Shoot to Thrill (27 page)

There was a sickening crunch as the Caddie bottomed out on a broken piece of pavement. Smith saw sparks fly out from the undercarriage like a swarm of fireflies, but Magozzi kept pushing.

‘Time?’

Gino checked the Caddie’s digital readout. God, he loved this car. ‘Thirteen minutes.’ He glanced to his right and saw the light-rail train keeping pace with them, heading for their intersection. ‘You gotta beat that train to the intersection, Leo. If we stop, it’s all over.’

‘How fast do they go?’

‘I don’t know. Thirty, thirty-five. You’re going thirty-six, Leo. That’s cutting it a little close.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ve got a thousand red taillights in front of me, and this fucking Cadillac is not a monster truck, so make a suggestion.’

Gino exhaled sharply.

*

He’d told the man to come at ten; he’d told Magozzi to come ten minutes later. The timing was critical. Please, God, let this happen the way it should.

‘Time, Gino!’

‘Eight minutes! You gotta beat that train!’

The funny thing was that John Smith, sitting in the backseat of a stupid drug dealer’s car racing a light rail to an intersection, was utterly ambivalent. Truly, this was so unexpected, and yet such a predictable outcome to the boring, faintly amusing, life he had lived. There would be a nicely framed picture of him on the wall in D.C., right next to one of the agent who had risked his life to save the child of a domestic terrorist last year, caught in the crossfire of justice. The man had been shot twenty-seven times in the act of saving a child. John, on the other hand, would die with a lamb kabob in his belly and the memory of a half-naked dancer in his brain, cut down by a light rail that could barely exceed the speed limit. Not exactly the heroic death he had envisioned. Still, he was afraid, because Magozzi had jerked the Caddie into the shallow ditch between the street and the tracks, was dodging poles and culverts and God

I told you, John. I don’t want you here for this.

Where else would I be? This is where I live.

And then he walked across the white hospital room to the white hospital bed and looked at the ever-so-white face of the first, and perhaps the last, woman he would ever love in such a way. The infinitesimal diamond was on her finger, clinging loosely to what little flesh was left, because the disease had been hungry. He had been twenty-nine, she had been twenty-seven on that day.

She managed a smile as he approached her bed, the first he had seen in many days.

That’s funny, John.

What is?

Everything just slowed down, like in the movies. I like that. It gives you time to see things.

It was like that now as the Cadillac bumped over this and that as it raced the train in that grassy ditch so close to the tracks, because if he looked to the left, he could see the cars on the street next to them, the curious, startled eyes of the passengers in the cars. He saw a child with a circle for a mouth, and a woman whose mascara was running with tears, and then the car soared up and went airborne over the hillock that connected it to the intersection, and someone pushed fast-forward.

And then they were on a two-lane side street with lovely homes on either side, and John took a breath and watched the pretty houses slide by like a newlywed looking at real estate, and the world was very, very quiet.

‘Okay. This is the way it’s going to go down,’ Magozzi said. The windows on the Caddie were closed, but still he whispered, as if there were ears in the parking lot near the eighteenth green, next to the polished SUV that Wild Jim had put there like a signpost. On the far side of the lot, behind the clubhouse and out of sight, they’d already checked out a low-slung Mercedes. They’d felt warmth still rising from the hood, careful not to touch the car itself. You never could tell what kind of alarm system these foreign models had as add-ons. ‘Whoever this guy is, he’s stalking Wild Jim. Obviously he’s already on site, maybe checking the perimeter for people like us, maybe just waiting for a clean shot. If the judge walks into that, he’s dead. If he’s smart, and I think he is, he got here long before the meet he set up, and he’s the one who’s going to bring this bastard down.’

‘So you’re assuming they’re both armed?’ John was dismayed.

‘The judge is always armed,’ Gino said. ‘But as far as we know, he’s never shot anybody. He spent his whole career working for the law, not against it. I wouldn’t put it past him to try to arrest the guy, though. I think he’s trying to go out as a hero.’

Aren’t we all,
John thought, depressed by how small the 9mm looked in his hand.

Ten minutes after he’d settled beneath the tree, his bottle of bourbon tucked between his thighs, Wild Jim’s hunter’s eyes saw the dark, hunched figure crab-walking along the sheltered margin of the woods surrounding the eighteenth green. Adrenaline burned through his heart like battery acid and his limbs went numb. Or maybe he was having a heart attack, which would actually be a wonderfully ironic outcome to this whole mess.

He looked up at the moon and the sky and decided there was little point in pondering God, destiny, and fate at this point, because he didn’t believe in any of them. But the old saying that there were no atheists in foxholes finally resonated with him on a fundamental level – when your life was truly hanging in the balance, you instinctively thought about the bigger picture, whether you believed in one or not.

The glowing dial of his watch face read 9:55. ‘You’re a little early,’ he said quietly in the general direction of his stalker.

The figure froze, then straightened slightly. ‘If you move, you’re dead,’ the man replied, equally quietly.

The judge caught a glimpse of gun metal gleaming in the moonlight. ‘I’m not moving.’

‘No joke, I’m going to circle around behind you and if I see even one little flinch, your brains are going to be fertilizing the eighteenth green. Let me see your hands.’

He didn’t remotely resemble the person Jim had been expecting, and he suspected the feeling was mutual, because the man’s eyes kept drifting from his human target to the Winchester in his lap and the bottle of bourbon between his legs. ‘How stupid are you? You arrange to meet a killer and you aren’t even holding your gun.’

‘As I said, you’re a bit early. Besides, I couldn’t manage the cork while I was holding my weapon. Care for a splash?’ Jim uncorked the bottle and took a swig. ‘It is, without question, the greatest fermented mash my rather experienced palate has ever known.’

The man leaned forward and stretched his arm, moving the gun closer to Jim’s temple. ‘I told you not to move, goddamnit.’

‘Yes, you did, but only because you were at a disadvantage at the time, and walking blindly into an uncertain situation. But since I am currently in plain view, you know that my movements have nothing to do with firearms or murder and everything to do with enjoying an innocent sip of fine spirits.’

The man’s gun dropped a few inches, which was a great relief. ‘So. You saw me with the faggot in the wedding dress.’

‘That’s imprecise. I saw you
kill
the faggot in the wedding

‘Whatever. How’d you find out who I was?’

Judge Jim sighed. ‘I followed you up to where you parked your car. You have a very nice car, by the way, spectacularly clean, which makes it so much easier to read the license plate. And if you have any connections with the DMV, as I do, a phone number is quite easy to come by. My only surprise was that you actually used your own car. That is the kind of oversight that solves crimes, you know. So why did you come tonight?’

‘Because you’re fucking blackmailing me.’

Jim smiled. ‘No, let’s be perfectly honest. A man like yourself wouldn’t pay off a blackmailer. You came here to kill me, which is sensible, and, ironically, my goal as well.’

The man grunted. ‘Well, damn. That kind of takes all the fun out of it.’

‘I’m sure it does, but the truth is you have no choice. I saw you murder a man. The question is, why haven’t you killed me already? I know you have it in you.’

‘Yes, I do. But I like to play with my food.’ He smiled then, and Jim knew he was looking straight into the eyes of a sociopath. He’d seen them plenty of times before from the bench, and it chilled his blood and reversed all the heat the adrenaline had put into him earlier.

‘So, did you kill them all?’

The man gave Jim a blank stare. ‘What are you talking about?’

Jim settled back and drank some more bourbon while he contemplated the answer to that question. He took one

‘Who the hell
are
you, old man?’

‘You know me as Hole in One.’

The man froze for a few moments, then started to chuckle, which eventually developed into a full-blown laugh. ‘Are you kidding me? Are you KIDDING? You’re Hole in One? From the chat room?’

‘And you are Killer, right? That’s your handle.’

Killer was having trouble believing what he was seeing and hearing. ‘You put up the hit list? A useless old drunk? Oh, man, this is rich. Wait until the guys hear about this.’

So there are others,
Jim thought miserably.
What have I done?
His eyes flicked to the other side of the green and saw man shapes hunched over, darting close to the trees while Killer’s attention was diverted.
About time, Magozzi and Gino
, he thought, and then realized he had to act quickly.

‘This is getting rather tedious,’ he said. ‘Either shoot me now, or I’m – ’

Killer’s gun fired before Jim could finish the sentence, but, truly, he was an appalling shot, at least in the dark. It was a miracle he’d ever managed to kill anyone.

‘Idiot,’ Jim muttered as he pulled the trigger on the .38 under his jacket. It made a dreadful mess of the man’s knee, and that pleased Jim enormously. It was precisely what he had been aiming for. ‘Come on over, Magozzi!’ he called out, smiling a little as a howling Killer fell to one knee and tried to crawl away, his weapon forgotten on the grass behind him.

This is going to make a great movie
, Jim thought, appreciating the cinematic perfection of moonlight on Killer’s back as

He sighed happily, put down the .38, and popped the cork on the bourbon.

Magozzi stood over him, breathing hard, pale in the faint light of the moon, his facial features stretched taut.

‘Good evening, Detectives. Perfect timing. Who’s your friend?’

‘Goddamnit, Judge, are you out of your fucking mind? What are you trying to do, commit suicide?’ Gino screamed at him, punching numbers on his cell to call for a bus and backup.

Jim chuckled. ‘I watched the man your friend is sitting on drown Alan Sommers in the river.’

The adrenaline rush leaked out of Magozzi’s legs and put him on his knees. ‘Bullshit. You were point-four-oh when they locked you up.’

‘Point-four-oh when they locked me up the next morning. Not when I watched the murder, and not when I followed the killer to his car and memorized the plate number.’

Gino’s mouth dropped open, then clicked shut when he dropped to a squat next to Jim and glared at him. It was surprising, really. Detective Rolseth had always seemed such a gentle sort to Jim, and yet in this moment he looked almost frightening.

‘I do apologize for deceiving you. Truly.’

‘Well, big whoop, the man apologizes. What if he had killed somebody else the next day, or the next? What was all that crap about the law and justice being your life? And all the while you were giving us that load of bullshit in your condo, you were letting a known murderer run loose.’

Jim blinked rapidly, then closed his eyes. The sorry truth was he had never considered that. Too consistently drunk; too interminably focused on his own misery.

‘This man is bleeding to death!’ John called out as he wrapped his suitcoat sleeves around Killer’s thigh in a crude tourniquet.

‘Bus on the way!’ Gino called back. ‘I swear to God, Judge, you’re going down hard for this one. I’ll be the guy in the back of the room, applauding.’

‘There were reasons …’ he stumbled over his words.

‘Don’t bother, I’ve heard them all,’ Gino’s voice was shaking with contempt. ‘Your son killed himself, you lost your job, you were abused as a child, whatever. Christ, I’m so sick of listening to excuses losers use for all the bad things they do.’

John ran over from the green and stopped, frowning down at Jim. ‘How long for the ambulance?’ he asked. ‘That guy out there is really bleeding. Looks like the femoral artery got nicked. And this one doesn’t look much better.’

‘He’s fine,’ Gino snapped, pushing to his feet. ‘Just contemplating his future in a state prison.’

Jim took a shallow breath. He wasn’t feeling so good

‘Slippery slope,’ John murmured.

Jim looked up at the stranger. ‘Yes. That’s it precisely. I can’t fix it. But tonight I tried. You’ve got your River Bride killer, and maybe a lot more.’

‘Yeah, right,’ Gino snorted. ‘We’ve got nothing on this guy except the word of a drunk who just shot him. What the hell are we supposed to do with that?’

Jim smiled a little, and Magozzi thought the old man was just about done in, because the color was going out of his face. ‘You have a little more than that,’ Jim told Gino, pulling aside his sportcoat and showing the wet, soggy evidence of his reddened shirt. ‘There’s a bullet in this pathetic alcohol-saturated belly that will match the weapon that man dropped. Murder One, if dreams come true.’

‘Jesus,’ Magozzi whispered, ripping off his own jacket, wadding it up, pressing it against the flood of life that was seeping out of Wild Jim onto the grass around him.

Magozzi, Gino, and John Smith sat in the Cadillac in the golf course lot, watching the ambulances pull away. Siren and lights on one, the other dark and ominous.

Magozzi gave the quiet a minute and then turned to Gino. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah. I’m okay.’

‘Is that a lie?’

‘I need to go home, Leo.’

‘Then that’s where you’ll go. How about you, John?’

‘Back to Harley Davidson’s, please. I have to pick up the rental car to take to the airport tomorrow.’

Magozzi turned the key and pulled out of the lot.