The Kingmaker

CHAPTER THIRTY

My apartment building in South Arlington is called the Coat of Arms and was built sometime in the late fifties, a big red-brick monstrosity filled with tiny one-bedroom apartments with your proverbial cramped porches off the living rooms, and broom closets for kitchens and bathrooms. When the Coat of Arms was built, kitchens were considered utility rooms instead of stadiums, and bathrooms were where you went to deposit your waste, not luxuriate in expansive, candlelit elegance.

The Coat of Arms has three things going for it: It’s cheap, it’s cheap, and it’s only five minutes from my office. The neighborhood ain’t great, but neither is it a crime-infested ghetto. It is a semisuburban place, halfway on life’s journey between a slum and a modest home with a lawn that has to be cut and a basketball hoop your kids never use in the driveway.

I slept in till seven, then made my way to the outdoor parking lot and my car. I was preoccupied, and I don’t mean by Mary’s confession the night before, or even by regrets about letting Katrina go. Those were niggling issues compared to something Mary had blurted out in her confession. She’d mentioned she’d been recruited to entrap her husband after a source tipped off the Agency about his treachery. A moment later, she’d admitted that she only joined the investigation to prove the tipster was wrong.

I had a new threat to consider, a fresh and unexpected turn, as they say in thriller novels. There was a tipster out there somewhere.

Somehow, in all of Eddie’s materials, there’d been nothing about any source tipping off the CIA and the molehunters about Morrison-no small oversight, if you think about it. In other words, Morrison hadn’t been caught by the brilliant detective work of the molehunters, or even by Mary turning him in. He’d been betrayed by someone, presumably somebody with direct knowledge. And if Mary was telling the truth, Eddie had the kind of witness I most dreaded-a guy who came over from the other side to testify firsthand to Morrison’s acts.

I was pondering this as I opened my car door and two guys appeared behind me. I’m normally fairly observant-recent evidence to the contrary-and they appeared out of nowhere. No noise, no chatter, no footsteps; I actually smelled them before I saw them-personal hygiene wasn’t their shtick. One was Latino, the other black, and they were dressed identically: baggy jeans with crotches that drooped to their knees, muscle shirts, and doo-rags on their heads. Both were also big and muscular, with that street look that told you they weren’t collecting for UNICEF. Particularly impressive was the. 38 street special in the Latino’s hand, which looked considerably more threatening than the six-inch blade the other hood was holding.

“Hey Patron,” said the Latino, his tone familiar and coaxing like we knew each other, “just relax, and this’ll go down easy. You gotta wallet, right, man? Keep this low-maintenance, huh? You hand over that wallet, we let you drive off to work, we all part amigos.”

He’d stopped moving toward me, while his partner kept coming, his knife held low, his grip tight. The police, who study these things, say the wisest thing in situations like this is to simply hand over your wallet. Something like 95 percent of the time, the crooks intend you no harm, so long as you pacify them by handing over whatever they ask for. Don’t challenge them. Don’t taunt them. Don’t try to fight. Play the odds and the worst you’ll get out of it’s the inconvenience of having to cancel your charge cards and replace your driver’s license. Even in those 5 percent of cases where the victims get hurt, fairly often the victim precipitates it, by choosing the wrong moment to act courageous, or failing to act respectful and subservient to the thugs.

On any ordinary day, I’d do exactly as the police advise. I mean, it’s not like I have a lot of money in my wallet. I’m an Army guy, right?

Something, however, didn’t look ordinary about this. Why did one have a gun and the other a knife? Why did the guy with the gun stand back, while the one with the knife kept moving toward me, his arm tense?

I studied their faces, and they only made one mistake. I immediately stepped to the right, putting the guy with the knife between me and the shooter. At the same instant I swung my briefcase up into his face while my right foot lashed out for his groin. It’s the oldest trick in the book: Threaten the target with two simultaneous chances of bodily injury. It was a fifty-fifty shot, and he took the 50 percent most advantageous to me. Instead of a broken nose, he got his testicles driven into his stomach.

Before he could even lurch over, I rushed him, ramming his body with all my strength, shoving him toward the shooter, using him as a screen. Which turned out to be a damned good idea, because the shooter let loose two shots at my human shield before we came into him full force.

The shooter sprawled on his ass, the pistol still in his right hand, his partner’s dying body still on top of him. I reached for his pistol hand and pinned it to the pavement. With my other hand, I tried to chop him across the nose but knowing the instant I struck that I’d hit something too hard, like his forehead.

I could feel his gun hand moving up, trying to redirect the pistol at my head. I let loose of his wrist and grabbed the gun barrel, trying to keep it pointed away from me. We stayed like this for a few seconds, me lying on the dying knifer’s body, the gunman trapped underneath it, both of us grunting and cursing.

He was a strong man, though. I could feel the gun barrel slipping from my grip, when the strangest damned thing happened. The dying man trapped between us screamed, “Bastard!” and furiously bashed his forehead into his partner’s face. That act of dying fury saved me. I felt his grip loosen and I turned the barrel toward his own head. In the process I must’ve cramped his trigger finger, because there was a sharp bang and blood and brain matter sprayed all over my face.

I lay still a moment to be sure he was dead. I couldn’t actually open my eyes to check, because my face was covered with goo. When he didn’t move, I finally rolled off, dragging the pistol out of his hand, just in the event I was wrong and there was a little life-juice left in him.

I stood up and wiped my face. Then I bent over and began searching their pockets, looking for identification. The black guy’s pockets contained nothing but a few reefers. The Latino had more reefers and a thick wad of money. I pulled it out and counted; five thousand dollars in used hundred-dollar bills.

A moment later I heard a siren and I nearly stuffed the bills back in his pocket, realizing as I started to do so that if the police fingerprinted the money, I’d have some explaining to do. Instead, I opened my car door and put the money under the front seat.

Then I sat on the seat and tried to look like I was shaken, which, frankly, required very little acting. The police car screeched to a halt and two officers rushed out, gripping their guns and screaming for me to put my hands where they could see them and stay perfectly still. It’s an old, overused line, but I didn’t argue. I always try to be good-mannered in situations like this. They looked down at the two bodies, saw they were street hoods, saw my Army uniform, and the younger of the two officers told me to sit back down and relax.

He was still taking my statement when a meat wagon followed by an unmarked car arrived and unloaded some emergency technicians, who inspected the corpses, while an older, somewhat overbearing detective named Sergeant Burrows took over the interrogation from the uniformed cop.

After ten minutes of semi-antagonistic questioning and the uniformed officer confirming my identity, Sergeant Burrows said, “Seems pretty open and shut, Major. Coupla punks make their way over from the city to score a quick hit. Probably they only wanted enough cash to buy some dope. They were hiding between some cars when you walked out. Wrong place, wrong time, shitty situation.”

“Very shitty,” I said.

“We’ll get their prints and know who they are by noon. Both had big-house tattoos, so they got records. Won’t be hard to identify.”

“No, I guess not,” I said.

“You know, you fucked up.”

“Actually, I think they fucked up.”

“What we advise in situations like this is to just give them what they want. Don’t play tough-guy hero. The gun and knife were only to threaten you. They probably meant you no harm, but you pushed the situation, so now we got two dead guys.”

“I feel so damned ashamed,” I said.

In a very tired voice, he said, “Don’t give me no lip, Major. I could just as easily run your ass to the station and book you for manslaughter. Then you gotta go through the bitch of hiring a lawyer and defending yourself.”

“Actually, I am a lawyer,” I told him. “I’d raise hell, you’d look stupid, and we’d both waste our time. I overreacted, okay? I saw that knife… I saw that gun, and I responded before I could think. I wish now I’d just handed over my wallet and took my chances. Believe me, I wish I hadn’t killed those two guys.”

He studied my face to see if I was sincere, and I awarded him with my most appropriately pained grimace. Either he believed it, or he decided it wasn’t worth his time to catfight with a lawyer.

He said, “Okay, here’s the way we’ll work this. We’ll find out who these two are. We’ll canvass the area and see if there were any other witnesses and if they’ll confirm it went down the way you said. We’ll then run this through the DA’s office and they’ll decide what to do with you.”

“Fair enough,” I replied.

He stared at me another moment, then walked back to his car. I couldn’t blame him for being grumpy, especially since I’d left a few things out of my answers during his interrogation. The biggest thing being why I was so damned sure they weren’t there to rob me; why I was damned certain they came to murder me.

What I’d seen in the black guy’s eyes was the same look I’d seen young soldiers get their first time in combat, trying to work up enough nerve or rage to kill someone. Nor did I inform him this was the second attempt on my life in two weeks, that the Latino corpse had five thousand bucks in his pocket, that somebody obviously hired them to kill me, that they’d approached me thinking I’d do exactly what the police recommend and just reach into my pocket and hand over my wallet. I didn’t tell him what a great setup it was, how my body would’ve been discovered by the next poor slob who walked out to the parking lot, a long, fatal gash from my pelvis to my chest, how the police would’ve filed it under those 5 percent of cases where the normal odds just didn’t work out.

Why didn’t I tell him these things? Because I would’ve been removed immediately as Morrison’s attorney. Because it would’ve opened a line of inquiry I didn’t want opened-about my meetings with Arbatov; about how I’d managed to turn a simple legal defense into some kind of murderous vendetta against me. And mostly, because I was wildly confused and needed time to think.

And because I realized something else-my client was probably innocent, and somebody was trying to keep me from proving it. There was simply no other explanation for two attempts on my life. And if you go one step past that logic, you realize that I’d somehow stumbled onto something that scared the hell out of whoever was behind this.

Which falls under the heading of good and bad news. The good news being that if I retraced my steps, I might discover something I’d done, somebody I’d talked to, some question I’d raised that marked me for death. The bad news being that I might be attending my own funeral before I found out what it was.