Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

Schimmel said. “Maybe. No. I mean, I never saw her at the mine offices or anything. She’s pretty.”

“I’m gonna need more than that.”

“Tall, dark hair, long legs.”

“Copy,” Childers said, unwilling to waste anymore breath with a guy whose intel was useless. The description didn’t sound familiar to him either.

A female informant. That was interesting. Maybe she worked for one of the senators. Maybe she was one of Grimsson’s old whores. It didn’t matter. Childers’s job wasn’t to figure out her motives, just to keep her from following through with them. She was meeting at a lonely church with a government attorney. That checked the only box he needed in order to move forward.

Eye on the scope, he watched the light change abruptly in the windows, flashing brighter, then getting dim again. She’d opened the front door and gone inside. The attorney stood in the middle of the chapel. He raised his arms, obviously animated about something – as if he were extremely surprised.

Taking both of them from this angle was problematic. Childers would have to wait for the woman to move into view, if she ever did. Following up would be messy – going inside to hunt down the survivor, risking someone else stumbling in on the action. Childers didn’t mind messy, but he preferred something a little cleaner. Moving only his thumb, he pressed a small button on the transmitter he’d taped to the stock of his rifle. Childers still couldn’t see the woman, but inside the building, the attorney’s head snapped up and he began to move toward the stairs that led to a small loft at the back of the sanctuary, and directly into the field of fire. The informant was, no doubt, already spilling her guts, which made Childers’s job clear.

Van Tyler and Ensley Rogers turned at the same time to look toward the loft. Tyler’s momentary anger when she’d come through the door had quickly turned to relief that he was no longer alone. He’d read that at least one of the priests was buried in a crypt under the podium.

Ensley crouched like a startled bunny, her eyes fixed high on the back wall of the chapel. “What’s that noise?” Clicking static came from somewhere behind the small balcony. Tyler could see the rounded tops of what looked like metal folding chairs over the railing.

“Sounds like a stereo speaker powering off and on,” Tyler said. He cocked his head to one side, squinting to study the exposed beams in the shadows above, the corners of the tiny church – the logical places for a sound system. He half expected to see frowning gargoyles perched on their haunches. There were neither. The loft balcony ran the width of the chapel with a waist-high wall of painted concrete that would allow those seated above to hear the sermon or liturgy or mass or whatever happened to be going on in the front. The top half of a door to what looked like a tiny storage room was visible on the end opposite the stairs. The entry doors were beneath it, as was a table where people could leave donations for bottles of holy water or rosary beads. There was a stone fireplace in the corner, beside two modest-looking confessional cabinets of dark wood.

“You think your informant’s already up there?” Ensley said. She crowded closer, nodding toward the door to the upstairs closet.

“Maybe,” Tyler said, his mind in overdrive. Everything about this seemed wrong. “But the fireplace is directly below. It’s got to be a mechanical room or something.” The clicking grew louder. Less random. He took Ensley by the elbow and nudged her toward the exit doors. “We should go.”

“What?” She gasped, slack-jawed, incredulous. “I can’t even… You go back to the car if you want to. Maybe your informant left you a recording, or a burner phone. That would be cool, right? I’m gonna check it out.”

Tyler’s grip tightened on her elbow. “Listen to me. Raul and Reggie Hernandez are extremely dangerous people. The kind of guys who saw off heads on their home turf. Nothing’s to say their people didn’t bring their saws to Juneau.” The words sounded pitifully maudlin when they left his mouth, but only that morning he’d reviewed a file about the brothers’ cartel affiliations. Something about empty churches had always scared him, and standing in the chapel he couldn’t get the bloody photographs out of his mind. He whispered, “They are bad. I mean, really bad.”

“I know,” Ensley said, her voice soothing. Certain. “That’s why I’m so proud of you. Somebody has to fight them.” Instead of yanking away, she reached across and took his hand, pulling him with her toward the steps.

“Okay, okay.” He took a deep breath. “But I’ll go first. You shouldn’t even be here.”

Childers had yet to get a clear shot of the woman until they started up the stairs. From that point, both she and Tyler were in view all the way to the top, so he decided to wait. The balcony offered the perfect sight picture, the perfect line of fire. Easy. The rifle’s optic pulled them close enough that he could see the woman’s chest tremble with each breath.

Working like a cricket, the tiny electronic noisemaker projected a maddening click that was almost impossible to locate. It gave the target something to focus on, while Childers lined up his shot – like whistling at a mule deer to get it to stop midflight.

Childers found himself wishing he’d planted a listening device. Dollarhyde and the old man would be highly interested in the conversation that was surely going on right now. The girl had probably spent the last five minutes venting her spleen to the Mr. GQ US Attorney. It would have been nice to know – but in the long run, it wouldn’t matter, so long as Childers did his job. The attorney surely knew too much by now. He couldn’t be allowed to walk out of this church.

Childers held a small sand bag