Dangerous Games (21 page)

Kolb paced his apartment, his footsteps heavy enough to rattle the walls.

He’d grown progressively angrier since coming home. It wasn’t losing the job that had turned him inside out. He didn’t give a shit about the job. He didn’t need to wear that crappy uniform or take abuse from goddamned loitering teenagers. And he certainly didn’t need the money, not with two million in the bank and more on the way.

It was the way that fat fuck with the bad comb-over had talked to him. The bored insolence in his voice. The sleepy, contemptuous eyes…

He snatched his book of philosophy off the shelf and flipped through it, finding the chapter on Hegel, his gaze skipping from one underlined sentence to another, one great thought succeeded by the next.

There was the vision of Napoleon “stretching over the world and dominating it…one of the world-historical men, the clear-sighted ones…who tell their age what its will is.”

They acted with zeal: “Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”

They acted without regard for the rest of humankind: “The particular is of trifling value: individuals are to be sacrificed.”

They acted with impunity: “So mighty a figure must trample down many an innocent flower—crush to pieces many an object in its path.”

That line, above all, held him fascinated. He felt it had been written directly to him. His response, he knew, marked him as the heir to the philosopher’s vision, one of the few who were worthy of it. He was the latest in a line of heroes from Caesar to Saladin to Napoleon, men who breathed power and disdained convention. He was a lord of the earth, soaring so much higher than his fellows as to be almost a new species.

“So mighty a figure…trample down…crush to pieces…”

This was greatness. This was progress. An inexorable march, a relentless advance. The weak things of the world had to perish, because they were weak and they were in the way.

In
his
way—like that dumb bitch last night.

He slapped the book shut.

He’d been wrong to let her off so easy. He saw that now. He should’ve stomped harder on her. Should’ve plowed into her sedan at even higher speed, blown her vertebrae out the back of her neck. Should’ve rammed her and rammed her until the bitch was dead…

The phone rang.

He whirled to it, startled by the noise.

It rang a second time. He watched it in almost superstitious fascination.

On the third ring he plucked the handset off the cradle. He held the phone to his ear but said nothing.

There was a beat of puzzled silence on the other end of the line. Then he heard a familiar voice, low and slightly muffled. “You there?”

His partner. That was who it was. For a second there, he’d almost thought…

Almost thought it was Tess McCallum. McCallum, calling him. Which was insane.

“I’m here,” Kolb said.

“I thought you might be at work, but I don’t know your hours—”

He didn’t want to talk about work. “What do you want?”

“We need to have a conversation.”

“We’re having one.”

“In person.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“No.”

The man’s tone worried Kolb, as did the fact that he’d muffled his voice. “There a problem?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Aren’t you the one who’s always telling me not to say too much on the phone? We need to meet. Below, half hour. Can you be there?”

“Yeah, but—”

Dial tone. The asshole had hung up.

Kolb banged down the phone.

Now even his partner was treating him with disrespect. Giving him orders. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to work. Yes, it was an equal partnership—in theory. And the money would be split equally. Kolb had no qualms about that. But it had always been tacitly understood who was in charge. Who was the boss, and who was the hired hand.

Maybe success was going to his friend’s head. And maybe he would have to do something about that.

He wouldn’t be screwed with; that was for certain. He was through being everybody’s favorite fuck-me toy.

Kolb left the apartment, punctuating his departure with a slam of the door, and headed back to the carport.

Tess pushed the equipment under the car and slid in after it. From her pocket she produced a penlight, holding it in her mouth, aiming the beam upward.

The floor pan was slimed with grease and scum. She used the putty knife to scrape it clean, then pressed the transmitter into place, bottom side up. The magnet affixed it to the metal, but to assure that it wouldn’t be jolted loose by a pothole, she secured it with the electrical tape. She taped it twice, then extended the antenna so it pointed straight down, clearing the metal surfaces that could produce interference. It would broadcast its signal for hours, operating on lithium batteries that had been newly installed before the package was sent.

She thought she should give the gadget a few more layers of electrical tape. Kolb’s car was in bad shape, indicating that he was a reckless driver, and she didn’t want—

Footsteps.

Someone coming this way, coming from the side door of the building, coming fast.

She knew it was Kolb, somehow just
knew
, the same way she’d known she was being watched at Madeleine Grant’s house last night.

She switched off the penlight and stuck it in her pocket. Lying on her back under the car, she waited.

He entered the carport. She saw heavy, dark shoes. Shoes that approached the Oldsmobile and stopped by the driver’s side.

It really was him. And it looked like he was going for a drive.

When he pulled out, he would see her in the space he’d vacated.

The sedan’s door opened. The car creaked on its shocks.

Her best shot was to crawl under the adjacent car, parked to the right of the Oldsmobile. If she moved fast, he was unlikely to see her through the passenger window.

She rolled sideways, trying to make it quick, but when she was halfway out, the sleeve of her jacket snagged on a bit of metal protruding from the sedan’s underbelly.

Overhead, the engine coughed but didn’t start.

When he got the car moving, he would back out, and right now she was trapped between the tires, certain to be run over.

She tugged at her sleeve.

The engine sputtered again—sputtered and coughed and came to life.

She heard the clunk of gears as the car shifted into reverse.

The sleeve ripped free.

She threw herself out from under the Olds, rolling beneath the other car.

Kolb’s tires caught with a shriek of rubber, and he rocketed out of his space, fishtailing in the parking lot. He straightened out and tore off, and Tess lay on her side, trying to catch her breath.

The electrical tape and putty knife lay on the ground where the Oldsmobile had been parked, but Kolb hadn’t noticed. She gathered them up and returned the items to the tool kit.

She was still shaking a little.
Tess’s big adventure
, she thought.

It had been more dangerous than she’d expected. Still, it seemed trivial compared to the risks Abby took every day.

She wondered where that thought had come from. What difference did it make what Abby did? Abby had nothing to do with her. Abby was a freelance private investigator, more or less, and Tess…

What exactly was she, these days? It had been a long time since she’d done any hands-on investigating. A manager, then. A supervisor. A bureaucrat.

Maybe that was why she’d risked planting an unauthorized tracking device. She wanted to be
doing
something, wanted to be in the game. She’d spent too long on the sidelines, shuffling papers, handing out assignments, organizing schedules, running meetings. She didn’t feel like a law-enforcement officer anymore. She didn’t feel like one of the good guys.

So what was the solution? Cash out of her career and go freelance? Become a vigilante?

That couldn’t be right. Yet she was edging closer to that precipice with every rule she broke.

18

Below Ground was, in its own way, a neighborhood bar, but not the kind of place where everybody knew your name.

On his first night here, Kolb had been flanked by a guy with a shaved head whose T-shirt read WIFE BEATER and by a goateed, ponytailed swish sipping from a wineglass. He’d gotten the message:
We take anyone’s money and ask no questions
.

That policy suited Kolb fine. After his time in stir, he’d found himself unable to fit in at most drinking establishments. Naturally, his old cop haunts were off-limits. He would hardly be welcomed by his former buddies—his comrades in arms, who’d deserted him under fire. Nor could he waltz into bars where ex-cons hung out. Too many of them would remember him from his days in uniform. As for the yuppie bars, their patrons looked askance at a blue-collar guy with callused hands and a bodybuilder’s physique.

Then he’d found this place. One of his aimless nocturnal drives had led him to this unprepossessing neighborhood near the intersection of Vermont and Olympic. He’d liked Below Ground immediately—a no-bullshit establishment, clean of pretensions, with just the right mix of civility and indifference, and an undertone of danger. It was a place that catered to people who wanted to be strangers, a place where he belonged.

In his nights here—he nearly always came at night—he’d seen the full variety of the bar’s clientele. There was the meat-market crowd, whose quick sexual transactions were conducted in lavatories and stairwells. There were the tough guys who started brawls. The pool sharks, intent on the mechanics of their game. The guy in the cowboy hat who played “Ring of Fire” on the jukebox and made a toast to the memory of Johnny Cash. The rich Westside bitches who went slumming—“Dumpster-diving,” one of them called it, the one who always left with a choice piece of trash. The cabbie who came here after his last fare and drank himself blind, murmuring obscure imprecations in some guttural foreign language. One or two guys who’d done time—Kolb could sniff them, and they’d caught his scent, as well. They circled each other, wary animals, keeping their distance.

And there were the voyeurs, the ones who stood back and watched the carnival. One of them was the bartender, a young, muscular guy who kept a Louisville Slugger behind the counter for use in crowd control. Another was Kolb himself.

The bar, true to its name, was a sunken cave. Kolb walked down a narrow staircase that descended from daylight into cool, subterranean gloom. By the time he reached bottom, the sun had been forgotten, along with any concept of time. One o’clock in the afternoon could have been one o’clock in the morning. There was no way to tell the difference, except that, from what he could see as his vision adjusted to the dimness, the daytime crowd was skewed toward a more professional class.

He didn’t see his partner at first, but he knew the man was here. His song was playing on the jukebox.

Scanning the bar, he found his partner in a corner booth with an untouched mug of beer. Beer was what he always drank. Kolb distrusted that choice of beverage. A man should have a taste for hard liquor.

He slid into the booth. “What’s so goddamn important?” he asked without preliminaries.

“There could be a problem.”

“Could be? On the phone you told me there
was
a problem. Now it’s ‘could be’?”

“What, you’re a semanticist now?” The man let out a soft, nervous chuckle. “You’re parsing my grammar?”

“Don’t laugh at me,” Kolb said.

“I was just saying—”

“No,
I
was just saying. Don’t you fucking laugh at me.”

“Okay, okay.”

“You laugh at me again, I’ll kill you.”

“All right, man. Chill.”

“And quit talking like a goddamned homeboy.”

He put his hands up. “No offense intended. I didn’t mean to piss you off. I’m a little on edge, that’s all.”

“What’ve you got to be nervous about? I’m the one taking the risks. You don’t even have to get your hands dirty.”

“That’s not quite true.”

“Your manicured hands.”

“I don’t get manicures. And we’re not here to discuss my grooming habits.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Because of our problem.” He hesitated. “We may have to call off tonight.”

“I’m not postponing.”

“I didn’t say postpone. We may have to quit, cold turkey.”

Kolb sucked in a harsh breath. “When they snipped your fingernails, did they snip your balls, too?”

“I haven’t lost my nerve. There’s a new element in the equation, that’s all.”

“What element?”

“McCallum.”

The name hung between them like a threat.

“Are you saying she’s on to you?” Kolb asked after a pause.

His partner shook his head. “No. She’s on to
you
.”

“That’s impossible.”

“She had a meeting with Madeleine Grant.”

“You’re bullshitting. What’s the idea? You trying to scare me off the job because you got cold feet?”

The other man looked past his beer mug into Kolb’s face. “I’m telling you the truth.”

Kolb saw it in his eyes. No lie.

He banged the table. “Son of a
bitch
.”

“Quiet down; keep cool.”

Kolb didn’t want to keep cool. He wanted to rage, smash things. That woman—that goddamned woman—she was fucking with him—fucking him over…. He didn’t even know which woman he meant, Tess McCallum or Madeleine Grant—they were blending together in his mind.

Then he realized the other patrons were looking in his direction, their attention drawn by his outburst. With a fierce effort he calmed himself.

“When did this meeting happen?” he asked.

His partner took a sip of beer before answering. “Last night.”

“McCallum just got into town last night.”

“Apparently the lady works fast.”

“How do you even know about it? Did she tell you?”

“She hasn’t told anybody—at least not anybody connected with the investigation.”

“Then how…?”

Another sip. “I’m your inside man, right? It’s my job to know what’s going on.”