State of War

17

The security guard turned out to be much better than the cop had been.

The guy came in dark. He had turned his car lights off far enough away that Junior never even caught them. He didn’t hear the motor, either, which meant that the guard must have coasted the last couple hundred yards in neutral, maybe even with the engine turned off. The first Junior saw of him, the guard was on foot and working his way toward the office with the kicked-in door.

He wore a dark gray and black uniform and some kind of dark-colored baseball cap. He was using cover and shadows and had his piece already drawn. He held the weapon in a crosshands grip, gun in the right, with a flashlight in the left hand above, pointing along the sight line but not turned on.

From the position of his hands, Junior could tell that the flashlight must have a button in the butt. It was probably one of those fat, stubby, tactical cop lights, most likely a Sure-Fire M6. If so, it was going to flare like a movie spotlight when the guard turned it on. Those things put out five hundred lumens, and cost two-fifty, three hundred bucks.

Junior had gotten one like it in a trade with a drug dealer once. He lost it somewhere later, but it was a fine piece of machinery. Anyone carrying one of those flashlights that he probably paid for himself was serious about his work, that was for sure.

Whether he was the real thing or a wannabe, that was something else. That was what they were going to find out.

This guy wanted to catch somebody, no question. If all he’d been looking to do was scare a burglar off, he’d have come in code three, those silly rent-a-cop orange rack lights flashing, siren howling, giving plenty of warning he was on the way.

But no, not this guy. He sneaked in quiet, gun in hand, GuardMan to the rescue! He was hoping somebody would still be there, hoping the door-breaker would be armed, hoping he’d resist. Then he’d blind him with that light cannon, and if the guy didn’t get his hands up fast enough, he was going to drop him.

Junior could tell that by watching the guy. He’d bet the farm on it.

It put a different spin on things. GuardMan there already had his gun out, so it wasn’t going to be a fast-draw contest. Junior didn’t get a great look at the hardware, but he saw enough of it silhouetted to see it was a semiauto, and his impression was that it was a SIG, could have been a 9mm, a.40, even a.45, they all looked pretty much the same at a distance, and all of which were fine combat weapons not likely to jam when the guy started cooking. Probably a.45, if he had to guess. The serious shooters still liked those best.

How good was he? No way to tell for sure, but he moved well, he kept his hands low and ready, to shine-and-shoot, and you had to figure the guy had some ability, given the company’s ads and all.

So Junior’s idea of stepping out of the shadows and yelling at the guy straight out went away real quick. If he did that, and if the guy was any good, the guard would spin and, flame on, light Junior up like a Christmas tree, and as soon as he saw him go for his heat, GuardMan would cook faster than a hot dog in a microwave, ka-blam!

No, Junior decided, he couldn’t do it that way.

But he also couldn’t mess around out here. He was pretty sure that the company dispatcher had called the cops at the same time that he sent the guard. If so, the official heat would be along, and probably sooner than later.

Junior would bet that Dover, Delaware, was not exactly a hotbed of serious felonies on a weeknight. A bored cop, county mountie, or smokey would be looking for something interesting to passe le temp. So letting the guard root around in the office for a few minutes and waiting for him to come out all relaxed thinking nobody was around was also not such a good idea. He wasn’t ready to rock with a hotshot guard and a state policeman, with maybe even a local shurf or two coming along just for grins at the same time.

As GuardMan worked his way toward the door, getting ready to make his move, Junior decided how he was going to play it. He squatted and picked up a handful of gravel from around the base of the building next to him, using his left hand. With his other hand he pulled his right-side Ruger.

Edging out of the dark, he stayed low and duckwalked toward the guard. He angled to his left a little, so the guard would stay backlit by the office lights. He was still thirty feet or so away when the guard reached the door and, after checking it out, got ready to shove it open.

Junior softly tossed the gravel at the wall to the man’s left, underhanded, and came up from his squat and into his isosceles stance.

The little rocks, all pea-sized or smaller, pattered against the metal siding like a sudden gust of hard rain, making a lot of noise in the quiet night.

GuardMan was wired tight. He twisted fast, lit the wall up with the flash — and it was bright, even not pointing at Junior, who had slitted his eyes tight to protect his night vision. Had to be bad on the guard’s eyes. The guy held the light and his weapon right at chest-level, textbook perfect.

The guy started to sweep the light his way—

Junior had already brought his left hand over to cup his right; now he shoved the revolver out like he was punching somebody in the throat, and yelled, “How’s your sister?!”

The guard was good. He never paused to think about that, but came on around, that big ole floodlight beam of his leading, but Junior started pulling the trigger as soon as he yelled, indexing his hold just above the flashlight and walking his aim up. Three double-taps, pow-pow! to the high chest, pow-pow! to the neck, pow-pow! to where he figured the guy’s head had to be—

— the guard’s pistol roared, adding its yellow-orange blast to the bright light. A.45, like Junior figured.

Between the flashlight and the muzzle blast, Junior’s night vision was pretty well shot, but he wasn’t hit — he wasn’t hit! A moment later the light fell, and then the guy did, too. Junior heard him thump hard on the concrete, and the guard’s shot, wherever it went, hadn’t hit him!

Junior came up from his crouch, holstered the empty gun with his right hand as he drew the full one with his left, fast and smooth like he had practiced a thousand times. He hurried forward, ready to cook again if the guy moved, but when he got there, he could see in the reflected gleam of the still-lit tactical light on the ground that the guy was done. Had a vest on, GuardMan did, and if it was as good as the rest of his gear, it stopped the first two rounds, but the higher ones got him. Junior saw three entry holes, one in the neck just under the chin, one in the right cheekbone, the last one into the hairline on the same side. An inch or two higher and that last one would have missed. One of his six had missed, but so what? In the dark like that, five were enough, especially with three of them hitting paydirt. He’d take it.

Junior’s breath came and went like an express train flying down a steep grade. He forced himself to slow it some, but his heart kept pounding hard. It was true what he had heard. There was nothing in the world that felt as good as being shot at and not hit, nothing like it!

Especially when you took out the guy shooting at you.

He saluted the dead man. “Bon soir, ma frien. See you in Hell.”

Junior turned and hurried to his car.

Mitchell Ames decided that, as long as he was in town, he might as well make a different set of rounds. He always had business he could do here in the nation’s capital. You didn’t get big things done without making connections here. He had a few lawyers, a couple of doctors, and several senators and congressmen he wanted to touch base with, and he spent the rest of the day and evening doing just that.

He had sent his assistant back to New York, so he was at loose ends for dinner. On a whim, he called Cory Skye’s number. She answered on the second ring.

“Mitchell. How are you?”

“Fine,” he said. “Actually, I’m in D.C. on business.”

“Really? Are you free for dinner?”

“As it happens, yes.”

“Let me take you to Mel’s. It’s a new Northwest Cuisine place, fresh crab, planked salmon, that kind of thing. I think you’d really like it.”

“Great. What time?”

“Ten okay? It doesn’t start to clear out before then. You have a car?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’ve got some business over drinks. Why don’t I just meet you there?”

“Sounds fine. Ten it is.”

After she discommed, he grinned at the phone and slipped it back into his jacket pocket. She was bringing her own transportation, so she was still keeping her options open. He liked that. No reason to hurry this. He had gotten a preliminary report from his investigators on her, and so far he liked what he’d heard.

Corinna Louise Skye, parents Holland George Skye and Gwendolyn Marie Sherman Skye, who lived full-time in Aspen, Colorado. Her father was a retired corporation president, her mother a college professor, also retired. No siblings for Cory. She’d gone to school at Columbia and graduated first in her class with a major in political science. She had gotten into lobbying after working on Marty Spencer’s winning senatorial campaign two terms back and had been immediately successful at it. She was beautiful, personable, bright, educated, and had, as far as he could tell, gotten to the top on her own — she’d never slept with a current client, nor with anybody she’d been lobbying. A member of Mensa, decent chess player, scratch golfer, and a qualified aerobics instructor. She had done a little sky-diving, some hang-gliding, and she liked to ski.

Her love life was somewhat sparse, and it appeared she tended to go for active men. She’d had brief affairs with a fireman while she was in college; an Olympic-class cross-country skier in Aspen; and, most recently, just a year or so back, a police detective-lieutenant in D.C. Nothing since that he’d been able to find. Jocks and authority figures.

Ames had noticed that kind of thing before. Sometimes, among intellectual women, there was a fondness for men with physical attributes, with a different kind of power, as if that somehow balanced things. Well, he wasn’t in bad shape, he certainly could run with her when it came to brainpower, and she seemed to enjoy his company.

He wanted her, and he was used to getting what he wanted. Determination counted for a lot. In fact, most of the time, determination to achieve a goal was more important than anything else. Given two people chasing the same rabbit, the man who wanted it the most had the edge.

The next report he was to get on dear Cory should include specifics on what kind of entertainment she liked — what DVDs she rented, movies she downloaded, plays, operas, concerts she went to, and the like. It would also tell him where she shopped, what brands she liked, what her favorite toothpaste was. All the little things would become his. The devil was in the details, and nobody knew that better than Ames.

Cory Skye was going to find herself on the receiving end of a lobbying effort unlike any she had ever known. When somebody knew everything that could be found out about you, that man could be a formidable opponent, especially when that man was an expert in waging winning campaigns for the hearts and minds of supposedly unbiased jurors.

Ames knew how people worked, mentally, socially, psychologically, and physically. He went after what he wanted, and he didn’t fail to get it.

He wasn’t planning to start now.