ABSOLUTION (A Frank Renzi novel)

by Susan A Fleet

  He reached into the box for another Mr. Goodbar.

  _____

  “Get him within ten feet of those windows and I can pick him off, no problem.” The sharpshooter snapped his fingers with a loud pop.

  Frank glanced at Dana. She shook her head, frowning.

  “How about a flash bang?” he said. “Four of us suit up with masks, go in the side door, stun him with the flash bang—”

  “What if he shoots the girl?” said Lieutenant Murphy.

  “Seems like the girl’s on his side,” said the Corporal.

  “He’s got a gun,” Whitworth said. “She might not be free to leave.”

  “Frank,” Dana said, tugging his arm. “I need to talk to you.”

  He asked Murphy to excuse them for a minute and led Dana back to his car, twenty yards away, beyond earshot of the others.

  “Frank, Tim doesn’t need to die.”

  “I’m not worried about Tim dying. I’m worried about Lisa.”

  “What’s the hurry? Why can’t we just wait them out?”

  “They’ve got food and water, toilets, lights. It could take a long time. He’ll get tired and irritable, and that makes for an unstable situation. He could lose his temper and hurt the girl.”

  “And then they’ll shoot him. You heard the sharpshooter. Frank, we can’t let that happen. We have to go in there and talk him out.”

  “That’s the plan,” he said, pacing in a circle, shoulders tight with tension. “I’ve done this before, up in Boston.”

  “If you pressure him, he’ll kill the girl and then he’ll kill himself. I know how to talk to him, Frank. Let me go in with you.”

  He stared at her, incredulous. “No fucking way.”

  Her mouth quirked at the corners—a frown, not a smile—and anger blazed in her eyes. “I was his therapist, Frank. I know him a lot better than you do. A lot better than these cops. I can talk him out, I know I can.”

  “Can you talk him out of killing Lisa? Can you talk him out of killing me, and you? I’d be crazy to let you go in there.”

  “Since when are you in charge? I’ll ask the Lieutenant.”

  She turned to go and he grabbed her arm. She nailed him with a look that said: Take your hand off me.

  He released her and gritted his teeth, willing himself to stay calm.

  “There’s too much testosterone out here, Frank. Too many guns. Too many people willing to shoot first and talk later.”

  “You are not going in there. It’s too dangerous. End of discussion.”

  As if to prove his point a soft whoop sounded as an ambulance rolled into the service area. Dana saw it too, and heaved a sigh.

  “Okay. But I don’t want you to go in there with a gun.”

  He couldn’t believe they were having this conversation, but that’s what happened when civilians got mixed up in the action.

  “That’s crazy. Tim’s got a gun. We know he shot at a woman, and he probably shot the clerk. If I go in there without a weapon, I’m at a big disadvantage. Tim’s got a gun and he’s got a hostage. He’s got Lisa.”

  “You’re the one with the advantage. Look around, Frank. Two dozen cops with guns just looking for an excuse to kill him. Tim’s smart enough to know he can’t stay in there forever. Besides, if you go in with a gun, he might fly into a rage and kill you right away.”

  “I’m not going to walk in there waving a gun. I’ll hide it.”

  “And lie to him? Tell him you’re unarmed?”

  “Jesus Christ! Of course I’ll lie, to save the girl. That’s the point, Dana, getting the girl out alive. You think I want a gun fight? You think I want people to get killed?”

  She set her jaw. “Promise me you won’t hurt him if he lets Lisa go.”

  Her words stabbed him in the heart. “Oh, I get it. Tim lets the girl go, shoots me and that’s okay with you, right?”

  Her mouth fell open. “Frank! How could you even think that?”

  Conscious of the Sig-Sauer in his ankle rig, he paced a tight circle, jittery with tension. The easiest thing would be not to tell her about the Sig, but he hated lying. He had lied to Evelyn a few times in the beginning when he was leaving the house at night and she asked where he was going. But then she stopped asking. She didn’t want to know.

  There had also been times when he’d felt compelled to lie to the parents of missing children, giving them hope when he knew in his heart they would never see their kid again, not alive anyway. And he wasn’t telling the whole truth to Maureen about the problems that led to the divorce.

  But if he got out of this alive he wanted to have a relationship with Dana. He’d never lied to the two women he’d loved outside of his marriage, and he wasn’t going to lie to Dana, either. He stopped pacing and faced her.

  “I believe I’ve got the best chance at getting Tim to let Lisa go, but face the facts, Dana. Tim thinks Sean and I conspired against him and he didn’t like it, didn’t like it so much he tried to kill Sean. Did you forget there’s an old man in the hospital with a fractured skull because of Tim?”

  “But you’re a cop, Frank. You’re an authority figure, like the father who never loved him. If he sees your gun, he’ll know you don’t love him.”

  He tried to quell his exasperation. Any minute now Murphy might change his mind and not allow him to go inside and negotiate with Tim. For some reason Dana was emotionally invested in Timothy Krauthammer, so invested she wasn’t thinking straight.

  “You’re right on two counts, Dana. I don’t love Tim, and yes, I’m a cop. And cops stare death in the face every day. Most people run from danger. Cops run toward it. I can talk to him. I’ve done this before, and I’m not going in without a weapon.”

  He raised his pant leg and showed her the Sig-Sauer.

  Her face and her body went still, as if every ounce of energy had drained out of her.

  “When you were Tim’s therapist he wasn’t sitting across the desk from you with a gun aimed at your head.”

  She closed her eyes as if saying a silent prayer and then opened them. “Okay, but please don’t shoot unless it’s your last option. Persuade him to come out with the girl. I know you can do it, Frank.”

  “I’ll try, but in a situation like this, things can change in a heartbeat.”

  He turned and looked at the men waiting beside the cruiser. When he turned back he saw tears in Dana’s eyes. She squeezed his hand. “Tim needs love like everyone else, and he never got any. You met his father. You saw what he’s like. Tim doesn’t have to die, Frank. Pretend he’s my brother.”

  My brother. So that’s what this was about. Maybe that’s what life was about, everybody trying to save their loved ones, even the ones beyond hope. Rona trying to resurrect her dead father. Dana trying to resurrect her misbegotten brother. Frank Renzi trying to keep a bad marriage afloat until his daughter was old enough to understand, because Maureen loved both of her parents and wanted them to be a happy.

  And he wanted Dana to be happy. She deserved it.

  “Shooting bad guys is easy,” he said. “What’s hard is loving someone and dealing with the fear of losing them.”

  That got him one of her crooked smiles. “Thank you, Frank. I knew you’d understand. Please be careful. I want you to come out safe.”

  He squared his shoulders, gearing up for the confrontation. “Don’t worry. I’m coming out alive. We all are, me and Tim and Lisa.”

  Hoping his declaration would make it so.

  _____

  Clutching the latest issue of Glamour magazine, Lisa Marie Sampson crawled to the back corner of the store and sat on the floor by the frozen food locker the way Tim had told her. If the cops came, there would be noise and loud shouts, but they wouldn’t shoot them, would they? She was glad Tim couldn’t see her face right now. He would know she was terrified, so scared she was ready to wet her pants.

  To distract herself, she thought about the night she met Tim. He had problems with his father too, nodding his understanding when s
he called her father a liar. That night when he left, she thought he’d kissed her off, but the next night he came back to the bar, looking for her. He liked the lines of scripture she memorized, she could tell. It had taken her all afternoon, poring through the motel Bible, picking lines, reciting them aloud till she got them right. Tim liked it so much he had given her a Bible of her very own.

  He thought she was brave. That’s what he said when she told him she’d run away. But she didn’t feel brave now, not with all those cops screaming at them to come out with their hands up. Tim said they were after him because they thought he’d done something bad.

  What could he have done that was so terrible the cops were ready to shoot him? She couldn’t imagine him doing anything bad, not after he’d given her a Bible. At the bar when she asked if he ever felt like killing anyone, he said he’d thought about killing his father, but saying you wanted to do something and actually doing it were two different things. Okay, he had shot at the woman pumping gas into her car, but he didn’t shoot until she was driving away. Tim didn’t intend to hurt that woman. He just wanted to scare her and make her go away.

  The clerk was different. The fucking asshole had pulled a gun on them and the pissed-off look on his face made it clear he had every intention of killing them. When Tim shot him it scared her to death, but now that she’d thought it through, she could understand why he’d done it. Tim had no choice. It was them or the clerk.

  She didn’t want to think about the dead clerk.

  She picked up her copy of Glamour and looked at Nicole Kidman on the cover, drop-dead gorgeous, sexy lips in a pout, come-hither eyes and a figure to die for. If only she were tall and thin like Nicole and Uma. Ever since Pulp Fiction Uma was her favorite movie star. When it came out on video she bought a copy and watched Uma suck up that vanilla shake and do that sexy dance with John Travolta a zillion times. John looked a little bit like her father, but John was a lot nicer to Uma than her father had ever been to her. And Uma had great moves in Kill Bill.

  Kill Bill. Damn! That reminded her of the clerk on the floor behind the checkout counter, stinking up the store. She didn’t know his name, but he had majorly shit his pants. Now he was dead, and she had his gun. She touched the gun with her fingers, feeling the hard snub-nose barrel through the fabric of her jeans.

  After Tim shot the clerk he’d told her to run away and escape, but what did he think she was? A quitter? A girl who didn’t stand by her man? No fucking way! They were in this together, for better or worse, just like when you were married. She’d only known Tim four days, but she knew she wanted to be with him always. They were soul mates. He understood her and she understood him. What more could a girl want?

  She touched the gun again.

  Tim had given it to her for her own protection, he said.

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She was tired and she wanted this to be over. Maybe her father could help them. He had clout. Lots of people knew Danny Sampson. But damn it to hell, she didn’t want to ask her father for anything, not after begging him for money all those years and listening to him lecture her on how to spend it.

  No. Tim was smart.

  Tim would think of a way to get them out of this.

  She heard the door open. Felt a breath of hot air. Felt very afraid.

  CHAPTER 29

  Feeling naked and vulnerable, Frank pulled open the door and stood in the doorway, pulse pounding, his mouth drier than toast. The Kevlar vest would protect his vital organs, but not his head and neck, or his arms and legs. He sucked air, filling his lungs, forcing the air down to his diaphragm to calm his galloping heart. Where was Krauthammer? And where was the gun?

  Was the gun aimed at his head at this very moment?

  He stepped into the store, smelled an unmistakable stench and thought: Oh, Christ. He stood stock still, his eyes flitting from the display racks by the door to the checkout stand to the shelves stocked with canned goods angling off on either side of him. No sign of Lisa. Or Tim.

  Thinking in proper modes of address now. Krauthammer was too cold and formal. His adversary, the cold-blooded killer of countless women, was a thirty-year-old loser named Tim, whose father never called him by name. A man in need of love, love that would make him stop his murderous rampages, or so Dana believed.

  “Tim,” he called. “How you doing?”

  He took two paces forward, heard the door close behind him with a soft hiss, stopped, and extended his arms with his palms outspread.

  “No weapons, okay Tim? I just want to talk.”

  Nothing but silence, and the putrid stench of death.

  “Hey, Lisa, how you doing? Are you okay?” Innocuous questions. Keep everyone calm, no fast moves, no angry voices.

  Ahead of him was the checkout stand, but no sign of the clerk.

  He took two careful paces forward and looked to his right, down an aisle between five-foot high shelves of groceries. From here he could see a door with a red EXIT sign above it. Bad news. The door was reinforced with a wire-mesh safety-gate and secured with a padlock. Four sharpshooters were outside, ready to break in if a shot was fired—Murphy’s orders—but Tim had barricaded the exit. It would take two or three minutes to break through both doors, and every minute was an eternity when bullets were flying.

  “Well, well, well, Detective Renzi. How nice to see you again.”

  Tim Krauthammer, speaking in a calm voice, or so it seemed.

  He wanted to scream: “Put your gun down and don’t fucking move!” But Tim had the upper hand. Tim had a gun and the girl. The voice had come from somewhere ahead of him, off to his left. He swept the area with his eyes, saw only shelves of canned goods, cereal boxes and bags of potato chips. No sign of Tim. Or the gun.

  Again, he extended his arms to show that he had no weapon.

  “I just want to talk, Tim. I don’t want any trouble.”

  “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?” Tim stepped out from behind a shelf stocked with Campbell’s soup and Betty Crocker cake mixes, arms extended in front of him like the cops on TV, holding a gun in both hands.

  He recognized it at once, a Glock 9-millimeter. A standard Glock came with an eight-shot magazine. He tallied the ammo: two shots at the woman in her car, one at the clerk. Five bullets left, more than enough to do serious damage. Tim stood twenty feet away beside the checkout stand, holding the Glock steady, as if he’d been practicing. Which he had. He’d practiced on the clerk. Frank saw no body but the stink of death was unmistakable.

  “It’s not too late, Tim. You and I can resolve this. Where’s Lisa?”

  “Who?” Tim frowned, then he smiled. “Oh, you mean, Marie.”

  Whatever. “Yeah, Marie. Where y’at, Marie? Are you okay?”

  “Pay no attention to him,” Tim said sharply.

  A telltale shift of his eyes told Frank the girl was behind Tim, hiding somewhere off to Tim’s right. Scared, but unharmed, he hoped.

  “Nobody else needs to die, Tim. Why don’t you put down the gun?”

  Tim raised the Glock and aimed it at Frank’s chest. “I know one person who needs to die. Here’s a hint. His last name begins with R.”

  Making up riddles to show how clever he was.

  “Just put the gun down, Tim, and we’ll all walk out safe and sound.”

  “Not so fast, Detective Renzi. This drama is far from over. You said you wanted to talk. Fine, but this time I’ll ask the questions.”

  _____

  He aimed the Glock at Renzi’s heart and felt a measure of satisfaction when Renzi’s eyes narrowed, relishing the small but unmistakable show of fear. The sweat on Renzi’s forehead belied his false bravado and feigned courage. Daily, the priest-pretender, a man wanted for murder, had altered the sketch in the Clarion-Call to curry favor with Renzi, had conspired against him in exchange for a clemency deal for his own crime. And Mr. Righteous, eager to humiliate him, had been happy to oblige.

  His adversary looked bulkier than he remem
bered, brawny and muscular in his long-sleeved gray sweatshirt and sweatpants. He studied the sweatshirt. Was there a weapon beneath those loose folds? No, it was probably body armor. A shot to the heart wouldn’t kill Mr. Righteous, but a head shot would. All the better.

  He would shoot Renzi between the eyes and destroy his brain.

  “Tim, I gotta tell you something. One shot goes off in here and twenty cops will come through the front door. You won’t have a chance.”

  The sinner smiled. “Guns blazing, is that it?”

  “That’s it,” Renzi said, looking him in the eye. “How many bullets you got left, Tim? My guess is five, unless you’ve got a refill for that thing.”

  Idiot! Why did you leave the spare magazine in the car?

  He gripped the Glock with both hands, trying to quiet the voice in his mind that constantly chided him for his failures and berated him for not acting like Father, the coldly precise mathematician, ever accurate and always correct. The man who posed questions that required tongue-twisting answers, torturing the son who never managed to be perfect enough to satisfy him.

  “Tim, it would be good if you’d put down the gun. It would make it easier for us to talk to each other. I’m worried about Marie.”

  “Why? She’s just an innocent bystander.”

  “That’s what I mean, Tim. Let’s let her leave so you and I can talk.”

  “You want to talk? Fine. Tell me about Sean Daily. He put you onto me, right? Without Daily’s help, you never would have found me.”

  “He didn’t have that much to say about you—”

  “Why did you lie to me? When we talked at the coffee house, you said you didn’t remember him.”

  “I didn’t at the time. But later—”

  “Liar! You had already called Charlie Malone and asked him about Daily. Charlie told me so.”

  A surprised look flitted across Renzi’s face. “Charlie Malone? Gee, Tim, I didn’t know you knew him. Next question?”

  The sinner smiled. This might turn out to be fun. “Daily’s no priest. But you already know that, right? He’s wanted for murder in New Hampshire.”