False Witness Read online

  The decision, Clark knew, had just been taken out of his hands.

  He checked the mirrors again. Nobody was gaining on them; that much was certain. But instead of feeling relief, the knot in his stomach only tightened.

  How much pain has my cowardice caused my friend? he wondered.

  “It’s okay,” Jessica said. “It’s okay.”

  As Clark worked his own cell phone, trying to contact the U.S. attorney’s office and the FBI after hours, he kept one eye on the GPS device. It tracked Kumari about thirty miles north of Apex and eventually came to rest somewhere in the middle of the desert. A mob hideout, Clark assumed. He realized now why they hadn’t seen the Lincoln since they left the blasting area. Xu had probably headed straight to the hideout in order to torture the algorithm out of Kumari.

  He would send someone else to finish the job with Clark and Jessica.

  28

  Twenty minutes later, twelve blocks from the North Vegas police station, Clark heard the distant whir of blades, like the return of a demon whispering threats from the sky. “Did you hear that?” Clark asked Jessica.

  “No.”

  Clark laid on the horn at the next busy intersection, slowing down only slightly for a red light. Tires squealed and angry drivers found their own horns.

  “You’re going to get us killed!” Jess yelled.

  “Check for helicopters,” Clark shot back, breathless. He had already hit the button to roll down Jessica’s window.

  She stuck her head out, twisting in her seat.

  “Hang on!” Clark swerved around a slow driver, jerking Jessica and banging her head against the window frame. She swore at him, and it almost made him smile. She’s back.

  She pulled her head inside, her face pale. “They’re coming.”

  “Fasten your seat belt!” Clark yelled.

  As Jessica fumbled with her belt, Clark approached another intersection. The light was red . . . of course. This time, the oncoming traffic didn’t stop. He laid on the horn again, waited for the smallest opening, and shot the Durango through.

  “How far away are they?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Half a mile?”

  Jessica still had the Glock in her right hand, and she knew how to use it—but what good would it do? A person couldn’t shoot helicopters out of the sky with a 9mm Glock.

  Traffic snarled and the helicopter closed in, the engine noise and roar of the blades growing ever closer. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Through Jessica’s open window, it seemed like the bird was directly overhead.

  Clark pulled partially onto the sidewalk and shot around some vehicles blocking his way.

  “They’re on top of us, Clark!”

  As soon as the words left Jessica’s mouth, a hailstorm of bullets rained on the front windshield. Jessica instinctively curled away from the glass, and Clark lurched back in his seat. The shattered glass, though riddled with bullet holes, held in place. “Give me the gun!” Clark shouted. They were firing large rounds from the helicopter, semiautomatics.

  Instead of giving him the gun, Jess pulled her shoulder restraint behind her back, grabbed the hand grip on the door frame, and stuck her head out the side window, gun in her right hand.

  “What are you doing?” Clark yanked the steering wheel hard to the right, jerking Jess back inside. Bullets bounced off the pavement beside him as the heavy Durango squealed around a corner, sliding onto a side street, narrowly missing another vehicle.

  How did they find us?

  Clark caught a glimpse of the copter’s underbelly out his own side window as the pilot regrouped and swooped in for another run. Clark drove like a man possessed, erratically swerving left and right. He caught a glimpse of the gunman on the passenger side of the helicopter, sighting them in. The next second, Clark lost him again as the helicopter moved directly overhead. Pang! Pang! The bullets ripped into the roof of the Durango.

  In a last desperate act, Clark pulled the wheel hard to the left, sending the Durango into an out-of-control spin, bouncing Jessica’s shoulder against the passenger door. The wheels hit the curb, and the vehicle rolled, wiping out a mailbox, skidding across a front lawn. Clark’s head banged against something, and his world turned fuzzy, spinning wildly. Abruptly, the spinning stopped and the Durango jerked to a halt, lodged partially on its roof, pinned against the front stoop of somebody’s house.

  Clark’s door was crushed, wedged against the ground. Jessica’s side of the Durango stuck up at a forty-five-degree angle, making his wife an easy target.

  If she was still alive.

  Dazed, Clark realized that the copter was circling back again. The smoky residue from his air bag made it seem like the car was on fire. He thought about the gas tank—exposed to the assassins’ bullets.

  Quickly, he took a mental inventory. His left shoulder blazed with pain, and he tasted blood in his mouth, but otherwise he seemed to be okay. He could move both legs and hands. But that was not his immediate concern. The helicopter had descended to treetop level, a black widow ready to devour the fly caught in its web. Clark heard Jessica groan.

  “Can you move?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Crawl toward me, Jess. Get away from that window!”

  He could hear the blades beating the air above them.

  “I can’t!” She frantically worked on her seat belt but couldn’t get it loose . . . and he couldn’t reach her.

  They had come so far—how could he lose her now?

  His eyes searched for the Glock, but everything was out of sorts, like some giant had picked up the Durango and shaken all of its contents loose. Shots rang out. He heard Jess scream, and his heart stopped. There! A black object! He reached for it. Grabbed it. More shots. He saw Jess frenetically pulling on the belt, trying to slide away from the window.

  “Clark!” she screamed. She turned to him with pleading eyes, not willing to look at the barrel of death pointing down from the helicopter. She couldn’t squirm loose. She quit trying. Taking Clark in, her face turned from panic to calm. He would never forget that look.

  He flipped the phone open and pressed 2. Held it. Waited for an interminable second. God, if this doesn’t work . . .

  The fury of the explosion rocked the sky.

  29

  Events bled together in the aftermath of the explosion. The shoulder pain numbed Clark, distorting his sense of time and place. His head throbbed and felt like it might explode. Some bystanders came running to the car. They knocked the shards of glass out of the windshield and cut Jessica’s seat belt loose. Jess had blood streaming down her face from a cut on her forehead. When Clark saw her move and realized she couldn’t put any pressure on her left leg, he was pretty certain it was broken.

  Clark could hear sirens in the distance as the Good Samaritans helped pull Clark from the car. He couldn’t use his left arm at all. “Agh.” Clark winced as a helper pulled on his left shoulder. “Easy.”

  “Lucky you’re not dead, buddy,” a man said. Clark realized how right he was.

  They helped Clark and Jessica to a spot on a neighbor’s lawn, a safe distance from the car, while tending to their cuts. Clark thought he heard one of the women say she was a nurse, but for some reason he didn’t really care anymore. He felt his body shutting down, the cumulative stress and searing pain taking its toll. It was as if he had gone into another dimension; events swirling around him were now taking place at the end of a long tunnel back to reality.

  “I think he’s going into shock,” he heard someone say.

  Helicopter debris littered the area while curious neighbors and motorists streamed to the accident site. For Clark, the scene became surreal. Sirens, questions, his wife’s bloodied face, and the residue from the air bags all blurred together like a Monet painting, colors and hues with no distinct boundaries.

  On the edge of consciousness, Clark fought against the growing sense that he wasn’t part of this scene anymore. He tried working his way back to reality by sheer force
of will. But the pain seared through his shoulder, pounded in his head, and overwhelmed his resistance. The Monet colors faded into a maddening collage, the pain in his shoulder dulled, and the last thing he remembered was a uniformed police officer asking him what happened. . . .

  Clark briefly emerged from the fog during the ambulance ride, floating in and out as Jessica answered questions from a Vegas cop sitting between Jessica’s gurney and Clark’s. Clark tried to contribute with his own fragmented thoughts, urging the officer to get the feds involved, but was interrupted by both the paramedic—“Take it easy, Mr. Shealy”—and the officer—“Mr. Shealy, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you . . .” The rest of the Miranda warning was lost in a tirade from Jessica, protesting how ridiculous this all was.

  “We’re the victims,” she insisted. “Can’t you see that?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but your husband has three separate warrants for his arrest on eleven different charges.” The officer consulted a list. “Kidnapping, assault and battery, assault with intent to maim, assault with a deadly weapon, grand theft auto . . .” It was enough to send a guy back into shock, rendering him unconscious.

  And it did.

  Later, it took nearly thirty frustrating minutes of answering questions from the locals before Clark talked to his first federal law enforcement official. The cops had separated him and Jessica. Clark’s doctor had pumped just enough Darvocet into him to dull the pain without causing Clark to lose his sense of time and place. The doc had immobilized Clark’s left arm and then, at Clark’s request, deferred X-rays until the questioning was over.

  “Looks like a broken collarbone to me,” the doctor said, rushing off to the next emergency room patient.

  Struggling to remain coherent, Clark fumbled with his answers and eventually turned cynical on the agents as they treated him like the accused felon he was. They couldn’t seem to get past the fact that he had attempted to rescue Jessica alone, without help from the authorities.

  Even in his drug-induced stupor, their bureaucratic questions made him realize he had made the right decision after all. Jessica was safe and being treated for her injuries. Preliminary reports indicated a broken ankle, a possible bone chip in her shoulder, the usual whiplash stuff, and the possibility of a closed-head injury. Basically, she would have a killer lawsuit against her own husband based on reckless driving.

  Considering where she had been that morning, Clark should have been turning emotional cartwheels. Instead, he felt an impending sense of doom as he sat in his private, curtained-off section of the emergency room, answering questions and fretting over what was happening to Professor Kumari. Every minute of delay lessened the already-slim chances that his new friend could be rescued alive.

  Relief came in the form of an FBI agent who introduced himself as Sam Parcelli, the first person who seemed more focused on catching the mob than grilling Clark. He was a middle-aged agent with leathery, pockmarked skin that probably resulted from a bad complexion early in life. Even in a sports coat and tie, he looked bony, with sunken eyes, long spindly fingers, and an Ironman Triathlon watch. He slouched next to Clark’s bed, his mouth turned down in a been-there-done-that scowl, and took notes on his PDA even as the tape recorder spun away on Clark’s bedside table.

  “Your wife told me all about the kidnapping,” he said, scrolling down on his PDA. “So you can skip that part. I’ve already got a few of my men looking for the GPS tracker in the wreckage from your vehicle. Right now, my top priority is locating Kumari.”

  “Thank God,” Clark said.

  “We’ll deal with your multiple felonies later,” Parcelli added.

  “Right. Maybe you could actually help me with those if I cooperate?”

  Parcelli stopped poking at the PDA and focused his narrow brown eyes on Clark. If he felt any sympathy, he was a master at hiding it. “Most of those are state offenses. Not my jurisdiction. But let me put it this way . . .”

  As Parcelli stared, the room seemed to shrink. The tough-guy local cops had not scared Clark, but Parcelli was a different story—so matter-of-fact. He seemed like a man who didn’t make threats and didn’t play games. “An innocent man’s life is in danger, Mr. Shealy. You might be the only hope he has. If you don’t cooperate, I won’t help you. That much I can guarantee.”

  Clark cleared his throat, took a swig of water through the straw sticking out of his plastic cup, and began spilling his guts. He told Parcelli everything—quickly, in chronological order. And Parcelli had the good sense to keep the interruptions to a minimum.

  Actually, Clark decided not quite everything was relevant. He failed to mention, for example, that Kumari had e-mailed him the algorithm or that Kumari’s trusted friend would be calling later that same year with the key. Clark also couldn’t resist putting his own spin on a few events where it might be his word against somebody else’s. But even in his own sanitized version, his list of indiscretions was lengthy—it was hard to spin the exploded kneecap of Johnny Chin or the collapsed nose of Dennis Hargrove.

  It might have been partially due to the medication, but for some reason Parcelli made Clark extremely nervous, necessitating frequent pauses to suck water through the straw. Relief flooded Clark’s body like a narcotic—or maybe it was the Darvocet—when Parcelli’s cell phone rang and it became clear that his men had recovered the GPS tracking device.

  “It looks like Kumari hasn’t moved from that spot you described,” Parcelli said after he finished the phone call. “My men are already heading there. We’ll pick up this interview later. Is there anything else we need to know before we try to extricate Kumari?”

  Clark pretended to be thinking hard, scrunching his face for effect. “Don’t think so. Good luck.”

  Parcelli stared for a beat too long, unnerving Clark. Then he handed Clark a card. “If you think of anything—anything at all—give me a call.”

  30

  That night, Clark and Jessica moved into a semiprivate room. Guards stood watch at the door. The treating physician detained Clark and Jessica for observation overnight because of possible closed-head injuries. Clark’s diagnosis might have been affected by knowing that he would be transported to a local city jail if he left the hospital anytime soon. Consequently, he suffered intermittent short-term memory loss. With a number of criminal investigations pending, he never knew when that might come in handy.

  The good news was that Jessica had not been sexually assaulted. Though her captors all wore masks around her, the man she identified as Huang Xu had actually been somewhat of a protector, insisting that only he and one of his men could touch Jessica.

  That one exception, a stocky Chinese man with a viselike grip, seemed to know every pain-inducing pressure point on Jessica’s body. He would dig his fingers into one such spot on the side of her neck, and she would nearly collapse from the pain, shrieking in agony as she begged him to let her go. If she tried to resist their demands, like getting her head shaved, or if Xu wanted her to scream during a phone call, he would simply nod, and this man would begin the painful torture. Jessica thought she saw a tattoo on the left side of the man’s neck once when his ski mask slid up a little, though she couldn’t swear to it.

  There was also a time, Jessica said, when Huang Xu was not around and one of the other men decided to burn her with cigarette butts. Clark suspected there might have been other such incidents as well, but Jessica didn’t want to talk about them, and Clark had the good sense not to push. Over time, perhaps, they would rehash the entire painful ordeal. Maybe he would ask about the photo Huang Xu sent him, maybe not. Clark knew just enough about hostage situations to realize that he might never know the full extent of what Jessica had endured.

  They would both need counseling, and they would both need time—lots of time. But together, they would heal. Jessica was strong. A survivor. And perhaps, one step at a time, they could both rebuild some semblance of confidence and hope in their shattered world.
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  It was after 2:00 a.m. when Agent Parcelli reappeared in Clark’s room. Clark pretended to be asleep, figuring he could also use grogginess to his advantage if necessary. But when Parcelli turned and quietly headed for the door, Clark knew his jig was up.

  “I’m awake,” Clark confessed.

  Parcelli walked over next to the bed and stood there in the shadows, his face impossible to read. From the angle, Clark noticed a jutting chin that hadn’t seemed quite so prominent before, covered with the sprouting stubble of a man who badly needed a shave and probably a warm shower.

  “You feeling any better?” Parcelli asked.

  Clark nodded. “Darvocet. Percodan. I’m lobbying for OxyContin.”

  Parcelli forced a thin smile. “Don’t make me add narcotics to your list of indiscretions.”

  Clark tried to smile back but suspected he didn’t succeed. The relief at rescuing Jessica had been short-lived, washed away by revelations about her mistreatment. Plus, Clark had maimed two men and killed several others. Kumari’s fate still hung in the balance. Clark didn’t feel much like celebrating.

  He let the quiet hum of hospital machines form the question he couldn’t bring his own lips to ask. They both knew why Parcelli had come back.

  “Your friend didn’t make it,” Parcelli said at last. He sounded apologetic, his all-business tone replaced by a more sympathetic one. “We sent our best SWAT team in, but things turned chaotic. One of the triad members executed Kumari—a bullet to the head—before we could get to him. Three of their men are dead; four others wounded but expected to survive.”

  Clark felt his throat constrict, his heart sickened by the news even as he struggled to digest it. “Huang Xu?”

  “He wasn’t there. Somehow, he must have known we were coming.”

  For the next few minutes, Parcelli briefed Clark on other aspects of the investigation. They hadn’t found Kumari’s computer yet and thought it might have been pulverized in the helicopter explosion. Even so, they worried that the mob might have accessed the algorithm before the explosion.