33

Richmond, Virginia

Sitting in a decent motel just off I-95 on the north side of town, Junior stared at the audio-only throwaway cell phone and blew out a big sigh. Might as well get it over with.

He punched in the number, a one-time use that should connect to one of Ames’s throwaway cells. Maybe he’d be lucky and Ames wouldn’t answer—

“Where have you been?” Ames said, a hard edge in his voice.

“Busy,” Junior shot back, instantly defensive. Yeah, okay, he should have called the man by now, and yeah, he had screwed it all up, but he did not like being talked to like he was some wet-behind-the-ears kid. Ames didn’t know what had gone down. Junior had killed men with guns, straight up, face-to-face. He was a man to be reckoned with. He didn’t have to take anything from any lawyer, even one he worked for.

“What happened?”

Junior took a deep breath, and went with his plan:

He lied.

“It’s all done. It was a little trickier than I expected, which is why I couldn’t call before, but I got rid of the old unit.”

“Permanently?”

“Of course.”

How would Ames know he wasn’t telling the truth? And this gave him some time to think things through. Come up with a plan.

“Well, that’s good.”

“You need me to, uh, get a replacement model?”

“No, I don’t think we’ll be doing any more business in that particular arena. How far away are you?”

“Day or so.”

“Head on back. Call when you get to town. We, uh, are relocating headquarters.”

Junior frowned. Something must have spooked Ames if he’d dumped his safe office. Could it have anything to do with Joan?

Nah, he decided. It couldn’t. She didn’t know anything about who they worked for. Her only contact had been Junior. It must be something else.

Junior broke the connection, dropped onto the king-sized bed, and stared at the phone. Joan was out there, but she sure wasn’t in Atlanta anymore, he’d bet his life on that. And even if she had stuck around, he couldn’t. He needed to get back to his place, change out the barrel on his right-hand Ruger, and ditch the old one. It wasn’t likely anybody was going to tie a dead Baltimore cop to one in Atlanta, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. There were all kinds of guys in gray-bar hotels who had hung on to a favorite piece after they’d capped somebody with it.

No, he would go by his place and pull a new barrel out of the safe. He was running out of them. He’d have to get some new ones — but not for a while, not until enough time had passed that the feds wouldn’t be checking that, too. It would be safer to buy a whole new gun and switch out the barrel with that. More expensive, and since he’d already had to replace one gun altogether, he was getting low on his preferred hardware. He only had a couple left, but when the alternative was maybe going to the gas chamber or a lie-down on the needle gurney, you didn’t decide to go cheap all of a sudden.

He still didn’t think Joan would be talking to the heat anytime soon. Oh, that would get her off on the prostitution and blackmail stuff, maybe even let her sell her story to the National Enquirer or something, but she had to know that as long as Junior was alive, she’d be in danger. And if she ratted him out, he had ways of getting to her, even from prison. She’d have to stay in hiding her whole life, and Joan wasn’t that kind of girl. She liked to get out and party down. So he should be okay, even after what had happened in the bar. She’d still be trying to figure out a way to turn it into gold. Until she did — and figured out a way to contact him and cover herself while she did it — he ought to be okay on that score.

So, he was safe, for now. For a little while.

There wasn’t anything he could do about it now, anyhow.

Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

Toni stared at the documents that had been scanned into the computer, copies of the police and FBI field-agent reports on the unsuccessful surveillance of the office building on Long Island. They couldn’t afford to keep men on the place, but they had gotten the building manager to watch. The man who’d rented the place had never come back.

Must have gotten spooked, Toni figured.

While she was looking at the projected images above her desk, one of the little LEO NewsAlerts flashed and ran across the bottom of the holoproj. An Atlanta policeman had been murdered during a traffic stop. Shot twice in the face by a man who had escaped in what turned out to be a rental car. The suspect was still at large.

Toni shook her head. Life in the big city. She wondered if the dead policeman had any family. A wife, children who would never know their father? So awful. As well-trained as she was as a fighter, she knew it didn’t make you bulletproof. Some loon with a gun could take it all away in an instant.

She remembered Steve Day. And the times when both she and Alex had come close to being killed. They had a child now. They shouldn’t be putting themselves in that situation anymore.

Something tugged at her memory. Something about the dead cop…

She read over the story again, but the details were sparse. Witnesses had heard the shots, seen a man jump in a car and drive off, but there was no good description of him. It had been dark, it had all happened so fast…

Toni was about to move on to other things on her agenda when she noticed a reference to the caliber of the gun used on the dead cop. It had been a.22 Long Rifle, and the investigators suspected it had come from a short-barreled handgun.

Hmm. Hadn’t there been another cop shot recently with a.22 somewhere not that far from here?

Her voxax circuit was open. Toni said, “Search: Shootings-slash-twenty-two-caliber-slash-time-frame-slash-two-weeks.”

As the searchbot’s screen popped up, she realized she should have narrowed the parameters to include “police officers.” Well, she’d see what came back, and narrow it if she needed to.

Apparently there had been more than two dozen such shootings in the country in the last fourteen days, including Arlo Wentworth, a United States Democratic congressman from California, and wasn’t that another awful note? There had been three incidents on the east coast, and one of them was indeed what she’d remembered, a policeman in Baltimore. And here was an armed guard, in Dover…

And somebody was also shot in a bar in Atlanta, same night as the cop down there had been.

Hmm.

Toni frowned. Surely if there had been any connection between the cops, the ballistics boys would have caught that.

Curious, Toni put in a call to the Net Force shooting range.

“Shooting range,” came Gunny’s voice.

“Sergeant, this is Toni Michaels.”

“Yes, ma’am. What can I do for you?”

“Answer a couple of questions.”

“Shoot. So to speak.”

“I was looking at CopNet’s LEO bulletins and saw that there have been some police shootings on the east coast recently.”

“Yes, ma’am. Baltimore and Atlanta.”

“You know about them.”

“Yes, ma’am. I keep track of LEOs who are getting shot, and with what. Professional interest.”

“My question is, how unusual is this?”

“Cops getting shot, or getting shot with mouse guns?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Not many get killed in the line of duty each year, but some do. And.22 is the most common caliber for civilian firearms. Probably followed by 12-gauge or.410 bore shotguns, deer rifles, 38 Specials, 25 autos, like that. A.22 isn’t a very good man-stopper, though, even out of a rifle, and these were all handgun shootings.”

“How do you know that?”

“MEs can usually tell by penetration. A twenty-two solid point out of a rifle is moving two, three hundred feet a second faster than one coming out of a short-barreled handgun. From a long barrel they sometimes punch right on through.”

“So you are saying these shootings are not that rare?”

“No, ma’am, I’m not exactly saying that. These particular shootings? They aren’t normal. The Baltimore cop, a security guard in Delaware, a congressman out in California, and the Atlanta motorcycle patrolman? They were all shot in the head.”

“Ah. And that is unusual?”

“Yes, ma’am. If you were going to shoot somebody with a.22, a head shot would be the way to go, and more than one round. If I’m not mistaken, all of these guys were hit at least twice. My guess? Same guy did them all.”

Toni blinked, taking that in. “Really?”

“Yes, ma’am. I have a friend in ballistics over at the regular feeb-shop. The cop in Baltimore? He was hit twice by two different guns. According to the forensics wound-angle stuff, they are pretty sure the bullets hit him at about the same time, and from the same height and distance. That tells me you either got shooters standing side by side and aiming for the same spot, or one guy with two guns.”

Toni nodded. “Go on. Please.”

“Yes, ma’am. Ballistics on the congressman say both rounds in him came from the same gun, two head shots, from inside five feet — there were powder speckles on the car and dead guy. The security guy in Delaware caught a bunch of rounds, in the body and neck, only one in the head, but that’s probably because the shooter started cooking and walked them up to be sure. Probably too far away to be certain of a head shot right off. All of those wounds were from the same gun.”

“And the Atlanta cop?”

“Nothing in on him yet, but if the shooter was the same guy who opened up in a bar forty-five minutes earlier, and it looks like he was, he was using a snub-nosed revolver.”

“There were witnesses?”

Gunny laughed. “A whole bar full of bikers, but none of them saw a thing. There was a security cam installed there. Atlanta PD is going over that recording with a microscope right now.”

“So what do you think?”

“Well, the revolver fits with the other shootings. The guy didn’t leave any used brass, for one thing, which implies it was a revolver. Of course, he could have hunted it up and collected it, if he’d been using a semiauto, but the two cops and the guard were done at night. Brass from a.22 flies a long way, and it would be very hard finding it all in the dark. At the Atlanta shooting, people looked out and saw a car pulling away right after the shots were fired. Not much chance of him stopping to hunt for expended shells. A revolver makes more sense.”

“Hmm.”

“Another thing. I think we’re dealing with a sportsman here.”

“Excuse me?”

“All the dead guys? They all had guns. And they had all cleared the decks when they got hit, all had hands on their weapons. I think we’re talking about a hunter. He only shoots people who can shoot back. Most-dangerous-game kind of guy.”

“Lord. Does the FBI think this?”

“I’d bet big money they’ve considered it, ma’am. They got some pretty swift folks over there.”

“Thank you, Gunny.”

After she hung up, Toni sat staring at the computer screen. It wasn’t her job to find the shooter or shooters who’d done this. But it did pique her interest. She knew some people over at the regular shop. Maybe she could get a copy of the tape showing the shooter?

It wouldn’t hurt to look at it.

Загрузка...