David Ellis - The Wrong Man

“I’ll need to be running in a bit here, yeah.”

“Are you seeing your folks?”

I laughed out loud. “No, ma’am. My mother’s deceased and my father isn’t close by.”

She cocked her head. “You’re all alone on Thanksgiving?”

“Not at all. I’m with you and Tom. That’s enough for me. It’s nice to see Tom enjoying something.”

“It is, it is. You should have seen him when he was a boy. His mother couldn’t keep enough groceries in the house.”

Then Aunt Deidre looked at me. She just stared at me for a long time and didn’t say a word. She didn’t need to say any words. I knew what she wanted.

“Deidre, we have a rough road ahead. You understand that.”

She finally broke eye contact. Her brain knew this. Her heart was hoping against hope for something different.

“I’m throwing a lot of darts at the board and hoping something sticks,” I continued. “I haven’t given up hope. And if we get a bad result, I think we have a pretty good appeal issue already, out of the gate, with the judge striking our insanity defense and not giving me more time. Most judges aren’t nearly so strict with discovery deadlines as Judge Nash. I think a higher court will be sympathetic.”

She nodded, trying to make this less difficult for me. It didn’t. It made it worse.

“The state has a circumstantial case,” I said. “I can drill some holes. Don’t give up.”

She didn’t look at me, but she rested her hand on my arm. “Whatever happens, whatever we get, it will be better with you than anyone else. I’m sure of it, Jason.”

She was putting undue faith in me. She was expecting something I was pretty sure I couldn’t deliver. It was a weight beyond what I normally carried on a case. I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle losing this trial.

I left on that note. I said good-bye to Tom, but he only looked up briefly, mashed potatoes and gravy on his chin, before he resumed his feast. I was going to remind him that I’d be back tomorrow, that we’d have to go over some things, but I didn’t want to ruin the small measure of enjoyment he was experiencing.

If things continued as they were, it would be the last home-cooked meal he’d ever eat.

The truck pulled up in the dirt at a red flag and stopped. “Number One at Rovner Street. Stand by for the five-minute.”

Randall Manning watched through binoculars and listened through his earpiece.

“Green light at Rovner, that’s the five-minute,” the voice crackled through the earpiece.

The truck started moving again. Manning followed along with his binoculars. Good so far. Wait for the green light.

“Number Two at Rovner Street.”

Good. Just about right. Manning’s pulse was steady. This wasn’t the first time they’d run through it. It was, in fact, the twentieth.

“Number One at Dodd Street, stand by for the two-minute.”

Manning moved his binoculars to the second red flag, four hundred yards to the south, coming toward him. It was an approximation in terms of timing. It wasn’t intended to be precise. It didn’t need to be precise. They weren’t in the city’s downtown, and they were nowhere near Rovner Street or Dodd Street. They were out in the country-the “boonies,” to most people. They were in unincorporated Fordham County, surrounded on all sides by farmland purchased by Summerset Farms following its acquisition by Global Harvest International.

“Green light at Dodd. That’s the two-minute.”

Manning had driven the real route dozens of times. Dodd Street was actually far less than two minutes from the target, but Manning had built in an extra time cushion to account for unpredictable traffic.

The truck continued south, coming toward Manning. He was inside a dome he’d constructed more than a year ago for this purpose. A few hours ago, this dome had housed all sorts of farm equipment-tractors and plows and backhoes-all of which had been emptied out for this exercise.

He watched out the window from his position on the second-level balcony as the truck drove through the open double doors into the vast dome. He turned to face inside the dome and watched as the truck picked up speed and drove toward the makeshift building, consisting of only a front facade and door.

“Red light at Dayton, doesn’t fucking mat-ter!”

The truck stayed at a speed of twenty miles an hour and pulled up just short of the front door of the building.

The rear door of the truck burst open, and Patrick Cahill jumped out. The driver, Ernie Dwyer, also jumped out. Each of them was wearing state-of-the-art body armor and a helmet with a face shield. They raised their black AKM assault rifles and backed away from the faux building.

“Pop the targets,” said Manning.

Standard tactical training, about which Manning knew absolutely nothing eighteen months ago. But he’d learned a thing or two since then.

Targets popped up like characters in a children’s picture book, the shapes of humans, in various spots around the faux building. From the distance he’d created, Cahill and Dwyer unloaded their assault rifles on the targets, knocking them flat. To the extent they missed the targets-though Manning doubted that the two of them had missed even once-their bullets hit a bulletproof tarp that had been placed floor-to-ceiling behind the building facade.

Randall Manning looked at his stopwatch.

“Good,” he announced. “Well done. Now clean up. Then we eat, and then target practice.”

The ammo would be the first phase of the cleanup. Every shell casing would be collected. The bulletproof tarp would be lowered and scrapped. The roof would be opened to air out the place of the smell of gunfire. Then the tractors and other farming equipment would be brought back in.

Within an hour, tops, this dome would look like nothing more than a warehouse for farming equipment again.

Manning looked over at Bruce McCabe, who was standing next to him, looking a bit flushed.

“What’s bothering you, Bruce?” he asked.

I stopped by my office to pick up the dossier that Joel had built up on the legendary Gin Rummy, because I knew he was pissed that I’d taken him off that assignment-actually, he was pissed that he hadn’t succeeded in finding the guy-and I knew that he’d be in my office bright and early on Friday, and if he still saw the file in the same place on my desk, he’d think I wasn’t paying attention to it. I wasn’t, not at the moment, but Joel didn’t need to know that. He had pretty thick skin, but he had a sensitive streak when it came to his professional abilities.

Then I picked up Tori at her condo. A cool wind whipped inside my car, and she closed the door quickly to keep it out. The temperatures were falling. It wasn’t going to be a white Thanksgiving, but it was going to be a cold one.

She had her trademark long white coat and nice boots, always nice threads, but that was the only thing about her that looked normal. Her eyes were hooded and her face drawn. She looked like she hadn’t slept well at all.

“I didn’t,” she said, when I commented. “And thanks for noticing.”

“Big math test coming up?” I asked, even though I was aware that she had finished her last final exam a couple days ago. She was off until mid-January now.

She looked at me. “Is that you making fun of me? You got something against math?”

“No, hey-I love math. Math is the greatest thing since… science.”

“Because that sounded like condescension. And that’s about the only thing I can’t take from someone.”

I had obviously struck a nerve with her that I hadn’t seen coming. “Tori, I’m sorry. That’s not how I meant it.”