by Roger Johns
With the leg barely within her grasp, Wallace jerked. The table snapped free and tottered toward her. Once it was close enough, she toppled it and dragged it close enough that she could use it to help hold Mason steady and to shield him from further gunfire.
Sirens howled in the distance.
Carefully, she probed under Mason’s jacket, feeling for his gun, hoping he still had it. She found the straps of his shoulder harness, but it was twisted around his body. She traced the harness around his blood-soaked chest. The holster was pulled out of position. It was underneath him.
Wallace gently lifted his right shoulder, feeling beneath him for the holster, which was wedged under his left shoulder. The weight of his body was keeping the gun from springing free. She pulled the holster toward her, but stopped when the sliding strap started to dislodge the shoe that was stanching the flow of blood.
Inch by inch Wallace spider-walked both of her hands beneath Mason’s shoulders, trying to get his weight off the holster without disturbing the shoe. Her gaze toggled between Mason and the door to the hall. She felt the gun. The mouth of the holster was facing to her left. She tented her aching right hand over the mouth of the holster—just enough to shift his weight off the gun without moving the shoe. Noise from the hallway drew her attention. Don was on his knees in the doorway. Mason’s gun sprang free into her left hand. Don raised his weapon.
In a single motion, she leaned right to draw fire away from Mason and slid the gun from beneath his limp torso. Left-handed, she fired. The bullet grazed Don’s head, scoring a shallow furrow into the scalp above his left ear.
Loud voices came from the front of the house. Someone banged on the front door. The door frame splintered and voices called from the living room.
Wallace switched the gun to her right hand, as Don lunged past her through the kitchen, toward the utility room. She turned, tracking him. She fired, but missed, when Don stumbled and sprawled near the door. She frantically checked to make sure her movement hadn’t caused Mason to start bleeding again. The back door banged open and Don’s footsteps scraped across the concrete slab at the bottom of the steps.
TWENTY-NINE
1:45 P.M.
Don slipped from the house and scuttled toward the fence. His mind was racing. After he had safely stowed the notebook and flash drives, he would return and take care of the detective. Using Carla’s key, he unlocked the gate and hustled into the alley in the direction of Matt’s car. Now that his identity was known, he would have to abandon his rental vehicle. If it wasn’t already the subject of an APB it was certain to be within the hour. But nobody would be looking for Matt’s car for a while.
Prudence dictated that he vacate the area as quickly and as surreptitiously as possible. He hated having to leave without getting rid of Carla first. But, with Gable dead, she was no longer useful as bait. And with the frenzy of law enforcement activity that was about to erupt in this little burg—foot patrols, roadblocks, maybe even door-to-door searches—any value she had as a bargaining chip was outweighed by the risk of getting caught as he dragged her out of the house. He needed to be gone before the net closed around him.
A heavy vomitus feeling blossomed up from his groin where the detective had kicked him. She had hurt him, but he had won the prize. He reached down to pat the little package stuck in the front of his pants—but it was gone.
She must have knocked it loose when she booted him in the groin. In all the commotion, he hadn’t noticed that it had slipped from its hiding place. What a goddamn disaster. What an unmitigated disaster.
Mounting rage blotted out the pain in his head and the ache between his legs. Holding a blood-soaked handkerchief to the gash above his left ear, Don peered back through the gate, raking his eyes along the path he had taken from the back door to the alley. It wasn’t there. It must still be in the house.
As Don continued his survey, a stocky man carrying a gun and wearing body armor with “FBI” stenciled in yellow capitals across the front stepped out of the back door. The agent studied the blood spatters on the concrete slab at the base of the steps, trying to gauge the direction of whoever had left them. Then he systematically scanned the yard, his head slowly moving in short methodical arcs. Before the agent’s gaze could find him, Don ducked behind the hedgerow lining the fence.
As Don hustled toward the car, Plan B formed in his mind. Even before it fully manifested itself, he fell in love with the idea. He would kill two birds with one stone. He would recover what he had snatched, at such great cost, from Matt Gable and he would punish the detective who had taken it from him.
* * *
A paramedic pulled Wallace away from Mason so they could get to work. Her thoughts turned completely inward. She barely felt the hand on her arm, ushering her into the hall.
“I’m okay,” she kept saying. “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay.”
She heard the paramedics calling out the steps in their procedures. Sporadic bursts of static from shoulder-mounted radios punctuated their chatter with some faraway ER doc. She heard these things, but none of them registered. Shameful, terrifying thoughts and images seized control of her—Mason’s juddering legs as she battled Don in the hallway, the ridiculous amount of blood soaking through Mason’s shirt and pooling around him as she fought to stop the bleeding, the flubbed wrong-handed shot at Don from less than six feet away. Mostly, though, she thought that she should never have let him enter the house with her. She had listened to him and ignored her instincts and Mason was paying the price for her failure of judgment.
From the bathroom, Wallace heard someone radio in the corpse in the tub—the missing Matt Gable she was willing to bet. The blood on the corpse’s face had kept her from positively identifying him earlier.
As she turned toward the front of the house, looking for a place to sit and recover her equilibrium, she felt something under her left boot. She felt it, but it almost didn’t cut through the blizzard of sensory input clamoring through the air around her. Almost. It made just enough of an impression to sneak past a fast-rising wall of worry that was trying to fence off the rational part of her mind. She looked down, but she couldn’t tell what it was. She made a conscious effort to focus her mind on what her eyes were seeing.
It was a nylon pouch with strips of tape stuck to one side. She recalled the cut ends of tape she had seen on the body in the tub. Opening the pouch, she poured the contents into her hand—a small, leather-bound notebook and two flash drives. She thumbed through the notebook, then returned the items to the pouch and slid it into a cargo pocket on the outside of her pants leg.
The FBI and the paramedics had arrived at almost the same time. Not long after that, Whitlock arrived and started lecturing the feds about some arcane aspect of crime-scene management. Mason was stretchered out the front door and into an ambulance. Light bars atop the responder vehicles strobed into the darkening sky and small knots of people from the neighborhood gathered on the sidewalk.
There was a tense moment between Wallace and the FBI agents when they tried to debrief her on the spot. The ambulance was leaving, so unless they intended to arrest her, she intended to follow it. But Wallace didn’t fight Whitlock when he insisted on taking custody of both her and Mason’s weapons. Both had been fired by an officer in the line of duty, and she knew he was required to keep them.
On the way to the hospital it began to rain—the kind of slow, steady, steamy rain that could go on for hours. Tire-spray from the road coated everything with a thin film of grime, and deepening cloud cover fooled some of the streetlights into coming on early.
BATON ROUGE 3:00 P.M.
Just as she was pulling up to the hospital, Jason Burley called to remind her that it was three o’clock and to find out why she wasn’t in his office handing over the case. He blew a fuse, when she told him what had happened. He went completely ape-shit when she told him she wouldn’t be coming back to headquarters until Mason was out of surgery. She knew it was a poor career move to hang up on B
urley when he was in mid-scream, but she had bigger worries at the moment. When he didn’t call back, she assumed he had either accepted her decision or he was busy preparing her termination papers.
Not to be deterred, the FBI agents followed Wallace to the hospital. They cornered her in the hallway outside the ER, then they all trooped down to a vacant office for a friendly game of twenty million questions. Once they established to their satisfaction that Wallace didn’t know any more about where Don might have gone than they did, they left the hospital.
When Wallace returned to the waiting room outside the ER, she learned that Mason had been taken into surgery and she was directed to the surgical waiting room.
Despite her exhaustion and the slow march of the hours, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She was hungry but she couldn’t eat. And she didn’t even try to stop her mind from going over and over her decision to let Mason go into Carla’s house with her. She felt ashamed and guilty and desolate. She had spent years carefully avoiding the kind of man who might provoke such deep feelings so that her mistakes wouldn’t—couldn’t—put someone she cared about in danger again. Yet, somehow, that was exactly what had happened.
The place on her abdomen where Don had kicked her was sore and bruised. Her right hand was swollen and tender, and she felt pretty sure something was fractured. The triage nurse had asked if she wanted to have it looked at, but Wallace declined. She didn’t want to think about her hand because that made her think about Don and the rest of the miserable situation. She had no interest in being distracted from wallowing in her personal miseries.
When it finally dawned on her that she should probably try to contact Mason’s family, she retrieved his satchel from her car and looked through it for names and phone numbers. She felt strange looking through his things. Unable to find anything helpful, she was about to give up when she spied an envelope shoved into a divider pocket. Her initials were scrawled on the front.
She was momentarily mystified by the odds and ends inside. Then it hit her. The receipt from the vegetables she used on Marcels, the swizzle stick from the Bridge City Diner, a matchbook from the restaurant where they shared their first meal the day he arrived, their temporary visitor badges from the Tunica lab. Souvenirs from their adventures together. Had he planned to present them to her? What would that little scene have been like? A tiny smile jockeyed her bleak expression aside as she played with the possibilities.
Her phone rang.
It was Colley’s landline. Shit. She had promised to return during the afternoon to continue her protest against his decision to retire.
“Colley, I’m so sorry—”
“I’ll tell him you said so.”
It was Don.
THIRTY
8:00 P.M.
“Let me talk to Colley,” she demanded. “I have to know they’re okay.”
“I’ve misjudged you,” Don said, playfully. “After that spirited fight you put up in the Chapman woman’s home, this afternoon, I expected a good deal more bluster from you. I had steeled myself for the onslaught of your righteous indignation, armored my fragile ego against a string of frightful threats. Instead, you come with this boring, no-nonsense approach.”
“Just tell me what you want, then,” Wallace countered. She grabbed Mason’s bag and sprinted for the exit.
“You don’t give the orders,” Don said flatly. “And you need to understand something. Until this business we have together is concluded, you will speak only and always to me. You will not attempt to communicate with anyone else. You will not hang up. And you better pray to all the gods you know that this call doesn’t drop, because if it ends for any reason, or if I think you’re stepping out on me, I’ll put a whole lot of dearly beloved blood on the walls … and on your conscience. Now, back to what I’m after. I want the thing you somehow took from me during our little lovers’ quarrel. It was a thoughtful parting gift from the former Matt Gable and it has a lot of sentimental value to me.”
“And what exactly would it be that you lost?”
“I didn’t lose it. That would imply that I’m careless and I assure you I am not. You managed to deprive me of my little treasure, undoubtedly when you tried to emasculate me.”
Wallace recognized his technique. Lots of hostage-takers used it. They toyed with you. They mixed glib humor and a cavalier attitude toward the situation with the nastier elements of their endeavor, hoping to convey the idea that they were unstable and capable of inappropriate, unpredictable actions. The whole idea, of course, was to put you in the mood to meet their demands, lest they be provoked to give in to their inappropriate, unpredictable impulses. She had been trained to see past this, to maintain control of the situation and her capacity to reason, but that only worked well when the hostages were strangers.
As soon as she cleared the exit, she raced to her car, which was parked only a few yards from the building, in a space reserved for law enforcement vehicles.
“The sounds coming through your phone just changed,” Don said, the instant she stepped outside the hospital. “You were indoors, and now it sounds like you’re outside. What are you doing, Detective?”
“I was getting out of my car,” she lied, “but I’ll stay where I am. What do you want me to be doing?” she asked, sliding behind the wheel and slamming the door hard to make sure he heard it. Little demons of fear were starting to swarm over the wall. She focused on the fact that Don was winding her up, and she told herself not to fall for it. As she fought to remain unaffected, her thoughts flashed to Mason who was fighting a battle of his own. She grabbed her Bluetooth headset that was stashed above the visor.
“We’re going to make a trade, Detective … your precious little friends for you and the package that remained behind when you forced me to flee the scene earlier. And you better be able to deliver.”
Wallace buttoned her phone inside her shirt pocket as she switched on the headset.
“What makes you think I could even get whatever this thing is that you want?” she asked. “If it stayed behind after you left, it’s probably been taken into evidence by now. The place was crawling with police and crime-scene techs. Nothing of any consequence would go unnoticed.”
Wallace coughed to cover the sound of her car starting.
“If, as you say, it was certain to be found, then I’ll assume that it was found,” Don insisted. “And that would have been a big deal. Everyone in the place would have heard about it right then and there, including you. And I know you were there. You were there for a good long while because I was halfway to Baton Rouge by the time the fucking ambulance nearly ran me off that God-forsaken road on its way to the hospital. And then there you were in your little Barney Fife squad car, in hot pursuit, all lathered up about your new best friend Mason. Simple logic tells me that if the police found it, then you heard about it, and if you heard about it, you would know what it is. And you wouldn’t need to keep asking me what I’m after.”
Wallace remained quiet, afraid anything she said, even her tone of voice, would give her away. She moved quickly into the traffic pattern around the hospital.
“Sorry, Detective, but your claims of ignorance just don’t add up. You’re a liar, and not a very good one. You should have just said you knew what it was and that you knew it was bagged as evidence. That I would have believed. But claiming ignorance when we both know my property would have been the belle of the ball is implausible. In fact, I’m willing to bet my badly bruised testicles that you are the one who found it and that you’ve still got it. So you can give your little charade a rest. Having my property with you is going to make matters a lot simpler.”
Again, Wallace remained quiet. She focused on the road ahead. Traffic was easing up, but a lot of thoughts were competing for her attention. She turned on her police flasher and pushed the pedal down as hard as she dared.
“We can always test my little theory, Detective. We can see how much pain the lovely Mrs. Greenberg can take, and how much humiliation you�
��re willing to put your excellent partner Mr. Officer Greenberg through as he sits helplessly by and watches me beat the shit out of his lovely bride. That sort of thing can seriously damage a relationship, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
“No need for that. Enough people have been hurt already. What makes you think I didn’t turn it over to the police or the FBI?”
“Because I shot your boy Mason, and it’s just possible you’ll want payback. I saw the way he looked at you when you dropped him off at his hotel so late last night, in that fancy car of yours. I saw the way you stared so longingly after him, as he strode into the lobby like the conquering hero. Didn’t look like police business to me. No, you wouldn’t give up the one thing you could use to lure me into your crosshairs.”
The streets into her neighborhood were usually quiet on Friday evenings, and tonight was no exception. She turned in, slowing, to keep her tires from squealing on the damp pavement.
“What’s the stuff in the little book about, anyway? And the flash drives?” Wallace asked, trying to steer their conversation into an area she hoped Don would not find agitating.
“Is this another of your lies, Detective? Cleverly concealed in the form of an interrogatory sentence? Do you really not know?”
“I know that at least two people are dead because of what’s in the little book. I recognize chemical notation when I see it, but what does it all mean? What could be so important?”
“Let’s table that question for the moment, shall we? I’m more interested in why you would begin our little dance with a false step. Given that the stakes are so high, I would think you’d be entirely forthcoming from the get-go.”
“If you thought I didn’t have what you’re after—that it would take me time to get it—I would have more time to arrange a rescue. Just trying to buy time. As you say, the stakes are high. I can’t afford to make any mistakes.”
