“I did.”
“Yet you stuck around. Bad decision.”
“If I’d known you were in the building, I never would have gone in there. How come your car wasn’t in the parking lot?”
“It was three blocks away, getting a tune-up.”
“How’d you find me tonight?”
“You never answered my question about how you got out of the freezer.”
“Professional secret.”
“Oh, you won’t answer my questions, but I’m supposed to answer yours?”
“I set off the temperature sensor by breathing on it. Somebody came to check on things.”
“That’s the way all IQ tests should be conducted. Then there wouldn’t be so many morons throwing their chewed gum on the sidewalk and cutting you off in traffic. I’d like to kill ’em all.”
“Now do I get an answer?”
“The Guillory sisters saw your reflection in a mirror when that screen fell over. We called the sheriff in Courville and he gave us your address.”
“Why kill me? It’s all over. The police know everything. Better for you to strike a deal with the DA before the others do.”
Ward shook his head. “If the police knew, you wouldn’t have come out tonight alone. Who sent you?”
“I told you that.”
“Look, here’s the deal. I can kill you fast or slow. Tell me what I want to know and it’ll be fast. Otherwise, we can start with your knees and work up. I’d hate that. It’d be like that guy who took a knife to the Mona Lisa. You can’t imagine the pain a gunshot causes, especially when it hits bone. The slug will shatter your knee and deflect, tunneling into your leg like a burning iron.”
Three seconds with his guard down, that’s all she needed. She unfastened another button on her blouse and folded it back so he could see the cleavage between her lush breasts. “Maybe we could arrange a trade. My life in return for . . .” She ran a finger down between her breasts.
Ward shook his head. “Only way a guy survives in this business is by remembering one rule: Follow your head first, your heart second, and don’t listen to a thing your dick says. See, you just gotta accept the fact you’re dead. And it really ain’t that bad. Nobody knows when they’re dead. Only pain matters.”
Kit’s outlook for getting out of this unhurt was so bleak, her thoughts shifted from escape to retribution and how she could take Ward with her. He’d said he was going to start with her knees. With the ensuing pain, it would be natural for her to bend over and cover them, gripping her ankles. With a little luck, she might be able to get off a shot before he caught on. She was glad now the dog had knocked the gun from her hand before she could use it. Otherwise, Ward would know she had it.
But she was frightened of the coming pain, afraid it would be so bad, she wouldn’t be able to function.
No.
She would function. Even if he killed her, she’d simply refuse to die until she’d done the same to him.
“So what do you think?” Ward said. “Slow or—”
A floorboard creaked in the hallway leading to the back door. Ward rose out of his chair, turning fast in that direction. Before he got fully around, Brian Tabor stepped into view and fired three rounds from his own silenced automatic. The bullets slapped into Ward’s chest and he dropped his gun. As he went down, his sideways momentum carried him into his chair, which fell backward, knocking the ceiling brace behind it loose, so it crashed into the TV set and clattered to the floor.
Glancing quickly at the loose plaster overhead, Tabor circled the spot and stood looking down at Ward’s body.
Kit found this unbelievable. She wasn’t going to die. She was going to live. She leapt from her chair and started toward Tabor, wanting desperately to hug him in gratitude. Before she reached him, he lifted his gun and fired two more rounds into Ward’s head.
Perplexed at the need for this, she stopped a few feet away.
“Why did you do that? He was no longer a threat.”
Tabor looked at her. “Maybe not to you.”
Confused as to what he meant, Kit just stood there, working on it.
Then a pall washed over her. “The governor—he was the other partner.”
Tabor raised his automatic and pointed it at her. “This is a poor way to show it, but he’ll be grateful for your alerting us to that meeting tonight. We were concerned the others might overreact to his demands. But we had no idea they’d go as far as they did.”
“You were there?”
“By the time you arrived, I’d already disabled their security system and slipped a needle-nose bug under one of the French doors to the room they met in.”
“How could you get there so fast from— Oh, you weren’t in Baton Rouge.”
“Right.”
“Killing me won’t help you. I called Andy Broussard in Memphis as soon as I got home and told him what I’d heard. He’ll—” Realizing that rather than helping herself with this story, she could be hurting Broussard, she faltered.
“By now he’s out of the picture, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what you’re thinking.”
The possibility that Broussard was dead was incomprehensible and horrible to contemplate, but facing the same fate herself, she couldn’t dwell on it. All day long, she’d been yanked in and out of life and it was wearing on her. Where, she wondered, would salvation come from this time? Certainly not from the gun on her ankle. He’d never let her get to that.
Her whirling mind locked on an idea. Coming in, Tabor had glanced at the loose plaster. Maybe . . . She lifted her eyes to a spot over Tabor’s head and cringed. Before he could catch himself, he, too, looked up.
Seizing the moment, Kit pushed his gun hand to the side and kicked him solidly in the groin, doubling him over. Afraid he’d recover before she could get her own gun out, she ran for the door and bolted onto the porch. There, she realized if she went down the steps to the courtyard, he’d have plenty of opportunity to pick her off before she got there. Impulsively, she went the other way and ducked around the corner into a dead-end alcove, hoping she’d have time to get her gun before he found her.
But she’d no sooner turned the corner than she heard him come onto the porch. It would take only a glance for him to see she hadn’t gone down the steps, and then he’d figure out where she was. Needing more time, she started up the ladder to the roof. As she reached the top and threw herself onto the slate shingles, she heard the now-familiar thwack of Tabor’s automatic firing from the bottom of the steps. At practically the same instant, a slug hissed past her ear.
Scrambling and slipping on the slate, she tried to put some distance between herself and the ladder, frantically looking for a hiding place. But on this part of the building, there were only a few small pipes coming through the roof, nothing large enough to shield her. On the older section, there were chimneys.
The pitch of the roof made for precarious footing and slowed her as she sprinted for the unrenovated wing. Tabor fired again from the ladder as soon as he could see her, once again narrowly missing the mark.
By the time he’d reached the roof himself, Kit had made it to the old wing. The first chimney was no more than ten feet away. As she ran, she planned what she’d do when she reached it. Take cover facing it, brace with her left leg. . . . Her thoughts raced, compressing time. If she used both hands to get the gun, she might slide off the roof. . . . Hold on to the chimney with her right hand and get the gun with her left. . . . No, she’d never hit him if she had to fire with her left hand.
Then there was a loud crack, followed by a cacophony of collapse as the roof gave way and she fell through. When the shock passed, she found herself suspended, slightly turned away from the chimney she’d been chasing, jagged roof slate surrounding her at chest level. Her left leg, hidden below, dangled in air; her right was bent at the knee by some kind of debris that had kept her from slamming into the floor of the room below. Her left arm rested on the roof; her right
was in the hole.
She tried to leverage herself out of the hole with her supported leg, but the debris under it gave with the pressure.
“I can’t stay up here long,” Tabor said from behind her.
Tabor . . . Jesus . . . The gun on her ankle—her right hand was practically touching it. She inched her hand down and found the cuff of her slacks already lifted by a protruding splinter or nail. She unsnapped the Velcro strap, cringing at the sound, which, though muffled, seemed all too audible. Her fingers closed on the butt of the gun and she lifted it from the holster. Praying Tabor couldn’t see it, she brought the gun up, sliding it against her chest.
“I want you to know there’s nothing personal in this,” Tabor said. “It’s business, that’s all. I actually—”
Kit twisted her head and torso in his direction. At the same instant she saw him, she fired—once, twi—
Her brain howled in shock.
Nothing.
Nothing was happening. The hammer was just clicking away like a kid’s toy.
She fired again with the same result.
“Afraid I’m responsible for that,” Tabor said. “After your shooting lesson at the range, I reloaded your gun with shells fitted with dummy primers. Now, I’ve got to go. Please don’t look at me.”
Left with no other way to resist, Kit stared into his face, determined he should know he’d killed a person, not merely conducted business. If giving him nightmares about this moment was all she could do, she’d take satisfaction in that.
“You, up there, drop the gun.”
A voice from the courtyard . . . Kit couldn’t turn enough in that direction to see who it was.
Suddenly, Tabor was running past her, headed for the end of the roof, where he was obviously planning to jump to the next building. The voice from below shouted again. “Stop or I’ll fire.”
Tabor kept running.
Before the owner of the voice could make good on his threat, the roof under Tabor gave way and he dropped from view. A second later, Kit heard him hit the floor of the room beneath. There was no further sound from that direction.
Very shortly, she was helped onto the roof by the smaller of the two cops who had saved her. Against the other’s advice, he then edged his way to the hole where Tabor had fallen through, playing his flashlight into the room beneath. He studied the situation briefly, then looked at Kit and grinned. “I love it when that happens.”
26
“Word is, if the governor doesn’t resign, the legislature is gonna impeach him,” Phil Gatlin said across Broussard’s table at Grandma O’s.
“That was quick,” Kit replied. “He hasn’t even been indicted yet.”
“Sure he has,” Gatlin said, “by every paper in the state.”
Broussard took a sip of his iced tea through cracked lips and put the glass down. “Nothin’ gets the legislature’s hackles up like a crooked politician,” He paused for effect, then added, “who’s gettin’ away with more than they are.”
Gatlin feigned a shocked look. “I hope when the swelling goes down, you’ll be the sweet old geezer we used to know. I’m sure you realize by hitting that woman in the stomach, it makes you a danger to the entire fabric of society.”
“I liked the world better the way it used to be—when at least a few issues were black and white. I hate gray.”
“What’d she look like?”
“She was actually quite attractive.”
Gatlin’s eyebrows rose. “I was wondering how she got you to believe that goofy story about a cabin in the woods.”
“It wasn’t her appearance. I was just too slow mentally. I had everything I needed to link Tabor to the murder of Anthony Hunter when I came out of the reptile curator’s office at the zoo. But I didn’t realize it. If I’d made the connection right away and followed up, I’d have probably stopped everything at that point and”—he looked at Kit—“you could have been spared a lot of what you went through.”
“The final result is all that matters,” she said. “But those cops who saved me at the end really cut it close.”
“I hate to think about that,” Broussard said. “A half hour before I called Phillip and told him you could be in trouble, I was sittin’ lost in the woods, my car hopelessly stuck in a mud hole, with no idea Tabor was involved. I’d decided to spend the night in the car and worry about gettin’ out in the mornin’, when I finally realized you were bein’ set up, too. Then, I had to get to a phone. I guess it was desperation that showed me how to get the car movin’.”
“How’d you do that?” Gatlin said.
“Jacked the rear wheels up and put the trunk liner under ’em. That gave me enough traction to get on solid ground.”
“Should have thought of that a lot earlier,” Gatlin said. “Or you could have gone back for the shovel and used it to throw some dry dirt under the wheels.”
“Next time I’m in a jam, I’ll be sure you’re along.”
Grandma O arrived and distributed the food they’d ordered.
“Anybody need anything else? No?” Her eyes stopped on Broussard. “Ah ain’t got time now to hear how your face got like dat, but Ah’m nosy enough dat Ah am gonna know what happened. So keep it all fresh in your mind.”
“It’ll be awhile before it fades,” Broussard said.
She went off to attend to her other customers.
“What was the connection you found between Tabor and Hunter?” Kit asked Broussard.
“When we first met Tabor in my office, he gave me a business card on the back of which he’d scribbled the phone number of someone named P. Bates. I’ve done the same thing myself—written a number on one of my cards, then mistakenly given it away. I figured it might be important to him, that he’d need the number. But by the time I’d noticed it, he was already gone. I gave the number back to him over the phone the night before I was taken out to the woods to be killed. That’s what precipitated it. He was afraid I’d figure out who P. Bates was.”
“Who was it?” Kit said.
“It wasn’t a who. It was a what.”
“Okay, what was it?”
“The toxicology lab in Memphis had determined that the poison used to kill Hunter was derived from a type of dartpoison frog, belonging to the genus Phyllobates.”
“P. Bates,” Kit exclaimed.
“Tabor apparently didn’t know how to spell the genus, so he abbreviated it. The phone number was for an animal importer who could supply wild-caught Phyllobates terribilis, the most toxic frog known. Tabor wanted me killed before I figured that out. I actually became a target the day I called the prison board to start an investigation. I dragged you into it when I sent you up to Angola. I’m sure they intended to kill us both eventually.”
“That’s why Tabor gave me a gun loaded with dud cartridges. Insisting I take a weapon made it look like he was concerned for my safety. But he knew at some point, after I’d helped him keep tabs on his crooked friends and he was ready to get rid of me, I might try to use it on him. That day at the firing range, I wondered why, when he reloaded the last time, he used a different box from the one he’d been using, even though the first one was still half-full.”
Gatlin swallowed a mouthful of turtle chili and waved his spoon at Kit and Broussard. “You both could have avoided all this trouble if you’d confided in me. You should have caught on when they requested you deal only with Tabor.”
Broussard gave Gatlin a critical look. “I’ll bet the Saints never lost a game you couldn’t have won for ’em if only they’d asked for help.”
“Well, there was maybe that one, when the whole starting backfield was out with the flu.”
“How did Tabor recruit a Memphis homicide detective?” Kit asked.
“I wondered that myself,” Gatlin replied. “I asked my friend in the department up there what they knew about it. She’s not talking, but my friend said it probably goes back to when she and Tabor worked Vice together in Baton Rouge. Rumor is they were both dirty.”
“Nobody told Memphis. They were never charged with anything, so it was all speculation. You prevent somebody from getting work by passing along rumors, you open yourself up to a lawsuit.”
“How dirty were they? She was prepared to commit murder.”
“She apparently always had an eye for things she couldn’t afford. And with the scheme the governor and his friends were working, Tabor could have offered her plenty. She talked her way into being your guide by saying you two were old friends.”
Broussard put his oyster po’ boy back in its lattice basket. “Sounds like you know exactly what they were up to.”
“The only one stonewalling is the governor. The rest are singing like they’re auditioning for the Met. The deal is, this guy Woodley discovered an ingredient in red wine that can reverse hardening of the arteries in mice. He figured out that the effective substance is made by yeast in the presence of alcohol and something I can’t remember found in grape skins. Anyway, after learning how to make this stuff in large quantities, he arranged a tentative deal with a German pharmaceutical firm that agreed to pay him—get this—one billion dollars for the rights to all his notes and the knowledge of how to make it—if it proved to be effective and safe on humans. So where could they get some human subjects nobody would miss if things went wrong?”
“The prison,” Kit said.
“They thought about just picking up street bums, but Woodley didn’t want the deck stacked against success by starting with drug addicts and winos.”
Remembering what she’d heard at the meeting, Kit said, “But in humans, it had a side effect.”
“Brain damage,” Broussard added.
Gatlin’s eyebrows jigged together. “If you two already know all this, why am I talking so much?”
“I don’t know all of it,” Broussard said. “You’re too edgy. I’m aware of the neural effects because I saw ’em in Ronald Cicero’s brain when I did his autopsy. He was obviously one of their test subjects.”
“Yeah, but he escaped before they could get rid of him and he somehow made his way to New Orleans, where he ran amok with that knife. If I’d known the governor was so dumb, I’d never have voted for him. To bring you two right into the heart of the conspiracy like that was nuts. Oh, sure, to hear Tabor tell it, they had it all thought out. They figured you were just gonna keep picking at the Cicero situation, so they thought by taking you into their confidence and getting you to report only to them, they could keep you corralled for a while, maybe long enough for their deal to work out. But sending Kit into Agrilabs as their agent was just asking for trouble, even if Bellair was afraid for his life and believed she was the ideal person to tap the director’s phone. Lunacy . . .”
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