After that, it all happened so slowly. There was enough time for me to turn and see the expression of horror on Hemmingway’s face before Rinehart blasted her at full center mass.
Friction Commodities had a large office, but a shotgun in any enclosed space is loud enough to stun. My ears rang for a few long heartbeats, and then I realized Davie was screaming.
(Well, Davie and everyone else in the room except for me and Ami, but hers was the only voice I heard.)
Hemmingway was… Let’s see, how can I put this gently…
Can’t, sorry. Gently had nothing to do with this.
Hemmingway was dead but she hadn’t realized it yet. Rinehart had shot her at close range from the side. The back of her clothing and most of her flesh was missing; everyone in the office could see her spine, way too many ribs before the flood of blood turned it all bright red… She was still moving, still trying to talk… Her ruined hand reached out to Rinehart...
The whole scene probably only a second or two, but still took her corpse an eternity to fall down.
I glanced over at Ami. She was yelling at Rinehart to put down the shotgun. He was complying, confused and scared half to death that she had suddenly turned her weapon on him.
“Josh!” Davie was shaking me by the shoulders. “Josh, whose blood is that?”
I looked down. My legs were covered in red gunk; Robert’s too. I ran my hands over our legs; Robert didn’t respond, so I assumed either he was fine or in deep shock.
“We’re okay,” I told her. “I think this is castoff from Hemmingway.”
Robert moaned and passed out. I caught him before his head hit the floor.
“Did you call an ambulance?” Davie asked.
“Yeah, and the police. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”
She helped me drag Robert a few feet away from the blood and gunk. You always assume a floor is level until you spill something, and what was left of Hemmingway was following the hidden slope towards the unconscious man. We both recognized that letting poor Robert wake up in a puddle of the stuff would be unspeakably rude.
“Were you really a negotiator?” she asked as we hoisted him up on a nearby couch.
“Nope. I was a twenty-four-year-old rookie. You think the FBI would have let me anywhere near a hostage situation?”
Davie gaped at me.
“But we should probably keep that to ourselves,” I said.
“Yeah,” she nodded. “Let’s do that.”
With Robert safely out of yuck’s way, Davie and I went to manage the hard stuff. There was an office full of people to pacify, not to mention the cyborg assassin still holding their boss at gunpoint. When Ami let Rinehart up, the crowd started to calm down; after we herded them towards the break room and away from the raw meat ruin of Hemmingway’s corpse, the beginnings of nervous laughter finally caught among them. Rachel once told me that nervous laughter is how the soul reasserts itself after a crisis. I have no idea if this is true, obviously, but I’ve always loved the idea behind it. I told a few jokes to keep the laughter coming.
I probably should have chosen different jokes. By the time Metro arrived, we had all come to terms with the moment. Perhaps too much so. Very little looks more suspicious than a room full of people having a great time when the butchered corpse of a coworker lies twenty feet away. So I had to smooth that over, too.
What a day.
And then Davie and I went home. Together.
What a day, indeed.
NINETEEN
My little autoscript in The Lexington’s computer database pinged me. I had set it to notify me when recognized a certain face. “Rinehart’s here,” I said to Davie.
She swore and slumped over the kitchen island. “I knew we didn’t have time to try that thing in the Jacuzzi!”
“If life has taught me anything,” I said, wiping a smear of flour from her face with my thumb, “it’s that there’s always time to try that thing in the Jacuzzi.”
I think we had been together about, oh, a month or so by then. Each week, she said it was time for her to move out, and each week, there was a reason to extend her stay. The excuses were getting thin; Davie was now claiming Ami was paying rent so she had effectively subletted Davie’s old condo, and Davie liked the Agent too much to evict her.
It worked for us. I was happy, Davie was happy, and once or twice a week Ami would come upstairs so the three of us could spend a night being enthusiastically happy together. I was never really alone (My therapist was having fits and using the term “setback” in almost every sentence, but whatever. I didn’t really need a therapist in the first place.), and I finally had the life I wanted.
There were no more death threats. Since there was no physical evidence to connect Viktor Kumarin to Hemmingway, and Hemmingway wasn’t around to testify, he had served his two days in jail and had gone back to Russia. Moldova had gone back to being yet another trivia question on Jeopardy! for us geographically-challenged Americans. And as of that morning, Davie had wrapped up the Afghanistan deal years ahead of schedule. Friction Commodities had become a major player in the rare earth minerals market.
Davie claimed she had no idea why her boss wanted to come over for dinner, but I had caught her doodling numbers in the fog on the glass shower doors. There were loads of zeros in them; Davie knew there was an enormous bonus in her future.
I was rather worried she might want to buy a horse.
“I’m here.” Rachel’s voice cut through my thoughts. “Shout out when you want Ami and me to come up.”
“Rinehart’s on his way,” I told her. “He’s early.”
“Perfect,” Rachel said. “We’ll make sure to accidentally bump into him on the elevator. See you in a minute.”
“Who are you talking to?” Davie asked. She had gotten used to my sudden silences; she still wasn’t fully comfortable dating someone with different people traveling through his head at any given moment, but she was trying.
“Rachel’s downstairs with Ami,” I said. “Spontaneous girls’ night in or something.”
“Invite them up!” Davie finished pouring the batter into the muffin tins and dusted off her hands. “We’ve got plenty of food. Can you ask them to bring up an extra bottle of wine?”
“You’re clear,” I told Rachel. “But bring booze.”
“Classy booze?”
“You know it.”
Rachel was the one who had put the pieces together. Her cop’s mind couldn’t find a good link between Kumarin and the sniper. The sniper was former U.S. military, returned from deployment in Iraq several years prior. Russian mobsters, even Russian mobsters trying to go straight, have snipers of their own to call when a dirty deed needed doing. Rachel had admitted it was possible that Kumarin had hired an American to cover his tracks in the same way Hemmingway had used the Moldovans, but it wouldn’t explain why Kumarin had shown anger when Squirrelface was shot.
The logical answer was the same one Ami and I had already tripped over: the sniper had been hired by someone else.
We had assumed Hemmingway had panicked and hired the sniper after the three Moldovans were arrested. Squirrelface needed to be eliminated to remove any connection between Friction Commodities and the Moldovans. Squirrelface had spoken English; the three Moldovans on their way to prison did not. Take out that one cog and crunch! The whole investigation machine locks up.
It was the easy answer, if you thought Hemmingway or Kumarin had been the only two involved. Which we did. For several weeks. Until Metro’s ongoing investigation of the sniper and his little box at Union Station linked Squirrelface’s murder to a similar event loosely connected to Rinehart’s previous company. As part of his plea, the sniper had confessed to several unsolved crimes, including the murder of one of Rinehart’s competitors. That crime had been written off as a random act of gun violence, and no one had looked closely at Rinehart as a suspect.
Rachel went back and checked the numbers. It was actually fairly shocking how many of Rinehart�
�s competitors had heart attacks at forty-five, or were the victims of suspicious accidents, or had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There wasn’t enough evidence for Metro to open a new line of investigation, and certainly not enough evidence to get a warrant for OACET to search through Rinehart’s digital records. (A warrant was a necessity: Rachel had torn Ami apart for sticking her brain where it didn’t belong. And then Rachel had come after me, for having let Ami do it. It was nearly a week before Ami and I could walk without limping.) Even his accidentally-on-purpose shooting of Hemmingway was on the record as a mistake made in a moment of passion. He saw the need to protect his employees and had decided to act. Hip-hip-hooray and all that.
There was very little we could prove, and nothing we could do.
We had figured Davie was safe, at least until the contracts were signed. After that was anyone’s guess; Rinehart’s own people didn’t seem to have his competitors’ suspiciously bad luck, but I couldn’t forget how he had killed Hemmingway right there in his own office.
Or how Hemmingway had died. I couldn’t get that image out of my head. Every time Davie went off to work, I shook.
Why not warn Davie, you ask? We wanted to, but she had a habit of confronting problems head-on and the three of us were aware that might end badly. Rachel, Ami, and I had unanimously agreed to wait and tell her after the deal had closed, so she wouldn’t quit without reason or storm into Rinehart’s office with her tiny mousegun blazing. We’d do our best to convince her to say nothing more than she had been offered a different job, and that she had stayed at Friction Commodities long enough to fulfill her obligations. I had already put out feelers and had located several local companies eager to hire someone with Davie’s experience in the Middle East, so her story would hold up if Rinehart followed up on it.
Which led to tonight’s dinner party. Rachel and Ami were here to help me make sure Rinehart didn’t slip anything in Davie’s wine during dinner, and after Rinehart had left they would back me up on what would likely turn into Davie and me’s first real fight as a couple.
(If I was especially lucky, Rinehart would try to shoot me, and Ami would be justified in popping his head off of his body like a bottle cap. The sadistic part of me was actually hoping for that: I figured that would be the only way I’d get out of sleeping on the couch.)
The first few hours went as planned. Drinks, dinner, Rinehart’s dramatic presentation of a large check made out to Davie, with his thanks.
Everyone seemed to be having a good time, but there was an undercurrent. I don’t think anybody but me and Rachel noticed, but Rinehart was out of synch with the rest of us. I’m not sure what triggered it. We weren’t actually expecting Rinehart to try to off Davie during the dessert course, so it’s not as though we were watching him over the barrel of a loaded gun. It was probably something simple, like how the cyborgs outnumbered the humans; early on, Rinehart twitched a bit whenever we lapsed into the outward silence of the link, and jumped when I changed the music or spun down the lights. After five minutes of this, I told Rachel and Ami we had to be on our best normalcy and we dropped all mention of OACET and technology from the conversation. I even dug through the sofa cushions to find the stereo remote.
It didn’t help. Rinehart continued to tick, like a bomb on a slow timer. Finally, I decided to apply my absolutely positive sure-fire one-hundred-and-ten-percent guaranteed approach for putting any businessman in a better mood: I reminded him I’m the best source of contacts he will ever meet.
I don’t enjoy name-dropping, but I do love to tell stories, and I’ve got this one about a Senator who might have gotten caught at the top of the George Washington Memorial in his birthday suit. I followed that with the one about the clowns (Seriously. Real circus clowns. Not a euphemism.) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which perked Rinehart’s interest to no end. He finally started to relax around the time Davie served her homemade cake, so I started telling the good ones. Like the one with the parrot and the golf cart and the Assistant Director of a Nameless Security Agency, and oh, if I didn’t know it’d send me directly to prison for treason, I’d tell that one right now.
And then Rinehart took a turn. Which was expected; conversation is a process. He was enjoying himself as he reminisced about the good old days back in Iraq. There was this Saudi prince who kept blocking his shipping orders, so Rinehart decided to wine and dine him. Well, he hadn’t realized that the “wine” part might cause problems in that region of the globe, so things escalated quickly. At the end of it, Rinehart was running through a Baghdad palace, a pack of dogs at his heels, wondering how he’d work around a very offended member of the Saudi royal family…
“Should have just dropped his photo off in a train station locker,” Ami quipped.
Rachel and I have spectacular poker faces. Ami, not so much. She realized what she had said and her eyes went wide.
“He’s on to us,” Rachel said. “He just went red.”
I didn’t need her abilities to know that we had been made. Even as he laughed at what might have been a joke, his shoulders had jerked and his eyes instinctively darted towards the exit.
“How in God’s sweet name did you ever make it as a covert assassin?” Rachel mentally sighed.
“I might be a little out of practice,” Ami admitted.
“Ladies? Plan B. On three… two… one…”
We stood as a single unit, then leaned over the table to rest our weight on our hands. We tilted our heads ever so slightly, like birds of prey sighting a rabbit; the effect was slightly spoiled by Rachel turning her head to the left instead of to the right like Ami and myself, but it was still creepy as hell.
Rinehart shrunk from us. “Don’t touch me,” he warned.
“As long as you don’t touch Davie,” the three of us said simultaneously. We had practiced this routine last night, just in case. I was pleasantly surprised at its effectiveness.
“Guys…” Davie had placed a light hand on my arm. “You’re scaring him. What are you doing?”
We didn’t take our eyes off of Rinehart. “Tell her,” we ordered. “Tell her now!”
“They know I hired the sniper,” he said before he could catch himself, then closed his eyes and groaned. “Get me a lawyer.”
“We’re done,” Rachel said. Ami started to protest through the link, and Rachel raised a single sharp eyebrow at her. “He asked for his lawyer. We’re done.”
“We’re all willing to go on the record as witnesses,” Rachel said, sitting down. “In case you have any ideas about backpedaling.”
“Chris, is this true?” Davie asked. She had moved away from the table when Rinehart confessed, and looked ready to run.
I wanted to go to her, but Rachel warned me off. “Don’t,” she said. “Davie’s terrified. Let them talk this through.”
Rinehart glanced at us, then nodded. “I did it to protect you,” he said. “I found out what Hemmingway was planning, so I had a friend from the military hire a guard to keep an eye on you.”
“He’s lying,” Rachel and I said to Ami.
“You two are very odd,” she said, and leaned in close to Rinehart’s ear. “You’re lying,” Ami whispered.
Rinehart jumped.
“The thing about snipers,” I said, walking towards the kitchen, “is they need a blind hide for a kill.”
“A blind hide,” Ami picked up the conversation as she circled behind Rinehart, “is a stationary location where a sniper can set up and wait for his target.”
“Your sniper needed to know that the kidnapper would be on a specific street at a specific time,” Rachel continued.
I topped off my wine and finished our thought. “Which means that if you hired a sniper, you already knew who his target was, and that he’d kidnap Davie.”
“Oh God!” Davie was horrified. “The GPS! You set the kidnapper up to die. You set him up to die in front of me!”
Rachel nodded. “We figure kidnapping you was a last-minute addi
tion to the plan, something Kumarin knew nothing about. He was furious to learn his business partners had killed one of the men he had hired.”
I shook my head. “The kidnapping was beyond dumb. I couldn’t understand why he did it. Turns out he was just following orders.”
“There’s no way you can prove that,” Rinehart said. “I’ll admit to hiring the sniper, but everything else is speculation.”
“Jail is jail,” Rachel shrugged. “We don’t care how you get there.”
And this is the other part of the story where things get weird again.
TWENTY
I’ll be honest. By that point in Rinehart’s confession, I thought it was over. I had taken Davie away from the dinner table, and had gotten out the good tequila and the limes—we had plenty of time for a margarita before the police arrived—and Ami and Rachel had him pinned between them. I assumed Rinehart was done.
Then Rachel shouted: “No!”
Her cry was both verbal and mental, and it startled the shit out of Ami and me. I dropped the tequila. I was already moving towards Davie as the bottle shattered on the travertine floor. My foot slipped in the new puddle, my legs went out from under me, and I banged my head on the counter as I fell.
Dazed, I watched as Ami spun towards Rinehart at the precise moment he hurled a full glass of wine in her eyes.
It takes a lot more than a beverage to slow Ami down, but it will throw off her aim. Rachel, who was lunging at Rinehart from the opposite direction, took the full force of Ami’s uppercut to her stomach. Rachel, gagging and unable to speak aloud, brought Ami down with a haymaker while shouting through the link that she should, “Stop punching her, Goddammit!”
I looked around for Rinehart. He was within arm’s reach of the front door, but by the time he had grasped the knob, I had locked him in. He wrenched the lock with all of his strength, then turned to look for another escape route, a weapon, something…
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