Collateral damage hj-2

by Austin S. Camacho

  “He hasn’t really done anything. And I’m afraid he might go crazy if some uniformed stranger was to push him. He knows you.”

  Hannibal was about to protest again. Then an image came to him, an image of Isaac Ingersoll on a rampage in a crowded government building. Somebody was sure to get hurt if the police handled the situation, maybe Isaac worst of all. And clearly Janet didn’t want that, despite all her husband had done to her. He was not there out of hate, but out of a confused love. If Hannibal was more likely to be able to defuse the situation, he really had no choice but to go. He might be able to end the possibility of violence with a little talk.

  Still, before he slipped his jacket on and pushed his Oakley sunglasses into place, he shoved his Sig Sauer P229 into the holster under his right shoulder.

  Hannibal slipped between the glass doors of the Department of Motor Vehicles. The ambient noise level was enervating, but he couldn’t pick out any words in any conversations. The counter had to be thirty feet long with maybe a dozen people standing behind it. The line of customers stretched the length of the counter then curled on itself, once, twice, six times. Almost every person in that line was talking, in one of four languages, not counting the small children who have a language all their own. The tone of that mass of indecipherable chatter was negative. It was a room full of frustration, and Isaac Ingersoll stood at the back of it, against the wall counter littered with forms to fill out. Match and powder keg in easy reach of one another.

  But what Hannibal saw in Isaac’s face was helplessness. He stared across the wide room at Janet who stood behind the eye test machine, working hard at working. When she spotted Hannibal, a huge breath escaped her, as if she were inflated with tension and his presence allowed some of it to leak out. Then her eyes went to her husband, and worry lines crowded her face. Hannibal followed her line of sight to Isaac who seemed to receive her psychic wave because he turned his head and saw Hannibal for the first time. His jaw set and his hands curled into fists.

  Hannibal kept his hands in front of him, one holding the other, and walked toward Isaac. Watching the bigger man’s eyes, Hannibal pushed himself closer, inside the danger area, less than arms’ length away. His neck craned and he stared up into that big Nordic face, showing no tension.

  “Could we just talk a minute?” Hannibal asked. “Maybe outside? All these people don’t need to be involved in this.” Then he turned his back to Isaac and eased away toward the door. A part of him anticipated a fist at the back of his head but he could not look back, could not offer Isaac an option.

  He pushed through the door and dim fluorescence was replaced by the scorching fireball hanging in the eastern sky. Hannibal walked a few steps toward it. When he turned, he stood in a corner of the parking lot. Isaac was no more than five feet away, raising his fists. But the sun was stabbing his eyes. Hannibal kept his hands and his voice low.

  “Isaac, I think you’re ready for a serious fight,” Hannibal said. “And you know what else? I think you could beat my face in.”

  Isaac shifted his feet into a more aggressive fighting stance. “You got that right, asshole.”

  Hannibal’s first goal was accomplished. He had the man talking. The next step was to get him thinking. “You know, your wife could have called the police and told them you were harassing her. Why do you suppose she didn’t do that?”

  While he talked, Hannibal floated lightly on his feet, keeping himself turned in such a way as to never offer Isaac a perfect target. Anger tightened Isaac’s face as he moved to try to reach the right position to land a solid punch. “You her new man,” Isaac said. “You tell me.”

  “You know it’s not like that,” Hannibal said with a smile. “Your wife is my client and nothing more. She asked me to come here because she’s scared, Isaac, and trouble is my business.” Could Hannibal establish a token amount of trust? His Secret Service training told him that was the next step. He stopped moving and extended his right hand. “Hannibal Jones is my name.”

  “Fuck you!”

  Maybe establishing a was too much to hope for, but Isaac didn’t sucker punch him while his hand was out. The anger was under some sort of control. “Okay. But I can assure you of this much. Your wife doesn’t have another man. In fact, I’m sure she never has.”

  “Bullshit!” Isaac’s fists were shaking with rage now. “Why would she leave me if she didn’t have another man?”

  It was time to commit. Hannibal rooted his feet and let Isaac get close enough to crush him. “Look at me Isaac, I’m six feet tall and I’ve been kick-boxing since high school. Got years of police training. And if you really wanted to you could kill me with your hands.”

  “Damn straight!”

  “Your wife is five foot two,” Hannibal said. “Maybe, what, a hundred ten pounds? Think about what happens to her body when one of your big hands hits her.”

  Isaac’s fist actually whistled through the air, down toward Hannibal’s head like a hammer. A sidestep allowed it to blow past, slamming down on the fender of a Taurus. He turned away from the impressive dent, following Hannibal with his eyes.

  “If she was scared of me, she would have called the police!”

  “You still don’t get it,” Hannibal said, beginning to dance around a bit, still working to keep the sun in Isaac’s eyes. “She’s more scared for you. She knew if you tried this crap with the cops they’d just as likely shoot your big dumb ass. And she doesn’t want you to get hurt. The woman loves you!”

  Hannibal stopped to see what effect his words were having. Isaac bellowed “No!” and swung faster than expected. A fist as big as a twelve-pound ham raked across Hannibal’s jaw, lifting him off his feet. He rolled across the asphalt to give himself distance and sprang up ready for action, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a boxer.

  “All right you get that one for free. Maybe you owed me one for the other night. Now you’ve got to call the next play, big man. You come in on me and you mash my face and the police come and throw you in jail. Or, you come in on me and I’m as fast as you know I am and I break your knee and put your face through a car windshield because I can’t go easy with a guy your size. Or, you go home and I promise Janet will call you tonight and talk about what’s wrong and how maybe you two can fix it.”

  Isaac looked startled for a moment. Maybe he expected Hannibal to go down and stay down after getting hit. Or perhaps the sound of Janet’s name had an effect on him. His fists lowered a few inches.

  “Tonight?”

  “My word on it,” Hannibal rushed to say. When he pulled a card from an inside jacket pocket he watched Isaac’s eyes and saw him register the presence of Hannibal’s pistol. Now he knew Hannibal didn’t have to take that punch.

  “My address is right there,” Hannibal said, slapping the card on a car hood. “If Janet doesn’t call you before the night’s over, you can come to me and we can pick this up where we left off if that’s what you want to do. Right now, you need to go home and relax a while.”

  Isaac’s big fist closed on Hannibal’s card, but his eyes turned back toward the double doors into the motor vehicle building. Hannibal moved into his line of sight. “You can’t take her back, Ike. You have to let her come back. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it works.”

  When Hannibal walked into the motor vehicle office, Janet deserted her post and rushed to him. She hustled him into the back offices and ran to the ladies’ room for a wet cloth to press against his face.

  “God, thank you thank you thank you.” The words poured out of Janet, tripping over each other. “Are you all right? What about Ike, did you have to hurt him? You didn’t have to involve the police did you? Is he gone, really gone?”

  “Not gone from your life, Janet,” Hannibal said, stopping her hand’s movement over his face and holding the cloth himself, applying less pressure. “I’ll be fine and he’s fine physically, but he’s a man in torment. If this is going to go on, I need to know how you feel about this guy. Do you still love him?”<
br />
  Her answer was very, very quiet. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you want, Janet?”

  Janet turned and walked to the closed door. When she turned back, her face was composed again. Her strength was returning with her distance from Isaac. “I want to be safe.”

  “I understand,” Hannibal said, “but it won’t be free.”

  “I’ll figure a way to pay you,” she said. “I know this is business for you.”

  Hannibal stood, dropping the cloth on her narrow desk. “That’s not what I meant. You can’t just avoid him. You’ve got to make peace with him one way or another. I told him you’d call tonight and talk to him. The two of you need to figure out what you want and how to make it happen. Counseling is probably a good idea.”

  “I’ll call him if you think it’s important. But I meant what I said about paying you.”

  Hannibal considered the inherent strength hidden in this woman and wondered how she ever came to a place where she would let a man beat her. “Janet, you can hardly afford my rates. But we might be able to handle this another way. Take it out in trade, maybe. Tell me, how hard is it to find a person if all you know is their license plate number?”

  This brought Janet’s first smile of the day. “You kidding? I’m the shift supervisor. Why don’t you give me the number and a description of the car and let me see what I can do?”

  When Hannibal pulled up in front of the palatial rambling home at the edge of Arlington he was replaying his last conversation with Janet in his mind. He had been little more than a mile from her office, stopped at a red light when she called, sounding chipper and in control again.

  “You said a red Chevrolet Corvette with Kitty as the vanity plate? No such vehicle.”

  “Damn,” Hannibal had muttered.

  “But,” she added with an annoying dramatic pause, “I do show a 2004 ‘Vette with a plate reading KITTYCAR. Think that could be it?”

  Hannibal pulled away from the light a bit faster than he should have. Irons would have considered that a gay license plate for sure. “Very likely, kid. Whose ride is that?”

  “Vehicle is registered to one Langford Kitteridge. And if you’ve got a pad and pencil I can give you his Arlington address.”

  Instead, he had memorized the address and driven straight there. Now he sat in the colonial’s extensive driveway, behind a low-slung midnight blue Lexus, gathering his official attitude. He had no doubt that this was the right place. The license plate on the Lexus read KITYCAR1. So the owners had wit and ego to spare. He didn’t know anything about the residents except their obvious financial security. Was this Dean’s last victim? If so, Hannibal might be no closer to tracking him down, but he accepted that as the way the job worked. You followed every lead. Detective work, unlike the romance of the movies, was in fact all about legwork.

  The door’s chimes echoed like bells in a church steeple. Hannibal imagined house workers scurrying like bats at the summons, but it was soon clear his image was mistaken. A minute is a long time to stand at a door. In that time he decided no one was home. The parked Lexus didn’t mean anything. Owners of a house like this might well have a third vehicle, an SUV probably, and the owners would be off in that one. Oh, well, it was still good to have seen the place. He’d return later.

  But he was only two steps away from the door when he heard it open, and a voice said, “Can I help you?” It was an older man’s voice, commanding but very disciplined. A butler’s voice, Hannibal thought.

  When he turned, that image dissolved. The tall man at the door wore sweat pants and running shoes. A towel hung around his neck, and upper body shone with drying perspiration. His bare chest displayed solid muscles and very low body fat. If not for some telltale sagging skin around his waist, it could have been the body of a thirty-year old, onto which someone had spliced a deeply cleft face with a full shock of white hair. Hannibal recalled actors like Charlton Heston and Charles Bronson whose faces looked ugly to him, but were always described by women as having character. This man’s face had character to spare, and charisma and the kind of energy that almost pushed you over.

  “I was just finishing my workout,” the man said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Sorry to disturb you,” Hannibal said, pulling out a card. “My name is Hannibal Jones, and I was looking for Langford Kitteridge.”

  “You selling something?”

  Hannibal smiled. “No sir, I…”

  “Then come on in. Looking for Langford Kitteridge, eh? Well, you found him.”

  Hannibal followed Kitteridge across a living room he normally wouldn’t try to navigate without a map and a guide, into a kitchen many restaurants would be proud of. Kitteridge pulled down a skillet from among the collection hanging above the center island. He carried the pan to the refrigerator and dropped a chicken breast into it.

  “Some lunch?”

  “No thank you,” Hannibal said from the doorway. “I won’t take up much of your time.”

  “I look busy to you?” Kitteridge asked. He covered the chicken breast with a cooking spray and turned it over. Then he lit the gas stove under the skillet. It was early for lunch to Hannibal, but the buttery smell and the crackle of frying called out to his stomach. Kitteridge turned to him, smiling with teeth too even to be real. “Well, now that you’ve found me, what are you planning to do with me?”

  Hannibal liked this lively old man already, the way he always liked people who chose living over existing. He wished he had encountered the lady of the house instead, though. If his theory was right, there might be a hurt in store for Mister Kitteridge. “Sir, I’m trying to locate a Dean Edwards. Does that name mean anything to you? Young fellow, blonde hair, kind of a round face…”

  “Yes, yes I know the boy,” Kitteridge said, flipping his chicken breast with a fork. The new top side was blackened, the way Cajun chefs do catfish. “One of Joanie’s foundlings. Hangs around here now and again. Crashes in the guest apartment over the garage from time to time. In fact, I think he’s been staying there the last couple of days. She even lets him drive her car sometimes. He in some kind of trouble?”

  “You expect him to be?”

  “Hey, you’re the one come looking for him, eh?”

  Smoke began to fill the room, clouding Hannibal’s path to the answers he needed. “My client just needs to talk to him about some plans they made. Do you have any idea how I might find him? Or perhaps your wife might know.”

  Kitteridge looked confused as he slid his steaming prize onto a plate and turned to stand at the island. Then, as if a new thought had struck him he said, “Oh. Yes, I see. Joanie. Sorry, son, there is no Mrs. Kitteridge. At least not yet, heh heh. Joanie’s my niece. She’s lived with me since we lost my brother, her father, in Vietnam. And yep, it’s a pretty sure bet she knows where he is. She hired him over at KCS.”

  “I’m sorry. KCS?”

  Kitteridge dumped salsa on his chicken and attacked it with a knife and fork. “Kitteridge Computer Systems. So sorry. Guess I assumed you knew who I was. I started the company, but Joanie runs it these days. In those damn towers in Falls Church. Sure you won’t split this with me?”

  6

  The comfortable but sterile waiting room was at the top floor of the tower, the ninth. The air tasted canned. The door to the hall, like the door into the inner offices, was a wide pane of glass. Both bore the company logo, a stylized letter “K” with lines for whiskers and balls at the top of the two upward lines imitating cat’s eyes. The receptionist reminded Hannibal of an old movie, recently remade, called The Stepford Wives. After exchanging the usual greetings and information with her, he sat in an ergonomically correct chair staring out wide panoramic windows and thinking how often what looked like the end of a journey turned out to be the first step.

  The man rushing into the room was tall and tanned, with high cheekbones and carefully styled brown hair. In his polo shirt, Dockers and running shoes he looked like a model who had stepped out of the page
s of Esquire just long enough to find out what was on Hannibal’s mind. As he came within reach, he seemed to take Hannibal in around his perimeter: curly brown hair, Oakley shades, black gloves, highly shined black shoes, and finally back to Hannibal’s face. Only then did he offer his hand.

  “Mister Jones? I’m Mark Norton, senior systems management analyst here at KCS. We’re just coming back from our lunch jog and Ms. Kitteridge isn’t quite back from the health club yet. I understand you have business with her?”

  Hannibal noticed Norton did his lunch jogging in the same Reebok DMX Run shoes he himself worked out in. “Actually, I asked for her only because her uncle Langford said I should.” Norton’s eyes flared at the name. It was the right entree. “My business is really with one of your employees, a Dean Edwards.”

  “Dean?” Norton’s face showed chagrin too easily. Hannibal couldn’t tell how much of it was fake. “He’s one of my systems programmers. Designs and develops accounting and financial applications for our clients. Real whiz with FOCUS and SQL.” When Hannibal didn’t react he added, “Standard Query Language,” as if that would explain it all.

  “I’m sure he’s a real whiz,” Hannibal said, “and I assure you what I need to see him about won’t affect his job performance in any way.”

  “Gee, this is tough,” Norton said in the same tone men in commercials say, “this one gives me a close comfortable shave.” Then his voice lowered a bit. “I’m afraid Dean didn’t show up for work today. But I’m sure Ms. Kitteridge will be happy to give you any information you need. Are you with the SEC?” Hannibal shook his head. “Treasury? Surely not the FBI.”

  “Not law enforcement at all,” Hannibal said. “Really, just trying to help somebody out.”

  “Oh. Well.” Norton ran his fingers through his hair, exactly the way men do in dandruff shampoo ads. “Tell you what. Why don’t you come down to my office? It’s a little more comfortable, and you can check CNN while I try to track Joan down. Shouldn’t be more than a couple minutes.”