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  The clues aligned at once, pulling together in the instant Tim’s hand dove for his Smith & Wesson. The low-rider—the Cutlass with the top peeled back. Wes’s own words—I’m a computer guy at heart. He’d posed as the Piper in one of the chat rooms—ones that guys like us can’t even find—and snaked the contract. The hit itself—highly competent but not meticulous, the imperfect work of a well-read and -practiced wannabe.

  Before Bear could utter his name, Wes Dieter slipped through the gauze, disappearing into the green-tinted shadows of the preserve. The four-time course champion, trying for a getaway but inadvertently heading into the lion’s den. Given the recent fallout from Tess’s murder, Tim had to assume that a real gun lurked in one of Wes’s innumerable holsters and cargo pockets.

  Bear seized Xavier, steering him for the door. Tim ran for the curtain, shouting over his shoulder, “Clear the whole building! When backup gets here, have them seal off the preserve’s perimeter!”

  He slipped through, dropping low on a knee, his revolver clutched tight in both hands. A muddy trail went a few feet before splitting in three directions. Fronds fluttered. Cottonwood, sagebrush, willow, and coyote bush broke his sight line. A coarse cawing. The silhouette of a great white egret scanned across the roof of the black netting, strobe-flickering against the dark gray sky beyond. The netting encasing the fifteen-acre preserve brought a kind of night-within-night. Tim eased forward, boots shoving into the mud, then stepped off the trail. He turned down the volume on his radio, cutting himself off from his backup. Noises all around.

  Tim melded into the imported foliage, listening for the sounds of human movement—headlong progress through brush, metallic clinks, leaves whispering across fabric. He and Walker were like sharks squaring off in a kiddy pool.

  Advancing on hands and knees could help him reduce his noise signature, but it would also slow him down. Since concealment options were copious, there was no need to maintain a low-to-ground profile. He was within an enclosed space with three potentially armed men, all of them killers, all of them hunting and being hunted. Time was of the essence if he wanted to play a role in the outcome. And prevent the naked corpse of a well-siliconed woman from making tomorrow’s page one. To strike the balance between caution and pursuit, he opted for a slow upright patrol, stop-move-stop.

  He paused, getting down on a knee in the tules to listen and feel the air.

  Walker likely didn’t know that Tim and Caden were present. If he had come, he’d set up to wait for the Piper. If Tim had some luck, Walker didn’t realize yet that that meant this nickel-badge-wearing keyboard jockey. What would be the best tactical spot from which to observe, and execute a shot? Tim would have chosen the highest ground. A rise in the northwest quadrant seemed the best bet. Tim started to forge in that direction, through the dark heart of the preserve. If he heard anyone moving, odds were it was Caden, Wes, the girl, or one of the paintballers. Tim’s first priority would be to reach the nonsuspects and direct them to safety. Then he’d try to latch on to Caden and trail and outflank him for an ambush, or stalk Wes until he drew Walker from cover.

  Someone large lumbered up the trail to Tim’s right, and he whipped his gun over, waiting to see who appeared. An excessively camoed man with a beer gut charged around the bend, slipping to a halt. He smiled at Tim, raised his paintball gun. “Pow.” His eyes changed when he took in Tim’s expression and the steel gleam of the Smith & Wesson. Tim flicked his barrel toward the exit to keep the guy moving; he was only too happy to comply.

  In the blackness up ahead, a woman shouted, “Who the hell are you?” She yelped, and Tim ducked into the foliage. A few moments later, she ran past, naked and screaming, Afternoon no longer D-Lited.

  To his left he heard two bodies startle in the leaves, then move for the exit also, the panicked movements and shouted directives telling him they were the last two paintballers. Bear could deal with them and the girl once they spilled through the curtain.

  Moving briskly, Tim closed in on the area of foliage in which the regulars had stumbled upon an uninvited guest. The band of dense, shoulder-high bush crossed the base of the slope where Tim thought Walker might be bedded down. Tim steered clear of the loose rocks composing the waterfall’s base, picking quiet footholds around the mud wallow. Another theme-park addition, a camouflaged heavy bag, creaked on its chain, its sway more than the net-blocked wind could have generated. Someone had shouldered it on his way past.

  Tim inched upslope, letting the branches bend slowly against him to avoid snaps and backwhips. A stout sprig hung up against his ankle, and he grabbed it, stepping past then carefully releasing the tension. Through the patchwork of underbrush, his eyes picked up the faintest movement against the mud, a dark boot rising out of view. He straightened, but the foliage blotted out any movement ahead.

  His stalker’s instincts froze him. Someone else moved to his left just a few feet away—Tim sensed a vibration or the heat. With excruciating slowness, he pivoted to face his pursuer, his heels soundless in the mud. He lifted his .357, dodging leaves on the rise. In the silence between the brush of leaves and the scratch of crickets, he heard it.

  The faint yet undeniable click of a hammer cocking.

  Behind him.

  His body reacted before the sound registered as a thought. He spun, and as his own gun jerked in his grip, he saw the flare from a muzzle illuminating Walker’s face, floating as if detached among the leaves. The gunshot, compounded, seemed unreasonably loud.

  Chapter 66

  Before Tim could comprehend that the explosion came in surround sound—from in front of him, behind him, and his own hands—a hot streak ripped his neck. His recoil spun him around to see Caden Burke drop to the mud howling and gripping his shoulder. Walker Jameson grunted—Tim’s bullet had struck home—and a Redhawk six-shooter spit from the bushes, knocked loose. Walker’s furious retreat sounded like a beast fleeing.

  Tim couldn’t go after him right away because he still had Caden loose and who he guessed was Wes up ahead. Putting his knee in Caden’s back, Tim frisked him, pocketing his Ruger and a quaint switchblade. Walker’s shot had missed Tim and embedded in the ball of Caden’s shoulder, pulling Caden’s shot off center and inadvertently saving Tim’s life. When Tim cuffed him, Caden screeched with pain.

  Tim scrambled back to reclaim the Redhawk. The stock was still warm and felt familiar somehow, molded to his hand. He stiffened at a sudden footfall, turning to source the noise. With a whooshing of leaves, Wes charged out of the brush—he’d circled during the commotion and come in from the west. Tim went airborne, extended in a sideways dive, using Walker’s Redhawk to sight on Wes’s substantial critical mass. A slow-motion clarity came over Tim as it often did in a close exchange. He saw the black hole of Wes’s mouth looming behind the smaller black hole of a handgun muzzle. The moonlight’s sheen on the glossy leaves misted from the waterfall. Caden bucking against the cuffs, snarling with pain and a sort of dumb puzzlement. Tim flashed on Tess, made to sit at gunpoint on her bed, made to wait as Wes Dieter—the man at the receiving end of the Redhawk that Tim now clutched—pressed steel to her temple. Her last-second, turned-head recoil before the shot, when fear turned to dumb instinct. Tim’s finger tensed, and the trigger inched back, hammer ready to fall on one of Walker’s titanium bullets. At the last instant before he struck mud, Tim moved the barrel three millimeters left and put a bullet through Wes’s forearm.

  Wes’s gun spun from his limp hand, and he shrieked, plopping in the mud wallow, his gun echoing the splash an instant later. Tim retrieved the gun, cinched Wes’s good wrist to his ankle with plastic flex-cuffs, and sprinted off after Walker, feeding Bear the update a mile a minute through the radio. Across the dark preserve and through the netting, he could see a line of blue and red lights moving in from the south.

  Leaves and thin branches whipped Tim’s face. He hurtled over a slope, and the netting appeared, blindsiding him and cradling his full momentum to a stop. Tim could see Bear at the
parking lot, shouting at the incoming units to spread out. Working his way along the netting, Tim shoved into it at intervals to test its tension. Finally a shove yielded no resistance and he tumbled through, landing on the flat, sparse wetland outside the preserve. The net had been sliced cleanly through. Within a few acres’ sprint lay Lincoln Boulevard and scores of side streets, the freeway a brief stretch beyond. The wind snapped the netting angrily behind Tim.

  He focused on the dark sweep of earth, looking for any movement. Its lights off, a car peeled out from the wetlands border, too dark for Tim to discern its make or model. It turned a corner, and Walker was gone. Tim ran his hand along the slit in the netting, and it came away sticky. He raised his fingertips, and the moonlight brought the drops of Walker’s blood visible.

  He radioed Bear the car’s approximate location and told him Walker was wounded. By the time he walked around to the building’s entrance, Game had been cleared of clients and the area was swarming with deputies, cops, and ambulances. Thomas and Freed had already retrieved Wes and Caden and turned them over to LAPD, a pair of cops keeping the hit men company in their respective ambulances. Xavier glared at Tim from the back of a departing black-and-white.

  Crossing the parking lot, Tim heard a pattering and looked down. Dime-size drops on the asphalt. He touched his fingertips to the ground, and they came up red, his prints marked with his own blood above the smeared stain of Walker’s. He patted himself down, searching for the entry wound with no luck until a paramedic clamped a gauze pad to the side of his neck and tried to lead him to the rescue vehicle. Tim took over the pressure clamp and said, “Just a second,” breaking toward Tannino and a cluster of deputies. The paramedic followed, voicing his concerns.

  Tannino said, “We’re spreading out through the area, two choppers en route. The roadblocks are up, but we’ve got two freeway entrances within blocks. How bad’s he injured?”

  “Not bad enough that he couldn’t haul ass out of there.” Tim readjusted the gauze on his neck; it was getting soaked through. The paramedic tugged at his arm, and Tim gestured he needed more time. “But there’s enough blood that he’ll need some aid and a hole to curl up in. Work the news outlets, the hospitals, the drugstores. I want to know if there’s a break-in at a veterinarian’s. Our nose is on the trail, we’re hot on his ass, and he’s injured. We keep charging at him and closing down options until he’s cornered. Now is the time to be relentless.”

  “You got nothing on the vehicle?” Freed asked.

  “It’s a standard car—Toyota, Honda, something. It could have been that stolen Camry. Remember, he doesn’t know we’re eyeballing it.”

  “The Camry just popped up in long-term parking at LAX. The driver’s seat was soiled with ash. Word came in just before we left the post.” Freed let the disappointment sink in. “Think he was faking that he went out of town?”

  “No, he just left the car where we wouldn’t find it for a few days so we’d be chasing our tails on the lead. Which of course, we were.” Tim bit his lip, tamping down his frustration and pondering his next move. “The parking-lot ticket should be in the car. Check when he pulled in to the lot and see if any other cars were stolen out of there in that time frame.”

  “Guerrera already handled it. None were. It’s a pretty secure lot.”

  “Goddamn it.” Tim hadn’t realized how much he’d staked on getting a vehicle ID.

  The paramedic quietly urged him, “You need to let me take a look at that.”

  “Okay.” Tim handed Tannino Caden’s Ruger and Walker’s Redhawk.

  Tannino hefted the Redhawk. “Walker’s?” He took a look at the wheel and said, “There’s three bullets missing. You reported to Bear that he only fired once.”

  “That leaves one unaccounted for. I fired the bullet that injured Wes Dieter.”

  Tannino’s dark brown eyes peered out beneath his bushy eyebrows. A few of the deputies bristled uncomfortably. “You used Walker’s gun on Dieter?”

  Tim nodded and let the paramedic lead him over to the rescue vehicle. He sat on the tailgate.

  “You are a lucky son of a bitch,” the paramedic said after a cursory examination. “You just got grazed. A few stitches, is all. About a centimeter to the right, you’d be geysering.”

  Tim shouted at Bear to seize Wes’s computer as evidence, and the paramedic said, “Can you hold still, please?”

  Thomas jogged over from Caden’s ambulance, his concern fading once he saw the paramedic readying a needle. “You awright, Rack? Shit, you scared me a moment there.”

  “You’re making me nervous, Thomas.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Since you gunfaced me.” Tim winced against the pinch of the needle. A few seconds’ hitch and then numbness spread through the wound. “We don’t like each other much, right?”

  Thomas’s Adam’s apple jerked, and he smoothed his mustache and looked away. “No, I guess not.”

  “For a minute there at Walker’s safe house, when you had the MP5 aimed at my head, you thought it would’ve felt nice. Maybe to pull the trigger.”

  The paramedic kept stitching. After a moment Thomas nodded. His stare met Tim’s in something short of hostility, something akin to intimacy.

  Tim said, “That’s what you’re freaked out about. You caught a glimpse. Don’t try to bury it. We all have it. So keep an eye on it and go back to being an asshole.”

  The crinkles around Thomas’s eyes deepened, and for an instant Tim thought he might get angry, but then he laughed and smacked Tim on the shoulder. “You know you’re doing your job well when your fugitive saves your life.”

  “There you go.”

  “Maybe you guys could be a team, get a hit TV show.”

  “We’re on too many already, but thanks.”

  “You think maybe he missed on purpose? Close shot and all?” Thomas broke off his stare with a smile, offered his hand. “Enemies?”

  Tim shook. “Enemies.” He watched Thomas disappear back into the mix, a faint grin tensing his mouth.

  The paramedic said, “I never understand you guys.”

  Guerrera, in whispered consultation with Tannino, drew Tim’s focus. Guerrera showed the marshal some papers, and Tannino blanched, his tired face drooping with worry. Whatever it was, it was significant enough to pull Guerrera out of the command post, overriding his light-duty sentence.

  Tannino pointed at Tim, and Guerrera started over.

  Tim felt a knot of barbed wire in his stomach. The paramedic said, “Relax. I’m almost done.”

  When Guerrera got within range, Tim said, “Tell me.”

  “I…uh, I wanted to come myself.” Guerrera’s voice sounded funny. “I was checking all of Pierce Jameson’s holdings, contacts, everything, like you asked.”

  Tim shrugged free of the paramedic, the needle dangling from his neck on a length of suture. “And?”

  “His past known associates came back. There’s one who I think we might be able to leverage.” Reluctantly, he offered the top page, what looked like a printout of a rap sheet complete with a booking photo.

  Tim took the sheet and stared down at the face of his father.

  Chapter 67

  Walker left the Accord two blocks away in an alley. Heat stabbed down his side with every step. The bulletproof vest absorbed most of the blood, but at the armhole a wet crescent rimmed his army-green T-shirt. He wouldn’t know how bad it was until he got to his room and took a proper look.

  He was breathing so heavily he had to pause at the base of the stairs. Each jarring step caused the vest to scrape over the wound. Putting his head down, he almost collided with someone midway up. Kaitlin. She’d made herself up a bit with mascara and a touch of eyeliner. Sam stood at her side, looking bemused and slightly scared by her evident anger.

  She said, “The least you could do if you drag us to a dirt fucking lot is show up. I would’ve left, but Sam insisted we—”

  “You shouldn’t be here.” Walker sagged against the
railing. Kaitlin saw the blood and scrambled to his side, purse slapping against her hip, her shoes clattering on the stairs. She fought the apartment key out of Walker’s pocket and fumbled it toward Sam, who took it calmly. “Go get the door open. Go on.”

  She helped Walker upstairs and in. Sam locked the door behind them, then gave a dramatic glance through the closed blinds of the front window. The bed bowed under Walker’s weight when he sat. He used his right hand to dig his Spyderco knife out of a pocket. Flipping it open with a jerk, he ran the blade under the front of his T-shirt. Kaitlin helped peel it off.

  About four inches down from his armpit, a quarter-size entry hole marred the meat of his lat. The blood welling inside looked like black ink. The bullet had missed the protective ballistic composite by a thumb’s width. There was no way, in the nighttime pivot-and-shoot, that Rackley could have seen he was wearing a vest. The bullet had sought flesh as lead often seemed to do.

  Kaitlin helped him unsnap the vest. He’d hoped the back fabric would have caught the slug, but no such luck. There was no exit wound.

  Kaitlin got a ratty towel from the bathroom, wiped off the blood, and applied pressure. Sam watched with wide eyes.

  She seemed light-headed. “This doesn’t look good, Walk.”

  “Seen worse.”

  Walker took up the pressure so she could sit down. When he withdrew a tweezers from the medic kit in his duffel, she flattened herself over her knees. “I don’t think I can.”

  He inserted the tweezers into the hole but had a tough time getting an angle. The metal tips digging around the swollen flesh was unpleasant. He said, “Kaitlin, just gimme a sec here.”

  Kaitlin started to stand up but fainted and fell back on the bed.

  Walker said, “Well, there you go.”

  Sam said, “I’ll do it.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I hit level forty-four on Champions of Norrath. I think I can find a stupid bullet in a cut.” His stomach looked more distended than before, bulging over his thin little-boy belt. He returned Walker’s gaze, playing up the apathy.