by Greg Rucka
“Yet he still wants to talk to me.”
“Like I said.”
“About?”
“That’s for him to say.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s got a house near Peden Point, maybe ten, fifteen miles away. He came here about a month after sending me down to watch for the two of you. Wanted to be close by if you finally showed up.”
Panno waited a moment, to see if either Alena or I had any further questions, though I suspect, if we’d had, he wouldn’t have answered them. Then he leaned forward, scooping the photograph in his right hand, making it vanish beneath the breadth of his palm. There was damage to his knuckles, scarring from one or more punches that had hit teeth, perhaps, rather than jaw. He slid the photograph carefully back into the inside pocket of his jacket, then got to his feet.
“I’ll take you to him,” John Panno told us.
Alena was staring at a point on the carpet, her brow furrowed. She glanced up to him, then moved the look to me, and I could see she was more puzzled than curious. Her association with Trent was negligible, and her only dealings with the man had left her unimpressed. It was Natalie she had bonded with. It was Natalie who might have become her friend if she had lived.
“Come on,” Panno said. There wasn’t impatience in his voice, just the command. “He knows you’re here. I’ve already called him. He’s expecting you.”
“All right,” I said, giving Alena my hand and helping her out of the chair. “Let’s go see just how much Elliot Trent hates me.”
CHAPTER
FOUR
Elliot Trent hated me quite a bit, it turned out. I knew this, because the first thing he said to me was, “You don’t deserve to be alive.”
He said it softly, and he said it with conviction, and he said it in my face, and when I didn’t respond immediately, he repeated it.
“You don’t deserve to be alive,” Elliot Trent said.
The last four years or so since I’d seen him hadn’t been kind, and Panno was right: It was the last three of them that had really done the trick. He still stood ramrod straight, still had the head of steel-gray hair, the same eyes, but they were sunken now, in a complexion that had gone sallow, and that beneath the porch light of his beach house home verged on jaundice. New lines had multiplied from the old on his face, and the sunken eyes, while still sharp, were shot through with broken veins. They burned with ferocity and hatred, and they dared me to answer him, and since what he had said to me twice now was probably very true, I didn’t respond.
He grunted, contemptuous, then turned and led the way for Alena and me to follow into the house. Panno took up the rear, and like everything else he’d done, there was nothing threatening to it other than his position.
As if Alena and I would have agreed to come this far only to make a break for it at the last moment.
Trent led us down a hallway, turning off into an open sitting room that afforded a view of the beach through three large bay windows. The walls had that whitewash-plank feel to them, the trim along the windowsill painted in a moss green. Everything in the décor and coloration should have been cheerful, but instead it felt melancholic, the way beach houses always do. There was a desk against one wall with a PC, switched on, and shoved beneath it was a plastic milk crate stuffed full of papers. Two framed photographs flanked the computer on either side, and at first I thought both were of Natalie, then realized only one was; the other was a portrait of his late wife.
Trent moved into the room, then turned, staying on his feet. He motioned to the various seating options, the easy chairs and the love seat, then put his attention on Panno.
“There’s chili on the stove, get some food in you.”
“We feeding them?”
Trent snorted.
Panno left the room the same way we’d entered it, leaving Alena and me standing at its entrance. Trent waited another few seconds, then repeated the refrain for a third time.
“You don’t deserve to be alive.” This time, I was sure that, along with me, he was including Alena in the declaration.
The view from the windows was spectacular. The house was off a street called Loder Avenue, and I could look out the windows and see the darkening beach in the sunset, the barrier islands disappearing beyond in the diminishing light. Come hurricane season, Trent would have a front-row seat.
Alena surprised me by speaking up, saying, “I am sorry for the loss of your daughter, Mr. Trent.”
Trent’s mouth worked slightly, as if he was searching for his teeth with his tongue.
“Was it your bullet?” he demanded. “Is that what you’re trying to say to me, it was your bullet that killed her?”
“We didn’t kill Natalie,” I said.
“Yes, you did.” It was a growl. “You didn’t shoot her, but you sure as hell did kill her.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “And if you think that I had the power to make Natalie do anything she didn’t want to do, you’re deluding yourself. She went her own way, and she always did. She walked away from you and Sentinel. If she had wanted to, she would have walked away from me, too.”
“But she didn’t.” Trent glared at me. “She chose you over me, and you let her die.”
I should have let it pass. He was her father, and it was his grief, and if anyone was entitled to rage at the injustice of it all, it was Elliot Trent.
“No,” I said. “You don’t get to accuse us of that, me of that. You’ve got your guilt because you think you drove her away, you lost her, you’re welcome to it. You earned it. You don’t like me, fine, you never have. You hate me—fine, maybe I’ve earned that, too. But I don’t own Natalie’s death, and neither does Alena, and if that’s what you’ve been waiting eight months or three years or all your goddamn life to say, then we’re done here.”
I turned my back on him, started out into the hall. After a fraction, I heard Alena moving to follow me.
“Don’t you leave,” Trent said.
I didn’t stop.
His voice was hoarse, and pained with the strain of the volume he put upon it. “Dammit, Atticus, don’t leave!”
Panno had appeared in the hallway to my left, coming out of the kitchen. He’d removed his jacket, and I saw that his T-shirt was actually a muscle shirt, missing its sleeves. There was light from the archway, and it spilled out, and I could make out a tattoo on his upper arm, a Chinese dragon in faded color. He had a bowl of his dinner in one hand, was eating a spoonful of it with the other. He didn’t look like he was going to try to stop us.
“You don’t blame me for that,” I said, without looking back at Trent. “You don’t blame Alena, and you don’t blame me.”
Behind me, I heard the creak of a chair, the sound of him taking a seat.
“No,” he said, and he sounded as tired as I’d felt this same morning. “No, all right. That’s fair.”
I turned, and Alena and I moved back into the sitting room. Trent tracked us as we came back, then indicated the love seat. Alena took it, and I followed.
“It’s hard to remember that she was precious to people other than me,” Elliot Trent said. “And it’s difficult to accept that she was precious to people I dislike as much as the two of you.”
“Just had to throw that in there, didn’t you?” I said.
“I’m not going to pretend.” He pointed at Alena with his right index finger, as if trying to stab her in the heart. “She’s a murdering bitch, and you’re her partner now, or so they say. Even if you weren’t, I know what you did for her, I’ve learned that much, at least. She’s a killer, no matter how she tries to change her stripes, and now you’re one, too. Two of The Ten, sitting side by side in front of me. If you think I like that, it’s you who’s delusional, not me.”
Beside me, Alena didn’t move. She wasn’t looking at him, instead focused on the view out the bay windows. The room felt like it was growing darker, despite the lamps that burned on the wall and in the corner.
“You’
ve gone to a lot of time and a lot of trouble to speak with us, Mr. Trent,” Alena said. “Perhaps you’d like to come to your point?”
“In a moment. Given the time and the trouble I’ve taken, I’m allowed an indulgence or two. I’ve been waiting for this for almost three years.”
“Panno said it was eight months,” I said.
“This has been eight months, since the only thing I had left to go on was Drama’s ‘Mr. Collins’ bullshit.”
“And before then, Elliot?”
“Why did you come back?” he demanded, and it was as hostile as anything he had said to us before. “You and Drama, you were gone. No one would have ever found you. You could have stayed hidden until your sins finally found your address, you could have died from old age before anybody knew you were still even alive. Why did you come back, Atticus?”
“I had something to do.”
“And is it done, now? Have you done it? While you were killing Matthew Bowles in Montana and wrapping the Lynch PD’s pants around their fucking ankles, have you managed to do what you set out to do?”
“Not yet.”
“Because you don’t know how. Do you? You’re missing that one little piece you need, and you haven’t the first idea where to find it.”
I stared at him, trying not to hope that he had what Bowles had died without sharing.
“We want the same thing,” Elliot Trent said. “We want the son of a bitch who murdered my daughter dead.”
Panno returned, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand, carrying a bottle of Budweiser in the other. He took the chair at the desk, turning it so he could watch the three of us while we spoke. Outside, night had dropped the curtain, and when there was silence in the room, all of us could hear the sound of the waves on the beach.
“Explain him,” I said to Trent after Panno had settled himself.
“John’s the son of a friend,” he said. “He’s going to help you out.”
“We don’t want his help.”
“You’re getting it whether you want it or not. I don’t care how good she is, how good you think you are, you’re going to need his help. He’s got connections, he’s my man on this, and the trouble you’re in at the moment, you need both those things.”
“Just give me the name,” I said. “I’ll handle the rest.”
He laughed at me. “Simple as that, huh?”
“Simple as that.”
“No.” Trent shook his head. “You think if it was that simple, I’d need you? I’d need her? You don’t have the first idea who you’re going after.”
“He’s in the White House.”
Trent reacted to that, mildly surprised. Panno gave a slight shake of his head.
“And that doesn’t scare you?” Trent asked. “That doesn’t make you pause? What if I told you it was the President of the United States, Kodiak? What if that was the name I gave to you? Would you still be so full of yourself, so damn stupid, you’d take that on?”
“Is it?” I asked.
He laughed again, in spite of the pain it caused him. “No, we’re not going to work like that. I don’t want favors from you. The last thing I want is you doing me a favor. I’m hiring you and your girlfriend there for this. I’m paying you. What’s the rate?”
Now it was my turn to shake my head. “Elliot—”
“Dammit, what’s the rate?”
“It depends on the target,” Alena interposed softly. “If we’re talking about the President of the United States, you don’t have that kind of money. Nobody does.”
“It doesn’t go that high.”
“I’m somewhat relieved,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” Trent said. “What I’ve got for you will still shrink your balls to acorns.”
“So give me the name.”
“How much?” Trent asked. He directed it at Alena.
“As I said, more information is required before that can even be discussed.”
“I want to do this right. The way it’s supposed to be done. What happens now? We’ve made contact, what happens next? You vet me, right?”
Alena hesitated, glancing to me as if to check for my permission to continue. I didn’t move my eyes from Trent.
“Yes,” she said. “The next step would be to verify that you are sincere. And that you are not setting us up.”
“You do that how? General surveillance? Background check?”
“That and more. But in this case it is unnecessary. You have already demonstrated your sincerity.”
“Have I?”
“You once protected the President of the United States, Mr. Trent. No man who has done that job would even dream of joking about trying to assassinate him. It would be inconceivable to even suggest such a thing. Simply joking about the solicitation of such an act is a federal offense. Yet here we are, and you are ex–Secret Service, and you are talking about this to us here, now, in front of a witness. You are more than sincere, Mr. Trent. You may be insane.”
Trent’s expression changed, like someone was tugging its corners like smoothing the sheet on a hospital bed, and he lost his focus on her for a moment, considering her words. I had no doubt in the truth of what Alena had just said, though I hadn’t consciously realized just how enormous a sin Trent was committing. For a moment, it seemed that Trent hadn’t, either.
He got out of his chair, and he did it awkwardly, and it made me wonder if he’d had bypass surgery, and if so how many times, and how recently. At first, I thought he was heading to Panno, but then I realized he was after the shrine to his lost family. He picked up the photograph of his wife, staring at it for several seconds before setting it carefully back precisely where it had rested.
“You don’t have children, do you?” He turned to look at us, on the love seat. “The two of you, wherever it is that you’ve been hiding, you haven’t started breeding?”
“No,” I said, and Alena glanced over at me, probably wondering why I’d bothered to even answer the question.
“Then you can’t understand. You cannot possibly begin to understand. We’re talking about my daughter, my only child, and the man who murdered her. We’re talking about the life that her mother and I created between us. Our child. When Maggie died, I had Natalie and that was all. Breast cancer’s genetic, you know that? It’s not the only risk factor, but it’s probably the most major one. There were times I’d look at Natalie and I swear my heart would stop at the fear of it growing inside her, too.
“You know how you can tell a real parent, Kodiak? It’s not biological. I don’t give a damn if you’ve adopted or warded or fostered, that’s not it. You know how you can tell? It’s a simple test, really. Doesn’t take much to prove it.
“A parent would give anything, do anything, to keep his child from harm, to spare his child pain. That’s what it means to be a parent. It means that the life of your child is more important than your own.”
He stopped speaking, focused now on me, making certain I understood.
“If there was any chance the law would take the man responsible for what happened to her, I would let the law do just that,” Trent said. “But the law won’t. The law will never touch him, because he’s protected himself from it. He’s wrapped himself in it and then elevated himself high above it. He’s not alone in that. There are a lot of them like that in Washington, there always have been, but these days I swear to God it’s worse.
“That’s why I want the two of you. We’re at war here, the fucking country’s at war, and there are bastards like this man more concerned with protecting what goes into his pockets than the people he purports to serve.”
“I’m not taking your money,” I said.
“You will,” Elliot Trent told me. “Because I won’t give you his name unless you do. I’m buying a murder, and I don’t want any of us to have any illusions about it. And I don’t want either of you forgetting that you’re working for me on this. That’s what my money’s buying.”
Alena moved her hand, resting it on
the back of mine. I looked down, saw her long, strong fingers on my own. When I moved my eyes up, she met them with hers, and there was a sorrow in them unlike any I’d seen before, and it was all for me. Even if she forgave herself every other crime she had ever committed, this was the one she knew was coming and the one she would never allow to be absolved. This was what she had done to me.
I looked away from her, to Trent.
“All right,” I said. “But we need the name.”
“He’s the White House chief of staff,” Elliot Trent said. “His name is Jason Earle.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
Jason Earle was born in Point Au Gres, Michigan, the eldest of four children, with three younger sisters. His parents were both deceased. His father had worked in insurance. His mother was a homemaker, and took home the blue ribbon at the county fair for her bread-and-butter pickles thirty-three years in a row, up until the year she died.
I was born in San Francisco, California, the eldest of two children, with a younger brother. My parents and brother, to the best of my knowledge, are still living. My parents are both academics, my father a professor of religion, my mother a professor of English, which goes a long way to explaining how I ended up with a first name like Atticus.
Jason Earle grew up in Point Au Gres, with his family. He played football, was on the debate team, and was elected senior class president. He attended the University of Michigan, and graduated third in his class, with a bachelor’s degree in economics. It was at Michigan where he first got involved in politics, working on both local and state campaigns.
Upon graduation, he was called up for service, but received a deferment, claiming undue hardship on a dependent; his wife of four and a half months, Victoria, was pregnant. He went to law school instead. Then he ran for the Michigan House of Representatives, and lost.
At twenty-nine, he took a job with Gorman Service Industries, a general service provider for gas and petroleum exploration and extraction. He remained with GSI for eleven years. For four of them, he was their assistant chief legal counsel.
