and threw his hands up to protect his face.

  The bright fireball hung over the car; boiling black smoke rose into the sky. The red flame collapsed on itself with a soft whomp. Smoke billowed from the charred skeleton of what was only a moment ago his Sable.

  Kevin dropped to one knee and stared, dumbstruck, wide-eyed.

  2

  WITHIN THIRTY MINUTES the crime scene was isolated and a full investigation launched, all in the purview of one Detective Paul Milton. The man was well built and walked like a gunslinger—a Schwarzenegger wannabe with a perpetual frown and blond bangs that covered his forehead. Kevin rarely found others intimidating, but Milton did nothing to calm his already shattered nerves.

  Someone had just tried to kill him. Someone named Slater, who seemed to know quite a lot about him. A madman who had the forethought and malice to plant a bomb and then remotely detonate the device when his demands weren’t met. The sce
ne stood before Kevin like an abstract painting come to life.

  Yellow tape marked a forty-yard perimeter, and within it several uniformed police officers gathered pieces of wreckage, labeled them with evidence tags, and stacked them in neat piles on a flatbed truck to be transported downtown. The crowd had grown to well over a hundred. Bewilderment was fixed on some faces; other spectators wildly gestured their version of the events. The only injury reported was a small cut on a teenage boy’s right arm. As it turned out, one of the cars Kevin had clipped in his mad dash across the street was none other than the impatient Mercedes. Once the driver learned he’d been following a car bomb, however, his attitude improved significantly. Traffic on Long Beach Boulevard still suffered from curiosity, but the debris had been cleared.

  Three news vans were in the lot. If Kevin understood the situation correctly, his face and what was left of his car were being televised live throughout the Los Angeles Basin. A news helicopter hovered overhead.

  A forensic scientist worked carefully over the twisted remains of the trunk, where the bomb had clearly resided. Another detective dusted for prints on what was left of the doors.

  Kevin had spilled his story to Milton and now waited to be taken down to the station. By the way Milton glared at him, Kevin was sure the detective considered him a suspect. A simple examination of the evidence would clear his name, but one minor fact haunted him. His account of events omitted Slater’s demand that he confess some sin.

  What sin? The last thing he needed was for the police to begin digging into his past for some sin. Sin wasn’t the point. The point was that Slater had given him a riddle and told him that phoning the newspaper with the riddle’s answer would prevent Kevin from being blown sky-high. That’s what he’d told them.

  On the other hand, willfully withholding information in an investigation was a crime itself, wasn’t it?

  Dear God, someone just blew up my car! The fact sat like an absurd little lump on the edge of Kevin’s mind. The front edge. He smoothed his hair nervously.

  Kevin sat on a chair provided by one of the cops, tapping his right foot on the grass. Milton kept glancing at him as he debriefed the other investigators and took statements from witnesses. Kevin looked back at the car where the forensic team worked. What they could possibly learn from that wreckage escaped him. He stood unsteadily, took a deep breath, and walked down the slope toward the car.

  The forensic scientist at the trunk was a woman. Black, petite, maybe Jamaican. She looked up and lifted an eyebrow. Pretty smile. But the smile didn’t alter the scene behind her.

  It was hard to believe that the twisted pile of smoldering metal and plastic had been his car.

  “Whoever did this had one heck of a chip on his shoulder,” she said. A badge on her shirt said she was Nancy Sterling. She looked back into what was left of the trunk and dusted the inside lip.

  Kevin cleared his throat. “Can you tell me what kind of bomb it was?”

  “Do you know bombs?” she asked.

  “No. I know there’s dynamite and C-4. That’s about it.”

  “We’ll know for sure back at the lab, but it looks like dynamite. Leaves no chemical signature that ties it to a specific batch once it’s been detonated.”

  “Do you know how he set it off?”

  “Not yet. Remote detonation, a timer, or both, but there’s not too much left to go on. We’ll eventually get it. We always do. Just be glad you got out.”

  “Boy, no kidding.”

  He watched her place tape over a dusted fingerprint, lift it, and seal the faint print on a card. She made a few notations on the card and went back to work with her flashlight.

  “The only prints we’ve found so far are in places where we would expect to find yours.” She shrugged. “Guy like this isn’t stupid enough not to wear gloves, but you never know. Even the smartest make mistakes eventually.”

  “Well, I hope he made one. This whole thing’s crazy.”

  “They usually are.” She gave him a friendly smile. “You okay?”

  “I’m alive. Hopefully I don’t hear from him again.” His voice shook as he spoke.

  Nancy straightened and looked him in the eye. “If it’s any consolation, if this was me, I’d be in a pool of tears on the sidewalk. We’ll get this one, like I said; we always do. If he really wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. This guy’s meticulous and calculating. He wants you alive. That’s my take, for what it’s worth.”

  She glanced up to where Detective Milton was talking to a reporter. “And don’t let Milton get to you. He’s a good cop. Full of himself, maybe. Case like this will send him through the roof.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Publicity. Let’s just say he has his aspirations.” She smiled. “Don’t worry. Like I said, he’s a good detective.”

  As if on cue, Milton turned from the camera and walked straight for them.

  “Let’s go, cowboy. How long you here for, Nancy?”

  “I have what I need.”

  “Preliminary findings?”

  “I’ll have them for you in half an hour.”

  “I need them now. I’m taking Mr. Parson in for a few questions.”

  “I’m not ready now. Half an hour, on your desk.”

  They held stares.

  Milton snapped his fingers at Kevin. “Let’s go.” He headed for a late-model Buick on the street.

  The station’s air conditioner was under repair. After two hours in a stuffy conference room, Kevin’s nerves finally began to lose the tremble brought on by the bomb.

  An officer had fingerprinted him for comparisons with the prints lifted from the Sable, then Milton spent half an hour reviewing his story before abruptly leaving him alone. The ensuing twenty minutes of solitude gave Kevin plenty of time to rehash Slater’s call while staring at a large brown smudge on the wall. But in the end he could make no more sense of the call than when it had initially come, which only made the whole mess more disturbing.

  He shifted in his seat and tapped the floor with his foot. He’d spent his whole life not knowing, but this vulnerability was somehow different. A man named Slater had mistaken him for someone else and very nearly killed him. Hadn’t he suffered enough in his life? Now he’d fallen into this, whatever this was. He was under the authorities’ microscope. They would try to dig into his past. Try to understand it. But even Kevin didn’t understand his past. He wasn’t about to let them try.

  The door banged open and Milton walked in.

  Kevin cleared his throat. “Anything?”

  Milton straddled a backward chair, slapped a folder down on the table, and drilled Kevin with his dark eyes. “You tell me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Milton blinked twice and ignored the question. “The FBI’s bringing someone in on this. ATF wants a look, CBI, state police—the lot of them. But as far as I’m concerned, this is still my jurisdiction. Just because terrorists favor bombs doesn’t mean every bomb that goes off is the work of terrorists.”

  “They think this is a terrorist?”

  “I didn’t say that. But Washington sees terrorists behind every tree these days, so they will definitely go on the hunt. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the CIA picking through the files.” Milton eyed him, unblinking, for a few long seconds, and then blinked three times in rapid succession. “What we have here is one sick puppy. What confuses me is why he picked you. Doesn’t make sense.”

  “None of this makes sense.”

  Milton opened the file. “It’ll take a couple days for the lab to complete their work on what little we found, but we have some preliminary findings, the most significant of which is nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing? A bomb about blew me to pieces!”

  “No evidence of real investigative value. Let me summarize for you—maybe it’ll shake something loose in that mind of yours.” He eyed Kevin again.

  “We have a man with a low, raspy voice who calls himself Richard Slater and who kno
ws you well enough to target you. You, on the other hand, have no idea who he could possibly be.” Milton paused for effect. “He constructs a bomb using common electronics available at any Radio Shack and dynamite, rendering the bomb virtually untraceable. Smart. He then plants that bomb in the trunk of your car. He calls you, knowing that you’re in the car, and threatens to blow the car in three minutes if you can’t solve a riddle. What falls but never breaks? What breaks but never falls? Right so far?”

  “Sounds right.”

  “Due to some fast thinking and some fancy driving, you manage to drive the car to a relatively safe location and escape. As promised, the car blows up when you fail to solve the riddle and phone it in to the newspaper.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Preliminary forensics tell us that whoever planted that bomb left no fingerprints. No surprises there—this guy’s obviously not the village idiot. The explosion could have caused significant collateral damage. If you’d been on the street when it blew, we’d have some bodies at the morgue. That’s enough to assume this guy’s either pretty teed off or a raving lunatic, probably both. So we have smart and we have teed off. Follow?”

  “Makes sense.”

  “What we’re missing is the most obvious link in any case like this. Motivation. Without motivation, we’ve got squat. You have no idea whatsoever why anyone would want to harm you in any way? You have no enemies from the past, no recent threats against your well-being, no reason whatsoever to suspect why anyone on this earth might want to hurt you in any way?”

  “He didn’t try to hurt me. If he wanted to kill me, he could’ve just blown up the bomb.”

  “Exactly. So we’re not only clueless as to why someone named Slater might want to blow up your car, we don’t even know why he did. What did he accomplish?”

  “He scared me.”

  “You don’t scare someone by nuking their neighborhood. But okay, say he just wanted to scare you—we still don’t have motivation. Who might want to scare you? Why? But you don’t have a clue, right? Nothing you’ve ever done would give anyone any reason to hold anything against you.”