by Sandra Brown
Shaw didn’t move except to cut his eyes over to him. “Want to lower that?”
“Not really.”
The prosecutor edged around Shaw and entered the room, chortling, “You should see your faces. I guess we pulled it off.”
Shaw watched Jordie’s lips part in disbelief. Or disillusionment, maybe. In a barely audible voice, she said, “You’re an FBI agent?”
“Guilty.”
With obvious reluctance the black agent lowered his pistol. “You son of a bitch. I almost shot you.”
Shaw turned his head and sized him up. “I don’t like you all that much, either.”
“Gentlemen, no need for hostility,” Dupaw said. He turned to Shaw and added under his breath, “I told you that I should come in first to neutralize the situation, but did you listen?”
Joe Wiley stepped around the table. Shaw could practically see smoke coming from his ears, and, frankly, he didn’t blame him. “If you’re FBI, I’m a Chinaman.”
“I caught ’em on a slow day.” If Shaw had felt better, he might have grinned. But he couldn’t muster the energy.
The woman beside Jordie had righted her chair and took her elbow in an attempt to guide her back into it. Jordie shook her off and remained standing. Shaw had only ever seen her in the jeans and top she’d worn into the bar. Today she was dressed for business in a navy pants suit with a pink scooped-neck top underneath the jacket.
But he was less interested in her wardrobe than in her facial expressions, which had evolved from dismay upon seeing him, to absolute fury upon learning how he had misled her, big-time.
He didn’t blame her, either.
Wiley propped his hands on his hips. “Badge?”
“Can’t carry one. But if you want to call Atlanta and check me out, I can give you a password.”
“Do that.”
Shaw gave him his code, the number to call, and the individual to ask for. The super-stud agent pecked the phone number into his cell and stepped out of the room to make the call.
Joe Wiley still regarded Shaw with blatant mistrust. “You work out of the Atlanta office?”
“When I work out of an office at all.”
“I can vouch for him,” Xavier Dupaw said with overblown self-importance. “I was about to indict him for that double murder. NOPD, you and Agent Hickam, everybody in Orleans Parish was pressuring me to do so.”
“I was wasting time in jail,” Shaw said to Wiley. “I had to tell him.” He nodded toward the prosecutor.
Dupaw said, “Mr. Kinnard revealed himself to be a covert operative.” The last two words were spoken in a stage whisper.
Wiley, frowning, grumbled, “We were sure you’d killed those two guys.”
“I did,” Shaw said. “They got wise to a DEA officer who was working the same case. To protect him…” He raised a shoulder.
Dupaw placed his right hand over his heart and said to Wiley, “I would have liked to share all this with you, but only I and the DA were entrusted with the classified information.”
Wiley gave a snort of distaste over the prosecutor’s condescension.
The other agent reentered the room. “He checks out.” He looked none too happy about it.
Shaw turned to Xavier Dupaw. “You can go now.”
The prosecutor blustered. “This is the thanks I get for coming to your rescue? If it weren’t for me, you would still be chained to your hospital bed.”
“Thanks. But you’ve served your purpose.”
“This case is far from over.”
“But it’s not your show. It’s federal. Crimes against the state were committed in another parish and outside your jurisdiction.” Shaw motioned him toward the door.
Dupaw sputtered, but eventually shot his cuffs and stalked out, peevishly banging the door shut behind himself.
Shaw looked at Wiley. “Mind if I sit?”
He was woozy and didn’t want to ruin his dramatic entrance by falling flat on his face in a dead faint. Wiley pointed him into a chair across the table from Jordie. Live coals didn’t smolder as hot as she was. Her rigid posture, the stern set of her lips, her glare, all attested to her barely controlled wrath as she sat down.
Shaw expelled a long breath. “Look. Jordie. I know I put you through a meat grinder. But I was—”
“‘Son of a bitch’ doesn’t come close to characterizing you.” She practically spat the words at him, then turned her head aside as if the very sight of him sickened her.
The fraught silence that followed was broken by the woman beside her, who quietly introduced herself as Jordie’s lawyer. Shaw acknowledged the introduction, but they didn’t shake hands. He had much more to say to Jordie, but there was business to attend to, she wasn’t in the mood to listen, and the real spoiler was that they were on opposing sides of a criminal investigation.
Wiley said, “Was Morrow in on this charade?”
Shaw nodded. “Couldn’t have done it without him. He’s a good man. Once Dupaw and I brought him into the loop, he facilitated everything. Ordered an ambulance, recruited a couple of guys from his department who he could trust to drive it. Got his dispatch operator to call the hospital administrator in Houma to inform him of the near-fatal shooting.”
“He bought it,” Wiley said.
“Good to know. The dispatcher told him it was a delicate police matter, some cock-and-bull like that, and ordered him not to put the media wise to it. Which he wouldn’t have anyway, because it might set him in the hot seat for green-lighting my premature release and making his hospital look bad.”
It had been necessary to take the surgeon into their confidence. He’d reluctantly removed the staples from Shaw’s incision and given him a supply of oral medications and extra bandages to take with him. Morrow had them in his squad car.
Thinking of that, Shaw said, “Morrow remembered to retrieve my boots from the hospital room closet before we left. I was rolled out, bare-assed in a hospital gown and handcuffed to a stretcher. Morrow went into a Walmart and bought me a change of clothes. Here I am.”
“Cover still protected,” Wiley said.
“Hopefully. For the time being anyway.”
“Why isn’t Morrow with you now?” Wiley asked.
“On the way here, he got an emergency call from his office. Couldn’t delegate. Had to turn back. He dismissed the ambulance and drivers. Dupaw brought me the rest of the way in his car. Morrow said to tell you that he’d check in with you as soon as he could.”
“Would have been nice for y’all to let us in on this,” Wiley said.
“Morrow was handier. He’d left my room just a few minutes before Dupaw showed up. Morrow wanted to bring you in, but the fewer people involved in the ruse, the more likely it would work. I convinced him of that.”
“How?”
“By telling him that was how it was gonna be.” He let that settle then glanced at Jordie, who had resumed glaring at him. “Besides, Morrow knew you had your hands full here.”
Wiley’s partner chimed in, “And letting us in on it would have spoiled your big entrance.”
Shaw looked up at him and decided to let the snide remark pass. “You’re Hickam?”
“That’s right.”
“I was denied the pleasure of meeting you yesterday during my arrest.”
The agent looked down at the spot where Shaw’s shirttail was draped over his holster. “Where’d you get the piece?”
“When I asked for my weapons back, Morrow obliged.”
“‘Weapons’ plural?”
“He keeps a pistol in his boot.” That from Jordie, who nastily added, “What kind of hit man carries only one gun?”
Matching her testiness, Shaw said, “A dead one.”
While the smoke was still clearing from that exchange, Joe Wiley asked, “What about the playboy and corrupt state policeman in Mexico?”
“They resisted arrest.” He said it deadpan and nobody commented. “By the way, whichever agency that girl belongs to needs to bring
her in and give her some better training.”
“Girl?”
“The one who left the party with the three of us that night. She hadn’t been at the villa for five minutes before I marked her as heat.”
“Only call girl to leave her clothes on?” Wiley asked.
“No, first one out of them. She’s too eager. She needs to learn subtlety. The idea is to make them try to impress her, not the other way around. If she doesn’t learn that, she’s gonna give herself away and die bloody. Find out which agency she works for and get word to them that I said so.”
Hickam and Wiley exchanged a look with eyebrows raised, but Hickam made a note of it on his iPad.
“I left the bodies where I knew they’d be found, along with a secret sign so our plant inside the state police would know it was me who took them out and would handle the mop-up, including all the paperwork required in Atlanta. I beat it across the border that night.”
“How’d you get across undetected?” Hickam asked.
“That’s classified.” Unfazed by the other agent’s resentful glower, Shaw continued, “I beat it here quick as I could. I’d waited months for a call from Mickey Bolden and didn’t want to keep him waiting.”
Wiley and Hickam continued to ask about his journey from Mexico to New Orleans. Most of their inquiries he answered with, “Classified.” And mainly, it was. But it was also a convenient dodge. He didn’t want to waste time on something irrelevant while Billy Panella and Josh Bennett were still at large.
Shaw tipped his head toward Jordie. “Do you have her cell phone?”
“In Wiley’s office,” Hickam said.
“Would you get it?” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “Please?”
With a look, Hickam consulted Joe Wiley, who okayed him with a nod. Hickam left the room. The four of them sat in strained silence until he returned with Jordie’s bagged cell phone.
Shaw said, “When I came in, you were grilling her about who called her to the bar. Check her call history. Friday night, there are two incoming calls from an unknown number.”
“We’ve called it back several times,” Hickam said. “Never got an answer.”
“Call it again.”
Hickam removed the phone from the bag, went to the log and tapped the screen. A few seconds later the phone inside Shaw’s shirt pocket began to ring. He took it out and showed them Jordie’s cell number in the readout. “This is a burner I bought the day I arrived in New Orleans, just before I hooked up with Mickey Bolden.”
“Okay,” Wiley said. “Friday night. What really went down? Why you’d call Ms. Bennett to the bar?”
“I’m coming to that.” Suddenly struck with a wave of dizziness, he propped his elbow on the table and tunneled his fingers through his hair. He was tempted to rest his forehead in his palm and close his eyes. But, afraid he’d be unable to reopen them, he lowered his hand, ignored the throbbing in his side, and plowed on.
“When I talked to Mickey from Mexico and he told me that Josh Bennett was on the loose, I figured he was the target we’d been contracted to hit. Then I got here. Shocker. Bennett’s sister was the target. Killing a woman? Jesus.” He shook his head. “Underscored just what a cowardly scumbag Panella is.
“But I had to appear indifferent to Mickey so I could stay cheek by jowl with the asshole and learn what I could. Mickey and I spent all day Friday following Jordie around Tobias. She went home around six. We watched her house for a while. It looked like she was tucked in for the night.”
“We had a sheriff’s deputy surveilling her,” Wiley said.
Shaw scoffed. “And doing a piss-poor job of it. He’d just as well have had a Maglite on his head. I spotted him right away, and I couldn’t believe he didn’t mark Mickey and me.” Looking at Jordie, he said, “You knew he was there, didn’t you? You shook him on the way to the bar.”
“Go to hell.”
He ignored the putdown. “Doesn’t matter now, I guess.” Turning back to his FBI colleagues, he continued, “Mickey and I went to a diner for supper, and that’s when he laid out the plan.”
“Plan A?” Jordie said with insincere sweetness.
Shaw looked at her, but didn’t respond. Wiley asked, “What was plan A?”
Shaw went back to Wiley. “To hit her early the next morning at her house. Make it look like a burglary turned deadly. Dumbest idea I’d ever heard and told Mickey so. It was rushed, rash, and breaking into her house was an engraved invitation to leave evidence.
“But Mickey said that was the plan. End of discussion. That’s when I realized that I’d be left dead, too. He’d brought me in specifically to take the fall. The clock was ticking. I had to stop it.”
“By calling her?” Hickam asked. “Why didn’t you tip the sheriff’s office, or us?”
“I’ll get to that,” Shaw said, hedging. “I went along when Mickey suggested we grab a drink at that joint before checking into a motel. Before we went inside, I excused myself and followed the arrow pointing around back to the toilet.” He looked at Jordie. “That’s when I called you.”
“How’d you know how to reach her?” Wiley asked.
“Panella had given Mickey the skinny on her, everything, including her cell number. Mickey shared it all with me ’cause he thought I would be dead in a few hours, so what did it matter?”
“So back to why you called her…” Wiley said, leading him.
“Mistakenly, I thought that crossing paths with her the night before the hit—especially with a local cop on her tail—would rattle Mickey and Panella enough to cancel it. At the very least postpone it. Which would have given me time to hang with Mickey, work from the inside, possibly track down Josh and, more particularly, Panella. But, instead of telling us to back off, Panella ordered Mickey to go ahead, to pop her then and there. I couldn’t let that happen.”
He paused and locked eyes with Jordie, willing her to remember what he’d told her before sending her out to Joe Wiley.
She said nothing for a moment, then a terse “Thank you for saving my life.”
“You’re welcome.”
But he was far from forgiven. Still seething, she grated out, “Why did you do the rest of it?”
Without excuse or qualification or missing a beat, he answered. “Because I want that goddamn fucking Panella.”
When he’d appeared in the open doorway, Jordie had barely contained a cry of joy. Now she wanted nothing more than to scratch out his damn lying eyes.
“I have nothing to do with Panella,” she said. “Since you have the skinny on me, you should know that. Once Mickey was out of commission, why didn’t you tell me you were FBI? Or just leave me there and drive away?”
“Because your brother is a friggin’ fugitive, Jordie. You’re the one and only link to him, and Panella is at the end of that chain.”
“In other words, you decided to use me as bait.”
“Okay. If you like that word better. I called you to the bar primarily to jinx the hit. But it served a dual purpose.”
“What was the other?”
“To test your loyalty to Josh. I dropped his name; you burned rubber getting there.”
“You bastard.”
He didn’t blink. “It’s been said.”
She rolled her lips inward, clinging to her temper by a thread which was unraveling a little more with each word from his mouth. Clearly, he shared Wiley and Hickam’s suspicion that she had been, and possibly was still, involved on some level in her brother’s criminal activity.
Joe Wiley said, “Ms. Bennett, did you know that Josh reneged on his deal with us and had run off?”
“No. Not until he told me.”
Shaw said, “For whatever it’s worth, Wiley, she seemed shocked when I told her that Josh had been missing for four days. I don’t think she knew. But that didn’t cancel the possibility of her knowing something. I knew she would be afraid of me because she’d seen me kill Mickey. I figured I could use that fear to get information from her.”
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br /> Hearing him admit it snapped her control. She shot from her chair and, planting her palms on the tabletop, leaned across it toward him. “You badgered me for hours about that damn phone call!”
“Only after you lied about it.”
“You terrorized me.”
“I guess. To some extent.”
“There’s no extent to terrorism.”
“You’re right,” he said, raising his voice to match hers. “I kept at you, thinking that I’d wear you down until you let something slip about Josh or Panella, which could have proved vital to their capture.”
“You browbeat me about that call, and all along it was you.”
“What matters more than who called is that you responded. You came running in record time. You made sure you weren’t followed. When your surveillance failed to show up, either inside the bar or out on the parking lot, you flunked the test.”
“To hell with you and your test!”
“You shook that tail because you expected somebody to be waiting for you in that beer joint. Who?”
She was about to fire a comeback when her attorney gave the hem of her jacket a hard tug, pulling her back into her chair. Taking the advice being urgently whispered in her ear, she fell silent.
During her shouting match with Shaw, Wiley looked like a spectator at a tennis match, his head swiveling back and forth between them. Hickam kept up the infernal pecking on the screen of his iPad. She couldn’t help but wonder what he was taking down. The session was still being video recorded. Was Hickam adding color commentary, details they would later use against her?
She strived to mask the emotions roiling inside her.
Eventually, Shaw resumed, addressing her. “When I stopped to switch license plates, I used your phone to call myself, so I could show you later that I had tried that number.”
“You’re full of clever tricks.”
He raised a shoulder.
“And bullshit.”
“Effective bullshit.”
Her face burned when reminded of how effective his words, both sinister and provocative, had been. She wanted to kill him. “You called that phantom number several times, hinting that Josh might answer, knowing full well he wouldn’t.”