Gregg Hurwitz - Last shot

The metal screen slammed down, leaving them alone in the darkness. Bear fumbled in his pocket, fed a crumpled bill into the machine, and then there was light. And breasts.

He shrugged at Tim. "Ambience."

"And say I don't want to talk to y'all?" Freddy asked amiably.

"Then we'd probably have to poke and pry around all that merch in your pad. Irregularities in your First Union account. How you afforded to fly yourself and Bernadette to Brazil. Who you saw there, what you brought back."

Freddy's eyes registered surprise at some of the proper nouns. "We don't want that," he agreed. The woman stopped dancing in her glass box and folded her arms, annoyed at the sudden lack of attention. Freddy fussed with the edge of his sweater sadly. "You talked to Bernadette, huh?"

"Tough lady," Bear said.

Freddy shook his head. "Word."

"What'd you tell Tommy LaRue?" Tim said. "Answer the question and we were never here. And we won't make trouble for LaRue. Or you."

Freddy squinted at Tim in the faint light. "Hey, you that dog killed them people?"

"Lotta dogs kill a lotta people in this city."

"A'ight. I'll bump gums. You cross me, I go public on your ass." Freddy winked good-naturedly. "Now, I don't know what it means. I'm just a relay man. Tommy can only call certain phone numbers from the inside, and I'm one of them. I'm his clearinghouse, right? Yesterday I get word to go to a pay phone at a certain time, someone would call. So I go. And they call. Just a grumble. 1Three words. Tommy calls me at our usual time today. I tell him. He hangs up. That's all I know. I just relayed the message."

"Which was?" Bear asked impatiently.

"'The left side.'"

As if on cue, the metal screen slammed down, bathing them in darkness. At the same time, Tim and Bear repeated, "'The left side'?"

"The hell does that mean?" Bear said.

"'F I supposed to know, they'd be no point in tellin' me in code, right?" Freddy held up his hands. "Like I said. I don't know too much so I don't know too much."

"I'm beginning to feel the same goddamned way."

After the next few questions went equally nowhere, Tim and Bear left the strip club in silence. Finally Bear said, "Maybe the left side was a meet point for after the break. The left side of a road. Or a river. Something."

"I think it's more than that. Walker had an emotional reaction to it. It put him in motion. It's the answer to something."

"So maybe it was a signal for the break. The bedsheet? Wasn't that on the left side?"

"I keep thinking it's gotta have something to do with Boss Hahn."

"Walker stabbed Hahn on the left side. Though I doubt that directive would've puckered him in the dining hall. Let's take a spin through the files again, have Guerrera do a keyword search on the Aryans, the prison, the Black Guerrilla Family, whatever we got." Bear pulled himself behind the wheel, slamming the door a little too hard. The dash clock showed 2:03 A.M., and it was ten minutes slow.

A long night, and they'd wound up with three words. Three words that could mean a lot of things but were cause enough for Walker Jameson to kill Boss Hahn and break out of prison.

And were likely cause enough for him to do more than that.

The run-down community within earshot of freeway traffic showed off couches, carports, and rusted truck bodies languishing on dirt lawns. The street was 3:38 A.M. quiet. Walker pulled over his Accord, shut the door soundlessly, and prowled.

Shadows, shrubs, tree trunks-even the pit bulls didn't pick him up. A light through a particular kitchen window caught his interest. He crept close, on his toes, peering. An open refrigerator door cast a golden glow across the sleep-puffy face of a slim brunette in her mid-thirties. Attractive features starting to wear down from work and worry. A pert mouth showing the pull of gravity at the edges. Shoulder-length hair cut in no particular style and parted in the middle. Her body, visible beneath a too-long L.A. Clippers T-shirt, still looked fit. Firm in the chest, pinched at the waist when the fabric shifted. Wide, flat feet, nails covered with chipped pink paint.

She returned the water pitcher to the refrigerator shelf and shuffled back down the hall with her glass. His steps muffled by the barren flower beds, he mirrored her movement outside, picking her up in her room through a seam in the blinds. Converted den, fold-out couch. She eased back beneath the sheets, took a final sip, and set the glass on her bed-stand. He followed the movement of her torso in the faint blue glow of the night-light. After a few minutes, her breathing grew deep and steady.

Walker withdrew silently, circled to the back of the house, and found a sliding glass door with a broken latch. He moved down the dark hall as if floating-not a creak beneath his boots. The doorknob turned soundlessly. Five well-placed steps and he was bedside. He inched the top sheet back, exposing a bare shoulder, and took in the swirl of brown hair on the pillow.

He stood over her sleeping form, the cool metal of the Redhawk pressed to the small of his suddenly sweating back.

Boston bounded past Tim over the porch, leapt through the truck's open passenger door, and Bear pulled out from the curb with a wave. Tim entered the house quietly. Dray was out cold on their bed, paperback butterflied on her chest.

She stirred, grinding a hand into her eye. "Your son requests your presence."

Tim checked his watch. "He's not down?"

"Is he ever? He doesn't fall asleep for good until he sees you. We know this."

Tim crossed the hall and saw Tyler's head poke up over the padded guardrail of his bed. Snowball, the aptly named hamster, snoozed on his exercise wheel. Habitually lazy, Snowball had never evolved into the playmate they'd hoped for; he'd just evolved into a larger hamster.

"Fuff pillow."

"It's fuffed. You want me to fluff it again?"

A solemn nod. Tim tapped the pillow on either side then kissed the outsize head. "Sleep tight."

"Elmo funny."

"I love you."

"I want a dog."

Then Tyler was asleep.

Tim sat on the glider rocker and watched him. Most parents he knew remarked that their children looked like angels when they slept. Not Tyler. His chin inexplicably weakened and his lips pressed out like a duck's bill. He wound himself in the sheets, contorted like a head case fighting a straitjacket. Sweat matted his fine blond hair. His head felt to be two hundred degrees-it had taken Tim and Dray months to figure out that he wasn't running a nightly fever, that he just slept hot.

From the time Tyler was a baby, Dray had dealt with him directly and easily-"Sorry, pal, the breastaurant's closed." Tim had been largely responsible for Ginny during her first three weeks of life when post-C-section complications had kept Dray bedbound; from the gates, his relationship with his daughter had felt more natural than his with Tyler. Ginny's murder at the hands of convicted child molester Roger Kindell, Tim worried, had taken away a part of him that he'd yet to recover or replace. But he was also ever more certain that during his and Dray's two-year childless gap, he'd revised Ginny's brief upbringing into something idyllic. He'd forgotten how thin a kid could wear a parent's patience. How irritating it was fighting tiny socks onto uncooperative feet. The exhaustingness of a child, this living machine designed to eat and cry and poop and resist and require, all from within an impenetrable shell of self-absorption.

The first time they'd taken Tyler to the park, Tim had hovered over him, righting him when he stumbled, steering him clear of metal and asphalt. Finally Dray had called him over. "The world doesn't work that way." She gestured at the playground equipment. "It has sharp edges and hard surfaces. He's gonna learn that. The longer he takes, the worse it hurts." Even as she was talking, Tim had scooped Tyler midair from a fall off a slide. Dray's grim silence on the walk home had an air of condescension to it.