“And then what happened?”
“On the drive over I asked him to get something out of the glove box. While he was doing that, I injected him in the neck with the same sedative I used on Stamos. I drove him to the lake near the town house. I stabbed him in the chest and tied a heavy rock to him. Then I threw his laptop and phone in the lake, too, after I rolled him into the water. Will was very heavy, but I was very determined. When I was throwing his stuff in, my phone fell out of my pocket and went into the water. I had some blood on me from stabbing him. I cleaned it up as best as I could, but I probably missed some.”
Devine glanced down at his hand where he had rubbed off the stains from her car seat. Will’s blood? “And the gas in the house? That was you?”
“I had to come up with a reason for Will’s disappearance, namely, that he tried to kill all of us and then disappeared. I went back to the town house, packed some clothes in his suitcase, and tossed it in a Dumpster in the downtown area. Then I came back and fiddled with the gas.”
“But weren’t you afraid of dying from the gas? I mean, you were really close to it, Jill, when I carried you out of the house.”
She looked at him calmly, with an utterly uninterested expression, which, under the tense standoff, was terrifying. “You should have just let me die, Travis. It would have been much better for me and certainly much better for you.”
“Meaning now it’s my turn? Is this what Dennis would have wanted?”
“Dennis never had a chance to know what he really wanted. But for what it’s worth, I’m very sorry, Travis.”
She fired the gun and the bullet slammed into his right shoulder. He fell back against the file cabinet and then dropped to the floor. The blood spurted down his front, and he desperately tried to use his shirt to stanch the bleeding.
She moved closer and aimed the gun at his head for the kill shot.
“I’m sorry, I meant to shoot you in the chest. I don’t have really good aim. But it won’t hurt anymore in a second, Travis. I promise. I never wanted any of this to happen.”
A second shot rang out.
Devine watched Tapshaw stiffen as a bullet went into her back, traversed her thin torso, and exited out her chest. In his wounded, muddled state, Devine thought he could see the bullet in midair. The round smacked into the wall and stayed there.
Tapshaw swayed on her feet for a moment. Then the Sig fell from her hand. And she followed along with it, hitting the hard floor face-first and not moving again, except for one last involuntary twitch as life quickly transitioned to death.
A bleeding and rapidly weakening Devine swiveled his head to the doorway.
Helen Speers stood there with her Glock still pointing at where Tapshaw had been standing a moment before. She looked down at Devine and started to run toward him, her phone coming out as she tapped in 911.
“Travis!” she cried out.
Right as Devine’s eyes closed.
CHAPTER
83
DEVINE LAY IN A HOSPITAL bed, but his mind was elsewhere.
The thump-thump beats of the chopper blades, the swirl of heated desert air, the taste of red sand in his mouth along with the biting fumes of aviation fuel in his bloody nostrils. None of those things should happen while you’re dying, because dying was enough of a bitch.
Ass over elbows, the IED had taken Devine, a 225-pound man, loaded down with fifty more pounds of gear, and launched him like a human cannonball across a rut-filled road fifty clicks outside of Kandahar. He hit the dirt unconscious. He woke up to a morphine-inspired fog. He endured multiple surgeries and a skin graft and did it all over again two years later when a badly aimed sniper round went through a defect in his body armor and ripped his shoulder apart instead of his brain.
Only this time it was the other shoulder, and he was nowhere near Kandahar.
Devine blinked himself awake and stared around the antiseptic confines of his hospital room. Just beneath the intoxicating shimmer of the morphine drip, he felt both the snakelike bite of the Sig Sauer nine-millimeter round and the surgery that had followed. Without painkillers he knew he would be shrieking in agony right now.
He flitted across time and space, and then his gaze lingered and stopped on twin figures.
Emerson Campbell was in a suit but without a tie.
Helen Speers was in a dark blue jacket and skirt with a red scarf around her neck. For a moment the drugged-up Devine thought she was an airline flight attendant.
“How is consciousness treating you, Devine?” asked Campbell.
Devine tried to form the words, but his mouth, along with his brain, was not entirely under his command.