Widow said, “I’m bringing you to a hospital. Just hang on.”

  He had a flawed plan. He would simply drop the car off near the emergency room and then walk away. On foot, he was good at disappearing. He knew that once the cops got hold of her, they’d try to get answers what the hell was going on, but she wouldn’t give any. Widow wasn’t afraid of her giving an eyewitness account of him or telling the cops she was part of a kill team tracking a runaway ex-con, or that she had a boss. He wasn’t afraid of her talking because whoever had hired her wasn’t the kind of guy you snitch on. Widow knew that because the woman had killed her partner to achieve the mission. Once Widow had immobilized the big guy by shooting him, and there was no more use out of him, she had killed him.

  That was when the Charger’s engine had gone as far as it could. It spurted and coughed and groaned. Smoke burst out faster than a teapot. He veered the car over to the shoulder of a virtually deserted on-ramp and killed the engine so as not to allow it to catch fire.

  He said, “Well, I guess this is as close as I get. Got a cell phone? I’ll call you an ambulance.”

  He turned all the way around in his seat and looked down at her again. Blood was now everywhere—on her face, her neck. Her shirt was soaked in it. There was nothing left to prove she was a white woman—not a hint of skin that wasn’t completely red.

  She was dead. Widow didn’t need to feel for her pulse to see that. She had that lifeless expression on her face. One he’d seen a thousand times, and that was probably not an inflated number.

  He reached down and checked her pockets, looking for any information. He found nothing but her cell phone, which was a burner—a good quality iPhone burner, but a burner nonetheless. It didn’t have a passcode on it, which meant she had either been sloppy or hadn’t had the chance to lock it yet. Both scenarios seemed plausible to Widow. They had been good, but sloppy. And really, this wasn’t a testament to how bad they were. The big guy had been the sloppy one. He had carried that Colt Anaconda, a dead giveaway. And then he had let himself get taken down. The woman alone would’ve been a better opponent. If she had come on to Widow and made it seem natural, he might’ve fallen for it for a while. But that hadn’t been the case. And now they were both dead, and the only answers Widow had were the easy ones.

  He sifted through her phone for any information that might help him. Outside the Charger, cars passed, entering the highway. He could see the silhouettes of the occupants of each car look over at the Charger, but no one could see details of his face, and so far, no one had stopped and help. Good Samaritans were few and far between these days, which was good for Widow. He wouldn’t harm an innocent civilian, not even to protect his own identity.

  He continued to search through the phone and found two things of interest. The first was a photograph of James Hood. Which only confirmed what he had suspected—they were after Hood. The second thing of interest was actually two separate things—phone numbers. Only two numbers had been both called and received by her phone. He slipped the phone into his pocket. Then he checked the big guy. He found six more forty-four Magnum bullets and another burner phone. His phone was a cheaper one. It was one of those old flip Nokias. There was nothing of interest in it. It looked as if he hadn’t made or received a single call on it.

  One thing the big guy had that the woman hadn’t been a wallet. Widow checked it and found over a hundred bucks in cash-money and an Ohio driver’s license. He really hadn’t been the best money could buy. But he was a big guy, so Widow figured he must’ve been the muscle. Maybe he was used for heavy lifting and the intimidation factor.

  The guy’s real name had been Francis—Francis Mahoney. Which Widow heard himself pronounce in his head as Ma-honey. That made him smile. Francis Ma-honey. But Widow was certain the big guy had told everyone his name was Frank and not Francis. Too bad no one would call him either anymore.

  Widow left the wallet and took the money. He took the forty-four Magnum and the Sig Sauer, which turned out to be a Sig Sauer P227, a good and reliable weapon.

  Widow stepped out of the car and looked both ways for oncoming cars or any other witnesses. Three cars were coming up the ramp and onto the highway. Widow turned casually, like he was going to look under the hood, and faced away so they couldn’t see his face.

  The cars passed.

  He turned and looked back down the on-ramp. No one was coming. There were no headlights as far as he could see.

  He went back to the driver’s side door and opened it. He popped the trunk and went back to inspect it. Once there, he stopped cold. There were two black body bags. They looked like the kind he’d seen in naval hospital morgues. Only these weren’t stamped with any official labels as to whose property they were.

  Not much riled Widow anymore because he had been all over the world on all seven continents—if you could count a cold three months in Antarctica investigating the crew of a nuclear submarine, where he had only stepped on land once. He had seen all kinds of atrocities man was capable of. He had experienced the worst kinds of treason and betrayal from being undercover with NCIS, but this was more unsettling than a lot of those things because the body bags were of two sizes. One adult. One child.

  There was one for James Hood, and there was one for Jemma Hood.

  12

  Widow had figured James Hood all wrong. Hood wasn’t trying to abduct his daughter. He was trying to rescue her. Whatever he had gotten involved in, or whoever he’d gotten involved with, Widow could see the scenario now. Claire had said her son wasn’t a bad guy. She had said he’d just been mixed up with the wrong people.

  Hood had fallen in love with an illegal immigrant who had a young, illegal daughter. Widow recalled the photograph Claire had. It was the same one Hood had on his Facebook page. There was a glow in both Lucy and Jemma Hood. They were a true mother and daughter, like a dream family. Beautiful smiles. And then there was Claire Hood, James’s incredibly brave mother. Widow could picture the guy feeling responsible for them and being desperate to provide for them, to protect them. Then he could picture Hood not being the brightest guy in the world and easy to take advantage of.

  Maybe they were desperate for money. And Lucy was sick. Very sick, according to Claire. Widow recalled she had terminal cancer. Being responsible for feeding and clothing a six-year-old girl and her mother was one thing, but being responsible for the medical bills of a cancer patient in America was something entirely different.

  Widow could imagine Hood doing what any good husband and father would do. Hood sought other methods of making money. And somehow he got involved with the wrong crew. And somebody in this outfit must have been the money man because these guys were professional. Maybe not good enough to take him out, but really, how often is it that a killing crew comes across a drifter who has his experience?

  Widow didn’t know the details, but he felt he was right in his estimation of the situation.

  Now he had to find Hood and Jemma before more bad guys came along. And he guessed there would be more, as soon as these two didn’t check in.

  Widow checked the street again and saw no sign of oncoming cars, just lights from the highway in the distance. He walked around to the passenger door and grabbed the big guy, trying to avoid getting blood on himself, and hauled him out of the car. Deadweight was always hard to move. Moving dead bodies wasn’t what he had planned for his day, but here he was. He dragged the guy all the way around and back to the trunk. One of the guy's shoes fell off along the way.

  Widow stopped at the trunk and made one quick glance back for headlights. When he saw none, he heaved Francis up and dumped him into the trunk on top of the body bags. He walked back along the side of the car and picked up his shoe and tossed it in.

  Widow returned to the woman and pulled her out. She was much, much easier than Francis had been. He lifted her up over his shoulder and suddenly imagined a passerby coming up the highway and seeing the silhouette of a giant hitchhiker carrying a dead woman slumped over his shoulder. He smirked, and then felt a little odd about it. Something he learned in the SEALs, something actually taught to him in a serious class, was about humor.

  The instructors railed on the men to find humor in combat. Find humor in the face of extreme odds because that old saying about laughing in the face of danger had a ring of truth to it. He’d just killed two people, and that was never a good thing, but it was him or them. Well, technically, the woman killed the man, but that was splitting hairs. They were dead because of him. It was them or Jemma as far as he was concerned.

  He dumped the woman down in the trunk on top of Francis and looked at them one last time. He tossed in Francis’s wallet and locked the car up and walked away toward the highway.

  He looked at himself in the car’s passenger side window and saw he was unsuccessful in keeping blood off his clothes. He opened the door and leaned in and grabbed a water bottle the woman had left in the cupholder. She wouldn’t need it.

  He took off his shirt and cleaned it with the water. Most of the blood was on his skin. He cleaned himself off the best he could. He flipped his shirt inside out and put it back on that way to hide the bloodstains on the front.

  He left the car and the dead bodies and walked away.

  Widow got a ride from an off-duty firefighter, which wasn’t good because he figured the guy would be well informed about the local news, and whenever the police popped that trunk, they’d find those bodies. Maybe there’d be a story on the news about it, and maybe the firefighter would remember the night he’d picked up a hitchhiker, practically in front of the car. The firefighter would remember Widow and possibly tell the cops.

  Widow wasn’t really too concerned about it because the police wouldn’t pop the trunk. Not right away. That car would probably sit there for several hours. A patrolman would drive along and check it out. The windows were tinted, which was good because the cop wouldn’t see the bloodstains on the back seat. But he would write a ticket and leave it on the window. And then several more hours would pass, and another cop would come by and see the previous ticket and slap a tow sticker on the window. Widow had seen those stickers before on abandoned cars along the highway. Usually, they were bright pink or yellow. They were signaling to the passing tow trucks to stop and pick up the car.

  The Dodge Charger would get towed to a city impound, where it would be forgotten for a while. No one would pay much attention to it until the bodies decomposed and rotted and smelled terrible. Then again, Widow hadn’t thought about the giant forty-four Magnum bullet holes in the engine and the hood. So probably the car would be towed to the impound, but only after the cops investigated the interior, found the blood, popped the trunk, and found the bodies. In every scenario Widow’s mind played out, he was better off getting the hell out of there and on his way.

  After the cops performed an investigation, they’d certainly find his fingerprints. They would send them back to the department to be analyzed, and then they would run them through the databases. They’d run them through the FBI database first since it was the biggest and most comprehensive. An hour or two would probably go by, and then their search would trigger a red flag in DC, which would be referred to the Department of the Navy, and then the search would be rerouted to Quantico, but not because that was where the FBI trained its agents. It would be sent to Quantico because that was the closest headquarters of the NCIS. They would then see the search was marked as classified. The identity of the fingerprints would be redacted and encrypted, and eventually, it would all trickle to Unit Ten, which was Widow’s old unit.

  Of course, they would deny information to the FBI and to the cops as a matter of national security, and that would be the end. But they would want answers.

  Widow figured that all of this would really be a good thing because now that things had changed for him, he could use the help, which meant that eventually, he would have to call his old boss.

  13

  Widow slept in a cheap motel off the highway, the kind that took cash and didn’t ask questions about its occupants. Otherwise, it would have no occupants.

  The room was filthy, and the neighbors were loud. The place was occupied by meth addicts and prostitutes. Widow had slept in worse places, but not in America. He had stayed in some less than reputable establishments in the US, but not like this one. This was like a bad episode of a cop show. Still, he had been exhausted and slept as well as a man could sleep on a mattress that was made with more spring than cushion. The noises hadn’t bothered him because he could tune them out as easily as anything. He had slept on the cold metal floor of Air Force cargo planes. He had to sleep flying over the Atlantic to Germany more times than he could remember, and that didn’t count all the times he flew in the same circumstances, only over the Pacific. Not to mention, he had to sleep in situations of heavy gunfire in the past.

  A seedy motel in Texas wasn’t a cakewalk, but it was the Hilton compared to some places he’d slept in.

  Widow had scrubbed his bloody shirt and clothes in the sink, then filled the bathtub with soapy water and let them soak for forty-five minutes before he took them out, wrung them all out, and left them hanging up overnight to dry.

  He woke up at first light and decided it was best to hit the road. His clothes were dry by then, but a new change of clothes wouldn’t hurt. First thing, he needed to shower.

  He had to admit that even though the motel was far from stellar; the shower was pretty good. Hot water the way he liked it and tremendous water pressure—all good things.

  Widow showered and toweled off with a thin white towel and dried his hair with a smaller one. Then he slipped his clothes back on and left the shady motel, never to think of it again.

  Widow walked a quarter of a mile toward the busier and more modern areas of the city. He found his way past a McDonald’s and a Target, which wasn’t open yet. He walked on, looking for a twenty-four-hour store or a department store that opened early. Widow found a small surf shop that was going out of business. He knew that because it had a sign out front that read, “Going Out of Business Sale.”

  An attractive bleached blonde was sitting on a lawn chair out front with some racks of jeans displayed. She wore sunglasses and cut-off jean shorts.

  She said in a fantastic Texas accent, “Hey, how ya doin’? Up early today?”

  Widow said, “Going out of business. Why?”

  “This little store just didn’t make it.”

  “Bad location?”

  “Yeah. I mean, there’s a bunch of box-retails around here. There’s a Target down the street. We just couldn’t compete.”

  “You going to be all right?”

  “Sure. This is my first store, but I got two others. Tough times is all.”

  Widow nodded.

  “So, you need some clothes?”

  He nodded and stood behind the rack, out of her sight to avoid being too memorable in case the cops tracked him this far.

  She said, “Okay. Well, today, everything is half off.”

  “You got a big-and-tall section?”

  “We don’t got any dress clothes for a guy your size. But there’s plenty to pick from in the T-shirts. Most of what we got is extra-large.”

  “What about pants?”

  “Try the jeans. They’re in the back of the store. Right side.”

  “Can I try them on?”

  “Sure, honey. The fitting room is in the back, past the counter.”

  Widow nodded and asked, “Aren’t you worried about me stealing?”

  “Nah, honey. I’m aiming to sell all this stuff by the end of business. There ain’t no room for it at my other stores. If you don’t buy it, then it all gets donated. Besides, you look trustworthy enough.”

  He didn’t respond. He shimmied through the racks of girls’ pants and accessories and into the store. First, he grabbed a black T-shirt, just because it was the first XL he saw, and then he hurried over to the jeans and studied them for his size and grabbed a dark-blue pair.

  He took them back to the fitting room and undressed and then dressed again in the new clothes. Everything fit well.

  Normally, he would’ve thrown away his old clothes at the store, but even though they were clean, crime forensics was an impressive field. He didn’t want to chance it. It was best to take them with him and throw them into a dumpster.

  Widow came out of the store and held out the tags from the jeans and the shirt. He handed her two twenties from Francis’s cash. He said, “This should cover the price, with the discount. Keep the change.”

  The bleach blonde store owner opened her hand and took the cash. She stayed seated and said, “Sure thing. You want anything else?”

  “No,” he said and then stopped and asked, “Which way to the bus station?”

  “Greyhound is about three miles down that road. Just head straight and turn right near the Waffle House. It’s across from the police station.”

  Great, he thought and repeated the words police station in his head.

  Everyone gets a little intimidated from time to time. When you’re guilty of murder, you get a little more so than the average person. Especially when you’re waiting for a bus and sitting right across from the police station.

  Widow had walked from the clothing shop that was going out of business and passed by a closed restaurant. He dumped his old clothes in a dumpster there, as well as the Colt Anaconda, after wiping it down. Tossing it made him a little sad because it was such a beautiful weapon. But he didn’t see the practicality in taking it with him. It was huge and bulky and not a weapon he could conceal in just jeans and a T-shirt. He kept the Sig Sauer, which was much more practical. The only thing about it was that the woman hadn’t brought extra rounds. So he had to settle for having only five left.