Horace could adapt to life back there, sure. Horace didn’t care about football or the weather or anything much except classical music. (And me, she thought, don’t forget me.) But this child? Shrivel right up and die in a snowbank the first winter.
She sighed. And then grimaced because the sigh sounded just like one of Pop’s. Wall clock said it was almost noon. She shut down her Mac, put on her coat, locked up, and went out to lunch.
Tommy’s Joint on Van Ness, treated herself to their buffalo burger. Some treat. Tommy’s specialty had always been one of her favorites, but she just wasn’t hungry today, couldn’t even eat half of it. Raining again when she came out, and she’d forgotten to bring her umbrella. Figured. She was dripping by the time she got back to the office.
Inside she hung up her coat, squeezed out her scarf and hung that up too. On her way to her desk, she heard the door open behind her. She thought it was Jake Runyon, took another couple of steps without turning. Next second she heard hard, quick footfalls coming up behind her, metallic objects rattling and clanking together, and that was when she started to turn—
Something cracked against the side of her head, something solid that brought a sunburst of pain and confusion and sent her sprawling headlong across the floor.
23
Steve Taradash was still doing that nervous, quit-smoking trick of his with a package of cigarettes. While I talked I watched him take one from the pack, roll it between thumb and forefinger, lay it on the desk blotter, and go through the slice-and-dice routine with his penknife. In the other chair Meg Lawton kept her eyes on me the whole time, a look of near anguish on her round face.
Eventually I stopped talking. Taradash said, “Rotten cancer sticks,” and swept the dismembered weed into his wastebasket. Without any sign of glee this time; his expression was bleak. Mrs. Lawton rubbed her palms over the silky material of her skirt, making a dry rustling sound.
She said, “It’s so hard to believe Spook murdered three people in cold blood. My Lord, he seemed so... harmless.”
“He was by the time you met him. Unstable personality unhinged by one psychotic episode, seventeen years of guilt and remorse and self-hatred.
“Until there wasn’t anything left,” Taradash said glumly, “but a walking vegetable.”
“Horrible,” she said. “I almost wish...”
“That we’d never found out the truth about him? So do I. Try to make a gesture in the spirit of the holidays, this is what you get. I should’ve left well enough alone.”
“Look at it this way,” I said. “If you had, Spook might never have been identified and nobody would’ve known what became of Anthony Colton. At least now the Mono sheriff’s department and the FBI can close their files on the case.”
“I suppose you’re right. Still... oh, hell, don’t misunderstand me, you and your people did a good job, I don’t begrudge the expense. It’s just that I’m feeling disillusioned right now.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“And I can’t help wondering if Spook got what he deserved out there in the alley, if Lightfoot and Valjean, if they’re the ones responsible, were justified in knocking him off.”
“Murder’s never justified, Mr. Taradash.”
“I’m not so sure I wouldn’t’ve done the same thing if a member of my family was shot down and I had a crack at the man who pulled the trigger.”
“Nobody knows what he’d do in a situation like that until he’s confronted with it. All I can say is that most of us wouldn’t give in to the impulse.”
“I wouldn’t,” Meg Lawton said. “I could never take a human life, not for any reason.”
“There’s another thing to consider, too. The man who murdered Spook also murdered Big Dog. Double homicide isn’t any less heinous than triple homicide... he’s no better than Anthony Colton. Worse in the eyes of the law because his crimes were premeditated.”
“Big Dog,” Taradash said. “You think he’d still be dead if I hadn’t hired you?”
“No question. He signed his own death warrant before we got involved.”
Taradash shook out another cigarette, began the ritual once more. “How’d he know who to blackmail? How’d Spook get recognized in the first place, after seventeen years?”
“No answers to those questions yet. We’ll get the rest of the story when the police make an arrest.”
“If they make an arrest.”
“They will. I don t think it’ll be long.”
Meg Lawton had been staring past her boss, through the window at activity on the warehouse floor — employees readying equipment for another indy film being shot in the city, I’d been told. Abruptly she said, as if a thought had just struck her, “Steve, what about... you know, a burial plot for Spook, some kind of marker?”
“You don’t expect me to go through with that now?”
“It’s not that I expect it...”
“We found out who he was, isn’t that enough?”
“I don’t know. If you think so.”
“Well, I don’t know either.” Taradash jabbed his penknife into the cigarette; tobacco spurted like flecks of dry brown blood. He asked me, “What do you think? Should I go ahead, arrange to bury the poor bastard?”
“Not my call. I didn’t know Spook.”
“No opinion either way?”
“Sorry, no.”
“And where would we put him? Here? Mono County?”
I didn’t say anything.
“He was so sad,” Meg Lawton said, “so... damaged. It’s horrible, what he did, but he wasn’t really free all those years, was he? Didn’t really escape punishment? It just seems to me he ought to have a final resting place.”
“Maybe,” Taradash said, “maybe you’re right, I wish I could make up my mind.” He jabbed the knife blade again into the corpse of the cigarette. “I wish it wasn’t the Christmas season,” he said.
Meg Lawton said, “I’m glad it is.”
So was I. For a lot of reasons.
24
Jake Runyon
The one thing he’d never liked about investigative work was surprises. When you knew what was going down, or at least had some advance warning, you could make preparations, plan for contingencies. But when you walked cold into an unexpected situation, it was like being hamstrung — you couldn’t act quickly, you needed time to regroup and by then it might be too late. More than anything else he hated being helpless.
This surprise was a bad one, the worst kind. Tamara Corbin sitting slumped at her desk, one hand cradling her head, smears and streaks of blood all down the left side of her face and neck and across the front of her blouse. Hot-eyed stranger standing spraddle-legged in the middle of the office — big, rangy, early forties; beard-stubbled, brown hair jutting wild from a blotchy scalp, big mole on the left side of his nose; wearing a flak jacket and camouflage fatigues and high-lace boots. Paper files and desktop items strewn all over the floor.
And guns everywhere — on the surface of Bill’s desk, on the floor, spilling out of an open duffel bag next to the desk. At least three handguns, an assembled assault rifle, a couple of big, rapid-fire machine pistols. The piece held steady in the man’s hand was a Micro Uzi SMG, which meant a magazine capacity of twenty rounds minimum of 9 mm parabellum ammo. Bad enough if it was semiautomatic, worse if it was automatic. Deadly as hell in any case. There was ammunition spread around, too, boxes of it for all the weapons.
Runyon took it all in, the details and implications, in the few frozen seconds after his entry. Hostage situation, suicide mission, planned slaughter. It shut him down inside, put him on cold alert. Emotion, any kind, was a liability in this type of situation. The only possible survival mechanisms were intelligence, training, instinct. And they were damned puny against a heavily armed man with death on his mind.