Want to Play?

by P. J. Tracy

  Because this time she had a gun, by God, and this time she was ready. No one else was going to pay with their life for the dubious privilege of being part of hers.

  ‘We can’t go, Grace.’

  ‘We have to go. Just for a little while.’ Grace was thinking fast, talking fast, feeling precious seconds tick away, cursing the imagination that saw Harley and Roadrunner and Annie somewhere downstairs, bleeding to death while goddamned stupid selfish Diane . . . She stopped and took a breath, redirected that good, strong anger away from Diane, back toward the killer.

  ‘Come on, Diane. It’s time to leave,’ she said reasonably. ‘You told me that once, remember? And you were right. Remember?’

  Diane blinked at her. ‘The hospital.’

  ‘Right. I was in the hospital, and you told me that sometimes we just have to walk away from things. That everything would be better if I just went away. And that’s what we did, remember . . .’

  ‘But . . .’ Diane looked at her helplessly. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. We weren’t all supposed to go.’

  Grace felt a tiny hitch in the world. ‘What?’

  ‘You were supposed to go. Not me, not Mitch, just you, but then everybody went, everybody had to follow Grace and I had to go, too, and now see what you’ve done?’ She was crying hard now. She dug in her purse for a tissue and pulled out a silenced .45 and stuck it in Grace’s chest.

  47

  Magozzi bit the inside of his cheek as he took the turn onto Washington on two wheels, tasted blood while he waited an eternity for four tires to find the pavement again, then jammed his foot against the floorboards.

  They slid sideways to a stop in front of the warehouse in time to see Halloran spread-legged in front of the little green door, emptying his clip at the lock with booming explosions that sent shrapnel flying all over the place. The trunk was popped on an MPD unit parked across the street, and a young patrolman was sprinting toward Halloran with a twelve-gauge and a tire iron.

  Magozzi and Gino were out of the car before it stopped rocking after the hard stop, doors left hanging open, coattails flapping as they ran for the door. Magozzi grabbed the shotgun barrel and jerked it down before Halloran started shooting. ‘No! It’s steel! Wait for the ram!’

  Halloran darted wild eyes toward him, then grabbed the tire iron and started hammering it into the crack where steel door met steel frame.

  Magozzi froze for an instant, paralyzed by hopelessness, hearing a chorus of sirens coming in from all different directions. ‘Fire escape,’ he said suddenly, and started to run for the side of the building before the words were out of his mouth. ‘Take the front!’ he yelled at Gino over his shoulder, just as the toothy grill of a fire department emergency vehicle nosed around the corner.

  One minute for the ram, he thought. Maybe two. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay . . .

  His cell phone rang when he was on the fire escape and Tommy yelled into his ear. ‘Leo! I found it! It’s Mitch Cross! James Mitchell is Mitch Cross and D. Emanuel is his wife!’

  Magozzi pounded up the metal stairs and threw his cell phone over the railing.

  All the air had left Grace’s lungs in a rush, as if the sudden pressure of the .45 against her chest had pushed it out.

  She hadn’t been ready after all. Her own gun was pointed off to the right, still trained on the stairwell door, and through the shock and the fear she was thinking, She could fire two rounds into my heart before I could swing the Sig around . . .

  Diane was looking at her with the empty, soulless eyes Sharon Mueller had seen in those last seconds before the bullet found her throat, eyes that Grace had never seen before. The waterworks had stopped the second she’d pulled out the .45. ‘I brought the big gun today, too,’ she said quietly. ‘I like the .22 better, but I needed to be sure. You have to be really close with the .22. Really precise.’

  It took a long moment for it all to sink in. Oh, sure, quiet, proper Diane who was squeamish about guns and who never so much as raised her voice had just shoved a .45 into her chest, but until the moment she mentioned the .22, the thought that she was the Monkeewrench killer had never entered Grace’s mind.

  ‘Oh no.’ Disbelief spilled involuntarily from lips that felt thick and useless, from a mind that was threatening to stop altogether. ‘You? You killed all those people? My God, Diane, why?’

  ‘Well, self-preservation, I suppose.’

  ‘But . . . you didn’t even know those people. They were just . . . profiles. In a game, for God’s sake. It was just a game.’

  Diane actually smiled at her, and it was so frightening Grace’s knees almost buckled. ‘That’s exactly it. I knew you’d understand. I was actually killing the game, not real people.’ Her eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Mitch tried to talk you out of that game, but you just wouldn’t listen, would you? Do you have any idea what you put that man through?’

  ‘You murdered people because Mitch didn’t like the game?’

  ‘Oh, Grace, don’t be ridiculous. It was much more than that. The game was going to destroy us. It was the end of everything!’ She paused a moment, head slightly tipped, listening.

  Grace heard it, too. A siren. Distant. On its way here, or somewhere else? Diane didn’t seem a bit troubled by it, which terrified her.

  ‘Anyway,’ Diane continued calmly, ‘I had to stop it before players started to get to level fifteen. Cops play games like that, you know. What if some of them in Atlanta saw that little crime scene you dreamed up and started asking questions?’

  Grace’s thoughts were spinning, colliding, trying to make sense of insanity. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Murder fifteen, Grace. You laid it all out for them. A half a dozen agencies and hundreds of cops couldn’t figure out who killed the people in Atlanta, and you told them with one stinking little clue in your stinking little game. Thanks a lot, Grace, for almost ruining my life. Obviously, I had to stop the game before anyone saw it. And I did. Killed a few people and you pulled it right off the web, just like I knew you would. But then those stupid cops sent your prints to the FBI, and that brought up the Atlanta murders anyway, and everything just started to fall apart.’

  More sirens. A lot more, and they were close. Diane didn’t bat an eye.

  Maybe she doesn’t hear them. Get her to listen. What was in murder fifteen? What clue was she talking about? No. Don’t think about that. It isn’t important now. Just try to distract her so you can move the Sig slowly, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time . . .

  ‘The police are coming, Diane. Listen to the sirens.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about them. It’s all part of the plan. Would you like to know the plan? It’s really quite ingenious. My original intention today was to kill just you, of course. I didn’t want to kill everyone, because then there’d be no Monkeewrench and Mitch would be unhappy, but . . . you know how it is. People just kept getting in the way.’ She frowned, irritated. ‘Like that woman cop downstairs. Now that ruined everything. What the hell was she doing here anyway? Did you know she was from Wisconsin? I saw it on the patch on her shirt.’ She tapped her forefinger against her lips, puzzling over something, then her face cleared abruptly. ‘Anyway, by the time the cops manage to break into the building – and I should give you a nod of thanks here, Grace, for this very excellent security system – I’ll be hysterical. I think I can do that pretty well. I’ve been practicing. And then all I have to do is tell them you just snapped and started killing people and I had to shoot you in self-defense. You know the FBI is just going to love that. They always wanted to believe you were the killer in Georgia anyway, and now they can, and they’ll get to close that pesky file. So everybody’s happy.’

  Her eyes darted to the elevator, then back, and her face darkened. ‘Well, not completely happy. It really pisses me off, Grace, that you made me kill Mitch.’

  Your fault, Grace. All your fault.

  ‘He loved you,’ Grace mumbled, and suddenly the Sig was so heavy,
and her arm was so tired. Had she moved it another fraction of an inch toward Diane? She wasn’t sure. ‘How could you kill him?’

  Diane’s eyes narrowed and Grace searched them for rage, hatred, some kind of human emotion, but all she saw was annoyance. ‘Well, that was not my fault. He was not supposed to be here. He promised. HE PROMISED. He walked in on me right after I shot that woman cop, and then of course I had to explain the plan, and naturally he didn’t want me to kill his precious Grace.’

  And then in a conversational tone so ordinary it made the hairs rise on Grace’s arms: ‘We had the worst fight of our marriage, Grace. The absolute worst. He was going to kill me, his very own wife, just to keep me from killing you, do you believe that?’

  Yes, Grace believed that. Mitch would have done anything for her. Anything. She tried to imagine what it must have been like for him, finding out his wife of ten years was a murderer. But he’d lived with her, damnit. How can you live with someone for that long and not just know? ‘I don’t understand how you kept it from him all these years.’

  Diane was puzzled. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Georgia.’

  And now she was amused. Enormously amused. ‘Oh, Grace! You think I killed the people in Georgia? Oh, God, that’s funny. Why on earth would I have done that? Mitch killed them.’

  Grace stared at her, stupefied. Her ears recorded gunfire from somewhere outside; a lot of shots, close together, but her mind refused to accept the information for processing. ‘That’s crazy. Mitch would never . . .’ she started to say, and Diane laughed a little, mirthlessly.

  ‘It wasn’t the brightest thing he’d ever done, but he wasn’t thinking that clearly in those days. I suppose he had some twisted idea that if he just eliminated all the people around you, you’d run right into his arms. It didn’t work, of course, so he had to satisfy himself to be . . . what? Your best friend?’

  Grace nodded, numb.

  ‘I happened to be following him the day he killed that Johnny person you used to date – oh, for heaven’s sake, the irony just struck me. Ten years ago I walked in on him after he’d killed someone; this morning he walked in on me after I’d killed someone. Huh. Full circle.’

  Her eyes seemed to lose their focus as her mind drifted a little before coming back with a snap. ‘Anyway, I’d already chosen Mitch as the man I was going to marry, so it worked out perfectly. I got the husband I wanted, he got a wife who couldn’t testify against him.’ She wrinkled her nose in distaste. ‘And everything would have been fine if the FBI hadn’t locked you up in that house with Libbie Herold. I’m telling you, Grace, that just sent him right over the edge, not being able to get to you. Personally, I think he may have been just a little bit psychotic then, hell-bent on “rescuing” you, and I couldn’t talk him out of it. And that’s when he lost the necklace.’

  ‘Necklace?’

  Irritated, Diane pushed the .45 harder into Grace’s chest. ‘Grace, try to keep up! The necklace. Your little Speedo joke.’

  And then Grace saw it. In the game, clutched in the hand of murder victim fifteen, and in real life, around Mitch’s neck all those years ago in college. Always under his shirt or sweater so no one else would see it.

  ‘The idiot lost it when he was killing that woman FBI agent, which wasn’t a problem until you put the damn necklace in that damn game and then put it on the goddamned Internet. And when the Atlanta cops see that they’re going to remember it’s just like the one they have in the evidence locker. Then guess what happens? They’ll come up here and start asking questions, how you came up with that idea, and you’ll tell them, gee, I gave Mitch a necklace just like that back when we were in college in Atlanta, and that would be it, end of story, because Libbie Herold cut him. His blood was all over the scene. And now with all the DNA testing . . .’

  Grace was barely listening. Mind, body, spirit – they were all numb. The rage she’d been counting on, the hatred that had filled her up and made her strong, had drained away in a flood of hopelessness.

  It had all been for nothing. Silly, really, when she thought about it. All that security to protect herself from a killer who’d been beside her every step of the way. All that sharp-eyed paranoia, suspicion of every strange face, when she’d been too blind, too stupid to see the truth behind one of the faces she thought she knew best.

  The Sig was growing heavier, and the muscles in her outstretched arm were starting to cramp. Why was she holding it there anyway? She would never have a chance to use it.

  Suddenly there were terrible noises from downstairs. Something big crashing, metal against metal, again and again.

  Diane’s eyes flickered. ‘Oh dear. The cavalry is getting serious. I guess we’d better finish up here. What the hell are you doing?’

  Grace blinked, a little confused.

  ‘With your neck, damnit! What are you doing with your neck?’

  She felt it then, between her fingers. Even as her gun hand had sagged toward the floor, her other one had crept to the chain she’d tucked inside her T-shirt, pulling out the cross that Jackson had given her. It hadn’t been a conscious gesture. You didn’t live through a life like Grace’s and retain a belief in talismans, religious or otherwise. But when she touched the cross she saw the young boy’s solemn brown eyes looking up at her, imploring her to wear it. He believed. Maybe that was why she had reached for it; to connect with the fragment of trust that life hadn’t beaten out of him yet.

  Grace, do you trust me? . . . as if she owed him that, because he had trusted her first.

  What a precious thing trust was; a fragile thing. That was what Jackson had really given her. Jackson and Harley and Annie and Roadrunner and Charlie, and even Magozzi, who shouldn’t have trusted her at all, but did . . .

  ‘It’s nothing. Just a cross. See?’

  Diane took a quick step backward, and for the first time in what seemed like hours, Grace took a breath without the .45 pressed against her chest.

  Diane was staring at the cross, transfixed, as it swung back and forth in Grace’s hand, catching the light from the loft windows, sparkling. ‘I had one of those,’ she whispered, touching her own throat, feeling a phantom. ‘Mother Superior gave it to me, but . . . I think I threw it away.’

  She was lost in a memory Grace couldn’t begin to imagine, distracted for just a split second by whatever she was seeing behind those staring eyes. And in that second Grace felt the heat of an adrenaline surge that started to raise her gun hand, saw the stairwell door open slowly, slowly; saw a woman in a brown uniform soaked in blood crawling on her belly, a gun shaking in both hands, then the muzzle sagging, clattering to the wooden floor as she lost her tenuous grip . . .

  In the next second Diane’s eyes blinked, jerked to the woman on the floor, and faster than Grace could follow, Diane angled the .45 toward the door at the same time the Sig was rising, and then the loft seemed to explode in a volley of deafening gunfire.

  Diane was flung sideways and went down very fast, her head hitting the floor hard with a sound that would feed nightmares forever. There was blood, a lot of blood, flowing from so many wounds in Diane’s head and body that Grace couldn’t make sense of it at all.

  She looked down at the Sig Sauer in her hand, confused. She’d fired once? Twice? Certainly no more than that, there hadn’t been time, and besides, the gun had been rising, barely above floor level, and she could see where the bullets had ripped and shattered the polished maple.

  He rose slowly from his crouch behind Annie’s desk so he wouldn’t startle her, gun pointed down, but still clenched tightly in both hands.

  ‘Magozzi,’ Grace whispered, and then again, ‘Magozzi.’

  It was only his name. He’d heard it all his life, but hearing it right now from Grace MacBride made his heart hurt. ‘And Halloran,’ he said, looking toward the stairwell door.

  Grace followed his eyes and saw a big man in a brown uniform bent over the bleeding woman, pressing his hand against the wound in her throat,
crying like a child.

  Grace heard a lot of yelling from the stairwell, up through the elevator. What seemed like a thousand voices calling unintelligible words, and her heart picked out three voices from all the rest, booming out her name.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she whispered mindlessly, even as she was dropping her gun, running to help the injured woman, oblivious to the tears streaming down her face. She was thinking of Annie and Harley and Roadrunner, alive, by God, alive; of Jackson and Magozzi, the man called Halloran and the woman bleeding beneath his hand – all the people who had saved her at last.

  Gino and Magozzi stood on the curb outside the warehouse, watching the ambulance speed away toward Hennepin County General. There were three police escorts, lights and sirens going full blast: two MPD units in front, and Bonar behind in the Wisconsin cruiser. Halloran had insisted on riding with Sharon. The med techs had been foolish enough to tell him they were sorry, but he couldn’t ride in the ambulance, and Halloran hadn’t said a thing. He’d just pulled out his gun and pointed it at them, and the techs had changed their minds in a hurry.

  ‘Techs said it doesn’t look good,’ Gino said.

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘How many cops do you know would have dragged themselves up all those stairs with a wound like that?’

  ‘I’d like to think most of them would.’

  Gino shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It was really something.’

  Magozzi nodded. ‘They were both something. Halloran jumped through that door and damn near emptied his clip before I could get off a second round.’

  Gino sighed. ‘I might have to rethink my position on Wisconsin cops. What was the deal with MacBride anyway? Why was she chasing the gurney like that?’

  Magozzi closed his eyes, remembering Grace running alongside the gurney as they wheeled it through the garage, jerking the crucifix off her neck, frantically wrapping the chain around Sharon’s wrist.

  Is she Catholic? one of the techs had asked her.