by Chris Holm
The MS-13 Task Force he’d worked for had placed him with the LAPD, posing as a dirty cop with a taste for blow and Salvadoran women, since being useful and corruptible was the only way into Mara for those who weren’t full-blooded Salvadoran. Turns out he didn’t pose well enough. Even now, six months after the shooting— his wounds healed and the coke habit he’d developed in the line of duty kicked quietly on the Bureau’s dime—he felt empty, a hollowed-out version of the man he’d been before.
He had to hand it to his partner, Thompson—she might come across a ballbuster, but even facing down the barrel of a gun today, she kept her wits enough about her to render a full account of what was said, as well as a half-decent description of her ghost. Seemed he fancied himself a cowboy. Anyway, he wouldn’t be free to roam the prairie long—word was, SWAT had chased him into the ventilation system and had every access point covered. If he made a move, they’d nab him—and if he didn’t, they’d gas him unconscious and go in after him.
Problem was, he only half-believed it. It seemed too pat. Too easy. Not that he could put the feeling into words. But the way his guts were twisted up, it didn’t feel like anticipation of the collar. It felt like worry. Like watching the sky for a big-ass second shoe.
Garfield looked the paramedic up and down. Slight, small-boned, dark-skinned: Hispanic or Latina or whatever. Damn pretty, too—nice body, high cheekbones, doe eyes.
She coulda used a touch of makeup, maybe, but then again, she was on the job.
“Special,” he said, with as much charm as he could muster.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“The title’s Special Agent Garfield,” he said.
“Special. Right.” The look on her face suggested she found him anything but.
Garfield heaved a weary sigh and shifted into business mode. There was a time, before the shooting, when he had game—a cocksure swagger women tended to respond to. But ever since, it was like whatever it was they were responding to had atrophied. “All right, then, whaddaya got?”
“White male, forty-five. Illinois license under the name of Alan L’Engle. Claims he tangled with your perp.”
“Leonwood, you mean?”
She flashed him a stern look, as if to say, No, asshole—I know how to read a fucking memo. “Not him, the other one. The guy who got away.”
“Did he, now. So this fellow’s what—some kind of ninja? Because he’d have to be, to go toe-to-toe with a guy like that and just walk away. Unless, of course, he’s just some attention-craving whack-job intent on wasting our time.”
A long pause—the woman’s pretty face unsure. Her tone unsure as well: “Actually, he says he’s a librarian.” Then she mustered up a fresh helping of confidence and added: “But he didn’t just walk away. He got beat up pretty bad. His leg’s been splinted, and his face is a swollen mess. I can’t say for sure without a doctor checking him out—and some imaging to boot—but my guess is, his ACL is blown, and his orbital socket’s cracked, at least.”
“Jesus,” said Garfield.
“You’re not kidding. I spent the last ten minutes picking glass shards out of his cheek—he says your perp hit him with a cocktail glass. He’s lucky his eye is still intact—he could have lost it.”
“He say why the guy attacked him?”
“No. In fact, the picture he painted, I think it was the other way around.”
“Come again?”
“He claims he started it.”
Garfield shook his head in disbelief. “Okay, sweetheart, I’m sold—take me to him. No way I’m passing up a chance to meet a librarian who picked a fight with a goddamn assassin.”
The woman bristled at his chosen pet name. “My name’s Sofia. You’d do well to remember it.” Then she turned on one heel and set off through the teeming crowd.
“I don’t understand,” said Engelmann, all furrowed brow and tortured innocence, to the arrogant FBI agent he’d last laid eyes on back in Miami. Frankly, he was surprised to find the man here so soon—it meant they’d had some foreknowledge of today’s events. Perhaps he and his partner were more competent than he’d given them credit for, and they had tracked his quarry’s movements. Or perhaps that boorish oaf Leonwood had slipped up somewhere along the way, and it was he they’d followed. Either way, Engelmann was glad of this development. After all, he’d failed to complete his mission, and he suspected that despite the Bureau’s best efforts, the man might yet escape. Best to enact a backup plan immediately. “Have I done something wrong? I was only trying to help.”
“No, of course not, Mr. L’Engle—”
“Doctor,” Engelmann corrected for his own amusement. “But please, call me Alan.”
“Alan. Sure. As I was saying, Alan, you’ve done nothing wrong as far as I’m aware—we’re simply trying to construct a fuller picture of the day’s events. So if you wouldn’t mind walking me through what happened...”
“But I already told my tale to the lovely young woman who patched me up,” he protested weakly. Engelmann knew this man would be more apt to believe his story if he was forced to work for it.
“And now I’d like you to tell it to me,” Garfield insisted.
Engelmann raised his hands in acquiescence. The hook was set. “As you wish.”
As Garfield listened rapt, Engelmann wove the tale of Alan L’Engle, reluctant hero—an elaborate braid of half-truths and outright lies. Alan L’Engle, it seems, was in town on business—what business, he never said—and had stopped in at the casino for some gaming and a bite to eat. He’d been handed a free ticket to the Palomera fellow’s check presentation, and not having ever seen so large a sum—or so physically large a check—he’d elected to attend. Okay, yes, he admitted sheepishly, perhaps the possibility of winning something for himself at the balloon drop had been part of the event’s appeal, but he was loath to admit it, since it seemed an unflatteringly selfish notion. “And anyway,” he said—gesturing to his swollen, bandaged face; his mangled, splinted knee—“you can see how well such greed served me.”
He’d been nursing a drink—gin and tonic, and a damn fine one at that; it’s rare on his librarian’s salary he treats himself to Bombay Sapphire—and waiting for the presentation to begin, when he spotted something amiss. An angry-looking man, angling determinedly through the crowd toward the stage, knife in hand. At first, he tried to signal to security, but their attentions were elsewhere, so—foolishly, he realizes now—he attempted to accost the man himself. He cut through the crowd as quickly as he could manage, coming up behind the man and grabbing him by the shoulder. It was clear he startled his attacker, though his startlement sadly did not last long. To this very moment, Engelmann said, he hasn’t the faintest notion of what he intended to do once he reached him, but the man rendered any decision moot by attacking him. The man kicked his leg out from beneath him—“breaking something in the process, I fear”—and smashed a glass into his face.
“And I think he would have killed me, too,” Engelmann concluded, “had that other fellow not started shooting. Then the balloons fell, and he fled. Shortly after, I lost consciousness. When I came to, he was gone.”
“Do you think you could describe this man to a sketch artist, Alan?”
“I think so,” he said, “although I may be able to do you one better.”
“How’s that?” Garfield asked.
“When I came to, I spotted these.” He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to Garfield. It rattled as Garfield took it.
“Careful,” Engelmann said.
Garfield unwrapped the kerchief. In it were three curved triangles of glass. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What exactly am I looking at?”
Engelmann smiled and puffed his chest out with pride. “Those are pieces of the glass he hit me with,” he said. “I collected them off the floor before the paramedics brought me out here, because I thought there might be prints or DNA on them, like in the movies, and I worried they might be trampled. I hope it’s all r
ight that I moved them—I didn’t handle them directly.”
He more than thought there might be prints on them; he’d inspected the shards carefully, and—given that the prints were made in blood—he knew damn well they were his quarry’s. He didn’t worry about them pulling his own prints or DNA from the glass—they wouldn’t find either in any database. But his intel on his quarry—and his firsthand assessment of his fighting style—indicated the man was former military, which meant he likely was on file. He hoped he was right in that regard, because that assumption represented his last chance to take down his quarry before the Council elected to do the same to him.
“Huh,” Garfield said. “Gimme a minute, would you?”
Garfield stepped away from Engelmann’s cot, but not so far away that Engelmann could not hear. Into his radio, Garfield barked, “I got a line on ID’ing our guy. Some evidence in need of processing. This could be the break that we’ve been waiting for—I need a crime scene tech here on the double.”
That done, Garfield talked to the pretty young paramedic, and to two uniformed police officers as well. Then he returned to Engelmann’s bedside.
“Listen, Alan, you’ve been a big help. If you don’t mind, I’d like to send you along to the hospital now to get you patched up. Ms. Alvarez and these two officers are going to ride with you.”
“Of course,” Engelmann said. “I’m not in any danger, am I?”
“No, no, no,” said Garfield, not entirely convincingly. “Nothing like that. But you’ve had one heck of a day, and your testimony may prove just the break we need—I’d like to repay you by ensuring you’re well taken care of.”
“That’s very kind of you, Special Agent Garfield. Honestly, I’m not sure what I’ve stumbled into here, but I’m not ashamed to say I think it’s more excitement than I care for.”
Though Garfield knew the man had simply read off his ID, which was at present on a lanyard around his neck, he smiled at the use of his proper title. Engelmann smiled as well. He knew the seed he’d sown had taken root. All that was left to do was give it time to grow, and then he’d reap his reward.
As they hoisted him onto a rolling stretcher and wheeled him toward the waiting vehicle, he unfastened the buttons on his filthy periwinkle-checked shirt and reached his right hand inside, as though massaging a knot, or checking his ribs for bruises.
“Are you all right, sir?” asked the pretty paramedic, Alvarez. “Something you’d like me to look at?”
“I’m fine, dear,” he replied, fingering the Ruger LC9 hidden in his concealment holster. “In fact,” he said, as she and the two officers loaded him into the ambulance beneath lights flashing red, slamming shut the doors as they climbed inside behind him, “I believe my day is finally looking up.”
30
The ersatz Mr. Gunderson and his security escort— whose name, Hendricks learned, was DeShaun—rode in silence down the elevator toward the gaming floor, the day’s events rendering small talk impossible and leaving grim glances and awkward shuffling in its place.
Hendricks watched the floors tick by, hope and fear playing tug-of-war with his guts. When the count reached one, the floor rose to meet him—and made Norm’s boat shoes pinch. Then the doors slid open with a ding so cheery it seemed sarcastic, and Hendricks’s worries, aches, and pains evaporated—or, more accurately, were rendered so unimportant as to go unnoticed.
The gaming floor had been transformed into a war zone.
The comparison wasn’t an idle one: Hendricks was a man familiar with combat. In his time in Afghanistan, he’d seen his share of bombed houses and burned-out cars, men once warriors wailing at their wives and children being reduced to so much charred meat. Collateral damage, the reporters back home called it, as though it were a side effect, or some minor and acceptable transgression. A sanitary term for a modern war. But war wasn’t sanitary, and war wasn’t modern. It was bloody and it was savage. And looking into the tear-filled eyes of those left with nothing but their grief to cling to, Hendricks had learned the lesson so few back home could grasp: no damage was collateral. Every limb lost, every hovel burned, every wife left husbandless, and every child orphaned created ripples of anger and resentment. Create enough of them, and we’ll one day wind up with a wave that will wash us off the map.
Leonwood had created his share this day.
And by not stopping Leonwood in time, Hendricks had, too.
The gaming floor was nearly empty, but far from quiet. Though no one was there to play them, banks of slot machines clanged and whirred and called out to nonexistent passersby like the soulless, faceless carnival barkers they were. Balloons, some speckled red, drifted past on AC currents, a morbid parody of good cheer. Broken glasses, cocktail napkins, and upturned buckets spilling chips were everywhere, though those shell-shocked few who zombie-walked among them were too dazed and horrified for opportunism to kick in. A few bodies lay akimbo on the ground, ashen and unattended to, the living taking priority over the dead. Armed men were stationed throughout the massive room—some stock-still beneath their flak helmets, hands resting on their gunstocks, while others ushered the crying wounded toward the massive lobby doors.
Hendricks watched awhile from inside the elevator, stunned into immobility. He didn’t understand at first how so many could be hurt—the shooting had taken place in an enclosed banquet hall, not on the gaming floor—but then a woman with a sticky purpled bruise on her upper arm staggered past, and he recognized the imprint of a sneaker tread.
These people had trampled one another.
Leonwood had opened fire and started a stampede.
When the elevator doors began to close, Hendricks realized DeShaun no longer stood beside him. He’d stepped out when the doors first opened and was now looking back at Hendricks expectantly, a hand extended to prevent the door from shutting all the way.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot you hadn’t seen this yet. I should have warned you. You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Hendricks said weakly, not sure if his tone was an affectation for his cover’s sake or not. He cleared his throat and tried again: “I’m fine.”
“C’mon, then. Let’s go find your wife.”
Together, he and DeShaun traversed the gaming floor— oddly brothers now, it seemed, bonded by the horrors that surrounded them. They stopped to help a man with a bleeding gash through his eyebrow—DeShaun blotting at the injury with the sleeve of his Pendleton’s sport coat, Hendricks linking elbows with the man to lead him back to daylight. When they stepped outside into the covered drop-off circle, the man was taken by an EMT to God-knows-where.
After a moment’s consultation with a uniformed cop, DeShaun indicated a makeshift pen to one side of the parking lot—two ambulances and a couple hundred people contained inside. “They’ve set up a sort of nerve center over there, where evacuees not badly injured can check in and find each other. I’m sure your wife will be there.”
“Thank you,” said Hendricks—and he meant it, too. Never mind that he was lying to this kid, or that he was painfully aware of the two dozen news cameras aimed his way as they ambled over to the barricade. The cameras were still some distance off—kept at bay by police tape patrolled by what must have been half of Kansas City’s uniformed PD—but Hendricks wasn’t fooled. They were close enough to pick him up just fine. A pretty picture for his growing file, perhaps, provided the Feds elected to confiscate the footage. He did his best to look away.
When they reached the penned-in area, they were greeted by an FBI agent in an agency windbreaker and aviator sunglasses, her dirty-blond hair pulled through the back of her matching agency baseball cap. She and DeShaun exchanged a solemn nod, after which DeShaun placed his hand briefly on Hendricks’s shoulder—a simple if heartbreakingly kind gesture of goodwill and reassurance.
Hendricks’s eyes met the agent’s, or tried. Proper eye contact is key to selling any con—too little and the mark reads the swindler as shifty, too much and he comes off overeager and c
reepily intense. But with the woman’s eyes hidden behind two reflective slabs of glass, her stare was cold and alien and gave up nothing of her receptiveness or her intentions. Hendricks felt exposed, uncertain—a feeling only bolstered by the three dozen sets of eyes amid the milling, haggard crowd that turned hopefully toward him, only to drop away, disappointed, as they realized the new arrival was not the one they waited for.
“Name?” the agent asked, her pen hovering above the clipboard in her hand. Hendricks glanced down at it and saw two lists: one printed and dotted with check marks— no doubt the hotel registry; one scrawled on a scrap of loose leaf—the day-trippers for whose visit there was no record, Hendricks supposed. He wished his cover allowed him to claim membership in the latter camp, whose identities were harder to confirm—but DeShaun still lingered within earshot.
“Gunderson,” Hendricks said quietly—hoping neither Patty nor Norman was close enough to hear.
The woman scanned her list. Her earpiece crackled loudly. Then she looked at him as if for the first time, her glasses bouncing his own image back at him in duplicate. “I’m sorry,” she said, frowning—distracted or suspicious, he wasn’t sure. “What was the name again?”
Hendricks’s heart pounded in his chest. His mouth went dry. A ripple of unease spread through the crowd. He wondered if its source was Patty Gunderson. If she’d just told the folks around her the man at the gate was an impostor.
“Gunderson,” he repeated. He felt his fight-or-flight response kick in and readied himself to make a run for it if it proved necessary.
Then he realized the guard’s distraction and the crowd’s unease had nothing to do with him. All the nearby emergency responders’ radios had crackled to life at the same time—the gate agent’s included. Seconds later, half the cop cars on the security perimeter lit up and took off at once.
