Next Last Chance

by Jon A. Hunt

  There he was, flopping about, nine floors closer to the pavement. From above there was nothing graceful about the corpse’s movement.

  Rafferty pointed. Across the street a miniscule man-shape in a white hardhat climbed into a little glass-sided elevator and rose slowly through the steel webbing of a crane tower. I wondered what it was like to have a squirrel’s disregard for gravity.

  The cable pinged and squirmed. A broken strand of wire jutted from the black plastic. The body at its lower end languidly flapped. Jeffers was beyond caring if he fell farther.

  “Didn’t they clear that street?” I yelled.

  Rafferty set his teeth and hauled his eyes downward, too. He knew the dark blue car and the white-haired man peering up at us beside it. “Pennington!”

  “Here to send you all home?”

  “Fuck him. I’m taking care of my man.”

  “How sure are you Jeffers was your man?”

  Rage burned under the Lieutenant’s ruddy brows. He didn’t have a good comeback. He pressed in from the column toward relative safety. Another gust circled our feet, raced inward ahead of us to gather dust and debris, and swirled what it found back out to oblivion. A clinking bit of brass skittered toward me. I stopped it under my shoe and picked it up a couple inches from the edge. An empty 9mm cartridge. I held it up by the ends where fingerprints don’t stick.

  Etched into the casing was a number. 10.

  Rafferty waved the girl over. She was not thrilled. She had a little bag for my find.

  “Smally, once he’s down you can let the mobs in. Ours and theirs. No reporters.”

  “Yes, sir.” The giant still squatted on his heels in the meantime.

  My brain revisited Saturday morning’s carnage, focused on the numbered bullet in the headrest. There’d been seven of those at Mount Olivet, just like Rico’s letter had promised.

  “Jerry, did you get a letter?”

  “Huh?”

  “From Rico. Did he send you another list?”

  The Lieutenant frowned southward at the thirteenth floor’s wide-open side. “No.”

  “Where’s Pennington staying?”

  Rafferty put the word out once we returned to the sidewalks, and as long as I didn’t kill anybody going a hundred, my bright red Dodge was temporarily invisible to Metro patrol cars. But I had a lot of thinking to do and 600 Marriott Drive wasn’t far. I barely did the speed limit.

  Smally, Rico, and probably Jeffers had all been inside my home Friday. I shouldn’t have bothered locking the door. Smally was too intimate with the written word to leave books upended on my shelves. That left Rico and Jeffers. Jeffers seemed more likely to nose through a library but wouldn’t have had access to empty brass from Rico’s Friday night handwork. The deduction that Rico left that shell for me, a message of sorts, felt believable. Jeffers must have taken the Smith & Wesson; Rico had already returned a gun to me once.

  Who’d stolen Sandra’s tattoo photograph? More importantly: why?

  I suspected Jeffers had relayed information of my whereabouts, maybe to Pennington, maybe on purpose, though the FBI isn’t in the business of scheduling hits. If Pennington wasn’t the recipient of that information…yet another player lurked in the shadows. I didn’t like that.

  Did Jeffers spot Rico when he stopped by to leave his calling card in my kitchen, and follow, with disastrous results?

  I couldn’t make the timing work out very neatly. But I had it firmly in my brain that someone had gotten Rico’s dreaded itinerary. Rafferty hadn’t notified Pennington of anything, because Jeffers was one of Rafferty’s people. Pennington had shown up anyway.

  Rafferty wasn’t going to ask about any notes. He disliked Pennington and his hands were tied. Mine weren’t. The feds couldn’t fish without their bait. I had questions for the fisherman.

  An incoming call interrupted my reverie. Sandra Donovan’s number flashed on the dashboard display. The part of me devoted to thinking voted to ignore the call. The part that always went looking for trouble answered it anyway.

  “Tyler, could you please come to Hillbriar?”

  I pretended to concentrate on negotiating the I-40/I-24 interchange. Possibly that was a subconscious ploy to get her to say my name again, which she did.

  “I’m here,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment now, but I can run over when I’m done.”

  “Will it take long?”

  “I don’t know.” My last meeting with federal agents—or at least with people who appeared to be federal agents—had claimed a whole night I’d rather have spent sleeping.

  “Can you reschedule?” Her voice quavered.

  “No. What’s wrong, Sandra?”

  “Not on the phone.”

  “Are you—” What was the word I wanted? “—safe?”

  The tower of the Nashville Airport Marriott came into view.

  “Sandra?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m safe. For now.”

  “All right. I’ll be there soon as I’m finished, okay?”

  “It’ll have to be,” she said and terminated the call.

  Seventeen

  The sprawling lot at 600 Marriott Drive served an immense facility that hosted some international convention or other practically every week. Nothing special happened to be underway on this particular Sunday, but there were an awful lot of late-model Chevrolets with extra antennae hogging the slots nearest the main entry. Four of these wore Metro’s white and blue livery, compliments of Lieutenant Rafferty.

  A uniformed officer greeted me by name and waved me through the automatic doors. I circumvented quartets of upholstered chairs around low mahogany tables. Most of the chairs were empty. People aren’t as thrilled about hotel lobbies as they used to be, but the chairs themselves seemed to be conversing. Soulless music oozed from unseen speakers.

  I stopped at a reservation desk cleverly constructed of woven strips of dark wood and made eye contact with a tidy-looking man behind it. “Could you please look up….” I realized nobody’d ever mentioned the man’s first name. I hadn’t asked. How many Penningtons could there be in the world? “….Mr. Pennington?”

  The clerk nodded amicably and tapped a keyboard I couldn’t see. Then he assumed the expected puzzled expression. Not Oscar-worthy but any daytime soap would have bought it.

  “He’s here. You know it and I know it. You can call down the day manager if you like, so he can lie to me instead. But I followed Pennington here and I’m really stubborn.”

  The kid hesitated. I looked pretty rough and he needed his job. But the policeman, watching unconcernedly by the doors, made him feel safer. “Your name, sir?”

  “Bedlam. He’ll recognize it.”

  He raised a handset to an ear. I maneuvered out among the chairs. A herd of teenagers and overtaxed middle-aged guardians cruised through the lobby. One of the teens found me fascinating and nearly tripped over his untied shoelaces. After they’d gone, piped-in music filled the void. Two chimes announced the arrival of one elevator car, the departure of another.

  A man in a suit rounded the corner. He stopped to talk with the desk clerk and didn’t look my way till the clerk mouthed my name. He was older, better-dressed than the trio who’d dragged me down to the Cumberland for knuckle sandwiches. Same haircut. Here he came.

  “Mr. Bedlam.”

  “Hi,” I said. “Who are you?”

  “Mr. Pennington is regrettably unable to meet with anyone right now. He sent me.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “He isn’t coming down.”

  “He has to eventually.”

  “I’m authorized to discuss what you wish—”

  I cut him off with a frown. The finely coiled wire running from his right ear down into this collar was almost, not quite, invisible. So it wasn’t just the two of us and the chairs.

  “If I can talk to any old stranger,” I said, and I said it loudly, “this town’s full of those. Sorry to have wasted your time.”

  The agent’s eyes took o
n the half-second vacancy you see when someone’s listening to his earbud instead of to you. He leaned into my personal space with a lot of purpose.

  “Mr. Bedlam, if you will come with me…”

  My last invitation to tag along with a crewcut was too fresh in my memory for me to fall for it twice. The agent banged his shins on a table I’d hooked with my foot. His training at Quantico must not have covered hotel furniture, because he pitched forward exactly like I’d hoped, a hand darting under his jacket. I caught that elbow and threw him to the carpet with a crash. The table broke. Chairs tipped over, made an embarrassing racket. But I was the one on top, and as long as I kept his arm bent funny, nothing inside his suit jacket was much of a threat.

  The clerk had his phone half up till the officer by the doors sent him a discouraging look.

  “You okay over there?” the cop asked.

  “Fine, thanks,” I said.

  He turned back to watching the sun shine outside. I twisted the agent’s arm till I could reach his wallet. This time it contained a genuine ID card and badge.

  “Keith, is it? None of you guys are big on introductions. Not very Southern.”

  Keith was a non-conversational lump smashed between me and the carpet. The closest I got to a response was a tiny electronic voice emanating from his right ear. I leaned in closer.

  “Mr. Pennington, can you count? Like eight, nine, ten. Same as in the letter.”

  The miniature voice squeaked authoritatively in Keith’s ear.

  “They’ll be right down,” he snarled.

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “No good. One. Unarmed.” I talked to the microphone, not the man wearing it.

  “Okay. One.”

  I pressed the agent’s elbow till his breathing got sharp and rapid, and turned him till I could extract his sidearm. Then I let him up off the floor and into one of the chairs we hadn’t upended. He glared at me. I unloaded the gun and tossed it far out into the middle of the lobby. It was just Keith, the uninvolved cop, and me. The desk clerk had split.

  An elevator pinged cheerily beyond a wall hung with pointless watercolors. A second agent came into view. Not a man in a suit. A tall athletic woman in shirtsleeves and slacks. Her badge was clipped to her belt. Honeywell, Andrea. She had red hair up in a loose bun secured with a pencil, and she compensated for a pretty face with an impressive no-nonsense demeanor. I glared back at Agent Keith and followed his more attractive counterpart to the elevator lobby.

  “Fair is fair, Mr. Bedlam,” she told me while we waited for an available lift. We had that place to ourselves, too. I’d never felt so lonely in a hotel before. “I’m unarmed. If you want to see Mr. Pennington, you will be, too.”

  Her blouse wasn’t wrinkled in the right places for her to have recently worn a shoulder rig and there was nowhere to hide a thing in those skin-tight slacks. The pencil in her hair might be dangerous. I’d have to take some risks. I removed the .45, took out the magazine, ejected the extra round from the chamber. She got the gun. I pocketed the magazine and extra cartridge.

  “I’m sure Pennington can handle me,” I said.

  Her smile when we got in the elevator wasn’t comforting.

  Pennington sat in a sixth-floor suite, at a table with a wall behind him and the window to his left. In front of him were a small notebook, two ballpoint pens emblazoned with the hotel logo, a closed laptop computer and a matte gray Colt semiautomatic. The only other chair in the room waited directly opposite him, in line with the Colt’s muzzle. Honeywell opened the door for me but she stayed in the corridor. I went in and sat on the chair.

  Pennington’s most notable feature from afar was his close-cropped stark white hair and matching eyebrows. But up close, the eyes beneath those brows were startling. They had very dark irises, so dark the overall effect was of two deep, unnerving holes staring at you. I was sure he used that to his advantage. Maybe he was near sixty.

  “Let’s be clear.” His voice had a directness that immediately put me on the defensive. “Any ill-timed gesture will be as good an excuse as I need to kill you. I am a very capable marksman. Honeywell’s only standing out there to clean up the mess if it happens.”

  I hoped my smile wasn’t ill-timed. Pennington didn’t return the expression. He inclined his forehead to let Honeywell know she should shut the door and wait in the corridor.

  “How do you know about the letter?” he demanded.

  Game time. He knew my sources. Rico’s modus operandi wasn’t public knowledge. Rafferty and Andrews would appreciate my not rubbing Pennington’s nose in it, though.

  “I do my homework,” I said. “Nobody else got a letter. And I’ve seen one numbered bullet and two numbered empty shells.”

  “So?”

  “The bullet was in a headrest behind what was left of one of your men—”

  “You’re awfully free with your assumptions.” The words had frost on them. “They stopped being my men, or the Bureau’s, the moment they went looking for you off the clock.”

  “Of course. You folks don’t operate that way.”

  No reply.

  “Shell number ten was rolling around on the thirteenth floor where Jeffers bought it. Don’t waste time denying your connections to him. If he hadn’t been snooping around my place for you, you wouldn’t have stopped by the Gulch to make sure that was really him swinging up there. I bet he was also your inside man on Jerry Rafferty’s team.”

  Pennington argued less than I expected. Not at all, in fact. I snapped the empty brass from my kitchen onto the table and let it roll in a lazy arc. I’d palmed it in the elevator after unloading my .45 for Honeywell. The deep black holes watched the shell wobble to a standstill. He still didn’t have anything to say. But I did.

  “I’m not the only person making assumptions. Everyone seems to think Rico’s out to put one of his artsy bullets in me. So why would he make a special trip to leave this at my place?”

  India ink eyes swiveled up to find mine. There could be no telling where they ever focused, but the lids tightened around them fiercely. “Why ask me?”

  “Who could possibly know Rico better?”

  That generated a flash of something in those eyes, like a lit match quickly extinguished. “Nobody knows a damned thing, Mr. Bedlam. You least of all. This is a lot bigger than you.”

  “It’s bigger than you, too,” I snapped. “Maybe the FBI is as leaky as Nashville’s police department. Maybe you don’t know which of your people you can trust and which of them might be helping Rico stay one step ahead of you. I mean, shouldn’t you have caught him by now?”

  “You’ve got some goddamned nerve telling me how to do my job!”

  “Do I? I’m just having a hard time adjusting to your decision that my ass should be on the line to advance your investigation.”

  His fingers twitched on the table’s edge. I could tell that matte gray Colt tempted him. I almost wanted him to go ahead and try. But I’d have to do something a lot dumber than sassing back to get that reaction.

  “I’m tempted get talkative with very gossipy people about Bureau ethics,” I said, “unless you give me a worthwhile reason to stay in the crosshairs. But the trouble for you is Rico could’ve killed me a dozen times over. Instead he blows away your guys—rogues or not—to keep me breathing. And he teases you about it. If I’m not bait for Rico, why am I still so damned fascinating that five men in government cars would want to dump my body in a river?”

  The twitching stopped. The black holes regarded me now with utter calm, marshalled by iron discipline. His enunciation was sharp enough to chip the words into my tombstone.

  “You’re finished, Mr. Bedlam.”

  I slowly stood. “If I’m finished when I leave here, every eye in Nashville will be watching you, not just mine. Whatever operation you’re running, you’ll be too visible to continue. If I don’t leave here, enough people will miss me the results will be the same.”

  “Sit down.”
r />   The back of my neck started to tingle. Only just now. I parked myself in the chair again.

  “This is….a diversion for you, Bedlam. You think you can stop anytime you like. You haven’t spent three decades scratching humanity’s ugly backside. I’ve hunted murderers and tormentors of the American people since you were in diapers. Most of the lowlifes I haul before the courts go back and pick up where they left off, unless they’re killed like they deserve. My problems are the whole country’s problems; yours are baloney because win or lose you won’t make a goddamned difference. But you think you’re important enough to give me a lecture?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  Pennington snatched up the 9mm casing. He’d handled a lot of them. He hated them.

  “Rico’s not the main objective,” he said.

  I made myself stare into those jet-black vacuums with eyelids and waited.

  “Persons coming here to hit Rico are huge, some of the biggest crime families in the nation. They all have scores they thought they couldn’t settle because he was dead. Now they know he isn’t. They’re coming here all at once because they want to be sure and see him pay.”

  “The FBI’s waiting to gather them up in one net.”

  “Every Don from the west coast. Several from up north. They’ll be arrested here, or they’ll die here, but they won’t leave Nashville any other way. If he’s still alive, we’ll bring Rico in, too. Then I’ll retire and someone else can scratch humanity’s backside.”

  “Why now? Why here? How did all of these gangs find out at the same time?”

  Pennington’s jaw set grimly. “You suggested yourself the Bureau had leaks.”

  That might explain how the bad guys knew more than the FBI and Metro. That might even explain five guys with crewcuts and very unofficial methods.