Last Shot (2006) (22 page)

Stopping on the walk, Ted picked up a melted army man and a discarded Barbie sundress and tossed them back at the front step. He had the type of gym-enhanced build common in L.A., heavy on biceps and quads, with more muscle definition than could be achieved without kidney-straining supplements. As a third-string quarterback at a Division One college, he'd learned the art of physical upkeep without having to endure the rigors of injury. The sole nondoctor, -lawyer, or -studio exec on his tree-lined block, he moved across his front lawn with confidence, the erect stride of the proud homeowner.

He pressed the "unlock" button on his key chain, and the Bronco greeted him with a friendly chirp. Spinning the keys around his finger, he paused a few feet from the truck. A folded note fluttered from the tinted driver's window, Scotch-taped, his name rendered in red ink.

He turned a quick circle, laughing in anticipation of a practical joke, but his front yard and the street were empty. A neighbor passed in a Lexus with a tooted greeting, and he waved before returning his attention to the note. He took a step forward, plucked it from the window, and opened it.

Puzzled, he stared down at the blank interior.

A pair of hands shot out from beneath the truck, the left clamping over the top of his foot, the right, which held an unfolded knife, hooking around the heel. Before Ted could move, the blade drew back toward the undercarriage shadows, carving around the rear of his ankle and severing the Achilles tendon. Spurting blood made a soft tapping noise against the driveway. Ted bent, hands shoved to his thighs, emitting a breathy, incredulous moan. The blank note fluttered to the concrete, blood soaking through it in spots. Ted turned to run toward the house, but his right leg didn't respond, and he fell flat on his chest, still unable to find his voice. The hands seized him around both calves, dragging him beneath the Bronco. Limbs rattled against the oil pan.

The brief struggle ended with a thud.

Propped in an uncomfortable sitting position, a cramp vise-gripping his lower back, Ted came to in a dank room. A thickness had seized his legs, which were extended before him, and his head throbbed. He groaned and struggled to move his arms. A lamp hooked to a workbench ten feet away provided meager lighting. Scattered tools, a bundle of antique rifles, a few powdery bags of rapid-set concrete. He strained to look behind him; his body wouldn't obey, but he managed to twist his neck. A roll-up door had been raised, revealing the silhouette of his beloved Bronco outside. The spare tire swing-arm carrier had been released, the tailgate laid open. Two strips of aluminum formed a loading ramp, extending down from the truck's well-advertised cargo space.

A clicking jerked him back around. A form crouched just past his feet, where moments before there had been mere darkness. His night vision was starting to kick in, enough for him to make out the glint of a knife. With a thumb and forefinger, the figure raised the folding steel blade from its handle, then let it snap back into place. The knife, a wicked-looking compression-lock Spyderco, featured a hollow-ground blade, hump-spined with a thumb hole, and a precision-drilled titanium handle, multiperforated for lightness and balance. Ted had come across similar models in some of his shady "security" dealings, generally in the hands of word-of-mouth referrals with extensive unspecified training. The man holding him was the real deal, not like the tough-guy producers, playboy entrepreneurs, and gun-waving pseudogangstas-cum-record producers who generally paid his mortgage. He looked down and saw the reason he couldn't move his legs or feet.

They were sunk into concrete.

The block encased him to the waist, as if he were sitting in a half-filled bath. He shouted and jerked his arms, but his hands had also been immersed in the gray mass, the ragged mouths of the entries cutting into his wrists. Oddly, he and the block rolled a few inches back before striking something that halted their motion. Recollection crashed in on him--the bite at his ankle, his fingernails snapping as he was pulled backward across the driveway, devoured by the shadows beneath the truck. When he refocused, the man was down on a knee, winding black tape around the laces of one boot. The man picked up a hand mallet and hammer and advanced on him. Ted strained and thrashed but could barely rock his powerful torso. The mallet clinked into position. Ted closed his eyes and bellowed.

A bang. A clatter of wood on the floor.

Tentatively, he took a glimpse. The man had knocked free one of the forming boards from around the concrete block. A few steps and the man disappeared behind him. Another bang shocked Ted upright, and a second board fell free. He tried to talk, to reason, but his throat had chalked up, issuing only rasps. The man proceeded with his quiet, measured pacing and hammering until only the block and Ted remained, centered on what he now saw was a carpeted dolly.

Frantic, he sought the man in the darkness. He was crouched again, just beyond Ted's immobilized feet, wrapping what appeared to be heavy-test fishing line around a spool as if he were drawing in a kite.

"Wh..." Ted panted a few times, as if readying for a charge. "Who are you?"

The voice--deep and maddeningly calm: "Walker Jameson. Ring a bell?"

"No. Not really."

Walker focused on his task, continuing to take up the fishing line. "Jameson," he said. "Think hard."

Rising heat set Ted's cheeks tingling. "I'll tell you everything."

"Yeah," Walker said, "you will."

Chapter
33

Kaitlin opened the door, smoothing down a poof of bed head and yawning. Bizarrely, her face was labeled with rectangular stickers--CHEEK on her cheek and HARELINE pasted to her upper forehead. She glanced at Tim in the dim porch light, started, then clutched the rumpled fabric of her waitstaff vest above her heart. "Sorry. You look like someone I--"

She caught herself, ignoring Tim's questioning gaze. She glanced at her watch, digital glow reading 9:34 P.M. "I, uh, dozed off."

Bear stepped from behind Tim, holding his star apologetically at his hip as if brandishing a weapon he was loath to use. "We're deputy marshals, ma'am, and--"

The label on the back of her hand, which read, predictably, BACK OF HAND, caught her attention, and she said quietly, "Oh, no. Are there...?"

Tim and Bear nodded, and her hand rose to her face, finding the labels and peeling them off with a grimace that suggested smarting. She pivoted. "Sammy!" she yelled.

The interior was dark, but a boy's voice muttered something from the ratty couch. She stepped back from the door, leaving it ajar in implicit invitation, and they entered. Kaitlin made exasperated noises as she took in the labels covering most objects in sight. REFRIGARATOR. TABLE. PICKURE FRAME. Tim stared at the floor to hide his smile. FLOOR! it proclaimed.

He and Bear stood awkwardly by the door while Kaitlin spoke with annoyance to Sam. Tim heard him reply, "But it shows I liked it."

Tim glanced around the tiny walk-through kitchen to their right. The new fridge seemed out of place given the peeling starburst linoleum and the aluminum foil pressed to the window seams to hold the heat. A browning chrysanthemum on the tiled window ledge drooped in its plastic pot, a pitchforked note reading, To Tess, the best office manager. A coffee-cup ring had worn through the small table's varnish. Reminders of the dead, everywhere. Tim recalled the first year after Ginny's murder, how he ran into her in every room, how the step stool by her sink or a Krazy straw in a kitchen drawer would pull him up short.

He and Bear ought to be able to uncover more here than they'd gleaned from the elderly neighbor. Millie Kensington had reiterated her memory of the car, glimpsed at night through the junipers outside her bedroom. Low-rider. Bowling-ball hood ornament. It had been a hot night--her hip acting up--so her window had been open, or she wouldn't even have heard it pull up. When Tim had asked what kind of car, she'd replied, "Why, gasoline, I'd imagine." Afterward Tim had bent over the curb between houses, his flashlight picking up the last faded blush of the red spot on the concrete. A calling card? A mark the shooter left behind?

Kaitlin, who'd grown less stern in the face of Sam's contrition, called Tim and Bear into the living room. She clicked on a light, revealing the thin form curled up on the cushions. Despite Sam's yellow sclera and jaundiced skin, Tim placed the features immediately--Vector's AAT deficiency poster child. "Hey. I recognize you from TV."

Sam's breathing was raspy, his voice lethargic. "I'm huge in Germany."

Tim laughed. "I bet. Was it fun? Shooting a commercial?"

Sam, weathered veteran of moderate fame, shrugged listlessly. "It was pretty cool. We got to ride in a limo and everything."

Bear cleared his throat and addressed Kaitlin. "I'm sorry to bring up what may be a tough topic, but--"

"I saw he escaped last night," Kaitlin said.

"Yes, and we thought maybe we could talk to you alone for--"

Sam shoved himself upright on the couch, eyes fixed on Tim's holster. "That a Smith & Wesson?"

"Yup."

Bear, to Kaitlin: "Have you seen or heard from him?"

She shook her head.

Again, from the couch: "Why don't you have a semiauto?"

Tim went into his rote explanation. "Only four rounds are exchanged on average in a gunfight, and since I'm more comfortable with the weighting--" He saw Bear looking at him: Do you need to be medicated?

Bear, flustered and evidently unaware of the hour, tried an inane tack. "Wanna play outside, give us a chance to talk to your mom?"

Sam said, "She's not my mom."

"Right. Can we talk to her anyway?"

Together Tim and Kaitlin said, "It's late."

"Sammy, why don't you go play video games?" Kaitlin offered.

A sigh and a slide from the couch. Sam blew his overgrown bangs from his eyes. "Aa-right."

"Eat something," she said, then quoted him even as he replied: "I'm not hungry." He giggled, and she added, "I know. Drink a Pediasure."

"Sick of 'em."

"Have a bowl of cereal. And add MCT."

He trudged off to the kitchen cartoonishly, shoulders slumped.

Kaitlin cast an awkward glance at Tim and Bear. "It's an oil we have to put in his food to give it more calories."

Tim said, "From his commercial it sounds like Vector's doing great stuff."

"For other kids," Kaitlin said. "They dropped Sammy from the trial group. Downsized him."

Tim felt Bear's eyes pull to him, but he kept his gaze on Kaitlin. "When?"

Her hand tapped the pager at her waist, checking it, a nervous habit. "A couple months ago. Then, a week later, his mother killed herself. I think he's doing okay for all that."

Again Bear shot Tim a glance from over the top of his notepad.

Tim asked, "You're his guardian?"

Kaitlin nodded. Down the hall a door thumped shut. Emotion or exhaustion seemed to catch up to her at that moment. "He's a special kid, such a special kid, and I'm in charge of him. Because no one else was around to do it. Not one family member was clamoring, so I got okayed. Me, with my credentials." Her voice dropped to a hoarse, almost scared whisper. "But it's a lot of work."

"Tess didn't have any other family?"

An unmistakable hint of anger--"None she trusted, I guess." Kaitlin seemed made uncomfortable by the silence, so she continued, "We'd stayed in touch a bit, and then regularly after Sammy was diagnosed. Sammy and I...well, I guess we took to each other."

"He's lucky."

"I'm not able to..." She shook off the thought, then looked down the hall toward Sam's room, her face warming through the sadness. "I'm lucky."

"When's the last time you saw Walker?" Bear asked.

"Not in years. We separated."

"Not divorced? How'd it happen?"

"He went to Iraq and came back but never really came back. You know? It was different than his other stints, Iraq. He never took the armor off after that." A faint laugh. "The stint in Leavenworth off the incoming flight didn't much help matters."

"I'm sorry to pry, but was there any domestic violence?" Tim asked.

"Walk never hit me, no. Drank some. Got ugly from time to time--words, you know how it gets--but he never laid a hand."

"Did he know Sam?"

"No. Walk and Tess drifted some after Tess got married, then he was gone most always. Deployed. I doubt Walker'd even recognize Sammy if you put 'em in the same room."

"Do you mind if we take a look at her room? Maybe ask Sam a question or two?"

She looked briefly worried, a mother's protectiveness. "One or two. Don't push him--he's got an active imagination. Tess's room is the last one on the left. Go ahead. I'm just gonna straighten up out here some." With a wry grin, she added, "Peel some labels."

Sam had created a sign for his door with crayons and construction paper. SAMS ROOM. PRIVATE PRIVATE PRIVATE. NOONE ALLOWED WITHOUT NOCKING. Tim heeded the warning, rapping his knuckles against the flimsy wood.

"Come in." Sam sat on the floor, face tilted back to take in the TV on his bureau. The bowl of cereal sat to one side, the milk all but absorbed. On-screen, a would-be sleazeball took a Bonnie and Clyde fusillade to his critical mass. Game cartridges littered the floor. Champions of Norrath. WWF Smackdown. Devil May Cry 3.