Dangerous Games (24 page)

Kolb had lost it there for a minute. He’d started shouting in the bar. A mistake, unworthy of him. Unlike him, too. He was always in control. He couldn’t let himself fall apart like that—especially not where he could be seen and noticed and, perhaps, remembered.

But once he was out of the bar, alone in his parked car, he let loose.

“Motherfuck!” He struck the dashboard with the flat of his hand, then with his fist, then with both fists, drumming on the cheap plastic until it cracked. “
Motherfuck!
”

A female pedestrian glanced at him. He gave her a furious stare, and she walked quickly away.

“Yeah, be afraid, bitch,” he muttered, “
be afraid of me
.”

Every woman in this city should fear him. Madeleine Grant should fear him. Tess McCallum—

He struck the dash again. Then he noticed that the knuckles of his right hand were bleeding.

He felt a twinge of fear. Screaming in his car, beating his fists bloody—what the hell was going on? It was like last night, when he’d given in to road rage. The same craziness, the same wild anger, the impulse to smash and kill without regard to consequences.

Losing control was not something he did—ever. He was always in control, in every situation. He never gave in to emotion. He was the superior man. He wasn’t rocked and buffeted by feelings and circumstances. He was beyond all that. He could stand all day in front of the supermarket taking abuse from foulmouthed teenagers and feel nothing. He prided himself on self-discipline, self-mastery.

Now it was all going to shit, and he didn’t understand how or why.

And it scared him.

With an effort he reasserted his composure. Whatever had come over him, it was temporary. Reaction to stress or some goddamned thing. He’d brought it out into the open, exorcised it, and now he was rid of it. There would be no more…episodes. He was himself again.

Nothing could touch him or wound him or move him. He would not allow it. He would be strong.

He sat unmoving until his breathing returned to normal and his pulse was low and steady. Aftershocks of rage shuddered through him. He let them pass. When they died away, he knew he was all right. He was calm. He felt fine. Better than fine. He felt nothing.

Except the beginnings of a headache, unwelcome and inexplicable.

But he could deal with that. Whatever happened, he could deal with it. Whatever McCallum was up to—

He shook aside that thought. Better not think of McCallum right now.

Anyway, he had things to do. Necessary things, practical things, which would take his mind off recent setbacks and refocus him on the job at hand.

The storage facility where he kept his equipment was only a couple of blocks from the bar, on a side street off Olympic Boulevard. He drove there and tapped his personalized entry code into the keypad at the gate.

Kolb had chosen this self-storage yard because all the lockers had outdoor access. Most of the facilities he’d investigated were indoors, with rows of lockers lining corridors. There were two problems with that setup. First, entry to the buildings was restricted to certain hours. Second, the entryways and halls were monitored by security cameras.

This facility had cameras also, but because they were outside, mounted high on the perimeter fence and the light poles, they would not record as clear an image. And his gate-access code allowed him entry at any time, day or night. There was a storage manager on duty, but Kolb had rarely seen him.

The rental fee was a strain on his budget, but he chalked it up to the cost of doing business. He couldn’t risk leaving anything in his apartment. The tools of his trade were kept here, in a locker that could never be traced to him. He paid the monthly fee in cash, having filled in a phony name and address on the registration form. Even if he were arrested, no one could find his stash.

He cruised through the yard to the parking space outside his unit. He had two keys to the locker, one kept in his kitchen drawer, another worn on his person at all times. The keys were unlabeled and untraceable. He used one now to open the padlock, then lifted the roll-up metal door and stepped inside. There was a bare lightbulb in the ceiling, but he didn’t turn it on. He didn’t want any passersby getting a look at the interior.

The locker was the size of a large bathroom, customized with a few shelves and pallets. It held the few items of furniture he’d retained after he let go of his previous apartment and sold most of his possessions to cover legal fees. His current apartment had come already furnished, and since he’d known it was temporary, he hadn’t redecorated.

Of more importance than the furniture were his newer acquisitions. A gun purchased from a black-market dealer whose acquaintance Kolb had made while he was a cop. A powerful flashlight to negotiate the storm-drain system. Sets of handcuffs to secure the victims, as well as a spray bottle of chloroform if they acted up. A laptop computer with a wireless modem. Sets of fake ID for him and his partner, paid for with his partner’s money but obtained by Kolb, using his connections on the street.

He focused on the disguises he’d put together. Two had already been used and discarded. He took some time deciding which of the remaining three he would use for his swan song.

The simplest was a phony police shield that would allow him to pose as a plainclothes cop. Another choice was a business suit purchased at a thrift shop, along with a cheap briefcase, an ensemble that would allow him to blend into any commercial neighborhood. Then there was his repairman’s outfit—a utility belt and rumpled jacket with matching cap. The cap had a decal bearing the name Steve, which he’d ironed onto the fabric. Steve, the friendly neighborhood repairman. That felt right.

He loaded the repairman’s outfit into the trunk of his car, along with the other items he needed—except for the gun, which he wedged into his waistband behind his back, pulling down the long-sleeved pullover to cover it. An extra magazine of ammo went into his pocket.

He made a final check of the locker to be sure he’d overlooked nothing. His gaze fell on the scrapbook he’d assembled during the Mobius case. That had been three years ago, before his stretch in prison, before Madeleine Grant, before any of it. At the time he’d been working out of Newton Area, a bad neighborhood—“Shootin’ Newton” in LAPD parlance. He spent his nights chasing down gangbangers—stupid punks hyped up on drugs or adrenaline, little better than animals scrapping over territory. To them, jail was no more of a hellhole than the shitty neighborhoods that had spawned them. They were shuttled back and forth between prison and the streets, learning nothing, going nowhere, dying young, and however many of them died, there were always more to take their place.

And then the Mobius story broke. Here was a guy who was smart, ambitious, ruthless, who terrorized the entire city over the course of Easter weekend, who’d had the LAPD and FBI working double shifts while politicians and department heads huddled in a bunker below City Hall. Mobius wasn’t some tattooed, body-pierced, street-trash, coke-snorting, drug-dealing product of the juvenile detention system. He didn’t know any homeboys and didn’t fuck around with two-bit back-alley deals for a gram of crack or a nickel bag. He was a
man
. He’d set his sights on something big.

Maybe it was Mobius who’d started Kolb thinking about what he could do outside the law. Or maybe he’d been thinking about it already. It was impossible to be a cop and not have ideas. He would see the dumb-ass mistakes the punks made, the truly dumb things they did that made arresting them almost too easy, and he would think,
I could do it better
. Cuffing a kid who’d shot a guy at an ATM, he would think,
I would’ve made sure the security camera never got a shot of my face
. Reading the Miranda warning to a junkie who’d broken into a pharmacy, he would think,
I would’ve deactivated the silent alarm
.

But he hadn’t actually planned on doing those things. He hadn’t been serious.

He wasn’t sure if he’d been serious even with Madeleine Grant. She’d ticked him off, that was for damn sure, and he’d had a hard-on for her tight, aerobicized body, but whether he would have taken it all the way, he didn’t know. Sometimes he’d thought he would. Other times it seemed more like a prank, a way to teach the woman a little humility, a little fear.

He’d been arrested before he’d learned what he would do. Ten months in prison had erased any qualms. He now knew he had to take care of Madeleine Grant. He’d intended to save her for last—the last one to die in the tunnels. She would be his signature affixed to the crime spree, his way of taking credit for his work.

Or, if things went sour before that, she would be taken in plan B.

He thought about the backup plan as he rolled down the locker door and resecured the padlock. He almost hoped it became necessary to grab Madeleine tonight. One way or the other he meant to finish her, even if he had to come back to LA six months from now and pay her a visit. She deserved it more than ever after setting McCallum on his tail.

Hell, maybe he would do her tonight, after the storm-drain job. Her and Abby Hollister, too. Sweet little Abby, too dainty and delicate to be seen with an ex-convict. She’d shied away from him like he was garbage, when all he’d done was stop to help her out with her piece-of-shit car….

He frowned, pausing by the side of his Olds.

It was a hell of a coincidence—Tess McCallum talking to Madeleine Grant last night, then Abby showing up on his way to work this morning.

The last time he’d met Abby had been only a few days before his arrest. A few days before incriminating evidence had been found in his apartment by the fire crew.

First she’d shown up while he was e-mailing Madeleine. Now she’d shown up the day after Madeleine had talked to a fed.

It didn’t smell right. She could be playing him somehow. Running a game.

She wasn’t a fed, though. Couldn’t be. Stalking Madeleine hadn’t been a federal case. No FBI involvement.

He didn’t think she was a cop, either. Not that he knew everything that went on inside the LAPD, but if there’d been an undercover op last year, he was pretty sure word would’ve gotten back to him after his arrest. Anyway, he had a feel for cops, and she wasn’t one.

Maybe she was a PI. It was possible Madeleine had hired her for protection, and brought her back into his life after consulting with McCallum.

He wasn’t sure, though. If Abby wanted to get close to him, she would have accepted his offer to go out. Instead she’d given him the brush-off. Why would she play it that way? Maybe to be less obvious, and to deflect any suspicions.

He knew what his partner would say about that: paranoid. Well, Kolb knew from experience that paranoia was sometimes simple realism. There were cases when the bastards really were out to get you. They’d gotten him, hadn’t they?

And Abby Hollister—if that was her real name—might have been part of it. Figuring that her cover hadn’t been blown last time, she was coming back for round two.

Or she might just be a horny, ditzy chick who’d had nothing to do with his arrest.

There could be a way to find out.

21

Abby was jazzed. It was always this way when she started work on a new job, any job, even a nonpaying assignment like this one. She could have squeezed Madeleine Grant for a little money, but she wouldn’t have felt right asking for a fee when she was tying up loose ends. Her services didn’t come with a lifetime guarantee, but she would follow up when circumstances required it.

Anyway, it wasn’t money she was after right now. She wanted a way to work off her nervous tension and excitement. She wanted to kick back, have a little fun. Hell, she wanted to get laid. And she knew who to call.

He picked up on the third ring. She’d been pretty sure he was off duty during the daytime this week.

“Hey, Vic. It’s you-know-who.”

“Let me guess,” Vic Wyatt said. “You want to pump me for information.”

“Mmm…You got that half-right.”

He needed a moment to get it. “Oh.” The word rode a lilt of interest, though not quite the degree of interest she’d expected.

“Are you up for it?” she asked. “So to speak?”

There was a beat of hesitation. “Sure. Of course.”

“Be at my place in twenty, or I start without you.
Ciao
.”

She wondered why he’d sounded less than enthusiastic. The prospect of a roll in the sack with her was the sort of thing that ought to set off every Pavlovian response in the male repertoire. Was it possible Wyatt was getting bored with her?

She shook away that thought. Self-doubt was neither healthy nor helpful for someone who depended on herself to stay alive on a daily basis. Besides, she and Wyatt hadn’t been together long enough for him to lose interest. It had been only…well, come to think of it, it had been almost four years.

The realization surprised her. She’d had no idea their little fling had lasted that long. There’d been nothing to mark the time, no anniversary celebrations, no nostalgic reminiscences. They just got together now and then—once or twice a week, or sometimes only once a month—and shared some quality time. It was always good, but never meaningful.

Wyatt was a sergeant in the LAPD and one of her few police sources. He’d been interested in her for quite some time before she’d succumbed to his persistence and her own curiosity. Right at the start she’d let him know that the relationship wouldn’t go anywhere. She wasn’t the type to get married and settle down. She needed her space. She felt easily smothered. Wyatt had said he understood. Maybe he had. But after four years of casual liaisons, he might be getting ready to move on to somebody who could offer him a more permanent commitment.

If that was the case, she couldn’t blame him. He hadn’t said anything, though. She might be reading too much into their brief conversation. Overinterpreting other people’s behavior was an occupational hazard.

Precisely twenty minutes after her call, the front desk rang to say that Mr. Bryce was here. Bryce was Wyatt’s alias. Using a phony name had been her idea. If the real nature of her work was ever exposed, Wyatt’s career in law enforcement would hardly benefit from an association with her.