Loose Ends Read Online Free

had—plenty to do what needed to be done.
    Half a block from the Quick Mart, he could see the Challenger in the small parking lot crammed between the store and an old, rundown hotel, which meant weak-link Cherie was still inside buying candy and cigarettes. She used the street lot every day, but Con’s favorite downtown parking was the high-rise garage catty-corner from the store. He liked it so much, he’d spent an hour in it last night, rigging a smoke bomb at the entrance and putting it on a radio signal controller.
    The setup wasn’t overly dramatic, just enough to get people’s attention, especially the attention of whatever guy was sitting at a certain outside table at the restaurant opposite the garage. A man had been there every day when Cherie pulled up, a different guy each day, and twenty minutes after she headed back to Steele Street, each one of those guys had gotten up and left.
    They were surveillance, and when Con spotted today’s observer, he conceded that the man was just as good, just as subtle as every other guy who’d been keeping the same schedule at that table, but they were all watchers, and what they were watching was Cherie and the Challenger. From the outside table where they’d all sat, they had a perfect line of sight to the store and the car, buttoday’s guy was going to have to turn his head to see what was happening at the parking garage.
    And he would turn his head. The smoke, with the added distraction of the scent Con had packaged with the “bomb,” guaranteed it. A couple of seconds, that’s all he needed.
    Coming up on the parking lot, he saw Cherie walk out of the store, and he timed his approach to be just ahead of hers. He had his hands in his pockets and the radio signal controller in one of his hands. At a precisely calculated moment, he flipped the switch and turned toward the Challenger parked three cars in from the sidewalk. He heard the small ripple of commotion when people saw the billow of smoke come out of the garage entrance, felt a spike of fear run through the crowd, and knew a fair percentage of them had flashed on 9/11 and the World Trade Center. He saw Cherie look back over her shoulder to see what was happening, and he didn’t hesitate. Stepping up to the rear of the Challenger, a lockpick in his hand, he popped the trunk. Up ahead on the sidewalk, a couple people quickly complained with an “ohmigod, can you smell that” while they were all trying to figure out just how frightened they needed to be. By the time they’d finished grousing, he’d climbed inside the trunk and pulled the lid closed on top of himself. The whole operation took less than five seconds. By then, the smoke and the smell were gone, and the crowd was curious but starting to feel relieved. It was a nonevent—except that people had noticed, and the man at the restaurant would have noticed. Guys like him were trained to see the forest
and
the trees. He would have looked.
    Inside the Challenger, the trunk space was a little on the shy side, but not unpleasantly so. Con had been in worse places, smaller spaces, all of them in the Bangkok prison laboratory of the long-dead, never-missed,demented Dr. Souk. He didn’t remember much of anything before awakening in one of Souk’s cells, but he did know he hadn’t been in many places that smelled like baby powder.
    Baby powder
—what the hell? he wondered. He knew from the car’s badges and the sound that the Challenger had header extensions and a 426 cid Hemi under the hood, a power plant with the well-earned nickname of King Kong, the biggest production engine ever to come off a line in Detroit. Nothing about the 1971 Mopar street machine said “baby powder,” but that was exactly what it smelled like in the trunk.
    He sniffed the air again, then reached toward the front right corner and found a diaper bag. He’d never actually seen a diaper bag, but he’d heard about them, and he knew this soft, padded cotton satchel he’d found