Blood List (10 page)

Robbie shot him in the other leg. Larry fell to the ground without so much as a whimper. He stabbed the knife into the floor and used it to pull himself forward an arm's length, dragging his face across the floor without bothering to lift his head. He did it again. Robbie got out his handcuffs and stepped on Larry's wrist to pin the knife in place.

Larry grabbed Robbie's ankle with his other hand and yanked him off his feet. Robbie hit the ground hard; the handcuffs clattered across the floor, but he managed to keep hold of the gun. Kicking frantically, he tried to dislodge Larry's hand. Larry didn't react, as if he didn't even feel it. His scratched face still looked befuddled as he yanked the knife from the floor and looked from Robbie's face to the ankle he still held.

"Don't," Robbie said. He aimed the pistol down the length of his body, right at the top of Larry's head. "Please." Larry raised the knife. Robbie shot him through the cranium at point-blank range. Larry's head dropped to the ground, and his body relaxed. The knife clattered to the floor. Blood gushed from the wound, thick and red.

Robbie scrambled to his feet and took out his phone. He stared at the body as he auto-dialed his office. A pleasant male voice answered the phone, "FBI St. Louis, Agent Barnhoorn's office."

"Chet, we have multiple civilians and maybe some officers down. I need an ambulance, police, and forensics at the Glenview safe house. Send a team, maybe two. I'm not sure this is over." The calm of his own voice surprised him. He couldn't stop shaking.

"Got it, Robert," Chet replied.

"And Chet? Contact Gene Palomini and Doug Goldman."

*   *   *

December 24th, 6:28pm CST; Home of Agent Robert Barnhoorn; St. Louis, Missouri.

Doug wiped up the juices from the Christmas ham with a piece of bread and shoved it whole into his mouth. He dumped his plate in the sink and returned to the living room.

Robbie's house was an explosion of holiday cheer. Wreaths hung from every wall, electric candles sparkled in every window, and the Christmas tree dominated the living room. A mound of presents spilled out from beneath it in perfectly orchestrated chaos. Seven-year-old Evan Barnhoorn lurked nearby, never too far from the tree.

Maureen sat with Marcy, nursing little Christine while Grace squirmed in her bassinette. Doug scooped her up one-handed and tickled her belly. She giggled.

He sat on the couch and grinned at Robbie. "I can't believe it's their first Christmas already."

Robbie grinned back. "I can't believe it's Evan's seventh. They get so big so fast." Marcy beamed at him from across the room. He leaned in and frowned. "Marcy wants to try for more."

Doug avoided looking at Maureen. "Mo's exhausted all the time. I don't know how she does it, between the kids and her clients. But she's already said she wants more. We'll have to see."

The phone rang. Robbie hopped up and grabbed the phone from the cradle. He looked at the caller ID, frowned, and walked out of the room. Marcy looked at Doug. He shrugged, then rubbed noses with his daughter, cooing.

Robbie walked back into the room and put the phone back on the charger. "Work," he said. "Nothing that can't wait." He nudged Doug with his foot. "Help me with these dishes, will you?"

Subtle,
Doug thought. He stood and followed Robbie into the kitchen. "What's up?"

"Larry's toxicology came back negative."

Doug frowned. "That's impossible."

Robbie grabbed a sponge and turned on the sink. "Maybe, but it's true. Clean as clean. He had some needle scars, but they were old. Very old." He washed a plate and handed it to Doug, who grabbed the dish towel off the stove handle and dried it. He put it in the drainer.

"No brain tumor, no chemical imbalance, no drugs. How the hell did Renner do it?"

"I don't know," Robbie said. "I don't know."

Marcy let Evan open one present, an Optimus Prime action figure the size of Doug's arm, then put him to bed. Marcy and Maureen headed upstairs to tuck in the girls while Doug and Robbie stuffed stockings. The house smelled of cinnamon.

Robbie looked pointedly toward the stairs. "Does she know?"

Doug shoved a handful of Tootsie Rolls into a red-and-green sock. "No, not yet."

Robbie sucked air through his teeth. "What are you going to tell her?"

"I don't know. The truth. We have to catch this bastard. We have to."

"Right. But she already knows that. What about after?"

Doug leaned his head against the wall and squeezed his eyes shut. "After that, there are ten thousand more just like him." He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. "The world is full of monsters, and if men like us don't catch them, what happens to our children?"

"Men like you," Robbie said.

"What?"

"Men like
you
catch monsters. I push pencils. I'd never fired my weapon, never even drawn it, on duty. It's…." He looked at Doug, stricken.

"It's not what you think," Doug finished for him.

Robbie shook his head. "It's the most terrible thing I've ever done. And God help me for saying it, that's why we need men like you. To do what the rest of us can't."

Doug said nothing. He picked up another handful of candy and shoved it into a stocking.

"Hey, Doug?" Robbie asked.

"Yeah?"

"You need to tell her soon." 

"I know," Doug said. "I'll get to it. Just as soon as I know what I'm going to do."

On the staircase, Maureen listened silently and wept.

*   *   *

January 1st, 7:02 AM EST; Gene Palomini's Apartment; Washington, D.C.

The ring of Gene's cell phone shattered through the bars of
Auld Lang Syne
that ran through his dream. He sat up with a start, spilling leftover popcorn all over the floor. He lay on the couch in his boxer shorts, surrounded by empty pizza boxes and an enormous pile of beer bottles. He'd shut the TV off six hours earlier, ten minutes after the last guest had left. The phone rang again. He knocked over several empties and fumbled for the phone he knew was somewhere on the coffee table.

What kind of monster calls at 7 AM on New Year's Day?
He found the phone and managed to pick it up. He stared at the tiny screen with sleep-bleary eyes and tried to read the caller ID. It snapped into focus, and he smiled.
Finally!
It had been almost two months since they'd sent the fake job to Paul Renner.

The entire team feared for Burton's life. Paul might not alert them to every job that he did, and Gene feared he would try to kill the man without ever calling. That thought had occurred to Mark Burton, but he'd signed up anyway. Gene worried that six undercover bodyguards might not be enough.

Gene had no idea where he'd put his micro-bead. He cleared his throat and hit "send."

"Hello?"

The voice wasn't even disguised. "Hello, Special Agent Palomini. How's Carl's arm?"

"Go screw yourself," Gene replied.

"California," was all he said. And then the line went dead.

Gene smiled to himself.
Hook, line, and sinker. Got him.

Gene stumbled to the shower.

January 6th, 3:12 PM PST; Shady Grove retirement community; San Diego, California.

Gene savored the salty air of a beautiful winter's day in southern California. The temperature was seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit, the humidity near zero, and twenty-eight FBI agents had staked out the entire area surrounding Shady Grove senior living facility, Mark Burton's home just outside of San Diego.

Shady Grove wasn't shady, and it wasn't a grove. It was a gated community complete with every luxury a retired person might want. It had its own tennis and squash courts, an eighteen-hole golf course, a gym complete with a massage service and personal trainers, four fine-dining restaurants, and even its own yacht club. It housed almost eight hundred men and women over the age of sixty-two, and was much like a town in its own right. Gene didn't want to know how a former Marine sergeant could afford the twelve thousand dollars a month it cost to live there.

Renner's timeline put the hit on Thursday, when Mark went golfing with some of the other residents, so they found themselves staked out around the course while Mark and his friends worked their way down the back nine.

Agent Atkinson's team was disguised as a group of Pacific Gas and Electric employees working on the power line, complete with an authentic PG&E truck. Their best sniper stood in the cherry-picker with a good view of the surrounding area. Doug was in the club house basement, watching everything on the security feeds and relaying information to the team.

Go time
, Gene thought.

Man, it's nice around here
, Paul thought as he hefted his golf bag. He'd hooked up with a couple of proctologists who'd been drinking in the club house. Today he was Dan McLawry, a psychologist from Connecticut in town on business. He'd chatted about problematic patients and let the doctors reminisce about their worst problems.

Like any good kill, the plan today was simple; play a few holes of golf, slip away with a medical emergency, remove the rifle from the golf bag, and shoot Mark Burton through the head. "One shot, one kill" was the marine sniper saying.
Today, this guy's going to learn what it really means, up close and personal
, Paul thought. He chuckled, coinciding with the punch line of Dr. Odan's dirty golf joke. The doctors laughed along with him, but at the wrong joke.

"Nine holes. Nice," Dr. Ryan said. They all laughed again, and with more horseplay than was seemly for their professions, headed out to the links.

"Cart or hoof it?" Paul asked.

Their replies were incredulous; of course they would walk. Paul sighed.
These Californians are a little too gung-ho about exercise
. He endured some good-natured ribbing about "lazy east-coasters," hefted his bag and followed the doctors onto the first hole.

He sliced the first ball hard and landed it in a bunker. He was off the lead by twelve at the fourth hole, his mind more on the job ahead than on the game. The doctors bemoaned his bad luck and offered their sympathies. Behind his back they bemoaned Stein's bad luck for finding such a bad partner, and Paul pretended not to hear them. He put his hand in his pocket and pressed a button. His phone rang.

Paul stepped aside and answered it with a curt "Hello." Keeping his voice low, he argued with the dial tone. Amid tepid protests, he begged off the rest of the game, and headed for the clubhouse. The doctors watched him go with a mixture of annoyance and relief.

Doug sat in the clubhouse basement, basking in the light of a bank of black-and-white monitors. He was grumpy about being stuck in the basement doing Sam's job, especially on a day this beautiful, just because the filthy rich owners of this "resort retirement community" didn't want to pony up the bucks to update their security system. He comforted himself in the knowledge that he wasn't stuck in a hot, sticky van like Gene. He scanned the images again.
Man, there's a lot of people out there today
.

His eyes flicked across the screens. He'd taped a picture of Paul Renner to the desk, courtesy of MacGowan at the CIA. He sipped his coffee and watched as Sergeant Burton finished his bogie on the sixteenth.
They're not bad, but I think I could take them
, he thought. Motion on the fourth hole caught his eye.

A man left a foursome, hefting a bulky bag of golf clubs, and headed to the clubhouse. He was of average height, average build, and walked with the confident grace of a martial artist. Doug looked at the picture of Paul Renner, then zoomed in, leaning toward the screen. He set down his coffee and fingered his COM ear-bead.

After a moment it was clear.
This isn't our guy. Right height, right hair color, but the face is all wrong.
The guy had an aquiline nose, like the pictures of Caesar on old Roman coins. Doug took a sip of his coffee and sighed. Mark Burton teed off on the last hole. If the hit was going to happen here, it would have to happen soon.

Once in the bathroom, Paul took a handicapped stall. He stripped off the ridiculous golf outfit, stuffed it into his golf bag's front pocket, then changed into the khaki shorts and green polo shirt of a Shady Grove groundskeeper’s uniform. He tore off the prosthetic nose and dropped it into the toilet, rubbed his face to remove the remainder of the latex adhesive, then slid the disassembled rifle out of the bag. Within forty seconds it was complete, except for the barrel attachment. That he would save for the roof.

Paul stuffed the mostly assembled rifle back into the bag, flushed the toilet, and exited the bathroom. A quick sidestep brought him into the kitchen, where an access door led to the roof. He opened it and recoiled, squinting.

The terra-cotta tiles blazed orange in the sunlight. Heat radiated off them in waves. Pausing to let his eyes adjust, Paul crouched and waited at the open door. He used the time to attach the barrel to the 30.06, which he did by touch. He clucked peevishly and thought for a moment that not bringing a scope was a mistake, but once he attached it, he didn't have a way to calibrate it anyway, so he let the thought go. He could shoot well enough without one.

"One, this is three."

"Go ahead, three," Gene said into the COM. He couldn't see anything from the back of the panel van and relied on Adkinson's team for recon.

"Someone just opened the access door on the roof of the clubhouse. Whoever it is, he's crouching down."

Gene triggered the COM to hit all frequencies. "This is
go
, people. Stay sharp. Possible shooter on the roof of the clubhouse."

Sergeant Mark Burton's gravelly voice rasped over the COM, "Just get him before he gets me. I don't want to miss meatloaf night."