Stone Barrington 27 - Doing Hard Time

turned away toward the car’s fuel filler he heard the driver speak to his companion in Russian. One of the many skills Teddy had picked up in his time at the CIA was languages. He had a gift, not so much for speaking but for understanding them.
    “You see the rented trailer over there?” he said. “It appears our prey have stopped for the night at the motel, there. This little burg is a good place to deal with them,” the driver said. “We’ll get a room for the night, then tomorrow morning we’ll wait for them on the road, kill them, and bury them in the desert. No one will ever hear from them again.”
    Teddy stopped in his tracks. “You fellas Croatian?” he asked. “That what you’re speaking?”
    “We are Italian,” the driver said.
    Teddy turned on the pump, unscrewed the fuel filler cap, stuck the nozzle in, squeezed the trigger, and locked it. Fuel began to flow. Teddy walked back past the driver’s window. “Scuse me, gotta take a leak,” he said to the man. “Your tank is filling up.” As he walked away from the car he heard the door open and the driver say in Russian, “He may have heard something. Take care of him.”
    Teddy walked into the garage and found his duffel. He removed a small .380 semiautomatic pistol and screwed the silencer he had built into the barrel, then stuck it in his rear waistband, under his shirttail. He went into the john and waited, the pistol in his hand, facing the door, and after a minute he flushed the toilet. The door flew open, and the Russian passenger began raising his weapon. Teddy shot him once in the forehead and watched him collapse in a heap. He picked up the man’s pistol and fired it once into the wooden floor, then waited.
    Another minute passed, and Teddy heard the other Russian. “Yevgeny!” he yelled.
    “Come help me!” Teddy called back, in Russian.
    “Can’t you do anything yourself?” the man yelled back, and Teddy could hear his footsteps. He aimed the pistol at a spot just inside the outside door and waited. A moment later the driver appeared, and Teddy shot him in the head. The man had been holding a pistol, too.
    Teddy walked outside, returned the gas nozzle to its pump, got into the Navigator, and drove it into the garage. He got out, closed the garage door, and switched on the neon sign that said CLOSED over the pumps.
    He was thinking fast now. With considerable effort, he hauled the two bodies to the rear of the Navigator, opened the rear door, and tossed the men’s luggage over the rear seat, then he muscled the corpses into the luggage compartment, tossing their weapons in behind them, and closed the door. Then he turned on the hose and washed their blood down the drain in the men’s room floor. He already had his plan worked out.
    Teddy went next door to where the rental equipment was stored and started the backhoe. He had had some experience with the machinery when, back in Virginia, he had dug his own swimming pool behind his house. He drove the machine out the rear door of the building and into the piñon trees that grew wild behind the property, found a clear spot, and began to dig. After a couple of minutes’ work he had established a rhythm, and in about an hour, he dug the equivalent of his Virginia swimming pool in the sandy soil.
    He left the backhoe idling, went back into the garage, started the Navigator, and drove it out to the hole. It was a little awkward among the piñons, but he maneuvered the SUV alongside his hole, then he switched off the ignition. He got back onto the backhoe and drove it toward the Navigator at a ninety-degree angle, then stopped eighteen inches from the vehicle.
    He got the backhoe’s blade under the SUV and began to lift it from the side. Soon, the Navigator toppled over onto its side into the waiting hole. The noise of it hitting bottom was muffled by the vertical sides of the hole and the surrounding piñons.
    Teddy turned the backhoe around and used the earthmoving blade to push the soil back into the hole, taking another half hour to fill it, then he drove the backhoe over it a few times to pack down the soil. After he had used a piñon branch to smooth the earth, there was nothing left to see.
    He returned the backhoe to the building and hosed off the dirt and dust, then locked up for the night. He freshened up and changed his clothes in the men’s room, then walked across the road to Sally’s Diner.
    The three young people were sitting in a booth, finishing their