by John McMahon
We thanked Zach and Flora and pushed out into the cool night.
Outside, Malcolm moved toward his car, but Wolf hung back for a second. “You got more bodies than just you two, right?” he asked.
“You did great,” Remy said to Wolf. Knowing we had to get going.
“Yeah, I feel you on that,” Wolf said. “But answer my question. It’s more than just you two?”
“No,” I said. “But we’re gonna hustle, man. I promise you that.”
“I could keep helping,” Wolf offered.
My partner glanced at me. I knew we could use a couple extra bodies. But there was a pro on the loose. An expert marksman, hauling around a lightweight sniper rifle and protected by a bodyguard with a background in hand-to-hand combat.
“Against regulation,” I said. “And Remy and I—we’ve gone against regulation enough times to know.”
“I can call Chester,” Wolf said. “Me and him take half the buildings.”
“You’ve helped enough,” I said, and we shook hands. “We’ll stay in touch. Tell you how it goes.”
“Okay,” he said, and caught up with Malcolm.
I turned to Remy after they left, the two of us standing by my truck.
“We got seven hours and no warrants,” I said.
“Just out-of-town badges and an expectation of cooperation.”
“Okay then,” I said. “We go light and fast. You split up the list of buildings as I drive. When we get to Atlanta, let’s be sweet as pie to any building security.”
35
By six-forty a.m., I had checked six buildings off my list, starting with SunTrust Plaza, at the tallest.
I’d badged security and night watchmen, and so far, each had shown me the roof, or their security center. Some had even helped me search it.
As I walked out of the W Hotel, I thanked the guys in charge and told them to keep up their vigilance.
My phone rang and it was Remy, who had taken the structures along Centennial so she could work on foot, going building by building, while I explored the places that were farther away and required the truck.
“I’ve cleared six so far,” I said to Remy on the phone. “I’m heading down near you, by the plaza. Check the Coca-Cola building and the parking garage by the aquarium.”
“Ten-four,” Remy said. “I’m walking up to Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd.”
There was a crest of orange on the morning horizon, and I was thinking what I’d thought the night before when I got Abe’s note about the shooter being in Alabama. That it would be good to be wrong. That I’d rather be tired from searching these rooftops in Atlanta than sorry that we hadn’t explored them and something bad had happened.
When I got down near the Coca-Cola building, I talked to security and they inspected my tin.
They assigned me this old-timer named Cecil, bone thin and white with wavy hair.
“How long have you worked here, Cecil?” I asked as we walked. The guy was older than dirt.
“This location, ten years,” he said. “But for Coke—a half century.”
Cecil moved like a turtle, and I pulled up alongside him. He smiled at me, but didn’t accelerate. He’d been around so long he probably knew the secret recipe for Coke.
We took a freight elevator up to the roof.
The top of the place was enormous, but I could immediately see that there was no one up there.
“Where to next?” he asked.
“What about the parking garage?”
“That’s not technically part of Coke, but we can go over there. It’s closed now, you know.”
“Let’s do it.”
Cecil’s left leg started getting gimpy, and it slowed us down more. We walked what seemed like a football field before getting to another elevator. Took it up to the fourth floor. Another cavern.
There were no cars parked in the lot, but we weren’t at the top level. “What’s above here?” I motioned at the concrete ceiling.
“It’s closed off right now.”
“Can we check?” I asked.
Cecil found a stairwell, but he looked at me. “The alarm’s gonna go off if we push this open.”
“Will it turn off after we close it?”
“Sure.” He nodded.
I pressed the bar to open the door, and the sound was deafening. “C’mon.” I motioned him inside.
The walloping ended, and we took the stairs up to the top, but Cecil was right. Nobody in sight.
I looked out from the rooftop toward the courtyard where the civil rights building was. The event was in less than two hours, and I could see uniformed staff rolling out circular tables and setting up an elevated stage for the speech.
My phone buzzed, and I took it out. The number was Wolf’s.
“Wolf,” I said. “We don’t know anything yet. Let me call you in a bit.”
“P.T.,” he said as if he didn’t hear me. “I think I just saw the big guy.”
“Big guy who?” I asked.
“The bodyguard. The one in the picture with Nolan Brauer.”
“In Mason Falls?” I asked.
“No,” Wolf said. “Uh . . . Chester and me came down here. Help out, you know?”
I moved across the parking garage toward the edge that looked up toward Centennial. “You’re in Atlanta?”
“Chester said, ‘If you can’t run with the dogs, stay on the porch,’” Wolf said. “So we thought—”
“Where did you see the bodyguard?” I interrupted Wolf.
“He was leaving some hotel,” Wolf said. “Midtown Suites, I think. I can’t find him now. Or reach Chester.”
I pulled up the picture of the list of buildings on my phone. Shit, I thought. What the hell had Wolf and Chester been thinking—coming here?
“Is everything all right?” Cecil asked.
“That’s one of Remy’s,” I said to Wolf, bringing the phone back to my face. “I’ll call you back.”
I hustled across the top of the parking garage in the other direction until I could see over the edge toward Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd. Diagonally up the street from me was the top of the Midtown Suites.
I took my binocs from my back pocket and scanned the roof of the hotel.
Remy had just come out of a door and was threading her way in between giant air conditioners.
I scanned left, across the rooftop, to see if it was empty.
That’s when I saw a man dressed in black pants and a long-sleeved black T-shirt.
“Shit,” I said. It was Nolan Brauer.
He pushed aside a gun case and lifted up the M24.
I could see the two replacement pieces, top and bottom, in unpainted white, as part of the gun.
“Remy!” I yelled instinctively, but she couldn’t hear me. She just kept walking. Maybe twenty yards from the guy. With neither of them seeing each other.
I pulled up my phone, but didn’t want the ringing to distract Remy or be something that Brauer heard.
Cecil came up behind me. “Do you see something?”
I nodded, moving a few feet toward the edge of the parking garage. “Go find a phone, Cecil. Call 911.”
I typed a quick text to Remy to watch out, and waited.
But Remy didn’t look down at her phone.
In between us was Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd. One busy lane in each direction, and my partner a block up.
I couldn’t get there in time. Nor could I reach Brauer with a bullet from a Glock 42.
I scanned back to my partner and saw her moving across the roof.
Then, fifteen yards away, dust kicked up, and Brauer ran toward Remy.
It seemed like slow motion. Him heading toward her—and her not seeing until it was too late.
She pulled her Glock as he tackled her, and the gun skittered away from her.
While he was stunned, Remy pushed him off and got up, running for her gun, but not knowing where it was.
I glanced down onto the boulevard. Then over at the hotel.
If you run for it, you’ll never get there in time, Purvis said. Worse, you won’t know what happened.
Remy found the gun case, but Brauer had already removed the weapon, placing it in between two air-conditioning units.
He dove at her, knocking her off her feet.
They squared off then, and I found myself talking aloud. Powerless.
“C’mon, Rem.”
Brauer landed a hard punch to Remy’s face. Motioned her to come closer.
She moved in, faking with her left and then coming with her right, landing a hard hit to his jaw.
Then she roundhouse-kicked Brauer, but made contact with his hand or the rifle instead, coming down funny on her leg.
Remy didn’t get up right away, and Brauer turned.
He grabbed the M24, a gun designed to be shot from long distance, and pulled back the action, aiming it at my partner.
I shifted my binoculars to Remy. She was crawling away, but something was wrong with her leg. She dragged her body across the roof, and I could hardly breathe.
Am I going to watch as someone murders my partner?
Am I forced to look on as someone else I love dies?
Brauer aimed the rifle at her from twelve feet away—and bam.
36
Wednesday, September 11, 1:44 p.m.
Jed Harrington saw the middle school campus ahead of him.
The main structure at Falls Magnet Middle School was a wide, one-story building with a façade of charcoal-colored bricks, interrupted only by strips of stacked stone that ran vertically, every thirty feet or so, from the bottom of the building to the roof.
The place had a look that split the difference between time periods—half colonial Georgia and half contemporary. A compromise in design that projected that the ways of the old South were a thing of the past, an architectural memory only.
Harrington pulled his Dodge Magnum slowly past the building on the far left side of the campus and shook his head.
“Motherfucker,” he said aloud.
He glanced around then, and maybe it was all the time he’d spent with the military, but he noticed the solitary road he’d just used to get onto campus.
One way in. One way out.
He pulled into a parking spot then and got out. Stood sentinel for a good minute before exhaling and pulling his long flannel over his jeans.
Am I really doing this? he wondered.
Am I really stepping into this?
And then he put his head down and plunged forward.
37
An explosion came from the roof where Remy was. A huge puff of smoke floating through the frame of my binoculars.
A car alarm went off, and a black cloud covered the rooftop.
Go, Purvis said, and I took off, down four flights of stairs without looking.
Crossing the street, I sped down the sidewalk. One building. A second building. I crossed the busy street without looking and burst in through the front doors of the Midtown Suites.
I moved through the lobby of the hotel, and my heart was in my stomach.
“I need access to your rooftop,” I said to a guy at the front desk, badging him. “Now!”
“Excuse me?” he said.
“Now.” I banged on the counter.
The clerk ran with me over to an elevator. But I could see from the dial that the two cars were both on high floors.
“Stairs,” I demanded, and he pointed me the way.
Up I went, the clerk in tow for the first two flights.
As I headed around the turn at three, I saw Chester Gardner, crumpled in the stairwell corner. His face was as purple as eggplant.
“Chess,” I said.
“The bodyguard.” He pointed up. “I’m sorry. Go.”
I jumped over Chester and raced up to the fifth level. The sixth.
I pushed the door open at the roof and heard the emergency alarm chirp on and off as the fire door closed.
I looked across at the parking garage where I’d left Cecil. Tried to judge where to look from where the aquarium garage was, and then moved right.
As I came around the corner, I could smell the pungent stink of nitroglycerin in the air—mixed in with blood. The smell of a weapon freshly fired.
And I stared at something strange.
The body of Nolan Brauer, except without the top of his body. The man’s head was gone, as was part of his upper chest.
And that’s when I saw Remy.
Her leg was twisted at an odd angle, and her body was covered in blood and guts.
38
I splashed water on my face, and wiped the dirt from it with a cheap hospital paper towel that broke apart in my hands.
It had been four hours since EMTs had ferried my partner down from the roof. Four hours since Wolf had steered Chester and me to Emory University Hospital about a mile away from the hotel, following the ambulance that held Remy.
I walked into the room where my partner was.
Darren Gattling stood by Remy’s bed. He was holding her hand, and he let go when he saw me.
I hadn’t seen Gattling since outside of Tandy’s bar, six days ago, and now he was in street clothes. A light blue sweatshirt and dark jeans clung to his muscular frame.
“I’ll let you two talk,” Gattling said, and turned. Headed out to the hallway.
I stared at Remy. Her face and arms bore a dozen cuts, but she looked better than she had on the roof when I found her, covered in the skin, blood, and intestines of the man once known as Nolan Brauer.
“How long you been up?” I asked. The room smelled of Mercurochrome and bacitracin.
“I dunno,” she said. “Why?”
“I came by a half hour ago, but you were asleep. I got close. Made sure you were breathing.”
“Creeper alert,” Remy said.
I started laughing, and so did Remy. Then she stopped.
“Oh my God, don’t make me laugh, P.T. I think I cracked a rib, and the doctors haven’t figured it out yet.”
I looked Remy over. When I found her atop the Midtown Suites, I quickly put together what had happened.
Brauer and Remy had fought, and she had landed a roundhouse kick in his direction.
He’d stopped the kick with his hand. Which was holding the M24.
Except what Brauer didn’t realize was that Remy had dented the plastic of the rifle just slightly when she made contact.
He aimed the barrel at Remy’s face, ten feet from her, and pulled the trigger. And the gun had backed up on itself. Kinda like Wolf’s friend, who had burned his hand with a 3D-printed gun. Except much, much worse.
“I’m sorry, Rem,” I said. “That I didn’t go to that hotel instead of you.”
“Oh my God.” My partner shook her head. “Of all people—you cannot pull that masculine shit on me, P.T. I’m the one who told you we should go see Wolf. Meet the whole Dungeons & Dragons crew and go after these guys.”
“I was on the top of the aquarium parking garage,” I said. “I haven’t felt that helpless since—” I stopped talking and Remy nodded.
“I know,” she said.
“I saw you kick him and then a minute later—boom.”
“When I came down from that kick,” she said, “I felt something in my leg snap. But I also had a feeling that I’d fucked up that gun.”
“You basi
cally created a grenade,” I said. “You blew him up when he pulled the trigger.”
“Pretty badass, huh?” she said.
“Pretty badass,” I agreed.
“You talk to the Feds?” she asked.
“A bit,” I said. “They have about fifty guys scraping Brauer off that roof. I didn’t think they needed any ‘local help’ with that.”
Remy went quiet then, probably thinking about the life she’d taken.
“C’mere,” she said, and I pulled over a chair. “I’m gonna be laid up for a couple weeks,” she whispered. “Doc said it’s a day here before they transport me home. But at home I’m gonna be out of work. In a boot, first. Then on crutches.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “The case is over. I’ll cover stuff.”
She shook her head then. As if I wasn’t following her.
“The case with Lena,” Remy said. “Under the liquor store. I said I’d go all the way with you. But I can’t now.”
“I’ll wait,” I said.
“No,” Remy said. “After this. And the school shooting. You’re never gonna be as high as you are now. And you’re gonna need to break some rules to take down Hartley.”
I stared at her, our faces close.
“Maybe I don’t need to,” I told her. “Like you said, maybe I just need to ignore the past. Stop chasing ghosts.”
Remy put out her hand to quiet me. “That’s important,” she said. “All that shit I told you when we were under that liquor store.”
“But?”
“But Hartley took out that building the next day because we went there,” she said. “We visited an abandoned building, and he blew it up. So you’re gonna have to be smarter than him, P.T. One step ahead of him.”
I held my gaze on her. “Yeah.”
“And you’re never gonna have more equity to burn than you do now,” she said. “So I want you to do something for me, okay?”
“Anything.”
“Go home. Walk the dogs. Rest that big brain of yours because we’ve been up for twenty-four hours, P.T. But then get up. Tell Senza you need a couple days off. And go like the wind, partner. Find out who hired Tarticoft. What they were doing under that liquor store. How Hartley’s involved. And fucking get ’em all.”
