Search and Destroy by JT Sawyer (top non fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

“I did like that fancy watch he was wearing though. That guy must have been making some serious coin working for Burke to afford a piece like that.”

She headed down the street, making a right turn at the stop sign. “And twenty bucks says Shepard was carrying.”

“A pistol? I doubt it. Even as a security consultant, he’d have a hard time getting a concealed weapons permit in this county.”

“He already suspects, like we do, that the explosion wasn’t an accident. Hell, I’d be carrying right now if I were in his shoes. Besides, you don’t need a damn permit in your own house.” Her Bronx accent slid out whenever she got irritated. “He’s gotta be taking this hard. His wife was pregnant, and he lost all of his colleagues yesterday. God, how do you bounce back from that?”

“Not sure you ever do.” He tapped his fingers on the armrest. “Where to next?” said Tremblay, glancing at a group of kids disembarking from a school bus at the stop sign ahead.

“To forensics. I want to see what they turned up on the cause of the explosion.”

“You know, there’s this thing called an iPhone for getting information. You want me to show you how that works?”

“I already heard what the guys down there had to say. I want to look over the actual evidence myself and see what I can see. There’s no substitute for being there in person.”

“Sounds like you’re never going to get that NYPD detective indoctrination out of your blood from the old days.”

“And you’re never gonna get the Google default button out of that brain of yours. Did they teach you anything at Quantico other than how to navigate a keyboard and print out wanted posters?”

“You old-timers…always so anti-tech. I bet you don’t even know how to cut and paste a document.”

“And I bet you my hat size is twice as large as yours. Besides, I’m only eight years older than you, so don’t give me all that ‘old-timers’ crap.”

“Well, you have the confidence of a much younger woman.”

“And you’re about to have a flattened nose.”

He chuckled. “That’s why I like working with you more than anyone else at the bureau, Carter. You can go from being a courteous federal agent holding your own against judges and congressmen to talking the shit with a coke dealer like you’re an undercover narco. Not too many people with your broad range of law-enforcement skills.”

“Now you’re just sweet-talkin’ me in the hopes that I buy lunch today, but this one’s on you. And you owe me twenty bucks.”

“For what?”

“Because Shepard was packing, trust me.” She glanced in her rearview mirror, recalling the faint scars on the man’s knuckles and the way he carried himself, even for someone so recently pummeled by life.

Security consultant…more like a streetfighter. Wonder if he’s from the Bronx too?

10

Diamond T Ranch, West Texas

Vincent Roth dragged the sleeve of his hunting shirt across his forehead, wiping away the beads of sweat that had formed from the unrelenting sun of the Chihuahuan Desert.

He refused to let the heat, the cold, the wind or any other elemental force interfere with hunting on his 67,000-acre ranch in the hill country. While the majority of the land was raw and undeveloped, the main residence was larger than some of the outlying towns in the region and was nine miles at its widest from west to east. The place was large enough to have its own topographic map named after it and was equipped with a small lake, private landing strip, shooting range, two horse barns, cook’s house, a veterinarian’s residence, and two bunkhouses for his resident staff of cowboys.

Most of the stone buildings were constructed of local quarried rock, and Roth’s three-story home had even been featured in several prominent architectural journals.

At the flurry of movement in the creosote brush to his right, he saw a covey of quail take flight. Swinging up his vintage Parker shotgun, he dropped three of the birds with a lead barrage from the .28-gauge weapon. The antique shotgun with a gold-inlaid walnut stock had been gifted to him by a former vice-president and cost more than most of his service staff made in six months.

After an abrupt command, Roth’s two purebred short-haired pointers bolted from his side, darting through the thick brush to retrieve the lifeless quail. They trotted back, depositing the bodies at their master’s feet. Roth patted the dogs roughly on their necks then nodded for his lanky assistant to remove the birds.

The pale figure knelt down, shooting a nervous glance at Roth before scurrying back to the Hummer to place the birds in a cooler on the rear tailgate. It was a look that Roth was used to in his daily affairs, whether on the ranch or at the corporate headquarters for Roth Energy International in Houston, where his net worth saw him grace the pages of Forbes’ top-ten list of oil billionaires on a regular basis.

He heard his encrypted cellphone ring from inside the front of the green Hummer. His bodyguard Karl emerged from the driver’s side, where he had been scouring the terrain with a pair of binoculars for more quail. The burly German moved without caution through the brush like one of Roth’s prize steers.

“It’s Landis. He’s in Virginia. Said it’s urgent.”

Roth exchanged his shotgun for the phone. Ian Landis, his chief oil lobbyist who handled all of his business affairs in DC, was overdue on checking in, and Roth figured it was because he was either scared shitless from recent events in Virginia or because his business meeting had taken longer than expected. He hoped it was the latter.

Landis had been with Roth for the past twelve years, often working behind the scenes to shore up Roth’s polished public image as a philanthropist and benefactor while removing any problematic snags along the way. Those snags were competitors, detractors and international leaders, whose numbers had grown thinner over the years but whose bodies could fill a shallow canyon, the