Ballard jerked open the stairwell door, sputtering disconnected thoughts as he did. “Greenly was ordered to get someone in the section... to switch the hit man’s photo with that of Pivarski... He did...”
“So the Pivarski who’s upstairs in that hearing room right now is not the Pivarski who was in the Oakland office last year.”
They charged up the stairs two at a time.
When Wayne Hawkley emerged from the first floor men’s room he found his way blocked by a big, sloppy-looking man who matched his own six-three in height and outweighed him by at least seventy-five pounds. “The hearing room is back that way and upstairs, counselor,” said Benny Nicoletti. He had never met Hawkley, but had seen him in surveillance photos often enough. Always fruitlessly until — maybe — right now.
“I am an attorney and I have a very important—”
“Upstairs, pal.” Nicoletti flashed his badge with one hand and began steering Hawkley back toward the elevators with the other.
“I’m going to have that shield, you... you...”
“Inspector Benny Nicoletti, Police Intelligence. That last name has two t’s, counselor, for when you make your complaint. Meanwhile, we’re going back upstairs.”
By chance they had an elevator to themselves. Hawkley tried again to object, but Nicoletti cut him short. “Y’see, counselor, I been walking and thinking. And I decided that you knew we were going to give our witness to the Flip Fazzino hit an eyeball of Pivarski. I also decided that you made such a fuss about keeping Pivarski from showing up at this hearing because you really wanted him to show up.”
“That’s ridiculous,” sputtered Hawkley.
“Wanted him to show up according to your timetable. I don’t know why, but...”
The elevator doors opened and Nicoletti dragged his reluctant companion into the hall. “... course if I’m wrong, I’ll apologize and you can go after my badge. But first we’ll see what’s happening in the hearing—”
A gun went off somewhere down the hall. Nicoletti made a magically quick movement at great variance with his bulk, and a Police Positive with a four-inch barrel appeared in his hand.
“You bastard!” he grated, dragging Hawkley forward, “if someone got shot...”
Dan Kearny got shot.
He sat down abruptly on the floor, one shoulder feeling like someone had slammed it in a car door, and stared stupidly at the blood running down off his lax fingers to the floor. How much blood, he wondered hazily, was there in a fifty-year-old fool who had been so stupid as to try and be a hero? He’d made a grab for the gun and it had swung around to look at him from a muzzle as big as a rain barrel, and then the rain barrel had spoken and Kearny had sat down.
The professional killer who had taken out Flip Fazzino and seven others over a ten-year career swirled the fingers of his left hand through Giselle Marc’s long blond hair and jerked her to her feet. She yelped with pain and then went white with shock as he rammed the muzzle of the .38 up under her chin. “She gets the next one,” grated the pseudo-Pivarski, and kept moving. No one else did. Verna was almost placid in the witness chair, the Hearing Officer had disappeared behind his desk, Hec Tranquillini was frozen half out of his chair, and John Delaney was holding Norbert Franks by the throat so Franks was unable to leave with his confederate.
Kearny finally understood most of it, as he watched the killer sliding out the door with Giselle. He wanted to throw a chair at the gunman, but was just too tired. The blood was puddling under his hand now. Pretty soon it would reach his thigh and ruin his suit pants. Blood was very hard to get out.
Or get back, once it was lost.
Sleepy.
But his brain seemed to work pretty well, even if the rest of him was sliding away.
Hawkley finds out there’s an eyewitness to the Fazzino hit who thinks he can l.D. the killer. The killer therefore needs an absolute alibi. Among his not especially bright nephew’s clients is somebody who has an alibi. He was in the DKA office making a payment at the time of the Fazzino hit. He looks a little like the hit man. Maybe the fact that his payment was being made to the office of Dan Kearny, who originally blew the whistle on Fazzino, is what triggers the idea of a substitution in Hawkley’s mind.
So he gets his nephew to push for a misconduct hearing with the Professional Standards Bureau. Easy, when the auditor is already in your pocket. At the hearings, if it comes to that, he can always try to get the phony Pivarski to testify on a day when none of the witnesses to the real Pivarski’s payment are scheduled to testify. The real Pivarski himself? Bought off or dead.
Kearny looked back at the doorway. His mind had been running so fast that he could still see part of Giselle’s back as she was dragged into the corridor by the killer. Poor Giselle. Ought to help her but... so tired...
So then Nicoletti turned up the witness. It was getting hot. And then Kathy died of natural causes. Suddenly the whole thing was necessary and would work. One witness dead, a second with a bad memory and willing to petjure himself anyway, a third disappeared.
So he tried it. And until the missing witness showed up, unexpectedly, on the day he brought the phony Pivarski in to testify, everything was working for Hawkley. Still was, since Hawkley had skipped clean, and the killer had just disappeared into the hall — clean. Enough to make you weep.
Suiting actions to thoughts, Dan Kearny put down his head and wept. Wept with physical weakness while cursing himself inwardly for what he thought was will-power weakness. And there was, at one side, Hec Tranquillini, using a belt as a tourniquet and saying the wound looked more bloody than bad, and on the other, the little black girl — what was her name — Verna Rounds, that was it, comforting him. Because, although Kearny didn’t know it, if there was one thing Verna had learned in the past months it was how to care for frightened little fellers who had started crying.
Without any need, because out in the hall the killer had, on coming from the hearing room, happened to look the wrong way first. He looked to his left, up toward the elevators, instead of to his right, over toward the stairwell. He saw a very bulky Benny Nicoletti dragging that goddamned screw-up Hawkley with him, and he saw a Police Positive in Benny Nicoletti’s right hand, pointed up the hall right at him.
And at Giselle, but he didn’t think of that. Being a killer, he would have fired instantly if the roles had been reversed. He didn’t know Nicoletti would not shoot as long as Giselle was endangered. There was no way he could comprehend such softness. When he pointed a gun at someone who also had a gun pointed at him, his gun went off.
So he whirled toward Nicoletti to blow him away, but in so doing jerked his gun away from Giselle’s face.
Which meant that Bart Heslip, crossing the hall silently from the stairwell in desperate preparation for an attempt to wrest the gun from his hand, could attack without endangering Giselle.
Bart Heslip hit the gunman in the kidneys with the hardest punch he had ever thrown in his life. He’d won thirty-nine out of forty professional fights, almost all of them by knockouts, and this was the hardest punch he’d ever thrown. Because he knew all about kidney punches. He’d suffered one in the fight he had lost. He’d finished the fight — and lost it by a split decision — and had gone home and urinated blood for a week afterwards.
The killer of eight men, struck in the kidneys as Heslip had been, screamed and fell on the floor. As he did, Larry Ballard came down on his gun arm with both feet, crushing his wrist and pulverizing his fingers so he wouldn’t be shooting any guns with that hand anymore once he got out of prison. If the men he was going to spill his guts about to stay out of the gas chamber would let him live long enough to get out of prison.