The Final Twist
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри
- Серия: Colter Shaw #3
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: G.P. Putnam's Sons
- ISBN: 978-0-525-53913-1
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Final Twist». Краткое содержание книги:
Following the enigmatic clues his father left behind, Shaw plays cat and mouse with the company’s sadistic enforcers, as he speeds from one gritty neighborhood in the City by the Bay to another. Suddenly, the job takes on a frightening urgency: Only by finding the courier bag can he expose the company and stop the murder of an entire family — slated to die in forty-eight hours.
With the help of an unexpected figure from his past, and with the enforcers closing the net, Shaw narrows in on the truth — and learns that the courier bag contains something unexpected: a secret that could only be described as catastrophic.
This arrow hit the drum they were behind.
Shaw was getting irritated. “Hey, cut it out! You could hurt bystanders doing that!”
“No, I could fucking hurt you!”
The brothers regarded each other again and nodded.
Another arrow hissed in their direction. As it flew by, Shaw and Russell were instantly on their feet, sprinting to the door. Shaw slammed into the heavy panel with his shoulder. The door in turn bowled the man to the floor.
La Fleur howled, dropped the weapon and held his hands up.
Russell pushed into the foyer just after Shaw, his pistol drawn, in case La Fleur chose to attack with a knife or, who knew, a broadsword or battle-axe.
But the skirmish was over as fast as it had begun.
He skittered over the oak to a corner, huddling and crying out, “Bastards!”
The man had wild white hair, not unlike Ashton’s toward the end, though La Fleur’s was pulled into a sloppy ponytail. He had lengthy blanched eyebrows. He was gaunt. Beneath the camo, he wore a red floral shirt and on his feet were sandals with tie-dye straps. Bronze earrings dangled. The man was a combat-ready hippie.
“Nazis! Fascists! I have rights!”
“Calm down,” Shaw said, pulling the man’s gloves off and zip-tying his hands behind him. He noted he hadn’t trimmed his nails in ages. They were yellow.
“No!”
Shaw: “I’m just doing this so everybody’s safe. We’re not going to hurt you.”
“You already did. My butt aches.”
“Calm. Down.”
The volume of the muttering diminished some and La Fleur nodded, as if he were afraid of the consequences of even speaking to the two home invaders.
Shaw re-latched the many locks.
“Anybody else in the house?”
A negative twisting of neck and head.
Guns drawn, the brothers went about clearing the place anyway. Though they hadn’t seen — let alone trained with — each other since they were children, they fell instantly into the procedure that Ashton Shaw had taught. “Door closed, left... Bathroom, half-open right... Clear. Breeze from second bedroom, window open. Barred... No hostiles. Clear!... No cellar... Attic sealed...”
They returned to the living room. Shaw looked over the place, which was perfumed with three distinctive smells: damp fireplace ash, rich pot and ocean. Two windows faced east, the direction of San Francisco Bay. These would have offered stunning views had they not been covered with thick metal shutters. Shaw knew their make and model. They were bulletproof, expensive and a favorite of cartel bosses. He knew of these qualities from a reward job a few years ago. He could also attest to the fact that when hit by automatic gunfire, the resulting bang was as loud as the muzzle burst itself.
The house could have been outfitted by a survivalist. There were stacks upon stacks of sandbags, piled halfway up the walls, enough to stop a fusillade of bullets. Ports had been cut into the wall through which he could pepper attacking hordes with his caveman arrows. La Fleur also had medical supplies aplenty, including a satchel labeled self-surgery kit.
Also fifty-gallon drums of drinking water and hundreds of pounds of MRE. Meals ready to eat were a staple for the armed services... and for gullible pseudo-survivalists who listened to paranoia-dishing talk radio hosts.
Ashton Shaw had taught the children that true survivalism means learning how to grow, gather and hunt for your own food.
One difference between this cliffside dwelling and the Compound: La Fleur had a computer and a TV. In the Compound there’d been no electronics whatsoever, except an emergency cell phone. It was kept charged but shut off. The only time Shaw remembered its being used was the cold October morning when he went off to look for his father on Echo Ridge, after the man had gone missing.
35
The brothers helped La Fleur into an indented armchair of faded green fabric and Shaw cut the restraint off. Now the grizzled man was trying a different tack; he was contrite. “It’s all a mistake. Me shooting at you? I thought you were burglars. Really. There’s been a string of robberies in the neighborhood. I have clippings. Do you want to see them? I would never have shot you if I’d known you weren’t burglars. Don’t hurt me!”
Russell frowned. “Burglars? Hmm.”
“Who’d you really think we were?” Shaw asked.
“From BlackBridge?” Russell asked.
The man froze and then looked down. It was as if the very word paralyzed him. He gave the faintest of nods.
“We’re not,” Shaw said.
Russell tapped the grip of his SIG Sauer. “If we were BlackBridge, you’d be dead. Right?”
La Fleur rubbed his wrists. He reached for a bong and a lighter on the chair-side table.
“No,” Russell said.
“You want some?” he offered the stained glass tube. Both men ignored him. He put it down.
“Amos Gahl’s mother told us about you.”
His face softened “Eleanor! How is she?”
“She’s fine.”
“And her husband? Mort.”
“Apparently okay,” Shaw said. “He was out. Now, Earnest. We need your help. Amos found some evidence against BlackBridge. We think it’s proof about the Urban Improvement Plan. You know about it?”
He frowned, taking this in. He remained cautious. “Who are you?”
“Our father,” Shaw said, “was killed by Irena Braxton and Ebbitt Droon. Ian Helms too.”
“Your father?”
“Ashton Shaw. Did you know him?”
“I don’t remember the name. But there was somebody... wild-eyed, like a cowboy.”
Russell displayed the picture.
“That’s him. He stopped me outside where I was living. He told me he was a professor and one of his students had been killed by BlackBridge.”
“Todd Zaleski, a city councilman.”
La Fleur squinted. “That was it, yes! Supposedly a robbery but your dad didn’t believe it. Like you guys — he was looking for what Ame had taken from BlackBridge. I told him I couldn’t help him. He left and I never heard from him again.”
“You were close to Amos, his mother told us.”
A nod and his weathered lips drew taut.
“Will you help us? Whatever Amos found is in a courier bag. He hid it somewhere in the Bay Area.”
Eyes again on the floor, La Fleur mumbled, “I don’t know anything. I swear to God.”
In the rewards business, Shaw had done a fair amount of kinesics analysis — using body language to spot deception. Included in that fine art was noting verbal tics. Anyone who ends a sentence with the assurance that they’re not lying probably is, and it’s a double hit if a deity is invoked.
Shaw stared at him until La Fleur added, in a whisper, “BlackBridge is the devil — the whole company. Everybody. Not just Helms and Braxton. It’s like the buildings are evil, the walls are evil... It’s so dangerous. Why do you think I’m living like this?”
“Don’t you want Helms to go to prison for what they did to your friend?” Shaw asked.
The man looked away.
Shaw felt frustration. This man knew something. He said, “There’s a family that Droon and Braxton are going to kill tomorrow.”
La Fleur’s face revealed some concern at this. “Why?”
Russelclass="underline" “We don’t know.”
“We find Amos’s evidence and go to the FBI. They arrest Ian Helms and Braxton and Droon. We stop the killing. Help us save them.”
Russell stirred impatiently. Shaw had refined his interviewing and interrogation skills over the years in seeking rewards. Though he could be firm, he generally used logic, empathy and humor to win over the subjects. He suspected his brother took a somewhat different approach.
Shaw persisted. “You and Amos met at Eleanor’s house a few times. You met there because she hadn’t been ‘Gahl’ for years. She’d remarried and changed her name. So Braxton and Droon wouldn’t know about her.”