In good shape from her thrice weekly workouts, she was well up to the challenge, making it quickly to the far end of the building, rounding the corner... but Willard was already almost to the parking lot. Damn! He had a good fifty yards on her.
She ran harder, closing the distance, but then she heard Hardesy yell, “Freeze, Glenn! Federal agents!”
Willard stopped, but he didn’t freeze. Instead his hand went behind his back, slipping under the untucked polo to yank out a small automatic from his waistband.
Rogers shouted, “Gun!” but she doubted Hardesy heard the warning over the report of his own pistol.
The automatic seemed to fly out of Willard’s hand of its own volition, then skittered out of reach as the young man crumpled into a heap on the pavement in an empty handicapped parking place.
Rogers rushed to the fallen drug dealer, her Glock still on him, and Hardesy did, too, from around the front of the building.
At first she thought her colleague had pulled off a trick shot out of one of those old westerns Reeder watched, shooting the gun right out of the man’s hand. But it had been pain that sent the weapon flying, not fancy pistol-work: writhing on the cement, Willard got his hands red trying to stop the blood pouring from a wound in his side.
The young man looked up at Rogers as if maybe she were a nurse there to help him. “Son of a bitch shot me,” he said, like it had hurt his feelings.
Kneeling next to him, Rogers said, “Shut up and lie still.”
She ignored his moans as she dragged latex gloves from her pocket, pulled them on, then took his scarlet-smeared right hand.
“Quit grabbing at it,” she said, then pressed his palm back against the wound. “Keep steady pressure.”
Pacing nearby, her cohort had his cell out, telling the dispatcher, “Suspect down! Suspect down! Ambulance needed.”
As he gave the address, Hardesy was fishing latex gloves out of a coat pocket. When he’d finished the call, he went over, bent down, and collected Willard’s automatic, dropping it into a plastic evidence bag like a dog owner cleaning up behind Fido.
Rogers remained crouched near Willard, who was wincing in pain but alert. She asked, “Good idea, you think, drawing down on a federal agent?”
Willard seemed about to say something, but all that came out was a groan.
They didn’t have to wait long for the ambulance, but while they did, Hardesy read Willard the revised Miranda rights, after which Rogers — still kneeling, as if praying for the perp — started asking questions.
“Glenn, did you regularly deliver Secretary Yellich’s lunch?”
But Willard was too busy whimpering to respond.
She kept trying anyway: “And the Secretary always ordered the same sandwich, correct?”
Not a nod nor a shake of the head. Just whimpering and tears.
“That sandwich had sesame in it, Glenn. And Secretary Yellich was dangerously allergic. Did you know that?”
He passed out.
As the attendants loaded Willard up and in, Rogers and Hardesy gave their statements to both the local cops and an FBI Agent Involved Shooting investigator. This took a while. Before long, the parking lot filled with cop cars whose flashing lights painted the late morning red and blue.
Hardesy said to her, “I told you he’d be an asshole.”
“Let’s hope he’s not a dead one.”
“Hey, he pulled on me, so don’t look for tears.”
“I won’t. But we can’t talk to him if he isn’t breathing.”
Finally they had the chance to enter Willard’s apartment, the FBI evidence team’s work winding down. The apartment wasn’t the mess she’d figured, the expected scattering of pizza boxes not present, nor the anticipated scruffy carpeting. The room was surprisingly clean, in fact, and she attributed any disorder more to the evidence team’s search than a lack of cleanliness.
The furniture — a leather sofa along a wall, a matching pair of chairs under the living room window, a good-size flat-screen against another wall — was higher-end than she would have expected in an apartment like this.
Granted, the place was redolent of the sickly sweet mixture of dope and incense, but otherwise everything seemed so... normal. The dining room, off the entry, had a polished wood table and four chairs with a pile of mail propped against a condiment holder.
Rogers picked up the envelopes, thumbed through — a few bills, some junk, nothing special. She set the stack back down and took a pass through the galley kitchen. Coffee pot and toaster on the counter, sponge and dish soap near the faucet, everything clean and in its place.
Martin Napoli, a tall, balding agent of around forty, strode into the room; he wore an FBI windbreaker and a seen-it-all expression. The Special Agent in charge of the evidence collection team, Napoli was a favorite of Rogers’ — good at his job, and he could always make her smile.
“Hiya, Patti,” he said.
“Hiya, Marty.”
Hardesy and Napoli traded nods.
“Find anything?” she asked.
Napoli gave up a tiny shrug. “You could say that.”
“Care to share?”
His expression giving away nothing, Napoli crooked a finger for Rogers and Hardesy to follow him down the hall.
As they trailed the evidence SAIC down the dim corridor, Hardesy whispered to her, “What’s he bein’ so cute about?”
“It just means he has something.”
They passed a bathroom on the right. Neat and clean. A bedroom, door open, was dark but appeared tidy, too.
Opposite was a second bedroom, its door closed. Napoli stopped there, wearing a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, then twisted the knob and pushed the door open.
The fecund aroma of weed rolled out.
As she and Hardesy stuck their heads in, Napoli said behind them, “Enough grass in here to replace the turf at RFK Stadium.”
If this bedroom had a bed, it was buried beneath bursting, stacked garbage bags, the pot aroma so strong that Rogers wondered if she could get a contact high just standing in the doorway.
“My lord,” she said. “Marty, any idea how much dope is in there?”
Napoli shrugged. “We haven’t exactly had time to weigh it, but my guess? Enough to make a guy carry a gun and make a run for it when federal agents come around.”
Nodding, Rogers said, “Anything to tie him to the death of Secretary Yellich?”
“Not unless one of these bags is filled with sesame seeds,” Napoli said with half a smirk. “And in the kitchen? Not a bun or a bagel with the deadly little beauties.”
Moving away from the odor, she said, “Well, stay at it, Marty. And thanks.”
“Always entertaining, Patti, when a call from you comes in. How’s your pal Reeder?”
“Getting rich not working for the government.”
She and Hardesy headed outside. Afternoon now, it was getting colder.
Hardesy regarded her with narrowed eyes. “So what do you think?”
“Well,” she said, “I almost wrote this off as a wild goose chase.”
“Yeah, me, too — but I didn’t figure it would lead to a half ton of marijuana.”
She huffed a laugh. “I guess we know why Willard pulled on us.”
“Do we?” Hardesy asked. “Or is Reeder onto something?”
“Always possible with him. We’ll have to keep digging. I wonder if taking a huge pile of dope off the street will make AD Fisk smile upon Special Situations?”
Hardesy laughed once. “We may get a day or two out of it.”
Her cell chirped — it was Miguel Altuve, their computer analyst.
“I’ve been going through security video,” he told her, “and not just from the day Secretary Yellich died — from the days before her death.”