When his cell phone rang the sound made him turn to look behind, like he'd been caught, like the truth had come out and someone would be standing there. He shook off the feeling and brought the phone out of his pocket. The readout on the incoming number was blocked.
"Nick Mullins," he said.
"I am deeply disappointed, Mr. Mullins," said a man's deep voice.
The tenor of the words immediately charged his nerves and Nick turned away from the ocean wind, cupping his hand over the cell to listen closer.
"Yeah? Maybe I am too," he said. "Would you mind telling me who you are and why you're disappointed?"
"You gave our story up, Mr. Mullins," the voice said. "I planned out a lot of possibilities, my friend. But I never figured you to give our story up to someone else."
Nick immediately turned and ducked his head and started back to his car to get out of the breeze so he could hear and think.
"Mike? Mike Redman?"
"I mean, come on, Mr. Mullins. A marauding killer? That guy Binder writes just like the rest of them. All flash and no substance. Although I have to give him credit for mapping out my use of your journalism to decide on who needed to be eliminated. But I have a feeling that was your work. Am I right?"
Nick opened his car, climbed in and closed the door to create a vacuum of silence.
"Christ, Redman. What are you doing, man? You're shooting people in the streets. That's not your training. I saw your work too. This is not what you do," Nick said, guessing at the words to use, trying to juggle what he knew with how he thought the sniper might be thinking.
"It's not what any of us were trained to do, Mullins. I went to war and killed innocent people, did everything the opposite of how I was trained. And now look at yourself. I've read every story you did on those scumbags over the years. You were the truth. And now you gave it up too. You handed it over."
Nick was silent. Had he copped out by quitting? Was the sniper right?
"OK, Mike. Maybe I did. But do you want to set it straight?" Nick said, scrambling to keep him talking, truly falling back on his training. "You and I could talk. We could do an interview. I'd get it out straight from you, tell the story the right way. The truth, like you just said."
There was the sound of a deep chuckle in the cell earpiece. The guy was laughing.
"See? You and I are a lot alike, Nick. You can't help but be the newsman. I can't help but pull the trigger. It's what we do," Redman said. "I'm not after publicity, Nick. I don't need any stories. Like I told you, I've got one more shot, tomorrow. One more piece of business, and it's for you. Then I gotta move on. Then I'm gonna get on with my life, Nick. And you can too. Don't you see? We're a lot alike, you and I."
Nick felt the conversation slipping away. He'd lost interviews before, had them stop before he had the answers he needed.
"Wait, wait, Mike," he nearly yelled into the phone. "What do you mean, for me? Who's for me, Michael? The Secretary of State doesn't mean anything to me, Michael. I only wrote that quote. It wasn't me that said it."
There was no response. But no dial tone either.
"Is it Walker? Do you know about Walker, Mike?"
Nick's voice was still rising, reverberating in the closed space and buffeting back on his own ears.
"Hey, don't put this on me, Mike. I'm not out for retribution. Mike!" Nick slapped his right hand against the steering wheel in anger and frustration. "Redman?"
Three electronic beeps and the line went dead.
Nick sat back in his seat and stared out at the horizon. And then dialed Hargrave's number.
Chapter 32
At six fifteen the next morning Nick was sitting in his car, parked next to the Dumpster, down the street but well within view of Archie's Tool Sharpening Shack.
After talking with Hargrave, he'd gone home last night and had dinner with Carly and Elsa and tried to put on a clear-headed, smiling act. But when he went quiet in the middle of a conversation about his daughter's science lesson on the African desert's effect on forming hurricanes, she looked up and saw his eyes staring out through the window. She turned to Elsa, but the nanny only shook her head and said, "It's OK, Carlita, he will be back."
They pretended not to notice and in a few minutes Nick was back, rejoining the discussion as though no lapse had occurred.
Later in the evening Nick helped with Carly's math homework and then gave her an early good-night kiss and went out to the patio. He slept in the chair and, almost as if an alarm sounded, he woke at five AM, took a shower and drove to this spot.
At six thirty he began to squirm. Walker was late and he had never been late so far. Light from the east was starting to glow and a dusty gray was rising into the sky. He was leaning forward, anticipating the headlights of Walker's car, when a sharp tapping of metal on glass caused him to jump.
At the passenger window was the face of a man, a long flashlight tube in his hand. Nick was confused for a second. No one had ever approached him before. The flashlight snapped against the window again and now Nick could see the badge displayed on the man's chest.
He hit the automatic button to lower the passenger-side window and only then did he realize a second man was on his side of the car, standing back a few paces at the rear panel.
"Please step out of the car, sir, and keep your hands where we can see them," the officer at the open window said. He was standing sideways as he bent to look in. A standard defense procedure, Nick knew, that gave less of a profile to hit if a driver was thinking of shooting a cop during a traffic stop.
"Yeah, yeah, sure, Officers. I'm cool," Nick said, exaggerating his hands up and fingers spread. "I'm just reaching down to open the door, OK?"
Nick had written about citizens being wounded by officers reacting to unpredictable and quick movements. He'd also written about cops being shot during traffic stops. Both sides needed to know what the other was doing.
He opened the door slowly and then pushed his upraised hands out first and then stood.
"Come around to the front here, please," the officer to the side said and Nick followed the instruction, only glancing at the cop standing behind him.
While Officer One ran his flashlight beam over Nick's clothes and finally his face, he could see Officer Two doing the same kind of search of his car interior.
"License, sir?" Officer One said.
"I'm gonna get it out of my front pants pocket. OK?" Nick said before reaching. He had always kept his wallet in his front pocket since some street hustler had tried to pick it one day. And he knew reaching oddly into a waistband area was a motion that would surely agitate a cop.
The guy nodded and Nick took out the wallet and opened it away from his body and slipped out the license and handed it over. The officer looked at the license and then at his partner and said, "Mr. Mullins, may we look in the trunk of your car, sir?"
"Yeah, sure, no problem," Nick said. "The button is right there on the left of the dash and the keys are in the ignition."
He turned his head to watch Officer Two lean in and take out the keys and then walk around to the trunk. Officer One said nothing and while they waited Nick took in the uniform badge and seal on the officer's shoulder. Fort Lauderdale Police Department. He knew that this was officially their jurisdiction, but had never even seen a sector car in this area before. A pair of cops doing foot patrol was way unusual, Nick thought.
"OK, Mr. Mullins," Officer One said after getting an all-clear sign from his partner, who slammed down the trunk lid. "Can you tell me, sir, why you're parked here so early in the morning?"
"Actually, I'm working on a story. I'm a reporter for the Daily News and I've got an early appointment to meet a guy here." Nick nodded toward the buildings across the street. "And I usually show up early to, you know, go through the questions I'm gonna ask and stuff."