Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [66]
“Will you two shut up?” Parker asked from the window of the camper, where he moved aside the curtain every so often to check on what was going on outside. “It’s bad enough that we’re stuck here in Pissant, Texas, without the two of you yammering at each other all the time.”
“He started it, the big gorilla,” Earl complained. “And you can finish it,” Parker pointed out. “Just tell us what we need to know.”
Earl was pale to start with, but his pallor deepened as he shook his head. “I can’t. They’ll kill me.”
“Maybe we’ll kill you if you don’t,” Ford said.
“No, you won’t. You’re the good guys, remember?”
“This day and age, it’s gettin’ harder and harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys,” Ford drawled.
He was stretched out on one of the camper’s bunks with his hands behind his head and his legs crossed at the ankles. The casual pose belied the fact that he was ready for trouble. They had been lucky since escaping from Corpus Christi with Earl Trussell as their prisoner, but Ford knew good luck never lasted. Bad luck always came along to replace it.
They had bought this used camper for cash in a little town south of Corpus, hooked it onto a pickup they had stolen that also had stolen license plates on it, then headed west into the largely empty southern tip of Texas.
The camper wasn’t all they bought. Parker and Ford picked up a couple of throwaway cell phones to replace the government-issued phones they had, well, thrown away. Off the bridge into Nueces Bay, in fact. Those phones would have been too easy to trace, and after everything that had happened, the two agents were no longer a hundred percent certain who they could trust.
It was a debate they’d had several times while driving all night across the flat Texas landscape. Ford was ambivalent about calling in and reporting that they had the target in custody. Parker was dead set against it.
“We were set up, Fargo,” he had declared as they argued. “The only reason we were there at that hotel in Corpus was so those guys could kill the little guy here and pin the blame on us. And there’s only one way they could have known we’d be there.”
“Our bosses told them,” Ford had said.
“Exactly. Or somebody who works for our bosses, anyway. If we let them know where we are, there’ll be another hit squad on us in a matter of hours.”
Ford hadn’t been able to dispute that logic, but he was still uneasy about their best course of action. “As long as we’re in the wind, they’re going to think we’ve gone rogue,” he had warned.
“Better that than being dead.”
Again, indisputable logic.
“I vote for staying alive,” the prisoner had piped up from between them on the pickup seat.
“You don’t get a vote,” Ford growled. “At least, not until you spill who you are and why so many people want you dead.”
“We want to know what was on that laptop of yours, too,” Parker had told him.
So far, though, they hadn’t gotten him to reveal anything except his name: Earl Trussell.
Early the next morning, they had stopped at this RV park in a small crossroads town and laid low ever since. Parker had walked across the highway several times to get food for them at the Tasty Kreme drive-in, which appeared not to have changed a bit since being built sometime in the 1950s.
Now Ford continued, “Speaking of lines blurring, we could always torture the little weasel, Brad.”
Earl sneered at him. “Do you worst, big shot.”
“Wouldn’t the worst torture be torture that didn’t make you talk? The best torture would be the stuff that makes you talk.”
“You can’t make me talk.”
“That’s just little guy bravado. Next thing you know, you’ll be threating to murdalize me.”
“Yeah, well, if I could—”
“Pipe down,” Parker said, tensing at the window. “An SUV just pulled up and stopped at the office.”
Ford swung his legs off the bunk. “So?”
“So it’s black and the windows are heavily tinted.”
“Doesn’t have to mean a thing,” Ford said, but he reached for his gun anyway. He felt better with