Play To Kill

by P. J. Tracy

  The glowing dial of his watch face read 9:5 5. 'You're a little early,' he said quietly in the general direction of his stalker.

  The figure froze, then straightened slightly. 'If you move, you're dead,' the man replied, equally quietly.

  The judge caught a glimpse of gun metal gleaming in the moonlight. 'I'm not moving'

  'No joke, I'm going to circle around behind you and if I see even one little flinch, your brains are going to be fertilizing the eighteenth green. Let me see your hands.'

  Jim rolled his eyes and raised his hands. This asshole was just full of it. 'I know you've got a gun, so stop wasting time playing black ops. This is a business transaction, so let's get it over with before Christmas.' He heard a grunt and a rustling in the trees behind, and then the man materialized in front of him, his gun poised for a shot.

  He didn't remotely resemble the person Jim had been expecting, and he suspected the feeling was mutual, because the man's eyes kept drifting from his human target to the Winchester in his lap and the bottle of bourbon between his legs. 'How stupid are you? You arrange to meet a killer and you aren't even holding your gun.'

  'As I said, you're a bit early. Besides, I couldn't manage the cork while I was holding my weapon. Care for a splash?' Jim uncorked the bottle and took a swig. 'It is, without question, the greatest fermented mash my rather experienced palate has ever known.'

  The man leaned forward and stretched his arm, moving the gun closer to Jim's temple. 'I told you not to move, goddamnit.'

  Yes, you did, but only because you were at a disadvantage at the time, and walking blindly into an uncertain situation. But since I am currently in plain view, you know that my movements have nothing to do with firearms or murder and everything to do with enjoying an innocent sip of fine spirits.'

  The man's gun dropped a few inches, which was a great relief. 'So. You saw me with the faggot in the wedding dress.'

  'That's imprecise. I saw you kill the faggot in the wedding dress. And for that, I thank you very much. I'd been trying to kill him for over a year. He killed my son, you see.'

  'Whatever. How'd you find out who I was?'

  Judge Jim sighed. 'I followed you up to where you parked your car. You have a very nice car, by the way, spectacularly clean, which makes it so much easier to read the license plate. And if you have any connections with the DMV, as I do, a phone number is quite easy to come by. My only surprise was that you actually used your own car. That is the kind of oversight that solves crimes, you know. So why did you come tonight?'

  'Because you're fucking blackmailing me.'

  Jim smiled. 'No, let's be perfectly honest. A man like yourself wouldn't pay off a blackmailer. You came here to kill me, which is sensible, and, ironically, my goal as well.'

  The man grunted. 'Well, damn. That kind of takes all the fun out of it.'

  'I'm sure it does, but the truth is you have no choice. I saw you murder a man. The question is, why haven't you killed me already? I know you have it in you.'

  Yes, I do. But I like to play with my food.' He smiled then, and Jim knew he was looking straight into the eyes of a sociopath. He'd seen them plenty of times before from the bench, and it chilled his blood and reversed all the heat the adrenaline had put into him earlier.

  'So, did you kill them all?'

  The man gave Jim a blank stare. 'What are you talking about?'

  Jim settled back and drank some more bourbon while he contemplated the answer to that question. He took one more big swig before he answered. 'Did you kill all of the others on the list?'

  'Who the hell are you, old man?'

  You know me as Hole in One.'

  The man froze for a few moments, then started to chuckle, which eventually developed into a full-blown laugh. 'Are you kidding me? Are you KIDDING? You're Hole in One? From the chat room?'

  'And you are Killer, right? That's your handle.'

  Killer was having trouble believing what he was seeing and hearing. You put up the hit list? A useless old drunk? Oh, man, this is rich. Wait until the guys hear about this.'

  So there are others, Jim thought miserably. What have I done? His eyes flicked to the other side of the green and saw man shapes hunched over, darting close to the trees while Killer's attention was diverted. About time, Magozzi and Gino, he thought, and then realized he had to act quickly.

  'This is getting rather tedious,' he said. 'Either shoot me now, or I'm - '

  Killer's gun fired before Jim could finish the sentence, but, truly, he was an appalling shot, at least in the dark. It was a miracle he'd ever managed to kill anyone.

  'Idiot,' Jim muttered as he pulled the trigger on the.38 under his jacket. It made a dreadful mess of the man's knee, and that pleased Jim enormously. It was precisely what he had been aiming for. 'Come on over, Magozzi!' he called out, smiling a little as a howling Killer fell to one knee and tried to crawl away, his weapon forgotten on the grass behind him.

  This is going to make a great movie, Jim thought, appreciating the cinematic perfection of moonlight on Killer's back as he crawled across the green in an absolutely senseless attempt at escape; the intensity in the faces of Magozzi and Gino as they rushed toward him; the rather frantic scramble of another man he didn't know racing to straddle the wounded villain, slapping on the cuffs while the eighteenth green's flag fluttered a little in the freshening breeze. He could almost hear the soundtrack.

  He sighed happily, put down the.38, and popped the cork on the bourbon.

  Magozzi stood over him, breathing hard, pale in the faint light of the moon, his facial features stretched taut.

  'Good evening, Detectives. Perfect timing. Who's your friend?'

  'Goddamnit, Judge, are you out of your fucking mind? What are you trying to do, commit suicide?' Gino screamed at him, punching numbers on his cell to call for a bus and backup.

  Jim chuckled. 'I watched the man your friend is sitting on drown Alan Sommers in the river.'

  The adrenaline rush leaked out of Magozzi's legs and put him on his knees. 'Bullshit. You were point-four-oh when they locked you up.'

  'Point-four-oh when they locked me up the next morning. Not when I watched the murder, and not when I followed the killer to his car and memorized the plate number.'

  Gino's mouth dropped open, then clicked shut when he dropped to a squat next to Jim and glared at him. It was surprising, really. Detective Rolseth had always seemed such a gentle sort to Jim, and yet in this moment he looked almost frightening.

  'You old bastard,' he hissed. 'Are you telling me that all this time you knew who he was and didn't tell us?'

  'I do apologize for deceiving you. Truly.'

  'Well, big whoop, the man apologizes. What if he had killed somebody else the next day, or the next? What was all that crap about the law and justice being your life? And all the while you were giving us that load of bullshit in your condo, you were letting a known murderer run loose.'

  Jim blinked rapidly, then closed his eyes. The sorry truth was he had never considered that. Too consistently drunk; too interminably focused on his own misery.

  'This man is bleeding to death!' John called out as he wrapped his suitcoat sleeves around Killer's thigh in a crude tourniquet.

  'Bus on the way!' Gino called back. 'I swear to God, Judge, you're going down hard for this one. I'll be the guy in the back of the room, applauding'

  'There were reasons…' he stumbled over his words.

  'Don't bother, I've heard them all,' Gino's voice was shaking with contempt. Your son killed himself, you lost your job, you were abused as a child, whatever. Christ, I'm so sick of listening to excuses losers use for all the bad things they do.'

  John ran over from the green and stopped, frowning down at Jim. 'How long for the ambulance?' he asked. 'That guy out there is really bleeding. Looks like the femoral artery got nicked. And this one doesn't look much better.'

  'He's fine,' Gino snapped, pushing to his feet. 'Just contemplating his future in a state prison.'

/>   Jim took a shallow breath. He wasn't feeling so good anymore. 'Condo key in my pants pocket,' he whispered to Magozzi. 'Tape recorder in the jacket. I really wanted to do the right thing. I thought you could do something just a little wrong to make a lot of things right. But that was a misstep.'

  'Slippery slope,' John murmured.

  Jim looked up at the stranger. 'Yes. That's it precisely. I can't fix it. But tonight I tried. You've got your River Bride killer, and maybe a lot more.'

  Yeah, right,' Gino snorted. 'We've got nothing on this guy except the word of a drunk who just shot him. What the hell are we supposed to do with that?'

  Jim smiled a little, and Magozzi thought the old man was just about done in, because the color was going out of his face. 'You have a little more than that,' Jim told Gino, pulling aside his sportcoat and showing the wet, soggy evidence of his reddened shirt. 'There's a bullet in this pathetic alcohol-saturated belly that will match the weapon that man dropped. Murder One, if dreams come true.'

  'Jesus,' Magozzi whispered, ripping off his own jacket, wadding it up, pressing it against the flood of life that was seeping out of Wild Jim onto the grass around him.

  * * *

  Chapter Forty-two

  Magozzi, Gino, and John Smith sat in the Cadillac in the golf course lot, watching the ambulances pull away. Siren and lights on one, the other dark and ominous.

  Magozzi gave the quiet a minute and then turned to Gino. "You okay?'

  Yeah. I'm okay.'

  'Is that a lie?'

  'I need to go home, Leo.'

  'Then that's where you'll go. How about you, John?'

  'Back to Harley Davidson's, please. I have to pick up the rental car to take to the airport tomorrow.'

  Magozzi turned the key and pulled out of the lot.

  John moved up to the front seat after they'd dropped off Gino and watched him walk up his front walk. Angela was out there in some kind of fuzzy pink bathrobe that sparkled in the porch light, opening her arms for Gino and leading him into the house.

  'Nice,' John said.

  'He's the luckiest man on the planet.'

  You ever think of going that route?'

  'What? Marriage? Kids that puke all over you in the middle of the night? Christ, yes. I think of that all the time.'

  John smiled and nodded. When he got into his rental he pulled out his cell and punched in a number. 'Harley. This is John. Could you stand some company?'

  Magozzi called Grace from Judge Jim's condo. 'I've got a computer for you.'

  'And I've got chicken piccata for you.'

  He took a breath and let everything go when he heard her voice. He needed to be there. He needed someone waiting in a silly pink robe under a porch light. 'You heard about what went down tonight?'

  You made the news, Magozzi.'

  'Do you have a pink robe?'

  'Black.'

  'That'll work.'

  It took John two full glasses of wine and a large pizza to summarize the night's events for Harley. By the time he'd finished, the warmth of the burgundy had seeped into every cell, wrapping him in a cozy, fuzzy cocoon of contentment, and he wondered if he'd ever be able to extricate himself from the down-filled cushion of his chair.

  Harley raised his glass. 'Well, here's to you, Special Agent John Smith, and your crazy, goddamned night. You got another one.'

  'But not all of them. We're never going to catch the other murderers, and even if we do, another two will pop up for every one we put away.'

  Harley shrugged. 'Oh, I don't know. Somebody somewhere will decide to go a little deeper into the dark side, and they'll find a way to slide into these foreign servers and anonymous networks all the dirtbags use. Then you'd be able to monitor the sites and servers undetected, and probably bust a whole lot of all kinds of cyber criminals, including our killers.'

  'That's illegal. There are international agreements prohibiting it.'

  Harley raised one bushy brow. 'Are there international agreements against spying? Because that's all this would be; just a simple matter of planting a little James Bond spy worm. He doesn't hurt anybody, he doesn't mess with the systems, he just keeps an eye on things and reports back. Now, if memory serves, you guys do quite a bit of spying yourselves.'

  John was shaking his head. 'There is no way any government agency could be complicit in such an operation. We are signators to those agreements.'

  Harley shrugged. 'Oh, hell, I know that. I'm just saying someday somebody's going to do it. And since you guys signed that silly agreement about not busting into foreign servers and anonymous networks, you're never going to be able to figure out who.'

  John just stared at him, glass frozen on its way to his half-open mouth.

  Harley smiled and reached into the humidor on his side table. 'I want you to know I make good on my promises. You got the belly dancers, and now you get the cigar.'

  Smith ran the cigar under his nose like he saw people do in the movies and smelled chocolate.

  'That's the real deal, Smith. Havana's finest. Enjoy.'

  They smoked in comfortable silence for a few minutes, sipping burgundy and watching gray smoke curl up toward the pressed-tin ceiling of the study.

  You know, John, I still think this whole case is a damn fine way to close out a career. You know what's gonna happen now, don't you?' he slurred a little. 'You're gonna become an adrenaline junkie and start doing stupid stuff like base jumping and mountain climbing and deep sea scuba diving'

  'After tonight, I don't think I have any adrenaline left.'

  You can make more.'

  * * *

  Chapter Forty-three

  Magozzi woke up the next morning in Grace's bed with Grace licking his face. She had a really big tongue. And it smelled like kibble.

  He shoved Charlie the dog down into the crook of his arm and fell asleep again, trying to remember the details of what happened last night. He'd pulled up in front of Grace's fortress house and turned off the car. She was sitting on the front steps under the porch light in a fuzzy black robe, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands like a little girl. So daring, so brave, as if there weren't people in her quiet neighborhood who would jump out and kill her.

  She fed him chicken piccata, whatever the hell that was, gave him a glass of wine, then tucked him into the big bed upstairs and held him until he fell asleep.

  'Magozzi.' He heard her voice in his right ear, felt the movement of her breath stirring his hair. 'Ten minutes till breakfast.'

  She had all his favorites at the kitchen table: orange juice, yogurt, and bran cereal. 'Gee, Grace, you shouldn't have.'

  She made a cute little snorting sound. 'Eat it. It's good for you. Besides, I haven't been home long enough to shop this week. While you're eating, you can listen to the judge's tape.'

  He eyed the little recorder she'd placed on the table between them. 'I don't think I can take any of Wild Jim's monologues on an empty stomach.'

  'He recorded his conversation with the murderer last night.'

  By the time the tape clicked off, Magozzi had eaten half the yogurt, which was disgusting, two bites of bran cereal, which looked like bunny turds and probably tasted like them, and was gulping juice to wash it all down. 'Half of that tape is drunken bullshit. Alan Sommers didn't kill his son. His son committed suicide, probably because he knew his father better than we did and couldn't stand him.'

  Grace studied him for a moment. 'Alan Sommers gave the judge's son the HIV virus. Jessie shot himself when he developed full-blown AIDS.'

  Magozzi closed his eyes.

  'Sommers was apparently golden on the meds, but seven other of his partners died, both before and after he passed on his little present to Jessie. The judge thought of him as a mass murderer, of sorts; one that couldn't be prosecuted.'

  Where are you getting this stuff?'

  'He wrote a daily journal on his computer. He wasn't that bad a man, Magozzi. He sat down on the riverbank with his gun every night for a year, trying to kill
Alan Sommers, but he couldn't make himself do it.'

  Magozzi scraped back his chair and headed for the coffeemaker. 'So he put Alan on a hit list and had someone else do his dirty work. It's still murder. Don't fall for his poor-me crap, Grace. And don't forget there were six other people on that list.'

  Grace held out her mug to give him something to do. 'He had no idea there were real killers on that site. He thought they were a bunch of twisted, juvenile blowhards pretending they were tough guys. In a way, he was making fun of them, holding up a mirror to what losers they were. So he taunted them with a list of people that he'd hated for years because they got light or no sentences for absolutely horrible crimes. He'd been either the prosecutor or the sitting judge on every case, and it almost killed him when the system he believed in failed.'

  'Still murder,' Magozzi grumbled, refusing to look at her for almost a full second.

  'It wasn't a hit list, Magozzi. It was a hate list posted by a despairing, ranting drunk.'

  "We should have found that connection in the victim files.'

  'Did you read the trial transcripts?'

  'Trial transcripts are at the end of the files, and they're hundreds of pages. The box thing interrupted us before we got that far. We should have started with them. I should have known that, goddamnit.'

  Grace started clearing the table. 'It wouldn't have made any difference, Magozzi. The murders had all happened by then.'

  'Not quite.'

  She stopped in mid-stride on her way to the sink, holding his cereal bowl in her hand. 'You liked him,' she said without turning around.

  'No. I did not. What I liked was that cereal. Bring it back.'

  Grace set the bowl in the sink and then did the weirdest thing. She walked over and bent to kiss his cheek. No passion, no pity, just a connection. It shouldn't have made Magozzi feel better, but it did. 'I have something to tell you, Magozzi.'