Dangerous Games

by Prescott, Michael

  “You mean this is it, then? This is the last time?” There was pitiful relief in the man’s voice.

  “It’s the last. We leave town after tonight. I hope your bags are packed.”

  “I’ll be ready. If you’ve got the papers.”

  “I’ve got them.”

  “Maybe I should take mine now.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s not like I’m going to run out on you.”

  “Then you won’t be needing them, will you?”

  No answer, just another nervous swallow of beer.

  “It’s a trade, jackoff,” Kolb said. “I give you the ID, you give me the account number. And not that there’s any mistrust involved, but I’ll be using a laptop with a wireless modem to check that bank account before you go anywhere.”

  “Don’t sweat it. Your half will be in there.”

  “Six million—that’s my share. Not a penny less.”

  “That’s if the city comes through with the ten mil tonight.”

  “They’ll come through. I have those assholes by the balls.” This wasn’t bravado. Kolb knew they would pay. They had to pay.

  “I really hate pressing our luck like this,” the other man said softly, his gaze fixed on his beer.

  “Since when did you start having opinions? And since when did I start to give a shit?”

  “I’m your partner.”

  “My silent partner.”

  “I have a say. It’s my ass on the line, too.”

  “Your ass. That’s for sure. Your lily ass would last about five minutes in maximum security.”

  “That’s why I don’t intend to go there. If you get caught, we’re both screwed.”

  “If I get caught,” Kolb said, “there’s always plan B.”

  There was a pause. “I know.”

  Kolb didn’t like the uncertainty he heard. “Listen, I need to know I can count on you. If I get picked up, you have to come through for me. You don’t, and I’ll give you up in a minute. You hear me?”

  “I hear you, God damn it. And I know what to do. Shit, I’m one step ahead of you. I already ran a recon mission.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means I went over to her house.”

  Kolb took a moment to figure this out. “Grant’s house? That might not’ve been smart, if McCallum’s been talking to her.”

  “She’s still the one you want to use, though, isn’t she? I mean, for plan B?”

  “Yeah,” Kolb said, tasting the words, “she’s the one.”

  “Okay, then. I had to check out her security.”

  “What’s the verdict?”

  “It’s a good system, but I can defeat it.”

  “Was this before or after you learned about McCallum?”

  “After.”

  “Then you must’ve known I wasn’t going to cancel tonight’s operation.”

  “I didn’t know what you were going to do. But I have the feeling that Grant is unfinished business with you. Even if we didn’t go tonight, you’d still have a bug up your ass about her.”

  “Can you blame me?”

  “I wouldn’t dare.”

  “Wise policy.” Kolb took the beer mug out of the other man’s grasp and downed a long gulp, then made a face. “What the fuck is this, mule piss?”

  “Light beer. Low-cal, low-carb.”

  “Jesus.” Kolb gave back the mug. “You know, there’s one advantage to McCallum meeting Grant. Now they’ve got a relationship. It gives us more leverage if you have to use her tonight.”

  “Which I pray to God I won’t.”

  Kolb smiled. “I doubt God is listening to your prayers.”

  “Or yours.”

  “I don’t pray. Prayer is for the weak. It’s a crutch for them to lean on—and a stick to beat them with. Religion teaches the meek and humble to be even more meek and humble. That way they can be even more easily controlled. Turn people into sacrificial lambs, and they’ll trip all over themselves marching to the abattoir.”

  “Right, right.” His partner wasn’t listening. He had no head for philosophy.

  Kolb switched back to more practical matters. “There’s no chance Grant saw you?”

  “I was discreet.”

  “Well, maybe you’re pulling your load, after all.”

  “Let’s just hope we don’t have to use her.”

  “Yeah. And let’s also hope you remember how bad you’d look on TV doing the perp walk.”

  “You trying to scare me?”

  “Just appealing to your self-interest. That’s what’ll motivate you to stick with me, not any concept of honor among thieves. I know you don’t go for that. You’re too well educated to really believe in anything.”

  His partner bristled. “Like you’re so goddamn superior?”

  “I am superior,” Kolb said complacently.

  “Right, I know, Nietzsche and the superman and all that crap. Nietzsche went insane, you know. He died in a mental hospital.”

  “It’s Hegel I like, not Nietzsche.”

  “Same difference.”

  “If they put Nietzsche in the nuthouse, it wasn’t because he was insane. It was because they have to lock up the superior man.”

  “I’ve heard this speech before.”

  “You haven’t heard shit. If you’d heard, you would understand.”

  “We don’t have time for this.” His partner started to get up.

  “Sure we do.” Kolb grabbed his arm and forced him back into his seat. “Take a few extra minutes on your lunch break. Relax. Chill.” He pronounced the last word with a keen sarcastic edge. “You ever ask yourself why I’m doing this?”

  “For the money.”

  “Go deeper.”

  “For revenge.”

  “Still not deep enough.”

  “I give up. Why?”

  “Because,” Kolb said, “this is how I teach the world a lesson. I show them who they’ve been dealing with. They thought they could break me? I’m fucking unbreakable. I’m more resilient than they ever guessed. I survived Chino and came back smarter and tougher than before. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

  “That’s Nietzsche.”

  “Yeah. And there’s nothing crazy about it.” He grabbed the mug again and took another swig. What the hell, low-cal or not, it was still beer. “They wanted me to bow down. But I’m making them bow to me. Making this whole city bow down. They have to recognize my will. They have to obey me. I intend to make them see.”

  “See…what?”

  “Who I am. Their master. One of the elite.”

  His partner leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “You want them to identify you, don’t you?”

  Kolb didn’t deny it. Nor did he give back the beer. “The great artist always signs his work. When this is over, people will be singing my song for a thousand years. Orpheus went down into the underworld and almost brought back his bride. Failed at the end, and lost her. But I’m going down into the underworld tonight, and coming up with ten million dollars. And the world will know my name and tremble. I’ll be a fucking legend. All those asshole serial killers who got caught—they’re nothing compared to me. They never held a city hostage.”

  “Mobius did.”

  Kolb paused with the mug halfway to his mouth. “Briefly.”

  “Is that why he’s your hero?”

  “He’s not my hero. You’ve never understood about that. I don’t admire failure. And I don’t need heroes. I don’t need anybody.”

  “No one’s going to write any songs about you. They don’t write songs about criminals.”

  Kolb finished the beer. “The Iliad is a song, and Achilles was a criminal. A pillager and a warlord and a straight maniac. The Odyssey—that’s a song, too, and Ulysses was a thief and a pirate. You look at any great man, and you see a criminal. What was Caesar except a killer? But they put up statues to him.”

  “I hope you’re not expecting any statues.”

 
; “Fuck, with my share of the money, I can buy my own. I’m on the verge of immortality. All I have to do is take care of one small problem. Which gives me an idea. You reprogram the phone for me?”

  “Yeah.” His partner extracted it from his jacket. “Here it is.”

  Kolb took it—an older cell phone, the same one he’d used to place the call to the mayor’s office during the Paula Weissman job. Before each abduction, his partner programmed it with a new serial number and phone number, making it a clone of somebody’s legitimate cell phone. Any calls made on it could not be traced to Kolb.

  “I want you to call me on the cell whenever McCallum is coming or going,” Kolb said.

  “Coming or…?”

  “Coming to the office, if she’s out in the field. Or leaving the office, if she’s already there. Give me as much of a heads-up as possible.”

  “I thought you were going to wait till tonight.”

  “I’m not much for procrastinating.” He pushed the empty mug across the table. “If I can take her down now, I’ll do it.”

  “I don’t know, Kolb….”

  “Don’t say my goddamn name.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And don’t tell me you don’t know. I’ve been to the Federal Building. Went there once or twice when I was a cop. Nice big parking lot, open to the public. Of course she might be using the underground garage—but I’m betting that as a visitor, she parks outside. If I see her there by herself, no one else around, I can blip her, easy.”

  “She probably knows what you look like.”

  “She’ll never even see me.”

  His partner restlessly picked up the mug and transferred it from hand to hand. “This is not a good idea.”

  “It’s the only idea. Look, either I do her this afternoon, or I do her tonight. Sooner beats later, right?” He didn’t wait for a response. “You just give me a call when she’s entering or leaving. With any luck, I can be in position to give her a little love tap.”

  “Killing a federal agent—”

  “Is a crime? Every goddamn thing we’ve done is a crime.”

  “I was going to say, it’ll put the whole city on high alert.”

  Kolb snorted. “Like they aren’t on high alert already? Take a look at the weather forecast. Rain, rain, rain commencing by ten P.M.” His voice hardened. “Just do it. No excuses.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “That sounds a little too noncommittal.” Kolb pushed himself forward, dominating the small table. “I need to know you’re with me. Not just on this. On everything. Plan B and all the rest.”

  The other man was staring into the beer glass again. “Of course I’m with you.”

  “Look me in the eye and say it.”

  “That’s kind of dramatic.”

  “Look at me—and tell me.”

  Finally his partner lifted his gaze and made eye contact. “I’m with you. In for a dime, in for a dollar. Or ten million dollars.”

  The statement seemed a little too humorous. “This isn’t something you want to joke about,” Kolb warned.

  “It’s no joke. I’m in it.” The man raised his empty glass. “All the way.”

  19

  Tess was driving east toward downtown LA and an unscheduled meeting with Deputy District Attorney Snelling when her cell phone rang.

  “McCallum,” she answered, and heard Josh Green’s voice.

  “Hello, Tess.” He sounded curiously subdued.

  “Checking up on me?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Did you water my plants?”

  “Uh, yeah, I did. Look, I’ve got some news, and it’s not good.”

  His tone finally registered with her. “What is it?”

  He told her. She listened with the phone at her ear, driving the car without conscious thought.

  “Okay,” she said when he was through. “I see.”

  “I’m sorry, Tess.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s not your…well, you know.”

  He’d been about to tell her it wasn’t her fault. “I know,” she said, though she didn’t. “Thanks, Josh.”

  “How, uh, how’s everything there?”

  She couldn’t have a conversation with him now. “Talk to you later,” she said, ending the call.

  She drove on, her vision narrowed by a fringe of dampness at the corners of her eyes.

  Coming up on her right was the spire of a church. On impulse she swung the Crown Vic into the empty parking lot. She killed the engine and sat in the car, wondering why she’d stopped. There was no reason for her to be here. She hadn’t been in a church in months—not since she’d looked into the trash bin behind the minimart and seen Danny Lopez. She wasn’t sure why she’d stayed away. Maybe she hadn’t felt worthy to go.

  But that was the wrong attitude. It wasn’t a question of worthiness. The most unworthy were the ones who were most welcome. The prodigal son and all that. Right?

  “Right,” she said.

  She left the car and ascended the steps to the main doors. As she entered, she realized she was carrying her gun in her coat. Bringing a gun into church was probably a sin in itself. But she figured she could get away with it. Even in LA, there were no metal detectors in churches—not yet.

  Out of habit she bowed at the knee just inside the narthex, then proceeded into the nave. The church was empty. Dim lighting from recessed lamps limned rows of straight-backed pews. Stained-glass windows let in faint daylight, illuminating scenes from the Way of the Cross. Behind the altar hung a small crucified Christ, frozen in his timeless suffering.

  She took a seat near the back, reluctant to go forward, feeling like an intruder. She sat motionless, breathing gently in the great quiet.

  There was a time when she’d been a stranger to her faith. That was after Paul Voorhees died—the only man she could honestly say she’d loved, in the full sense of the word, not simply as a lover but as a partner in life. For him to have been taken from her was an assault on any meaning, any spiritual purpose in the world.

  Slowly, by degrees, she’d allowed herself to rediscover what she’d lost. Other people could bear to exist in a universe leached of values, a random agglomeration of particles and planets held together by blind forces, proceeding only to oblivion. She could not.

  Her belief wasn’t what it had been in childhood, the naive acceptance of every tenet and doctrine. She had no particular commitment to theological niceties. She was willing to grant that a great deal of her religion was legend and symbol, ritual and tradition—myth, miracle, and authority, in the words of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Even so, she loved some of the symbols and traditions—the musty smell of the missal, the flicker of candles, the great ethereal music of the mass.

  But the surface trappings didn’t really matter. It was odd how people could get so caught up in the rites and the sacred stories, which were no more than the vocabulary of faith, a language of symbols. The symbols varied from faith to faith, and most people accepted whichever ones they were born into, just as they accepted whatever language they were raised in. The particulars were arbitrary, but the underlying meaning was not. The imagery and symbolism were a way of reaching beyond the mundane world, into a transcendent awareness—to escape from pettiness, worry, jealousy, hatred, fear, if only for a few moments, and to lose oneself in something higher, something timeless and perfect. To defeat the ego and find the higher self.

  That was the truth behind her faith and behind all faiths, a constant truth, however it had been mythologized and ceremonialized. It was a truth she couldn’t phrase in words or defend with logic, but that was all right. She had enough of words and logic in her working life. She came to church to exercise another part of her being, a part that was neither analytical nor analyzable, but real. Maybe it was the realest part of all.

  When she felt ready, she made her way down the aisle and knelt at the altar rail. Eyes shut, she prayed. She wasn’t sure what she was praying for. Yes, she w
as. She wanted relief. Relief from the load of guilt and self-accusation, the dead weight on her shoulders, dragging her down.

  “Come to me”—the Bible verse drifted through her mind—“all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.”

  She crossed herself and said, “Amen.” But she didn’t fool herself. She felt no different. Nothing had changed.

  She wanted to leave but couldn’t find the strength. She sank into a pew in the front row and wondered if she’d done something wrong, asked for the wrong thing, or if she really wasn’t worthy, after all.

  “Good morning.”

  She looked up and saw a young priest bending over her. “I’m all right,” she said automatically, though she knew the tears on her cheeks gave the lie to her words.

  The priest regarded her with sympathy. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

  “I’m afraid it’s a long time since I’ve been to confession.”

  “My door is open,” he said with a nod toward a corner of the room.

  She had only painful memories of childhood visits to the confessional. And she had nothing to tell this earnest young man. He would never understand the problems she faced, the pressures, the choices, the compromises. He’d removed himself from the world, and she was part of the world, up to her elbows in it, and soiled by it, unclean….

  “I thought confession was taken on Saturday afternoon,” she whispered.

  “The schedule isn’t carved in stone.”

  “I’m sure you’ve got other things to do. I don’t want to waste your time.”

  He smiled. “This is what they pay me for.”

  She was sure she would say no, but she surprised herself. “Maybe it would help…just for a minute…”

  “Drop in whenever you’re ready.”

  She wasn’t sure how long she sat in the pew, unwilling either to approach the confessional or to leave the church. Eventually she decided she was being a coward. Cowardice was hateful to her. She sometimes thought it was the only mortal sin.

  She got up and entered the small, dark room. Some churches had done away with anonymous confessions, but this one was more traditional. There was the sliding grille, and the heavy darkness, and the strange, floating, disembodied sense of guilt that seemed to hover over the room.