“Just my gun. How do we plan to stage it?”
Jesse hesitates. “I don’t know. I didn’t think that far,” he says as he rubs his side. Is he trying to make sure I’m aware of the bomb? “You ready? I don’t want to waste time or Michaels might figure out where we are.”
Right… someone had to have realized that Michaels has the address. Which means that Whitaker has someone in the police department. It’s the only answer to this. Someone had to have figured out that I knew and pinned down Jesse. Someone who Jesse would have trusted. But then how did Jesse get here so quickly? There’s no way he had the time to set this all up since Jesse practically beat me here… unless Whitaker started this well before Richard cracked. Did he know I’d target Richard next? Maybe Whitaker had this plan ready but hadn’t put it into motion until he somehow found out that I would be interviewing Richard again. Then, just in case he caved, he had a pawn snatch up Jesse before I even had a chance to speak to Richard. If Richard didn’t cave, then he’d still drag me here using Jesse. If Whitaker’s plan is to blow up Jesse and take down some others with him…
It’s a game. It’s always a game with this man.
Maybe he’ll blow me up after he talks to me. Or maybe his plan is to kill me with his own hands, and when I’m dead, he’ll save Jesse for when the rest of the police department comes in and then blow them all up?
Wouldn’t that be quite the spectacle?
But why, after being so… discreet for so many years, does Whitaker want to create such a spectacle? Is it his obsession with Jesse? His anger over my defiance? The steady decline of his “followers”?
“Are you ready?” Jesse asks again as his eyes drop down, and it finally dawns on me why he’d slammed into me. It wasn’tjustso I could feel what was beneath his oversized winter coat.
It was so he could slip something into my pocket.
I slide both hands into my pockets and nod. “Let’s get this over with.”
I do as I’m told because the goal is to keep Jesse from dying. How hard will that be? I’m not sure.
While I walk up, I pull the syringe out of my pocket and slip it up my sleeve. And then I get ready to toss myself right into Whitaker’s hands.
In an attempt to make it look like I’m trying my best not to be noticed, I carefully pick the lock of the back door, but before I even finish, I can feel someone moving in behind me.
I jerk back, but a bullet embeds itself into the side of the cabin, inches from where I stand.
“The next one will go in your kneecap,” a familiar voice growls. “Hands up.”
I lift my hands slowly, not wanting to give up too quickly or it’ll look suspicious.
“Officer Wilcox, is it?” I ask as I cautiously turn my head to look. “Interesting choice of afterwork activity. I’m going to be honest, when I realized that it had to be someone in the department… I was hoping it was Donna, but my mind kept coming back to you. Awfully convenient how close you were to Jesse’s house when the head got called in.”
“Shut your fucking mouth and keep your hands up or I’m going to blow a hole in your kneecap. Whitaker already has Jesse. I warned Whitaker that it was going to be hell getting hold of you and you walk right in like a dumbass. Are you really this cocky?”
“You’re asking me a question but also threatening to blow my kneecap out if I talk. Which is it?”
He smashes his gun into the side of my face, and I have to stomp down the darkness inside of me that tells me that I could very easily remove the gun from his hands and blow a hole in his useless brain.
But I can’t… not until I know more about how to get that bomb off of Jesse.
Wilcox begins jerking at my coat, ripping it off me and tossing it before he grabs my gun and slides it into the back of hispants. He starts from my ankles, removing the knife I’d hidden, before moving up both legs. He rams his hand against my balls like he thinks I might have tucked something there, then continues up my armpits and my raised arms. Irritatingly, he’s doing a very thorough pat down. Wilcox knows me well enough to not take me lightly.
I have the syringe held at my wrist, pinned down with the tip of my finger while his fingers move inches from it. I can see the way my shirt outlines it as his hand tightens around my arm on its way up.
And just when he’s about to touch it, I twist, just a little, and let go of it with my finger. I feel it slide down my arm and into my shirt that is thankfully still tucked into my pants.
He hits me again, splitting my lip which causes blood to seep into my mouth. “Stop fucking moving,” he snaps.
I want to spit the blood in his face, but keeping my blood from splattering all over the crime scene seems wildly in my best interest.
So I patiently wait until Wilcox finishes and permits me to enter the little cabin. The interior is very open, and I find Jesse standing in the foyer a good fifteen feet from where Whitaker is standing.
It gives me a decent idea of just how close Jesse can get to us before the bomb he wears would blow us to smithereens.
“The infamous Liam, we finally get to meet,” Whitaker says with a smile on his irritating face. He looks so put together, a handsome man with a kind face… it’s easy to see why Jesse was swayed by him.
“Are you a masochist? Would you like me to degrade you to your face? Tired of me doing it over the phone?” I ask.
