Page 59 of No Safe Place

“I already bought the cap,” he said very quietly. “I was supposed to leave today but I stayed for the party that my guys threw. Now this. Why didn’t I just leave?”

I looked at him.

I pulled up my sleeve to show him the tattoo I had on the inside of my left bicep. It was a small one of the skeleton of a frog.

“You ever see this one before?”

His eyes lit up.

“Frogman. The SEALs! You are a SEAL?”

I nodded.

“I thought you said you were a cop.”

“I was both,” I said.

“So, what do we do, Mike?” he said with a sudden hope.

“Simple,” I said as I lowered my sleeve. “Just follow the frogman.”

“You have a plan?” he said.

“Just follow my lead, Mathias,” I said, giving him a wink as I patted him on his big shoulder. “Start by getting your buddy Mario to listen to you. And when they come for us, just stay out of my way, all right? Let me take the lead. And if I tell you to do something, you do it quick. No questions, no bullshit. You do that—you have my back—your little girl gets her hat. You want that, right?”

“You think you can really get us out of here?”

“It’s a done deal,” I said brightly. “Especially now that I’ve got the Iron Swede on my side.”

“Iron Norwegian,” Mathias said with a smile.

“Aye, aye, Captain Norway,” I said. “Batten down the hatches because if what I think they are about to do is coming, this is about to get bumpy.”

52

Carpenter swung the BearCat’s armored plate back door closed like the door of a Swiss bank safe and then Shaw, all alone now behind the driver’s seat, put the transmission into Drive and hit the gas.

The twin turbo diesels purred as he pulled off from the first waypoint. He drove down the block and before the left turn onto Main Street, he pulled the indestructible monster truck in under an old oak.

He needed to wait a bit now, give the boys some time to sneak down to the side of the restaurant.

He rolled his neck as he took a look around at the square. The whole town was like something out of an innocent yesteryear, wasn’t it? he thought, surveying the bumpy sidewalks, the wide lawns trimmed with actual picket fences.

The front porch of the hundred-plus-year-old house to his right had a hanging rocking chair swing. In a minute Ma and Pa Ingalls would come out and sit down and sip some fresh lemonade as they read the Bible, wouldn’t they? Shaw thought, shaking his head.

“Worthless hayseeds,” he mumbled as he fished into his gear bag.

“Ah, there you go,” he said brightly as he found his pill bottle of Adderall, dry swallowing three of them. Almost immediately he felt his heart rate begin to kick.

Hitting on the tunes on his phone, he began drumming the steering wheel along to the ominous jungle drumbeat of the opening of Van Halen’s “Everybody Wants Some!!”

“Oh, yeah, scratch my back, baby,” he called out as Eddie’s first screeching chords filled the inside of the cab.

Nothing like a handful of lid poppers and a stadium rock classic to get the old game face on, Shaw thought, doing a little air guitar.

Just like old times indeed.

Juices starting to flow now, he turned off the tunes and adjusted his comm link microphone as he brought up the electronic tablet surveillance screen.

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