Collateral Damage (7 page)

“I think she does,” Hannibal said, extending a hand. “Go take care of her. And take care of yourself.”

The telephone waited until almost nine-thirty to ring. Not bad for a Monday morning. By then Hannibal had run his five miles, showered, eaten his Cheerios and pulled on his working clothes. Now he sat at his desk dealing with the paperwork the government uses to keep the small businessman in his place. Fortunately these days, most of those papers are really streams of electrons and he was finally becoming pretty comfortable maintaining his records on his computer. Steam curled from his second cup of coffee and a Quincy Jones album sprinkled the room with soft but pulsing background music. Hannibal smiled at the phone for waiting until he was ready for it.

“Mister Jones? It's Anna. Can you come out here? I need some help. Can I hire you?” The words poured out of her mouth like water from a burst dam, jolting Hannibal into rigid attention.

“Slow down a bit and tell me what's wrong.”

“He's here,” she said. Keeping her voice low didn't cover the panic. “Ike is here. He showed up here at work not much after I arrived. I'm afraid he'll do something.”

“Where are you exactly?”

Anna was having trouble catching her breath. “I'm at the Springfield DMV office, over on Franconia. He keeps coming in and going out again. Now he's just standing there by the door, staring at my cage. I just know he'll do something crazy.”

Hannibal thought about facing that giant again. It was not a fun thought. “What about the police, Anna? Has your office called them?”

“He hasn't really done anything. And I'm afraid he might go crazy if some uniformed stranger was to push him. He knows you.”

Hannibal was about to protest again. Then an image came to him, an image of Isaac Ingersoll on a rampage in a crowded government building. Somebody was sure to get hurt if the police handled the situation, maybe Isaac worst of all. And clearly Anna didn't want that, despite all her husband had done to her. He was not there out of hate, but out of a confused love. If Hannibal might be able to defuse the situation, he really had no choice but to go. He might be able to end the situation with a little talk.

Still, before he slipped his jacket on and pushed his Oakley sunglasses into place, he shoved his Sig Sauer P229 into the holster under his right shoulder.

Hannibal slipped between the glass doors of the Department of Motor Vehicles. The ambient noise level was enervating, but he couldn't pick out any words in any conversations. The counter had to be thirty feet long with maybe a dozen people standing behind it. The line of customers stretched the length of the counter then curled on itself, once, twice, six times. Almost every person in that line was talking, in one of four languages, not counting the small children who have a language all their own. The tone of that mass of indecipherable chatter was negative. It was a room full of frustration, and Isaac Ingersoll stood at the back of it, against the wall counter littered with forms to fill out. Match and powder keg in easy reach of one another.

But what Hannibal saw in Isaac's face was helplessness. He stared across the wide room at Anna who stood behind the eye test machine, working hard at working. When she spotted Hannibal, a huge breath escaped her, as if she were inflated
with tension and his presence allowed some of it to leak out. Then her eyes went to her husband, the worry lines crowding her face. Hannibal followed her line of sight to Isaac who seemed to receive her psychic wave because he turned his head and saw Hannibal for the first time. His jaw set and his hands curled into fists.

Hannibal kept his hands in front of him, one holding the other, and walked toward Isaac. Watching the bigger man's eyes, Hannibal pushed himself closer, inside the danger area, less than arms' length away. His neck craned and he stared up into that big Nordic face, showing no tension.

“Could we just talk a minute?” Hannibal asked softly. “Maybe outside? All these people don't need to be involved in this.” Then he turned his back to Isaac and eased away toward the door. A part of him anticipated a fist at the back of his head but he could not look back, could not offer Isaac an option.

He pushed through the door and dim fluorescence was replaced by the scorching fireball hanging in the eastern sky. Hannibal walked a few steps toward it. When he turned, he stood in a corner of the parking lot. Isaac was no more than five feet away, raising his fists. But the sun was stabbing his eyes. Hannibal kept his hands and his voice low.

“Isaac, I think you're ready for a serious fight,” Hannibal said. “And you know what else? I think you could beat my face in.”

Isaac shifted his feet into a more aggressive fighting stance. “You got that right, asshole.”

Hannibal's first goal was accomplished. He had the man talking. The next step was to get him thinking. “You know, your wife could have called the police and told them you were harassing her. Why do you suppose she didn't do that?”

While he talked, Hannibal floated lightly on his feet, keeping himself turned in such a way as to never offer Isaac a perfect target. Anger tightened Isaac's face as he moved to try to reach the right position to land a solid punch. “You her new man,” Isaac said. “You tell me.”

“You're know it's not like that,” Hannibal said with a smile. “Your wife is my client and nothing more. She asked me to come here because she's scared, Isaac, and trouble is my business.” Could Hannibal establish a token amount of trust? His Secret Service training told him that was the next step. He stopped moving and extended his right hand. “Hannibal Jones is my name.”

“Fuck you!”

No rapport, perhaps, but Isaac didn't sucker punch him while his hand was out. The anger was under some sort of control. “Okay. But I can assure you of this much. Your wife doesn't have another man. In fact, I'm sure she never has.”

“Bullshit!” Isaac's fists were shaking with rage now. “Why would she leave me if she didn't have another man?”

It was time to commit. Hannibal rooted his feet and let Isaac get close enough to crush him. “Look at me Isaac, I'm six feet tall and I've been kick-boxing since high school. Years of police training. And if you really wanted to you could kill me with your hands. Your wife is five foot two. Maybe, what, a hundred ten pounds? Think about what happens to her body when you hit her.”

Isaac's fist actually whistled through the air, down toward Hannibal's head like a hammer. A sidestep allowed it to blow past, slamming down on the fender of a Taurus. He turned away from the impressive dent, following Hannibal with his eyes.

“If she was scared of me, she would have called the police!”

“You still don't get it,” Hannibal said, beginning to dance around a bit, still working to keep the sun in Isaac's eyes. “She's more scared for you. She knew if you tried this crap with the cops they'd just as likely shoot your big dumb ass. And she doesn't want you to get hurt. The woman loves you!”

Hannibal stopped to see what effect his words were having. Isaac bellowed “No!” and swung faster than expected. A fist as big as a twelve-pound ham raked across Hannibal's jaw, lifting him off his feet. He rolled across the
asphalt to give himself distance and sprang up ready for action, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a boxer.

“All right you get that one for free. Maybe you owed me one for the other night. Now you've got to call the next play, big man. You come in on me and you mash my face and the police come and throw you in jail. Or, you come in on me and I'm as fast as you know I am and I break your knee and put your face through a car windshield because I can't go easy with a guy your size. Or, you go home and I promise Anna will call you tonight and talk about what's wrong and how maybe you two can fix it.”

Isaac looked startled for a moment. Maybe he didn't expect Hannibal to be up so quickly. Or perhaps the sound of Anna's name had an effect on him. His fists lowered a few inches.

“Tonight?”

“My word on it,” Hannibal said quickly. When he pulled a card from an inside jacket pocket he watched Isaac's eyes and saw him register the presence of Hannibal's pistol. Now he knew Hannibal didn't have to take that punch.

“My address is right there,” Hannibal said, slapping the card on a car hood. “If Anna doesn't call you before the night's over, you can come to me and we can pick this up where we left off if that's what you want to do. Right now, you need to go home and relax a while.”

Isaac's big fist closed on Hannibal's card, but his eyes turned back toward the double doors into the motor vehicle building. Hannibal moved into his line of sight. “You can't take her back, Ike. You have to let her come back. I'm sorry, that's just the way it works.”

When Hannibal walked into the motor vehicle office, Anna deserted her post and rushed to him. She hustled him into the back offices and ran to the ladies' room for a wet cloth to press against his face.

“God, thank you thank you thank you.” The words poured out of Anna, tripping over each other. “Are you all right? What about Ike, did you have to hurt him? You didn't have to involve the police did you? Is he gone, really gone?”

“Not gone from your life, Anna,” Hannibal said, stopping her hand's movement over his face and holding the cloth lightly himself. “I'll be fine and he's fine physically, but he's a man in torment. If this is going to go on, I need to know how you feel about this guy. Do you still love him?”

Her answer was very, very quiet. “I don't know.”

“What do you want, Anna?”

Anna turned and walked to the closed door. When she turned back, her face was composed again. Her strength was returning with her distance from Isaac. “I want to be safe.”

“I understand,” Hannibal said, “but it won't be free.”

“I'll figure a way to pay you,” she said quickly. “I know this is business for you.”

Hannibal stood, dropping the cloth on her narrow desk. “That's not what I meant. You can't just avoid him. You've got to make peace with him one way or another. I told him you'd call tonight and talk to him. The two of you need to figure out what you want and how to make it happen. Counseling is probably a good idea.”

“I'll call him if you think it's important. But I meant what I said about paying you.”

Hannibal considered the inherent strength hidden in this woman and wondered how she ever came to a place where she would let a man beat her. “Anna, you can hardly afford my rates. But we might be able to handle this another way. Take it out in trade. Tell me, how hard is it to find a person if you know their license plate number?”

This brought Anna's first smile of the day. “You kidding? I'm the shift supervisor. Why don't you give me the number and a description of the car and let me see what I can do?”

When Hannibal pulled up in front of the palatial rambling home at the edge of Arlington he was mentally replaying his last conversation with Anna. He was barely a mile from her office, stopped at a red light when she called, sounding chipper and in control again.