Last Shot

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Walker said, “God, you’ve got your mother in you.”

  “And you.”

  “Nah, not me.”

  The kid’s face went slack with hurt—not an expression Walker had expected. He’d meant it as a compliment, but it was too thorny to explain, and he had a mushroom of lead grinding in his side. He offered Sam the blood-tipped tweezers, and Sam took them. He raised his arm, and the kid went to work with an impressive scientific detachment.

  Kaitlin stirred, propped herself on her elbows to take in the tableau, and said, nauseously, “There goes my spot on the PTA.”

  She rose, keeping her eyes averted, and disappeared into the bathroom. A moment later Walker heard the sink running. Inside him metal clinked against metal—he wasn’t sure if he heard it or just felt the timbre of the vibration.

  Sam said, “Doesn’t that hurt?”

  “This? Nah.” Walker braced himself as the tweezers made another pass at the embedded slug. “Pain’s got fear, too. You can scare it outta you.”

  The bullet came slowly and not without friction. Sam dropped it in Walker’s palm. A Troubleshooter special, served hot from a Smith & Wesson.

  Sam stared at him with those crazy yellow eyes. “I know about pain.”

  “I figure. You’re smart for an eight-year-old.”

  “Seven.”

  “Whatever.”

  Walker rotated his arm once, testing it. He leaned against the pillows and blinked once, slowly. Sam watched him intently.

  Walker said, “I got nothing to offer you. I guess only the example I didn’t set. But I can tell you this: Your mom didn’t kill herself. Some men had her killed.”

  All the lines seemed to smooth out of Sam’s face, and then tears were on his cheeks, though he didn’t seem to be crying. Anger, sure, and some fear, but mostly relief. He sat down, head bowed, scratching at the dry patches on his bruised arms. “So you’re gonna what? Kill them all?”

  The toilet flushed, and then the sink water turned on again.

  “Yup,” Walker said.

  Chapter 68

  Dolan had spent the last hour pacing laps around the pool table, his agitation sprouting more hydra heads than he could keep in sight. His momentum finally flung him off the table on a turn, propelling him through the double doors. A security man wordlessly stood his post outside. He shadowed Dolan down the hall like a bodyguard, his finger raised to his ear, seating the transmitter. His orders being updated? After a few paces, Dolan grew uncomfortable. When he glanced back, the guard dropped his gaze as if granting Dolan privacy. On the way down the stairs, it struck Dolan that the man now seemed more like a stalker than a bodyguard. He tried to convince himself that he was manufacturing the guard’s tacit menace, transferring his anxiety onto something concrete.

  Dolan stopped short when he entered his father’s office and found it blanketed with open manila folders, Dean shoving papers through a shredder with uncharacteristic haste. Edwin abided Dean’s pointing finger, retrieving and filing with a stiff-backed posture that infused each menial task with elegant rectitude.

  Dean paused, then shot an accusatory glare at the guard, as if he were responsible for Dolan’s appearance. Dolan made out the label on the report in his father’s hands: X4-AAT SAFETY STUDY. Dean lowered it to the blades. A chuffing disintegrated it into snowflakes.

  Dolan moistened his lips, looking around in bewilderment.

  Dean said briskly, “Nothing untoward is going on here. There are confidential documents that I don’t feel comfortable having at the house. Not with the fallout from this afternoon and the investigation that’s grinding forward. Your company’s been set back enough by recent events.” Dean handed off an expurgated folder to Edwin, who promptly returned it to the file cabinet. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”

  “Sir, I do want answers. I’m entitled to know what’s going on with Xedral. I’ve given seven years of my life to this.”

  “And I devoted thirty-five years to building the business that under-wrote the lab in which you were working. So why don’t we leave entitlement out of this? Every test tube you’ve touched since you were six, I bought.”

  Dolan felt his outrage transmogrify into adolescent defensiveness. “Not at school.”

  “Right. A multiyear, seven-figure pledge to UCLA’s biology department that commenced the day you matriculated. But the test tubes came out of the professor’s pocket.”

  “I got into UCLA on my grades, not your money.” Dolan picked up an empty folder, turned it inside out, and dropped it on the floor. “What happened during the Xedral safety studies?”

  A disgusted exhale. “Nothing. Huang spoke to you. He told you himself nothing was out of the ordinary.”

  “You own Huang.”

  “I own everyone. Including you. Every lab station, every microfuge, every pencil.”

  Dolan felt beaten down, diminished. “You don’t. Not me.”

  “Oh? Your corporation is behind on its rent, Dolan. Or do you recall that your lease specifies a dollar a year?” Dean scowled at him, a rosy flush rouging his pallid cheeks. “I can have Bernie retroaccount so hard and fast you’ll be in debt to Beacon-Kagan until your children’s children have children. I will ruin you.”

  “You’re actually thr—”

  “I’m saying there is an empire at stake, Dolan. This—” Dean gestured to the loose papers, though there were few left; while they’d been arguing, Edwin had tidied up, even spraying sanitizer on and wiping the wooden surfaces. “This is the mess and sweat of a corporation. You don’t want this. You have a sinecure and unlimited funding. Few would complain in your situation. Tinker with your petri dishes and leave the business to us.”

  “I’ve always been willing to leave the business to you. Just not the science.”

  “It’s the same thing,” Dean said with slow exasperation.

  Dolan weaved a bit on his feet. The sanitizer’s lemon scent coated his throat, soured his stomach. Dean indicated the guard with a flare of his hand, and the guard came off the wall and positioned himself a few feet behind Dolan.

  Dean folded his hands at his stomach, the picture of reason. “Here are your choices: You let me handle what needs to be handled, and you return to a top post at your own company poised to make one of the most significant advances medicine has seen in decades. Or you can be stubborn and obtuse and wind up teaching photosynthesis to snotty seventh-graders at Harvard-Westlake.”

  Dolan’s throat clicked drily when he swallowed.

  “Now, if you wouldn’t mind going upstairs”—Dean nodded at the guard—“I’d like a bit of privacy in my own office.”

  Chapter 69

  The lawn was overgrown. Not a noteworthy observation elsewhere, but Tim had never seen the grass without mow strips aligned as though they’d been measured off. The mailbox—stuffed. Four still-rolled newspapers on the doorstep. An unswept porch. He paused midway up the walk, his first hesitation about choosing to come alone. It wasn’t until he rang the doorbell and heard the approaching footsteps that his brain gave voice to the concern that had been lurking beneath his thoughts—that he’d find his father dead in the house.

  The doorknob turned, and then his father, a handsome man approaching sixty, peered out from the gap. Behind him the lights were off, the interior projecting gloom. His usually impeccable hair was disheveled, and he was unshaven. His stubble had grown in more white than black, a detail that Tim found inexplicably disconcerting. In his thirty-eight years, Tim had known him only to be immaculately composed. Never a stray hair, a stain on his pants, an unironed shirt.

  In a rare show of restraint, Tim’s father offered no wisecrack about the half-stitched gash in the side of Tim’s neck. Instead he stepped back from the door, letting Tim enter—another break in protocol. He didn’t even ask him to remove his shoes. The living room air was stale from thrown-out coffee grounds. The kitchen, normally museum meticulous, was strewn with dirty dishes. His father scooted two sealed VCR box
es over on the couch so Tim could sit, then took his favored La-Z-Boy opposite. All these years later, the picture frames on the mantel still displayed the stock photos they’d come packaged with.

  Tim’s palms were slick and his stomach roiled. He’d done zero-visibility oxygen jumps from thirty-three thousand feet without breaking a sweat, but his father’s proximity still set him on edge. He reminded himself to offer up nothing—if given an inch, his father could unload oceanfront time shares in Wyoming. Tim wiped his hands on his jeans, taking in the boxes and papers piled around the living room. “What’s going on here?”

  “You’ve got no right to ask me that.” Tim hadn’t heard his father’s voice in three years; it had picked up some hoarseness around the edges. “What do you want, Timmy?”

  “One of our fugitive’s fathers, Pierce Jameson, has become a name of interest in our investigation.”

  “Ah, Pierce. Yes, I’ve seen Walker’s making a run to knock you off the tabloid covers. Is the Troubleshooter feeling neglected by his public? Upstaged as vigilante darling of the masses?”

  The old chess match. Playing his part, the stoic straight arrow, Tim maintained an expression of impassivity. “I know you’ve dealt with Pierce. I need to find some leverage on him. We’re having a hard time untangling his finances. If I know you, you did your research before getting into bed with him. I thought you might know enough to give us a way in.”

  “What about honor among thieves?” Tim’s father’s lips tensed—they both knew he’d snitched, double-crossed, and back-doored his way out of more jail time and soured deals than either of them could remember. “And what do I get?”

  “Nothing.”

  “A characteristically vain proposition.” His father picked a speck of lint from his trousers, crumpled it into a handkerchief, then settled back and crossed his legs. The same regal bearing. A man with more grace than character. To Tim’s great surprise, he said, “I’ll help you. If there is something to get on Pierce, I know how you can get it.” A moment to let his magnanimity sink in. Tim waited for the other shoe to drop, and of course it did. “But. You’ll owe me a favor later. I won’t disclose what it is now, but I’ll tell you it’s not illegal.”

  Tim said, “No.”

  “It won’t have anything to do with using your law enforcement connections improperly to help me.”

  “No.”

  His father, who Tim had once seen bluff a table of professional poker players out of a twenty-thousand-dollar pot with a seven deuce in the dark, maintained even eye contact. He looked unconcerned, but Tim sensed—from the state of the house and from the quickness with which he’d offered to help—that he was verging on desperate. Tim made a move to rise, and his father said, “Okay, look, just…just sit a minute.”

  He’d never seen his father capitulate, and he was surprised that the sight of it made him feel bad. Holding all the cards—at last—in an exchange with his father didn’t make him feel vindicated or powerful, just vaguely sad. Though his father’s face still betrayed nothing, the awkward delay showed he was struggling for words. He’d been many things over the years, but never vulnerable.

  Finally he pressed his lips together and said, “I’m going away. I report in a month and change. Monday the twenty-fourth, seven A.M. Not just a three-or six-monther. No deals to be had. No pleading it down. Fifteen years.”

  Despite all the work Tim had done to get free and clear of his father, despite the fact that he’d always known that one day he’d be having a conversation like this with his father—he’d imagined it, rehearsed it, pictured it taking place in this very room, even—Tim felt dismayed by the notion of his father doing hard time. He couldn’t make eye contact. He was unsure what to feel. The thought did occur to him that this could be the introductory act of one of his father’s convoluted scams, but Tim had come to him, not vice versa. And through the nearly five decades’ worth of ruses Tim had witnessed, never once had his father permitted his house or appearance to lapse. He was genuinely distressed, and Tim was shocked to discover that he was distressed along with him. His father usually pled or bargained, flipped on guys higher up the fraud chain. To Tim’s knowledge he’d never served more than a six-month stint at a low-security facility. And now he was staring at fifteen years. Even with good behavior and early parole, he’d be close to seventy when he got out. If he got out. Time was hard on the inside, and often it turned into less time.

  “Fifteen years? What’d you do?”

  “I had an inside man at the DMV.” He shook his head faintly—at himself, perhaps. “Never trust an inside man who’s a woman.” He lifted his impenetrable stare to Tim. “Identity theft. Multiple counts.”

  “Okay,” Tim said, buying time, though for what he didn’t know. “Okay.”

  “I’m getting older, Timmy. What am I gonna do, go on the lam?” He pressed his fingertips together. Tim noticed that his knuckles were white from the pressure, though his tone remained perfectly calm. “I’d like you to take me in.”

  Tim was well practiced at betraying nothing in front of his father. He waited until the rush of blood at his ears faded, and then he said, “Your deputy marshal son walks you in, maybe you get treated like a VIP?”

  “You did some time, you know nobody gets it cushy. Make my transition a little easier, is all. Perhaps we could let the guards know…”

  Tim had a hard time keeping the disdain from his voice. “What?”

  He cleared his throat. “Let them know I have family.”

  Tim swallowed hard and looked away. The curtains were drawn, leaving him feeling blocked in. “Where are we going?”

  “Corcoran.” He made an effort to say it evenly.

  Roger Kindell’s prison. His father in the same lockup as his daughter’s killer. Another one in the eye from Fate. Tim supposed it made a perverse kind of sense.

  His father’s smile gave way to an amused chuckle. “Yeah, it’s an irony to savor.”

  Tim said, “What do you have on Pierce?”

  “Pierce.” His father settled back into his well-worn chair, seemingly pleased to be back on familiar terrain. “Pierce and I ran some charity scams in the wake of 9/11. Red Cross, victim funds, that kind of thing. He’d cleaned up mostly by then, but it was a boon to business, 9/11. A lot of bacon to go around. Hard to pass up. Back in the day, Pierce had an operations guy named Morgenstein. Hard times now, though, with Pierce getting out of the game altogether. I’d bet the phone doesn’t ring for Morg the way it used to. But I’d bet it still rings now and then. See him and lean. He’ll cough.”

  “You got an address?”

  “Got a phone number in the other room. Dump by the beach. Tell him you know about the incident at the greyhound track in Corpus Christi.”

  “What happened there?”

  Tim’s father smiled—the same impenetrable smile. “That,” he said, “is a story for another day.”

  Saltwater had eroded the staircase leading up from the sand. Tim warned Bear about a cracked step, not wanting to see his well-fed partner put a boot through the soft wood. The wind-battered wreck of a building sat atop a patch of Venice real estate worth more than an average trust fund. Probably owned by a nightgown-wearing widow in her nineties who lacked the patience for upkeep, the energy to remodel, and the nerve to sell.

  Bear had met Tim up the block, coming directly from Parker Center, where Wes Dieter had crumbled early into the interrogation. He’d confessed to appropriating the contract intended for the Piper through an elaborately fraudulent Internet communication and to swapping out Tess’s hard drive and delivering the original to Ted Sands. Wes had hedged his bets with Sands by making a spare copy of Tess’s hard drive, which he’d gladly turned over as an opening concession for plea-bargain negotiations. Bear’s preliminary spin through the hard drive had revealed no e-mails—pizzazzu.net was Web-based—but an immense file on Vector that included everything about the company from pipeline projections to early-phase vectors. Though Guerrera was now continui
ng the search, Bear had found no damning documents about Xedral, certainly nothing to cause a mother to pull her son from the last-ditch trial. Pete Krindon was unreachable, but Bear planned to get him on Tess’s hard drive if he couldn’t coax the forwarded e-mail from the dental-office computer.

  Bear thought that Wes was sincere in his claim that he couldn’t source the trail beyond Sands; having copped to a murder one, Wes had little reason to lie about that particular. Most contracts ordered by high-end players were issued through a third party like Sands to preserve plausible deniability, a concept with which Tim presumed the Kagan family was familiar.

  A thousand bucks in folded hundreds stiffened Tim’s back pocket, cash from the Service’s unspecified account generally tapped into for bounty hunters and confidential informants. Tim’s father could predict people’s actions better than anyone Tim had known. If Morgenstein talked—and Tim was confident he would—he’d need to be set up with some cash to get out of Dodge. It would work out cheaper than protective custody.

  All that remained of the apartment numbers were dark outlines on the sun-faded wood. Bear knocked on the appropriate screen door, and it tilted back from where it had been leaned against the frame.

  “Come in.”

  They entered the flop. A futon mattress with no accompanying frame lay on the floor, heaped with trash and dirty clothes. A man sat before a black-and-white TV holding a sagging antenna in position, supporting his extended arm on the prop of his opposite hand. He wore a sport coat with the front pocket ripped off. A bottle of Gordon’s gin leaned between his legs.

  Tim held up his badge, the cash fanned into view behind it. “Are you Arthur Morgenstein?”

  The guy glanced over, thinning hair wreathing a peeling scalp. He smiled, dropping the antenna, and the screen went to fuzz. “About fuckin’ time.”