Shoot to Thrill (28 page)

John moved up to the front seat after they’d dropped off Gino and watched him walk up his front walk. Angela was out there in some kind of fuzzy pink bathrobe that sparkled in the porch light, opening her arms for Gino and leading him into the house.

‘Nice,’ John said.

‘He’s the luckiest man on the planet.’

‘You ever think of going that route?’

‘What? Marriage? Kids that puke all over you in the middle of the night? Christ, yes. I think of that all the time.’

John smiled and nodded. When he got into his rental he pulled out his cell and punched in a number. ‘Harley. This is John. Could you stand some company?’

*

‘And I’ve got chicken piccata for you.’

He took a breath and let everything go when he heard her voice. He needed to be there. He needed someone waiting in a silly pink robe under a porch light. ‘You heard about what went down tonight?’

‘You made the news, Magozzi.’

‘Do you have a pink robe?’

‘Black.’

‘That’ll work.’

It took John two full glasses of wine and a large pizza to summarize the night’s events for Harley. By the time he’d finished, the warmth of the burgundy had seeped into every cell, wrapping him in a cozy, fuzzy cocoon of contentment, and he wondered if he’d ever be able to extricate himself from the down-filled cushion of his chair.

Harley raised his glass. ‘Well, here’s to you, Special Agent John Smith, and your crazy, goddamned night. You got another one.’

‘But not all of them. We’re never going to catch the other murderers, and even if we do, another two will pop up for every one we put away.’

Harley shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Somebody somewhere will decide to go a little deeper into the dark side, and they’ll find a way to slide into these foreign servers and anonymous networks all the dirtbags use. Then you’d be able to monitor the sites and servers undetected, and probably bust a whole lot of all kinds of cyber criminals, including our killers.’

Harley raised one bushy brow. ‘Are there international agreements against spying? Because that’s all this would be; just a simple matter of planting a little James Bond spy worm. He doesn’t hurt anybody, he doesn’t mess with the systems, he just keeps an eye on things and reports back. Now, if memory serves, you guys do quite a bit of spying yourselves.’

John was shaking his head. ‘There is no way any government agency could be complicit in such an operation. We are signators to those agreements.’

Harley shrugged. ‘Oh, hell, I know that. I’m just saying someday
somebody’s
going to do it. And since you guys signed that silly agreement about not busting into foreign servers and anonymous networks, you’re never going to be able to figure out who.’

John just stared at him, glass frozen on its way to his half-open mouth.

Harley smiled and reached into the humidor on his side table. ‘I want you to know I make good on my promises. You got the belly dancers, and now you get the cigar.’

Smith ran the cigar under his nose like he saw people do in the movies and smelled chocolate.

‘That’s the real deal, Smith. Havana’s finest. Enjoy.’

They smoked in comfortable silence for a few minutes, sipping burgundy and watching gray smoke curl up toward the pressed-tin ceiling of the study.

‘You know, John, I still think this whole case is a damn fine way to close out a career. You know what’s gonna

‘After tonight, I don’t think I have any adrenaline left.’

‘You can make more.’

Magozzi woke up the next morning in Grace’s bed with Grace licking his face. She had a really big tongue. And it smelled like kibble.

He shoved Charlie the dog down into the crook of his arm and fell asleep again, trying to remember the details of what happened last night. He’d pulled up in front of Grace’s fortress house and turned off the car. She was sitting on the front steps under the porch light in a fuzzy black robe, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands like a little girl. So daring, so brave, as if there weren’t people in her quiet neighborhood who would jump out and kill her.

She fed him chicken piccata, whatever the hell that was, gave him a glass of wine, then tucked him into the big bed upstairs and held him until he fell asleep.

‘Magozzi.’ He heard her voice in his right ear, felt the movement of her breath stirring his hair. ‘Ten minutes till breakfast.’

She had all his favorites at the kitchen table: orange juice, yogurt, and bran cereal. ‘Gee, Grace, you shouldn’t have.’

She made a cute little snorting sound. ‘Eat it. It’s good for you. Besides, I haven’t been home long enough to shop this week. While you’re eating, you can listen to the judge’s tape.’

He eyed the little recorder she’d placed on the table

‘He recorded his conversation with the murderer last night.’

By the time the tape clicked off, Magozzi had eaten half the yogurt, which was disgusting, two bites of bran cereal, which looked like bunny turds and probably tasted like them, and was gulping juice to wash it all down. ‘Half of that tape is drunken bullshit. Alan Sommers didn’t kill his son. His son committed suicide, probably because he knew his father better than we did and couldn’t stand him.’

Grace studied him for a moment. ‘Alan Sommers gave the judge’s son the HIV virus. Jessie shot himself when he developed full-blown AIDS.’

Magozzi closed his eyes.

‘Sommers was apparently golden on the meds, but seven other of his partners died, both before and after he passed on his little present to Jessie. The judge thought of him as a mass murderer, of sorts; one that couldn’t be prosecuted.’

‘Where are you getting this stuff?’

‘He wrote a daily journal on his computer. He wasn’t that bad a man, Magozzi. He sat down on the riverbank with his gun every night for a year, trying to kill Alan Sommers, but he couldn’t make himself do it.’

Magozzi scraped back his chair and headed for the coffeemaker. ‘So he put Alan on a hit list and had someone else do his dirty work. It’s still murder. Don’t fall for his poor-me crap, Grace. And don’t forget there were six other people on that list.’

‘Still murder,’ Magozzi grumbled, refusing to look at her for almost a full second.

‘It wasn’t a hit list, Magozzi. It was a hate list posted by a despairing, ranting drunk.’

‘We should have found that connection in the victim files.’

‘Did you read the trial transcripts?’

‘Trial transcripts are at the end of the files, and they’re hundreds of pages. The box thing interrupted us before we got that far. We should have started with them. I should have known that, goddamnit.’

Grace started clearing the table. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference, Magozzi. The murders had all happened by then.’

‘Not quite.’

She stopped in mid-stride on her way to the sink, holding his cereal bowl in her hand. ‘You liked him,’ she said without turning around.

‘No. I did not. What I liked was that cereal. Bring it back.’

He stood on the front stoop of Grace’s house, hands shoved in his pants pockets, thinking how strange it was that he wasn’t reacting. Funny. You wait and wait for things to change; for people to change. You don’t work at it, mind you; you just wish and wait and only tell yourself in secret that it will never happen. And then suddenly, right out of the blue, it does.

How about that.

John was standing in the doorway of the Big Boy’s Room, thinking of what a comedown his own bedroom and tiny bathroom in D.C. were going to be tonight.

He could hear the soft murmur of voices and went downstairs after a final, longing look at the bedroom.

When he exited the elevator, Annie, Grace, and Roadrunner were standing in the foyer next to Harley.

Annie batted her eyelashes at him – he was certain of it this time around – and in her sweet sugary drawl bid him good morning. She was wearing a sunny yellow suit with an elaborate, veiled hat, like the kind women wore to the Kentucky Derby. In her hand she had a beautifully wrapped gift dressed up with a green satin ribbon.

‘Good morning, everybody. What a wonderful surprise to see you all again.’

Roadrunner was grinning. ‘We wouldn’t let you go without a send-off, John.’ He nudged Annie like an excited kid. ‘Give it to him.’

Annie extended the gift. ‘This is from all of us. And please don’t say something stupid like “You shouldn’t have” or I’ll have to slap you silly.’

Smith cocked a brow at her. ‘You shouldn’t have.’

Harley laughed. ‘You’re getting a funny bone, Smith. Good for you.’

He took his time unwrapping it, as if that would somehow delay his plane and his imminent departure.

‘Jesus, John, you must be a nightmare on Christmas morning,’ Harley gave him a good-natured needle. ‘You’re going to miss your flight if you don’t kick it into gear.’

He chuckled and pulled the lid off the box. Inside was a stack of printed pages and a tiny cassette.

‘Those are from Magozzi and Gino,’ Grace told him. ‘That’s a copy of the judge’s tape from the golf course, and all the entries from his computer journal.’

John smiled. ‘Sharing information,’ he murmured.

‘That was the deal.’

‘And what’s this?’ He pulled a single sheet of paper from the bottom of the box. John read a short list of names he didn’t recognize.

‘Oh, nothing much, really,’ Annie said. ‘Just the names of your other murderers, is all.’

John slid his eyes to look at Harley, who was rocking back on his heels, hands shoved deep in his pockets, like a little boy hiding frogs. ‘Where did you get this, Harley?’ he asked quietly.

The hands came out of the pockets and opened, frogless. ‘It was the damnedest thing. We got an anonymous tip this morning, took a few minutes to check out the names, and it looks like it might be the real thing. Thought you might like to take them back to D.C. and follow up.’

‘An anonymous tip.’

‘That’s right. An e-mail right out of the blue.’

‘I suppose it was untraceable.’

Roadrunner said, ‘Kind of a cool thing to hand over to your bosses if it turns out legit, huh?’

John looked from one face to another. No one was smiling. ‘Very cool,’ he said finally. ‘Very cool indeed.’

It seemed that John Smith had fallen just a little bit short of every goal he’d ever set for himself. As a kid, he’d wanted to be a superhero with a cape; instead, he’d ended up a Fed with a blue suit. In college he’d wanted desperately to be one of those glorious golden young men who raced in the America’s Cup and called out magical phrases like ‘Hoist the mains’l!’ and ‘Man the helm!’ or some such thing.

Surprisingly, he’d turned out to be a natural sailor, but never found a crew that would take him on because he couldn’t remember all those pesky nautical terms. They’d always seemed a little silly to button-down John. Like ‘hard a’starboard.’ Who thought up such things? Why not just say ‘ Turn right’? Everybody knew what that meant. Which was, of course, the whole point. Every exclusive club had to have its own parlance.

How strange, then, that after so many near-misses, well into the second half of his time on earth, he was learning to excel at life – the one thing he’d never really aspired to.

Once a year for all the years he’d been with the Bureau, he’d taken the boat south to the Keys; sometimes all the way to the Caribbean. For two weeks he’d dance the boat through waters that had too many colors to claim one, watched sun and moon and ocean mingle like a trio of lovers, and felt his mind slow down and finally bob and drift

He closed his eyes and smelled salt, heard the ticking of the rigging against the mast and the ruffle of heavy cloth in the breeze, and then felt the wind in his hair for the first time in years. He hadn’t had it cut for three weeks now, an all-time record. Maybe he’d let it grow long like Harley’s and wear it in a ponytail, just another gray-haired man reverting to the wild.

He opened his eyes when he heard the familiar clicking up the three steps from the galley, then the soft padding of bare feet. He watched as Grace and Charlie crossed the teak deck to the bow. They both liked to stand up there where the wind was always strongest, whipping Grace’s hair back, making her look like one of those figureheads the Vikings used to put on the prows of their ships. Charlie stood with his head poked through the rails, the wind blowing his tongue sideways out of his mouth.

John liked watching them.