Want to Play?

by P. J. Tracy

  Roadrunner looked guiltily at the Twinkie and set it down. ‘They are, but I was hungry. The Food and Fuel is a little weak on the food part and I didn’t have time for anything else.’ He eyed her outfit. ‘You look like a tree.’

  ‘Honesty will never get you a date, pal.’ She dug in the bag and slapped a cherry turnover down on his desk. ‘If you’re going to poison yourself with sugar and fat, at least do it without the preservatives. The Russians used Twinkies to preserve Lenin, did you know that?’

  Roadrunner gave her a crooked smile and took the turnover. ‘Thanks, Annie. You look like a pretty tree.’

  ‘Uh-uh. Too little, too late.’

  ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘Harley walked down to Liquor World to get a little hair of the dog. Grace went with him.’

  ‘How is she?’

  Annie clicked her tongue against her teeth. ‘Okay, I guess, considering. But she doesn’t want to leave.’

  Roadrunner looked alarmed. ‘But we have to leave. We all agreed.’

  ‘We all agreed. Grace agreed to meet, to talk about it, that’s all. She’s not going to go, Roadrunner. She’s not going to run this time.’

  ‘Oh, man, Annie, he was in her backyard. There isn’t any doubt now, is there? This is the guy – he’s back. And he’s close. Jesus, she can’t stay here.’

  ‘Settle down. I talked to Mitch, he’s on his way over. When we’re all together, we’ll find a way to talk her into it.’

  The elevator rumbled up a few minutes later and Mitch emerged, looking wild-eyed and worse than anyone had ever seen him.

  ‘Good Lord, Mitchell, what is the matter?’ Annie asked.

  He gaped at her. ‘Are you kidding? You mean aside from the fact that there’s a killer stalking Grace, the company is going bankrupt, and we have to disappear and start all over again?’

  ‘Yeah. Aside from that.’

  Mitch collapsed into a chair and dragged his hands down his face. ‘Christ. I told Diane we were thinking about leaving and she just freaked. You know what this means, don’t you? She’d have to stop painting. She’s at the top of her career, she has stuff hanging all over the world, and now she’s going to have to drop off the face of the earth and give it all up.’

  They were all silent for a moment. It was Roadrunner who finally spoke. ‘You know, Mitch . . . you don’t have to go. You’re married. You have obligations the rest of us don’t. Your family’s got to come first.’

  Mitch looked aghast. ‘This is my family. This has always been my family. If Grace goes, if the rest of you go, I go.’ He pressed his palms into his eye sockets. ‘Shit, this is such a fucking mess I can’t believe it. I’m not even supposed to be here. I promised Diane I wouldn’t come here today. I gave her my fucking word. And the minute she left for the gallery, I snuck out like some guilty, FUCKING KID.’

  ‘Jesus, Mitch,’ Roadrunner said. ‘Take it easy. You’re going to have a heart attack.’

  ‘I should be so lucky. Anyway, I can’t stick around for long. I’ve got to get back home before Diane does. Where the hell are Grace and Harley?’

  The elevator started down, answering a call from below. ‘That’s them,’ Annie said. ‘And before they get up here, you should know that Grace said she doesn’t want to go.’

  They’d had a meeting like this once before, Grace remembered. Only that time the others had all been standing around her hospital bed in the psych ward at Atlanta General. She’d been young, scared out of her mind, half in the bag from whatever tranquilizers they had dripping into her arm, and images of Libbie Herold bleeding to death on the other side of that closet door had still been playing on the inside of her head. In that state, she probably would have gone to the bunker with Hitler if he’d told her to.

  But not this time. This time she was just too goddamned tired. She wanted it over, one way or the other.

  ‘Damnit, Grace, it’s different this time!’ Harley was pacing around their circle of chairs, smacking a beefy fist into his palm, making the dragons on his arms twitch and ripple. ‘He’s totally focused on you. He was in your backyard, for chrissake! This time you are the target, can’t you see that?’

  ‘That’s why I don’t have to run this time, Harley. This time it’s my risk, and only mine.’

  ‘Grace.’ Roadrunner leaned forward in his chair and grabbed her hands with long, bony fingers. ‘We could just go for a little while, until they catch him, then we could come back. It wouldn’t have to be forever.’

  Grace squeezed his fingers and smiled. ‘If I disappear, he disappears, just like last time. And then maybe I’ll have another ten years of looking over my shoulder before he finds me again, and then it will start all over. The cops are getting close. Let’s give it another day or two.’

  ‘The cops are hopeless!’ Roadrunner said. ‘They were all over the Megamall and look what happened! And how about the paddleboat? You should have seen the men they had down there, and they didn’t do a damn bit of good!’

  Harley stopped pacing and looked at Roadrunner. ‘Are you telling us you were down at the paddleboat landing when that guy was killed?’

  Roadrunner gave him an irritable look. ‘Obviously not, or I would have seen the killer. By the time I got there the cops and the security people were already there.’

  ‘You stupid shit, are you crazy? Do you realize what they would have thought if they’d seen you there?’

  ‘I just wanted to make sure they had it covered, that’s all! I didn’t want anyone else to die!’ Roadrunner shouted, and for a minute it looked like he was going to burst into tears.

  Grace patted his hand and smiled at him.

  By the time Magozzi called to tell Grace Deputy Sharon Mueller was on her way, Mitch was in his office gathering paperwork to take home, Annie was across the street picking up takeout from an Italian deli, and the rest of them were hard at work on the only thing that remained for them to do – tracing the e-mails.

  There was a hissing sound as Harley opened his second beer. ‘We’re going to get this son of a bitch,’ he muttered at his monitor.

  44

  Halloran sat in the driver’s seat of the cruiser, listening to the crackle of static from his shoulder unit, feeling like a coiled spring about to shoot through the windshield.

  The minute the warehouse door had closed behind Sharon, the radios had stopped working, and he’d panicked. He’d jumped out of the car and run across the street to the MPD unit parked there, scaring the hell out of a blond kid behind the wheel who looked about ten years too young to be wearing a uniform.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Becker said after Halloran’s hurried explanation. ‘We have a lot of trouble with reception in some of these old buildings. Some kind of metal they used to reinforce the concrete plays hell with the radios. Should clear up when she gets upstairs where there are some windows.’

  So now he was waiting, counting seconds in his head like a kid trying to figure out how far away lightning was. She’d do a walk-through of the big downstairs garage before going upstairs; that was a given; but goddamnit how long would that take? She’d already been in there three minutes and forty-four seconds.

  Sharon had locked the shoulder radio transmit key in the ‘on’ position before she left the car, and on her way to the intercom box next to the big warehouse door, she’d heard Halloran say, ‘I can hear you breathing.’

  Something like a mild electrical shock – startling, but most certainly not unpleasant – had run through her body when he’d said that. She smiled now, remembering the feeling.

  She’d heard the radio start to clutter up the minute the door closed behind her, and figured she had about five minutes to check the garage and get upstairs before Halloran started shooting his way in.

  For two long years she’d felt nothing coming off him except the indifferent waves of a man who worked hard to keep whatever he was really feeling under tight control. But in the last few days she’d poked a big hole in that indifference and let the caveman
out. Never mind that she could outdraw, outshoot, and probably outfight the guy, for all the difference in their sizes. Halloran felt a primitive compulsion to protect her, and Sharon felt a primitive compulsion to let him. That, she figured, was the way it was supposed to be.

  She didn’t like the garage, although there was no reason she could find to feel that way. It was well lit, spotlessly clean, and completely devoid of shadowy nooks and crannies. She could see damn near every inch of it without taking a step, and there was no reason in the world to expect that anyone else was down there; but still, she felt uneasy.

  She held her breath for as long as she could and listened to the tomb-like silence.

  Nothing.

  There were two cars parked near the back wall: a black Range Rover and a Mercedes, both silent, both dark. A mountain bike and a big Harley Hog leaned on their kickstands nearby.

  She dropped to a crouch and peered beneath the cars, feeling a little silly for doing it. And when she stood up again, she did something even sillier. For the first time in her life outside of a target range, she unsnapped her holster, lifted out the big 9mm, and chambered a round. The unmistakable ratcheting echoed in the big empty space, and just the sound of it embarrassed her a little.

  Better safe than sorry, she rationalized, sweeping her gaze along the back wall as she started to walk toward it. There was a freight elevator in the center that had rumbled down as she entered, with interior lights that showed it was empty behind the wooden grate.

  In the back left corner was a man-sized door marked STAIRWAY. In the right corner was another door with a black-and-yellow high-voltage sign on the front.

  Cars first, she told herself, then the doors, and why the hell are my hands sweating?

  Grace was staring mindlessly at her computer screen, mesmerized into near stupor by the white blur of tracking information that was scrolling down her monitor.

  The Wisconsin deputy Magozzi had sent over had just called from downstairs. Grace had talked to her for a few minutes, then used the remote to key her in and send the elevator down.

  Mitch came out of his office, lugging his briefcase and laptop. His suitcoat was rolled up in a ball under his arm. He stopped at Grace’s desk and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m going to take off. Are you okay?’

  She covered his hand with hers and smiled at him. ‘I’m going to be fine. You go home and take care of Diane.’

  Mitch looked at her for a long moment, giving her everything with his eyes, like he always did. ‘You know, Grace,’ he said softly so he couldn’t be overheard, ‘if you change your mind about leaving, I’ll be right beside you. Nothing could keep me from that. Nothing.’

  It was always there between them, this remnant of a first love that men seemed to cling to for all of their lives. But usually Mitch wasn’t this overt and it made Grace a little uncomfortable. ‘I know that. Go home, Mitch.’

  He looked at her for a moment longer, then turned for the elevator.

  ‘I sent it down for that deputy Magozzi sent over,’ Grace remembered. ‘She should be up in a few minutes.’

  Mitch shook his head. ‘I’ll take the stairs. See you guys.’ He waved to Roadrunner and Harley, who were so focused on their monitors they just lifted their hands in farewell without looking up.

  Down in the garage Sharon was hurrying now, rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the concrete as she walked past the open freight elevator.

  She figured she’d eaten up three minutes checking the cars and the padlocked door with the high-voltage sign on it, and she was starting to worry about Halloran calling out the National Guard before she could check the stairway and get upstairs, where she hoped the radio would work again.

  She still had her gun drawn, but by now her uneasiness was fading and her hands had stopped sweating. Any enclosed space would tell you if it was empty, if you just listened to your senses, and once she’d checked out the cars and banished the mental bugaboo of the only viable hiding places, all of her senses came through loud and clear, telling her she was absolutely alone down there.

  She was ten feet from the stairwell door when it opened suddenly and one of the Monkeewrench geeks bopped out, then froze comically at the sight of her gun. ‘Oh my God. Don’t shoot!’

  Sharon relaxed. ‘Sorry.’ She smiled a little sheepishly and looked down to holster her gun. ‘I’m Deputy Sharon Mueller. . .’ she started to say, and then she looked up and saw only eyes, and in that instant she knew she had just made the biggest mistake of her life.

  Both her hands jerked automatically, one toward the useless radio on her shoulder, the other to her holster, and all the time she was thinking crazily, See, Halloran? I told you I might be able to see something, I told you I was good at this . . .

  . . . and her hands were still moving, too fast to see, too slow to do any good, and then she heard a soft popping sound and felt a bite on her throat above the vest, goddamnit, above the fucking useless vest, and then there was a gush of something warm and wet running down her shirt and her right finger moved spasmodically against nothing but air, trying to pull a trigger that wasn’t there again and again and again.

  Magozzi hurried down the hall toward Tommy’s office, took a step inside the door, and skidded on an empty Chee-tos bag. ‘Jesus Christ, Tommy, this place is like a minefield. What have you got?’

  Tommy stabbed a finger at the monitor in front of him. ‘I got a name. D. Emanuel. That’s your boy.’

  ‘That’s Bradford?’

  Tommy grinned and rubbed his Buddha belly. ‘You bet your ass. First I checked the county Saint Peter’s School is in, and then I was going alphabetically until I figured a high-school kid wouldn’t travel too far, so I did the adjacent counties and got a hit on the second one. Livingston County. Brian Bradford changed his name to D. Emanuel the day after his eighteenth birthday.’

  Magozzi grabbed the phone and punched the extension for Homicide. ‘No first name?’

  ‘Nope. Just D.’ He gestured at another monitor. ‘I’m running a New York and Georgia search on D. Emanuel now, see if anything pops.’

  ‘Gino!’ Magozzi barked into the phone. ‘The kid changed his name to D. Emanuel. Check it on the lists.’ He was just hanging up the phone when Tommy frowned at one of the monitors.

  ‘Well, that’s weird.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I got a marriage certificate for D. Emanuel in Georgia. But this can’t be right.’ He leaned closer to the monitor as if that would make the information more clear. ‘This D. Emanuel married James Mitchell . . . It’s got to be a different one.’

  Magozzi was tense, almost rigid. ‘No it doesn’t.’

  ‘Same-sex marriages in Georgia? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Brian Bradford is a hermaphrodite.’

  Tommy’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re shitting me. Why didn’t you tell me that before?’

  ‘We didn’t tell anyone.’

  Tommy was looking at the screen, shaking his head. ‘James Mitchell. I’ve seen that name.’

  ‘It’s about as common as dirt.’

  ‘No, I mean recently. Give me a minute. Christ, it had to be in the FBI file. That’s the only thing I’ve been working on.’ He slid over to another keyboard and started typing frantically.

  The phone rang and Magozzi snatched it off the hook.

  ‘That’s it, Leo. D. Emanuel was on the registration list, but not the admissions list. He’s the guy. Is Tommy running it?’

  ‘Yeah, we’re working on it. I’ll let you know.’

  45

  ‘Roadrunner, Harley?’ Grace said quietly. ‘I just got another message.’

  Harley and Roadrunner tore over to her desk and hovered over either shoulder to look at her monitor.

  ‘Open it, Grace,’ Harley said.

  Grace clicked the mouse and a single message line appeared on the screen:

  I DIDN’T WANT TO HAVE TO DO THIS

  ‘Jesus,’ Roadrunner whispered. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’r />
  Suddenly the lights in the office snapped out and the monitor flickered. The e-mail disappeared and was replaced by a blue screen. A few seconds later, the monitor started drawing a power grid schematic.

  ‘Power failure warning.’ Roadrunner stated the obvious.

  ‘Lot of good that does,’ Harley said. ‘We already know the power failed.’

  ‘Says the main isn’t receiving power,’ Grace said. ‘What exactly does that mean?’

  ‘Means there’s probably a big trunk line outage somewhere,’ Harley said. ‘Shit. It could be a while.’

  He walked over to the windows and opened the louvered blinds, for all the good it did. The sun was behind a black wall of clouds that looked like they weren’t going anywhere soon. ‘Darkest goddamned day of the year and we lose power.’

  ‘Why isn’t the generator kicking in?’ Grace asked. ‘I thought we had it set up to take over automatically.’

  Harley shrugged. ‘Who knows? We’ve probably never had the thing running or serviced since we got it. It’s like a car battery – use it or lose it. I’ll go down and take a look. Roadrunner, how much battery time do we have on the computers?’

  ‘Around two hours.’

  ‘I’ll report it to the power company and start making backups of our drives,’ Grace said. ‘You guys go see if you can’t get the generator running.’

  ‘Where the hell is the generator, anyhow?’ Roadrunner asked.

  ‘It’s in the power room in the garage.’

  Roadrunner looked confused.

  Harley rolled his eyes. ‘Didn’t you ever notice the door with the big yellow high-voltage sign on it . . . never mind. You’re hopeless. Come on, let’s go.’

  ‘But the elevator runs on electricity.’

  Harley sighed impatiently. ‘The stairs, Roadrunner.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  Roadrunner had reluctantly taken the lead down the dark stairwell, carefully mincing a slow side step to accommodate his size-fourteen feet. But the farther down they descended, the darker and more tomb-like the stairwell became and the more nervous he got.