Last Chance to Die by Noah Boyd (good books for 8th graders TXT) 📕

of Radkay’s back. They’ll have to strip him to find it. Just make sure you keep enough distance between us so you can’t see them. Then they won’t be able to see us.”

She handed Vail the phone. He picked up the radio mike. “Luke, have you got them?”

“I’ve got them five-by.”

“Just stay behind us, I’ll watch the screen.”

“Any trouble inside?”

“Just picking Radkay up and dropping him while they were shooting at us.”

“I know Radkay didn’t mind, but for you I would strongly recommend therapy.”

The two men from the LCS got in the right lane of 95 South and maintained the speed limit. It took them over an hour to reach Route 30, exiting onto the eastbound ramp.

“The two last night must have been going to the same spot,” Bursaw said over the radio. “Think they’re going to that lake again?”

“If they’re not, that means last night was a contingency plan, which would be impressive.”

“It would be if they weren’t dead.Besides, these people are chess masters—supposedly.Chess is contingency planning at its purest.”

Vail watched the cell phone as the car drove past the turnoff where the shoot-out had taken place the night before. “They just passed the lake turnoff,” he told Bursaw.

“So far so good.”

After another fifteen minutes, Vail said, “Okay, they’re turning off.”

When Kate reached the point where they had turned, she pulled onto the shoulder of the road, and Bursaw parked behind her. He got out and climbed into their backseat. “Up there by the mailbox is where they turned in,” Vail said. “It looks like private property.” Glancing at the cell phone, he said, “They stopped about a quarter of a mile in.”

“How about getting the Richmond office out here?” Kate asked.

Vail said, “The king of Sparta once said, ‘The Spartans do not inquire how many the enemy are but where they are.’ ”

“And I believe none of them survived,” Bursaw said.

Kate said, “I’m calling Richmond.”

“Go ahead and get them started this way, but last night it took them a long time. Right now we’ve got to find out where they’re putting that body and catch them doing it. We’ll finally have some hard evidence.”

After identifying herself, Kate told the Richmond duty agent that they needed all available agents to their location immediately. She hung up. “I assume we’re going to surprise these two.” she said.

“We’ll have to walk in to do it. Luke, have you still got that shotgun in your trunk?”

“After last night I don’t go anywhere without it. I also have something else that could prove useful—the night-vision goggles we took off those two. And one more instrument of comfort.” All three of them got out and went back to Bursaw’s trunk. He held up an MP5 submachine gun. “When you called today, I took this from the gun vault. Not that I expected any problems with you along.”

Vail handed Kate a pair of the goggles. “You and Luke wear these.” He helped her put them on and adjust the straps. “Keep them flipped up until we get off the road, or the headlights along here will blind you.”

Vail took the shotgun, and all three of them started loading extra ammunition into their pockets.

They turned up the winding dirt road, and Vail checked the phone screen to make sure the two men they’d been following were still stationary. “Evidently they’re at their destination.” He reached over and pivoted Kate’s goggles into place. “All right?”

“Wow, yeah, I’m good.”

As quietly as possible, Vail chambered a buckshot round. Then he checked the phone and pointed up the road. Quietly but quickly they started walking. There were some stands of trees, mostly hardwoods, now bare. A few minutes later, they followed a turn in the road, and in the distance both Kate and Bursaw, through their goggles, could see a stone cottage sitting on a small rise about seventy yards away. Thirty yards from it was an old-fashioned water well. It had a waist-high wall around it, constructed of the same type of stone as the cottage. The car they had followed was parked next to the well, and the two men were taking Radkay’s body out of the trunk.

Beside the well was a small, newly constructed shed. One of the men carried something from it that looked like a bag of cement. Through his goggles Bursaw could see that the man had taken out a pocketknife and was cutting open the top of the bag. He then went to help carry the body.

Bursaw described everything to Vail in whispers.

“That’s probably lye. It’ll eventually destroy all traces of the body. Let’s go.”

When they got to the top of the rise that the old house sat on, Vail glanced over at Bursaw, who because of the goggles didn’t notice the red laser dot on his own chest. Vail jumped into him just as a rifle shot came from the house, which was now at their ten o’clock. At the same time, Kate dove to the ground. Quickly Vail crawled next to Bursaw. “Are you hit, Luke?”

“Left shoulder.”

Vail pulled his friend’s coat open, and after finding the bullet hole in his shirt, he carefully tore it open. “It’s not bad.” Another shot came from the house. Vail called over to Kate. “You all right?”

“I’m okay.”

There was a small amount of cover provided by the uneven terrain, so Vail crawled forward a couple of yards to find a firing position but immediately started taking handgun fire from the two men at the well. He came back to Kate and Luke’s position. “This is an ambush. They were expecting us.”

“How?” Kate asked.

“Probably my call to the club. Radkay would have used a code name.”

From a second window in the house, a barrage of automatic-weapons fire ricocheted around them. “I guess we had a wrong head count. There are at least four of them. And they’ve got us pinned down in an L-shaped crossfire. Right now they can’t hit us. If they had waited another ten yards before springing this, we’d all be well-diving by