Last shot

Chapter 69

The lawn was overgrown. Not a noteworthy observation elsewhere, but Tim had never seen the grass without mow strips aligned as though they'd been measured off. The mailbox-stuffed. Four still-rolled newspapers on the doorstep. An unswept porch. He paused midway up the walk, his first hesitation about choosing to come alone. It wasn't until he rang the doorbell and heard the approaching footsteps that his brain gave voice to the concern that had been lurking beneath his thoughts-that he'd find his father dead in the house.

The doorknob turned, and then his father, a handsome man approaching sixty, peered out from the gap. Behind him the lights were off, the interior projecting gloom. His usually impeccable hair was disheveled, and he was unshaven. His stubble had grown in more white than black, a detail that Tim found inexplicably disconcerting. In his thirty-eight years, Tim had known him only to be immaculately composed. Never a stray hair, a stain on his pants, an unironed shirt.

In a rare show of restraint, Tim's father offered no wisecrack about the half-stitched gash in the side of Tim's neck. Instead he stepped back from the door, letting Tim enter-another break in protocol. He didn't even ask him to remove his shoes. The living room air was stale from thrown-out coffee grounds. The kitchen, normally museum meticulous, was strewn with dirty dishes. His father scooted two sealed VCR boxes over on the couch so Tim could sit, then took his favored La-Z-Boy opposite. All these years later, the picture frames on the mantel still displayed the stock photos they'd come packaged with.

Tim's palms were slick and his stomach roiled. He'd done zero-visibility oxygen jumps from thirty-three thousand feet without breaking a sweat, but his father's proximity still set him on edge. He reminded himself to offer up nothing-if given an inch, his father could unload oceanfront time shares in Wyoming. Tim wiped his hands on his jeans, taking in the boxes and papers piled around the living room. "What's going on here?"

"You've got no right to ask me that." Tim hadn't heard his father's voice in three years; it had picked up some hoarseness around the edges. "What do you want, Timmy?"

"One of our fugitive's fathers, Pierce Jameson, has become a name of interest in our investigation."

"Ah, Pierce. Yes, I've seen Walker's making a run to knock you off the tabloid covers. Is the Troubleshooter feeling neglected by his public? Upstaged as vigilante darling of the masses?"

The old chess match. Playing his part, the stoic straight arrow, Tim maintained an expression of impassivity. "I know you've dealt with Pierce. I need to find some leverage on him. We're having a hard time untangling his finances. If I know you, you did your research before getting into bed with him. I thought you might know enough to give us a way in."

"What about honor among thieves?" Tim's father's lips tensed-they both knew he'd snitched, double-crossed, and back-doored his way out of more jail time and soured deals than either of them could remember. "And what do I get?"

"Nothing."

"A characteristically vain proposition." His father picked a speck of lint from his trousers, crumpled it into a handkerchief, then settled back and crossed his legs. The same regal bearing. A man with more grace than character. To Tim's great surprise, he said, "I'll help you. If there is something to get on Pierce, I know how you can get it." A moment to let his magnanimity sink in. Tim waited for the other shoe to drop, and of course it did. "But. You'll owe me a favor later. I won't disclose what it is now, but I'll tell you it's not illegal."

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."