Read Online Brute Force by Marc Cameron - Free Book Online

inside.”
    “She’s my cousin,” Thibodaux said. “Who says I trust her?” His face darkened and he got to the meat of his worries. “You think Camille looks like Téa Leoni?”
    “Same husky voice, maybe.” Quinn couldn’t help but chuckle at the random things that might be bouncing around in Jacques Thibodaux’s brain at any given moment. “But the looks are 180 degrees off.”
    “Yeah.” The big Cajun shrugged. “But I had a dream about Téa Leoni last night. Camille would shit a brimstone brick if she thought I had a thing for Téa Leoni.”
    Quinn rolled his eyes. “I think you’ve been away from home too long.”
    “I’m sorry, l’ami .” Jacques gave a sheepish grin. For a guy who could bench 405, he had the embarrassed schoolboy thing down pretty good. “But this not being able to call her has me all screwed up. I don’t mind tellin’ you this dream scares my mule. Camille has a way of lookin’ into my skull and finding out about shit like this.”
    Quinn shrugged, both hands on the steering wheel. “Good. Then maybe you can channel a little bit of your inner Camille the next time we need to get information out of somebody and pull something out of their skull.”
    “Whatever you say, Chair Force, but this is serious business. I haven’t had a dream about any woman besides Camille in years. Wooeeee!” He shook his head as if to purge any unclean thoughts about Téa Leoni. “Anyhow, don’t you fret. I’ll focus on not getting killed now that we’re coming into civilization.”
    “Good idea,” Quinn said, breathing a measured sigh of relief when he brought the van off the relatively light traffic of the Karakoram Highway and into the riot of evening commuters. The packed arterial road was a chorus of honks and shouts mingled with braying donkeys and no one took notice of Quinn’s van, swerving or not.
    “Funny,” Thibodaux said, staring out the dusty window at the sprawling oasis of 350,000 people. “From the way you talked about it, I pictured this place as some Alibaba-ancient Silk Road caravan stop with magic carpets and shit.”
    “Yeah.” Quinn nodded. “The Chinese government’s knocking more and more old buildings down every day to make way for progress.” Quinn sped up to get ahead of a motorized trike hauling a load of fat-bottomed sheep in the rusty bed. Once far enough ahead, he took another lane to turn on Renmin Road toward his old friend Dr. Gabrielle Deuben’s neighborhood. “There won’t be any of the old town left before too long.” He took his eyes off the road long enough to shoot a glance at Thibodaux. “But believe me, there are still plenty of places for the Feng brothers to hide.”
    “We’ll find ’em.” Thibodaux grinned, tipping his head at the low sun that cast long shadows through the last pistachio grove before the land gave way completely to concrete and stone. “We got a while until dark.”
    Quinn smiled to himself, remembering the shadowed mazes of alleys, dead-end roads, and walled courtyards that made up Kashgar’s centuries-old neighborhoods.
    “There are some places,” he said, “where night falls well before dark.”
     
     
    Gabrielle Deuben’s home was located in an apartment above her the clinic. Quinn parked the van a block down out of habit, backing in so he had plenty of room to drive away unimpeded if he had to leave in a hurry.
    He’d not spoken to Deuben since she’d helped him and Garcia get across the Wakhan Corridor into Afghanistan nearly two years before. Any hotel would require a passport and he hoped the doctor would give them a place to rest their heads for a few minutes—along with any information she might have come across from the working girls she treated that would lead them to the Feng brothers. Quinn wasn’t a hundred percent sure that she was even still in the same place, but her missionary zeal when it came to treating the ailments of the prostitutes and other poor in Central Asia made it a