Gregg Hurwitz - Last shot

Tim was well practiced at betraying nothing in front of his father. He waited until the rush of blood at his ears faded, and then he said, "Your deputy marshal son walks you in, maybe you get treated like a VIP?"

"You did some time, you know nobody gets it cushy. Make my transition a little easier, is all. Perhaps we could let the guards know…"

Tim had a hard time keeping the disdain from his voice. "What?"

He cleared his throat. "Let them know I have family."

Tim swallowed hard and looked away. The curtains were drawn, leaving him feeling blocked in. "Where are we going?"

"Corcoran." He made an effort to say it evenly.

Roger Kindell's prison. His father in the same lockup as his daughter's killer. Another one in the eye from Fate. Tim supposed it made a perverse kind of sense.

His father's smile gave way to an amused chuckle. "Yeah, it's an irony to savor."

Tim said, "What do you have on Pierce?"

"Pierce." His father settled back into his well-worn chair, seemingly pleased to be back on familiar terrain. "Pierce and I ran some charity scams in the wake of 9/11. Red Cross, victim funds, that kind of thing. He'd cleaned up mostly by then, but it was a boon to business, 9/11. A lot of bacon to go around. Hard to pass up. Back in the day, Pierce had an operations guy named Morgenstein. Hard times now, though, with Pierce getting out of the game altogether. I'd bet the phone doesn't ring for Morg the way it used to. But I'd bet it still rings now and then. See him and lean. He'll cough."

"You got an address?"

"Got a phone number in the other room. Dump by the beach. Tell him you know about the incident at the greyhound track in Corpus Christi."

"What happened there?"

Tim's father smiled-the same impenetrable smile. "That," he said, "is a story for another day."

Saltwater had eroded the staircase leading up from the sand. Tim warned Bear about a cracked step, not wanting to see his well-fed partner put a boot through the soft wood. The wind-battered wreck of a building sat atop a patch of Venice real estate worth more than an average trust fund. Probably owned by a nightgown-wearing widow in her nineties who lacked the patience for upkeep, the energy to remodel, and the nerve to sell.

Bear had met Tim up the block, coming directly from Parker Center, where Wes Dieter had crumbled early into the interrogation. He'd confessed to appropriating the contract intended for the Piper through an elaborately fraudulent Internet communication and to swapping out Tess's hard drive and delivering the original to Ted Sands. Wes had hedged his bets with Sands by making a spare copy of Tess's hard drive, which he'd gladly turned over as an opening concession for plea-bargain negotiations. Bear's preliminary spin through the hard drive had revealed no e-mails-pizzazzu. net was Web-based-but an immense file on Vector that included everything about the company from pipeline projections to early-phase vectors. Though Guerrera was now continuing the search, Bear had found no damning documents about Xedral, certainly nothing to cause a mother to pull her son from the last-ditch trial. Pete Krindon was unreachable, but Bear planned to get him on Tess's hard drive if he couldn't coax the forwarded e-mail from the dental-office computer.

Bear thought that Wes was sincere in his claim that he couldn't source the trail beyond Sands; having copped to a murder one, Wes had little reason to lie about that particular. Most contracts ordered by high-end players were issued through a third party like Sands to preserve plausible deniability, a concept with which Tim presumed the Kagan family was familiar.

A thousand bucks in folded hundreds stiffened Tim's back pocket, cash from the Service's unspecified account generally tapped into for bounty hunters and confidential informants. Tim's father could predict people's actions better than anyone Tim had known. If Morgenstein talked-and Tim was confident he would-he'd need to be set up with some cash to get out of Dodge. It would work out cheaper than protective custody.

All that remained of the apartment numbers were dark outlines on the sun-faded wood. Bear knocked on the appropriate screen door, and it tilted back from where it had been leaned against the frame.

"Come in."

They entered the flop. A futon mattress with no accompanying frame lay on the floor, heaped with trash and dirty clothes. A man sat before a black-and-white TV holding a sagging antenna in position, supporting his extended arm on the prop of his opposite hand. He wore a sport coat with the front pocket ripped off. A bottle of Gordon's gin leaned between his legs.

Tim held up his badge, the cash fanned into view behind it. "Are you Arthur Morgenstein?"

The guy glanced over, thinning hair wreathing a peeling scalp. He smiled, dropping the antenna, and the screen went to fuzz. "About fuckin' time."

Sam sprawled on the bed, mouth ajar, glasses askew over closed eyes, his breath coming shallow and regular. His olive green T-shirt, still sporting the folds from the store shelf, stretched over his distended belly. Walker sat on the other twin, shoulders propped against the wall where a headboard should have been. A few gauze pads and tightly wound tape had brought the bleeding under control, and he'd zipped into his flexible bulletproof vest to keep pressure on the bandaging. In the alley below, a homeless guy shouted schizophrenically, the latest dose of street theater. The lights were off. Kaitlin sat next to Sam, stroking his head.

Walker listened to the whine of passing traffic. He'd retrieved his backup Redhawk from the duffel, filled it with his last six titanium bullets, and seated it in his rear waistband. With the press of metal against his right kidney, he felt whole again. His heartbeat had finally started to slow, but his head still felt wobbly from the blood loss, and his skin was damp. "You should get out of here."

"His sleeping's been so off, I hate to wake him when he's down."

The yelling from the alley faded, replaced by a bed knocking the neighboring wall and sweet nothings grunted in Spanish. On the verge of laughter, Walker and Kaitlin shared the inside joke across the distance of the room until the predictable climax of "Ai, papi" s gave way to the sounds of a Telemundo talk show and a running shower.

The intervals between Kaitlin's yawns shrank until she switched beds, curling beside Walker and putting her cheek on the ballistic composite plating his chest. Sam murmured something and rolled over, clutching a pillow between his knees.

Walker spoke softly, so as not to wake Sam. "Sometimes we really had fun, me and Tess. We had a Thanksgiving together during our mother's little break. We walked around, watched everyone eating through their windows, these great meals. We went back to the Buick, tried to sleep, but we were too hungry. So Tess had this idea"-a faint smile at the memory-"we were so broke and so hungry we drew pictures of food. Big turkeys. Hams. Mashed potatoes."

Kaitlin looked at him with amused eyes. "Cranberry sauce."

"Why not, huh? I drew mine with a broken pencil on the back of a road map. I wish I had that drawing still. What a great Thanksgiving." On the other bed, Sam mumbled and shifted, and they were quiet until his breathing smoothed out again. Walker said, "I ever tell you that story?"

Kaitlin nodded, her cheek rasping against the vest. "Yeah."

"I never told you about when I got strep throat, though. The next month."

"I thought I knew all those stories."

"It was a few weeks later, when we kept the Buick under the freeway at Griffith Park. The whole back of my throat was white with pus. I wound up spitting into a bag because it hurt too much to swallow." Amusement crept into his voice. "I was a mess. I needed penicillin, but we couldn't go in to see a doctor because we were scared they'd report us and haul my ass off to a kids' home or something. Tess found a guy worked at the drugstore, said he'd filch some pills for us for twenty bucks. But, of course, we didn't have twenty bucks. That night I got bad. Fever, sweating, the whole nine yards. Tess stayed up with me, rubbing ice on my forehead. She told me…" Kaitlin looked up, startled, but already he was back in control. His voice, twenty-two years later, still held disbelief. "She said if she could've had it instead of me, the strep throat, she would have. Well, there was this older guy always sniffing around us. Gold Rolex, would come to the park with his wife, push his kids on the swings. He'd always watch Tess. A few times, when he came alone with his kids, he'd take her aside and talk with her. The next day after that night with my fever going, the guy comes by again. He pushes his kids on the swings. Tess goes over and talks to him, and then they go away. I remember thinking it was weird, him leaving his kids playing alone on the swings. Maybe fifteen minutes later, she comes back. She drives me to the drugstore. We get the pills."