The Widow File

by S. G. Redling

  Mrs. O’Donnell put the gun in her pocket. “And you are nothing but fallout.” She raised her hand, her finger pointed to the sky. With a flick of her wrist, she dropped her hand, her finger pointing at Dani and Choo-Choo. A second later, two shots rang out.

  Booker watched the van arrive. Just once he wished people like this would show up in a lemon yellow convertible or a beaten-up Impala, but no, the black panel van seemed to be standard issue for villains. Nobody stepped from the vehicle so Booker made himself comfortable on the curb in the shadows around yet another statue. He peered up at the wet bronze face—John Paul Jones. Water gurgled from bizarre-looking sea creatures at the statue’s feet. Funny, Booker thought, that they put in a water feature for a sea admiral when they could have just turned the statue around and given the man an eternal view of the Tidal Basin. Still it wasn’t a shabby spot for a Scot to be memorialized. The Washington Monument shone white and huge a few hundred yards to his right; straight ahead and less than half that distance, the World War II Memorial glowed yellow and somber.

  It was a nice spot for a clandestine meeting, a place he would have picked himself for a hit. The wide open spaces, the broad pass of Independence Avenue behind him leading away from the Mall gave the illusion of safety but the lights of the many memorials played strange tricks bouncing off the wet pavement. Low wisps of fog hung close to the trees and manicured shrubs. An unchecked imagination could make a person see figures darting through the night.

  Booker’s imagination stayed put. He kept his focus on the black van parked less than fifty feet from where he sat. The streetlights made the moisture sparkle on the glossy paint job. The shadows could swallow him before anyone could step foot from the vehicle.

  He didn’t know how much later he saw the trio arrive onto the broad walkway of the World War II Memorial. Interesting, he thought, watching the redhead charging ahead and Dani walking after her, arm in arm with the tall blond man. He had seen that man before. Booker rarely forgot a face. It didn’t matter now. Now he just wondered which one, if either of them, Dani could or did trust.

  They argued and Booker smiled at the stubborn stomp of Dani’s little foot. She looked mighty out there holding her ground in the light of the memorial. The other two towered over her but Dani seemed to him the hardest force at play. He wanted to cheer for her. The redhead apparently lost the argument, because she walked off toward the van alone. The passenger window rolled down and she leaned in to talk with whomever sat inside. Booker watched Dani and the blond for a moment, swallowing down a flare of jealousy when he saw her rest her head on his shoulder. He indulged himself with one quick image of her head on his own shoulder, of Dani finding her comfort with him. Nothing to be done about it now.

  The door to the van opened and Booker perked up. Maybe now he would finally get to see who was pulling the strings, who had the power to silence the news and silence the client. When the tall, black-clad figure stepped out, Booker let his head fall back.

  “You have got to be shitting me,” he whispered to the sky. Mrs. O’Donnell? That iron bitch was the principal? He’d seen her tied to the chair in the van, her imperious posture and snotty expression looking down on him. He’d wanted to slap her just because he could, but the client had held his hand. Now he knew why. The whole kidnapping bit had been for show to get her off-site and into the driver’s seat. He’d been played. Unbelievable. He wished he’d slapped her when he had the chance.

  He watched the two women walk into the pool of light and he knew what was going to go down. Four people stood together at the memorial, only one was going to walk away. What he didn’t know was how many other figures were in play. Would Mrs. O’Donnell shoot them all herself? It didn’t seem likely. Not that she didn’t seem capable of murder. The woman looked like she’d bathe in the blood of kittens given the chance, but three people were difficult for one person to kill without some serious firepower. He’d bet she’d brought along a shooter.

  He had to admire Mrs. O’Donnell’s approach. She started by dropping the redhead to the ground in a cloud of blood. That certainly got their attention. He tried to imagine what Dani must be feeling, industrious, clever Dani who probably kept her head down and did her job and cashed her check and never worried about things like climbing the ladder and impressing her boss. Now that the boss turned out to be the boogeyman, would she panic? Or would she get pissed? He bet she’d say something funny either way.

  Mrs. O’Donnell’s voice echoed off the marble walls but Booker didn’t bother listening to her ramble. Villains and their speeches. They always loved the sound of their own voices. Instead he kept an eye on the van. Sure enough, once Mrs. O’Donnell had really hit her stride, he saw a man, all in black, slip from the van and pad quickly across the street toward the statue where Booker sat hidden. If the man in black’s attention hadn’t been so focused on his boss, he might have seen the figure in the shadows as he passed. Booker was smiling at the close call when a sliver of light fell across the shooter’s face, and then he groaned inwardly.

  R. Mrs. O’Donnell’s sniper was the client’s obnoxious assistant, his “internal security consultant.” Booker had never picked up a clue. At that moment he knew that as soon as he finished this job, Booker was taking a vacation. His instincts clearly needed a break. This job had been a disaster since the get-go.

  Booker rose from the curb, pulling the damp seat of his trousers away from his skin. He could see his breath in the mist but felt warm and comfortable. Staying in the shadows, he followed the sniper to his position on the Washington Memorial side of Seventeenth Street, directly across from Dani and company. Pretty nervy, he thought, striking a hit in such a public location.

  R stood in a shooter’s stance, his attention on the targets in his sight. Booker watched him for a moment, wishing he would have the chance to see R’s face when he realized it was Booker who killed him. But Mrs. O’Donnell raised her hand and R tensed and Booker knew he had to strike. Sliding the serrated blade out of its sheath, he slipped up behind R, ready to move his hand between the shooter’s left arm and his chin. With a simple flick, the blade would slice from jugular to jugular and blood would explode. But R was fast and got a shot off before the blade hit home, a second shot going wild as Booker leapt back from the blood spray.

  Booker swore.

  Dani had screamed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The marble exploded behind Dani and half a second later her thigh erupted in pain. Before she could register the wound from the ricochet, another shot fired, this one hitting Choo-Choo square in the chest as he lunged to cover her. The force of the bullet threw him backward and for one horrible second he lay balanced over the low wall of the memorial, blood blossoming across the front of his shirt, his eyes wide with terror. Gravity and momentum won, throwing his body over the wall and down onto the level below. Dani screamed, jumping up to try to catch him or save him or touch him, but the wound in her leg screamed louder and she fell to one knee.

  Mrs. O’Donnell screamed too, although hers was a scream of anger and impatience. “Shoot her! What are you waiting for? Finish the job!”

  Dani crab-walked back against the wall, keeping her head beneath the ledge as if this would somehow make her invisible. Blood poured from the hole in her leg, making her slide as she scrambled to put distance between herself and her screaming former boss. When the yelling stopped, Dani listened for a sound from Choo-Choo but heard only the rush of the fountain and her own panicked breathing. Mrs. O’Donnell had turned from her, looking toward the lawn of the Washington Monument, and Dani stared, trying to see what she watched for.

  It was Tom. Dani knew him from the set of his shoulders and the shape of his head. His white shirtsleeves had become transparent in the rain and his dark hair clung to his forehead but she knew him. He looked just as he had looked outside the hotel—warm and comfortable despite the icy air, despite the purpose he was bending himself to. Dani had to squint to be sure but from where she sat, it looked
like he was smiling at her.

  “Well, well, well,” Mrs. O’Donnell said. “If it isn’t the freelancer. Trying to score a little overtime pay, Mr. Booker? Because I must say that you—”

  Booker fired without breaking stride, the bullet hitting her in the center of the forehead. “Shut up,” he said as her body collapsed in a heap. “God almighty, does she ever shut up?” He stopped less than twenty feet from where Dani huddled. “How badly are you hurt?”

  Dani blinked several times, her thoughts refusing to line up in any orderly fashion. She managed to get to her feet, pressing her fist into the wound. “I think I’m supposed to say it’s just a flesh wound.”

  He laughed, his smile bright in darkness. “People say it’s only a flesh wound when it’s someone else’s flesh that got wounded.” He turned to stare at Mrs. O’Donnell’s body. “So who are they? Or should I say, who are you? CIA? NSA? Homeland Security?”

  “I don’t know,” Dani said truthfully, sliding herself sideways. “I haven’t really found out. I don’t think any of the answers is better than another.”

  Booker shook his head, muttering something to himself. He pulled out a handkerchief, wiped down the gun, and tossed it onto Mrs. O’Donnell’s body. The action should have reassured her—Booker was throwing down his weapon—but the resignation in his posture set off alarms in her mind.

  She had a bad leg and a very short head start, but everything in Dani’s body told her to run.

  Booker threw the gun onto Mrs. O’Donnell’s body. They’d never trace it back to him. There was no point in carrying it anymore. Gunshots on the Mall tended to make the police nervous. He was running out of time. The last bits of this job were going to have to be done by hand. The thought of killing Dani with a gun seemed vulgar and cold, in any event. He wanted to feel the blade sink into her flesh. He wanted to see her eyes when she died. He owed her that.

  When he looked back and saw her limping into the shadows, he had to smile again. That took guts. From what he could see, the wound on her thigh was messy. That she could run at all told him it had missed the major infrastructure of the leg, but still, it probably hurt like hell. Never let it be said Dani Britton lacked grit, he thought. He called out to her.

  “Dani, stop. Don’t do this to yourself. I get it. You’re tough. It doesn’t have to be like this.” It really didn’t, but as he set off at a casual stroll after her, he had to admit that he was more than a little glad it was like this.

  She was headed toward the Tidal Basin where the sidewalks were dark and hidden from traffic. It would have been a smart play if the weather was warm and the trees and bushes in bloom. There might have been a place to hide or groups of tourists strolling in the warm night air to seek help from. This time of year, however, the branches were bare and the sidewalks deserted. With her injured leg, she wouldn’t get far and when he caught up with her, he would have her to himself. Booker bit his lip and smiled.

  Even as she ran Dani knew she was screwed. If she’d run the other direction, she might have seen a cop or gotten to the street, but running the other direction would have put her closer to Tom. She would have had to step over Ev’s bloody body.

  Who was she kidding? She’d run the direction she’d run because that was the direction she’d been facing and her only thought was to go forward. Forward meant down to the Tidal Basin and the long, open sidewalk.

  She bit her lip against the shrieking pain of her leg. Her boot felt like it was full of pudding as blood soaked into her sock, and her jeans stuck to her in the most revolting way. She barreled lopsided and off rhythm toward the stone wall around the water. Tom shouted something but she couldn’t hear him. She could only hear her heartbeat in her ears and the thump-slide thump-slide of her gait.

  The wall around the basin gave her something to lean on, speeding up her pace. She wouldn’t say it made her optimistic but the increase in distance held despair slightly further at bay.

  The mist had turned to full-blown rain. Her clothes weighed a ton. If she had any hope of keeping up this pace or any pace, she had to shed some of the weight. The wet woolen outer shirt clung to her as she peeled it off and Dani nearly lost her balance as she wrestled the clinging beast from her wrists. Images of falling on her face, her hands bound neatly behind her in her stupid shirt, made panic rise up in her chest until she finally freed herself from the garment, flinging it behind her. Maybe Tom would trip on it.

  Tom wiped R’s blood from the serrated knife on his pants leg as he trotted along the basin wall. The hooked blade was his second favorite weapon, the first being the smaller knife at his back. He debated which one to use. The serrated blade ended things quickly and really he did owe Dani as much mercy as he could summon. Yet he was drawn to that little blade, the one he called Nugget, which required skill and proximity. It made a mess and worked best in the closest of quarters. It wasn’t a coward’s knife.

  Something black lay heaped on the sidewalk and Booker slowed to study it. He crouched down beside it and poked at it with the hooked tip of the blade. A shirt. It could have been anyone’s—D.C. had no shortage of homeless people, or a jogger or any of the tourists who had strolled this sidewalk when the sun had been up could have dropped it—but Booker decided it was Dani’s, that she had peeled it off as she ran. She’d been wearing a shirt like this, something two times too big for her.

  He tried to dam the thought before it got to him but failed. He kept forgetting how small Dani was. If she hit five feet, he’d give her a nickel. He kept seeing those little boots in her closet and how low the clothing bar had been set. She’d even installed a second, lower peephole in her apartment door. It didn’t make him pity her. Far from it. Booker didn’t know if he was even capable of pity anymore. He’d kill a frail old woman just as quickly as a strapping young buck. No, what he admired in Dani was the contrast between her petite frame and her mighty presence. That was the only word he could find to describe her—mighty. She’d eluded him, ducked him, lied to him, smiled at him, and talked to him, really talked to him. He wished he could call her right now. He wished he could get his thoughts straight, because even as he didn’t want to kill her, he also knew that he looked forward to it.

  The small elation of confidence she’d felt when she’d hit the wall dissolved further with every step she took. Dani knew she was hitting a different wall altogether. She didn’t know how much blood she was losing. She told herself that if it had been a femoral artery she’d be dead already but that didn’t comfort her much. She felt cold to the bone, not the cold that came from the rain or the night air but a cold that came from shock and loss and operating at a deficit of supplies. She couldn’t keep this up. She couldn’t keep running but the dark and the rain made focusing difficult. A few pathways rose up from the sidewalk but from where she stood, the enormity of propelling her body up the slope seemed insurmountable.

  Maybe Tom had given up. The dwindling rational voice in her brain screamed “NoNoNo” but the rest of her rejoiced at the thought, clinging to any possibility that meant stopping this marathon, closing the eyes, laying the body down. She should never have entertained the thought, because her legs mutinied and her hands joined in, grabbing at the wall and hauling her into one of the shallow look-out alcoves peppering the wall around the Tidal Basin. Less than three feet deep and six feet wide and open to the sidewalk, the alcove had waist-high metal fencing that let visitors peer down into the icy water of the man-made reservoir. Dani would have been hard-pressed to find a worse hiding place short of just lying down in the middle of the sidewalk. But it seemed she was no longer the master of her own body. The arms and legs and cold toes and bleeding fingers commandeered the decision and Dani found herself crouched in the corner of the alcove, her head resting on a lower rung, her bleeding leg straight out before her. The buckle of the Rasmund pouch strap dug into her side where she pressed against the wall. She started to pull the damned thing off and got only as far as pulling her shoulder free. The pouch rested in her lap, th
e strap around her neck.

  In the unfunniest of ways, it was funny. She’d started this whole nightmare in a crouch. She’d crouched in front of Hickman when she’d heard gunshots and seen him dead. She’d spent the day scrabbling and crouching and hiding until she was running and sliding and jumping off of roofs. She’d been shot. She’d hidden in a beanbag chair. She’d had a bologna sandwich just like the ones her dad would make her. She wished she’d kissed Joey from Big Wong’s. She wished she’d kissed Choo-Choo. She doubted there was going to be much more jumping and sliding tonight. At least she didn’t feel cold anymore.

  Booker stopped and listened. He didn’t hear any footsteps. The soft sound of traffic floated in from a distance but he no longer heard the irregular beat of Dani’s footsteps.

  Was she hurt? Worry stabbed at his gut. He didn’t want to think of Dani fallen down or unconscious. He knew what he was going to do to her would hurt but he would make that hurt better, he would make it mean something. Dani didn’t deserve to die alone and cold, hit by a car or bleeding out from a bullet.

  Or was she hiding? Had she found a lead pipe or a two-by-four and decided to lie in wait for him? Did she have a plan even now, injured and exhausted, shocked beyond reason? The idea of stepping from a shadow and seeing Dani coiled and bloody, her messy hair and bright eyes waiting to attack, thrilled Booker in a way that surprised him. He felt that same rush of blood he’d felt upon entering her apartment. It felt sexual and spiritual and primitive and scintillating all at the same time. More than a little bit, he hoped he’d get the chance to wrestle a weapon from her.

  He saw her boot first.

  The little round toe of it peeked from the edge of one of the fenced viewing alcoves around the basin. Booker froze, waiting, but the boot didn’t move. He risked another step, leaning forward to peer around the edge. Her right leg, the injured one, sprawled out before her, her left leg was bent and falling to the side. Dani looked too pale as she lay with her head back against the fencing, her mouth open, her eyes closed.