“You like guns?” she asked.
“I’m from Texas,” Shepherd volunteered. “I hunt.”
“Whereabouts?” asked Malloy.
“Where do I come from or where do I hunt?”
“Both,” said Alex.
“I come from Houston, but we used to hunt in East Texas. A place called Nacogdoches, near the Louisiana border.”
“Where in Houston?” asked Malloy. “I’m from Dallas myself.”
Alex said nothing. Malloy was born and raised in Seattle, but she liked his tactic to keep the pressure on Shepherd.
“Sugarland.”
Malloy nodded, then asked offhandedly, “Who’s mayor down there?”
“No idea,” said Shepherd. “I haven’t lived there in years. Who’s the mayor of Dallas?”
Malloy stumbled and Alex picked up the baton. “You don’t sound like you’re from Houston,” she said. “Are you in this country illegally?”
It was Alex’s practice to go at a suspect head-on. She believed that confrontation yielded the greatest results, both immediate and in the long term. You had to shake the tree to see if any fruit might drop to the ground. She liked to shake it hard.
“I’m American,” said Shepherd. “Last I checked, that gives me the right to be here.”
“Do you have a passport?”
“Okay, enough,” said Shepherd, holding up his hands. “Can you please tell me what this is about?”
“I’m sure you know.”
Shepherd didn’t respond, and Alex saw his eyes narrow, a current of anger rustle the calm façade.
“We want to know where you are keeping the machine guns,” she added.
“Pardon me?”
“I believe they are AK-47s.”
Shepherd’s eyes widened, and he laughed as if a great weight had lifted off his shoulders. “AK-47s? Here? You’re serious? At least now I know you’re at the wrong house. You had me worried.”
Alex assessed Shepherd’s body language. His arms hung loosely at his sides. His eyes held hers. The laugh was rich and easy. There was no fidgeting, no playing with his hands, no delaying or prevaricating or any of the giveaways typically found in a person who had something to hide. Everything indicated that he was telling the truth. The twinge had lessened, but it was still there.
“We had a report that you were unloading a crate with Russian markings at three a.m. a few days ago,” she said.
“That?” Shepherd chuckled, showing a set of straight white teeth: just a big ole Texas boy. “Can you stay here a second? I show you.”
I show you. Odd, thought Alex. “We’d rather come with you.”
“Suit yourself.” Shepherd led the way through the kitchen and into the attached garage, where a late-model Ford pickup was parked. He skirted the truck and stopped, pointing at the ground. “There’s your crate,” he said. “I like to play paintball. That’s our ammo.”
Alex rifled through the crate, sifting the bags of paint balls. Malloy picked up a bag, then dropped it, disappointed. He looked at Alex and sighed. Case over. One more false alarm. Alex couldn’t read Cyrillic, but she could make out AK-47 well enough. She ran a hand inside the crate; her fingers came away slick with paint. She rose, and the three walked back through the kitchen.
“That’s some load of groceries,” said Alex. “Expecting someone?”
“Family,” said Shepherd. “Barbecue tonight.”
“They in from Texas?”
“All over, actually,” said Shepherd. “You’re welcome to stop by and see for yourself. We’re firing up the grill around seven.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said Malloy.
Alex slowed, eyeing the groceries on the counter. There was milk and orange juice, bread and peanut butter, and bags of beef jerky. To one side were amassed a dozen small bottles of five-hour energy drink. Above the fridge sat two cartons of Marlboro Reds, but she knew Shepherd didn’t smoke. His fingers were clean, with no nicotine stains between the index and middle fingers. And there were those white teeth. She didn’t see any chicken or steaks or ground beef: staples of a summer barbecue. Of course, he could have already put it away. She looked at the refrigerator, then thought better of it.
She and Malloy stopped at the front door. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Shepherd,” she said. “We’re sorry to have intruded on your day.”
“It is no problem.”
Alex smiled as the twinge in her back turned into a dagger. There it was again. The clumsy syntax. The faintest of accents, turning it into eet. She didn’t know exactly where he was from, but it wasn’t Houston, Texas.
She rubbed her fingers together and found them as slippery as a few minutes before. Not paint but grease. The kind of grease that keeps rust from gun barrels. And all the while she kept her eyes locked on Mr. Randall Shepherd.
You bastard, she thought. You goddamned, Oscar-winning bastard.
Shepherd stared back, eyes steady, unblinking. He ran a hand over his scalp, and Alex observed two rivulets of sweat at his temple beginning to roll toward his jaw.
“Au revoir,” she said, as lightly as her thundering heart would permit.
“Au revoir,” said Shepherd. The response was immediate and unrehearsed. It was French French, not her clumsy American variant. She knew it, and he knew she knew it. Shepherd shook his head, chuckling to himself. “Mais merde.”
“Hands against the wall,” said Alex. “You’re under arrest.”
“What is it?” asked Malloy. “Did I miss something?”
But by then the man who called himself Randall Shepherd was bringing a large semiautomatic pistol to bear and Alex was pushing Malloy aside as she cleared her Glock.
“Drop it!”
She was a second late.
15
The first bullet struck her in the chest. She wasn’t sure where, only that she felt as if she’d been flattened by a truck. The second hit her in the same place, and even as she tumbled backward and her head hammered the doorframe, she knew that he was a professional. What kind of professional, she wasn’t sure, because by then she’d hit the ground and she couldn’t breathe, and even though her eyes were open, all she could see were skyrocketing colors.
Alex tried to raise her head, but nothing happened. The thought came to her that she was wearing her vest so the bullet couldn’t have penetrated the Kevlar plates and injured her spine. She tried again, with only a marginally better result. She didn’t like slackers, or anyone else who refused her orders, and the same went for herself. Angered, she ordered her fingers to curl, but for all her efforts, she remained as immobile as a petrified rock.
Gunfire battered the air, the bangs and concussions so loud that her ears hurt worse than her chest. There was a thud on the floor beside her, and like that, she could see again. Malloy was lying next to her. Blood spurted from his neck in messy arrhythmic geysers. He’s a goner, she thought. No one can lose that much blood. She knew this was a terrible thing, and that later she was going to be heartbroken. But for now she was too stunned to feel anything.
The floorboards shuddered beneath her. Feeling rushed back into her limbs. She raised her head in time to see Shepherd running up the stairs. He stopped halfway and fired his pistol. The shot sounded louder than the others and brought her back to her senses. More gunshots followed. She was in a shooting gallery at Coney Island, if every shot made you wince and rattled your insides. Jason Mara came out of the kitchen, firing across the room at Shepherd. He and DiRienzo had taken the back door to insure against Shepherd’s pulling a runner. Mara’s head snapped back. Blood splattered the wall behind him. He fell. She knew he was dead.