The Final Twist by Jeffery Deaver (free ebooks romance novels txt) 📕

made a call on his walkie-talkie, then strolled to another truck. He glanced back, seeing the brothers. He looked them up and down. “This’s private property.” The voice was a growl.

Shaw and Russell continued forward and stopped when they were about fifteen feet away.

His weathered face soured. “I said, case you didn’t hear, private property. You get the fuck out of here.”

Russell said, “We have some questions.”

“Leave! Or you don’t know the kind of hurt you’ll have. I’ve whipped Somalian pirates, I’ve put down mutinies. I whaled on a carjacker so bad he needed his jaw rebuilt. Now!” The head, beneath its jaunty hat, turned toward the exit.

Russell said, “There’s an employee—”

“What’s with that beard? Are you some kind of Amish person?” His face grew even more fierce. “Or a Muslim?”

Shaw: “An employee at BayPoint Enviro-Sure. His—”

“I’m not telling you again.” His cheeks reddened; his temperature must have risen a few degrees. Soon the shade was actually livid.

“—initials are S.P. He has some connection with this facility. We need his name and address. It’s important. We’ll pay you. A thousand.”

“Why would I care what you need and don’t need? Fuck-fancy. Get off this property now.”

Fuck-fancy. Not a phrase Shaw was familiar with. He kind of liked it.

He continued, “I’m a spit away from calling security.”

The expressions got better and better.

“All right. That’s it.” Up came the radio. Apparently the old salt hadn’t whipped those pirates without backup.

But before the call went out, Russell smoothly drew his silenced pistol and blew a nearby rat to eternity.

Not the approach Colter Shaw would have taken.

Then again, as he’d learned very well over the past few days, it wasn’t unusual for two siblings to solve a problem in significantly different ways.

73

At 6:45, fifteen minutes before the family was to die, Colter Shaw was sitting, alone, in the front seat of Russell’s Lincoln Navigator. He was looking over the house of Samuel Prescott, the BayPoint Enviro-Sure Solutions whistleblower. Shaw watched the garage door rolling down, hiding from view the family’s sedan, a red Volvo.

Trevor Little—the belligerent pseudo captain on the Hunters Point dock—had glanced in horror at Russell’s gun and quickly told the brothers Prescott’s name. It seemed the employee and his family had been out of town at a funeral but were due back today.

This would be the reason for the specific time and date of the hit in the kill order; the murderer would have to wait until the family returned to their home from the airport. Karin had checked passenger manifests and flight schedules. The Prescotts were due back at about 4:30 and would be home about fifty minutes later—the time it would take them to collect luggage and travel from San Francisco International Airport to their home in Forest Hill, a suburb of San Francisco.

Shaw, Russell and Ty had met the family’s flight.

A scheduler at BayPoint Enviro-Sure Solutions, Prescott was in his forties, stocky and tanned, with sandy-colored hair. His wife, Bette, was blond and willowy. Their son and daughter were twins and had their mother’s pallor and hair, freckled both. They were twelve.

At SFO, Ty had displayed an ID card, which Shaw caught a fast glimpse of. He saw the initials U.S. and a round emblem similar to, but not the same as, the Justice Department’s. Shaw wondered if it was real. In any case, it took no convincing for Prescott to believe that he and his family were in danger.

Prescott had been surprised Devereux had learned of his espionage. He’d taken care to hide the fruits of his spying on his computer with sophisticated encryption.

He was not, however, surprised that the CEO had issued an order to have him killed. “He’s murdering people with toxic waste. Why not kill somebody with a bullet?”

Explaining to the brothers how he’d discovered Devereux’s toxic waste scheme, Prescott said, “The numbers, always the numbers. They never lie. I’m a scheduler, right? I keep an eye on transport down to the hour, the minute. I noticed that the timing of some of our trucks was off. When they went out and when they came back wasn’t right. I knew how far they had to travel to the sites—the legitimate ones—and they were coming back to the dock too soon.

“Not a huge time difference, but it was suspicious. I called in sick one day and followed one of the trucks. It didn’t go to the site it was supposed to. It went to a vacant lot in Oakland. The waste was pumped into an unmarked tanker. I followed it to a factory owned by one of Devereux’s competitors. These men got out—like special forces, all in black. They dumped the waste into a creek downstream from the factory. I got pictures and samples. I was going to the EPA and the U.S. attorney this week. I just wanted to find a few more target locations.”

Shaw looked over the street the family lived on. It was a quiet avenue in Forest Hill, with houses set back behind small front yards of grass or gardens. It was one of the least densely populated parts of the city and, as the name suggested, more arboreal than most. Their house was modest. Prescott made good money at his job and Bette was the senior bookkeeper for a chain of urgent-care clinics. But even with double incomes, this was all they could afford. Home prices in the Bay were crushing.

Though the blinds were drawn, Shaw noted the flickering light from the TV in the living room.

He scanned the street again and saw no threat. He also was watching the rooftops to the east, looking for rifle muzzles or scope flares.

Russell and Ty were in the latter’s car, behind the house, scanning Hawk Hill Park, which is where a sniper targeting the Prescott house from the west would be. Those two had already swept the home for IEDs and found no traces of explosives. Drive-bys wouldn’t be the order of the