While Galileo Preys (27 page)

“Lisa? Is that you? Over.”

Galileo answered the request with another wipe of the mic along his khakis.

“What the hell is that?” asked a second guard. His question wasn’t directed into the mic but was instead picked up as ambient noise. He must have been standing near the first guard. Galileo made a mental note: at least two guards inside the gun shop.

“Lisa?” This, again, from the first guard. Probably the leader. “Answer me. Over.”

Fifteen seconds passed.

Finally: “I’m going to check it out,” decided the leader.

Galileo cocked the H&K, left the trunk open, and waited for his quarry to emerge.

The final tally was this: Bob, 502 and Tom, 453.

Ever the sportsman, Bob offered his hand, which Tom gladly shook.

“Looks like your FBI is going to be getting a make-over,” Bob said.

Tom shrugged. “I’m not sure if that’s something I’ll regret.”

Bob smiled, then guffawed.

“I had a feeling,” he said.

They both stared down that hundred-yard alley of their large soundproofed room. Just two men and their guns.

“One more?” offered Tom.

“You didn’t even have to ask.”

They mounted the paper men onto their clips and sent them to their places. They each only had five bullets left, so this round would be abbreviated, but some fun was better than no fun.

Bob glanced at Tom. “Ready?”

Tom donned his earmuffs. Bob donned his, and they took aim at their targets. Feet apart, hips at an angle, dominant hand forward. The proper stance for firing a handgun created a triangle. These were men who knew what they were doing.

Bob, who was closest to the door, thought he felt a breeze between shots one and two, but ignored it. The floor was ventilated, of course, to handle the discharges from the firearms, but there were no windows or cracks in the walls. The idea of a breeze was preposterous—and distracting. Bob intended to get a perfect score, and his first shot had been dead-center. If only his cousin Margaret could see him now.

He fired off two more rounds. One actually passed through the bullet hole left by another! He felt like Robin Hood. Let his pre-judgmental liberal base disapprove of his gun-love. He was about to get a perfect score, damn it. He was in the zone. So much so that he angled his barrel up and instead of the easier target of the chest, he aimed for the head. Because my platform will reach the American people in their hearts and their brains, he mused. The goofy thought stretched his lips in a smirk. He fingered the trigger and felt something hot touch the back of his head and he paused and he frowned and then the bullet from the H&K ripped through his skull and Bob died.

Tom, for his part, noticed Galileo approach out of his peripheral vision about half a second before the assassination occurred. He swung his Smith & Wesson around toward the sandy-haired man. Galileo glanced over at him and appeared confused. After all, what was Tom Piper doing here?

That confusion was all the opportunity Tom required. He shuttled past the obligatory demand of “Freeze!” and just fired away, two shots, to the killer’s chest.

Click, click.

His Smith & Wesson was empty.

He’d fired his last bullet at the paper target.

Fuck.

Galileo raised his own pistol and Tom lunged forward, tackling the man to the soft floor. First step: disarm. Tom slapped the H&K out of Galileo’s hands. It scuttled away, harmless. Galileo raised his left knee toward Tom’s groin, but the FBI agent was well-accustomed to wrestling thugs and he used the weight of his own knee to keep Galileo’s pinned to the ground. Second step: disable. Here, an amateur might resort to a fist-pummeling, but that risked at best bloody knuckles and at worst a broken hand so Tom chose to go a different route. He pressed his right elbow into Galileo’s windpipe and waited for the son of a bitch to black out.

Meanwhile, Tom caught a glimpse of Bob Kellerman’s body, crumpled in an undignified mess several feet away. Tom’s heart keened for the man. He returned his attention to Galileo. This man who had killed Darcy
Parr, who had slaughtered countless men and women and even children, who had—

Wait. What the hell was Galileo doing here? Wasn’t he supposed to be in custody? In that moment, Tom knew. He knew that Norm and Daryl and everyone else were dead. He knew that someone had probably tried to contact him on his cell phone.

He pressed harder onto Galileo’s windpipe. If it snapped and the fucker died of asphyxiation, well, these things happened, didn’t they? Tom poured his grief and wrath into his violence. He could hear Galileo’s vague gasps of breath, but he didn’t care. Someone needed to end him. And he was so intent on doing so that he failed to notice the heavy wallet in Galileo’s hand until it smashed him in the left shoulder. His bad shoulder. The shoulder that had been shot back in February, at Baptist St. Anthony’s in Amarillo. It had mended, sure, but it was still sensitive and when Galileo struck it with the full might of a desperate man, the pain resounded through him like sound waves from a tuning fork. He flinched—and Galileo squirmed out of his grip. Tom reached for the man’s ankle, but Galileo was like a chased rabbit, too fast, too fast. Galileo went for his Heckler & Koch and Tom finally caught up with him and felt the bullets enter his chest and ignored them—he had a job to do, damn it—but then the world got so dark so quick, and cold, and quiet.

W
hen they returned from the fundraiser, after they made sure Sophie was asleep and made sure Lester was preoccupied with the TV, Esme and Rafe retired to their bedroom and fucked like teenagers. Sheets were entangled. Alarm clocks were knocked to the carpet. Headboards were rattled.

The following morning, when Esme awoke, she was on the floor beside the alarm clock. Rafe was nearby, cocooned in their olive-colored comforter. She traced an index finger across the outline of his face. When she reached his lips, she could feel his breath exhale against her fingertip.

She brought her finger back, leaned across the carpet, and kissed him. His lips still tasted like Dom Perignon. She slid her left hand inside his comforter cocoon and against his smooth belly—and he awoke.

“Morning,” she said.

He smiled, then grimaced, then frowned. “Where…?”

Befuddled, Rafe sat up and looked around.

“How did we get on the floor?”

“Gravity,” Esme replied.

“Ah.” He reached for the alarm clock and checked its results. “We’ve got five minutes.”

Five minutes later, Esme wiped the fresh sweat from her forehead and watched her husband wobble into the shower. Between her still-mutinous backbone and her upsy-daisy equilibrium, she required the leverage of the bed to help stand up, but once vertical she quickly donned her pink bathrobe and went about her day. Her first stop was Sophie’s bedroom. Unsurprisingly, her daughter was already awake, although still in bed, and was playing with a few of her dolls.

“Morning, peanut.”

“Morning, Mommy!”

Esme climbed into her daughter’s bed, and they spent the next ten minutes selecting the proper ensemble for Skipper to wear on her big date with SpongeBob SquarePants. Sophie herself was wearing her Bugs Bunny nightgown in honor of Easter, which was next week.

Soon they could smell the sweet aroma of Grandpa Lester’s flapjacks, and Sophie scooted out of bed and down the stairs. Esme tried to keep up as fast as her back would allow, but by the time she reached the kitchen, her daughter was already sitting down beside a steaming plate of sugar-sprinkled fried batter.

“Need some tomato juice?” Lester asked Esme, which was his oh-so-clever way of asking if she had a hangover, but she just shook her head and sat beside her flapjack-inhaling daughter.

“Don’t forget to breathe,” recommended Esme.

Sophie took a deep breath, then launched back into some more.

By the time she was on her second plate, Rafe joined them, dressed for work. He had his specs on, and the blue of his irises appeared misty behind the glass lenses.

“Top of the morning to you, squirt,” he said, and dove down to give his daughter a bear hug. He made his way to the fridge and poured himself a glass of tomato juice. Lester, still flapping those jacks, took note of his son’s beverage and let loose a rubbery smirk.

It was Rafe’s turn to drive Sophie to school, so while she scampered to her bedroom to change into her “daytime clothes,” he took the time to click on the TV and catch up on the latest hoopla. Unsurprisingly, the top stories were Governor Kellerman’s speech and the capture of Galileo in Kansas City. Few knew the two were related, but Rafe was one of those few. He glanced back at Esme, who was stuffing her face with Lester’s cooking.

How had he forgotten how special his wife was? Never again.

He chugged down the remainder of his tomato juice, kissed his wife, shook hands with his old man (because that’s what men do), and escorted his little blue-eyed angel out to the car. She was wearing her polka-dot dress today. He complimented her on it. He told her it looked resplendent. She complimented him on his tie. She told him it looked shiny.

Esme stood by the kitchen window and watched them leave. She felt like a wife again, and a mother….

“You going to get dressed today?” murmured Lester.

…and a daughter-in-law.

She wanted to remain in her bathrobe just to spite her father-in-law, but mindful of the impression that sloth might imprint on the old man, she wandered back to her bedroom, enjoyed the massage of a very long shower, and slipped into a casual white blouse and brown slacks. By now it was almost 9:00 a.m. She absently wondered what Tom was up to, how he’d made it home from the fundraiser (home for a field agent being a relative term). His motorcycle was still parked wherever the valets had put it. She and Rafe, in their impatient desire to rip each other’s clothes off, had forgotten it at Amy’s mansion. Esme made a mental note to ask Amy about it when she showed up.

In the meanwhile, it was puzzle time. She booted up the desktop and navigated to a Web site she’d recently discovered which offered user-created Sudoku puzzles which were sorted by difficulty level and, best of all, timed. The clock factor turned a regular game into a suspenseful race. Once completed, she could compare her time with others who had worked the same puzzle.

As she surfed through the day’s newest offerings, her news feed application loaded along the bottom of the browser window. Just as with the TV, all the online folk seemed to concentrate on was, as they so succinctly put it, “the serial killer” or “the atheist nominee.” There was also, it appeared, a genocide occurring in one of the former Soviet republics, but hardly anyone was blogging about
that
. She loaded up the Beta Band on her iPod and attacked one of the puzzles
labeled Impossible. Nothing like starting the day with a challenge.

By noontime, after a few coffee breaks, a long argument with Lester about the merits of having Sophie attend sleep-away camp this summer, and a therapeutic walk up and down the street to strengthen her leg muscles, she was on her sixth puzzle. Her iPod growled out Irish punk rock courtesy of the Stiff Little Fingers. Her best time so far on an “impossible” puzzle had been eight minutes, forty-eight seconds. She aimed to beat that. She popped the joints in her neck, stretched her fingers, and, while the puzzle was loading, glanced down halfheartedly at the news ticker.

BREAKING NEWS…. Democratic nominee Bob Kellerman shot at firing range in LI…

Esme blinked. Shot at a firing range? It sounded like the punch line to a bad joke. She clicked on the ticker and the full article sprang to life and the bad joke transmogrified into a horrific nightmare.

…one bullet to the head…

…survived by a wife, Betsy, and two children…

…scheduled stop at a local business called Nassau Firearms…

Esme wiped at her eyes. Was she crying? Yes. She hardly knew the man, but had invested so much time in the past month into his campaign, and upon meeting him had been so impressed by his dignity and his integrity, and now, some religious extremist offended by his speech had gunned the man down. She shook her head in disgust, and read the rest of the article.

Other confirmed casualties in the attack include the
owner of the store, Will Clay, 62; his wife Emily, 69; Kathryn Hightower, 40, who served as Governor Kellerman’s communications director; several members of the governor’s security detail: Devon Smith, 32; Lisa Penny, 28…

She jumped to the next paragraph.

Two victims remain in critical condition and were rushed to nearby Glen Cove Hospital. These are Paul Ridgely, 31, campaign manager for Governor Kellerman, and Tom Piper, 56, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of—

Esme didn’t remember reading the rest of the article. She didn’t remember going on Google to find the address of Glen Cove Hospital or putting on her shoes or telling Lester she was leaving or even getting into her Prius. One moment she was at her computer and the next she was on the Long Island Expressway, heading west, at ninety miles per hour.

No one pulled her over. All local law enforcement was gathered outside Port Washington, at a local business called Nassau Firearms. She cruised to the hospital in silence. The stereo remained off.

What was Tom doing there? He didn’t have a motorcycle so he hitched a ride with the future president of the United States? How had anyone been able to get past an entire security detail and Tom? Her mind briefly flitted to Galileo, but no, he was locked away in Middle America. So it found solace in Tom. She would get to the hospital and he would be in surgery and it would be hours and hours but then the doctor would come out and tell her he wasn’t out of the woods and that he
couldn’t see any visitors so she would have to sneak in to see him, as he had come to see her, and he would be lying there in his bed as she had been lying in hers and she would sit beside him and he would look terrible but alive and they would trade quips, because that was how they dealt with tragedy, they would trade quips, and embedded in the quips would be granules of wisdom, and they would have a heart-to-heart, a real heart-to-heart, and she would tell him what he meant to her, and he would tell her what she meant to him, and they would work together to find this assassin, whoever he may be, and Esme careened into the hospital parking lot and sprinted into an entanglement of policemen and someone recognized her, that asshole Pamela Gould from the Long Island bureau, but she let her through the entanglement and into an alcove full of chairs and magazines and it was there and then that Esme knew that Tom was not going to make it.

“It was Galileo,” rasped Trumbull.

Esme sipped at her cold coffee.

To his credit, Trumbull came to the hospital first, before heading out to the crime scene. He actually was about to board a government plane to the crime scene in Kansas when he got the news about the massacre on Long Island. He instructed the pilot to alter his flight plan, and soon they were airborne, flying not over the Great Plains but over the great Atlantic. When he arrived at Glen Cove Hospital, the media hubbub had barely subsided; after all, it was here that the governor’s body had been brought. Trumbull took a hit from his
oxygen tank, which he carried now with him wherever he went, and gruffed his way through the mob. None of the reporters harassed him. To them, he was just another dying old man going in for a checkup.

He found Esme in that same alcove. Pamela Gould was coordinating the efforts at Nassau Firearms. Esme was alone, and near catatonic. He sat beside her. They exchanged pleasantries (or a tragic facsimile thereof). And then Trumbull hit her with his bombshell about Galileo. He told her about the van, and the cover-up. He told her about his efforts to contact Tom. He told her what he knew—so he could tell her what he now wanted.

But she wasn’t emotionally ready for that. Not yet.

“I saw Tom,” she said.

Trumbull raised a liver-mottled hand to his lip to wipe away some loose saliva. “Oh?”

“Galileo shot him in the chest.”

Trumbull nodded. He’d read the report.

“Not in the head,” Esme added, pointedly.

“Our boy put up a fight. Galileo got desperate, and took the easier shot.” He coughed wetly into his fist. “Yes, he did.”

“He didn’t have his motorcycle,” muttered Esme. “Rafe took it from him last night in a…”

“I don’t know if I follow what…”

She gazed up at him. Her eyes were glassy, as if her soul had gone far, far away. “If he had his motorcycle, he wouldn’t have needed a ride with Bob Kellerman. He wouldn’t have been there at the scene….”

“We don’t know yet why he was there,” Trumbull
replied. “But we’ll piece it all together.” Which provided the perfect segue to his request. He opened his mouth to speak and—

“Esme!”

Her overweight professor husband bounded into the alcove and into her embrace. Trumbull shifted in his seat and watched her cry onto his shoulder. He was never one for public displays of affection, even when appropriate.

So he decided to make their public display a private one. “I’ll be right back,” he muttered, and lolled toward the restroom. Halfway there, he stopped, and turned. “Don’t go anywhere, please, Special Agent—forgive me—Mrs. Stuart. I need to talk to you about something.”

Once he was gone, Rafe took his seat.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. Her hands were in his. “I’ve been in class and in meetings, but as soon as I heard, I swear, I got in my car and hightailed it as fast as I could, except traffic was insane. I mean, I’ve never seen traffic like this, not even on the Taconic. The police had set up barricades and were searching every car on the highway in either direction. By the time I got to the house, Dad told me you were here. I should’ve called, but in all the chaos I must have left my cell in my office. He picked up Sophie from school.”

“Sophie…oh, God…”

“She knows something’s wrong, but he didn’t tell her what it was, and he’s not letting her watch the TV. She’s too young to be exposed to anything like this. We’re all too young to be exposed to anything like this.”

He held her again. He could feel the right shoulder of his shirt becoming moist with her tears. He let her cry. He didn’t know what else he could do—what could he possibly do at a time like this but be with her—so that’s what he did. For his own part, his feelings were definitely muddled. There was shock, of course, and bewilderment, and anger, anger at whoever committed this horrible crime. And yet…deep down…though perhaps not that deep…some part of him had learned that Tom Piper was in critical condition and was…not happy but…relieved. Did that make him a bad person? Did that make him selfish? These were questions best ignored, for the time being.

“Rafe…” she said, and caressed his adorably soft cheekbones.

“Come on. Let’s go home.”

He got up.

She didn’t.

“What is it?” he asked. And maybe he knew what was coming. Maybe he knew what she was going to say. He wasn’t a fool. “What is it, Esme?”

“Trumbull’s going to ask me to help. He thinks I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I do. I always did. That’s what he needs to talk to me about.”

“Help? With what?”

“Rafe…”

He sat back down. “We’ve had this argument already. You lost, Esme, remember?”

“Things are different now….”

“Yes, you said that too. You said that to me a few weeks ago. When you finally were able to get off the
couch. After almost dying. ‘Things will be different now,’ you said. Things were falling apart between us but you made everything right. You did it. And now you want to, what, throw all of that away?”