Robert Browne - Kill Her Again

He began to sing, in a low, sweet voice:

Every little star

Way up in the sky

Calls me

And to Pope’s surprise, Anna stirred. She could hear him.

Heaven in my heart

Wishing I could fly

Away

Anna jerked her head in Evan’s direction. “Momma?”

Drift off to sleep

Into a dream

“Momma, is it you?”

My soul to keep

I do believe…

And then, suddenly, Anna blinked and her eyes came into focus, staring at Evan as if he were a long-lost friend. Tears began to flow as she pulled him into her arms, hugging him furiously.

She was back. A little worse for wear, but present in the room.

“Oh, god,” she said. “I’ve missed you so much.”

She released him and Evan smiled, squeezing her hand, stroking her cheek. “I know, sweetheart. I’ve missed you, too. And I love you, darling. You’ll always be my little star. Always.”

Then he collapsed to the floor.

Ed “Sharkey ” O’Donnell was worried.

Two years of his life. Two years spent working deep undercover on a case that involved racketeering, gambling fraud, murder, and a string of bribes that stretched all the way to his own department-and some dipshit hypnotist was about to bring it all crashing down.

The first time Sharkey saw Pope outside of a TV screen was downstairs in the VIP poker room. Pope had a short stack, a bad hand, and seemed willfully determined to lose everything he owned.

But thanks to an impromptu bit of heroism on Pope’s part that night-performing the Heimlich maneuver when Troy started choking on his personal pizza-Troy had taken a liking to the guy. So much so that he’d fronted Pope just enough cash to keep him from signing over the house he’d closed up and left for dead.

Not only was Troy grateful that he could continue his life of crime, but he felt sorry for Pope, or so he claimed.

Sharkey suspected his attraction to the guy had more to do with Pope’s celebrity than anything else.

Earlier in the year, the “Little Ben” kidnapping case (as the reporters had dubbed it) had dominated the media for weeks. When Troy wasn’t cruising the Internet or downstairs playing poker, his attention was fixed on the 60-inch plasma in his game room, where news of the snatch, the murder, and the subsequent trial played endlessly.

If you were good with a remote and timed it just right, you’d get wall-to-wall coverage. The police, the pundits, the overly serious talk show hosts, all dining on the Pope family corpse.

Sharkey, like most in law enforcement, assumed the kid was dead long before they found him. And after watching a clip of the mother begging for the big bad Mexican carjacker to bring her son back, Sharkey was convinced that she was the perp. She was as nutty as a fucking fruitcake. A woman who had seen some bad times in her life and had never quite recovered.

But that wasn’t his concern at the time. He was smack in the middle of an investigation that had required him to give up his own life as he’d known it. A mole hunt that was so sensitive and so far off the radar that nobody but his handler knew what he was up to.

So when Pope first appeared in that VIP poker room, Sharkey had been curious about him for about three seconds. Troy, however, had decided to adopt the poor sonofabitch and, after months of loaning him money and watching him lose it, had cut a deal with him to repay his debt by launching that ridiculous hypnosis show.

“We need a headliner,” Troy had said. “And Ricky and His Red-Hot Horns aren’t cutting it anymore.”

“I’m not a performer,” Pope had told him.

Troy responded with a statement that made it clear that he wasn’t about to take no for an answer. “Then I guess you’d better learn.”

Within a month, Ricky and the Horns were history. Sharkey had to admit that, despite Pope’s reluctance, he handled himself pretty good onstage. As ridiculous as it was-drunken morons jumping around like they were possessed by bigger, louder, drunker morons-the show managed to bring in a good-sized crowd and nearly doubled casino traffic, thus solidifying Troy’s belief that he was some kind of genius.

But like anything Troy involved himself in outside of his criminal pursuits, his big-screen TV, and his computer, his enchantment with the show, and with Pope himself, began to fade as the novelty wore off and the crowds grew thinner.

And that was when Troy’s paranoia set in. In the past few weeks he’d become more and more concerned about allowing Pope into the inner circle, and Sharkey knew it was only a matter of time before the order came down to have him disappeared.

Pope didn’t help things much by being such a smart-ass.

And because Sharkey had let him go, his own investigation could well be compromised. But he’d had no choice. Pope wasn’t a mobster; he wasn’t a crook of any kind. And Sharkey would be damned if he’d let an innocent man get snuffed on his watch.

But after Troy got that phone call from Pope, and the extended silence of the twin defenders, Sharkey knew that Troy was about to go into burn-and-purge mode. Which meant that any chance of uncovering the mole in Sharkey’s department just went from difficult to nearly impossible.

It took twenty minutes for his handler, a veteran cop named Billingsly, to return his call. Before his promotion to captain, Billingsly had been Sharkey’s squad commander. He had approached Sharkey about the undercover assignment after an informant had told him of a possible connection between Troy’s syndicate and the LVMPD.

There were a few others in the loop-some high-ranking officials from the mayor’s office-but because of the sensitivity of the operation, Billingsly had kept Sharkey’s identity on a need-to-know basis. And as far as Billingsly was concerned, nobody needed to know.

“We’ve got problems,” Sharkey said, then told him what was happening.

Billingsly sounded unconcerned. “It may not matter. I think I’ve found our mole.”

Sharkey almost choked on the Raisin Snail he was munching. “What?”

“Most of those bank numbers you sent me were dummy accounts, but I finally connected with one. You wouldn’t believe how much money Troy’s been funneling into this guy’s pockets. He could buy his own private island, for chrissakes.”

“Who’d you trace it to?”

“He’s got a gold shield, I can tell you that much. We’ll get into it later. In the meantime, hold tight, and I’ll see if I can find out what’s going on in Ludlow. I’ll try to diffuse the situation before your colleagues decide to get talkative. We don’t need the feebs trying to nose in on this.”

Sharkey smiled now. All that worry for nothing. “Un-fucking-believable,” he said. “Are you sure you’ve got the right guy?”

“We’re this close to solid, O’Donnell. You’ve done a helluva job. It’s almost time for you to come home.”

Yes, indeed, Sharkey thought. Yes, indeed.

Arturo’s nose was broken.

He was standing near the doors to Troy’s suite when Sharkey got off the elevator. The nose looked like a small, bruised eggplant and both of his eyes were black.

“I still want to know how I wound up on that elevator floor,” he said.

“I guess you’ll have to ask Pope.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Don’t get your boxers in a bunch,” Sharkey told him. “What possible reason could I have for fucking you up?”

“I don’t know. But I’m watching you, my friend.”

“Oooh, you’re scaring the shit right outta me.” He deposited his shoes, then gestured for Arturo to open the doors, and Arturo did, ushering him inside. Sharkey could feel the guy’s gaze on him the entire time and had to admit that it didn’t feel good. He didn’t know how Troy had hooked up with Arturo, but there was no question he was an asset to the organization. If you needed someone killed, that is. Quickly and unimaginatively.