Michael Prescott - Mortal Faults

She tensed. He saw her reaction and hesitated, smiling. “Need to get my glasses,” he said. “Okay?”

His reading glasses. She’d forgotten.

“Okay,” she said.

His hand went inside his jacket. Went low.

Last time he’d taken out the glasses, they had been in the vest pocket of his shirt.

He wasn’t getting them out now.

She closed the distance between them and brought the flat of her palm down hard on his wrist, and something clattered on the ground. A gun. With a swipe of her foot she sent it spinning into the sunny part of the alley. She grabbed his hand and yanked his index finger back, cracking bone. His face twisted. He doubled over. Her knee caught him in the gut before she kicked his feet out from under him. He fell on the asphalt, and then she was kneeling on his back with her chrome-plated Sig Sauer in her hand, having drawn it without conscious intention, and she was saying very quietly, “Don’t move.”

She held the gun to his head while she patted him down. He was clean. The gun, now yards away, was the only weapon he’d been carrying.

“You’re on my fucking kidney,” Biscuit complained.

She dug her knee harder into his back. “Why’d you try to draw on me?”

“I wasn’t, I swear.”

“Answer the question.”

He groaned. “I don’t like feds.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Not much of a reason to kill somebody.”

“Who says I was trying to kill you? I never drew down on you. You can’t prove a fucking thing.”

“I can prove you were in possession of a firearm. I make you as an ex-con, Biscuit. Owning a gun is a felony for you.”

“It’s not my gun.”

“Doesn’t matter whose it is. Doesn’t matter if you just borrowed it. You’re not allowed to even handle a firearm.”

“Maybe I didn’t. Maybe you planted it on me.”

“Very original. I’m sure that’ll hold up in court.”

“You got any witnesses to say different? You got a partner to back you up? My word against yours.”

The hell of it was, he wasn’t wrong. As a veteran criminal he would know how to game the system. He would know more tricks than the public defender they assigned to him.

And if she took him in, he might not give her anything.

“I came here for information,” she said. “Was there really a woman in the bar, or were you just feeding me a line?”

“There was a woman.”

“You willing to ID her if her photo is in that envelope?”

“In exchange for what?”

“Getting back on my good side.”

“You saying you’ll let this go if I help you out?”

“I’m not saying anything, except that the only way you can help yourself in this situation is if you help me.”

He thought about it. She gave him time. She even eased up on his back a little.

“Okay,” he said finally.

Tess reached over and retrieved the envelope, then spilled its contents on the ground in front of his face. “Is she one of these?”

He blinked at the pictures.

“Gotta have my glasses,” he said a little sheepishly.

She pressed the gun to his head. “I’ll get them. Don’t try anything.”

“I already tried everything I’m gonna try.”

She reached under him and pulled the glasses from his vest pocket, then flipped them open and perched them on his nose. One lens was cracked.

“Shit,” he whined, “you busted ’em.”

“I’m crying for you. Look at the pictures.”

He squinted through the good lens, surveying the printouts. She waited, breath held.

“The third one,” he said.

Tess pointed at the photo. “Her?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“No doubt about it.”

It was Abby.

Tess felt a sudden sinking sadness, as if something inside her had died. Only then did she realize how much she had wanted to be proved wrong.

“Are you sure you could see her well enough?” she pressed.

“I only got trouble with close-up stuff. I can see anything at arm’s length or further just fine. It was her.”

“All right.”

She got off him and gathered up the photos. He remained prone on the ground.

“So what happens now?” he asked.

“I’ll let you off with a warning,” Tess said.

“Appreciate that. For a fed, you’re all right.”

“Is that why you tried to kill me?”

“That wasn’t personal.”

She shook her head. “You’re a disappointment, Biscuit. I thought you were a better man.”

He crooked his neck to look up at her. His eyes were cold. “Ain’t no such thing.”

She didn’t react fully to the encounter until she was back in the car. Then she began to shake all over as a wave of nausea rolled through her. She knew what it was-the combined effect of her adrenaline rush and the revelation about Abby. Of the two, she wasn’t sure which hit her harder.

All along she’d been hoping her suspicions were groundless. Now she knew she had been right from the start. Abby had lied about hooking up with Dylan Garrick, which meant she had lied about everything else. She had left the bar with him. She had gone to his apartment. She had pistol-whipped him with his own gun, and then she had shot him in the face-shot him twice, first taking time to wrap the gun in a pillow to muffle the reports.

She had gone rogue. And she had to be stopped. Had to be taken off the street. Now. Today.

There was only one way to do it. Bring in the Bureau. The secrets Tess had been keeping for more than a year would have to come out. She didn’t know what it would do to her career or her life, but she couldn’t think about that now. Sometimes it was necessary to do the right thing. She had put off doing it for too long.

And Abby…

Abby would be put under arrest. If things went well, she would go quietly. If she resisted-well, Tess didn’t want to consider that possibility.

For a last moment she hesitated. She didn’t want to start a chain of events that would end with Abby either dead or in custody, facing a life sentence. There ought to be another way.

“I could talk to her,” she murmured.

A copout. She had tried talking. She had asked Abby to open up last night at the Boiler Room, and again this morning at Palisades Park. Both times she’d been lied to. Abby was beyond help, perhaps beyond redemption.

But not beyond punishment.

Tess pulled into traffic, heading for the Santa Ana Freeway, which would take her north to L.A.

Abby couldn’t say exactly what brought her to Vic Wyatt’s apartment in Culver City at three thirty. She had a little time to kill before she had to sneak Andrea away from the FBI, but there was more to it than that. She knew Wyatt would be home-he was working the night watch this week and usually slept till midafternoon-and he was always up for a roll in the sack. But that wasn’t it, either. Not entirely, anyway.

What she needed from him-well, she couldn’t quite say. She needed something, though. Something more than sex, but of course the sex came first, as it always did between them. He greeted her at the door in his underwear, and without a word he led her into the bedroom, where a neighbor’s TV, tuned to a game show, was audible through the thin wall, and he stripped her down with unsmiling efficiency and mounted her fast and hard as the bed creaked and a contestant played the lightning around. A lightning round was what it was for them, too, no foreplay, nothing complicated, none of the rococo contortionism on display in late-night movies and teenage fantasies, just a single-minded mission, carried out in a rush of sweat and heat, and concluding with a burst of applause from the studio audience.

Then they were done, and Abby lay beside him, strangely unsatisfied.