A car zipped between them, horn wailing. Swonger didn’t so much as blink, stubborn as a two-year-old at bath time. Gibson waited, but Swonger looked prepared to turn blue before he’d acknowledge Gibson. So be it; he didn’t have time to deal with this now. Gibson left Swonger to play statue, but a quarter mile down the road, Gibson saw the Scion swing around to follow.
Swonger made a point of riding the van’s bumper all the way to Dule Tree Airfield. Gone were the days of following Gibson at a discreet distance. Gibson made no effort to get away; that would have felt foolish and been a waste of energy. He turned off the main road and climbed the dirt road to the airfield. The Scion followed. At the gate, Gibson killed his lights and coasted slowly toward the main office; he didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean they were alone. Behind him, at the front gate, the Scion waited patiently. Seeing no other apparent way out, Swonger seemed content to leave him to his reconnoiter.
Something had crashed into the chain-link fence surrounding the hangar. The impact had caved in several sections, and judging by the deep tire tracks, it had taken a lot of tire-spinning to dislodge whatever vehicle had been responsible. In the moonlight, Gibson followed the tracks out onto the field abutting the runway, afraid of who or what he might find in the tall grass. But apart from a torn-up field, Gibson didn’t see any hint of Lea’s whereabouts. It was a relief, but not much of one . . . something bad had happened here.
Gibson drove around the grounds, looking for anything out of the ordinary, but came up empty. Lea was right, though—there were so many stars.
Over on the far side of the airfield, a light in the trees caught his eye. It rippled among the branches, but he couldn’t see its source. Curious, he drove to the tree line, which dropped away down a hillside. He grabbed a flashlight and walked to the edge. Thirty feet down, cars had been rolled off the edge and lay stacked on top of each other like models at the bottom of a kid’s toy chest. A shattered pyramid of metal and chrome. Gibson also found the source of the light—one of the cars was wedged upright between two SUVs; it stood on its hind end, headlights illuminating the canopy above.
His sense of relief shaken, Gibson clambered down the hillside to an SUV that had rolled to a stop against a tree away from the main pileup. Other than a shattered windshield, it looked more or less intact. At least until Gibson played the flashlight over the SUV—someone had used the side panels for target practice. It looked like it had been flown in from a war zone. He shone the flashlight inside, but the SUV was empty. Something caught his eye, and he opened the driver’s side door. Blood had pooled in and around the seat, shell casings glittering amid the gore. Someone had fought and died in this car. So where was the body? On a hunch, Gibson popped the trunk but found it empty too.
Gibson checked the other vehicles. Most had taken small-arms fire, and he found plenty of blood but still no bodies. Someone had won a decisive battle at the airfield, dumped the cars down the hill, and taken all the bodies. He wondered who had come out on top and had a sinking suspicion that he knew the answer to that one. Emerson looked to have made good on his word.
What he still didn’t know was whether Lea was alive or dead, only that she wasn’t here. And that left only one option.
Niobe.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Not long after midnight Gibson arrived back in Niobe. He powered up the Stingray and programmed it to sniff for Lea’s cell phone. Then he rolled slowly up Tarte Street, looking for signs of life, but the town was as still as a held breath. At the liquor store, a tumbleweed dog aloof on its haunches watched him go. As the familiar outline of the Wolstenholme Hotel loomed up on his left, the Stingray began to ping, the signal strengthening as he passed the front entrance. Lea’s phone was inside. He glanced up through the glass doors into the dark of the lobby. A figure in the gloom stepped back and out of sight, or it might have been nothing but a shadow thrown by his headlights.
The hotel’s side parking lot was deserted. As were the five spots in front of the Toproll—a first in Gibson’s experience. He parked in back beneath the stairs to Lea’s apartment, tossed his baseball cap on the dashboard, and scratched his scalp hard with both hands. No sleep in the past twenty-four hours had him feeling like a tire with no tread left.
A cinder block propped open the Toproll’s back door. He counted that as an invitation and let himself inside. Faint music led him through the kitchen to the swinging doors that opened out to a nearly empty bar. Peering out, Gibson saw Margo behind the bar and Old Charlie at his regular perch, keeping a lonely vigil over a shot and beer. He found the man a comforting sight.
Gibson took a seat, and Margo came down the bar to see what he wanted.
“Well, well. The prodigal asshole returns.”
“Coffee,” he said. “Please.”
She poured him a cup. “Fresh pot.”
“Sugar?”
She slapped a caddy down on the bar.
“Where is everyone?”
“No one came in tonight, so I closed early.”
“How come?”
“You know how come.”
“What’s the sheriff think?”
“Ain’t seen the sheriff all day. Jimmy Temple neither. Hotel’s been shut up tight since the fifth floor came back from wherever they went. Then the phones went out—landlines and cell. Internet too. That was two hours ago now.”
“Is that all?” Trying to buck himself up with a lame joke.
“And I’m stuck with him?” She pointed to Old Charlie.
“You never had it so good,” Old Charlie muttered.
“Lea with them?” Gibson knew they had her phone, and that probably meant they had Lea, but he would love visual confirmation before making his next move.
“Lea quit and moved out this morning. She’s long gone.”
“You really believe that?”
“No,” Margo said and warmed up his coffee. “She went to the prison.”
Gibson filled Margo in on the rest. How from the prison she’d gone to the airfield with Charles Merrick. The text messages. He described what he’d found at the bottom of the hill.
“Why didn’t you stop her?”
“I think there was no stopping any of us.”
“Damn, but you’re a bunch of fools.”
Truer words had never been spoken; still, there was a silver lining. Gibson knew the fifth floor hadn’t gotten what it had come for at the airfield. How could it? There was no money to get—Gibson having finished the job that Martin Yardas had begun years before. But Emerson wouldn’t have taken Charles Merrick at his word. They’d have to interrogate him, and that would require time and privacy. Why else come back to the hotel at all? A town this size probably had a single trunk line that handled phone and data; knocking it out had put Niobe on an island. For one night, the fifth floor owned Niobe, and that was all the time they’d need to extract their mistress’s pound of flesh. Gibson didn’t like to think about what might be happening over in the hotel. Especially since Charles Merrick couldn’t give them what she wanted.
He needed a plan.
“What are we gonna do?” Margo asked with a bartender’s clairvoyance.
“Let me get a whiskey.”
“Not sure drinking is a solution,” Margo said.