Play To Kill

Chapter Forty-one

'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.

Magozzi nodded at John's weapon. 'If we see anything, especially firepower, take a long breath before you pull the trigger. Make sure you home in on the bad guy.'

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 9:5 5. '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.'

Jim rolled his eyes and raised his hands. This asshole was just full of it. 'I know you've got a gun, so stop wasting time playing black ops. This is a business transaction, so let's get it over with before Christmas.' He heard a grunt and a rustling in the trees behind, and then the man materialized in front of him, his gun poised for a shot.

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 dress. And for that, I thank you very much. I'd been trying to kill him for over a year. He killed my son, you see.'

'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 more big swig before he answered. 'Did you kill all of the others on the list?'

'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 crawled across the green in an absolutely senseless attempt at escape; the intensity in the faces of Magozzi and Gino as they rushed toward him; the rather frantic scramble of another man he didn't know racing to straddle the wounded villain, slapping on the cuffs while the eighteenth green's flag fluttered a little in the freshening breeze. He could almost hear the soundtrack.

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.

'You old bastard,' he hissed. 'Are you telling me that all this time you knew who he was and didn't tell us?'

'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 anymore. 'Condo key in my pants pocket,' he whispered to Magozzi. 'Tape recorder in the jacket. I really wanted to do the right thing. I thought you could do something just a little wrong to make a lot of things right. But that was a misstep.'

'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.