Flashback - Page 103

“I like how you leave yourself out of that group.”

“I know what I’m dealing with.” He flipped up his jacket hood. “You can handle yourself out here by yourself, can’t you, Krebb?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll take care of this.”

“Wallace, no!”

Wallace smiled and ran into the darkness.

Lynch crouched behind a bush on the hillside, waiting for Krebb’s two men to reach their assigned positions. He unsnapped his shoulder holster, but he hoped not to use the gun. Even with a silencer, the shots would be loud enough to give away his position to anyone nearby. There were quieter options.

There was rustling on the hillside above him. He tilted his head. The sounds came from two positions: one directly above, another about fifteen yards to his right. Lynch slowly turned. The guys were good; he couldn’t see either one. Fine. They’d show themselves soon enough. He crouched lower to hide in the shadows.

More rustling, more footsteps directly above. Had he been spotted?

With the shoot-on-sight order still ringing in his ears, Lynch imagined a red laser targeting dot playing across the back of his head.

The guy finally emerged from a clump of bushes. He held his automatic rifle in front of him.

In one motion, Lynch pulled a long-bladed knife from its scabbard and let it fly.

The knife buried itself in the man’s chest, and he fell onto the ground. The only sounds were the crunching of brush as he rolled a few feet downhill.

His partner called out in a whisper: “Banyon… Banyon!”

Lynch pulled another knife and tried to zero in on the second man’s location. Come on, call out again. Once more…

“Banyon!”

Lynch threw the knife, and it found its target on the second man’s throat. He gurgled and wheezed for a good thirty seconds before falling dead to the ground.

Lynch scrambled up the hillside and took the automatic weapons from the dead men’s hands.

It was a dangerous game he was playing, Wallace thought. If Lynch or the women didn’t kill him, one of Krebb’s trigger-happy goons might.

But it was intoxicating. He hadn’t felt this alive in years. Well, maybe except for when he’d cornered Kendra Michaels in her garage the other day. He’d never gone after case investigators before; he usually preferred to keep them dangling on a string as they pathetically tried to bring him down. But to actually see Kendra Michaels cowering before him… He’d thought of little else, as invigorating as it had been to reacquaint San Diego with the Bayside Strangler. But those two young women didn’t present near the achievement that Kendra Michaels would for him.

He couldn’t let Krebb’s men get to her before he did.

Kendra ejected and reinserted the cartridge of her automatic handgun. She, Chloe, and Sloane were crouched in the crawl space below an observation platform where a telescope had once been mounted. They’d been listening for any sign of Krebb’s men or Lynch’s return, but the only sounds were of the pounding surf and barking seals in the distance.

“I know where Harley is,” Kendra whispered. “He can’t get enough of those seals.”

“Those seals have been keeping us awake since we’ve been here,” Chloe said. “I think it’s their mating season.”

Sloane anxiously peered between the crawl space’s wooden slats. “How long are we going to wait here?”

Kendra looked back at the dark hillside. “I know Lynch wants us to wait for a signal from him, but if we see an opening, I say we move closer to the boat.”

Sloane shifted restlessly. “We prepared for this. I say we go now and—”

“Shh!” Kendra raised a hand to silence her. “Listen!”

It was a whirring sound in the distance. Kendra pushed aside another of the weather-beaten planks for a better view. An electric-powered boat slid onto the shore, crewed by four more men with assault rifles. A group of harbor seals approached the boat, possibly searching for food. As the gunmen disembarked, one of them produced a shock baton and turned toward the seals.

“No!” Kendra whispered.