The Black Bullet

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

The taxi driver with no face rose from the cab’s front seat, sat up, placed both hands on the wheel and slowly turned his head toward O’Brien. Greenish yellow blowflies fed on the blood from the eye cavities.

O’Brien was in the old warehouse looking out toward the river. He watched the black helicopters in the distance hover then sweep down above the surface. They looked like giant black prehistoric birds, predators ready to scoop prey out of the dark water.

He awoke from a deep, erratic sleep, sat straight up in a strange bed and stared at a clock on the nightstand: 3:57 a.m. He sat there for a minute, the sweat dripping through his chest hair, the images of the dead fading in the dark, the sound of a passing car outside the motel.

O’Brien sat on the edge of the bed for a few seconds trying to clear his head. Think. He got up, turned the light on and walked into the bathroom where he shook three aspirins from a bottle he’d bought earlier. He filled a glass with water and chased down the aspirins. O’Brien looked at himself in the mirror. Eyes red. Lips chapped. Hair matted. A four-day growth on his face.

He flashed back to his dream, to the Blackhawk helicopters flying over the river. “The river …,” he mumbled. “A perfect escape … if they had a boat.” O’Brien splashed water on his face, dressed, shoved his Glock under his belt and walked to his Jeep.

He stopped at pier 13, got out and turned on his flashlight. Pockets of mist drifted up from the river’s surface, like ghost couples entwined in a silent dance across a black marble floor. He heard the drone of a tanker moving upriver. He walked down to the edge of the dock, slowly panning the flashlight across the concrete for clues. O’Brien leaned over the edge, shined the light on the big rubber bumper guards protruding from the dock.

Blood.

Just above the water line, in the center of the cement joint. A spot the size of a dime. The tide was rising and O’Brien could tell by previous waterline marks, it wouldn’t be long before the blood was washed away. Was it Jason’s blood? Was one of Sharif’s men wounded? He looked at the last piece of physical evidence leading to the river. The escape was done in a boat. Why? He looked up at the river, the twirl of mist in the foreground, the silence of dark water moving toward the sea.

On the way back to the motel, O’Brien called Hunter and told him what he found and what he thought.

“Gimme a second,” Hunter said, his voice heavy with sleep. “Could have been fish blood for all we know. Maybe somebody had been fishing there earlier.”

“No. There are high-water marks on the bulkhead. Tide was probably going out when Mohammed hit Borshnik. Tide’s been rising all night. At high tide it’ll cover the bumper. I could see the blood was fresh. It dripped there today.”

“How far are you from the motel?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“I’ll start the calls now. Coast Guard and Navy are all over this place. Mohammed could have been in the Atlantic in a half hour from Pier 13. Depending on the speed of their boat, they may have headed south toward Miami or north. They have a big head start.”

“I don’t think Sharif plans to export something he’d kill to have imported into this country. Where is he going to get the stuff packed and made into a real bomb that will work? If we can figure that out, we might have a chance of stopping him.”