Trace - Cornwell Patricia (читать книги онлайн полностью без регистрации .TXT) 📗

"She's no longer my wife," he says, his eyes hard and cold. "And she's never had a dog."

"Sweetie," Lucy says.

He looks at her, and something glints in his eyes.

"Where's Sweetie?" Lucy asks.

"The only Sweetie I know is me and Gilly," he says, a smirk on his face.

"Don't be funny," Lucy warns him. "There's nothing funny about any of this."

"Suz calls me Sweetie. She always has. And I called Gilly Sweetie."

"That's the answer," Benton says. "That's enough. Get out."

"There's no puppy," Dr. Paulsson says. "That's a lot of shit." He leans into the conversation more, and she sees what is coming. "Who are you?" he asks. "Give me the pen." He gets up from the chair. "You're just some stupid little girl sent in to sue me, aren't you? Think you're getting money. You see how foolish this is, don't you? Give me the pen."

Lucy stands with her arms by her sides, her hands ready.

"Move out," Benton says. "Now."

"So a couple of you Whirly-Girls get together, think you're going to get a few bucks?" He stands before her, and she knows what is about to happen.

"Move out," Benton says emphatically. "It's over."

"You want the camera?" Lucy asks Dr. Paulsson. "You want the micro recorder?" She has no recorder. Benton does. "You really want them?"

"We can just pretend this never happened," Dr. Paulsson says, smiling. "Give them to me. You got the information you wanted, now didn't you? So we'll just forget everything else. Let me have them."

She taps the cellular interface that is clipped to a belt loop, the wire

connected to it running through a tiny hole inside her flight suit. She pushes a switch, turning off the interface. Benton's screen just went blank. He can hear and talk but he can't see.

"Don't," Benton says in her ear. "Get out. Now."

"Sweetie," Lucy mocks Dr. Paulsson. "What a joke. Can't imagine anybody calling you Sweetie. That's sickening. You want the camera, the recorder, come and get them."

He rushes at her and runs right into her fist, and then his legs go out from under him and he is on the floor with a grunt and a cry and she is on his back, a knee pinning his right arm, her left hand pinning his left arm. His arms are wrenched and trapped painfully behind his back.

"Let me go!" he yells. "You're hurting me!"

"Lucy! No!" Benton is talking but she isn't listening.

She grips the back of Dr. Paulsson's hair, and she is breathing hard and tastes her rage, and she lifts his head by his hair. "Hope you had a nice time today, Sweetie," Lucy says, jerking his head by the hair. "I should beat your fucking brains out. You molest your own daughter? You let other perverts do it when they came to your house for sex games? You molest her in her own bedroom right before you moved out last summer?" She presses his head against the floor and holds it hard as if she is drowning him in the white tile floor. His cheek is squashed against the floor. "How many lives have you ruined, you motherfucker?" She bangs his head on the floor, hard enough to remind him she could smash his brains out. He grunts and cries out.

"Lucy! Stop!" Benton's voice pierces her eardrum. "Move out!"

She blinks, suddenly aware of what she is doing. She can't kill him. She must not kill him. She gets off him. She starts to kick him in the head, but stops her foot. She breathes hard, sweating, backing off, wanting to kick him, wanting to beat him to death, and she could, easily. "Don't move," she snarls, backing away from him, her heart flying as she realizes just how much she wants to kill him. "Lie right there and don't move. Don't move!"

She reaches toward the countertop and snatches up her bogus FAA forms, then backs up to the door and opens it. He stays down and doesn't move, his face against the floor. Blood drips from his nose and is bright red against the white tile.

"You're finished," she says to him from the doorway, wondering where the plump woman is, the secretary, glancing out toward the stairs and seeing no one. The house is perfectly quiet and she is alone inside it with Dr. Paulsson, just the way he planned. "You're finished. You're lucky you're not dead," she says, shutting the door behind her.

47

Along the narrow streets inside the training camp, five agents armed with Beretta Storm nine-millimeter rifles with Bushnell scopes and tactical lights move in from different directions on a small stucco house with a cement roof.

The house is old and in poor repair, and the small overgrown yard is gaudy with inflated Santas, snowmen, and candy canes. Palm trees are sloppily strung with multicolored lights. Inside the house, a dog barks nonstop. The agents wear their Storms on tactical slings that angle across their bodies and hold the muzzles down at a forty-degree angle. Dressed in black, they are not wearing body armor, which is unusual on a raid.

Rudy Musil waits calmly inside the stucco house behind a high barricade of turned-over tables and upended chairs that block the narrow doorway leading into the kitchen. He is dressed in camouflage pants and tennis shoes and armed with an AR-15 that is not a lightweight search weapon like the Storm but a. high-power combat weapon with a twenty inch barrel that can take out the enemy up to three hundred yards away. He doesn't need a weapon to clear the house because he is in the house.

He moves from the doorway to the broken window over the sink, looking out. He sees movement behind a Dumpster about fifty yards from the house.

He props the AR-15 on the edge of the sink and rests the barrel on the rotting windowsill. Through the scope he finds his first prey crouching behind the Dumpster, just a sliver of his black-clothed body exposed. Rudy squeezes the trigger and the rifle cracks and the agent screams, and then another agent darts out of nowhere and hits the dirt behind a palm tree and Rudy shoots him too. That agent doesn't scream or make any sound that Rudy can hear, and he moves from the window to the barricade in the doorway, angrily kicking and tossing tables and chairs out of his way. He breaks through his own barricade and rushes to the front of the house and smashes out the living room window and begins firing. Within five minutes, all five agents have been slammed with rubber bullets, but they keep on coming until Rudy orders them over the radio to halt.

"You guys are worthless," he says into his radio as he sweats inside the raid house that the training camp uses for simulated combat. "You're dead. Every one of you. Fall in."

He steps outside the front door as the agents in black walk toward the yard festively decorated for Christmas, and Rudy has to give them credit. At least they are not showing their pain, and he knows they hurt like hell where the rubber bullets slammed into their unprotected bodies. You get hit enough times with rubber bullets and you want to break down and cry like a baby, but at least this batch of new recruits is hard-faced and able to take the pain. Rudy presses a small remote control and the CD of the barking dog inside the house stops.

Rudy stands in the doorway and looks at the agents. They are breathing hard and sweating and angry with themselves. "What happened?" Rudy asks. "The answer's easy."

"We fucked up," an agent replies.

"Why?" Rudy asks, the AR-15 down by his side. Sweat streams down his muscular bare chest, and veins rope along his tanned, chiseled arms. "I'm looking for one answer. You did one thing and that's why you're dead."

"We didn't anticipate you having a combat rifle. Maybe assumed you had a handgun," an agent offers, wiping her dripping face on her sleeve and breathing hard from nerves and physical exertion.

"Never assume," Rudy replies loudly to the group. "I might have a fully automatic machine gun in here. I might be firing fifty-caliber rounds in here. But you made one fatal mistake. Come on. You know what it is. We've talked about it."