The Black Bullet

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

“Dave, you gotta get here quick!” Nick said into the cell phone.

“What happened?”

“Dude’s shot. Dead.”

“Where’s Sean?”

“Inside the storage place.”

“By himself?”

“I don’t have a fuckin’ gun!”

“Are the hostiles there?”

“I don’t know who the hell’s here!”

“Any cars in the lot?”

“Two.”

“Stay out of the way, Nick. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Sean said for you to call the cops.”

“Done.”

O’Brien removed his shoes inside the air-conditioned storage warehouse. The floor was concrete. He didn’t want the sound of his soles to give him away. Locked doors lined both sides of a thirty-foot hallway. O’Brien crept down the passage. He stopped before it opened into a T-corridor going left and right. He listened, trying to detect the slightest hint of human presence. He could hear the hum of the air-conditioners, the creak of the sun’s heat against the corrugated rooftop, and the buzz of a fly that had followed him inside.

As he walked by one of the units, he smelled old furniture and rat poison. Then he smelled gunpowder the same time he stepped on a large sliver of glass. O’Brien looked up at a security camera he remembered seeing the last time he was here. It had been hit with a single bullet in the lens. Glass on the floor. He stepped around the glass and a broken piece of mirror that had fallen from the shattered lens. He picked up part of the mirror.

O’Brien knew Dave’s storage unit was to the left about fifty feet down the hall. But what if the hostiles stood silently in the right side corridor? They’d blow the back of his head off before he could turn to face them. He wedged the section of broken mirror into the end of the Glock’s barrel. Then he slowly extended the pistol until he could see a reflection from the hallway off the mirror’s surface. No one. He reversed the angle and saw no one down the other corridor. The door to Dave’s unit was ajar.

O’Brien stepped to unit 236 knowing what he’d see before he opened the door. The padlock had been hit with a bullet shattering the lock. He opened the door and saw a half dozen cardboard boxes and Dave’s outboard motor. The U-235 canisters were gone.

O’Brien felt something wet on the bottom of his sock. He lifted his right foot and saw a blood stain on the concrete, dripping from the cut caused by the piece of glass from the shattered camera lens. O’Brien could hear the sound of sirens approaching. His thoughts were rapid, pulling at fragments, trying to grasp the enormity of the theft.

What would they do with the U-235? Who took it? How many could die? What else did they get out of Jason? What had Jason told Nicole? What if Jason told the hostiles the story about the other canisters buried somewhere on a beach? Are Abby and Glenda Lawson’s lives at stake?

“Sean!” Dave Collins yelled outside the storage unit.

“In here! Clear!”

Dave ran in with Lauren Miles, Ron Bridges, Paul Thompson, Nick, two sheriff’s deputies, and two men O’Brien assumed were government agents. Dave looked at O’Brien’s face and didn’t even ask the question.

“Gone,” O’Brien said.

“Shit!” shouted Thompson.

Dave said, “The vic outside probably was the manager.”

Lauren said, “We’ve got two choppers in the air! Flying the perimeter of this place in an expanding three-sixty.” She asked the officers, “Are roadblocks in place?”

“Should be in place now,” one officer said. Police radios crackled with orders.

“Should be isn’t good enough!” yelled Thompson.

One officer held his hand up for silence, trying to hear the police radio. He said, “We have a ten-sixty-nine. They found a body. White male. About twenty. Wearing a gone fishin’ T-shirt. Found his body behind some bushes near the South Davison Wal-Mart.”

“Jesus, no.” Nick said, making the sign of the cross. “Tell me it’s not Jason.”

O’Brien felt his stomach in his throat. The air in the storage unit was like a crypt, the taste of mold and the odor of rat urine coming from the concrete floor. O’Brien put his arm around Nick’s shoulder for a moment. “Can you ride back with Dave? I need to take care of some business.”

“No problem,” Nick said.

O’Brien walked back down the corridor, picked up his shoes, pushed open the door, stepped around the blood from the body, and limped in his socks to the Jeep. An oak tree was full of movement, black starlings, their chortles like canned sitcom noise, mixed with the sirens in the distance and the whirr of an FBI helicopter nearby. Beyond the glut of flashing blue lights and the blur of yellow crime tape, O’Brien could see the media circling like a pack of wolves.