Cut and Run

by Ridley Pearson

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

Six years ago, witness protection marshal Roland Larson did the unthinkable: he fell in love with a protected witness, Hope Stevens, whose testimony was to put away prominent members of the Romero crime family. When Hope's plan to "cut and run" is interrupted by both the government and the mob, she disappears into a new identity, taking with her not only her testimony but a secret never shared with Larson.

Larson, who has been looking for her ever since, is put back on her trail when the Romeros intercept the master WITSEC list from the Justice Department and Hope is believed among the first protected witnesses to be targeted for execution.

In a series of terrifying encounters, Larson matches wits with a brutally ingenious killer whose sole target is Hope Stevens. For Larson, the stakes couldn't be higher-he must find Hope in order to protect her, and simultaneously prevent the mob from auctioning off the master witness protection list-an act that will put seven thousand innocent, and not-so-innocent, lives in jeopardy.

Taut and edge-of-the-seat compelling, Cut and Run is a unique thriller that skillfully blends romance and suspense-Ridley Pearson at his heart-pounding best.

Release date: March 1, 2006

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 448

Sample

PROLOGUE

SIX YEARS EARLIER

The forty-first day was their last together.

Roland Larson was holed up in a truck stop’s pay phone, half-mad from guarding her round-the-clock while denied any privacy with her whatsoever. He resorted to calling her on the phone. He’d slipped her his cell phone, and now dialed his own number to find her breathless as she whispered from her hardened bedroom, the aft cabin of the bus, not thirty yards away.

“I can’t stand this,” she said.

He found himself aroused by the hoarse, coarse sound of her. Forty-one days, under every conceivable pressure, and this the first complaint he’d heard from her.

“Us, or the situation?” he asked.

Hope Stevens had been moved on three separate occasions: first, to a wilderness cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the kind of place Larson could see himself retiring to someday, a lethargic life so different from the one he lived; then she’d been moved to a nearly abandoned Air Force base in Montana, the desolation reminding him of a penitentiary, a place he knew well; and finally, into a private coach, a customized diesel bus that Treasury had confiscated from a forgotten rock band, its interior complete with neon-trim lighting and mirrored tables. Painted on three sides as a purple and black sunrise, the coach comfortably slept six and converted to club seating by day. Three deputies, including Larson, two drivers, and the witness traveled together—one of only a handful of times in the U.S. Marshals Service’s long history of witness protection that a “moving target” policy had been adopted. The last had been aboard a sleeper train in the mid-’70s.

Ironically, the more attempts made upon her life, the more importance and significance Hope Stevens gained in the eyes of her government. It wasn’t for her keen understanding of computers that they guarded her, nor for her fine looks or sharp tongue (when she did bother to speak); it was instead for a few cells and chemicals inside her skull and the memory trapped there, living now like a dog under the front porch, cowering with a bone of truth in its jaws.

The problem for Roland Larson was that the longer he guarded her, the more he cared for her—cared intensely—a situation unforgivable and intolerable in the eyes of his superiors and one that, if discovered, could have him transferred to some far outpost of government service, like North Dakota or Buffalo. But the few private moments shared with her overwhelmed any sensibility in Larson.

After just seventeen days of protection, the Michigan cabin had gone up in flames—arson; in the resulting firefight, a shadowy ballet in the flashes of orange light from the mighty blaze, two deputy marshals had been injured.

When, at the Montana Air Force base, mention of “persons unknown” had been intercepted by some geek in an NSA cubicle, the marshals had been instructed to move Hope yet again. Larson wasn’t much for running away from a faceless enemy, but he knew well enough to follow orders and so he did.

As a former technical consultant to an industry probe of fraudulent insurance practices, Hope had connected a string of assisted-care facilities to millions of dollars in wrongful charges. The names she’d eventually given Justice—Donny and Pop Romero and, by inference, the young scion of the crime family, Ricardo Romero—were well known to federal law enforcement’s Organized Crime Unit. The Romeros, notorious for inventive white collar crime on an enormous scale, also played rough and dirty when required, the arson and the shoot-out at the lake a case in point. Hope’s value to Justice was not only her initial discovery of insurance fraud—a scheme involving billing Medicare long after the patient was dead—but, more important, her interception of a series of e-mails sent to and from the Romeros that proved to be murder-for-hire contracts. Five executives of the same health care consortium that had called for the probe, all referred to in the correspondence as whistle-blowers whose actions threatened the Romeros, had later been found brutally murdered, the victims of so-called Serbian Spas—laundry bleach enemas that burned the victim from the inside out over a period of several hours, their families tied up and forced to watch their prolonged deaths.

Intended perhaps to implicate the Russian mob, these horrific tactics did nothing of the sort. The FBI had immediately placed the Romeros onto their Most Wanted list and their two remaining witnesses, Hope Stevens and an unnamed accountant, had been placed in protective custody.

The e-mails had been electronically destroyed; they existed now only in Hope’s memory. Government prosecutors believed a jury would convict based primarily on her testimony. And so they sequestered her on the garish bus, never allowing her off, never risking her being seen in public, and never stopping the bus for more than fuel or supplies. The strategy had kept her alive for the past ten days and left everyone on board with a bad case of cabin fever. Discussions had begun to once again relocate her, this time to a “static,” or fixed, location, probably a federal facility, quite possibly a short stint inside an unused wing at a federal penitentiary, or in an ICU at a city hospital. They had myriad tricks up their sleeves if left to their own devices. They seldom were.

“Isn’t there something you can do?” Hope asked. “Order us to stop at a motel, and arrange for you to guard my room? There has to be something.”

“I’m only guessing here,” Larson answered, “but I think a few of the guys might see through that tactic.” He caught his reflection in the polished metal surrounding the pay phone’s keypad. No one was going to call him pretty, although they had as a child. He’d grown into something too big for pretty, too hard for handsome, like a puppy growing into its feet. Pedigree be damned.

She sputtered on the other end, not quite her trademark laugh but a valiant effort.

He said, “You could make like a heart attack, and I could give you mouth-to-mouth.”

A little more authentic this time.

At the cabin, and then again at the Air Force base, they’d managed to find moments together, though not the moment both of them longed for, one he repeatedly daydreamed about. But once onto the bus, they’d barely shared a glance. A phone call was as much as they were going to get.

“It’s probably better this way,” she said. “Right?”

“No. It’s decidedly worse.”

“As soon as I testify . . . as soon as that’s over with . . . they’ll put me into the program and that will be that. Right? We should have never started this, Lars.”

Her testimony against Donny Romero—the fraud case—would come first. The capital murder charges were likely still a long way from prosecution—a year or two—but he knew better than to mention it. One didn’t talk about the future with a protected witness, the reality far harsher, the adjustment far more difficult than they understood. In practice, breaking off all contact with one’s former life proved traumatic, invariably more difficult than the witness imagined.

“Seriously?” he asked. “Because I don’t see it that way at all. I wouldn’t trade one minute with you for something else.”

“You’re hopeless.”

“I’m hopeful,” he said, an intentional play on her name that he immediately congratulated himself for, though no doubt one she’d heard before.

His feeling for her had come on like a force of nature, as unavoidable and inexplicable. Together, they communicated well; she accepted teasing in the face of all the madness; they fit. And when you found that, you held on to it.

Nearly ten minutes had passed since he’d left the bus. Members of his small squad would be wondering why the delay. Ostensibly, he’d left the bus to settle the bill—with cash, always cash—but ten minutes was pushing it.

“My gut tells me we’ll work this out somehow,” he lied. He couldn’t see them ending this now—not before they tested the boundaries. He’d attended the seminars on avoiding emotional attachment with the witness. Brother bonding with the male witnesses was as dangerous as what he and Hope had stumbled into. It screwed up everything, risked everything, and he well knew it. It could not possibly have a happy ending. Still, he encouraged her to stay with him while he looked for some way around it all, a way that he suspected wasn’t there. At this moment, after what they’d been through together, letting her go was not an option.

“Lars,” she spoke, yet again in a hushed whisper, the crisp sibilance rolling off the s and causing a ripple of gooseflesh down his left side. It snaked into his groin and lodged there. But rerouted by a synapse, it suddenly sparked across a gate in his brain that translated it differently, albeit a beat too late: This was nothing short of the sound of panic.

“Hope?”

“Oh, my God.”

The line went dead.

The bus.

Larson dropped the receiver and ran, losing his balance as he took a corner too quickly on wet tile, ignoring the yellow sandwich board written in Spanish and English with an icon of a pail and mop and a splash of water. He went down hard. He scrambled to his feet, knocked over a corn chip display, and hurried out the truck stop’s main door, the cashier’s cry of complaint consumed by the high-pitched whine of highway traffic.

“Rolo?” This came from Trill Hampton, a member of his squad, a fellow deputy marshal. Approaching footfalls of shoes slapping blacktop came on fast. Larson’s running had sent a signal. Hampton was in full stride, already reaching for his piece.

Larson’s arrival into sunlight temporarily blinded him. They’d stopped at far too many truck stops over the past ten days for him to immediately recall the layout of this one. They’d parked out here somewhere. A spike of fear insinuated itself as he considered the possibility that the entire bus had been hijacked, for he didn’t see it anywhere.

But then, as Hampton caught up to him and edged left, and the two of them moved around the building, Larson spotted the rows of diesel pumps and the bus where they’d parked it, wedged amid a long line of eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers.

Hampton walked gracefully, even at double time.

Leading at a slight jog, Larson assessed the bus from a distance, seeing no indication of trouble and wondering if he’d misinterpreted Hope’s distress.

“What’s up?” Hampton asked, not a sheen of sweat on his black skin.

He wasn’t about to confess to phoning the witness from the truck stop. “A bad feeling is all.”

“A bad feeling?” Hampton questioned. “Since when?” He had a flat, wide nose, too big for his face, and a square, cleft chin that reminded Larson of a black Kirk Douglas.

Larson wasn’t exactly the touchy-feely type; Hampton saw through that.

Larson sought some plausible explanation for Hope hanging up on him. He seized upon the first thing he saw. “Why isn’t Benny stretching his legs?” The older of their two drivers had been complaining to anyone who would listen about a bad case of hemorrhoids. Larson saw Benny through the windshield, sitting behind the wheel.

“Yeah, so?”

They drew closer. Benny not only still occupied his driver’s seat, but his head was angled and tilted somewhat awkwardly toward his shoulder, as if dozing. This, too, seemed incongruous, as Benny rarely slept, much less napped.

“Rolo?” Hampton said cautiously. Now he, too, had sensed a problem with Benny. Hampton and Larson went back several years. Hampton had come out of one of New Haven’s worst neighborhoods, had won an academic scholarship to a blue blazer prep school, and had gone on to graduate from Howard University. He’d wanted to be a professional sports agent, but had become a U.S. marshal as an interim job, at the urging of an uncle. He’d never left the service.

“Radio Stubby,” Larson instructed.

Hampton attempted to raise Stubblefield, the third marshal, who remained inside the bus, but won only silence.

“Shit!” Hampton said, increasing his stride. The man could cover ground when he wanted to.

The two were twenty feet away from the bus now, Larson adjusting his approach in order to come from more of an angle to avoid being seen, his handgun, a Glock, carefully screened.

He instructed Hampton: “Hang back. Take cover. Lethal force if required.”

“Got it.” Hampton broke away from Larson, hurrying toward the adjacent tractor-trailer and taking a position that allowed him to use it as cover.

Larson found the bus door closed—standard procedure. Benny would typically open it for him as he approached, but that didn’t happen, sounding a secondary alarm in Larson’s head. He slipped his hand into the front pocket of his jeans, searching amid a wad of cash receipts for the cool, metallic feel of keys—the duplicate set to the bus that, as supervising deputy, Larson kept on his person.

Benny remained motionless, not responding; Stubby not answering a radio call. But who could storm a bus through its only door—a locked door, at that—and overcome two drivers and a deputy marshal?

Larson heard thumping from inside. Banging. Just as he turned the key, out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a state police car parked beyond the diesel pumps and he thought: Benny would open the door for a uniform.

As Larson opened the door and entered, the banging stopped abruptly. Larson both tasted and smelled the bitter air and knew its source from experience: a stun grenade—an explosive device that uses air pressure to blow out eardrums and sinuses and render the suspects temporarily deaf and semiconscious.

The narrow stairs that ascended to the driver prevented him from seeing into the main body of the bus. He saw only Benny, whose shirt held a red waterfall of spilled blood down the front. Larson’s first assessment was that the man’s nose was bleeding—typical with stun grenades. But then he saw a precise line below his jaw, like a surgical incision. His open eyes and frozen stare cinched it: Benny was dead.

Weapon still in hand, Larson kept low and climbed the bus stairs, ready for contact. The banging he’d heard had been someone attempting to breach the hardened door to Hope’s cabin. He saw Stubby, unconscious or dead, on the left side, behind a collapsible table. Clancy, the other driver, sat upright in a padded captain’s chair opposite Stubby, his head tilted back. A game of gin rummy between them had ended abruptly. No blood or ligature marks on Clancy.

No sign of a state trooper either, the aisle empty, a sleeping cabin on either side.

One of Stubby’s golf clubs lay broken in front of the rear cabin’s door, which appeared intact and suggested Hope remained safe, a source of great relief. The intruder had been trying to use a club to pry the door open.

There was only one key to that door, hidden in a Hide A Key in the rear engine bay. Larson edged forward.

He went down hard as a strong hand gripped his ankle and pulled from behind. The gun hit the carpet and bounced loose. The wind knocked out of him, Larson reeled.

The intruder was a stringy guy with frog-tongue reactions. He seized Larson’s hair from behind and pulled. But Larson rolled left and the razor blade, intended for his throat, missed and caught the front of his right shoulder instead. Larson broke loose, dived forward, and grabbed for the gun. He spun and squeezed off three rounds. Two went into the mirrored ceiling, raining down cubes of tempered glass, and blinding him in a silver snow.

A crushing force caught Larson in the jaw, snapping his head back. He inadvertently let go of the gun for a second time. The intruder had fallen onto him, and Larson realized he’d hit him with one of the three shots. Larson grabbed for the man and felt fabric rip.

A uniform. Larson fought back, the wounded man keeping him from the gun. Larson bucked him off, but his cut shoulder caused his arm to flap around uselessly, refusing all of Larson’s instructions. Tangled up with the man, Larson drove his left elbow back and felt the crunch of soft bone and tissue, like an eggshell breaking.

He then heard a series of quick footfalls and looked in time to see the intruder hurry off the bus.

Landing out on the parking lot’s pavement, the uniformed man’s voice shouted, “Someone call for help!”

Larson came to his knees. His head swooned. He looked around for his gun through blurry eyes.

Hampton saw the slender state trooper throw his hands in the air as he called for help. He was bleeding. The man sank to his knees in front of the door to the bus.

Hampton held his weapon extended and stepped out from behind the tractor-trailer. “Hands behind your head,” he called out, not feeling great holding a gun on a man in uniform.

As the trooper sat up, Hampton saw a yellow-white muzzle flash. He took the first round in the thigh, driven back by the impact and losing his balance. He sprawled back onto the hot blacktop, rocking his head to the right and watching the suspect run off. He fired two rounds from his side.

As Larson dragged himself toward the front of the bus, he tried to lock down anything he remembered about the intruder: thin and wiry; strong; the uniform; a scar. He focused on the scar. The lines of pink, beaded skin crossed, forming a stylized infinity sign on the inside of his forearm. Larson’s vision filled with a purple fringe, the dark, throbbing color coming at him from all sides. His shoulder was cut badly. Sticky down to his waist. He felt faint. Sounds echoed. Again he smelled the tangy air, laced with black powder and sulfur. Bitter with blood. His stomach retched. He felt as if he were being pushed and held underwater—dark water—by a strong, determined hand. He resisted, but felt himself going. Deeper.

His last conscious thought was more of a vision: not an infinity sign at all, but two triangles facing inward, touching, point-to-point.

Like a bow tie.

CHAPTER ONE

THE PRESENT

Of all things, Larson thought he recognized her laugh. Here, where he least expected it. It carried like a shot, well past his ears and spilling down into the audience where it ran into a waterfall of others—though none exactly like it—and broke to pieces before the footlights and spots that made the dust in the air look like snow. It might as well have lodged in his chest, the way it stole his breath.

He’d started the day perfectly, the way he wished he could start every day, busting his body into a sweat while pulling on twin sticks of composite carbon painted on the scoop in a diagonal of rich burgundy and black, the owner’s college colors no doubt, driving the borrowed scull through swirls of no-see-ums and gnats so thick he clenched his teeth to filter them out, the occasional dragonfly darting swiftly alongside as if challenging him to a race. He’d been up before the birds, and would be done—put away and showered, Creve Coeur Lake behind him—before the rush-hour traffic made the city’s famous arch stand still.

He’d taken in the play on a whim, calling the box office to see if there were any singles available, a guilty pleasure he wouldn’t have told anyone about if he hadn’t engaged the receptionist, Lokisha, in a discussion of Shakespeare on the way out the door.

The fact was that in over five years of secretly searching for Hope at Shakespeare festivals and performances—in places as far away as Ashland, Oregon, and Cedar City, Utah—he’d become passionate about the Bard himself: the violence, the romance, the lies and deceptions, the cunning, the manipulation, the symmetry of the plays. It had never occurred to him that he might find her here in his own backyard. The belief in coincidence had been trained out of Larson in the way a dog could be made to lie by the dinner table and not look up to beg.

He’d felt his BlackBerry purr silently at his side several times over the past ten minutes, but it was after hours and it did that for any incoming e-mail, spam or legitimate, and he wasn’t about to bother the people sitting next to him by lighting up a pale blue electronic screen in his lap while they tried to remain firmly in the sixteenth century. The intermission was fast approaching. He’d check e-mail and messages then.

This city was the last place—the absolute last place—he might have expected to hear her laugh: a combination of wild monkey and a Slinky going down a set of stairs. Even almost six years later he would have known her musical cackle anywhere. But St. Louis, in the Fox Theatre? Not on your life. Not on hers, either.

But it was Shakespeare, which he knew to be in her blood. If he were to find her, it would be at a performance like this—and so a part of him was tempted, even convinced, that he’d finally found her.

The balcony. He imagined her selecting a seat that offered the strategic advantage of elevation, because that was just the kind of thing he’d taught her.

Onstage, Benedick, having dived into a horse trough, addressed the audience, his black leather riding pants and billowing shirtsleeves leaking water. Another volley of laughter rippled through the crowd, and there it was again. Larson felt like a birder identifying a particular species solely by its song.

He was no longer laughing along with the others. Instead, driven by curiosity, he was turned and straining to look up into the balcony.

Being too large for the closely crowded seats, his temperature spiked and his skin prickled. Or was that the possibility running through him? He represented Hope’s past, her former self. Would she want that as badly as he did? Had she somehow found out about his transfer? Through all his training, coincidence nipped at his heels. Baffled, unsure what to do, he stayed in his seat.

The Fox Theatre, a renovated throwback to a bygone era, dwarfed its audience. Its combination of art deco, gilded Asian, quasi-Egyptian splendor, with anachronistic icons, like a twenty-foot-tall cross-legged Buddha, lit in a garish purple light, looked intentionally overwhelming. Despite the vastness of the hall, Larson felt impossible to miss. At well over six feet, and with shoulders that impeded both the theater-goers on either side of him, he would stick out if he stood. It seemed doubtful she might spot him, might recognize him from the back at such a distance, but he hoped she would. He glanced around once more, amused and concerned, intrigued and feeling foolish, his muscles tense. His shoulder ached, as it had ached for the past six years every time a storm drew near. He’d carried the same badge all these years, though now his credentials wallet showed a different title, Larson having been reassigned, along with Hampton and Stubblefield, to the Marshals Service’s elite Fugitive Apprehension Task Force. Part bounty hunter, part bloodhound, part con man and actor, FATF marshals pursued escaped convicts and wanted felons in an effort to return them to their predetermined incarceration.

If she spotted him before he spotted her, what would come of it? Larson wondered. Would she fight through the crowd to be in his arms? Would she run? Again he put his own training onto her, deciding for her that she’d selected an aisle seat near an exit. She’d probably make for that exit rather than risk running into him.

He’d lost all track of the play. The audience erupted in laughter, and he’d missed the joke. He continued to imagine various ways this could possibly be her, but none made sense. Not here. Not St. Louis. Not unless she, too, were looking for him.

Six years. It seemed alternately to him like both a matter of days and a lifetime. What would he say to her? Her to him? Would she even care?

Larson wiped his damp palms on the thighs of his khakis. Again, a wave of laughter washed over the crowd. But this time, something different: her distinctive laugh was no longer a part of it. Larson turned again in his seat, scanning various exits. No sign of Hope, but slightly behind him, a pair of men in dark suits stood with an usher, both dutifully scanning the crowd.

In an audience of twenty-five hundred, there were plenty of men wearing suits—but none quite like these two. Conservative haircuts, thick builds. The big guy looked all too familiar. Federal agents, like himself. Though not like him at all. FBI maybe, or ATF, or even Missouri boys, working for the governor. A WITSEC deputy? The federal witness security and protection service was now a separate entity, but had recently been part of the Marshals Service.

Larson knew many of those guys, but not all. These two, WITSEC? He doubted it.

He might have thought they were looking for Hope, but the big one looked right at him and locked on. This man somehow knew the row, the seat—he knew where to find Larson. Cocking his head, the agent directed Larson to meet up with them. Larson held off acknowledging while he thought long and hard about how to play this, the earlier buzzing of his BlackBerry now more persistent in his memory.

As with Hope’s laugh, two deputy marshals, or agents, materializing at the Fox was anything but coincidence.

He felt tempted to check the BlackBerry but didn’t want to leave his head down that long. The big guy’s posture and the way he bit his lower lip revealed a gnawing anxiety, a nagging unrest. This wasn’t a social call.

A nearby woman wore too much perfume. He’d been struggling with it through the performance, driven to distraction. Only now did he find it nauseating.

The audience laughed uproariously.

Larson chanced a last strained look toward the balcony, then gave it up.

Hope didn’t miss anything. Whether she’d seen Larson or not, she’d likely have spotted the suits by now, and therefore was alr. . .