Jack Daniels Six Pack (130 page)

He turns on the device and attaches it to the underside of her rear bumper. Then he lights the second bottle of napalm, yells “Recon!” and chucks it at a patrol car.

Munchel runs back the way he came, slipping between houses, making it to his car a block away. It had taken him almost forty minutes of circling to find that parking space, and even though he was clearly the required twenty feet away from the fire hydrant, he still got a ticket. Assholes.

Rather than dwell on it, Munchel throws the suitcase and the rifle into the backseat, hops behind the wheel, and beelines for the rendezvous point, imagining Pessolano and Swanson watching his heroics on CNN and cheering him on.

6:54 P.M.
KORK

J
ACK’S BOYFRIEND LATHAM
is kind of cute. Red hair, a strong chin, broad chest. He doesn’t cry out when I crack him in the nose with the butt of my revolver, and doesn’t beg for his life when I stick the business end under his chin.

“On the sofa, next to the old lady.”

He complies, but takes his time, fixing me with what he probably thinks is a cold stare. He’s about as menacing as a teddy bear. If he wanted to learn cold stares, he should have grown up in my family.

“When’s your girlfriend getting home?” I ask.

He reaches out, holds the woman’s hand. Doesn’t answer. Which pisses me off.

I’ve lost track of how many people I’ve killed, but I know I’ve killed men for annoying me less than Latham is doing right now. But I don’t want to do anything permanent until Jack gets home and is able to watch. So I settle for smacking him with the gun again.

I hit him pretty good, opening up a cut on his cheek, and he refuses to meet my eyes. So much for the tough guy act.

“I don’t like repeating myself,” I say.

“She told me nine.” His voice is soft, dull. “She’s on a case.”

I check my new watch. Heathrow didn’t allow watches. Or jewelry. Or makeup. Or bras. Or shoes. We had our unisex cotton pants and top, and slippers with flimsy rubber soles. I could understand them keeping security tight. A few of the women in there were crazy. But my minders confused
insane
with
feeble-minded.
Big mistake.

My watch tells me I have about two hours left before Jack arrives. I’m hungry. Maybe I can get Mom to serve me some of that stew she’s making. I also haven’t gotten fucked in forever. The last time was with my so-called husband, and he was as in effective in bed as he was at everything else. I eye Latham’s broad shoulders, trim waist, then move my eyes lower, to his crotch. I wonder if he is up for the job. I know from experience that a man sometimes has problems getting it up when a gun is jammed in his mouth.

But when they can manage, the sex is mind-blowing.

Later, I decide. One more thing that Jack can watch.

“Who else is hungry?” I ask.

I smile, not the easiest thing to do when you’ve lost most of the nerves and muscles in half of your face. Mom grimaces. Latham stares at the floor.

“Both of you, stand up. Slow and easy. If you move too fast, or if I get the feeling you aren’t going to behave, I’ll shoot your knees.”

They stand, and hero boyfriend puts his arm around Mom’s shoulders. It’s touching, the warmth. Really. When the time comes, I don’t know which one I’ll kill first.

No need to think about that now. We have all night. And what a night it will be. These aren’t the only guests I’m inviting to this party. With some duct tape to keep everyone manageable, and some delivery pizza, we could keep this going for a few days.

First things first, Mom can serve some dinner. And I can warm loverboy up for our floor show later on. He looks to be the loyal type. Tough to break.

But I’ll break him. When I was growing up, Father used the stove for more than just cooking. He used it for punishment. Showed me up close and personal all the ways a stove can make a person scream.

And I’m more than happy to share the knowledge.

6:56 P.M.
JACK

W
HILE I FIRE
at the sniper the cops in the house clear out, carrying their injured team member. Herb comes up behind me, and we watch through the window as they make their way down the street. They join the others who were lucky enough to have gotten away, to the end of the block where the ambulances are.

We also watch our perp run around in jerky patterns, dragging a suitcase behind him and holding a huge sniper rifle, occasionally yelling something incoherent. He stops twice to throw homemade bombs at cars. Each one bounces off and causes a small fire on the sidewalk.

“This might very well be the world’s stupidest criminal,” Herb says.

I’m out of rifle ammo. Herb and I pull our ser vice pistols, keeping the perp in our sights. Though he keeps zigzagging and ducking down, he would have been a cinch to shoot if he came within our range. We could even have nailed him without looking, because he kept whooping like a drunken sports fan, giving away his location. Unfortunately, he stays at least fifty yards away the entire time, and eventually disappears between two houses, running off into the night.

Herb and I meet the Special Response Team in front, and I send them in the direction the sniper had gone. By that time the small fires have almost extinguished themselves, and the cops who’ve been in hiding come out and attend to the dead.

The sniper might have been an idiot, or a lunatic, or both. But he still managed to kill ten of my men. I maintain a brave face for the TV cameras, but each time I see a body bag being loaded into an ambulance my throat closes up.

My boss, Captain Bains, arrives in a patrol car. He has his dress blues on, ready to make a statement for the press. Deputy Chief Crouch, the superintendent’s right hand, is also present, setting up interviews with everyone involved. I’m first in line.

I’m bone tired, but I know I’ll be debriefed over and over again for the next few hours, and there’s no way to postpone it. I go back into the house and use the bathroom, doing a mediocre job washing off the blood. Then I call home, get the answering machine. Leave Mom a message that I won’t make dinner to night. I also call my long-suffering fiancé to let him know he’s welcome to stay the night, and I’ll make it up to him by cooking breakfast in the morning. I get his voice mail. Perhaps he and Mom are in a heated match of rummy.

Internal Affairs shows up—a bystander had been nicked by police crossfire. It wasn’t by me, but they take my gun anyway; standard operating procedure so ballistics can rule out my bullets as the lethal ones. I’m too numb to argue. My phone rings, and I excuse myself for a minute.

“Jack, it’s an emergency.” Mom sounds frazzled. “You need to come home.”

“Mom? Are you okay? What’s going on?”

I’m talking to a dead line. I call back. Get the machine. Call again, get the same results. Try Latham once more, go directly to voice mail.

What the hell?

“I need to check on my partner,” I tell the IA guys. Then I catch up with Herb as two paramedics assist him into the ambulance. The assistance involves a lot of lifting and grunting.

“I need a favor, Herb.”

“No problem. I’ll make a copy for you.” He taps his jacket pocket, which held the Kingston Trio CD. “And yes, it’s got ‘Tom Dooley’ on it.”

I lean closer. “I need you to cover for me, for a few hours. The deputy chief wants answers. The Feds are coming, probably to compare this to every other sniper incident in the past seven hundred years. Plus I’m going to have to tell the same story again for IA.”

“Are you going to tell them I stole folk rock?”

“No. I’m going to tell them to talk to you first. I just got a weird call from my mother, and something’s not right. I have to run home. And as you’re well aware…”

Herb finishes for me. “You live in the suburbs, even though you’d be fired if they found out, and even though there were many perfectly nice single-family homes in my neighborhood.”

“I’ll be two and a half hours, tops. Just make sure they don’t go to my old apartment.”

Because then they’ll know I don’t live in the city anymore.

“Take three hours,” Herb says. “I use a lot of adjectives when I tell stories.”

I pat his shoulder. “Thanks, Herb. Good luck with those stitches.”

“If my wife asks, I didn’t get shot. Tell her I was bitten by a monkey.”

“Sure. She’ll buy that.”

“She’s terrified of monkeys.”

“Wouldn’t a dog be more realistic?”

“She loves dogs. If it’s a monkey, I’ll get sympathy sex.”

I speak to the deputy chief and inform him I have a family emergency, but he can debrief my partner at the hospital. I promise I’ll be back within an hour. Which is an outright lie, because I live an hour away.

During the ride to the suburbs I obsess about my mother. If something happened to her, why hasn’t Latham called? Or perhaps the emergency has to do with Latham, and Mom is too shocked to go into details.

I’m overwhelmed by mental snapshots of death: car accidents, strokes, heart attacks, earthquakes, floods. Are they en route to the ER? Is that why they couldn’t pick up the phone? It can’t be a fire, because the answering machine keeps going on—a fire would destroy the line.

Is it something to do with my father? Mom never forgave Dad for leaving us, and while I’ve been trying to rebuild a relationship with him, she refuses to acknowledge his existence. Maybe Dad had shown up at my house, which would cause Mom to go supernova.

Or is this something more insidious?

I look at my cell, find the call from the Heathrow Facility. The caller ID indeed reads
HEATHROW
, but maybe that can be faked. I dial 411, get the same number, and let them patch me through. I speak to three different people, all of whom confirm that Alexandra Kork is dead as dead can be.

Okay. I’m being paranoid. Even if Alex were alive—and she isn’t—she still didn’t know where I live.

Maybe Mom saw the sniper shootings on television and is simply worried about me. Not picking up the phone is a guarantee I’ll rush home.

Or maybe Latham has some sort of surprise planned. I think of the mariachi band he hired when he proposed, and a smile breaks through my mask of worry. He truly is a sweetheart.

I get off the expressway on Route 20, heading for York Road. What ever the emergency is, I’ll find out soon enough.

My thoughts momentarily shift to the shooter. Finding sex offenders is a snap—thanks to Megan’s Law, anyone can log onto the Internet and access the National Sex Offender Registry and get their names and addresses. But if this is some sort of warped vigilante group, why kill cops? Did the sniper simply get carried away? Or is he really out of his mind? And are his two partners just as unbalanced?

I turn left down my twisty road, heading home. I hear the dead leaves crackling under my tires, see glimpses of the moon through the canopy of trees, and wonder what Mom loves about this neighborhood so much. Can it even be called a neighborhood? We’ve never met our nearest neighbor, who lives a quarter of a mile away. Come Halloween, I wonder if parents drive their children house to house for trick-or-treating. If I had kids, I’d drive them—to the city.

Thinking of children makes me think of Latham, and I get sort of gooey inside. I pull into the driveway and park next to his car, convinced that this
emergency
probably has to do with Mom fudging points in their card game, or burning the apple pie. I do a quick mirror check, finger comb my hair, and hop out of my Nova.

The front door is locked, and the front room is dark. I notice a light in the kitchen through the bay window. I unlock the door and go in.

“Mom? Latham?”

I smell food. Stew, and some sort of baked goods. Maybe I’m right about the pie after all.

Mom is in the kitchen, sitting at the table. It takes me a second to realize she has duct tape over her mouth and around her arms, and then something appears in my peripheral vision, something blindingly fast.

I duck, but not quickly enough, and get knocked to the floor, my vision all lopsided and swirly.

“Welcome home, Jack.”

I can’t focus, but I recognize the voice.

Alex is alive.

And that means we’re all going to die.

8:02 P.M.
KORK

J
ACK’S MOMENT
of realization is priceless. It’s an expression of fear and helplessness, and it’s so raw and honest that I feel like a peep-show voyeur watching it.

I want to hit her again, to turn her fear into pain. But there isn’t any need to rush. Better to play it safe, make sure she’s restrained first.

“Handcuffs,” I say.

Jack doesn’t answer. I don’t think she’s trying to defy me. I think she’s so scared she can’t even speak. I give her a kick in the ribs to help with her articulation.

“Handcuffs,” I repeat. “You’ll have plenty of time to be scared speechless later.”

“Purse,” she says.

I follow her eyes, see an ugly clutch on the floor. I keep the gun on her and walk over to it. There are handcuffs inside, but no gun.

“Where’s that little toy Colt you carry around?”

“Internal Affairs. Had a shooting to night.”

I wonder if she’s lying, then notice that she has blood on her skirt, her shirt. Looks like Jack has had a busy night.

It’s about to get busier.

“Cuff your hands behind you,” I say, tossing her the bracelets.

She complies, sneaks a look at Mom. I wait for Jack to say something like “Let her go, this is between us” or “If you touch her, I swear I’ll kill you” or something equally meaningless. She surprises me by saying nothing. Perhaps she knows it won’t do any good. Or perhaps she’s saving her energy because she knows she’ll need it later. For screaming.

I allow them their mommy/daughter moment, then wrap my hand in Jack’s hair and jerk her to her feet. It doesn’t take much effort. At Heathrow, I was able to catch up on two things—soap operas and exercise. The last time I’d encountered Jack, I’d been soft.