Then we waited.
It seemed like a long wait. Five minutes, six, seven. I collected rocks, three of them, each a little larger than my palm. I watched the horizon to the west. The sky was still full of low clouds and I figured headlight beams would reflect off them as they bounced and dipped. But the horizon stayed black. And quiet. I could hear nothing at all except the distant surf and the old guy breathing.
"They got to be coming," he called.
"They'll come," I said.
We waited. The night stayed dark and quiet.
"What's your name?" I called.
"Why?" he called back.
"I just want to know," I said. "Doesn't seem right that I've killed you twice and I don't even know your name."
"Terry Villanueva," he called.
"Is that Spanish?"
"Sure is."
"You don't look Spanish."
"I know," he said. "My mom was Irish, my dad was Spanish. But my brother and I took after our mom. My brother changed his name to Newton. Like the old scientist, or the suburb. Because that's what Villanueva means, new town. But I stuck with the Spanish. Out of respect for the old guy."
"Where was this?"
"South Boston," he said. "Wasn't easy, years ago, a mixed marriage and all."
We went quiet again. I watched and listened. Nothing. Villanueva shifted his position. He didn't look comfortable.
"You're a trooper, Terry," I called.
"Old school," he called back.
Then I heard a car.
And Villanueva's cell phone rang.
The car was maybe a mile away. I could hear the faint feathery sound of a faraway V-6 motor revving fast. I could see the distant glow of headlights trapped between the road and the clouds. Villanueva's phone was set to ring with an insane speeded-up version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D. He stopped playing dead and scrambled halfway up to knees and dragged it out of his pocket. Thumbed a button and killed the music and answered it. It was a tiny thing, lost in his hand. He held it to his ear. He listened for a second. I heard him say, "OK." Then, "We're doing it right now." Then, "OK." Then he said "OK" again and clicked the phone off and lay back down. His cheek was on the blacktop. The phone was half-in and half-out of his hand.
"Service was just restored," he called to me.
And a new clock started ticking. I glanced to my right into the east. Beck would keep trying the lines. I guessed as soon as he got a dial tone he would come out to find me and tell me the panic was over. I glanced to my left into the west. I could hear the car, loud and clear. The headlight beams bounced and swung, bright in the darkness.
"Thirty seconds," I called.
The sound got louder. I could hear the tires and the automatic gearbox and the engine all as separate noises. I ducked lower. Ten seconds, eight, five. The car raced around the corner and its lights whipped across my hunched back. Then I heard the thump of hydraulics and the squeal of brake rotors and the howl of locked rubber grinding on the blacktop and the car came to a complete stop, slightly off line, twenty feet from the Saab.
I looked up. It was a Taurus, plain blue paint, gray in the cloudy moonlight. A cone of white light ahead of it. Brake lights flaring red behind. Two guys in it. Their faces were lit by their lights bouncing back off the Saab. They held still for a second. Stared forward. They recognized the Saab. They must have seen it a hundred times. I saw the driver move. Heard him shove the gearshift forward into Park. The brake lights died. The engine idled. I could smell exhaust fumes and the heat from under the hood.
The two guys opened their doors in unison. Got out and stood up, behind the doors. They had the Glocks in their hands. They waited. They came out from behind the doors. Walked forward, slowly, with the guns held low. The headlight beams lit them brightly from the waist down. Their upper bodies were harder to see. But I could make out their features. Their shapes. They were the bodyguards. No doubt about it. They were young and heavy, tense and wary. They were dressed in dark suits, creased and crumpled and stained. They had no ties. Their shirts had turned from white to gray.
They squatted next to Villanueva. He was in their shadow. They moved a little and turned his face into the light. I knew they had seen him before. Just a brief glimpse as they passed him, outside the college gate, eighty-four hours ago. I didn't expect them to remember him. And I don't think they did. But they had been fooled once, and they didn't want to get fooled again. They were very cautious. They didn't start in with immediate first aid. They just squatted there and did nothing. Then the one nearest me stood up.
By then I was five feet from him. I had my right hand cupped around a rock. It was a little bigger than a softball. I swung my arm, wide and flat and fast, like I was going to slap him in the face. The momentum would have taken my arm off at the shoulder if I had missed. But I didn't miss. The rock hit him square on the temple and he went straight down like a weight had fallen on him from above. The other guy was faster. He scrambled away and twisted to his feet. Villanueva flailed at his legs and missed them. The guy danced away and whipped around. His Glock came up toward me. All I wanted to do was stop him firing it so I hurled the rock straight at his head. He spun away again and took it square in the back of his neck, right where his cranium curved in to meet his spine. It was like a ferocious punch. It pitched him straight forward. He dropped the Glock and went down on his face like a tree and lay still.
I stood there and watched the darkness in the east. Saw nothing. No lights. Heard nothing, except the distant sea. Villanueva crawled out of the upside-down car on his hands and knees and crouched over the first guy.
"This one's dead," he said.
I checked, and he was. Hard to survive a ten-pound rock sideways into the temple. His skull was neatly caved in and his eyes were wide open and there was nothing much happening behind them. I checked the pulses in his neck and his wrist and went to look at the second guy. Crouched down over him. He was dead, too. His neck was broken, but good. I wasn't very surprised. The rock weighed ten pounds and I had pitched it like Nolan Ryan.
"Two birds, one stone," Villanueva said.
I said nothing.
"What?" he said. "You wanted to take them back into custody? After what they did to us? This was suicide by cop, plain and simple."
I said nothing.
"You got a problem?" Villanueva said.
I wasn't us. I wasn't DEA, and I wasn't a cop. But I thought about Powell's private signal to me: My eyes only, 10-2, 10-28. These guys need to be dead, make no mistake about it. And I was prepared to take Powell's word for it. That's what unit loyalties are for. Villanueva had his, and I had mine.
"No problem," I said.
I found the rock where it had come to rest and rolled it back to the shoulder. Then I got to my feet and walked away and leaned in and killed the Taurus's lights. Waved Villanueva over toward me.
"We need to be real quick now," I said. "Use your phone and get Duffy to bring Eliot down here. We need him to take this car back."
Villanueva used a speed dial and started talking and I found the two Glocks on the road and stuffed them back into the dead guys' pockets, one each. Then I stepped over to the Saab. Getting it the right way up again was going to be a whole lot harder than turning it over. For a second I worried that it was going to be impossible. The coats killed any friction against the road. If we shoved it, it was just going to slide on its roof. I closed the upside-down driver's door and waited.