John Miller - Side by Side

“What is the point?”

“I don’t have a badge, so you don’t have any rights. If you tell me where the Dockerys are, you’ll live. If you don’t, I’m going to move straight up the Smoot family tree, clipping off every diseased limb I come to until one of your kinfolk is smart enough to tell me.”

“You don’t scare me.”

“I know you’ve been threatened by people with guns before.”

“I sure have.”

“You think Sarnov would have shot you if you hadn’t gone belly-up and agreed to join up with his firm?”

This tic fully closed Click’s eye.

“Not fifteen minutes ago, Serge Sarnov sat right there on the couch and said that your family abducted the Dockerys and that they are going to kill them. I have it on audio and video tape.”

“Why would something some Russian I never laid eyes on before says to me mean anything? The man broke into my house.”

“I’m going to ask you nicely where Lucy Dockery and her boy are, and you’re going to tell me. If they are where you say, I’ll turn you loose. If they aren’t, I’m going to ask again, but not nicely.”

Something flickered beyond Click’s right shoulder. Max Randall’s illuminated face seemed to be floating out in the darkness. As a gun rose to Randall’s shoulder, Winter kicked out, sweeping Click’s feet out from under him and falling to the floor as he did so.

There was a flash outside.

The window shattered and large fragments of glass blew into the room and showered the two prone figures.

Winter knew immediately that the weapon was an MP5-SD. There’d been a total lack of sound except for the thuds of the rounds punching through Sheetrock and the high-pitched whines of the ricocheting subsonic 9mm rounds. Grabbing Click’s ankle, he dragged the skinny young man into the hallway. As he pulled the boy, a second shooter opened up and the recliner spewed chunks of cotton and foam rubber as rounds chewed into it.

One of the shooters whistled, and Winter heard their feet as they fled across the stone patio.

“Want to live, don’t move a muscle,” Winter ordered, and got to his feet.

Gun in hand, Winter vaulted through the empty window frame and sprinted around the house in the opposite direction the assailants had taken, figuring they might be lying in ambush around the corner.

As he rounded Click’s house, Winter saw their running shapes and aimed at them, but there were too many houses behind the fast-moving men, and he didn’t want the immediate attention that firing a gun in this neighborhood would bring. The two shooters jumped into an SUV parked half a block away. It roared off, leaving Winter standing on the sidewalk in front of Click’s house, pelted by the rain.

He remembered Click’s Smith amp; Wesson and the rounds in the trash can. “Christ,” he mumbled and ran back toward the house, praying he wouldn’t have to kill the kid, or take a round in his chest for losing track of the fact that Click was the enemy.

The front door was standing wide open, and Winter knew he hadn’t left it that way. He’d been flanked.

“Oh my God,” Click pleaded, “don’t shoot me! Please, please. .”

Winter turned the corner and aimed at the back of the person who stood aiming a gun down at Click’s upturned face. The young man lay on the hallway floor on his back. In one hand he held the unloaded Smith, and in the open palm of the other, a pair of bullets. Click had been stopped from loading the handgun by the unblinking eye of a large-bore FBI-issued Glock.

“Shoot her!” Click yelled when he spotted Winter.

“I thought you left,” Winter said, putting his SIG in its holster.

“Did you see who did this?” Alexa asked.

“One was Max Randall. The other shooter was too large to be Sarnov.”

Alexa snatched Click’s gun away from him, slipping her own into her shoulder bag. She looked into the den and shook her head slowly. “What the hell were they using?”

“Where did you come from?”

“I found your truck empty and I was standing at the front door when I heard glass breaking. I came in and found Ferny Ernest here loading his piece.”

“A pair of MP5s firing subsonic rounds, noise suppressors. That the sort of weapons the good colonel was dealing?”

Alexa nodded.

“So, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I had an epiphany. I doubled back.”

“I didn’t see your car on the street.”

“Parked on the next street and cut through the Lathams’.”

“What was this epiphany?”

“I figured you planned to do something insane and that I should be with you so I’d know what you didn’t do in case I’m ever asked officially. I thought about what you said about this guy’s value weighed against the Dockerys’ lives.” She winked at Winter and smiled. “You were right. I was wrong. This is new territory for me.”

“It was Max Randall?” Click asked, from the floor.

Winter nodded. “Yes, Click, I saw his face clearly.”

“Why would he shoot me?”

“I’d bet he came back to cancel the job offer Sarnov extended to you earlier this evening.”

“Why would he do that?” Click demanded.

“Because Sarnov as much as told you that he was planning to wipe your family out, and Max probably decided it was too much information too soon. He knows nothing you can do with a computer is unique enough to jeopardize his ass after Bryce is free.”

Click said, “You saved me-so I know you aren’t going to hurt me.”

Alexa laughed and shook her head slowly. “Boy, for a genius, you do not know Shinola.”

Winter Massey looked in his rearview mirror at Alexa’s headlights, and then beside him at sulking Click’s profile. Being almost killed had a sobering effect on people lucky enough to be able to remember it after the fact. Click was still wearing his red-and-blue plaid flannel robe over his T-shirt and boxers. The athletic sock on his right foot was bunched around his ankle like a badge of defeat.

“Your girlfriend was going to kill me,” Click said.

“You were trying to load your gun. If you had, I would have killed you. What are you bitching about? You’re murdering a young mother and her child.”

“You have children?” Click asked.

“No,” Winter lied.

“Married?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

He shook his head.

“Gay?”

“Don’t talk to me unless you’re ready to tell me where the Dockerys are.”

“Why?”

“You really want to know?”

“Du-uh,” Click said. “I wasn’t asking so I could smell your breath.”

“I don’t want anything personal about this. It’s business. I intend to keep your family from killing two innocent people, and I am willing to do whatever I have to do. I don’t want to remember you as a real person because it might make me feel bad about what I had to do to you.”

“I was just making conversation.” Click looked at the road ahead, sullen. “I mean, somebody saves your life, keeps their girlfriend from killing you, and plans to torture you, you have to wonder about them.”

“I didn’t save you because I like you or give a damn if they kill you. I did it because I want to find out what you know. You’re just a map to me. Whatever happens to you depends on how it affects my route to find the Dockerys.”

“I can’t help you hurt my family.”

“You’re not like them. They’re killers, you’re not.”

“They might be what you say they are, but they’ll be around a long time after you’re dead. I’m no Judas.”

“If they murder the Dockerys, I’ll make sure you spend the next thirty years in prison without access to computers.”