Snowbound - Blake Crouch [92]
He steadied himself and said, “We have ambulances waiting outside for everyone.”
Rachael stood up, said, “Take that woman in front first.”
The paramedic knelt down. “What’s her name?”
“Natalie.”
He was staring at an eighty-pound woman, severely malnourished and catatonic, who’d suffered so much trauma, it had destroyed her mind.
“My name’s Rick,” he said. “Your family’s here, Natalie. I’m gonna carry you out, okay?”
He unbuckled the safety belt and lifted the woman from her seat, turning around carefully in the cramped space near the door and the cockpit. Through her window, Devlin watched another paramedic take Natalie out of Rick’s arms. He was cradling her like a child, her eyes open yet seeing nothing. Someone draped a blanket over her.
A man emerged from the crowd, staggered toward Natalie. He was pale and shell-shocked, like he’d encountered a ghost or become one himself.
Rachael grabbed Devlin’s and Will’s hands. “Guys?” she whispered. “You see what you did? It isn’t just about our family.”
Outside, the paramedic said, “Is this your wife, sir?” The man had no voice, could only nod.
“Why don’t you come with me. You can ride with us to Providence.”
SEVENTY-FIVE
Will dutifully tread and retread his story, from start to finish, so many times that he could tell it without thinking, without feeling, to the special agents in charge with the FBI’s Phoenix and Anchorage field offices, to Inspection Division agents from the Bureau’s headquarters, to Border Patrol, ATF, even a detective from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, successor to Teddy Swicegood, who had died of a stroke two and a half years earlier on a golf course in Sierra Vista.
The FBI had been looking for Kalyn Sharp for the last year, since it had come to light that she’d defrauded the Bureau, absconding with $150,000, which they suspected she’d used to track down her sister. They called her “a rogue agent, mentally unstable,” said that had she not been killed in Alaska, serious prison time would have loomed in her immediate future.
“Just to be clear, you do understand who this character was?” Agent Messing said, his big West Texas accent filling the drab hotel room.
It was two days before Rachael’s scheduled release from the psychiatric hospital at the University of Colorado, and this young DEA agent from the Phoenix Field Office sat on the couch in Will and Devlin’s suite at the Oxford in downtown Denver. Will had been staring out the window toward the Front Range, his patience worn ragged by the steady stream of agents from more law-enforcement agencies than he cared to keep track of.
He replied, “Kalyn told me he was with the Alphas.”
“Not with. Number-two honcho. We had a bug in a Tempe ware house they’d been using. One in Jav’s car. One in his mansion. I could put my hand on the Bible and say he’s the scariest sumbitch I ever encountered.”
“You met him?”
“Once. At a Starbucks in Scottsdale. I’d been tailing him for a few days, and he made me while he was ordering.”
“What happened?”
“We had espressos on the patio.”
The agent unbuttoned his too-tight Belk suit, ran his fingers through a blond crew cut that let too much of his oily scalp shine through.
“What is it?” Will asked.
Agent Messing shook his head. “This ain’t for public consumption, and in fact, it can’t walk out of this room.”
Will got up, went over to the open door that led into Devlin’s bedroom, where MTV blared from the television.
He closed it, returned to the chair, and when he was sitting down again, Messing said, “I had reason to believe, and this is coming from a reliable source, that Javier wanted out.”
“Out of what?”
“Everything. His marriage. The Alphas.”
“Why the Alphas?”
“Greed probably. Whatever the motivation, it wasn’t rooted in goodness. Wasn’t ’cause he found Jesus. Nothing like that. The man is pure evil. But the point is, you don’t leave the Alphas. It’s blood in, blood out. Know what I mean?”
Will shook his head.
“You kill to join, and the only way to leave is through death. In light of this development, we really, really