Last Man Standing

by David Baldacci

  Shake of the head.

  “Hey, Paulie, you know the difference between talking to you and talking to a wall?”

  “What?”

  “Not a damn thing.”

  “What do you want me to say, Web? I saw the kid, I watched the kid and then the kid was gone.”

  “Are you telling me he didn’t say one thing to you?”

  “He was pretty tight-lipped. He told us his name and gave us his address. We noted that down. Mickey tried to talk to him some more but got nothing. Hell, Cortez doesn’t even talk to his own kids. See, we weren’t all that sure what the boy’s role in all this was. I mean, we’re hauling ass to the courtyard, see your flare and stop. Then this kid comes out of the dark with your cap and a note. I wasn’t sure if he was on our side or not. I didn’t want to screw up legally by asking him stuff I shouldn’t.”

  “Okay, that was actually smart of you. But you passed him off to the suits without a word? How the hell does that compute?”

  “They flashed their creds, said they were there for the kid and that was that. It’s not like we had the authority to say no. HRT doesn’t do investigations, Web, we just bang ’em and hang ’em. The suits do the snooping. And I had other things on my mind. You know me and Teddy Riner were in Delta together.”

  “I know, Paulie, I know. So about what time was that, when the suits showed up?”

  Romano thought about this. “We weren’t there that long. It was still dark. Say, two-thirty or so.”

  “Pretty efficient for WFO to get its act in order and send guys for the kid that quickly.”

  “So what’d you want me to say to them? Hey, guys, you can’t have the kid, you’re way too efficient, and the FBI just doesn’t work that way? Boy, that’d do wonders for my career. I could kiss my GS fourteen salad days good-bye with that one.”

  “The suits, can you give me a description?”

  Romano thought this over. “I already told the agents.”

  “A bunch of other suits. So tell me. It won’t kill you. Trust me.”

  “Right. If I was that stupid you wouldn’t have to stop at the bridge because you could sell me Brooklyn too.”

  “Come on, Paulie, assaulter to assaulter. Hotel Team to what’s left of Charlie.”

  Romano thought about this for a bit and then cleared his throat.“One of them was a white guy. A little shorter than me, thin but wiry. Satisfied?”

  “No. Hair?”

  “Short and blond—he’s a Fed, what else is it going to be? You think J. Edgar walked around with a ponytail?”

  “Some folks claim he did. That and a dress. Young, old, in between?”

  “Thirties. Had on your standard-issue Fed suit, maybe a little nicer than that, actually. A lot nicer than anything you have in your closet, London.”

  “Eyes?”

  “He had on shades.”

  “At two-thirty in the morning?”

  “Well, they might have been tinted prescription glasses. I wasn’t exactly gonna interrogate the guy on his choice of eyewear.”

  “You remember all that and you can’t remember the guy’s name?”

  “He flashed his creds and I zoned out. I’m in the middle of a crime scene with people running everywhere and six of our guys with their heads blown off. He came for the kid and he took the kid. He walked the walk and talked the talk. Hell, he probably outranked my ass.”

  “What about his partner?”

  “What?”

  “His partner, the other suit, you said there were two of them.”

  “Right.” Romano didn’t look so certain now. He rubbed at his eyes and sipped his beer. “Well, see, that guy didn’t actually come over. The one suit pointed at him, said it was his partner and that was that. That other guy was talking to some cops, so he never actually came over.”

  Web looked at him skeptically. “Paulie, that means you don’t know for sure if the guy you talked to was even with that other guy. He could’ve been working all alone and just been blowing smoke up your butt. Did you tell the real honest-to-God FBI all this?”

  “Look, Web, you were an honest-to-God Fibbie. You’re used to investigating this kind of crap. I was a Delta. I only joined the FBI so I could jump to SWAT and then onto HRT. It’s been a long time and I’ve forgotten how to play detective. I just bang ’em and hang ’em. Just bang ’em and hang ’em, man.”

  “Well, you might just have hung a little boy.”

  Romano stared at him angrily for a few seconds and then slouched down and looked off. Web figured Romano was thinking about his own two sons. Web wanted the guy to feel guilty, so this blunder would never happen again. “That kid’s probably in some landfill right now. He has a brother. Some badass named Big F.”

  “Don’t they all,” growled Romano.

  “Kid hasn’t had much of a life. You saw the bullet hole on his cheek. At all of ten years old.”

  Romano took a slug of beer and wiped his mouth. “Yeah, well, six of our guys are dead and they shouldn’t be and I’m still wondering why it wasn’t seven.” He shot Web a nasty look as he said this.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I’m getting some professional help now trying to figure that out.” This was a huge admission for Web to make, particularly to Romano, and he immediately regretted it.

  “Oh, yeah, that makes me feel so good I’m gonna run through the streets yelling ‘Web’s seeing a shrink, the world is safe.’”

  “Give me a break here, Paulie, you think I wanted to freeze out there? Do you think I wanted to see my team get shot up? Do you?”

  “I guess you’re the only one who can answer that,” Romano fired back.

  “Look, I know this all looks bad, but why are you giving me such a hard time?”

  “You want to know why? You really want to know why?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, I did talk to that kid, or let me put it better. The kid talked to me. You wanta know what that kid said?”

  “I’m sitting here, Paulie.”

  “He said you were so scared you were bawling like a baby. He said you begged him to please don’t tell anybody. You were the biggest piece of chickenshit he’d ever seen. He said you even tried to give him your gun because you were scared to use it.”

  Talk about your ungrateful kid. “And you believed that crap?”

  Romano took a swig of his beer. “Well, not the part about the gun. You ain’t giving that damn SR75 to nobody.”

  “Thanks a lot, Romano.”

  “But the kid must have seen something to make him say stuff like that. I mean, why would he lie about everything?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Paulie, maybe because I’m a cop and he’s just not big into law enforcement types. Why don’t you go ask some of the snipers about it? They can tell you if I was crying or shooting. Or maybe you wouldn’t believe them either.”

  Romano ignored this. “I guess people turn chickenshit all the time, course I wouldn’t really know about that.”

  “You know, you’re a real bastard.”

  Romano put down his beer and half rose out of his chair. “You want to find out how much of a bastard I really am?”

  The two looked to be working up to blows when Angie came over and said hello to Web and gave him a comforting hug along with some soothing words.

  “Paulie,” she said, “maybe Web would like to stay for dinner. I’m making pork chops.”

  “Maybe I don’t want Web to stay for damn pork chops, okay?” growled Romano.

  Angie bent down and grabbed Romano’s shirt, jerking him up. “Excuse us for a sec, Web,” she said.

  Web watched as Angie dragged her husband over to the side of the garage and gave him what Web could only describe as a dressing down of intimidating proportion. She tapped her bare foot and waggled her hand in his face and did a very fine impersonation of a drill sergeant taking a serious bite out of an enlisted man’s ass. And Paul Romano, who could kill just about anything that lived, just stood there, head down, and qui

etly took it from his “little woman.” Angie finally led him back over to Web.

  “Go ahead, Paulie, ask him.”

  “Angie,” said Web, “don’t make him—”

  “Shut up, Web,” snapped Angie, and Web shut up. Angie smacked the still-silent Romano on the back of the head. “Either ask him or else you’ll be sleeping in the garage with that stupid car of yours.”

  “Do you want to stay for dinner, Web?” asked Romano as he stared at his lawn, arms folded across his chest.

  “A pork chop dinner,” prompted Angie, “and why don’t you try saying it like you actually mean it, Paulie?”

  “Would you like to stay for a pork chop dinner, Web?” asked Romano in the meekest little voice Web had ever heard, and damn if he didn’t even look Web in the eye when he said it. That Angie was a miracle worker. With all Romano’s suffering, how could Web say no, although the truth was, he was really tempted to decline the invitation just to tick the guy off.

  “Sure, Paulie, I’ll stay, thanks for thinking of me.”

  As Angie went in to start dinner, the men worked on their beers and stared at the sky.

  “If it makes you feel any better, Angie scares the crap out of me too, Paulie.”

  Romano looked over and for the first time, at least in Web’s recent memory, he actually smiled.

  Web looked down at his beer. “I guess you told uptown what the kid said.”

  “Nope.”

  Web glanced up, surprised. Romano just stared straight ahead.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it wasn’t true.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “I know when kids are lying their asses off, my own boys do it enough. I guess I was just pulling your chain. Guess that’s gotten to be a habit.”

  “But I really can’t believe the kid said all that, Paulie. I saved his butt. Hell, he got lucky twice. It’s only thanks to me he didn’t have another bullet hole in his head.

  Romano looked at him, puzzled. “That kid didn’t have a bullet wound.”

  “Sure he did, on his left cheek. And he had a knife slash on his forehead too, long as my pinky.”

  Romano shook his head. “Look, Web, I was with the kid and maybe I wasn’t paying all that much attention to him, but I wouldn’t have missed something like that. I know what a bullet wound looks like because I got one of my own. And I sure as hell have popped enough guys to know what they look like.”

  Web sat up very straight. “What was his skin color?”

  “What the hell are you talking about, what was his skin color? He was black!”

  “Damn it, I know that, Paulie! I mean light-skinned? Dark?”

  “Light-skinned. Smooth as a baby’s ass, and not a mark on him. From my lips to the Pope, I swear.”

  Web smacked the arm of the chair. “Damn!” Kevin Westbrook, at least the one Web had run into, had chocolate brown skin.

  After dinner with the Romanos, Web visited Mickey Cortez and got the same story. He’d heard no other statements from the kid. No ID on the suit who had taken him away, but corroboration on the time. And no bullet wound on the boy’s cheek.

  So who had made the kid-switch? And why?

  11

  Fred Watkins climbed out of his car after another long day for the U.S. attorney. It took him an hour and a half to drive into Washington each day from his northern Virginia suburb and about the same coming home. Ninety minutes to drive barely ten miles— he shook his head at the thought of it. His work wasn’t over either. Despite having risen at four A.M. and having labored ten hours already today, he had at least another three hours awaiting him in the small study he used as an office in his house. A little dinner and some brief quality time with his wife and teenage kids and he would burn the midnight oil. Watkins specialized in high-profile racketeering cases at the Department of Justice in Washington after a long stint as a humble commonwealth’s attorney in Richmond prosecuting whatever miscreants came his way. He enjoyed the work and felt he was doing a real service for his country. He was reasonably well compensated for doing so, and though the hours were sometimes long, his life had turned out all right, he believed. His oldest would be going off to college in the fall, and in another two years so would his youngest child. He and his wife had plans for traveling then, seeing parts of the world they had only viewed in travel magazines. Watkins also had visions of taking an early retirement and teaching as an adjunct professor of law at the University of Virginia, where he had received his degree. He and his wife were thinking of maybe even moving to Charlottesville someday permanently and escaping forever the traffic dungeon that northern Virginia had become.

  He rubbed his neck and breathed in the fresh air of a nice, cool evening. A good plan overall; at least he and his wife had a plan. Some of his colleagues patently refused to think beyond tomorrow, much less years from now. But Watkins had always been a practical, commonsensical man. That’s how he had always approached his law practice and that’s how he dealt with life.

  He closed the car door and headed up the sidewalk to his house. On the way he waved to a neighbor pulling out of her driveway. Another neighbor was grilling next door, and the smell of cooking meat filled his nostrils. He might just fire up the barbecue tonight too.

  Like most people in the Washington area, Watkins had read about the ambush of the Hostage Rescue Team unit with great interest and sinking despair. He had worked with some of those folks on a case once and had nothing but good things to say about their bravery and professionalism. Those guys were the best, at least in his book, and they did a job that virtually no one else would be willing to do. Watkins had thought he had had it tough until he saw what those fellows went through. He felt especially sorry for their families and was even thinking about inquiring if a fund had been established to help them. If there wasn’t such a fund, Watkins was thinking about starting one. Just another item to add to the old to-do list, but that’s just how life worked, he guessed.

  He never saw it until it rose from the bushes and charged right at him. Watkins yelled out and then ducked. The bird missed him by inches; it was the same damn blue jay. The thing seemed to lie in wait for him most nights, as though trying its best to scare him into a premature coronary. “Not this time,” said Watkins to the fleeing creature. “Not ever. I’ll get you before you get me.” He chuckled and walked up to the front porch. As he opened the front door, his cell phone rang. Now what? he thought. Few people had this number. His wife, but she wouldn’t be calling him because she had no doubt seen him pull in the driveway. It had to be the office. And if it was the office, that meant something had happened that would probably take up the remainder of his evening and perhaps even require him to turn around and drive back into town.

  He pulled out his phone, saw that caller ID was unavailable and thought about not answering it. But that just wasn’t how Fred Watkins did things. It might be important, yet maybe it was just a wrong number. No, no barbecuing tonight, he thought as he punched the talk button, ready to confront whatever it was.

  They found what remained of Fred Watkins in the neighbor’s bushes across the street where the blast that disintegrated his house had delivered him. The instant he’d hit the talk button a tiny spark from his phone ignited the gas that had filled his house, gas that Watkins had little chance of detecting when he opened the door because of the smells of grilling meat next door. Somehow his briefcase had survived, still clamped in a hand that was now virtually all bone. The precious papers were intact and ready for another attorney to take over from the deceased lawyer. The bodies of his wife and children were found in the wreckage. Autopsies would show that all of them had already died from asphyxiation. It took four hours to extinguish the fire, and two other homes were engulfed before the conflagration was put out. Thankfully no other people were seriously injured. Only the Watkins family had ceased to exist. The question of how he and his wife would spend their retirement years after a lifetime of hard work was laid to rest with them. They had no problem finding Watkins’s phone, because it had melted to his hand.

  At about the time Fred Watkins’s life was ending, ninety miles south in Richmond, Judge Louis Leadbetter was climbing into the back of a government car under the watchful eye of a United States marshal. Leadbetter was a federal trial judge, a position he had held for two years after being elevated from being chief judge of the Richmond Circuit Court. Because of his relative youth—he was only forty-six—and his exceptional legal ability, many folks in powerful places had their eye on Leadbetter as eventually a candidate for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and perhaps even one day taking his seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. As a judge in the legal trenches Leadbetter had overseen many trials of varying complexity, emotion and potential volcanic -->