Vengeance Is Personal (A Colton James Novel, Book 2)

by Thomas DePrima

  "Okay, James. Tell your story to the interviewer."

  "I can probably type it faster than I can say it, sir."

  "Do it our way, James."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Philbin will conduct the session," Sobert said, then left without another word.

  ~

  Special Agent Philbin had entered the interview room a few seconds later. I assumed he'd been watching from behind the two-way mirror where cameras, sound recorders, and various other types of monitoring equipment were already recording every micro-second of the interview.

  "Why don't we start with you telling me exactly what happened from the time Osborne and Snow dropped you off at home last night," Philbin said.

  So I started with the moment I'd entered the outside door of the building and finished with the arrival of NYC cops responding to numerous 911 calls from neighbors reporting a gun battle. The entire incident had lasted less than ten minutes, so it was almost a second-by-second description.

  "That's your whole story?" Philbin asked, looking at his own scrawled notes.

  "Yep," I said. I hadn't lied about anything. I had omitted several minor points though. I'd said that Diz was apparently looking for something, which was true, but I never mentioned that he'd found a small matchbox in my pocket, or that he had ordered me to activate the piece of paper he'd found inside. And there was one thing more I hadn't fully divulged.

  In relating the events in my apartment, I'd said that my friend had blindsided Diz's companion, then knocked Diz backward against the apartment door with a shoulder to his chest before jumping into the bathroom and locking himself in. That was all true. But I had omitted that my friend had grabbed the paper out of Diz's hand, then flushed it down the toilet. Since I was the only survivor of the shootout, there was no one to contest the accuracy of my statements.

  "What's this thing Diz was looking for?" Philbin asked.

  "He said Morris Calloway had reported giving me something when I went to Paramus. He also said he had killed Calloway."

  "How?"

  "He didn't say, and I was in no position to perform an interrogation. I was too busy trying to figure a way to survive the night. Diz only said he had 'offed that geek.'"

  "Offed?"

  "Those are his words, exactly."

  "What was it Calloway gave you?"

  "Morris gave me nothing. I went there seeking information and left with nothing more than I arrived with. He couldn't answer my question."

  "He didn't give you a package or anything?"

  "How many ways would you like me to say the same thing? Morris gave me nothing. Morris didn't give me a package. I received nothing from Morris. Morris never even offered me a jelly donut. Morri…"

  "Okay, James." Philbin said, interrupting. "I get the picture. So why do you think Calloway would have told them he gave you something?"

  "You want me to speculate?"

  "Yes. Speculate."

  "Perhaps he knew they were going to kill him and figured I was equipped to take them down. A sort of 'revenge from beyond the grave' motive."

  "Was Calloway that calculating?"

  "Who's to say what anyone would be capable of under those circumstances?"

  "Why did you refuse to accept the package when Morris offered it to you?"

  I sighed loudly at Philbin's poor attempt to use the Reid interrogation technique by hitting me with a question that contradicted a previous statement I'd made in order to confuse me and trip me up. I picked up where I had left off a few seconds earlier. "Morris never offered me a jelly donut. He never offered me a cup of coffee. He never offered…"

  "Okay, okay, James. Enough."

  "Rephrasing a simple question altered to add an implicit suggestion that I'd committed perjury earlier isn't going to get you a different answer, Philbin."

  Philbin glared at me, then calmed and smiled. "Sorry. You know all the tricks, don't you?"

  "I received the same training at Quantico that you did. I don't claim to know all the tricks, but I don't need to. I've been completely honest about the meeting with Morris. We can remain here all day and into the night with me answering the same questions over and over, and the answers won't change. Morris gave me nothing, and I gave him nothing, despite what anyone might suspect. All we did was talk for about an hour, and then I left. What he might have told someone else, and for what reasons, won't change that."

  "Preliminary reports suggest that both of Delcona's men had already suffered fatal wounds when you decided to decorate your apartment walls with their brain matter. Why?"

  "Fatal doesn't mean dead until their hearts stop beating. Both were down but not out. Yes, they probably would have died from the first wounds, but before that happened they might have been able to take me with them. They were trying to do exactly that when I administered the final wounds."

  "Administered the final wounds? Is that how you describe murdering two men?"

  "It's a better description than the one you used. I was protecting my life. I make no apologies for that. If they hadn't continued to make an effort to kill me, I wouldn't have had to 'decorate my apartment walls with their brain matter.'"

  "You always shoot to kill, don't you?"

  "Always?"

  "You killed a man on the North Sea a few weeks ago with three forty-caliber slugs to the chest and another in Spain a week ago with two slugs to the chest after shooting him in the shoulder, a wound that left him unable to even hold his weapon. You don't take prisoners, do you?"

  "I do what's necessary to survive. The encounter with the assassin in Spain wasn't our first meeting. He had tried to kill me in a hotel bathroom in Amsterdam. On that occasion I'd been able to incapacitate him without shooting him, and disarm him. And, for the record, after I shot him in the right shoulder and he dropped his pistol, he picked it up with his left hand. He might have been ambidextrous."

  "Or you just didn't want him coming at you a third time, so you finished him off at your second encounter."

  "What's this about, Philbin? The British police and the Spanish police agreed that I was only defending myself. Neither filed charges against me."

  "I've been a Special Agent for fourteen years and have never once had to fire my weapon in the line of duty."

  "Bravo. Your point being?"

  "Perhaps you didn't have to use yours either. Perhaps you just like killing people when it can be justified."

  I knew what Philbin was doing now. He was trying to make me so angry I'd slip up and tell him something I didn't intend to. I said calmly, "I get no satisfaction from taking the life of another human being. I only do what's necessary to preserve my own."

  Philbin knew I was onto his game. Bad cops and former cops were the most difficult to catch and prosecute because they did know all the tricks and procedures. Philbin scowled at me, then stood up and left the interview room.

  ~ ~

  I'd been left sitting alone in the interrogation room for about twenty minutes, and I assumed the various law enforcement groups wanted to discuss the information I'd just reported. I had nowhere else to be, so I leaned back in the chair and thought about where my life was going from that point forward. The more I'd thought about it, the more depressed I became. The loss of close friends or family, either from death or simply the breakup of personal relationships, could create an enormous void in a person's life. I sometimes felt as though everyone was suddenly gone.

  It wasn't true of course; I still had many friends. But the sense of loss could be so acute at this point that some people decided they didn't even want to go on. I believed I was stronger than that, and I also knew the overwhelming sense of loss would diminish with the passage of time and as I established new relationships. Hell, I was only thirty-one-years-old.

  I would just pick up the pieces of my life and continue. Even if I was to be separated from the FBI, I still had my writing career, as weak as that had been, with a slightly distant-but-solid relationship with fans of the free stories I posted onl
ine. Most importantly, my finances were rock solid. The recovery fees I'd received from my sideline work had enabled me to begin seriously looking for a co-op in New York City. As everyone knows, buying property in Manhattan doesn't happen without a sound financial footing.

  My reverie had been interrupted by the return of Philbin. "Okay, James, ADIC Sobert says you can go for now."

  I'd left without saying anything further, but I wondered how I'd done with the stress-monitoring equipment. There could be no doubt that I was under stress. I had just killed two human beings, after all, or at least what passed for human beings in some places these days, so I imagined any stress level of my testimony would be acceptable as long as there were no serious spikes during the questioning.

  After retrieving my suitcases from the locker room, I'd headed for the elevators. The security folks in the lobby again stared at me as I passed them and crossed to the exit doors. I managed to hail a cab at the curb, and the cabbie popped the trunk but didn't offer to assist me with my suitcases.

  I'd instructed the cab driver to head to a wine shop where I knew they handled the better vintages, and I learned I was in luck. The proprietor said he had the Mascarello Barolo I was looking for. He disappeared into the back and was gone for what seemed like five minutes, but when he returned, he had three bottles of the wine in his arms.

  After paying for the spirits, I'd returned to the waiting cab and asked the driver to take me to a midtown hotel. I wanted to forget the day's events for a few hours. At least as much as possible.

  I hadn't really intended to get blind stinking drunk, but that's apparently what happened. I couldn't help but wonder if I'd stayed in the hotel for the entire time or possibly gone out and done something I'd deeply regret later. I wished I could remember.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  Two days of insobriety continued to impose its expected physical toll on my body. After straightening up the hotel suite, I tried to sleep, but the little man wielding a sledgehammer inside my head made that impossible. I continued to hydrate, pop aspirin from the small bottle I always carried in my shaving kit, and stare up at the ceiling as I lay on the bed, trying to mentally block the pain.

  I wanted to think about something more pleasant, but my thoughts kept returning to that terrible night in my apartment. Had it really been only three days ago? I had never met Delcona or even seen him in person, but the television news image of his smiling face as he'd left the courthouse a free man the year before kept playing in my head. The government's latest effort to convict him on racketeering charges had failed when all eyewitnesses suddenly developed amnesia regarding their previous knowledge of Delcona's activities.

  I realized that my mind wasn't going to allow me to lose myself in some more pleasant distraction, so I focused on the events in my apartment. I reviewed everything in minute detail from the moment I'd arrived at my building, trying to determine how the outcome might have been different— better different. But everything pointed to an outcome that could only have been worse. The New York City government had done an effective job of disarming law-abiding citizens while leaving weapons in the hands of criminals who didn't bother to obey the law. Fortunately, not everyone had bowed to the government's conviction that they must adopt a persona of impotency and humble submission when they came face to face with an armed criminal. If Billy hadn't taken the action he had, my death at the hands of those two thugs had been almost assured. His efforts definitely saved my life. I wished I could have saved his.

  It was after eight a.m. when I first realized my headache was almost gone. As I stood at the tenth-floor window, staring down at the growing snarls of traffic on the streets far below, the tragic events of three days ago seemed like a nightmare from which I couldn't awaken. Right then, my best friend should have been starting his workday in his cab instead of lying on a slab at the morgue with a tag hanging off one of his toes. The thought made me want to get some wine and start another drunk, but it would be all too easy to slip into a sort of permanent daze. I couldn't let that happen. And besides, I had far too much to do.

  My first call was to the morgue. At first I received the standard response that I should call later and speak to a clerk, but when I identified myself as an FBI Special Agent, the morgue attendant made a small effort to check the files. He reported that Billy's body was still awaiting the required autopsy.

  Whenever there was suspicion or evidence of violence or foul play, when the death may be the result of a mysterious disease, when an otherwise healthy person died while unattended by a physician, or under any circumstances where a physician was uncomfortable signing a death certificate without an investigation, an autopsy was required.

  There was no doubt that Billy and the two underworld thugs had died as a result of violence, and the backlog of autopsy cases meant that it could be five to seven more days before the morgue was ready to release Billy's body to a funeral home.

  Billy's family lived in or near Binghamton, N.Y., so I would need my computer for my next call. As I opened my suitcase, I saw the box containing the beer stein I'd purchased in Amsterdam, but which I'd never had a chance to give to Billy. I was sure he would have loved it. My first impulse was to smash it against the wall. But that wouldn't change past events, so I carefully removed the stein from the box and pulled off the packing material to see how it had fared on the trip. It still looked as good as the day I'd picked it up at the secondhand shop. The store owner had done a fantastic job of fixing the chip in the top rim. If I hadn't known exactly where to look, I would never have known it had been damaged.

  The man had also done a fantastic job with the old cigarette lighter I'd purchased there. Lengthened by two centimeters, it was now a better fit in my large hand. During World War II and through the nineteen forties and fifties, probably seventy percent of men carried a Zippo lighter. Back then, most people probably would have noticed my lighter's increased length. But that was then. I was betting that few would ever recognize today that it had been lengthened. The shop owner had also polished and buffed the exterior silver surface to a brilliant luster. It looked almost as good as the day it had been manufactured. I removed it from my pocket and flicked open the top. Using my thumb to spin the rough steel wheel, I saw sparks jump towards the wick and watched as a flame flared into being. I stared at the small fire for a couple of seconds before closing the lighter and returning it to my pocket.

  After carefully repacking the stein in the cardboard box and placing it on the desk, I removed my laptop computer from the suitcase. As an IT professional, I had come to rely on my computer like people used to rely on their day planners. Most folks these days used a smartphone to keep track of everything, but with the built-in GPS, smart phones allowed other people to track all movements of the smartphone holder. That both bothered me and frightened me. Some people, upon hearing that, called me paranoid, but I preferred to think of myself as being security aware. If I wanted people to know exactly where I was, I preferred to tell them.

  My immediate need was for the address file that served as my link to the world. I hoped the phone number of Billy's familial home in upstate New York was in there, but if it wasn't, I could probably find it on the net.

  I was in luck. The address record for Billy contained his parents' names, address, and phone number. But now that I had the information, I hesitated to place the call in case they were late risers. I decided to wait until after nine a.m. In the meantime, I unpacked both of my suitcases because I didn't know how long I was going to be staying at the hotel. I knew I would look like an unmade bed if I went anywhere right now, so I called down to have a valet come retrieve my suits so they could be cleaned and pressed. I considered having the valet take and discard my blood-soaked suit as well, then decided against it. I didn't want to give the wrong impression to the hotel staff, which was probably already aware that I had holed up with enough wine for a dinner party.

  The ruined clothes, already wrapped in a plastic evidence bag
I'd gotten down at FBI Headquarters to protect my other clothes, went back into my suitcase. Then I sat down to wait until I felt it was late enough to call Billy's family. I let my thoughts drift to the days ahead. Delcona had sent his thugs to retrieve me and the gizmo, but I had survived and his people were dead. I didn't believe for a second that would be the end of it. But the firefight in my apartment, combined with the reappearance of Morris's body in the New Jersey swamp, had turned another, even brighter spotlight in his direction. For a while at least he would probably be a good little mob boss and not start any shooting wars. As long as I stayed in the hotel, I was reasonably safe— first because no one knew where I was, and second because there were far too many witnesses around. But I couldn't hide here forever.

  After a valet had picked up my clothes, I placed the call to Billy's folks. They had already been notified of his death and were naturally grief-stricken, but they had received few details and were anxious to hear anything I could tell them. In as gentle a manner as possible, I related the events of the night. But as I relived my last minutes with Billy, my voice choked up and tears began welling up in my eyes. Okay, so the hard-bitten persona I'd been trying to project in recent months hadn't fully taken hold— yet. Perhaps in time I'd be able to appear as indifferent as Osborne and Snow, but I also hoped I never completely lost touch with my gentler side.

  Once we made it through the tragedy of the event, it was time to make funeral arrangements. I offered to pay for accommodations at my hotel for all family members coming to the city for the services, but Billy's folks said they preferred to have the wake and funeral in Binghamton. Billy's body would then be interred in the same cemetery where other family members had been laid to rest for generations. I told them I'd pick up all expenses for bringing the body to Binghamton and cover all the expenses of the coffin, wake, and burial. They tried to argue but I refused to budge. I knew they were nearing retirement age, and I didn't want them draining their retirement savings to pay for the funeral. I owed Billy big time, and this would be a small down payment on that debt. They finally agreed to let me pick up all the costs. I asked them to make arrangements with a local funeral home to accept Billy's body, and I would have it taken there when it was released by the morgue officials.