Tell No One - By Harlan Coben Page 0,69

shooting gallery mallard. The van's front doors opened.

"Hands up now!"

Guns appeared. Two of them. Aimed in the back. The Asian guy let go. I flopped back, unable to move.

Behind the guns I saw two familiar faces, and I almost cried out in joy.

Tyrese and Brutus.

One of the white guys made a move. Tyrese casually fired his weapon. The man's chest exploded. He fell back with his eyes open. Dead. No doubt about that. In the front, the driver groaned, starting to come to. Brutus elbowed him hard in the face. The driver went quiet again.

The other white guy had his hands up. My Asian tormenter never changed his expression. He looked on as though from a distance, and he didn't raise or lower his hands. Brutus took the driver's seat and shifted into gear. Tyrese kept his weapon pointed straight at the Asian guy.

"Uncuff him," Tyrese said.

The white guy looked at the Asian. The Asian nodded his consent. The white guy uncuffed me. I tried to sit up. It felt as if something inside me had shattered and the shards were digging into tissue.

"You okay?" Tyrese asked.

I managed a nod.

"You want me to waste them?" I turned to the still-breathing white guy. "Who hired you?"

The white guy slid his eyes toward the young Asian. I did the same.

"Who hired you?" I asked him.

The Asian finally smiled, but it didn't change his eyes. And then, once again, everything happened too fast.

I never saw his hand shoot out, but next thing I knew the Asian guy had me by the scruff of my neck. He hurled me effortlessly at Tyrese. I was actually airborne, my legs kicking out as though that might slow me down. Tyrese saw me coming, but he couldn't duck out of the way. I landed on him. I tried to roll off quickly, but by the time we righted ourselves, the Asian had gotten out via the van's side door.

He was gone.

"Fucking Bruce Lee on steroids," Tyrese said.

I nodded.

The driver was stirring again. Brutus prepared a fist, but Tyrese shook him off. "These two won't know dick," he said to me.

"I know."

"We can kill them or let them go." Like it was no big deal either way, a coin toss.

"Let them go," I said.

Brutus found a quiet block, probably someplace in the Bronx, I can't be sure. The still-breathing white guy got out on his own. Brutus heaved the driver and the dead guy out like yesterday's refuse. We started driving again. For a few minutes, nobody spoke.

Tyrese laced his hands behind his neck and settled back. "Good thing we hung around, huh, Doc?"

I nodded at what I thought might be the understatement of the millennium.
Chapter 32
The old autopsy files were kept in a U-Store-'Em in Layton, New Jersey, not far from the Pennsylvania border. Special Agent Nick Carlson arrived on his own. He didn't like storage facilities much. They gave him the black-cat creeps. Open twenty-four hours a day, no guard, a token security camera at the entrance... God only knows what lay padlocked in these houses of cement. Carlson knew that many were loaded with drugs, money, and contraband of all sorts. That didn't bother him much. But he remembered a few years back when an oil executive had been kidnapped and crate-stored in one. The executive had suffocated to death. Carlson had been there when they found him. Ever since, he imagined living people in here too, right now, the inexplicably missing, just yards from where he stood, chained in the dark, straining against mouth gags.

People often note that it's a sick world. They had no idea.

Timothy Harper, the county medical examiner, came out of a garage like facility, holding a large manila envelope closed with a wrap-around string. He handed Carlson an autopsy file with Elizabeth Beck's name on it.

"You have to sign for it," Harper said.

Carlson signed the form.

"Beck never told you why he wanted to see it?" Carlson asked.

"He talked about being a grieving husband and something about closure, but outside of that..." Harper shrugged.

"Did he ask you anything else about the case?"

"Nothing that sticks out."

"How about something that doesn't stick out?"

Harper thought about it a moment. "He asked if I remembered who identified the body."

"Did you?"

"Not at first, no."

"Who did identify her?"

"Her father. Then he asked me how long it took."

"How long what took?"

"The identification."

"I don't understand."

"Neither did I, quite frankly. He wanted to know if her father had made the ID immediately or if it took a few minutes."

"Why would