A Clattering of Jackdaws (The Birdwatcher Series Book 2) Page 16

  Sarah ran the length of the front of the building and glanced down each alley first before returning to the front door. By this time Malick was out with her and they both had guns drawn.

  “You okay?” she asked him. He nodded but it didn't instil her with much confidence.

  “I’m going in, keep an ear out for me calling for you,” Sarah said and Malick nodded.

  Sarah slipped in through the open door silently and took a couple of steps inside, keeping close to the wall. She could smell the blood in the air at once, it was fresh and pungent. Something bad had happened here, had she just missed her chance again!

  Her eyes scanned the floor as her throat constricted and she held her breath. She was going to see something horrendous, of that she was sure. Then a noise from above caught on the air and she looked up, someone was up there, climbing on the old gangways towards the sides of the building.

  “Stop! FBI! Malick, he's headed for the right side of the building!” Sarah called out. The figure hesitated a moment and then glanced back down at her. Sarah was shocked to see the face of Tyler Ford. She looked at him in disbelief; what the hell was going on here?

  “I can explain later Sarah,” Tyler whispered down, his voice barely reaching her in the gloom. Waves of confusion crashed over Sarah and she froze unable to decide what to do. She couldn’t think straight, she was feeling both betrayed and terrified at the same time. Was Tyler the ‘Agrarian’? Was he playing with her all along?

  “I said stop, FBI!” she shouted up to him. He was clamouring through a broken window and she had a shot, her finger tensed on the trigger and then...

  He was gone, out through the window. Malick would see him and take him into custody. She ran back out the door to back her partner up at the side of the building. She was surprised when she came out to see Malick off to one side, down in a marksmen kneeling position and he fired off a shot without any warning at all.

  Then he suddenly was on the ground, curled up in a ball and trembling but... Had she seen him glance her way just before he did this? Was she in his peripheral vision? She came over to him and crouched down,

  “Malick are you okay?” she asked and she looked to the building. There was no sign of anyone and she knew Tyler would be getting away by now. As if to punctuate this though the sound of a motorbike revving up came from nearby and the screech of tires and it was gone. Sirens were wailing in the near distance as the patrol cars began to arrive at the scene.

  “I thought I was fine,” Malick said, “Even after I took the shot for a moment I was still fine and I thought I'd kicked this but it came back!” He was sobbing and Sarah put an arm around his shoulders,

  “Come one, get up,” she said, “You don’t want the uniforms to see you like this.” Malick looked around at the approaching cars and stumbled to his feet.

  “Thanks Sarah,” he said, “I don’t know what I’d do without you. I’m sorry.”

  “Save the sorry's,” Sarah replied, “But we need to talk about this again later.” As she was saying this the first of the squad cars pulled up and the two officers within sprang out with guns drawn like it was something from the old west.

  “Freeze!” one of them shouted on seeing both of the people before him had drawn guns.

  “FBI,” Sarah said wearily as she reached slowly for her ID. “Suspect is a male, early to mid-thirties, I didn’t get a good look at him but I think he got away on a motorcycle,” Sarah added and then turning to Malick said, “Did you get a good look at him?” This was the moment of truth and she did her best to let this roll off her tongue casually.

  “I saw him but my description is not much better than yours. He was far away and its dark out, the jacket could be red but that might have been the street lights reflecting on it.”

  “Was it leather?” one of the cops asked.

  “Could have been,” Malick replied and he looked to Sarah who nodded,

  “I think it was,” she said. “Call an ambulance too, I think it’s too late but someone is in there." She nodded to the building.

  “We better go in and take a look,” Malick said. He seemed to be coming back to himself and if you didn’t know him he would seem fine, but Sarah could still see jitters deep within him. She couldn’t help but think this was the end of his career. She couldn’t let it slide anymore; it was too dangerous for everyone involved.

  The putrid menace of blood odour was even more offensive on entering the warehouse a second time. If there had been any doubt of the person being dead before, this smell alone would confirm it. Only the two FBI agents had entered the building and they approached the body at the far end of the room cautiously. Their eyes rove all over, trying to ascertain that they were now the only people in here save the dead body. Blood had pooled around it in a large half-moon and splatters of blood were spread out on the floor in all directions.

  “What the hell happened here?” Malick said. Sarah looked up to where she’d seen Tyler and noticed a pipe running across the centre of the roof, just above them and there was a dark stain on it that had to be blood. She flashed a light up there and nodded to Malick at the deep red.

  “Looks like he fell from up there, but he was already dead by then, perhaps.”

  "I’d say that’d be about right,” Malick said as he walked around the body in a wide arc to avoid the blood on the floor. “Let’s see if we can get a look at this guy’s face,” he said.

  Sarah was walking around in a similar arc only on the opposite end of the body and they met in the middle on the far side. It was darker on this aide, less light filtering in through the high windows but Sarah knew at once who it was. She had looked at his file so many times over the last few days there was no way she could not recognise him.

  “It's Carson Lemond,” she said and Malick leaned in to look closer.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Couldn't be surer,” Sarah said, this was a whole pile of shit she didn't want at her door.

  Chapter 42

  TYLER FELT THE GUNSHOT rip past him, far too close for comfort and he dived down from the side of the building into some bushes for cover. He was cut and scraped as he went through this but set to running at once on landing, his life was at stake now. In the back of his mind he knew it wasn’t Sarah who had shot at him, but it still felt like a betrayal that the FBI was shooting at him when they were all on the same side. His motorcycle was hidden around the back here, near the water and he jumped on and set off right away. He didn’t hear any more shots or even someone shouting after him, only the sirens on the way here. He looked to the water where Spalding had dived and searched out a boat or something he might be making his getaway on but there was no sign of anything in the still water.

  Racing along the bank, keeping from the roads where he knew he would be spotted easily, Tyler looked for a spot enough distance away to dump the bike and get away on foot. Motorbikes were great for speed but they stood out more than cars because of how few there were in comparison on the roads. He pulled up and killed the engine and waited a moment listening. Then he rolled the bike into the river and made sure it was submerged fully before going on his way again.

  He called a contact of his in Baltimore, Freddy Dengow, and arranged to be picked up at a street corner bar called ‘Searson’s’ not far from where Tyler currently stood. Freddy owed him a lot and Tyler knew he could trust him for a job like this.

  While he waited at the bar with a scotch in his hand, Tyler wondered if the police would be looking for him. Did Sarah trust him or had she told them who she had seen. It didn’t look good his escaping the warehouse with Carson’s dead body on the floor, and his having not told her he was going to be there. How could she trust him really in that scenario? He called a few contacts in the various police departments in the city to find out who they were looking for. The description matched his own, and he was thankful he'd ditched the red leather in the river with the bike. The main point was that his name was not out there. Sarah hadn’t said a
nything. He would owe her one for that.

  Tyler toyed with the idea of getting Freddy to drop him back to the warehouse, to show up in his official capacity as a journalist. It would be quite normal for him to be there, and his newspaper editor wouldn't be best pleased if ‘The Baltimore Echo’ missed out on the big story of Carson’s Lemond’s demise in Baltimore! Still, he knew he couldn't do it; Sarah may not have ratted him out yet but if he was to show his face there brazenly like that it would no doubt send her furious and who knew what she would say then.

  Tyler got Freddy to drop him to a storage facility where Tyler had a car stashed. He drove home in this, calling first his editor to tell him he was on the other side of the State looking into a story and explaining why he wasn’t going to be able to make it to Baltimore that night. Briggs was not happy but he grumbled and hung up saying he’d get someone else to cover it. Tyler didn’t give a shit how Briggs felt; he knew how talented he was and that he could get a job at any number of papers throughout the country if he really wanted to. Briggs would just have to put up with shit like this now and then if he wanted Tyler’s stories to adorn his crappy little paper.

  Tyler was at home a few hours later when the call he’d been waiting for came. It wasn’t Spalding- though he did think he was going to hear from him real soon too- but Sarah. He hadn’t tried to call her knowing how busy she would have been with the warehouse mess.

  “Listen you fuck!” she said as soon as he answered and Tyler was taken aback by her ferocity, “You give me one good reason not to ‘remember’ who I really saw in that warehouse tonight!”

  “Sarah, I’m sorry...”

  “Bullshit! One good reason, right now or I call it in.” She was playing serious hardball and the worst thing was he didn’t think she was playing, she was ready to do it if he didn’t tell her what she wanted to know. It was time to come clean, about all of it.

  “Spalding contacted me to arrange a trade,” Tyler said, knowing full well the pain this would cause in Sarah’s heart. “Information that only I had in exchange for Carson’s life.”

  “Why is Carson dead then?” she asked and this threw Tyler too; he would have expected her to be so focused on the fact Spalding was there everything else would have diminished into the background.

  “I didn’t have the information he wanted,” Tyler said.

  “What did he want to know?”

  “He kept asking me ‘How many’ over and over,”

  “How many what?” Sarah asked.

  “That’s just it,” Tyler replied, “I don’t know and he wouldn’t be any more clear. I think he was playing with me and was going to kill Carson all along. He must have tipped you guys off too, so you’d show up and it would look like I was the one who killed Carson.”

  “How can I be sure you’re not?” Sarah asked and her voice had never been colder.

  “Sarah!” Tyler said, “You know I’m not capable of something like that.”

  “I don’t know anything about you right now,” she said. Tyler didn’t say anything back to this and let silence fall before changing tack.

  “He was there Sarah, Spalding was there, I saw him, spoke to him.” Sarah didn't say anything then and Tyler wondered what was going through her head. He didn’t say anything more but let this wash over her. It was a tactic that had served him well in the past with her.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” she said at last.

  “What?” he asked.

  “This secrecy, this chasing shadows, I can’t do it anymore, and it’s too much. I’m tired of it all.” Tyler was worried, she sounded serious and he didn’t know if he was going to be able to talk her out of this. He waited a moment longer. “I’m serious, this is the end of it all.” There was a death note of finality in her voice and he had to accept it as the truth.

  “What about Spalding?” he asked.

  “I’m still going to get him, but I just have to do it the right way, through my job.”

  “They’ll never let you, Sarah,” he said.

  “If I want it enough, I’ll make it work,” she said sounding almost like she was about to fall asleep. “And I do want it enough.” Tyler sensed defeat, but only in the battle- the war was far from over.

  “You can only do what feels right at the time,” he said, by the way of explanation for his actions tonight and also her current feelings about working with him.

  “I guess so,” she said.”

  Chapter 43

  IT SEEMED A LIFETIME before Megan and Ellie came to a road. They had been through hell across all kinds of inhospitable terrain to get here. Their clothes were soaked through from marsh and swamp, their skin was cut and nicked all over from thorny bushes and briars and they were covered in twigs and mud from so many obstacles they’d had to climb over or under on their way to freedom. They both thought it, but neither said it, that they must have taken the least optimal route out of the place. It probably would have been simplest to just follow the driveway off the land to find a road, but that was twenty-twenty hindsight talking. At the time they’d been scared and tired and had made the most logical choice they felt was open to them.

  The two girls jumped and hugged one another in joy when they got to the road. Someone would be along soon enough and would pick them up and take them to the nearest town. It was just about all over. Tears streamed down both of their faces as their feet felt the hard road surface.

  This all changed however, when the sounds of the first car to come along approached in the distance. They couldn't see it but they knew it was coming. The euphoria lifted so fast that both of them felt it physically.

  “What if it’s Spalding?” Ellie said, her voice tinged with fearful certainty. Megan didn’t want to believe it but she felt the same tension growing within her. They stared deep into one another's wide, open eyes, each looking for some fact or reason but not finding it. At the last moment, just before the car rounded the bend in the road and became visible, both Megan and Ellie scrambled in terror to either side of the road.

  The car went by, probably speeding for the road it was on, but Megan got a good look at the driver and it wasn’t Spalding. Just for a moment she thought of breaking cover and running into the road behind the car, calling out and waving for him to come back. But fear stopped her. Why was he going so fast? Was it possible he was looking for them on behalf of Spalding? Lord knew he had people doing his dirty work all over the place.

  “Was it him?” Ellie’s nervous voice called out from the treeline on the other side of the road.

  “No,” Megan said, making her way to the road again. Ellie came out to meet her. She clearly hadn’t seen the driver from where she was hiding but she looked scared still and didn't ask Megan why she didn’t try to hail them if she knew it wasn’t Spalding. Megan felt she had to explain anyway.

  “He was going too fast, I wondered if he was looking for us for Spalding.”

  “You’re probably right,” Ellie said looking on the road the way the car had gone “This escape is probably going to take longer than we thought.” Megan nodded in agreement with this.

  “We just need to keep to the edge of the road and hide when we hear a car coming,” she said.

  For many hours they walked the lonely road, coming to the odd off road that looked like it might run to a farm or house. They were too scared to chance going down any of these either. The whole area seemed abandoned and there was no way to tell if anyone might live there or if they did they might be under Spalding’s power too.

  Night had fallen by the time they came to a town limits line. The sign said ‘Dover’ and neither of them had ever heard of it.

  “It shouldn’t be any more than a few miles from here,” Megan said and Ellie smiled with relief. They were exhausted and both were limping from the long walk on the rough road surface.

  “Race ya,” Ellie said breathlessly and Megan smiled at her. It was a pure joy to see Ellie could still have a sense of humour after all they had been through. It was a
n uplifting moment and it brought fresh tears to Megan’s eyes. Ellie threw an arm around her shoulders and they set to walking again. They had an appointment with the Dover Sheriff’s Office to get to.

  Thirty minutes later they were in the tiny town of Dover. There wasn’t much to it and the Sheriff’s Office stood out in town like it was a place of business. Megan felt suspicious eyes from behind blinds and twitching curtains as they passed the few houses on the way. This place seemed so quiet that two strangers rolling in looking like she and Ellie did was probably the closest thing to scandal or trouble the place had seen in twenty years. Some had probably already called the law to report them by now.

  They entered the Office and as soon as they were inside, Megan’s knees crumpled and she fell to the floor. Ellie leaned over and the strain seemed to do the same to her and they both lay there on the dusty wooden floor, tears streaming down both of their faces as they embraced. For the first time in so very, very long, they felt they were safe. It was not something they had ever thought they were going to ever feel again.

  Chapter 44

  IT WAS DRINK DRIVING, there were no two ways about it. It didn’t matter that she was an agent of law enforcement, she was guilty of an offence but right now she didn’t care. Sarah was angry about a lot of things. A lot of unsolved cases, a lot of personal struggles and most recently of all a semi drunk call to her ex Marcus who she could tell was very eager to get off the phone. Why had she called him; weren’t things fine now, wasn’t she past that? She had thought so, and knew she didn’t have a place in her life for a man right now, not until her mission was over. And yet she had done it, she picked up the phone, looked at it, told herself not to do it, that it was stupid and then dialled. She had the chance to hang up as he took so long to answer but still she held on knowing it was not the right thing to do, that she was going to make a fool of herself. And that was what had happened, and now she wanted to blame someone. Tyler Ford was the cause of it all and he was the one who was going to pay for it. Sarah was on her way to his house and she was going to tear him a new asshole when she got there. Assuming of course she wasn’t picked up for drink driving on the way.