Spree

by Michael Morley

  Her fate lay inches away.

  Angie clung to the last vestige of cover that separated her from the intense red light glowing in what she guessed was an open area at the center of the old factory.

  Laughter tumbled from hidden speakers, then faded into a hiss of static before a male voice announced, “Come on. Come on. I’m waiting for you.” The voice sounded slow, almost drugged.

  Angie didn’t move.

  “You’re on camera.” He sounded bored now. “Have been since you did that fancy entrance through my front door. Now come on round and don’t be shy.”

  Angie stepped out, the gun held in a two-handed firing stance. Light was in her eyes but she could see the floor was boarded black and the walls painted green. On a raised platform three feet high was a high-backed throne chair upholstered in red leather with brass studs.

  Sitting on it, bathed in the bloodlight of an overhead spot, was Warren Hendry.

  His legs were spread wide and he slouched in an open white shirt, baggy blue jeans but no shoes and socks. Beside his bare feet was an empty half-bottle of vodka and a freshly opened replacement. America’s most wanted man was half-drunk and sat before her unarmed.

  “Cool gun,” he said, picking something from his lap. “My brother did good business with those.” He lifted his right hand and showed her a cellphone. “But we live in an age when the phone is mightier than the bullet.” He waggled it. “No, really, it is. Take another step closer and I’ll use it to blow us both up. As I’m pretty sure you’ve guessed, I don’t really care about living any longer.”

  Angie’s eyes studied the cellphone. The guy had blown up a memorial service and outwitted Chips. She had every reason to believe he could do what he said.

  He studied her curiously, moistened his drunk-dried mouth with a swallow and asked, “Tell me—are you Elysia, or just one of her lackeys?”

  “I’m an FBI profiler”—she inched closer—“so yeah, I’m Elysia, but I’m a fuck of a lot more than that.” She had to stop her finger pulling the trigger. “The agent you killed was to be my husband.”

  Hendry’s eyes flickered with amusement. “My, how terrible. Still, these things do happen.”

  She edged forward.

  “Stop!” He raised the phone again.

  Angie stood her ground. “He is the father of my unborn child.”

  There was no reply, no concern, just a look of curiosity.

  “Did you hear me?”

  Hendry nodded. “Yes, I heard you. It makes what’s going to happen all the more interesting.” He turned the phone round and examined the screen. “You can also make calls with this, disarm the security and play songs and films.” He looked at her with disappointment. “You’re nothing like I imagined. Nothing.” He reached down for the vodka bottle without his eyes leaving her, raised it to his mouth and took a long swig.

  She waited for him to cough from the heat of the alcohol but he didn’t.

  Hendry wiped his mouth with the back of a hand and added, “At first, I thought you were real, Elysia, that you actually understood me. Then I saw your so-called home in Watts and I knew. Those cheap lights on timer switches, coming on in the dead of night to make it look like someone was at home. Stupid!”

  “As stupid as all this?” She rolled her head to take in his stage and lights. “Was that tragic drama you acted out really necessary? You’re bright and smart—why couldn’t you have vocalized your anger over your brother’s execution, attacked the politicians and the system verbally instead of with violence?”

  He waved down her argument. “Lots of reasons.”

  “Tell me one.” Angie was happy to listen. It burned time. Increased the chance of backup arriving before the situation got any worse.

  “What you won’t understand is that he did it all for me.”

  “Did what for you?”

  “There was this piece of gang shit who tried to kidnap me.” He fell silent. Looked pained. Reflective. “Winston…” He dried up on saying his brother’s name. “He’d refused to supply them with guns and they said they’d teach him a lesson for dissing them. They even told him what they were going to do. Said he’d then have to give them what they wanted. Only they fucked up. I saw them coming on some webcams I’d rigged at the place we lived and I got out. Later, when I showed Winston the footage, he just went crazy.”

  “And this was when he gunned down a mother and child as well.”

  “Collateral damage.” He shrugged. “Like the kids and teachers I shot in the Strawberry Fields, like the little dirtbag I sent to the memorial service with the explosives.”

  Angie feigned interest. “What was with that? More innocents killed—why? To match Winston’s sins?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yeah, I do. It’s my job to understand these things.”

  “With the fruit pickers, I just needed the practice.” He raised the phone like a gun and pretended to shoot her with it. “I wanted to see if I could hit people when they were moving. Whether I could keep my nerve when I went for the real target in the mall.”

  “That’s all?” Angie felt maternal outrage. “You killed a child and teachers because you needed shooting practice?”

  “Yeah, that’s about it. And before you ask, the street kid with the bomb was just gang scum, from the same trash Winston wasted. He had no future. I just stopped him growing older and fucking up other people’s lives.”

  “You’re empty. Just a shell. There’s not even a shred of humanity left inside you.”

  Hendry laughed. “You’re right, Mrs. FBI lady, absolutely right. Garbage guys emptied my soul out years ago. I thought if I made all of those jurors suffer for the injustice of the system, then I’d find some peace. The more I killed, the more my debt to my brother would be paid.”

  Angie sneaked a glance at her watch. Almost fifteen minutes had passed since she’d spoken to Chips. Since he’d promised backup. Now she had no option but to keep talking. “Bad debts owed to bad people never get better—only worse. But I guess you know that. And the booze you are hitting says you’re off track—behind with your payments, so to speak.”

  “I wouldn’t be,” he snapped. “But for the grunt you’ve been screwing. If he hadn’t intervened, with his boy soldier ignorance and his fuckbrain speechifying, I’d have stuck to my plan—to my list.”

  “Be smart, Warren, and shut up now.”

  He could tell he’d touched a nerve. “Do you want to see lover-boy again? I can show you him.” He raised an eyebrow and smiled. “I can show you him like you’ve never seen before.” He swiped a finger across the screen of the phone and the recessed speakers hissed with static.

  Angie’s nerves prickled.

  The green-screened walls all around her filled with projected moving pictures.

  Angie put her hand to her mouth.

  Jake was everywhere. All around her. Staring at her and walking toward her.

  She felt dizzy.

  He was outside his apartment. Half a smile on his face as he peered into a light and tried to make out who was behind it.

  Angie could hear his footsteps in high-volume surround sound. Then, even louder, deathly clumps of the man behind the camera, about to kill him.

  Angie felt the last of her resolve crack. “Stop this fucking tape.” She thrust her Glock toward him. “Or so help me, I will fucking shoot you.”

  Giant Jakes crowded in on her. The hand that so often had held hers loomed large in the frame as he shielded his eyes and shouted toward the light. “Hey, buddy, enough’s enough.” Angie watched in horror as Jake stepped forward.

  A burst of gunfire dropped the father of her unborn child to his knees.

  Angie let out a primordial noise, an unearthly sound somewhere between a high scream and a deep cry.

  A second burst of bullets erupted in the speakers.

  Tears ran down Angie’s face. “You motherfucking bastard.”

  On the screens the camera tilted. A voice behind
the lens said, “Dead or alive, Mr. Grunt?” There was a beat of silence before it added, “I choose dead.”

  Angie felt the gun in her hand shift up and jerk suddenly.

  One shot. Two shots.

  Blood spurted from Hendry’s skull. His eyes said his brain hadn’t yet registered what had happened.

  Angie saw his hands twitch.

  There was a sudden boom.

  Even before everything went black, before the debris flew and the pain raced through her nervous system, she knew what had happened.

  He’d triggered the bombs.

  43

  Skid Row, LA

  A succession of blasts ripped apart the old shoe factory.

  The sequence of explosions cleaved a moat into the surrounding yard. It blew away the flimsy metal and plasterboard walls. Left a swirling wall of fire and smoke.

  Ruis Costas and his team were a block away when the quiet of the evening was broken by thunderclaps and the sky filled with rising clouds of smoke and debris.

  He jumped from Tess Holderbach’s ops truck before she’d even braked it. Raced across the road and clambered into the tar pit of smoldering blacktop. Bomb-felled trees were on fire. Dozens of shocked car alarms screeched like alien birds as he scaled the slipping rubble and shouted, “Angie! Angie!”

  Ruis knew all about the risk of exploding gas pipes, fuel containers, maybe further booby traps as he pulled away timbers and steel supports. But the caution he’d shown at Nate Payne’s house had gone now.

  The blasts had turned the old unit into charred Jenga. Wooden beams, wallboards, joists, planks and sheets of metal were piled precariously on top of each other.

  “Angie!”

  This was survivable. That’s what he told himself as he shifted splintered wood and rummaged through layers of broken glass, tile and stone.

  An FBI helicopter appeared out of the darkness, a searing white searchlight crossing back and forth as it neared the blast crater. Across the debris Ruis saw Tess hauling an emergency medikit from the truck.

  Black smoke rising into the darkening sky was batted away by the blades of the copter. Across the backstreets, sirens of fire trucks drowned out the car alarms.

  Through the ground dust and spread of rubble, Ruis saw a flutter of pink fingers rise like stalks of exotic flowers on barren wasteland.

  “Angie!”

  The trembling stems curled in a deathly stoop.

  Ruis scrambled over the blasted building. Pulled aside a mass of boards weighed down by dirt and asphalt.

  He saw her face now. Hair matted with dust and blood. Eyes shut.

  There was no sign of life.

  44

  Angie had dragged the conscious world into the unconscious.

  The feel of her finger flattening against the trigger guard. The hole in Hendry’s skull. Jake’s falling body on the giant green screens. All of those actions and emotions had tumbled surreally into the vortex caused by the explosion.

  She’d covered her belly, not her face. Wood had thumped her back. Dust filled her mouth and nose. Then the blackness had swallowed her.

  Unconsciousness was like an anesthetic. The chemical onslaught in Angie’s brain left her imagining she was lying on her stomach on a towel at the beach. Jake had been astride her, bare-chested, with those tree trunk legs of his threatening to burst his shorts. He’d been rubbing oil on her shoulders and himself against her. She’d felt him move her hair and kiss her ear and her neck. His hands had strayed a little too far—just a little—before she’d grabbed his arm and pulled him down to the sand alongside her. Their eyes had locked and their mouths found each other. Her head swam with the dizziness of his touch.

  She struggled for breath.

  He was kissing her too hard. Too long. She had to break free.

  “Angie.”

  She coughed dust.

  Fingers touched her face.

  Ruis Costas wiped dirt from her eyes. Unseen hands pulled rubble and boards off her body.

  “Are you okay?” Ruis dragged things away. Blood dripped from his grazed knuckles. “Are you all right?”

  She didn’t know. She was half in one world and half in another.

  Angie put a hand to her stomach. It felt wet. She pulled it away and looked at her fingers.

  Red.

  Blood red.

  Her eyes widened in horror.

  The baby.

  Her thoughts were only of her and Jake’s child.

  People around her pulled off the last of the boards.

  Then she saw it.

  Parts of Warren Hendry’s blasted torso lay against her. She got to her feet and scraped his remains from the front of her clothes.

  Ruis and Tess supported her as she wobbled. She felt queasy. Her brain ran mental checks. She remembered it all now. Hendry. Her shots. His phone. The blast.

  Now she did the physical checks. Fingers touched skin and bone, tested vital areas with gentle pressure, moved tentatively over her body like a scan. Her lip was busted. Her cheek cut.

  But her stomach was unhurt.

  The baby was okay.

  Angie managed a smile. “I’m fine. We are fine. Now get me the hell out of here.”

  45

  One Week Later

  Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia

  Angie had dressed in funereal blacks. A new midlength skirt and matching jacket constituted an outfit she’d hoped she’d never wear. Her hair was pinned up, beneath a modest black hat with lace veil, and, for good measure, dark shades.

  In the end, she’d agreed that respects had to be paid. Traditions observed. The Marines, the FBI brass and even the members of his own unit had all wanted Jake honored at Arlington, the vast six-hundred-acre cemetery that was the final resting place for thousands of veterans, astronauts, presidents and even fighters in the Civil War.

  It was, they all said, the only place a hero should be.

  Chips was similarly suited. He wore a white shirt and black tie for the first time in his life and stayed glued to Angie’s side. Her arm looped through his, both of them supporting each other in equal measure.

  The sky was cloudless and the sun shone hot and high above the canopies of the centuries-old trees that shared the green rolling hills of the cemetery with tens of thousands of white, cream and black tombstones.

  Ruis, Crawford Dixon and even McDonald had all been sympathetic to Angie’s wishes, and in the end they’d gone along with the unorthodox accommodation that she’d asked for. Dixon had fixed it with the committee at Arlington that Jake could be cremated privately in Los Angeles, and then a full military service with honors held at the national cemetery, complete with gun carriages and salute.

  Angie had personally brought his ashes over on the flight with her and surrendered them to the cemetery staff. They had then been placed in a special container that fit inside what looked like a normal body-sized casket, covered with the American flag. It was a regular practice, and sadly one used by many veterans blown up in war zones.

  Joe Lamotta was one of the eight Marines who marched crisply alongside the wooden-wheeled caisson as it trundled across the cemetery blacktop led by six white horses. Whatever secret Lamotta was keeping from her didn’t matter today. Nothing mattered except Jake’s memory.

  A bugle sounded. The Marines moved as one and took their corners.

  The casket rose from the carriage and Angie’s heart sank.

  More than a hundred people from the FBI had flown over to show their respects and most of them were fighting back tears. The president and the vice president had sent wreaths and private messages of sympathy that Angie hadn’t even opened.

  A full military band struck up. The soldiers took a synchronized step forward. The final slow journey to the columbarium had begun. Chips tightened his link on Angie’s arm and she gratefully hung on to the only man left in the world that she could truly say she loved.

  With every step, her heart beat as deeply as the military drum booming bass across
the hillsides.

  Everything became blurred.

  The music, the prayers, the dour-faced military chaplain, the staring crowd. They were all smeared across the moment in Technicolor numbness.

  The bearers reached the niche wall and lowered the casket onto a waiting plinth.

  Angie’s eyes roamed the vast slab of gray fieldstone. It ran for almost half a mile and contained more than five thousand plaque-fronted recesses where the urns of veterans, and later their spouses, were deposited. Pigeonholes in symbolic eternity.

  This wasn’t what Jake had wanted.

  She knew it now more than ever.

  Crawford Dixon stepped forward and slid open the end of the casket. The other men moved back in unison and saluted.

  The section chief began to fold the flag.

  Angie let go of Chips’s arm. This was her time. There was no shake of her hands, no hint of uncertainty as she lifted the fine china urn that magnetized everyone’s eyes. She turned and slowly placed it in the tight space of the niche.

  A single bugle sounded “Taps.” The traditional end to U.S. military funerals. A haunting, fading note floated into the cornflower-blue sky and slowly disappeared like a dematerializing spirit.

  Then came a heartbreaking silence.

  Angie had asked that no final words were said. She wanted only total quiet. Sixty seconds of peace for people to remember Jake in their own private way.

  The minute and collective memories of his life ticked by.

  Smack on sixty seconds, a volley of shots burst from the seven-strong funereal firing party.

  Three times their fire filled the sky.

  Angie closed her eyes and felt them fill with tears. There was no more hanging on. The sound of gunfire was too acute a reminder of how he’d died.

  Chips gripped her arm.

  Crawford finished folding the flag and handed it to her.

  It was almost over.

  Soon she’d be in private and able to cry her eyes out.

  46

  A small reception was held after the inurnment. The type of somber event where people instantly split into small groups and, wineglass in hand, shared respectful reminiscences. No one laughed too loud or drank too much. Angie observed the restrained behavior as she bravely did the rounds, thanking people for coming.