Want To Play (42 page)

She heard her heart pounding against the wall of her chest, she heard the hum of the computers and the oblivious twitter of a bird outside the window.

And over it all, she heard the elevator, coming up.

Run! Hide, goddamnit!
She dropped to a crouch behind her desk and in a flash she was back in that closet in Georgia ten years ago, doing what FBI Special Agent Libbie Herold told her to do. She’d heard her heart pounding then, too, and other sounds: the quick padding of Libbie’s bare feet across the wooden floor, toes still wet from her shower; the creak of a floorboard in the hall, and then a
snick, snick
, coming from the bedroom doorway. Through dusty louvers she saw Libbie’s bare legs wobble back into view, and then there was a flash of metal that opened her thighs in two bloody smiles that spilled a red lake on the floor. And through it all, Grace hadn’t made a sound. She’d just cowered in her laughable hiding place, eyes wide with terror as she waited for her turn, doing nothing to help Libbie Herold, doing nothing to save herself.
Doing nothing.

Run and hide
. It was an instinct so ingrained, so powerful, that in an instant it had overridden the exhaustive training of the last ten years. The defense classes, the bodybuilding, the target practice, all of it useless as Grace cowered now as she had ten years ago, waiting, doing nothing.

Like any prey, she tried to make herself smaller, pressing her arms tight against her sides, hugging herself, and then suddenly she felt the gun and remembered who she was. Who she had created from that ruined girl in the closet.

She glanced over her shoulder at the window that led to the fire escape. She could still make it. Out the window, down the stairs, onto the safety of the street . . .

Not this time.
She closed her eyes briefly and turned back to the elevator. It was almost all the way up. Too late to race past it to the stairwell, but time enough to pull the Sig from its holster and chamber a round; time enough to dart forward to the cover behind Annie’s desk and steady the gun in both hands on the smooth wooden surface.

This is your entire world when you shoot
, her first firearms instructor had lectured over and over again.
Your gun hand, your target, and the path between. Nothing else exists
.

She’d been in that world a hundred times, a thousand, firing fifteen rounds in a pattern so close the holes all overlapped. Ironically, the deafening noise of the target range had provided her only moments of real peace, when the world around her blurred and disappeared and there was only that narrow, sharply focused path demanding her attention.

She felt the peace settle on her now as she put pressure on the trigger and saw only her gun, and the grate of the elevator door.

She breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, and waited with eerie calm to kill her first human being.

Magozzi was driving so fast the Ford fishtailed when he took the turn onto Hennepin through a red light. Pedestrians and bikers scattered in front of the wailing siren and the screech of tires. Gino was in the passenger seat, one hand braced on the dash, yelling the warehouse address into the radio, calling for ERT and backup, broadcasting a possible officer down.

Sharon Mueller wasn’t responding to radio calls.

The top of the elevator rose slowly into Grace’s line of sight, then the interior, and when it was level with the floor, it clunked to a stop.

Grace’s heart stopped with it, and then broke into a million pieces. She heard it break in her ears, and felt the clatter of all its parts against the inside of her ribs.

There was no killer in the elevator. Only Mitch, slumped against the side wall, staring at his sprawled legs with blue, sightless eyes, wearing bloody Armani. The side of his head that faced her was utterly gone, inside out, as if someone had pulled off his ear like a pressure cap, letting his wonderful brain spill out.

No, no, no
. Grace felt an anguished, outraged wail threatening to rise from her throat, and knew that that sound, if she let it come, would be her surrender.

So she looked away from strong curled hands that had touched her with tenderness, dead eyes that had loved her once and forever, and let the hatred come instead, filling her up.

She moved silently, quickly, boots barely scuffing as she crept around the desk, past the elevator
don’t look!
toward the stairwell, gun held at arm’s length, leading the way.

The door opened fast, but Grace was faster, down on one knee, holding her breath, finger increasing the pressure on the trigger until she felt that tiny tug of resistance that came a hair’s breadth before firing . . .

. . . and then Diane stepped clear of the door and froze, staring down at the muzzle of Grace’s gun.

She was in heavy sweats and her running shoes, a canvas purse slung over her shoulder. Her blond hair was snagged up in a ponytail, and her face was flushed and twisted and terrified. ‘I . . . I . . . I . . .’

Grace jumped to her feet, grabbed Diane’s arm, and pulled her against the wall, all the while keeping her eyes and gun trained on the door as it eased closed. ‘Goddamnit, Diane . . .’ she hissed close to her ear, ‘did you see anyone? Harley? Roadrunner? Annie?’

Diane made a tiny, keening noise in her throat, and Grace felt her start to collapse next to her. She jerked her eyes away from the door for a second, saw Diane staring at Mitch’s body in the elevator, her mouth open and her breath coming very fast.

‘Look what you did, Grace,’ she whimpered. ‘Look what you did.’

Grace flinched as if she’d been slapped, looked down at her gun, then realized what Diane must be thinking. ‘For God’s sake, Diane, I didn’t do that!’ she whispered frantically, jerking Diane to her other side, standing between her and the awful thing in the elevator. ‘Listen to me, we don’t have time, there’s a deputy downstairs, did you see her?’

Diane was moving her head, trying to see past Grace to the elevator. Her eyes were wild, open too far, a circle of white showing around the blue.

Grace shook her arm. ‘Don’t look at that, Diane. Look at me.’

Empty blue eyes slid slowly to Grace’s. They seemed pathetic, resigned, as ruined as Mitch’s head. ‘What?’ she asked dully.

‘Did you see anyone downstairs?’

Diane’s head went up and down. ‘Woman cop.’ Her throat moved in a convulsive swallow. ‘She’s dead . . . messy . . .’

‘Oh, God.’ Grace closed her eyes briefly. ‘What about the others? Harley, Annie . . .’

Diane shook her head mindlessly.

Jesus, Grace thought, she isn’t even blinking. I know where she’s going. I’ve been in that place, I remember. She pinched the skin of Diane’s arm hard enough to make her gasp in surprise and jerk backward.

‘You hurt me.’ It began as an anguished whisper and crescendoed to an awful wail. ‘You hurt me you HURT ME YOU HURT ME . . .’

Grace slammed her free hand over Diane’s mouth, pushing her back against the wall, hissing into her face. ‘I’m sorry. I had to do that. Now listen to me. I have to go downstairs. I have to find Harley and Roadrunner’ –
and please God let Annie not be here; let her be safe outside, standing in line at the restaurant, impatient and pissed and sassy and alive . . .
‘Do you understand, Diane? I have to go, and I can’t leave you up here alone. You have to come with me, behind me, all right? I won’t let anything happen to you, I promise.’

Because this time she had a gun, by God, and this time she was ready. No one else was going to pay with their life for the dubious privilege of being part of hers.

‘We can’t go, Grace.’

‘We
have
to go. Just for a little while.’ Grace was thinking fast, talking fast, feeling precious seconds tick away, cursing the imagination that saw Harley and Roadrunner and Annie somewhere downstairs, bleeding to death while goddamned stupid selfish Diane . . . She stopped and took a breath, redirected that good, strong anger away from Diane, back toward the killer.

‘Come on, Diane. It’s time to leave,’ she said reasonably. ‘You told me that once, remember? And you were right. Remember?’

Diane blinked at her. ‘The hospital.’

‘Right. I was in the hospital, and you told me that sometimes we just have to walk away from things. That everything would be better if I just went away. And that’s what we did, remember . . .’

‘But . . .’ Diane looked at her helplessly. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. We weren’t all supposed to go.’

Grace felt a tiny hitch in the world. ‘What?’

‘You were supposed to go. Not me, not Mitch, just you, but then everybody went, everybody had to follow Grace and I had to go, too, and now see what you’ve done?’ She was crying hard now. She dug in her purse for a tissue and pulled out a silenced .45 and stuck it in Grace’s chest.

Magozzi bit the inside of his cheek as he took the turn onto Washington on two wheels, tasted blood while he waited an eternity for four tires to find the pavement again, then jammed his foot against the floorboards.

They slid sideways to a stop in front of the warehouse in time to see Halloran spread-legged in front of the little green door, emptying his clip at the lock with booming explosions that sent shrapnel flying all over the place. The trunk was popped on an MPD unit parked across the street, and a young patrolman was sprinting toward Halloran with a twelve-gauge and a tire iron.

Magozzi and Gino were out of the car before it stopped rocking after the hard stop, doors left hanging open, coattails flapping as they ran for the door. Magozzi grabbed the shotgun barrel and jerked it down before Halloran started shooting. ‘No! It’s steel! Wait for the ram!’

Halloran darted wild eyes toward him, then grabbed the tire iron and started hammering it into the crack where steel door met steel frame.

Magozzi froze for an instant, paralyzed by hopelessness, hearing a chorus of sirens coming in from all different directions. ‘Fire escape,’ he said suddenly, and started to run for the side of the building before the words were out of his mouth. ‘Take the front!’ he yelled at Gino over his shoulder, just as the toothy grill of a fire department emergency vehicle nosed around the corner.

One minute for the ram
, he thought.
Maybe two. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay . . .

His cell phone rang when he was on the fire escape and Tommy yelled into his ear. ‘Leo! I found it! It’s Mitch Cross! James Mitchell is Mitch Cross and D. Emanuel is his wife!’

Magozzi pounded up the metal stairs and threw his cell phone over the railing.

All the air had left Grace’s lungs in a rush, as if the sudden pressure of the .45 against her chest had pushed it out.

She hadn’t been ready after all. Her own gun was pointed off to the right, still trained on the stairwell door, and through the shock and the fear she was thinking,
She could fire two rounds into my heart before I could swing the Sig around . . .

Diane was looking at her with the empty, soulless eyes Sharon Mueller had seen in those last seconds before the bullet found her throat, eyes that Grace had never seen before. The waterworks had stopped the second she’d pulled out the .45. ‘I brought the big gun today, too,’ she said quietly. ‘I like the .22 better, but I needed to be sure. You have to be really close with the .22. Really precise.’

It took a long moment for it all to sink in. Oh, sure, quiet, proper Diane who was squeamish about guns and who never so much as raised her voice had just shoved a .45 into her chest, but until the moment she mentioned the .22, the thought that she was the Monkeewrench killer had never entered Grace’s mind.

‘Oh no.’ Disbelief spilled involuntarily from lips that felt thick and useless, from a mind that was threatening to stop altogether. ‘You? You killed all those people? My God, Diane, why?’

‘Well, self-preservation, I suppose.’

‘But . . . you didn’t even know those people. They were just . . . profiles. In a
game
, for God’s sake.
It was just a game
.’

Diane actually smiled at her, and it was so frightening Grace’s knees almost buckled. ‘That’s exactly it. I knew you’d understand. I was actually killing the game, not real people.’ Her eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Mitch tried to talk you out of that game, but you just wouldn’t listen, would you? Do you have any idea what you put that man through?’

‘You murdered people because Mitch
didn’t like the game?
’

‘Oh, Grace, don’t be ridiculous. It was much more than that. The game was going to destroy us. It was the
end of everything!
’ She paused a moment, head slightly tipped, listening.

Grace heard it, too. A siren. Distant. On its way here, or somewhere else? Diane didn’t seem a bit troubled by it, which terrified her.

‘Anyway,’ Diane continued calmly, ‘I had to stop it before players started to get to level fifteen. Cops play games like that, you know. What if some of them in Atlanta saw that little crime scene you dreamed up and started asking questions?’

Grace’s thoughts were spinning, colliding, trying to make sense of insanity. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Murder fifteen, Grace. You laid it all out for them. A half a dozen agencies and hundreds of cops couldn’t figure out who killed the people in Atlanta, and you told them with one stinking little clue in your stinking little game. Thanks a lot, Grace, for almost ruining my life. Obviously, I had to stop the game before anyone saw it. And I did. Killed a few people and you pulled it right off the web, just like I knew you would. But then those stupid cops sent your prints to the FBI, and that brought up the Atlanta murders anyway, and everything just started to fall apart.’

More sirens. A lot more, and they were close. Diane didn’t bat an eye.

Maybe she doesn’t hear them. Get her to listen. What was in murder fifteen? What clue was she talking about? No. Don’t think about that. It isn’t important now. Just try to distract her so you can move the Sig slowly, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time . . .

‘The police are coming, Diane. Listen to the sirens.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about them. It’s all part of the plan. Would you like to know the plan? It’s really quite ingenious. My original intention today was to kill just you, of course. I didn’t want to kill everyone, because then there’d be no Monkeewrench and Mitch would be unhappy, but . . . you know how it is. People just kept getting in the way.’ She frowned, irritated. ‘Like that woman cop downstairs. Now that ruined everything. What the hell was she doing here anyway? Did you know she was from Wisconsin? I saw it on the patch on her shirt.’ She tapped her forefinger against her lips, puzzling over something, then her face cleared abruptly. ‘Anyway, by the time the cops manage to break into the building – and I should give you a nod of thanks here, Grace, for this very excellent security system – I’ll be hysterical. I think I can do that pretty well. I’ve been practicing. And then all I have to do is tell them you just snapped and started killing people and I had to shoot you in self-defense. You know the FBI is just going to love that. They always wanted to believe you were the killer in Georgia anyway, and now they can, and they’ll get to close that pesky file. So everybody’s happy.’