Play To Kill

by P. J. Tracy

  'Tell me about it. Six o'clock, latest Mom ever had dinner on the table, and Pop nearly had apoplexy. I'm telling you, the world is going to hell when dinnertime jumps past when the kids go to bed.'

  Gino nodded a chin starting to bristle this many hours past the last shave. 'Let us become inebriated as quickly as possible, and toast the days when you ate supper and still had time for baseball in the corner lot before dark. Do you realize it's past nine?'

  'I do.'

  The bartender brought out a plate of tiny little meatballs on a stick propped on a bowl of white stuff with green flecks and set it in front of Gino with an arrogant flourish. 'Sir,' he said snippily.

  Gino scowled down at the meager offering and opened his sportcoat to show his gun. 'Listen, you little puke. I am

  MPD Homicide and today I have saved the world. These are not meatballs. They're dots on a toothpick. Now get your ass back to the kitchen and try harder.'

  The barkeep had a lot of white around his dark eyes when he opened them that wide and backed away.

  Surprisingly, it was relatively quiet in the little room off the entry. Most of the patrons collected their drinks and carried them out to the main room so they could watch the belly dancers.

  'Detectives.'

  Magozzi jumped at the voice behind him and the hand on his shoulder, and spun to see Special Agent John Smith, who had been standing too goddamn close to Grace.

  'I want you to know it has been a privilege and an honor to watch real law enforcement at work, and I thank you both for the opportunity to witness it. And Detective Magozzi, you are the most fortunate of men. You have the affection of a most extraordinary woman, which is in itself the accomplishment of a lifetime.'

  Magozzi felt like a cartoon character with his mouth hanging open like that, and all he could do was nod like one of those stupid plastic birds on the glassy edge of a killer tropical drink. Happily, the bartender returned at that moment with a meat platter of giant meatballs and a gravy boat of the white stuff with green flecks. Gino dug in without breathing.

  'Okay, guys, I don't know what the hell this is, but it ain't bad. Barkeep, you're the man. Give us three big ones of whatever alcohol goes with this stuff.'

  The bartender, probably remembering his glimpse of Gino's weapon, almost bowed. 'It's lamb kabobs, sir, with cucumber sauce, most frequently accompanied with ouzo.'

  'Well, it's friggin' excellent, is what it is. Bring us some of that oo-stuff to go with it.'

  Magozzi had his hand around a narrow glass of the oo-stuff when his cell vibrated against his hip. He flipped it open, frowned at the readout, and waited for the caller to identify himself.

  When you were a cop and got a call from an unfamiliar number on your personal cell, you didn't say anything until you knew who was on the other end. A county deputy in Alexandria had made that mistake five years ago while he was running regular rounds of the local bars, checking for underage drinkers. He answered his cell with his name, and a drunken ex-con with a grudge, a snoutful, and a long memory for the name of the cop who had put him in Stillwater promptly shot him in the back. The drunken shooter got twenty years and the deputy got a bagpipe funeral.

  'Good evening, Detective Magozzi. This is Judge James Bukowski.'

  That made Magozzi unhappy. The man was getting intrusive, taking advantage. 'How'd you get this number, Judge?'

  He heard the judge sigh just before a belly dancer literally bellied up to the bar next to John and jingled her bells and clicked her little metal clackers at him. Magozzi backed away a few paces.

  'How I got your private number is irrelevant, Detective.

  Please pretend for a moment that I might be a man with something important to say, and listen very carefully. We don't have much time.'

  'I'm listening.'

  Would you mind giving me your approximate location?'

  'St. Paul. Downtown.'

  'Thank you. Unhappily, it is a bit farther away than I'd anticipated, so I will have to be brief.'

  'Music to my ears, Judge.'

  'I am quite certain it is. Are you familiar with the Woodland Hills Country Club Golf Course?'

  'Just off Minnehaha, right?'

  'That is correct. The man who killed Alan Sommers - the River Bride, as the media refers to him - will be meeting me on the eighteenth green in a very short time.'

  Magozzi rolled his eyes and put his forefinger on the cell cover to flip it closed. 'Excellent. Have him give me a call in the morning, will you?'

  'Alan Sommers died at 11:17 according to the knock-off Rolex he was wearing. The watch face was broken in the struggle.'

  Magozzi's hand tightened on the phone and he felt the slip of sweat under his fingers. No one knew that. Just him, Gino, and Anant. They'd bagged the watch and held it back. 'Jesus,' he murmured.

  'Splendid. I have your attention. Now, as I was saying, the killer is meeting me very soon on the eighteenth green. His intent, I am sure, is to kill me, since I threatened to reveal his identity. My intention is that you and Detective Rolseth intercept and arrest him. A little present for both of you, for being the good cops you are, and also for being respectful to a drunken old man. You will find a key to my condo in my pants pocket. Give my computer to your friends at Monkeewrench. It will tell you everything you need to know. Is that clear'

  Magozzi was already heading for Gino and Smith, jerking his thumb toward the exit while he kept talking. Whatever was in his face made both men follow him instantly without question. 'What you've said is clear, Judge. What you mean is a little murky.'

  'That will change, Detective Magozzi.'

  You sound almost sober.' He heard a dark chuckle at the other end of the line.

  'I always sound sober, and never am. I don't know the identities of all the killers, Detective Magozzi, but I suspect this man's computer will give you an excellent start in solving all the Web murders you've been working on. That Huttinger… person…' his voice was rich with contempt; 'was not part of this…'

  "Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Part of what? What the hell are you talking about?'

  'Patience, Detective. We're running out of time, but it is important to me that you know those waitresses should never have been attacked. I hope you can believe that. Now. Look at your watch. You have exactly twenty-eight minutes to make it to Woodland Hills. Twenty-nine, and I'll be dead. Thirty, and your killer will be gone. Please leave now.'

  When the line went dead, they were already halfway to the front door, badges held high to carve a path through the jam of people. 'Gino, mark the time. We've got twenty- seven and a half minutes!'

  Wild Jim flipped his cell closed and laid it on the passenger seat next to him before he got out of the car. He breathed in pond smell from the eighteenth-hole water hazard, and saw moonlight reflecting on the flag stuck in the cup.

  He started walking from the parking lot next to the clubhouse, out to the green, and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Hole in one, he thought, remembering Jessie's last shot from the tee, miraculously skittering into that cup and breaking all the club records, because no one had ever done that before. It was a par-three hole, singled in the father-son tournament for the very first time when Wild Jim and his amazing son, Jessie, had taken home the silver trophy. Had they been talking then? He couldn't remember. What he did remember was Jessie's face when the crowd at the green let out a roar, telling the twenty-five- year-old kid he was something special.

  He'd never thought of the course being frightening; then again, he'd never been here since that last grand and glorious day of sunlight and applause.

  At night, everything changed. Trees laid down shadows on the grass in front of the moon, and men who killed for fun hid behind their trunks, waiting.

  John sat in the back of the Cadillac, listening to Magozzi's and Gino's scattered descriptions of who Wild Jim was while he stared fearfully out the side window, watching the freeway mile markers flash by at speeds that were really quite frightening. High-s
peed chases were normally the purview of local cops, rarely Federal agents, and it took a full ten minutes before John stopped being terrified and started getting one of those adrenaline highs he'd heard about.

  'So this man is a drunken judge kicked off the bench who happened to be near the river the night your bride was drowned, and probably saw the body.'

  'That's about it,' Gino said pleasantly. He liked highspeed chases, even when they weren't chasing anybody, and especially in the Caddie.

  'And you believe he saw the killer, why?'

  Magozzi looked manic at the wheel with the dash lights hollowing out his face and showing the tension there. 'Don't know. It's kind of hard to explain.'

  'Do we have any kind of a plan?'

  Gino turned around to look at him. 'Hell, no. Usually we make up our plans after everything's gone down, just to fill in the lines on the report, you know?'

  Magozzi swerved around a cone with a blinking light on top and nearly put them in the median. 'Goddamn road construction,' he muttered, utterly unfazed.

  John tightened his seat belt and cleared his throat. 'So basically we're going to some golf course in the middle of the night to intercept some crazed killer who's going to kill your alcoholic ex-judge.'

  Gino punched the recline button and smiled. 'Well, what do you know. We have a plan after all. Check your load, Smith. You're going to have to hide behind a tree and maybe shoot somebody.'

  'I've never actually shot at a real person.'

  'Yeah, well, there's a first time for everything.'

  Wild Jim Bukowski, fierce believer in law and justice, padded across the short-clipped green in the pair of maroon Uggs he'd taken to wearing when he'd exited the world. He flinched at the sound of a cricket in the grass, and nearly collapsed at the mating call of a male frog in the water hazard. He shouldn't have been afraid. This was what he had wanted, what he had planned, and now at the end of his journey he felt the rapid heartbeat of fear and wondered if he could find the courage to sustain him.

  There was a flutter of leaves in the carefully tended woodland surrounding the green. Wind, or man? He froze close to the flag and heard the pounding of his own heart. There was a breeze, and it whispered terror in the leaves, making his eyes sharpen against the moonlight. It was too soon.

  Gino wasn't reclining in his seat anymore, but sitting bolt upright, frantically trying to program the Caddie's GPS to find an alternate route that wasn't closed for construction. Despite the air conditioning, sweat was beading on his forehead. The ninety-mile-an-hour whiz on the freeway had ended abruptly when they'd taken the Hiawatha exit. The highway was down to one lane, jammed with the vomit of cars from the Twins game and the detritus of construction that was so constant and ongoing that Minnesotans called it a season.

  'Damnit!' Magozzi stood on the brakes and screeched to a halt about a millimeter away from the big bumper of the SUV in front of them. Smith felt the shoulder belt bite into his flesh and his heart jump to his throat. The bubble light strobed ineffectively, and there was no way to get around the congestion without taking out a few orange-and-white barrels. 'How much time, Gino?'

  'Fifteen minutes, and there's goddamn construction all the way down Hiawatha. Shit, we're never going to make it. Next street, take a right, it switches back to…'

  Magozzi veered the wheel hard to the right and stomped on the accelerator, pushing the Caddie down the shoulder, and through an obstacle course of cones and barrels, some of which died for the cause.

  'Jesus, Leo! Half the pavement is gone…'

  There was a sickening crunch as the Caddie bottomed out on a broken piece of pavement. Smith saw sparks fly out from the undercarriage like a swarm of fireflies, but Magozzi kept pushing.

  'Time?'

  Gino checked the Caddie's digital readout. God, he loved this car. 'Thirteen minutes.' He glanced to his right and saw the light-rail train keeping pace with them, heading for their intersection. 'You gotta beat that train to the intersection, Leo. If we stop, it's all over.'

  'How fast do they go?'

  'I don't know. Thirty, thirty-five. You're going thirty-six, Leo. That's cutting it a little close.'

  Yeah, well, I've got a thousand red taillights in front of me, and this fucking Cadillac is not a monster truck, so make a suggestion.'

  Gino exhaled sharply.

  Wild Jim scurried from the eighteenth green into the woodland border and found the tree he had selected before. It was old and broad, with soft bark to cradle an old man's rickety back. He sat down with his legs splayed and leaned against it, trying to make his heart slow down because, goddamn, it was beating so hard anyone could hear it. He laid the rifle with its night scope across his knee, emptied the chamber, and waited.

  He'd told the man to come at ten; he'd told Magozzi to come ten minutes later. The timing was critical. Please, God, let this happen the way it should.

  'Time, Gino!'

  'Eight minutes! You gotta beat that train!'

  The funny thing was that John Smith, sitting in the backseat of a stupid drug dealer's car racing a light rail to an intersection, was utterly ambivalent. Truly, this was so unexpected, and yet such a predictable outcome to the boring, faintly amusing, life he had lived. There would be a nicely framed picture of him on the wall in D.C., right next to one of the agent who had risked his life to save the child of a domestic terrorist last year, caught in the crossfire of justice. The man had been shot twenty-seven times in the act of saving a child. John, on the other hand, would die with a lamb kabob in his belly and the memory of a half- naked dancer in his brain, cut down by a light rail that could barely exceed the speed limit. Not exactly the heroic death he had envisioned. Still, he was afraid, because Magozzi had jerked the Caddie into the shallow ditch between the street and the tracks, was dodging poles and culverts and God knew what else, pushing the big car to a speed slightly faster than the train, but not fast enough. Even John could see that, because the intersection was just ahead, the wooden arms were coming down while the lights flashed and a bell clanged, and everything seemed to be going so fast, until suddenly, it slowed down.

  I told you, John. I don't want you here for this.

  Where else would I be? This is where I live.

  And then he walked across the white hospital room to the white hospital bed and looked at the ever-so-white face of the first, and perhaps the last, woman he would ever love in such a way. The infinitesimal diamond was on her finger, clinging loosely to what little flesh was left, because the disease had been hungry. He had been twenty-nine, she had been twenty-seven on that day.

  She managed a smile as he approached her bed, the first he had seen in many days.

  That's funny, John.

  What is?

  Everything just slowed down, like in the movies. I like that. It gives you time to see things.

  It was like that now as the Cadillac bumped over this and that as it raced the train in that grassy ditch so close to the tracks, because if he looked to the left, he could see the cars on the street next to them, the curious, startled eyes of the passengers in the cars. He saw a child with a circle for a mouth, and a woman whose mascara was running with tears, and then the car soared up and went airborne over the hillock that connected it to the intersection, and someone pushed fast-forward.

  John felt the Cadillac bottom out on the tar, saw sparks and splinters from the crossing arms peck like demented crows at the windshield, and then Gino was bouncing up and down in his seat, pounding the dash with his fists, shouting, 'Fucking A, Leo! Fucking A! You beat the goddamned train!'

  And then they were on a two-lane side street with lovely homes on either side, and John took a breath and watched the pretty houses slide by like a newlywed looking at real estate, and the world was very, very quiet.

  * * *

  Chapter Forty-one

  'Okay. This is the way it's going to go down,' Magozzi said. The windows on the Caddie were closed, but still he whispered, as if there were ears in the parking l
ot near the eighteenth green, next to the polished SUV that Wild Jim had put there like a signpost. On the far side of the lot, behind the clubhouse and out of sight, they'd already checked out a low-slung Mercedes. They'd felt warmth still rising from the hood, careful not to touch the car itself. You never could tell what kind of alarm system these foreign models had as add-ons. 'Whoever this guy is, he's stalking Wild Jim. Obviously he's already on site, maybe checking the perimeter for people like us, maybe just waiting for a clean shot. If the judge walks into that, he's dead. If he's smart, and I think he is, he got here long before the meet he set up, and he's the one who's going to bring this bastard down.'

  'So you're assuming they're both armed?' John was dismayed.

  'The judge is always armed,' Gino said. 'But as far as we know, he's never shot anybody. He spent his whole career working for the law, not against it. I wouldn't put it past him to try to arrest the guy, though. I think he's trying to go out as a hero.'

  Aren't we all, John thought, depressed by how small the 9mm looked in his hand.

  Magozzi nodded at John's weapon. 'If we see anything, especially firepower, take a long breath before you pull the trigger. Make sure you home in on the bad guy.'

  Ten minutes after he'd settled beneath the tree, his bottle of bourbon tucked between his thighs, Wild Jim's hunter's eyes saw the dark, hunched figure crab-walking along the sheltered margin of the woods surrounding the eighteenth green. Adrenaline burned through his heart like battery acid and his limbs went numb. Or maybe he was having a heart attack, which would actually be a wonderfully ironic outcome to this whole mess.

  He looked up at the moon and the sky and decided there was little point in pondering God, destiny, and fate at this point, because he didn't believe in any of them. But the old saying that there were no atheists in foxholes finally resonated with him on a fundamental level - when your life was truly hanging in the balance, you instinctively thought about the bigger picture, whether you believed in one or not.