He remembered Click’s Smith amp; Wesson and the rounds in the trash can. “Christ,” he mumbled and ran back toward the house, praying he wouldn’t have to kill the kid, or take a round in his chest for losing track of the fact that Click was the enemy.
The front door was standing wide open, and Winter knew he hadn’t left it that way. He’d been flanked.
45
“Oh my God,” Click pleaded, “don’t shoot me! Please, please. .”
Winter turned the corner and aimed at the back of the person who stood aiming a gun down at Click’s upturned face. The young man lay on the hallway floor on his back. In one hand he held the unloaded Smith, and in the open palm of the other, a pair of bullets. Click had been stopped from loading the handgun by the unblinking eye of a large-bore FBI-issued Glock.
“Shoot her!” Click yelled when he spotted Winter.
“I thought you left,” Winter said, putting his SIG in its holster.
“Did you see who did this?” Alexa asked.
“One was Max Randall. The other shooter was too large to be Sarnov.”
Alexa snatched Click’s gun away from him, slipping her own into her shoulder bag. She looked into the den and shook her head slowly. “What the hell were they using?”
“Where did you come from?”
“I found your truck empty and I was standing at the front door when I heard glass breaking. I came in and found Ferny Ernest here loading his piece.”
“A pair of MP5s firing subsonic rounds, noise suppressors. That the sort of weapons the good colonel was dealing?”
Alexa nodded.
“So, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I had an epiphany. I doubled back.”
“I didn’t see your car on the street.”
“Parked on the next street and cut through the Lathams’.”
“What was this epiphany?”
“I figured you planned to do something insane and that I should be with you so I’d know what you didn’t do in case I’m ever asked officially. I thought about what you said about this guy’s value weighed against the Dockerys’ lives.” She winked at Winter and smiled. “You were right. I was wrong. This is new territory for me.”
“It was Max Randall?” Click asked, from the floor.
Winter nodded. “Yes, Click, I saw his face clearly.”
“Why would he shoot me?”
“I’d bet he came back to cancel the job offer Sarnov extended to you earlier this evening.”
“Why would he do that?” Click demanded.
“Because Sarnov as much as told you that he was planning to wipe your family out, and Max probably decided it was too much information too soon. He knows nothing you can do with a computer is unique enough to jeopardize his ass after Bryce is free.”
Click said, “You saved me-so I know you aren’t going to hurt me.”
Alexa laughed and shook her head slowly. “Boy, for a genius, you do not know Shinola.”
46
Winter Massey looked in his rearview mirror at Alexa’s headlights, and then beside him at sulking Click’s profile. Being almost killed had a sobering effect on people lucky enough to be able to remember it after the fact. Click was still wearing his red-and-blue plaid flannel robe over his T-shirt and boxers. The athletic sock on his right foot was bunched around his ankle like a badge of defeat.
“Your girlfriend was going to kill me,” Click said.
“You were trying to load your gun. If you had, I would have killed you. What are you bitching about? You’re murdering a young mother and her child.”
“You have children?” Click asked.
“No,” Winter lied.
“Married?”
“No.”
“Girlfriend?”
He shook his head.
“Gay?”
“Don’t talk to me unless you’re ready to tell me where the Dockerys are.”
“Why?”
“You really want to know?”
“Du-uh,” Click said. “I wasn’t asking so I could smell your breath.”
“I don’t want anything personal about this. It’s business. I intend to keep your family from killing two innocent people, and I am willing to do whatever I have to do. I don’t want to remember you as a real person because it might make me feel bad about what I had to do to you.”
“I was just making conversation.” Click looked at the road ahead, sullen. “I mean, somebody saves your life, keeps their girlfriend from killing you, and plans to torture you, you have to wonder about them.”
“I didn’t save you because I like you or give a damn if they kill you. I did it because I want to find out what you know. You’re just a map to me. Whatever happens to you depends on how it affects my route to find the Dockerys.”
“I can’t help you hurt my family.”
“You’re not like them. They’re killers, you’re not.”
“They might be what you say they are, but they’ll be around a long time after you’re dead. I’m no Judas.”
“If they murder the Dockerys, I’ll make sure you spend the next thirty years in prison without access to computers.”
“Smoot blood goes back hundreds of years. Our ancestors came here from England. No Smoot has ever ratted out another one.”
Winter figured the first Smoots came kicking and screaming, clapped in irons, straight from the bowels of some British penal institution.
“One way or the other, you’re going to tell me where the Dockerys are. That, Click, is a dead-certain fact.”
“You can’t make me tell you anything.”
Winter smiled.
“I bet you’ve never beaten anybody up or tortured them before. You don’t have the eyes for it. You didn’t even shoot back at Randall.”
“No need to make a racket that would have brought the cops.”
Click reached down, opened his robe, and pulled up the T-shirt. Even in the dimly lit cab, Click’s torso looked like Jackson Pollock had created a masterpiece on the young man’s canvas of skin by using a variety of blades and red-hot objects to get the desired effect.
He sneered. “Do anything you want to me. We have this family tradition that gets passed down from father to son. You can burn me with cigarettes, break bones, pull out my fingernails, or carve me up like a Thanksgiving turkey and all you’ll get for your trouble is your own sweat.” Click dropped his shirt and closed his robe. He said offhandedly, “Whatever you can do, I’ve already had. You might as well just shoot me and go on about your snooping business without wasting any more time than you already have.”
Winter thought about a man who would do such a thing to his own child. He thought then about his own son and his infant daughter, and deep inside he was on fire.
He intended to find Lucy and Elijah, but after he did, he wanted to kill Peanut Smoot.
Maybe Click truly believed he wasn’t going to rat out his father, but Winter knew differently.
47
The sign that had been suspended from a bar between the brick columns had been taken down. As a precaution Winter handcuffed Click’s wrists behind him before he got out of the truck. He opened the padlock and swung open the steel pole that stretched, from hedgerow to hedgerow, across the asphalt driveway. The No Trespassing signs on either post glowed in the headlights. Winter watched Alexa drive through, took his truck in, then locked the gate.
The parking lot had been cut into the side of a hill studded with pine trees. The building at the base of the hill stood on a flat beyond a rock-walled stream. Its dark roof, accented by pools of rainwater, looked every bit as large as a football field.
“What is this place?” Click asked.
“Isolated,” Winter said.
Winter led Click and Alexa down a long run of wide stone steps, across a wooden bridge over a rushing brook. The slopes and flower beds were buried under a carpet of rust-colored pine needles. A motion-sensitive light came on, illuminating the walkway and the front of the structure. The trio crossed an expanse of concrete, beneath a cantilevered awning, to arrive at a set of glass doors. Streaks of adhesive were evidence of logo graphics that had been removed from the inside of the glass at some point with a razor. Subtle lighting from a fixture over the reception counter, which was faced with wood veneer, allowed the arrivals a view of a lobby that had been stripped of all other furniture. Winter took his keys from his jacket and, isolating one, used it to unlock the door. As he ushered the others inside, a rhythmic beeping filled the space.