Blood List (18 page)

Paul turned his hands palms-up with a chuckle. "I think 'mangled' is a bit exaggerated." His palms were red, scraped, and blistered. The EMTs had washed out as much of the grit as they could, and although it stung like hell and itched like crazy, it looked a lot worse that it was. "Like I said, I don't think I did anything that anyone else wouldn't have done."

"I don't know," Jerri said. "It just doesn't fit with what we know about you. You were a hero today. I wouldn't have expected it."

"Agent Bates," Paul said. "Don't ever make the mistake of thinking I'm not the bad guy. People who get in my way get hurt. We just happen to be headed in the same direction." Punctuating his point, the plane accelerated down the runway.

"You can't be all bad," Jerri said with a tiny smile. "You didn't kill Carl or me when you got the jump on us, you didn't kill Gene after he broke your ribs, and you rescued Carl and Marty today. Why?" she asked. "What makes you tick? What led you down the path to D Street?"

Paul wondered if her curiosity was genuine. "You first. What makes a pretty little Irish girl grow up to be an FBI agent?" The landing gear left the runway, and they were airborne.

"Ugh," she said. "Calling me 'pretty little' should earn you a punch in the mouth. I deal with sexist bullshit twenty-four-seven."

"Well, you're not exactly large, and you're attractive. And I don't buy into people getting offended by the truth."

"I'm not offended," Jerri said. "But being a woman in a male-dominated field means you can't let people call you 'pretty little' anything."

"Fair enough," Paul said. "So what makes a petite, attractive woman want to join a male-dominated field like the FBI?"

Her cheeks colored a touch. "You can't laugh."

Paul affected his best poker face. "I won't." She said nothing for a long moment. Paul smiled at her. "I said I wouldn't laugh."

The words escaped softly from her mouth. "Agent Scully." A crimson rush covered her face.

Paul almost suppressed a grin. "From the
X-Files
?"

She nodded, and her cheeks deepened to nearly purple. She replied through clenched teeth. "You said you wouldn't laugh!"

"I'm not laughing." He laughed. "Tell me more."

Paul followed her gaze to the front of the plane. Gene and Marty leaned toward one another, bickering. Doug had leaned his seat back, and he looked to be asleep. Behind them, Carl sat in the back where he plugged away at his PDA, oblivious to the world. "Paul, I swear if you tell anyone—"

"I know how to keep a secret," he said. "Why her?"

"Scully was just so strong and smart. In the turmoil of the whole show, she grounded everything in reality." She looked sheepish. "I wanted to be just like her."

"And is it everything you thought it would be?" 

"It's nothing like I thought it would be. It's better, just in totally different ways. I mean, obviously some parts of it suck. The paperwork is crazy. Dead-ends are frustrating.
You
are frustrating. We took your taunts personally. Why do you do that?"

"Let's just say that the FBI aren't always the good guys they think they are."

"What does that mean?" 

"It means what it means," Paul said.

"Uh-uh, not good enough. Scully buys me more than that, Paul."

He looked in her eyes and said nothing. She waited. He grinned. "Maybe you'll find out one day. But not today."

Her petulant frown was more cute than angry.

"Did you ever find any aliens?" Paul's eyes lit up with the jab.

Jerri laughed. "Screw you, Renner." She laughed again. "So anyway, that wasn't an answer, so it's your turn."

"Quite the interrogator, aren't you?" He smiled to take the edge off the question.

"It's my job. How'd you get where you are?" 

"Gillian Anderson doesn't buy you a story that long, but it'll buy you a start. I was a normal middle-class kid from a middle-class town. My mom died when I was little, and my father never remarried." He smiled to hide the memory. "My dad's a great guy. I'm an only child, so he and I were best buddies. To make a long story short, I had a choice to go to a community college or into the service for the GI Bill to go to a better school. Well, every bumfuck town in this country is packed full of entry-level workers with community college degrees, so I picked the military."

"Which branch?" Jerri asked.

"It doesn't matter." He smiled at the annoyed look on her face. "I found out that I was real good at violence. Firearms, hand-to-hand combat, explosives, whatever. If it involved killing something, Paul Renner was your boy. Well, when Uncle Sam owns your ass and you have a skill he can use, he's a dirty old uncle who likes touching you in your naughty place." He paused. "I think that's more than enough payment for Agent Scully. Where'd you grow up?"

"Pittsburgh," Jerri said. "All the bad parts of a big city combined with all the bad parts of a rural Midwest town."

"Oh, come on, I've been to Pittsburgh lots of times. It's a great town."

"Yeah? Says you."

"That's right," he said, folding his arms. "Says me." He grinned, amused at himself. "Okay, no home town talk. Inspired by Agent Scully, you dyed your hair red and applied to the FBI. How'd that go?"

She rolled her eyes. "It's natural. And I applied three times before I got an interview. I have a bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice, but so did everyone else. I think the
janitors
at Hoover have a BA in Criminal Justice. Anyway, once they called me for an interview, I knew I was in. I can talk my way through anything. They made me an interrogation specialist. Good Cop, mostly, although I can play bitch queen with the best of them. It's not chasing UFOs with David Duchovny, but it's interesting in its own way.

"They skipped me off to the New York field office for a couple years. Then Gene requested that I join his team, and here I am." She cracked her neck and stretched. "Your turn. You're in the service and found your niche. What next?"

"I traveled the world," Paul said. "Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Australia. Always outside the U.S., no uniform, no dog tags. They'd give me a target and a deadline, and off I'd go. Sometimes I'd have to plant evidence, sometimes remove it. Sometimes I'd have to make it look like an accident or a random thing like a mugging. Sometimes it had to look like it was on purpose. At times, months would go by and I'd just sit on base doing nothing, getting paid to wait for the next job."

"What base?"

Paul ignored the question. "Sometimes they'd bounce me from job to job so quick I'd barely have time for a shower and a cup of coffee before the next briefing started. So, anyway, after four years of dedicated service to my country, I left to go to college and put that well-earned tuition money to good use."

"Which college?"

"Do you want to hear the story or not?" 

"You know I do."

"Then quit asking questions you know I won't answer." The amusement in his voice disappeared as he went back to the story. "So I got an associate's degree in Computer Science and transferred to a great four-year school for my bachelor's. Two months in, after two and a half years of no contact, I get a phone call. A threat to national security needs to be removed, and they need me to do it.

"So I tell them I've been out of the service for a couple years, and the guy says word-for-word, 'civilian contractors are always compensated higher.' I point out that this arrangement is illegal. He counters that, without my uniform or my tags, what I was doing was illegal all along. To make a long story short, we negotiated a fee, and on a warm summer night on D Street in Tacoma, Washington, as a service to my country, I killed a man."

"D Street was a government job?" 

"Once I picked up the old trade, the calls flooded in. The money was good, the work was challenging, and at some point I stopped caring if they were traitors or spies or terrorist masterminds. I was more interested in the job than the money.

"So one day I get a call from someone who knew someone who knew that someone important's wife knew that he was cheating on her, and she was going to file for divorce and bilk him for all he's worth. They, of course, needed Paul Renner to resolve the problem. It didn't even occur to me that taking that job crossed some fictional line that turned an honorable soldier into a murderer.

"They needed someone killed, so they called a killer." He felt no remorse and sadness as he said it. It was just a fact.

Jerri stared out the window for a while. Finally she spoke. "That's pretty fucked up, Paul."

"Yep," he said.

"You know, this morning I was afraid of your hands." Jerri set her hand atop Paul's. "But no matter what else you've done with them, at least today they did some good." She smiled at him with sparkling green eyes.

Paul returned the look with interest. "Today they did," he agreed.

She gave his hand a squeeze and pulled hers back, then looked out the window.

It was four in the morning when the plane landed at Dulles International Airport. The howling wind blasted freezing-cold grit in their faces as they assembled on the tarmac. It only took a moment for the government SUVs to pull up. Gene took shotgun in the first, and Renner hopped into the back seat. Jerri took the other side. Marty stepped toward that car, but Doug sidled past him and got in. That left an SUV just for Carl, Marty, and their driver. They got in, and moments later the team was on its way back into Washington D.C.

Carl ran his hand over his mostly-bald head. "I'm going to have to shave tonight. You, too, Marty. We look pretty ridiculous."

Marty didn't reply.

"Listen up, folks," Gene said over the COM. "Sam has confirmed that Doctor Lefkowitz is still in private practice in Manassas, and he's still at the address on file. He doesn't appear to be going anywhere, and we've got the local PD staking him out, so everyone head home and catch an hour's sleep. It'll take forty-five minutes to get there if we leave early, and two hours if we catch the morning rush. That means we're leaving HQ at oh-five-thirty, and you can nap in the car. We'll catch some breakfast once we get there."

Marty checked his watch.
3:47 a.m. Got to get up at 5:00.
Just the thought of the early start brought a yawn. It spread to Carl, who punched him in the arm.

"Jerk," Carl said when he was able to talk again.

Marty killed his COM. "Why do you think he did it?"

Carl looked confused. "Why do I think who did what?"

"Renner. Why'd that motherfucker pull our asses out of the fire today?"

"Well," Carl said, "he probably pulled
mine
out because of the tragedy it would be if my dashing good looks were no longer available to the world. I don't have a clue why he rescued your ugly ass."

Marty scowled. "Be serious, Carl. He's a cold-blooded, ruthless son-of-a-bitch who murders people for a living, and he knows I'd geek him in half a second if I had the chance, and he saves my fucking life? I don't owe that fuck a goddamn thing, Carl. I won't be indebted to that piece of shit."

"Relax, Marty. I don't owe him anything either. I still don't know if working with him is a good idea, but tomorrow we're going to nab the guy who ordered those killings. That's worth something, isn't it?"

Marty looked ready to spit. "I know if it's a good idea, and it fucking isn't. I don't care who else we catch, this fish is big enough for all of us. Fuck him. Motherfucker."

"We'll take him into custody as soon as we have Lefkowitz, you know."

"That motherfucker knows it, too. He's not stupid, and he'll run. You watch, Carl. Someone's going to get hurt tomorrow, you fucking watch. We just got to make sure it's Renner."

Carl let Marty stew in his own juices for the rest of the ride.

January 10th, 5:27 AM EST; J. Edgar Hoover Building, Parking Garage; Washington, D.C.

Gene yawned into his fist and watched Jerri's car pull in. It was a clear, crisp morning but not as cold as the previous day. With no wind it wasn't that bad outside, and low levels of oxycodone for pain helped his general mood. Paul Renner stepped out of the passenger side of Jerri's car and his FBI escorts out the back. Gene hobbled over to Doug. "Any idea what that's all about?"

"Don't know," Doug said. "I imagine they made arrangements to get Paul from visitor parking to here. So Jerri must have met him there. I'll ask Valiera."

Gene grunted by way of reply. He saw his brother seething at Renner as Paul walked toward the group. "Marty!" he yelled to grab his attention away from Paul. "You're driving car two."

Marty snapped out of his funk and caught the keys that Gene had thrown at his face. "Yeah, whatever." He turned to his assigned vehicle, got in, and slammed the door. Gene turned his attention elsewhere.

Once inside the SUV, Marty looked at the keys in his hand, then realized the car was already warmed up and idling.
What'd he do, throw me his house keys?
Marty dropped the keys into the cup holder as his brother's voice blurted orders through the COM.

"Renner, you and I are riding with Doug. Brent, Bates, you're with Marty. Traffic's picking up; let's move out."

The team piled into the big black SUVs as ordered. In Marty's auto, Carl got in the back, put on some earphones, and settled back to snooze on the way. Jerri hopped into the front seat and smiled. "Morning, guys! Did you get any sleep?"

Carl cracked an eye open and smiled back. "Not much, but I'm going to add to it, starting now." He turned up the volume on his iPod and his eye closed again. Marty couldn't tell what Carl was listening to, but he could hear the bass from the front seat.

"How about you?" she said to Marty as they pulled out.

"Not really," Marty said without looking at her. "No."

"I'm wide awake. Want me to drive?"

As the car stopped at the garage exit, he looked at her with anger in his eyes. "Do you honestly think I don't know what's going on?"