Last shot tr-4 Page 35

  Tim said, "No."

  "It won't have anything to do with using your law enforcement connections improperly to help me."

  "No."

  His father, who Tim had once seen bluff a table of professional poker players out of a twenty-thousand-dollar pot with a seven deuce in the dark, maintained even eye contact. He looked unconcerned, but Tim sensed-from the state of the house and from the quickness with which he'd offered to help-that he was verging on desperate. Tim made a move to rise, and his father said, "Okay, look, just…just sit a minute."

  He'd never seen his father capitulate, and he was surprised that the sight of it made him feel bad. Holding all the cards-at last-in an exchange with his father didn't make him feel vindicated or powerful, just vaguely sad. Though his father's face still betrayed nothing, the awkward delay showed he was struggling for words. He'd been many things over the years, but never vulnerable.

  Finally he pressed his lips together and said, "I'm going away. I report in a month and change. Monday the twenty-fourth, seven A.M. Not just a three-or six-monther. No deals to be had. No pleading it down. Fifteen years."

  Despite all the work Tim had done to get free and clear of his father, despite the fact that he'd always known that one day he'd be having a conversation like this with his father-he'd imagined it, rehearsed it, pictured it taking place in this very room, even-Tim felt dismayed by the notion of his father doing hard time. He couldn't make eye contact. He was unsure what to feel. The thought did occur to him that this could be the introductory act of one of his father's convoluted scams, but Tim had come to him, not vice versa. And through the nearly five decades' worth of ruses Tim had witnessed, never once had his father permitted his house or appearance to lapse. He was genuinely distressed, and Tim was shocked to discover that he was distressed along with him. His father usually pled or bargained, flipped on guys higher up the fraud chain. To Tim's knowledge he'd never served more than a six-month stint at a low-security facility. And now he was staring at fifteen years. Even with good behavior and early parole, he'd be close to seventy when he got out. If he got out. Time was hard on the inside, and often it turned into less time.

  "Fifteen years? What'd you do?"

  "I had an inside man at the DMV." He shook his head faintly-at himself, perhaps. "Never trust an inside man who's a woman." He lifted his impenetrable stare to Tim. "Identity theft. Multiple counts."

  "Okay," Tim said, buying time, though for what he didn't know. "Okay."

  "I'm getting older, Timmy. What am I gonna do, go on the lam?" He pressed his fingertips together. Tim noticed that his knuckles were white from the pressure, though his tone remained perfectly calm. "I'd like you to take me in."

  Tim was well practiced at betraying nothing in front of his father. He waited until the rush of blood at his ears faded, and then he said, "Your deputy marshal son walks you in, maybe you get treated like a VIP?"

  "You did some time, you know nobody gets it cushy. Make my transition a little easier, is all. Perhaps we could let the guards know…"

  Tim had a hard time keeping the disdain from his voice. "What?"

  He cleared his throat. "Let them know I have family."

  Tim swallowed hard and looked away. The curtains were drawn, leaving him feeling blocked in. "Where are we going?"

  "Corcoran." He made an effort to say it evenly.

  Roger Kindell's prison. His father in the same lockup as his daughter's killer. Another one in the eye from Fate. Tim supposed it made a perverse kind of sense.

  His father's smile gave way to an amused chuckle. "Yeah, it's an irony to savor."

  Tim said, "What do you have on Pierce?"

  "Pierce." His father settled back into his well-worn chair, seemingly pleased to be back on familiar terrain. "Pierce and I ran some charity scams in the wake of 9/11. Red Cross, victim funds, that kind of thing. He'd cleaned up mostly by then, but it was a boon to business, 9/11. A lot of bacon to go around. Hard to pass up. Back in the day, Pierce had an operations guy named Morgenstein. Hard times now, though, with Pierce getting out of the game altogether. I'd bet the phone doesn't ring for Morg the way it used to. But I'd bet it still rings now and then. See him and lean. He'll cough."

  "You got an address?"

  "Got a phone number in the other room. Dump by the beach. Tell him you know about the incident at the greyhound track in Corpus Christi."

  "What happened there?"

  Tim's father smiled-the same impenetrable smile. "That," he said, "is a story for another day."

  Saltwater had eroded the staircase leading up from the sand. Tim warned Bear about a cracked step, not wanting to see his well-fed partner put a boot through the soft wood. The wind-battered wreck of a building sat atop a patch of Venice real estate worth more than an average trust fund. Probably owned by a nightgown-wearing widow in her nineties who lacked the patience for upkeep, the energy to remodel, and the nerve to sell.

  Bear had met Tim up the block, coming directly from Parker Center, where Wes Dieter had crumbled early into the interrogation. He'd confessed to appropriating the contract intended for the Piper through an elaborately fraudulent Internet communication and to swapping out Tess's hard drive and delivering the original to Ted Sands. Wes had hedged his bets with Sands by making a spare copy of Tess's hard drive, which he'd gladly turned over as an opening concession for plea-bargain negotiations. Bear's preliminary spin through the hard drive had revealed no e-mails-pizzazzu. net was Web-based-but an immense file on Vector that included everything about the company from pipeline projections to early-phase vectors. Though Guerrera was now continuing the search, Bear had found no damning documents about Xedral, certainly nothing to cause a mother to pull her son from the last-ditch trial. Pete Krindon was unreachable, but Bear planned to get him on Tess's hard drive if he couldn't coax the forwarded e-mail from the dental-office computer.

  Bear thought that Wes was sincere in his claim that he couldn't source the trail beyond Sands; having copped to a murder one, Wes had little reason to lie about that particular. Most contracts ordered by high-end players were issued through a third party like Sands to preserve plausible deniability, a concept with which Tim presumed the Kagan family was familiar.

  A thousand bucks in folded hundreds stiffened Tim's back pocket, cash from the Service's unspecified account generally tapped into for bounty hunters and confidential informants. Tim's father could predict people's actions better than anyone Tim had known. If Morgenstein talked-and Tim was confident he would-he'd need to be set up with some cash to get out of Dodge. It would work out cheaper than protective custody.

  All that remained of the apartment numbers were dark outlines on the sun-faded wood. Bear knocked on the appropriate screen door, and it tilted back from where it had been leaned against the frame.

  "Come in."

  They entered the flop. A futon mattress with no accompanying frame lay on the floor, heaped with trash and dirty clothes. A man sat before a black-and-white TV holding a sagging antenna in position, supporting his extended arm on the prop of his opposite hand. He wore a sport coat with the front pocket ripped off. A bottle of Gordon's gin leaned between his legs.

  Tim held up his badge, the cash fanned into view behind it. "Are you Arthur Morgenstein?"

  The guy glanced over, thinning hair wreathing a peeling scalp. He smiled, dropping the antenna, and the screen went to fuzz. "About fuckin' time."

  Chapter 70

  Sam sprawled on the bed, mouth ajar, glasses askew over closed eyes, his breath coming shallow and regular. His olive green T-shirt, still sporting the folds from the store shelf, stretched over his distended belly. Walker sat on the other twin, shoulders propped against the wall where a headboard should have been. A few gauze pads and tightly wound tape had brought the bleeding under control, and he'd zipped into his flexible bulletproof vest to keep pressure on the bandaging. In the alley below, a homeless guy shouted schizophrenically, the latest dose of street theater. The lights were off. Kai
tlin sat next to Sam, stroking his head.

  Walker listened to the whine of passing traffic. He'd retrieved his backup Redhawk from the duffel, filled it with his last six titanium bullets, and seated it in his rear waistband. With the press of metal against his right kidney, he felt whole again. His heartbeat had finally started to slow, but his head still felt wobbly from the blood loss, and his skin was damp. "You should get out of here."

  "His sleeping's been so off, I hate to wake him when he's down."

  The yelling from the alley faded, replaced by a bed knocking the neighboring wall and sweet nothings grunted in Spanish. On the verge of laughter, Walker and Kaitlin shared the inside joke across the distance of the room until the predictable climax of "Ai, papi" s gave way to the sounds of a Telemundo talk show and a running shower.

  The intervals between Kaitlin's yawns shrank until she switched beds, curling beside Walker and putting her cheek on the ballistic composite plating his chest. Sam murmured something and rolled over, clutching a pillow between his knees.

  Walker spoke softly, so as not to wake Sam. "Sometimes we really had fun, me and Tess. We had a Thanksgiving together during our mother's little break. We walked around, watched everyone eating through their windows, these great meals. We went back to the Buick, tried to sleep, but we were too hungry. So Tess had this idea"-a faint smile at the memory-"we were so broke and so hungry we drew pictures of food. Big turkeys. Hams. Mashed potatoes."

  Kaitlin looked at him with amused eyes. "Cranberry sauce."

  "Why not, huh? I drew mine with a broken pencil on the back of a road map. I wish I had that drawing still. What a great Thanksgiving." On the other bed, Sam mumbled and shifted, and they were quiet until his breathing smoothed out again. Walker said, "I ever tell you that story?"

  Kaitlin nodded, her cheek rasping against the vest. "Yeah."

  "I never told you about when I got strep throat, though. The next month."

  "I thought I knew all those stories."

  "It was a few weeks later, when we kept the Buick under the freeway at Griffith Park. The whole back of my throat was white with pus. I wound up spitting into a bag because it hurt too much to swallow." Amusement crept into his voice. "I was a mess. I needed penicillin, but we couldn't go in to see a doctor because we were scared they'd report us and haul my ass off to a kids' home or something. Tess found a guy worked at the drugstore, said he'd filch some pills for us for twenty bucks. But, of course, we didn't have twenty bucks. That night I got bad. Fever, sweating, the whole nine yards. Tess stayed up with me, rubbing ice on my forehead. She told me…" Kaitlin looked up, startled, but already he was back in control. His voice, twenty-two years later, still held disbelief. "She said if she could've had it instead of me, the strep throat, she would have. Well, there was this older guy always sniffing around us. Gold Rolex, would come to the park with his wife, push his kids on the swings. He'd always watch Tess. A few times, when he came alone with his kids, he'd take her aside and talk with her. The next day after that night with my fever going, the guy comes by again. He pushes his kids on the swings. Tess goes over and talks to him, and then they go away. I remember thinking it was weird, him leaving his kids playing alone on the swings. Maybe fifteen minutes later, she comes back. She drives me to the drugstore. We get the pills."

  Kaitlin was propped on her elbow, her face beside his. Her forehead was wrinkled in the middle like she might cry, but instead she stroked his face. It was the longest he could ever remember talking, his words pulling together one after another. He was probably a touch loopy from the blood loss. He found himself missing Sally and Jean Ann, his palm trees that he could see from his house in Terminal Island.

  He heard himself continue. "I kept a picture of you." He tapped his temple. "Didn't fade, no matter how much I wanted it to. Not in Iraq, not in Leavenworth, not through two and a half years at TI. Maybe I didn't want to ruin that, that image. After Iraq I knew I would if I gave myself a chance."

  Her cheeks glimmered in the neon light that managed to filter through the blurry back window. Her upper lip was slightly drawn, in anger or hurt or maybe both. "Coward."

  "That, too, I guess."

  A weak voice from the other bed. "Guys?" Sam had awakened, and his face looked yellow and bloated. "I don't feel so good."

  A dog growled out front, and Walker stiffened. He crossed the room and fingered down the front blinds to see the Troubleshooter leading seven men in raid gear up the stairs.

  Tim crept to Apartment 22, the brass numbers matching those that Morgenstein had scrawled on a torn bit of pizza carton. One of Pierce's portfolio companies had diversified into slumlording, this fine property north of the airport one of numerous holdings. MP5 in the high-ready position, Tim shouldered to the knob side of the jamb as Miller's explosive-detection dog cleared the door for booby traps. Maybeck's battering ram hit home, the door smashing open, and Tim charged in, the other ART members fanning out behind him to cover the rooms.

  No people, no furniture, no bed-nothing but stained carpet and a startled rat in the far corner. Bear returned from the bathroom and stood beside Tim, half illuminated by the slash of streetlight yellow leaking through the splintered front door. Zimmer dropped his MP5, letting it dangle across his chest from the sling. Maybeck cursed, and Denley, still humming, poked at the rat with his boot.

  Thomas said, "I'm getting tired of raiding empty rooms."

  Bear's Remington shotgun swung at his side, its sawed-off tip brushing his knee. He dug the torn patch of pizza carton from his pocket and double-checked the address. "Lying piece of shit."

  "Maybe." Tim used the tip of his gun to lift a torn strip of carpet by the door. A bullet lay just beneath the ripped seam, the cause of the tiny bump. Using his barrel, he flipped it out. Homemade. Awfully familiar tint to the bullet head. The missing bullet from Walker's recovered gun?

  Thomas said, "Really?"

  "Doubt it," Tim said. "Walker's not this careless."

  "Even if he cleared out in a hurry?"

  "He's trained for worse than a hurry." Tim stepped out into the floating hallway. He was standing on the short end of the L that formed the second floor, the staircase intersecting the nexus of the wings. A Latino guy in a towel, still glistening from a shower, peered out one of the doors across the way, then closed it quickly.

  Why would Walker bother leaving evidence behind? To make them think he'd camped there, sure. But what benefit would that be?

  Bear stood beside Tim, studying the pizza-carton corner. He spoke in a rumble of a whisper. "He'd want to know if we showed up. Because then he'd know Morgenstein leaked. The bullet's so we'd figure we missed him, that he already cleared out. So we'd know there's no sense in us sticking around."

  "And he wouldn't want us to stick around because…"

  Bear nodded. "He's watching us. Right now."

  Tim said, "Let's ring some doorbells."

  Sam held his stomach and moaned. From the window Walker watched the deputies fan out along the second floor, knocking on doors. He glanced at the back window. He'd tested it already-it screeched, and the rusty fire escape made a racket. Waiting it out was the best option. He still felt too weak to outrun eight men with MP5s.

  Walker said, "Put him in the bathroom. Close the door. Now." He caught Sam's eye. "If they hear you, someone's gonna have to die. I'm trusting you. That makes us family."

  Kaitlin coughed out a note of disgust at Walker. With her help, Sam staggered to his feet. She sat him in the bathroom and said, "Honey, just hang on for a couple of seconds, okay?"

  "No," Walker said, "keep the light off. And put the fan on for white noise in case he keeps moaning."

  "I'll close the door, but I am not leaving him in the dark."

  "I'm not scared of the dark," Sam said.

  Through a sliver in the closed blinds, Walker watched the huge deputy flash a crime flyer at Humpy Gonzalez next door. No worries there, since Walker had been careful to come and go without being sighted. The flic
ker in Morgenstein's eye-greed? envy? — when he'd handed over the apartment keys to Walker had raised a red flag. As promised, the building was in an ideal nowhere location, peopled by nowhere tenants. Walker had taken advantage of his father's hospitality but moved down the hall into another empty apartment to find out if Morgenstein was as untrustworthy as Walker suspected. Unlike the proffered pad in the short wing, this apartment-the door of which an angry-looking deputy with a thick mustache was about to bang on-had a fire escape leading to an alley that fed into a network of back streets.

  Kaitlin drew near and whispered fiercely, "His stomach's hurting. I'm not keeping him out of my sight for more than a minute."

  "You won't have to."

  A hammering on the door. They froze in the darkness, standing back from the front window. "Police. Open up, please." A pause and then another series of knocks. "Open up."

  Through the bathroom's closed door, above the hum of the fan, Sam's cough was barely audible. Walker eased the Redhawk free of his waistband. Kaitlin caught it on the rise, folding it in both hands and holding it firm so it pointed at her stomach. She shook her head-no way. Walker couldn't risk prying the gun free, not without risk to Kaitlin and not with a deputy three feet away, separated only by a two-inch hollow-core door.

  If the deputy was coming in, he'd have a free shot at Walker.

  Kaitlin matched Walker's glare until the deputy's footsteps ticked down the hall. She shoved the gun away and ran to the bathroom, throwing open the door. Sam lay sprawled by the toilet. Kaitlin let out a cry and flipped the light switch.

  Splashes of bright red vomit stained the tiles.

  The standby paramedics flicked their cigarettes through open windows and drove off. Tim cabled and padlocked his MP5 in the rear of his Explorer.