two weeks ago,” Crutchfield said. “He had an appointment somewhere in the city. I didn’t go with him. I don’t know where it was, or why he went there, but he came back to the hotel very disturbed, distraught. He … I don’t know, he …” His voice trailed off.
“Continue,” Dylan ordered.
The lawyer squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “Randolph looked really shook up, panicked, and he had a few drinks. Maybe more than a few, and he started talking, mumbling, about some Navy SEAL who’d become an abomination. That’s what he called it, an abomination, a twisted mistake, a creature that had been crying out for him, calling his name over and over—and he blamed himself, said some crazy things about experiments going wrong in a lab somewhere. He’s been spooked ever since, like I’ve never seen him.”
Not good, Dylan thought. Not good at all. Navy SEALs were pirates to begin with, the real wild cards in the elite warrior deck, and with Souk dead, he could only imagine who might be out there trying to continue the demented doctor’s work.
“Tell me everything you know about the SEAL.”
“That’s it,” Crutchfield said. “That’s everything. I don’t know what kind of lab makes guys like Farrel and Banner, but this one scared him. It scared him badly.”
“You know more.” People always did. “Think back to the hotel that night and tell me what else he said.”
Crutchfield just stared at him, his face blank, and then his expression suddenly changed.
“Monk,” he said. “That’s what he called the SEAL, Monk.”
Perfect.
Dylan keyed the mike on his radio and contacted Skeeter.
“We’re looking for a guy named Monk,” he said. “He was a Navy SEAL. It’ll be a recent entry in the LeedTech files.”
Quinn dropped the rope and walked over to retrieve Crutchfield’s phone from the pile of stuff they’d taken off the guy. Dylan watched him scroll down the contact list and press the send key. Randolph Lancaster was about to get a call.
Coming up behind Crutchfield, Quinn held the phone to the lawyer’s ear and a gun to the back of his head. From the sudden look of blank, unadulterated terror on the man’s face, Dylan figured he could count on Mr. Crutchfield’s full cooperation.
Walking back over to the pool edge, he pulled a piece of paper with a carefully scripted statement typed on it out of his pocket. He waited until he heard Lancaster answer, then held the paper in front of Tyler’s face at eye level—and the guy did great, just great.
“It’s me,” Crutchfield said, reading the lines. “I’ve got her. I’m bringing her up. Let me in.”
As soon as Crutchfield was finished reading, Quinn cut off the call, and Dylan hit a number on his own phone. When the Boy Wonder answered, he said only one word. “Go.”
The party had started.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Are you sure this is okay?” Jane asked.
“Yes.”
Well, he was wrong, she thought, shifting uneasily on her feet. No way in the world was it okay to be breaking into this bungalow tucked into the last lot on a dead-end street, especially when he was taking way too damn long to do it. Baby-blue clapboard and green trim made the house the most colorful home on the block. The multilayer gardens surrounding the place turned it into a gem hidden in a jungle of trees, budding bushes, and flowers coming into bloom. The place smelled wonderful, and she could hear a fountain bubbling and splashing from somewhere around back.
It was an unexpected and oddly disconcerting oasis in a night of violence and fear. They’d been on the run for hours and had suddenly washed up in a quiet, pastoral corner of the suburbs.
She looked back to the east, and the neighborhood instantly went to hell. A police cruiser was rolling into view. It stopped at an intersection two blocks away, its lights flashing, its siren silent, then slowly turned in their direction and began easing its way up the block.
Oh, cripes.
“Here,” she said, stepping closer to him and taking the lockpicks out of his hands. “Let me do this.”
He didn’t resist, and she wasn’t surprised. He’d started trembling right about the time she’d stopped, about halfway up the street. He could hardly hold the picks, and his skin was hot—too hot to be anything but bad.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, sliding the second pick into the lock alongside the first one. “You’re shaking all over.”
“Fever,” he said, taking a match out of a small container affixed to the house and