Nantucket Five-Spot (26 page)

“You'd be going down alone. You and Beaumont. I needed a conspirator inside the DHS so I could walk away clean. You were the perfect choice. Because you trusted me.”

Out of control, she darted across the room to his desk. Jack knew how to push her buttons.

“Franny!” I shouted. Too late.

Jack grabbed her and jammed his gun against her forehead.

I said, “This is pointless. I have your phone. It stores the last ten calls, all them from you. I'm taking you down, Scooter. You're looking at twenty years to life.”

Franny tried a different tack. “I know you're angry, Jack, furiously angry and brokenhearted and—”

“You know nothing!” He gripped her harder, drilled the gun into her temple. “Don't you fucking patronize me, you little slut. I'm not some mook you can talk down from a ledge. You're coming with me. You're my ticket out of here.”

I edged a few steps closer, keeping myself between them and the door. “Don't do this, Jack. Put the gun down.”

“You've got to be kidding.”

“Put it down and I can help you.”

“Listen to him,” Franny said.

Jack roared, “Shut up bitch! One more word and I will shoot you in the face just to shut. You. The. Fuck. Up.”

I took a breath and brought out my last weapon. It wasn't a gun or a knife. It was a name.

“Sarah wouldn't want this, Jack.”

He froze as if I'd just told him he was walking through a mine field. “What? What did you say?”

I slipped closer, pushing the smooth soles of my feet into the thick pile wall-to-wall carpet. Baby steps. “You know it's true.”

“What the hell are you talking about?

I risked a glance at my watch. Six minutes left. I could feel the troops taking up their positions outside. Jack noticed the motion.

“How long did they give you, Kennis?”

“Not long. They're going to come in hard, Jack. You know the drill.”

“Let them come. They're not going to risk shooting you.” He stepped away from the window, though there was no perch nearby for a marksman to get a bead on him.

“I mean it. Think about Sarah.”

“How do you know about Sarah? Who told you about Sarah? How could you possibly—”

“I figured it out, Jack. I did my homework. You were working the drug trade at Doha with Beaumont. It all went south because of Haden Krakauer. Someone died. Franny told me about that—you crying in the men's room over a girl in Iraq.”

He shook her, bent her neck sideways with the muzzle of the gun. “You bitch.” She bit back a cry of pain.

I pushed on. “What did Haden do? He shut off the flow of safe drugs. But your girl was hooked. She couldn't go cold turkey. She shot a bad load from some Arab street dealer and she died.”

“You can't know that.”

“I looked up the American ODs that turned up at the base hospital and the American medical facilities in Kuwait City. I had your service records and Beaumont's. I knew the rough dates. Late 2002, early 2003. Am I right? Four women, only two Americans, only one of them in the right age range. Sarah Lucy Constable.”

“Fuck you. Don't you dare say her name, you fucking prick.”

“She loved you, Jack. She wouldn't want you to end this way.”

“Nice try, Sherlock, but she'd be cheering me on right now. She'd have blown you away the second you walked through that door. Now step aside. Franny and I are getting out of here. Move it.”

He took another step toward me. We were as close together as we were ever going to get, actually within arms' reach of each other. I needed a distraction and there it sat on Haden's desk—Jack's prize piece of Steuben glass.

I lunged sideways. With a hard sweep of my arm I batted the ice-fishing Eskimo off the desk. The move pulled something in my back and the heavy glass banged my wrist—two blasts of pain. But it worked. Jack swung from Franny for one vital second, diving to catch the sculpture—too late. It bounced on the rug and the silver Eskimo snapped off. Franny staggered back. I flung myself at Tornovitch. We hit the carpet in a thrashing tangle of arms and legs. Jack still held the gun, twisting to jab it into my stomach, trying to get off a shot. We struggled, locked in place. I was too weak to dislodge his arm. I tensed, waiting for the impact of the bullet, but Franny pulled him off me.

The gun fired with an ear-splitting crack, burying the bullet in the wall. Jack knocked Franny away and kicked clear of me. She fell to her hands and knees beside me on the floor. He leapt up. Lonnie's men were banging at the door.

“Get back!” I shouted. “No one's hurt. Everything's under control! Stay out!”

“Jack—” Franny began.

“Shut up.” He spun to face me. “You think I'm crazy, Kennis? Maybe I should kill your girlfriend here. Then you'd understand.”

His gun swiveled over to Franny.

I talked to distract him now. “Don't make this worse for yourself, Jack. No one was seriously hurt tonight, no one died. They have you for conspiracy, but that's all. The DA will cut a deal. A couple of years in jail and then—”

He smiled. “Oh, I'm not going to jail, Kennis.”

“There's no way out of this room, Jack. Whether you kill us or not.”

“Guess again, Boy Wonder. There's
always
another way out. I'm free! Deal with it.”

Franny cried, “No!” and launched like a runner off the starting block.

Jack jabbed the big gun under his chin and pulled the trigger. The 9mm bullet shattered the office window and sent a spray of brain blood and bone fragments chasing the shards into the humid night air, raining down on the crowd below, spattering on the big stone compass by the front doors.

Jack collapsed, the gun hit the floor and the Swat team burst in, knocking the door clean off the hinges, all at the same time.

I threw up my hands. “Stop! Don't shoot! It's over!”

No one fired a shot. These kids were smart and disciplined. Lonnie Fraker pushed in behind them and gave the all clear.

Dazed and shell-shocked, Franny and I made our way downstairs and out through the garage into the security parking lot behind the building. The postmortems could wait until tomorrow. The town was safe. Jack was gone, and Zeke Beaumont was left alone to face the music, just like always.

Haden had arrived, shaken but determined, and I left him to handle the details. He could collect the evidence, make sure Beaumont was secure in a holding cell, organize the transport of Tornovitch's body, and start the cleanup.

I was done.

It took a while to reach the car. Franny drove. I closed my eyes and tipped my head against the window. I may even have fallen asleep for a few seconds.

When we got to my house, I invited her in for a drink. She poured us each a splash of vodka from the bottle in my freezer and squeezed a lemon over the ice while I walked around turning on lights. I didn't much like vodka—that bottle had been in there since Christmas—but the alcohol smoothed down the nap of my ruffled nerves.

There was no chance of our making love, even if we had wanted to. Sometimes a night of death and destruction can galvanize the limbic system, but I was too sore and we were both too rattled and numb to do anything but sip our drinks and sit quietly. When we finished, Franny got up and poured us another round.

She handed me my glass. “Don't worry about that e-mail trick. Jack must have left a trail. I can find it.”

I nodded. “He must have thought he was smarter than you. After all this time.”

“I thought I knew Jack. But I didn't. I didn't have a clue.”

“You can't know a person like that, Franny. There's no way in. It's impossible.”

Chirping crickets stitched the scented night air. She tasted her drink. After a while she said, “I'm leaving in the morning.”

“Battlefield promotion?”

“Something like that.”

“Washington DC.”

“Horrible town. But I'm stationed there.”

“You love it there. You belong there, just like I belong here.”

“I could visit.”

I took a drink, shook my head. “That would make it worse.”

She spoke, rattling her ice. “I don't want to lose you.”

The symmetry of it all could have made me smile, but I pursed my sore lips and squeezed my face into neutral. Facts were facts. This completed our role reversal. I had said those exact words to her in Los Angeles.

I took her hand, pulled her down onto the couch. “You found me, Franny. We found each other. I never thought that would happen. But it did. Jack told me once, ‘Write it off as a victory and walk away.'”

“Hank—”

“I was married then. You're married now to the job. You'll never divorce it. You're about to get a huge promotion. And you deserve it. What would you do here? Buy new curtains and write parking tickets? That's crazy.”

“I could transfer to the Boston office. I could commute.”

“Come on. No one gets ‘transferred' to the Boston office. They get exiled there.” I pressed her knee. “‘We'll always have Paris.'”

She clamped down on my hand. “I hate this.”

I lifted my glass. “Here's looking at you, kid.”

She put her drink down on the coffee table and leaned over to kiss me. It hurt and I let it. We held each other for a long time.

Then she stood up. “It's late. I have to go. There's paperwork and packing, and—there's a lot to do before morning.”

I studied her. She was adding things up again, but the figures always came out the same.

“Good-bye, Franny.”

“Good-bye, Hank.”

She turned away and walked out of the house, making sure not to slam the screen behind her. I sat on the couch and listened to the car start, and the diminishing note of the engine as she drove away.

She never said, “I love you.” I respected her for that.

Best to get away clean.

Chapter Twenty-one

Small Town Life

During the next week, Nantucket was overrun with network and cable news, reporters from the
New York Times
and the
Boston Globe
, stringers from newspapers as far away as Seattle and Los Angeles. Local stations from Boston and Providence brought their vans over, bristling with microwave antennas and bright-painted logos.

Yet David Trezize was the only journalist who got the whole story, which took up an entire double-sized issue of the
Nantucket Shoals.
His feature got picked up by UPI, Reuters, and various other news agencies around the world. He made quite a lot of money—what the
Shoals
normally brought in over the course of a year combining advertising and circulation, and he made his name in the world of big-time journalism. He got admiring letters and job offers. He deserved them. The articles he wrote were accurate and detailed. They were exciting to read. David had finally found a good story. He caught it like a screen pass and ran it eighty yards for a touchdown.

“The best part was getting a byline in Reuters,” he told me a few days later. “I read that name in the newspapers the whole time I was growing up. Stories had that dateline—‘from Reuters.' It was so glamorous. For years I thought Reuters was an actual place—this fantastic country where everything interesting happened. Now it turns out I live there.” He shrugged with a little self-deprecating smile. “For a few days anyway.”

We were standing in the steady roar of the south wind at the Delta fields, waiting to pick up our kids from Murray Camp. I nodded to Mike Henderson. Despite the fact that I had arrested him for murder briefly the winter before, we had stayed on friendly terms. His wife, Cindy, told me Debbie Garrison was spending half her time in Madaket with Billy Delavane now. Debbie was planning to move to the island in the fall, attend NHS, and live with him. She looked happy. Her mom, not so much, but she had given her permission.

“So the
Providence Journal
wants me to cover Homeland Security for them,” David was saying. “They think I'm connected. I had to tell them—uh oh.”

I turned to follow his look.

Pat Sauter was lumbering toward us. He must have weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds, which gave him three inches and sixty pounds on me. His son was trailing behind him, crew cut like his dad, with the same slab face, the same wet lips carved from blubber—Pat's Mini-Me. My kids were running to catch up. Mike and several other parents moved toward us, sensing trouble.

Pat stopped right in front of me. “Jake says you pushed him around, Chief. That true?”

“He was beating up my son. So I separated them.”

“You like pushing my son around, Chief?”

“That's an absurd question. Of course not. But I—”

“Remember what you told my kid? Pick on someone your own size.”

“I don't see anyone around here like that. Just you.”

“Funny guy. Big hero. Mr. Police Chief. Figure you're safe because no one wants an assault beef on a cop. That right? You gonna hide behind the badge? Suck your thumb behind the badge? Huh, Chief? That's how it's gonna be?”

My body still ached, but I was sick to death of these relentless bullies with their grudges and their agendas, their stupid pointless hatreds, their rage and aggression, prowling the world for targets, attacking the people I loved.

“Forget the badge,” I said. ”Take your best shot, lard-ass.”

He shoved me hard, one-handed—a straight-arm jab with the flat of his hand. The effect was so extreme it was almost comical. For a second I thought he had dislocated my shoulder. The blow sent a flare of pain up my neck and down my arm, spun me around and sent me staggering backward. I tripped over my own feet and wound up sitting down with a jarring thud on the hot asphalt. I was an idiot. Certainly, no match for this guy. He was approaching me with the crabwalk preparation of a field goal kicker going for a thirty-eight-yard bomb. I knew the kick would do permanent damage, but I couldn't budge.

Tim screamed, “Stop it!” throwing himself at Sauter. The velocity more than the weight threw the big man off balance. Tim sank a fierce bite into the massive leg. Sauter yelped. He knocked Tim off with a flailing swat and my paralysis broke. I was on my feet and charging. I slammed into Sauter's chest as he was pulling back for a punch. We danced for a few seconds and then he got me into a stranglehold.

You see it in the movies all the time. What they don't show you is how to break the hold. It's one of the easiest moves in the whole playbook of hand-to-hand combat. I lifted my right arm straight up like a kid in class begging to be called on, and then twisted my body around.

His hands came loose and I drove a side-chop into the side of his neck. That startled him. He took a step back and we faced off again. My ribs were screaming—he might as well have stabbed me with an ice pick. My vision was going blurry. I had no more fight left while he was just getting started.

But as he jumped at me, Mike Henderson and three other parents grabbed him. One of them was the garbage man Sam Trikilis—Alana's father. I was stunned to see that David Trezize was one of them—he had Sauter's left arm. The fourth guy I had never seen before. The group of five thrashed and careened in a tight circle: Mike had Sauter's other arm, Sam had a grip on his waist and the fourth Samaritan was holding onto the giant's left leg. Somehow they managed to stop him.

“All right! All right! Get offa me!” he bellowed. He shook himself, like a dog after a swim.

“Fine,” he said, catching his breath. “You win, Mr. Police Chief. But watch your back. Because these people won't always be around to protect you.”

For some reason that moronic threat made me angrier than anything else.

“Yes they will!” I shouted at him. “Don't you get it? They'll always be here to protect me and I'll always be here to protect my son. This is our town and we take care of each other.”

He glared at me for a second and then stormed off. I looked around for Tim and Caroline, huddled together near the parked cars. Debbie Garrison ran up and hugged Tim. He was too surprised to react.

“That was incredible,” she was saying to him as I limped over. “You were so brave! I thought he was gonna kill you. O my God. I'm so glad you're okay.”

She kissed his cheek and then bolted.

“She likes you,” I said. “And she's right. You saved my ass today.”

“I bit him.”

“Good move.”

We started for the car and Caroline gave her final verdict on the incident. “Boys are all insane. And this proves it.”

The afternoon had lurched back to normal as the crowd scattered. I waved to Mike Henderson. He lifted a fist in solidarity. David gave me a thumbs up as his kids climbed into his car. Sam saluted me with a grin. The other guy waved. I had to find out who he was.

When we were alone, I sat behind the wheel of my police cruiser for a minute or so, battered and hurting, craving an aspirin or six, breathing with the wind that rocked the car on its springs, watching my friends drive off. Good friends, it turned out.

And I didn't even know some of their names.

I closed my eyes for a second, then keyed the ignition and drove my kids home for dinner.