‘Oh boy,’ said Mahoney and tossed away his apple.
Chapter One Hundred and Eight
‘Suspect is going southeast. He must have seen us!’ A message came over the short wave.
I gunned our car in the direction where the Porsche had disappeared. I managed to get the sedan up to sixty-five on the narrow, winding street lined with gated McMansions. I still couldn’t see the silver Porsche up ahead.
‘I’m heading east,’ I spoke into the two-way. ‘I’ll take a chance he’s trying to get to the highway.’ I didn’t know what else to do. I passed several cars coming the other way on the quiet street. A couple of drivers sat on their horns. That’s what I would have done too. I was going seventy-five miles an hour in a residential area.
‘I see him!’ Mahoney yelled.
I stepped down hard on the gas. I was finally making up some ground. I spotted a blue sedan approaching the Porsche from the east. It was Braves Two. We had Brendan Connelly from two sides. Now the question was whether or not he’d give up.
Suddenly the Porsche shot right off the road and into a thicket of bushes that rose higher than the car’s roof. The Porsche tilted forward, then disappeared down a steep slope.
I didn’t slow down until the last second, then I braked hard and went into a controlled shudder and spin.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Mahoney shouted from the passenger side.
‘Thought you were HRT,’ I said.
Mahoney laughed. ‘All right then, partner! Let’s get the bad guy!’
I steered the sedan through the bushes and found myself on a steep hill dotted with large rocks and trees. When the first branches cleared, I had limited vision because of all the other trees. Then I saw the Porsche smack into a mid-sized oak, and career to one side. The car slid sideways another fifty feet before it finally stopped.
Sphinx was down.
‘Let’s go get the bad guy!’ I shouted.
Chapter One Hundred and Nine
Mahoney and I wanted Sphinx and it was personal with me, maybe with both of us. I let our sedan roll another fifty or sixty yards. Then I braked and the car stopped. Mahoney and I jumped out. We almost slid down the steep hill, which was slippery with mud.
‘Crazy son of a bitch!’ Ned Mahoney shouted as we stumbled ahead.
‘What choice did he have? He had to run.’
‘I mean you. You’re crazy! What a ride.’
We saw Brendan Connelly lurch out of the damaged Porsche. He held a handgun aimed our way. Connelly fired off two quick shots. He wasn’t good with a gun, though. But he was shooting real bullets.
‘Son of a bitch!’ Mahoney fired a shot and hit the Porsche – just to show Connelly that we could shoot him if we wanted to.
‘Put the gun down,’ Mahoney shouted. ‘Put the gun down!’
Brendan Connelly started to run down the hill but he was stumbling a lot. Mahoney and I kept gaining on him until we were only thirty yards or so behind.
‘Let me,’ I said.
Brendan Connelly looked back over his shoulder just then. I could tell he was tired, scared, or both. His legs and arms were pumping in a disjointed rhythm. He might work out in some gym, but he wasn’t ready for this.
‘Get back! I’ll shoot!’ he shouted – almost right into my face.
I hit him, and it was like a speeding tractor-trailer back-ending a barely moving compact. Connelly went down, cartwheeling crazily. I stayed upright. Didn’t even lose my balance. This was the good part. It almost made up for some of our misses and failures.
Connelly’s ignominious roll finally stopped after twenty yards, but then he made his biggest mistake – he got back up.
I was on him in a second. I was all over Sphinx, and it was where I wanted to be. Mano a mano with this bastard. He had sold his own wife – the mother of his children.
I threw a hard right-handed shot into the bridge of Connelly’s nose. The perfect shot, or close to it. Probably broke it from the crunch I heard. He went down on one knee – but he got up again. Former college jock. Former tough guy. Current asshole.
His nose was hanging to one side. Good deal. I threw an uppercut into the pit of Connelly’s stomach and liked the feeling so much I threw another. I crunched another right into his gut, which was softening to the touch. Then a quick, hard hook to his cheek. I was getting stronger.
I jabbed his broken nose and Connelly moaned. I jabbed again. I looped a roundhouse at his chin, connected, bull’s-eye. Brendan Connelly’s blue eyes rolled back into his forehead. The lights went out and he dropped into the mud, and stayed there, where he belonged.
I heard a voice behind me. ‘That how it’s done in D.C.?’ Mahoney asked from a few yards up the hill.
I stared up at him. ‘That’s how it’s done, Natty Bumpo. Hope you took notes.’
Chapter One Hundred and Ten
The next couple of weeks were quiet, disturbingly, maddeningly so. I found out I was being assigned to headquarters, as Deputy Director of Investigations under Director Burns. ‘A big, fat plum,’ I was told by everybody. It sounded like a desk job to me, and I didn’t want that. I wanted the Wolf. I wanted the street. I wanted action. I hadn’t come over to the Bureau to be a desk jockey in the Hoover Building.
I was given a week off and Nana, the kids and I went everywhere together. There was a lot of tension in the house, though. We were waiting to hear what Christine Johnson was going to do.
Every time I looked at Alex my heart ached; every time I held him in my arms, or tucked him in bed at the end of the day, I thought about his leaving the house for good. I couldn’t let that happen, but my lawyer had advised me it could.
The Director needed to see me in his office one morning during my week off. It wasn’t too much of a problem. I stopped in after I dropped the kids at school. Tony Woods, Burns’s assistant, seemed particularly glad to see me.
‘You’re something of a hero for the moment. Enjoy it,’ he said, sounding, as always, like an Ivy League prof. ‘Won’t last long.’
‘Always the optimist, Tony,’ I said.
‘That’s my job description, young man.’
I wondered how much Ron Burns shared with his assistant, and also what the Director had in mind this morning. I wanted to ask Tony about this plum job I was slated for. But I didn’t. I figured he wouldn’t tell me anyway.
Coffee and sweet rolls were waiting in Burns’s office, but the Director wasn’t there. It was a little past eight. I wondered if he’d even gotten to work yet. It was hard to imagine that Ron Burns had a life outside the office, though I knew he had a wife and four children, and lived out in Virginia, about an hour from D.C.
Burns finally appeared at the door in a blue dress shirt and tie, with the shirtsleeves rolled up. So now I knew he’d had at least one meeting before this one. Actually, I hoped this meeting wasn’t about another case that he wanted me to dive into. Unless it involved the Wolf.
Burns grinned when he saw me sitting there. He read my look instantly. ‘Actually, I have a couple of nasty cases for you to work on. But that isn’t why I wanted to see you, Alex. Have some coffee. Relax. You’re on vacation, right?’
He walked into the room, sat down across from me. ‘I want to hear how it’s going so far. You miss being a homicide detective? Still want to stay in the Bureau? You can leave if you want to. The Washington P.D. wants you back. Badly.’
‘That’s good to hear, that I’m wanted. As for the Bureau, what can I say? The resources are amazing. Lot of good people here, great people. I hope you know that.’