Greg Iles - The Quiet Game

Victory is written on Leo’s face like blood after a hunt, and the wolfish blue eyes are laughing. I have not struck another human being in anger since I was fifteen years old, but my knee rises into his groin with preternatural speed and force. The air explodes from his lungs. As he doubles over, my elbow crashes into the side of his head, just the way a Houston police detective once taught me.

“Stop it!” Livy screams. “Penn, stop!”

She is running around the car to get between us. Some part of my brain knows I should stop, but I’m still moving forward, pursuing Leo as he staggers back. He shakes his head and raises his big left hand to his jaw. I draw back my fist, then freeze as a silver derringer appears before my nose as though by magic. He must have had it palmed all along, a little nickel-plated gambler’s special.

“Go ahead, you little pissant,” he snarls. “Go ahead.”

“Daddy?” Livy stands two feet behind her father, her voice riding a current of hysteria.

“Go inside, baby. You don’t want to see this.”

“Daddy, I love him.”

This simple declaration hits Leo like an arrow. He actually flinches, like a bear struck between the ribs, and an expression of pure hatred comes over his face. “Go inside, Livy! This boy’s forgotten his place. He assaulted me on my property.”

But Livy doesn’t go. The three of us remain locked in our positions, a pathetic standoff on the edge of tragedy that lasts until Daniel Kelly’s rented Taurus rolls slowly up the drive.

Kelly parks alongside the cars, five feet from us, and rolls down his window like a tourist asking for directions. But what comes through his window is not a map but a Browning Hi-Power pistol, which he points at Leo’s head.

“Please go inside the house, sir,” he says.

“Who the hell are you?” Leo asks, keeping the derringer in my face.

Kelly’s suntanned face remains calm, as though he were listening to a soothing piece of music. “I’m the man who’s going to end your life unless you take that gun in the house.”

“Bullshit,” Leo grunts. “Get the fuck off my property.”

“I’m here to do a job, sir,” Kelly says in the same lazy voice. “Don’t make yourself part of it.”

At last Leo really looks at Kelly, and the muscles in his jaw tighten. He has vastly multiplied his family fortune by accurately judging men’s characters. And whatever he sees in Daniel Kelly’s eyes convinces him that today is the wrong day to tempt fate. He lowers the derringer.

“You just made yourself part of my job, sonny.” He raises two fingers in a little toodle-loo gesture, then turns and walks up the broad steps of his mansion.

“Livy,” he says without turning around. “Your mother needs you.”

“I’m coming.” She steps toward me and tries to take my hand, but I pull it away. “Make a public apology, Penn,” she pleads. “Please. Do that, and I’ll convince Daddy to drop the suit.”

“It’s too late for that.”

She looks at me sadly. “You can’t play my father’s game and win. Not in this town. Not in this state. Nobody can. You could lose everything you have.”

“You’ve got a short memory, Livy. Your father lost his case against mine twenty years ago, and he’s going to lose this one.”

“That was different. It was a weak case to start with.”

“Then why did he take it?”

Unreadable emotion flares in her eyes. “I don’t know. But I do know you nearly fainted when he told you that man had been arrested. He was your last hope, wasn’t he? He was your case. If you walk into that courtroom Wednesday, you’ll be like a lamb going to slaughter.”

I step back from her, trying not to think of Peter Lutjens. “That’s my problem. Your problem is a lot bigger than that. Your whole life is built around some secret tragedy whose real victim is a girl crying alone in a room three miles from here. What are you going to do about that?”

Her eyes go cold again. “Nothing. And you’d better not either.” She turns and walks up three steps, then looks back to me. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you about the trial.”

This time she goes all the way up and through the massive door.

I get into the BMW and start to leave, but Kelly pulls his Taurus in front of it, blocking my way. Then he gets out and comes around to my window.

“Boss? To an objective observer, it looks like you’re trying awful hard to get killed.”

“I’ve learned some upsetting things in the past half hour. I haven’t even begun to understand them yet. All I know is that I want to nail that son of a bitch more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life, other than to save my wife from dying. And that was beyond my power.”

“Maybe this is too,” Kelly says gently. “I wouldn’t mind bringing that bastard down a peg myself. But things seem pretty seriously stacked against you. Sometimes you’ve got to pull back. Regroup. Fight another day.”

“No,” I say doggedly, perhaps stupidly. “If I let the momentum die, Marston and Portman will never pay for whatever they did. Any evidence that exists will disappear.” Althea Payton’s words sound in my head like a ghostly refrain. “If not now, when. You know?”

A skeptical grunt. “Yeah, maybe.”

“I’ve got one shot left, Kelly.”

“What?”

“Dwight Stone. He knows the truth. He could bring down the whole damn temple.”

“Caitlin says he won’t testify.”

“He wants to help me. I know he does. But he’s got a daughter in the FBI. That gives Portman total control of her life, and by extension, Stone’s.”

“So, what can you do?”

“I’m going back to Colorado.”

The old Kelly smile returns to his lips. “Well… I was ready for a change of scenery anyway.”

“Do we still have FBI surveillance covering us?”

“I’ve seen them three times today. They’re good.”

“That’s okay. You’re going to keep them nice and busy for me.”

“Yeah, and…? How do we lose them?”

“We don’t. This time I’m going alone.”

The American Eagle ATR plows into a trough of turbulence, drops like a stone, then catches an updraft from the Rocky Mountains below and settles out again. I and my fellow passengers are thirty miles from Crested Butte, Colorado, and I can’t wait for the wheels to hit the runway. When I flew out of Baton Rouge, it was ninety degrees. When I changed planes in Dallas, it was sixty-eight. In Colorado there’s two feet of snow on the ground, my plane is three hours behind schedule because of the unexpected storm, and the only thing I know about ATR aircraft is that they fly like hogs with ice on the wings. But that isn’t the only reason for my anxiety. In less than an hour I will be face to face with former special agent Dwight Stone, the only man on earth who can give me what I need.

The desire for revenge I felt when I attacked Leo Marston at Tuscany yesterday seems trivial now. I am a different man than I was yesterday. The past I thought I knew is dead. Because last night I faced a truth so terrible I can hardly accept it even now.

After Kelly and I left Tuscany, we drove straight to the motel. I felt an overwhelming desire to hug Annie, the daughter I knew beyond any shadow of doubt to be mine. After spending the evening watching television with her, I put her to bed and sent Kelly out for a bottle of Absolut. For the first time in years I drank with the sole purpose of getting drunk. It didn’t take long, and drunkenness brought with it the blessed inability to ponder clearly the events of twenty years before. Who was sleeping with whom. And when. And why, if I “really thought about it,” as Livy had told me to do, I would know that I could not possibly be Jenny Doe’s father. I passed out in a chair, and if my mother hadn’t knocked on my door to check on me, I might not have fathomed the truth until much later. As it was, I awakened in the midst of a nightmare, tortured by images I could not have conceived of the day before.