P Tracy - Play To Kill aka Shoot To Thrill

An hour later Johnny finished with the first file and spent five minutes leaning back in his chair with his mouth open, trying to hit his eyes with eye drops.

Gino snatched one of his pages out of the saline shower. 'Jeez, McLaren, take the rainstorm to the can, will you?'

Johnny wiped at the water on his cheeks. 'I hate these damn things. Could somebody tell me why you can never get this crap in your eyes unless you're standing in front of a mirror? I know where my eyes are, and even if I didn't, I'm looking straight up at Mr. Nozzle and still can't hit the target.'

Magozzi reached for his phone when it rang. Your eyes were closed, McLaren.' 'No.'

'I was watching. It's a reflex. You see the drop coming down, you blink at the last second. Gino, take him to the can and staple his lids open.'

'No problem.'

'I heard that, Magozzi.' Grace's voice came over the phone, making him smile. 'And I like the new greeting. A lot more creative than saying "Homicide, Detective Magozzi." Whose lids are you stapling open?'

'McLaren's.'

'What if I'd been a customer?'

'I would have said you'd misdialed and gotten the mayor's office.' He heard a soft chuckle, which was really weird. 'Stop laughing, Grace. You're scaring me.'

'I'm happy. We got him, Magozzi. Clinton Huttinger, aka Teacher of the Year, aka attacker in both Medford, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Medford PD just arrested him at the airport.'

'That's great news, Grace. Really great. Any chance he's connected to any of the other murders?'

'None. The Medford cops checked on that, and he's got solid alibis in public places for every one of the others, including your bride. Sorry, Magozzi. But he knew the pre-post code, so his computer may tell us something. We'll let you know.'

'I need a date, Grace.'

Silence for a few seconds. 'Leave your cell on, Magozzi. It might be late, it might not be at all.'

John Smith was at the window table in the Monkeewrench office, looking out through the leaves of a tall tree with a trunk as big around as his Great Aunt Harriet five years after she discovered fast food and Twinkies. He wondered how old the tree was. Decades, certainly; maybe centuries, or however long trees lived. Maybe this one had witnessed the migrations of the Ojibwa and the Sioux, the growing pains of a city that kept changing its identity, depending on which industry or immigrant population was dominant, or maybe Harley had planted it last year. John didn't know, and would never have wondered about such a thing three days ago. It disturbed him enormously that such questions were starting to occur to him, and he blamed Monkeewrench for putting him at a table where a tree constantly distracted him.

Why did he care how old it was? Such musings were the provenance of people who wore funny wide shoes and hung wooden beads around their necks. If you couldn't kill it or pick it and throw it in a stewpot for supper, nature's bounty had never held any interest for him. For the most part, it was messy, sometimes dangerous, and always annoying. Especially insects. They'd been bad in the often humid climate of Washington, D.C., but in Minnesota they were enough to drive a man insane. The one and only time in his career he'd been tempted to draw his weapon was when a swarm of gnats had descended on him in the motel parking lot.

And what was so wrong about killing all the insects? Who cared if the frogs died with them? The only thing frogs were good for was keeping the insect population down, and clearly they were lousy at that. So if the insects were gone, the frogs could either find another job or go extinct. That was the way of the world… and, come to think of it, a pretty good description of the Bureau's mandatory retirement policy.

His cell phone lay forgotten on the table next to him, still warm from almost an hour of calls informing those who needed to know that Clinton Huttinger had been arrested in Oregon and was now under lock and key. A surprisingly big part of John understood that he had been a very small part of capturing this particular psycho ( making the world safe for waitresses everywhere!), and every time he passed the news along in that dignified, self-effacing manner that the classes in Quantico had drilled into him, he felt a little flutter in his stomach, a sense of that satisfaction his father had talked about when he locked a bad guy into the back cage of his squad, and the feeling was like a narcotic. Too bad it had happened for the first time so near the end of his law enforcement career.

'Penny for your thoughts, man.' Harley's big mitt came down on his shoulder, making him jump. Funny how such a big man could move so quietly.

John looked up at him. 'Murder, mayhem, chaos – the usual.'

'Holy crap, John, I think you may have come close to a rib-tickler there. Are you okay?'

'Actually, I am very well, thank you. Passing on the news that Clinton Huttinger is off the streets was very… satisfying.'

Harley set his bulk down in a chair and stretched out his legs. 'We all kicked some bad ass there, didn't we? So that's who you've been talking to all this time? The big guns in D.C.?'

'Yes.'

'That's good to hear. At first I figured you were having phone sex, you were on that cell so long; then I was afraid you were having some kind of special freaky moment with that tree, the way you were looking at it all serene. For a second there you looked almost happy. Very un-Fed.'

John rolled his chair to face him. 'I was actually thinking about killing all the frogs, if that makes you feel any better.'

Harley raised a brow. 'Frogs, huh? That's a pretty weird target for a crime fighter.'

'It was a very convoluted train of thought.'

'That's never bad. Someday we'll get snockered together and you can tell me how you got there. Not that I care. Personally, I hate frogs. Always did, ever since I ran over one with the lawnmower at foster home number seven. Freaked me out big time. And speaking of that, we just put the dead-people software to bed.'

John took a breath as he tried to fumble his way through Harley's maze of thought. Foster home number seven? How many had there been? 'The dead-people software?'

Yeah. Remember? The thing you brought us on board to do? Roadrunner's spinning the thing through the beta version now, and when that's tight, we'll have a product that can tell you in two seconds if you've got film of a real dead body or a setup. So the whole damn day is just plain good. Huttinger's in jail, and you've got the software you wanted.' 'Oh.'

'"Oh"? That's all you've got to say? Get your dancing shoes on, Mr. John, because the champagne flutes are polished and I'm ready to dust off the big boys.'

John almost smiled, and it looked a little silly, as if smiles rarely found a comfortable spot on his face. You know, half the time I have no idea what you're saying, but I do enjoy the way you say it.'

Harley guffawed and clapped him on the back just as John's cell phone started skittering across the desk. 'Tell whoever's on the other end of that thing to lose your number. We've got some celebrating to do.'

Harley walked away, giving him some privacy, which John thought said a lot about the man. He snapped open the cell and listened carefully for a time, and felt that elusive and rare moment of semicontentment he'd been enjoying seep away. 'I'll pass it on and get back to you,' were the only words he uttered during the entire conversation. When he snapped the phone closed he looked down at his watch, wondering where the afternoon had gone, where the years had gone, and how the world had changed so starkly while he was right there in it, a blind witness.

Everything seemed to be swirling out of control, falling apart – his watch included. There were little things on the face he'd never noticed before. A fleck of dirt under the glass between the two and the three; a dull spot where the metal had worn off on the minute hand. Cheap junk, deteriorating less than a year after he'd bought it. He thought of his uncle, in the ground for over a decade now, wearing the Swiss watch his own father had given him the day he put on the blues. I should have snatched it off his wrist while the coffin was still open, he thought, and then closed his eyes, startled that such a thing had occurred to him. When he opened them again, Harley was back in the chair opposite, fingers laced over his barrel chest.