by Mike Lawson
It didn’t seem possible, but Hadley Morgan’s gray complexion grew even grayer.
“I have another young associate,” Mahoney said, “and he has an associate. One of those weird guys who hunts on the Internet the way I used to hunt ducks from a blind. Well I asked this fellow, this computer fellow, to look into your computer, Morgan, to see what you’ve been hiding. And can you guess what he found?”
Morgan didn’t say anything. Mahoney wasn’t sure that he could.
“The computer guy, he said something about being able to trace visits made to Internet sites from your computer, Morgan. And he made a record of your visits, something that proves that you were the one doing the visiting. I don’t know how he did it— maybe that young aide of yours can explain it to you— but it seems you’ve been visiting these sites in your spare time, sometimes for several hours at a time. Well, I had him print me out a copy of one of the pictures you see on those sites. I was gonna bring the picture with me but I was terrified I might get hit by a bus and that picture would be found on my dead body. But you don’t need to see a picture, do you, Morgan? You know exactly what sorts of pictures they have on those sites.”
“No,” Morgan said, “I don’t need to see a picture.”
“I thought not,” Mahoney said. Then he leaned forward so that his big face was an inch from Hadley Morgan’s, and said in a harsh whisper: “Now you listen to me, you sick fuck. If you take Denny Cochran’s grandkids away from him I’m gonna send every paper in the state a copy of your computer logs. And for what you’re doing on the Internet, Morgan…well, let me put it this way: if you ever decide to indulge your sick fuckin’ fantasies in the flesh, if you ever go near a child in person, I’ll send you to jail, as God is my witness, I will. Can you imagine jail for someone as gray and frail as you, Morgan? Can you imagine how you’d spend your nights?”
Mahoney turned away and called to the barmaid, “Sweetheart, could you be a darlin’ and bring me just one more?” To Morgan he said, “Get the hell outta here. But by the day after tomorrow, I better read in the papers that you’ve decided to retire.”
Morgan’s dry lips parted to say something but nothing came from his mouth. He slipped off the bar stool and moved slowly toward the exit, walking carefully, as though he wasn’t certain that his legs would support him.
The redheaded bartender brought Mahoney his drink, then leaned down, placing her forearms on the bar so Mahoney could enjoy her cleavage.
Mahoney smiled at her. She smiled back.
“I love it,” Mahoney said, gesturing with his head, “the way the lights shine down on the ballpark, on all that green grass. Can you remember, sweetheart, the first time you made love on the grass?”
67
The viewing window above the racquetball court exploded into a million shards and glass rained down onto DeMarco’s back and head. When the glass stopped falling, he looked up and saw Li Mei still standing in the gallery overlooking the racquetball court, her pistol still extended. He looked back toward center court where Emma had been standing, expecting to see her lying on the floor. She wasn’t. Emma was unharmed, in the same position she’d been in before Li Mei had fired. Either the thick glass of the viewing window had deflected the shot or Li Mei hadn’t intended to kill her with the first bullet.
DeMarco swiveled his head and looked up again at Li Mei. She was now aiming the gun at him, not Emma. With the glass out of the way she could shoot directly down at him, even if he was pressed up against the back wall of the court.
She was going to kill him first.
As Li Mei was about to pull the trigger, Emma screamed “No!” and then flung her racquet at Li Mei’s head. Li Mei ducked, and the racquet sailed over her, and she trained her weapon again on DeMarco.
And then two gunshots boomed out, fired by an un-silenced weapon. Li Mei spun to her right, toward whoever had fired, and began to shoot her automatic. DeMarco could hear the little “puffs” her gun made each time she pulled the trigger. He didn’t know how many bullets Li Mei’s weapon held, but it sounded to DeMarco like she fired five or six shots. Then she stopped firing and turned and ran to her left, in the direction of one of the stairways leading down from the gallery. As Li Mei ran, someone fired at her two more times, one shot chipping plaster from the ceiling of the gallery.
While Li Mei had been shooting, Emma had sprinted to the corner of the racquetball court. She had placed a small purse in one corner of the court and now she removed an automatic from the purse. She chambered a round into the weapon and pushed against the door to the court. The door should have swung outward but it didn’t move. It appeared that Li Mei had wedged something beneath the door.
“Joe, help me,” Emma said.
DeMarco and Emma slammed their shoulders against the door until it opened far enough for them to slip through. They probably wasted two minutes, maybe three, opening the door.
Emma ran without hesitation toward the set of stairs that led down from the gallery, the stairs that Li Mei would have used to escape. She didn’t bother to go up to the gallery. She knew that by now Li Mei had already descended. She ran instead toward the nearest exit and slammed a foot into the bar that opened the door. She held her weapon in front of her in a two-handed grip and swept the grounds with her eyes and the gun. Li Mei was gone. Emma stood there a minute, continuing to look for a target, then relaxed her pose. She turned to DeMarco and said, “Go call…Oh, shit! Carla!” She pushed past DeMarco and reentered the club.
It took DeMarco a moment to remember who Carla was, then it came to him: Brunhilda, the bodyguard. He found Emma on the other set of stairs that led to the viewing gallery. Carla was lying facedown at the bottom of the stairs. There was a gun near her left hand and the hardwood floor beneath her head was awash in blood.
“Ah, Christ,” Emma said. “You poor, poor thing.” Emma rose slowly to her feet. “She died saving my life,” she said to DeMarco.
“Emma,” DeMarco said, looking down at the body, “it looks like she was shot in the back of the head.”
“Yeah,” Emma said. “She was probably spinning away after she fired at Li Mei.” Before DeMarco could say anything else, she said, “I’m going to see if Rolf’s still alive.” The way she spoke, she didn’t sound as though she expected him to be. “Call Bill Smith,” Emma yelled to DeMarco as she ran down the hall. “Tell him to try and get here before the cops do.”
As Emma sprinted away, DeMarco thought back on the sequence of shots. Li Mei had fired her silenced weapon first, breaking the glass above the racquetball court. Before she could fire a second shot, someone fired two shots at Li Mei with an un-silenced weapon. Li Mei then turned and let loose a volley of shots, five or six, then ran for the gallery stairwell. Then two more un-silenced shots were fired.
The first thing that occurred to DeMarco was: How did an Olympic biathlon contender miss a stationary target with two shots? The second thing that occurred to him was that if Li Mei had shot Carla in the head, who had fired the last two shots?
DeMarco called Smith then left the club to find Emma. She was standing over Rolf’s body, which was lying behind a shrub near the club’s parking lot. The bullet that had killed him had entered the back of his head and the exit wound had made his face unrecognizable. Emma said that Li Mei had been less than a foot from Rolf when she fired, and from her tone, it sounded as if she couldn’t imagine how she had gotten so close without Rolf noticing. To DeMarco’s untrained eye, the gunshot wound in Rolf’s head looked similar to the one in Carla’s.
The next two hours were organized chaos. Patrol cars and ambulances roared into the club’s parking lot; medics put bodies into bags; forensic technicians crawled on their knees near the racquetball courts looking for clues. Club members, all dressed in expensive athletic wear, were herded into a cafeteria and then led out one at a time to be interviewed by detectives. Most of the members were quite shaken— gunshots had been fired in their exclusive club, people had been killed. Their faces all see
med to say that their dues were far too high for something like this to have happened in a place where they played.
Bill Smith finally arrived and managed to convince the local cops that it would be okay for Emma and DeMarco to leave with him. As they’d each brought their own car to the club, they left the parking lot in convoy fashion, Smith and DeMarco following Emma. She led them to the first bar she could find.
No one said anything until they all had drinks in front of them. DeMarco swallowed most of his drink immediately and noticed that Emma did the same.
“She didn’t do what I expected,” Emma said.
“The bitch never seems to,” Smith said.
“I figured she’d try for me while I was jogging,” Emma said. “Instead she picks a place filled with civilians.”
“Do you think she planned to nab you again or just kill you?” Smith said.
“I don’t know,” Emma said. “She could have killed me right after she shot the viewing window out but she aimed for Joe instead. Then before she could fire, Carla started shooting.”
“Thank God for Carla,” Smith said, raising his glass in a small toast to the fallen.
“Yes,” Emma said. “Did she have anyone? A boyfriend, a husband, kids?”
“I don’t know,” Smith said. “I didn’t know her.”
“Well, find out,” Emma snapped. She finished her drink and waved at the bartender for another round.
“I’m not sure Carla saved you,” DeMarco said. He hadn’t spoken until now. Emma seemed completely recovered from the gunplay that had occurred but DeMarco was still shaken by what had happened.
“What?” Emma said.
DeMarco told them about the sequence of shots and the fact that Carla had been shot in the back of the head.
“You’re saying someone else was shooting at Li Mei?” Smith said.
“I don’t know. I could be wrong about the shots.”
“You are wrong,” Emma said. “If somebody else had been there we would have seen him.”
DeMarco shrugged. There’d been a lot of shots fired and glass had been raining down on his head and his heart had been beating a zillion times a minute. And Li Mei had used a silenced weapon so maybe she’d fired more shots than he had heard. But it still bothered him that Carla had missed Li Mei with the first two shots. When he said this, Smith said, “Well, firing at paper targets and firing at a human being are two different things.”
“No,” Emma said, “I think Joe has a point.” She reached out and pulled a piece of glass from DeMarco’s hair. To Smith she said, “Call the cops at the club. Ask them to see if the clip in Carla’s weapon is still full.”
Smith nodded, took out his cell phone, and made the call. DeMarco noted that when Smith talked to the cops his voice took on this I’m-a-government-heavy-hitter tone. They all waited, sipping their drinks, as Smith held the phone to his ear.
“Okay,” he finally said into his phone. “Thanks.”
“She never fired a shot,” Smith said to Emma.
“Then who shot at Li Mei?” DeMarco said.
“There’s only one answer to that question,” Emma said. “The Chinese. They must have sent a team here to watch for her and to watch me. They must have seen her this morning when she followed me to the club.”
“So why didn’t they try to capture her?” Smith said. “Or kill her before she got inside the club?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said. “Maybe they didn’t spot her until just before she entered the club. She’s good.”
“No shit,” Smith said. He paused a moment to sip from his drink then said, “So in addition to Li Mei, we got a fucking Chinese hit squad on the ground, right here in the Capitol, trying to catch one of their own agents.”
DeMarco opened his mouth to rail at Smith, to tell him that if he’d had the right manpower guarding Emma, his guys might have spotted Li Mei and the Chinese. But before DeMarco could say anything, Smith said, “Well, the good news is that the FBI will jump all over this now that we know Li Mei’s here. And they can’t give me any more crap about how protecting Emma is a DIA problem.”
“You know,” DeMarco said, “I’m getting pretty goddamn tired of all this interagency, bureaucratic bullshit. You guys need to—”
“I’m leaving the country,” Emma said. “I’m going to get on a plane using a false name and switch planes a couple of times before I get to where I’m going. Li Mei doesn’t have the resources to find me.”
“Then what?” Smith said. “You stay in exile for the rest of your life?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said. “But I do know that no one else is going to get killed because of me.”
Smith snorted. “I got a better idea,” he said. “We’ll set you up someplace— like a cabin on a beach with good lines of fire. We’ll make sure she knows you’re there, I don’t know how yet, but we will. Then we’ll surround the place with snipers in gillie suits. I’ll be there myself. And when Li Mei shows up, I’ll put a bullet right through her fuckin’ heart.”
DeMarco’s first reaction to Smith’s statement was: Why didn’t you just do that in the first place? He also realized at that moment that Smith was a cold-blooded killer. He talked about waffles and looked about as lethal as the late Mr. Rogers, but DeMarco suddenly realized that affable Bill Smith was a member of the same lethal club that Emma belonged to. He’d kill Li Mei without hesitation and not lose a wink of sleep afterward.
“I don’t want her killed, Bill,” Emma said. “I want her off the streets but I don’t want her dead.”
“Are you nuts, Emma?” Smith said. “That woman has killed— how many?— seven, eight people since this thing started? And she’s going to kill you for sure the next time she gets a chance.”
“We made her what she is, Bill. Me and the damn CIA. Those bastards.”
68
Mahoney walked out of the bar, drunk but not too drunk. He laughed at that. The Irish in him said there was no such thing as too drunk.
As the elevator descended to the parking garage, Mahoney thought that it had been a grand evening, putting that rat Morgan back in his cage. And seeing Myra again. She’d aged well; she looked great. He had thought about asking her to meet him at his hotel for a drink after her shift ended, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to put her on the spot. And maybe, he thought, just maybe, he was getting too old for that sort of thing.
Nah. He laughed out loud.
The elevator doors opened. Now where the hell had he parked his car? He should never have driven to the bar; he should have driven back to his hotel, parked the car there, and taken a cab to his meeting with Morgan. But he’d been late, so he had driven straight to the bar. Normally, Mahoney would never have rented a car at all. He would have had someone drive him, but when he came up here to squash Morgan he also scheduled a lunchtime speech to a bunch of Rotarians or Shriners— some group like that— and after the lunch he met with a couple of guys, guys he needed to open their wallets, but not guys he wanted people to know he was meeting. So he’d driven himself— and now here he was, half in the bag, and stuck with a car he couldn’t find.
He checked the markings on the pillars in the garage. Yeah, he was on the right level. He’d just have to wander around until he found the damn car. It was a big, black Lincoln. It shouldn’t be that hard to find— he hoped.
As he searched for his car, his knee started to ache. Damn shrapnel. He hoped the little motherfucker that had planted that mine was crippled with arthritis. That was funny, now that he thought about it. He didn’t want the guy dead, whoever he’d been. That war had been a long time ago. His enemy was now as old as he was, maybe older, and Mahoney wished him well— well with a limp.
Where the fuck was his car? Ah, there it was. Big as life. He reached into his pocket and searched for the keys. Now where were the keys? Jesus, he was losing his mind. He hoped he hadn’t left them up in the bar. Ah, there they were. He was a lucky man. Yes, he was.
He started to insert the key in
to the lock when he felt something hard pressed into the middle of his back.
“Get in van, old man,” a voice said. The voice sounded young and foreign.
Aw, shit. Mahoney turned to see who was speaking: a young guy, probably Vietnamese, five foot six, and maybe all of eighteen years old. He was holding a Glock.
