Probably.
Unless the MP-5 was set to full auto. Then a dozen rounds would leave its barrel within the first second. If even one of those caught Dryden in the head, then forget the whole plan. Rachel would be left defenseless.
Dryden watched the machine gun’s barrel. Watched it sway through tiny arcs in the man’s shaking hand. Waited for it to sway just far enough—
“I don’t got a choice,” the man said softly. “It ain’t that I mean it.”
There was a trace of pity in the guy’s eyes, though it seemed to Dryden the man was mostly feeling it about himself. But that was the least of what Dryden noticed about him. What struck him the most was that his early impression—even in that first glimpse as the pickup slid across the road—had been dead on. This man’s intelligence could hardly be above that of a child. Even taking into account that he might’ve been dazed by the crash, there was no mistaking the signs.
It was, in its own way, the strangest thing about the situation: Why would Gaul—or whoever had sent the man—trust critical work to a guy like this?
Dryden had found himself at gunpoint before, and many more times he’d faced adversaries who at least had weapons close at hand. Every one of those men, no matter his ideology or his coldness or his rank in whatever pecking order, had been smart. Not just smart—animal sharp and quick. You could always see it in the eyes. Hired guns lived a Darwinian life. You didn’t meet many stupid ones; they didn’t last.
“I don’t mean it,” the man in the overalls said again.
“You’ve got the safety on,” Dryden said.
The man didn’t exactly fall for it. His reaction was nothing as dramatic as turning the gun sideways and peering at the thing. All that happened was a twitch of his wrist. A reflexive move, so-called muscle memory, in the instant before he caught himself. The MP-5’s barrel turned maybe five degrees aside from Dryden, aiming itself at the desert floor ten feet behind him, but almost at once it began to pivot right back to where it had been. The whole flinch opened up no more than a third-of-a-second window of opportunity.
That was enough.
Dryden’s hand moved. The action was as practiced and unconscious as flipping the light switch in his own kitchen. He drew the SIG from his rear waistband, leveled it, and fired twice.
Both shots took the man in the forehead. The first was centered, and the second was an inch to the left. The double exit wound blew the back of the guy’s head open, the explosive force of it actually causing the head to jerk forward toward Dryden, as if the guy were trying to head-butt the space in front of him. He flopped face-first onto his own shins and lay still.
Dryden fell back two steps, then turned and sprinted for the Honda as fast as he could.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Some impulse, maybe just good old-fashioned paranoia, told Dryden to steer clear of the town. He took the Honda off-road over the hard scrubland and went east for two miles until they came to a county two-lane running north; it had signs for an on-ramp to U.S. 50. Five minutes after that they were on the freeway again, eastbound. They’d said almost nothing since the moment they left the pickup behind.
“I don’t know,” Dryden said at last. “I don’t have the first clue what that was.”
*
He didn’t start to relax for another hour or more. By then they were on I-70, on the east side of the state. They came to a small town called Sumner; from the freeway it looked just big enough to have a library somewhere in it. When they found it, on Main Street across from a school, its parking lot was close to empty. That boded well for the place not being full of potential eyewitnesses. All the same, Dryden wondered just how effective the Oakleys and baseball hat really were.
The thought of sending Rachel in by herself went against all his instincts, but sometimes instinct was wrong. If someone spotted him, if they simply picked up a phone and dialed 911— “A girl my age by herself might raise eyebrows, too,” Rachel said. Then, softer: “I don’t want to be alone again.”
*
There was a single librarian at the checkout desk, just inside the entry. She offered a professional but friendly greeting. Dryden answered with a nod, keeping his face in profile to her. Rachel gave her an energetic wave and a smile; it drew the woman’s attention like a magnet.
Pretty smart, Dryden thought.
“Thanks,” Rachel said, when they’d gone by.
“Anything in her thoughts like Is that the guy on TV?”
Rachel shook her head.
They found a counter with three computer terminals in the back corner, all of them deserted. So far as Dryden could see, the only other visitor in the library was a kid of maybe fourteen, sitting alone in a sunlit reading area at the opposite corner of the huge room.
They pulled up two chairs and woke one of the computers from its sleep mode.
The obvious first move was a Yellow Pages search for Holly Ferrel in Amarillo, Texas.