Page 97 of Deathtoll
The parade. Thousands of people.
A split second of frozen shock. Then they all launched into action.
“The device is somewhere along the parade route.” Murph looked back at the picture and scrutinized every pixel. “What’s new construction?”
“The spectator stand and the stage,” Bing said.
Murph grabbed his phone and dialed Maria at Hope Hill. When she picked, he spoke only a single sentence. “I need everyone with explosives experience on Main Street.”
Cirelli was shouting orders into her own phone. The captain was radioing the information to the rest of his team.
Murph didn’t wait for them to finish. He took off running. He’d just slammed behind the wheel of his truck when his phone rang.Unknown caller.
“I’m having a party,” a male voice said on the other end. “So far, it’s just me and a couple of your friends. Why don’t you join us and even out the numbers?”
Before Murph could respond, the man added, “I’ve got a camera on you, Dolan. I’m watching you. Now roll down your window and toss your gun and phone as far as you can. Two cars down, there’s a Nissan Altima. Key in the ignition. Directions to the party on the dashboard. If you try to signal for help to anyone, in any way, I’ll blow your insignificant little town off the map.” He laughed. “I’m undecided on it, to be honest. Play your part and play it well, and I might just spare the town yet.”
“I’m not tossing a loaded gun into the street. I’m going to take the bullets out and leave them in my truck.”
“Does the good-guy stuff ever get tedious? Because the bad-guy stuff is still just as much fun after all these years. You should consider a career change.”
Murph made a show of emptying the weapon and stashing the bullets in his glove compartment, sneaking out his smaller backup gun and the ankle holster at the same time. He pretended to drop a bullet. Swore so Asael could hear him, then ducked and fastened the holster under his blue jeans.
Then he opened his door and tossed his main weapon under his car.
“Phone next,” the hitman ordered.
Murph ended the call, lowered the phone to his lap, snapped it out of its thick protective case, and hid it in his boot. Then he tossed the protective case under the car too. He hoped Asael wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from the distance, that the man would see a flash of something small and black and the right shape, and his brain would fill in the rest.
Murph got out immediately after, to keep Asael’s attention on himself.
The Altima waited for him as promised, a hand-drawn map on the dashboard. The hastily scribbled drawing showed the old industrial park as his destination. Made sense. In hindsight.
The parade floats were stored in the empty warehouses out there.
Murph hadn’t thought of the place, exactly because of that. Crews were coming and going all day. But that could work for Asael too, couldn’t it? If he’d found a way to blend in.
Murph had to drive around the streets that were closed for the festivities, but even with the detour, he was at the location the X on the map specified in fifteen minutes.
The building was perhaps the smallest on the sprawling lot. According to the sign on the side, it had housed an antique repair/storage shop at one point, but with its peeling paint and the weeds reaching halfway to the roof, it looked long abandoned.
The shop was surrounded by larger warehouses, the ones that housed the floats. They must have been a bustle of activity an hour ago, but now they were deserted, the crews at the parade with their creations.
Murph pulled to a stop behind a building a hundred feet from his destination, out of sight, then he ran in a half circle in whatever cover he could find, to get himself behind the old antique repair place, marked by X on Asael’s map.
At the back wall, he pulled out his phone and texted Cirelli his location, then he dropped his phone into the bushes. If Asael managed to drop a dime on him, Murph didn’t want the bastard to know that reinforcements were on their way.
I’m coming, Kate.
Murph climbed up the cement block wall, just enough mortar missing from between the old blocks for a fingertip or toehold here and there.
He was on the corrugated metal roof in under two minutes, thanking the wind that made enough noise to cover him as he bent down over the edge to the aluminum vent. His pocket knife came in handy to unscrew three corners of the vent cover.
He worked slowly, stopping frequently, trying to coincide with the wind brushing the branches of a couple of dogwoods against the siding below him. Once three screws were removed, he rotated the vent cover on the fourth, and just like that, it was out of his way, yet secured, not falling off, not making a sound. Since the bug screen—to keep out creepy crawlers—was glued to the back of the vent cover, that too went with it.
If the attic fan box were the standard twelve-inch residential size, he would have been shit out of luck. The industrial building, however, had an industrial-size fan, twenty-four by twenty-four inches. Not a particularly spacious fit, but not an unsurmountable challenge for Murph.
Since the hot days of summer were long gone, the fan wasn’t on—another piece of good luck. Murph unfastened it, then pushed in one side, enough so he could grab the plastic-coated wire, and then, using that, he quietly lowered the fan against the wall on the inside.
