Divided States, page 15
He reaches the hand behind his torso to finish cuffing his hands.
No, he’s not.
Gates isn’t injured. He has a pistol hidden in his waistband.
Lori raises hers. “Do it and I’ll drop you.”
Gates finishes gripping the gun as though she hadn’t threatened to kill him. Rather than whipping around to fire at her, Gates lowers the Glock to his thigh, index finger along the slide.
“Novak’s a hell of a leader. Almost as smart as Clarke was. Almost as smart as me, if I’m honest. That’s why he’s in charge now.” He smiles with his lips, but his eyes darken. “I can’t believe you didn’t think I had a contingency. Novak can execute MANIFEST from where he is. You’ve got till nine. Then you’re screwed.”
His right index finger moves to the trigger. Lori does the same, but before she can fire, the sound of gunfire drifts northeast with the wind. She rushes to Gates. By the time she gets there, Boudreaux’s already kicked away his gun. Her next instinct is to check his pulse, but it would be superfluous. His left temple is gone and four GSWs are grouped tightly on his sternum.
“You heard the same thing I did, right?” she asks.
“Yeah.” He checks the black watch on the inside of his wrist. “The bomb is detonating in seventy-three minutes, forty-two seconds. We need to contact your ex.”
She pulls the burner phone from her coat pocket. “On it.”
A gust nearly knocks her off balance.
“Go to the Escalade,” Boudreaux says. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Sleet stings Lori’s face and she fights the wind for gulps of air. She’s thankful for sanctuary when she closes the passenger door and swipes up on the phone’s screen.
It wants a six-digit passcode.
Jeremiah didn’t give her one when he handed her the device, but there are a few likely choices. Before their divorce, he yelled it to her when she demanded to check his phone in a moment of projecting her own secrecy onto him.
She taps in the numbers.
The phone shakes.
She used to constantly tell Jeremiah her code. Maybe he made it easy for her.
Nope. Shit.
All phones lock after a string of incorrect entries, and the max number of tries for this phone could be three. Lori needs to think before entering another code.
She’d been assuming the phone was programmed with either Jeremiah or her in mind. But it could be one of a batch, meant to serve as walkies for his team. Giving her one might not have been planned. If that’s true, the passcode would be easy and universal.
Had Jeremiah ever mentioned that? Yes. Once, when they were discussing INSTA contingency plans. It was early in their marriage. His job scared Lori and she demanded to know every safety measure. That’s when she got details of Big Blue and every other eighteen-wheeler INSTA uses. She also got a promise that if a transport felt off, he’d give her a way to communicate.
The passcode would be all ones.
She presses the digit rapid-fire. The screen lights up with a few square icons in front of a bright blue background. She taps contacts and finds three—the card for her phone and two labeled Mac and Dom Zeus. Before dialing, Lori turns and looks out of the back windows. They’re dark and wet, nearly opaque, but she can still see Gates’s body. One of the pickup’s doors is open, Boudreaux half inside the cab, searching for something.
Lori takes a few more moments to open the contacts and read the numbers aloud before calling Dom Zeus, knowing he’d let Mac keep her phone.
“Lori?”
“Where are you?”
“Driving north on the eighteen, just out of town. You?”
“Still south of town. We caught up to Gates and—”
“What’s he saying?”
Lori chokes down her urge to lay into Jeremiah. Since their falling out, Jeremiah rarely lets her finish a sentence. It’s annoying enough in everyday conversation, but right now he’s making her want to reach through the phone and break his jaw.
“Nothing,” she says instead. “He killed himself before we could interrogate him.”
A pause. “I guess we can rule out money as his motive. Only a true believer eats cyanide rather than give up intel.”
“It was a bullet to the head, but yeah. Gates did mention a guy named Novak”—Boudreaux lifts the rear hatch, so Lori puts the phone on speaker—“And apparently this Novak guy’s in charge now.”
“Oh Jesus,” Jeremiah says. “That’s bad.”
Lori starts to ask for details, but she’s interrupted by a loud grunt from Boudreaux. She turns to find him hunched over and sucking wind behind the Escalade.
Lori tells Jeremiah to hold on and mutes her end of the call.
“You okay?” Lori asks.
He waves her over. “Come help.”
When she gets around the SUV, Lori yelps despite herself. Gates’s body is laying parallel to the back bumper, what’s left of his graying face staring blankly at the storm overhead.
“What the fuck, man?”
“If we leave him here, the cops’ll be all over us. But if it’s just a dented truck and some blood on the side of the road, they’ll think a drunk hit a deer and fled.”
Lori’s skeptical. “What about the deer? Where’d it go?”
Boudreaux straightens and breathes deep. “Maybe it survived and limped away. Or the guy’s buddies decided they wanted venison tonight. But if we don’t take him, the sheriff’s are guaranteed to be up our ass while we’re trying to keep the world from bombing itself into oblivion.”
Fair enough. Lori’s not sure why she was being so bitchy. She thinks about apologizing for questioning him, but right now she has to focus on the task at hand because Gates is a big man. His dead weight is almost too much, but Lori and Boudreaux manage to flop him up and roll him in. She’s still trying to catch her breath after returning to the cab and unmuting the phone.
“What’s wrong?” Jeremiah asks.
“Nothing.” Another labored breath. “We had to take care of the body.”
“Oh.”
Boudreaux opens the center console and drops in Fowler’s satphone and Gates’s Glock.
“So Novak’s in charge now?” Jeremiah asks.
“Yes,” Boudreaux says. “And Gates said he’s capable of detonating your payload.”
“Remotely?”
Lori looks at Boudreaux and points to herself. She should deliver the news.
“He didn’t get into specifics,” she says. “But we think so.”
Silence.
“And Jeremiah,” she says, delaying it for a few moments longer. “He’s going to do it at nine o’clock.”
“You mean an hour from now?”
“Yes.”
Lori and Boudreaux wait a moment to let Jeremiah—and anyone in his truck who might’ve heard—process the information. Lori has no idea how she’d handle knowing the moment she’ll die.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I know you’re only in this because of me, and—”
“In the movies, they always try to send the bomb into water,” Jeremiah says. “We can make it to Sooner Lake in time.”
Jeremiah wasn’t contemplating his imminent death. He was finding a way mitigate the damage.
Problem is, he’s wrong. She thinks.
“If you do that—”
“We’ll still die. I know.”
“Will you let me talk for once. I was going to say, if you do that, the fallout might be worse.”
Lori watched a documentary about Operation Crossroads several years ago. The government detonated a pair of nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands in 1946. The second test, Baker, was detonated about 90 feet underwater—a close approximation to detonating at the bottom of a lake.
“Bullshit,” Jeremiah says. “The water will dampen the explosion.”
He may be guessing, but Jeremiah’s right about that part. The thermal radiation that burns everything around ground zero will be absorbed by the water.
“But the fallout will be worse if it detonates in the lake,” she says.
According to the documentary’s smooth-talking narrator, the Federation of American Scientists concluded fallout from a detonation in shallow water would spread over a larger area than one on solid ground. But a nuclear explosion in the lake would be better than Cushing, not to mention a major city.
“And how would you know any of this?”
An old documentary is flimsy evidence. And there’s a possibility the information’s out of date or if she misunderstood the documentary since her audio recall is perfect, not her comprehension. But he’s no more a nuclear physicist than Lori. The disbelief is rooted in his mistrust of her, not the information.
Boudreaux must know it too because he picks up the phone. “She’s right. You need to drive to a rural area without many towns to the northeast. Let me pull up maps on this phone.”
He doesn’t have time to open it before Jeremiah speaks. “I know a place.”
“Haul ass,” Boudreaux says. “We’ll go back and get Fowler, see if he knows how we can stop Novak. We have to retrieve the woman’s body anyway.”
“Copy.”
Boudreaux ends the call before Lori can say goodbye.
“Hey—”
“You’ll say goodbye later. Right now, I need you to get your shit together and help me keep more people from dying.”
Nobody’s spoken to her that way since she wore a badge. Back then, she’d just grind her teeth because making detective seemed like the most important thing in her life.
Not anymore.
“What the fuck did you just say to me?”
Goddammit. She hopes he doesn’t catch it, but the corner of Boudreaux’s moustache rises so she cuts him off.
“It’s a figure of speech, asshole. You know what I meant.”
Boudreaux punches the ignition button and puts the Escalade in reverse. “If we’re going to survive this, I need the Lori Young who killed those boys in New Orleans with nothing but a letter opener.”
He may be right, but Lori won’t give him the satisfaction of a response.
“You were a step behind just now, and it wasn’t your leg. Then there’s Fowler, who you knocked out instead of shooting—”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
When he’s done turning, Boudreaux stops. “Yes, we’re lucky you left him alive. But that doesn’t mean it was the right tactical decision. I need the woman who’ll pull the trigger. The one who’ll beat an evil sonofabitch to death because the world is better for it.”
Angry is Lori’s default. But now, confronted with her past, Lori feels something else. Her face, already hot from rage, begins burning. Stomach acid crawls into her esophagus, leaving in its place a knot that nearly doubles her over.
Alcohol and opium have kept it at bay for so long, Lori had almost forgotten the visceral nature of self-loathing.
“You don’t know everything.” The words are weak, barely audible over the engine and chassis jostling over the crumbling road.
“I don’t need to,” he says. “What I need is for you to turn back into a badass. Now.”
I can’t.
“And don’t tell me you can’t.”
How does he do that? But he’s just reading her. He doesn’t know her. Lori’s not a vigilante, righting wrongs and cleaning the streets one shitbag at a time.
“It doesn’t work like that.” She’s still mumbling and won’t look him in the eye.
Boudreaux pulls over as they approach the intersection that leads back to Fowler and Clarke’s body.
“What are you doing? We don’t have time for this. What if Fowler wakes up?”
“I know, but I need to say something.” Boudreaux’s tone is no longer antagonistic, but matter-of-fact. “I thought pissing you off would help get you where you need to be for this. It was an assumption based on your past, but I was wrong. For that, I’m sorry.”
Thank you. “Whatever.”
“But I’m not taking you into a volatile situation if you’re going to keep hesitating, which I completely understand. So, if you can’t handle this, it’s better if I drop you off now and come back after I’ve secured Fowler.” Boudreaux tells her to think it over while he’s taking a leak. “But if you come, be ready to do whatever it takes.”
Everything he said makes sense. She’d been off since they touched down and had no clue why. The information was still there. The instruction she’d been given. Muscle memory from ten thousand hours of hand-to-hand combat.
More than half of that HTH training—especially when it involved sharp objects and other improvised weapons—came courtesy of her father, who realized Lori’s afflicted brain was an asset when combined with her inherited athletic ability. In addition to having an elite soldier with no empathy on one side, Lori’s mother was a world-class mixed marital artist who would’ve gone to the Olympics were it not for her schizophrenia. Neither lived to see if Lori also inherited their psychological defects.
Then there was the academy, where she kept her combat skills sharp and improved with her pistol. And even after years off and nearly a quarter of her life spent treating her body like shit, Lori had still disposed of two trained intelligence officers with nothing but a letter opener and a GSW to her leg.
What had changed in the intervening seven hours? It wasn’t exhaustion. That go-pill Boudreaux gave her was every bit the miracle drug he claimed. She hadn’t felt this clear in years, which may explain why thinking about that night hit her so hard.
Had Kevin Ryan Booker deserved to die? Absofuckinglutely. He raped four women in downtown Amarillo over the course of two months. The first two didn’t report them until after the third was found unconscious in a parking lot. The next ended up spending a month in the ICU. He was escalating so quickly, SVU briefed her and the three other homicide detectives.
The guy was white, approximately six-three and two-forty with brown or black hair, green or brown eyes and no visible tattoos. He acted after three in the morning, when even the hardest partiers had found a place to rest—except the women who’d gone home with someone else but didn’t want to leave their car overnight.
Booker had used chloroform at approximately 4:05 a.m. and shoved the fourth victim into her own Jeep, keeping her inside for more than an hour as he raped her, beat her unconscious, then woke her up and raped her again. SVU’s canvas turned up two witnesses. Neither approached the vehicle, assuming it was just a couple screwing in the back. Patrol had increased downtown after victims one and two came forward, but none were on that block during the sixty-eight minutes of brutality.
In her official statement, Lori said she’d happened upon Booker and his fifth victim, Angela Jazmine Collins, after leaving a bar on Polk Street and walking across downtown to take in the cool night air. All of that was true, but she left out the fact she’d started doing it every time Jeremiah left town, hoping to run into him.
Lori said she heard a scream as she walked south on Pierce Street, prompting her to engage with Booker. In truth, she’d seen Collins walking to the car from one of the second-floor lofts that had become popular with the city’s young, single professionals. She stayed low and hid behind a hedge half a block away until Booker sprinted to her Bronco from the other side.
The first scream belonged to Collins. Lori showed up before he could apply the chloroform, so she knocked her out of the way. She took about ten frantic steps before stopping.
The second round of screams were Booker’s. After he lost consciousness, Lori’s voice provided the acoustics as she grunted and screamed obscenities at his battered face while dropping knees into his torso, which was filling with blood. The medical examiner in Lubbock said Lori displaced several ribs on both sides, causing Booker’s abdomen to fill with blood and puncturing his left lung. She also bruised his liver, broke his jaw, and snapped his left radius.
Collins started sobbing and asked Lori to stop. But Lori was still working him over. Collins went silent before it ended and pulled away when Lori tried to console her. Collins didn’t let anyone touch her until a sympathetic EMT led her toward an ambulance.
Lori has no choice but to remember the sounds. But for this memory, all five senses will forever remain in sharp focus.
She’s not sorry Booker’s dead. That’s not why it makes her gut clench.
Lori hates how it happened.
She was armed that night and could’ve pulled on Booker, got him to stop, maybe even called for backup without laying a hand on him. If he attacked Lori in the process, she wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot. But her prolonged, unnecessary beating brought back a truth she spent decades avoiding.
Not everyone she’d killed deserved it.
* * *
Snapping fingers send Lori into a panic. That wasn’t just thinking over the noise. She’d gotten lost in thought. That’s never happened, not even when she’s loaded. If she ever sleeps again, it’ll require noise-cancelling headphones.
“Tunnel vision’s another side effect,” Boudreaux says. “But it helps me find clarity sometimes.”
She tries slowing her heart but can’t. “How long were you out there?”
Boudreaux narrows his eyes. “Less than a minute. Why?”
