Dangerous Games (28 page)

And Michaelson would have to wait. To hell with him.

She sped past the Federal Building without stopping. Bel Air wasn’t far. She would sit down with Madeleine and learn everything that had happened. And then she would decide what to do about Abby Sinclair.

Kolb had waited twenty minutes, and McCallum still hadn’t shown. He was getting edgy when his cell phone rang.

“She hasn’t come back,” his partner said, voice hushed.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Nobody knows where she is. She’s not answering her phone. She must have decided to blow off the director.”

“So she’s not coming in?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Fuck.” Kolb ended the call and sat unmoving, the gun in his lap. There was a cartridge in the chamber that had been meant for McCallum’s skull. Useless now. Damn, he’d been primed to whack that bitch.

Rage quivered in him. He raised his fist as if to strike out at the steering wheel, the dashboard, something, anything. Then he saw the bloody cuts on his knuckles. He remembered pounding the dash, savaging his hands. Not again. Not in the parking lot of the goddamned Federal Building, for Christ’s sake.

With a shuddering effort he got himself under control and drove out of the lot.

Under other circumstances he might have waited longer, just in case she showed up. But waiting wasn’t an option now. The sun was sinking over the western horizon, its orange glare lighting up the swollen bellies of storm clouds.

The rain was coming.

He had work to do.

26

Abby was pissed off about her meeting with Tess. She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised. She’d known from the start that the woman had a yardstick up her ass. What Tess needed was a good lay. She’d gone without for way too long. Abby could tell. She had a sixth sense about these things.

And to be honest, she was more than just pissed. She was worried. There was no telling what Tess might do. If she decided to bare her soul to her fellow G-men and G-women, she could make some serious trouble. At the very least she would blow Abby’s cover and make her unemployable in this town.

The threat of prison wasn’t something she took seriously. She could always change her identity and relocate to another city. She was quicker on her feet than any posse on her trail. But to flee would mean leaving behind her condo and her contacts, her lifestyle, her few friends…and Wyatt. It would mean starting over from square one.

She was an idiot. Never should’ve met McCallum. Yeah, she’d wanted to see the FBI report, but it hadn’t been important enough to justify placing her entire future in jeopardy. So why had she done it?

Well, she knew the answer to that one. She’d wanted to meet Tess McCallum. She’d thought…

Oh, hell, it didn’t matter what she’d thought. It had been a mistake, that was all. A dumb, stupid, boneheaded mistake. She would pay for it, probably. There seemed to be some law of the universe that said you always paid for your mistakes. Personally, Abby would have liked to see that law repealed, but for now it was still on the books.

So she would deal with it. Later. Now she had more immediate priorities.

She was home, in the privacy and comfort of her condo, with the curtains shut and the lights off and soft instrumental music playing.

It was time to prepare for battle.

In a combat situation, which was how Abby viewed her upcoming encounter with William Kolb, she couldn’t afford to be distracted or unfocused. The events of the day must be banished, their associated demons exorcised. She needed to direct her total attention toward her adversary—read his body language, assess his vocal intonations, watch every flicker of his facial expression. A second’s slowness could be fatal.

So Tess had to go. The memory of her, anyway.

If her brain kept replaying the confrontation at the diner, then her body would continue to pump out chains of neuropeptides produced in response to anger, defensiveness, and fear, and those neuropeptides would continue to swarm throughout her system, into every branching blood vessel and vital organ, where they would crowd out other chemicals associated with serenity and detached alertness.

It helped her to visualize her body like this, as a network of pulsing fluids in which her emotions could be located anywhere—not only in the brain, but in the spleen, the kidneys, the heart, the gut. She saw no value in dividing her mind and mood from her flesh and blood. Those artificial barriers would keep her disconnected, when what she needed was unity, the absolute oneness of herself. She had to manifest a change of consciousness, rise above the mundane, transcend the world.

Other people went to church and prayed. This was
her
way.

Eyes closed, she reclined in an overstuffed armchair, her body limp and palms upraised, her breathing progressively slower and more regular. She descended toward sleep but resisted the final drop-off, holding herself suspended in a limbo between waking consciousness and dreams. Now her body was no longer even a meshwork of fluids, but a cloud of atoms, and each atom was nothing but a cloud itself, a field of energy extending through empty space. She sank into the emptiness and merged with it.

Thoughts came and went, but they were distant, like birds passing in the sky. She let them go, holding on to none of them, until there were no thoughts, only vague, disorderly images that flickered here and there. Then these, too, were gone, and there was only a humming stillness and an ever-expanding circle without a center.

She didn’t know how long she remained in this state. Eventually, like a swimmer needing air, she surfaced. Her eyes opened, and her breathing, which had slowed nearly to the point of hibernation, began to normalize.

Tess wasn’t there anymore. The incident at the diner had been forgotten, filed away, to be reviewed later if necessary, but of no importance now.

She felt refreshed, alert, ready.

She picked up her cell phone and called William Kolb.

27

The sun was setting when Kolb changed into navy blue denim jeans and a long-sleeved dark blue pullover, with a double layer of thick black socks to protect his feet from the dampness of the tunnels.

The repairman’s utility belt, cap, and jacket were in the trunk of his car. He would put them on later. If he was seen dressed as a repairman when he left his apartment, his neighbors might wonder what was up.

He’d expected to go through this routine at least a couple more times. Tess McCallum had spoiled his plans. He didn’t appreciate having to make adjustments because some goddamn FBI agent was sniffing his trail. And now it turned out Abby was screwing with him, too.

His partner kept telling him he was paranoid. But the fact was, he did have enemies everywhere. His instincts had been right. Tess, Abby, Madeleine Grant—three bitches, all out to get him.

He still couldn’t figure out how Grant had connected him with the kidnappings. It worried him, because what he couldn’t understand, he couldn’t control.

There was a lot of stuff he couldn’t control lately. Losing his job, for one thing. And that craziness last night on the road, and the way he’d lost it today in his parked car. It was like he couldn’t stop himself, like things were spinning out of control.

He set his jaw. He was overreacting. This business with Tess and Abby had him worked up. Well, the odds were that one of them, maybe both, would show up tonight. He would be watching. He would—

The phone rang.

His partner, probably. Kolb picked up. “Yeah?”

“Hello…William?”

He took a long moment to respond. When he did, he was smiling. “Abby.”

“Hi. I’m glad I got through to you.”

I’ll bet you are
, he thought. He asked the obvious question, though he already knew the answer. “How did you get this number?”

“Information. You’re the third William Kolb I’ve called.”

Sure he was. She’d gotten his phone number and address off some database used by private detectives, he assumed. Probably his auto registration, too. She knew everything about him. Or she thought she did. There was one thing she didn’t know—that he was on to her.

“I don’t understand.” He was playing dumb. “Why would you want to call me?”

“So I could apologize. For how I acted this morning. You were so nice, stopping to help me like that, and I was all standoffish and, well…”

“Scared.”

“I’ve never known anyone who was in jail before.”

He put concern in his voice. “Maybe you’re better off not knowing anybody like that.”

“Look, I don’t know exactly what happened last year or who did what. It seems to me like you got involved in a personal situation that went haywire….”

This irritated him. Bad enough she was lying. She could at least pretend to believe the lies he’d told her. “I said I was innocent.”

“I think maybe there are degrees of innocence—and guilt. You know? Maybe you did something that was technically over the line—you got on this woman’s case a little too hard. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t mean you’re dangerous. You just showed some bad judgment.”

He’d never showed bad judgment in his life, but he didn’t make an issue of it. “Maybe I did.”

“I showed some bad judgment, too—the way I treated you. I acted like you were a leper or something.”

“Kind of felt that way.” He felt like a sad sack, saying it, but he had to play along. He already knew where she was headed, and he only had to help her get there.

“Anyway, I just wanted to say…I’m sorry. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll try to be a little less judgmental. I guess that’s all I wanted to tell you.”

It would be funny to make her sweat on the line a little longer, but he decided to cut to the chase. She would be expecting him to think with his dick, anyway. “You got anything planned for tonight?” he asked.

“Not really.”

Of course she didn’t. Her evening was conveniently free. He’d assumed it would be.

“Maybe we could get a drink or some dinner or something.”

Her hesitation lasted just long enough. “Well…sure.”

She was a good actress. If he hadn’t caught on to her, he would have bought her bullshit, no doubt about it.

He offered to pick her up at her place, but he wasn’t surprised when she suggested dropping by his apartment instead. She probably wanted to get a look at where he lived. It was only fair. He’d already seen Abby Hollister’s digs.

He gave his address. “That’s right on my way home from work,” she said with the right note of surprise. “I can be there in twenty minutes.”

Another stroke of luck. He wondered where she was really calling from. Did she have an office somewhere, or did she work out of her home—her real home, wherever that was?

There were a lot of questions he meant to ask. He would have plenty of opportunities once he got her into the tunnels.

“Take your time,” he said with a smile. “I don’t want you running any red lights.”

“Not me. Safety first, that’s my motto.”

He laughed at that. “See you soon, Abby.” He ended the call.

Safety first. He didn’t think so. She was a girl who liked taking chances, liked pushing her luck.

This time she’d pushed it too far.

28

Madeleine Grant wasn’t at home. After some reluctance her housekeeper revealed that she’d gone to “the gun place.” Further inquiries, aided by Tess’s display of her FBI creds, yielded the information that the gun place was an indoor shooting range on Beverly Boulevard.

It was five fifteen and fully dark when Tess parked outside the gun club, under a sign that read FAMILY-ORIENTED SHOOTING. She was greeted at the entrance by an employee who wanted to see her membership ID. Again the FBI badge did the trick.

“Ms. Grant is shooting,” she was told. “Stall six. If you’re going out there, you’ll need ear and eye protection. Club rules.”

Tess donned shooting goggles and ear pads. She headed down the hallway, past the men’s room and ladies’ room, each said to be equipped with a baby-changing station. Family-oriented shooting, indeed.

There were sixteen lanes on the firing range. Even wearing the ear protectors, Tess could hear the pops of pistols and small-bore rifles. The sound always reminded her of microwave popcorn. Beneath the staccato gunfire thrummed the whir of the ventilation system, low-pitched and ominous.

She walked behind shooters aiming at bull’s-eye and silhouette targets. One guy was using the automated retrieval system to pull up his target and check his score. He’d scored over 50 percent in the A-zone, a respectable tally.

Madeleine, in the sixth stall, was practicing with a .32. Tess hung back and observed as she ran through a double-tap drill with a silhouette target at seven yards. She started with her hands at shoulder height, drew the gun from her hip holster, took aim, expended two rounds, then reholstered the piece and repeated the procedure. Her technique was only fair. The draw was fast but shaky, and she seemed to be watching the target when she should have been focused on the front sight of her gun. Still, she was scoring kill shots often enough. Tess had no doubt who the silhouette target was intended to represent.

Madeleine emptied her gun and removed the magazine, checking the chamber to be sure there was no unexpended cartridge inside. Tess wondered if Abby had taught her the procedure. As Madeleine was picking up the brass casings on the stall floor, she saw Tess.

“Agent McCallum?” Her voice was raised to be heard over the gunfire from adjacent stalls. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“We need to talk.” Tess gestured toward a side hallway. “Someplace quieter.”

“One minute, please.”

She collected the rest of the casings and put her unloaded weapon in its carrying case. “All right.”

“Don’t you want to check your score?”

“I would, actually.” Madeleine brought up the target and surveyed the damage. She seemed satisfied. “Good enough, don’t you think?”

“You would have stopped him. But you were more accurate with your first shot than your second. Recoil’s throwing you off. Take an extra moment to steady yourself before the second trigger pull.”