P Tracy - Play To Kill aka Shoot To Thrill

When you were a cop and got a call from an unfamiliar number on your personal cell, you didn't say anything until you knew who was on the other end. A county deputy in Alexandria had made that mistake five years ago while he was running regular rounds of the local bars, checking for underage drinkers. He answered his cell with his name, and a drunken ex-con with a grudge, a snoutful, and a long memory for the name of the cop who had put him in Stillwater promptly shot him in the back. The drunken shooter got twenty years and the deputy got a bagpipe funeral.

'Good evening, Detective Magozzi. This is Judge James Bukowski.'

That made Magozzi unhappy. The man was getting intrusive, taking advantage. 'How'd you get this number, Judge?'

He heard the judge sigh just before a belly dancer literally bellied up to the bar next to John and jingled her bells and clicked her little metal clackers at him. Magozzi backed away a few paces.

'How I got your private number is irrelevant, Detective.

Please pretend for a moment that I might be a man with something important to say, and listen very carefully. We don't have much time.'

'I'm listening.'

Would you mind giving me your approximate location?'

'St. Paul. Downtown.'

'Thank you. Unhappily, it is a bit farther away than I'd anticipated, so I will have to be brief.'

'Music to my ears, Judge.'

'I am quite certain it is. Are you familiar with the Woodland Hills Country Club Golf Course?'

'Just off Minnehaha, right?'

'That is correct. The man who killed Alan Sommers – the River Bride, as the media refers to him – will be meeting me on the eighteenth green in a very short time.'

Magozzi rolled his eyes and put his forefinger on the cell cover to flip it closed. 'Excellent. Have him give me a call in the morning, will you?'

'Alan Sommers died at 11:17 according to the knock-off Rolex he was wearing. The watch face was broken in the struggle.'

Magozzi's hand tightened on the phone and he felt the slip of sweat under his fingers. No one knew that. Just him, Gino, and Anant. They'd bagged the watch and held it back. 'Jesus,' he murmured.

'Splendid. I have your attention. Now, as I was saying, the killer is meeting me very soon on the eighteenth green. His intent, I am sure, is to kill me, since I threatened to reveal his identity. My intention is that you and Detective Rolseth intercept and arrest him. A little present for both of you, for being the good cops you are, and also for being respectful to a drunken old man. You will find a key to my condo in my pants pocket. Give my computer to your friends at Monkeewrench. It will tell you everything you need to know. Is that clear'

Magozzi was already heading for Gino and Smith, jerking his thumb toward the exit while he kept talking. Whatever was in his face made both men follow him instantly without question. 'What you've said is clear, Judge. What you mean is a little murky.'

'That will change, Detective Magozzi.'

You sound almost sober.' He heard a dark chuckle at the other end of the line.

'I always sound sober, and never am. I don't know the identities of all the killers, Detective Magozzi, but I suspect this man's computer will give you an excellent start in solving all the Web murders you've been working on. That Huttinger… person …' his voice was rich with contempt; 'was not part of this…'

"Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Part of what ? What the hell are you talking about?'

'Patience, Detective. We're running out of time, but it is important to me that you know those waitresses should never have been attacked. I hope you can believe that. Now. Look at your watch. You have exactly twenty-eight minutes to make it to Woodland Hills. Twenty-nine, and I'll be dead. Thirty, and your killer will be gone. Please leave now.'

When the line went dead, they were already halfway to the front door, badges held high to carve a path through the jam of people. 'Gino, mark the time. We've got twenty- seven and a half minutes!'

Wild Jim flipped his cell closed and laid it on the passenger seat next to him before he got out of the car. He breathed in pond smell from the eighteenth-hole water hazard, and saw moonlight reflecting on the flag stuck in the cup.

He started walking from the parking lot next to the clubhouse, out to the green, and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Hole in one, he thought, remembering Jessie's last shot from the tee, miraculously skittering into that cup and breaking all the club records, because no one had ever done that before. It was a par-three hole, singled in the father-son tournament for the very first time when Wild Jim and his amazing son, Jessie, had taken home the silver trophy. Had they been talking then? He couldn't remember. What he did remember was Jessie's face when the crowd at the green let out a roar, telling the twenty-five- year-old kid he was something special.

He'd never thought of the course being frightening; then again, he'd never been here since that last grand and glorious day of sunlight and applause.

At night, everything changed. Trees laid down shadows on the grass in front of the moon, and men who killed for fun hid behind their trunks, waiting.

John sat in the back of the Cadillac, listening to Magozzi's and Gino's scattered descriptions of who Wild Jim was while he stared fearfully out the side window, watching the freeway mile markers flash by at speeds that were really quite frightening. High-speed chases were normally the purview of local cops, rarely Federal agents, and it took a full ten minutes before John stopped being terrified and started getting one of those adrenaline highs he'd heard about.

'So this man is a drunken judge kicked off the bench who happened to be near the river the night your bride was drowned, and probably saw the body.'

'That's about it,' Gino said pleasantly. He liked highspeed chases, even when they weren't chasing anybody, and especially in the Caddie.

'And you believe he saw the killer, why?'

Magozzi looked manic at the wheel with the dash lights hollowing out his face and showing the tension there. 'Don't know. It's kind of hard to explain.'

'Do we have any kind of a plan?'

Gino turned around to look at him. 'Hell, no. Usually we make up our plans after everything's gone down, just to fill in the lines on the report, you know?'

Magozzi swerved around a cone with a blinking light on top and nearly put them in the median. 'Goddamn road construction,' he muttered, utterly unfazed.

John tightened his seat belt and cleared his throat. 'So basically we're going to some golf course in the middle of the night to intercept some crazed killer who's going to kill your alcoholic ex-judge.'

Gino punched the recline button and smiled. 'Well, what do you know. We have a plan after all. Check your load, Smith. You're going to have to hide behind a tree and maybe shoot somebody.'

'I've never actually shot at a real person.'

'Yeah, well, there's a first time for everything.'

Wild Jim Bukowski, fierce believer in law and justice, padded across the short-clipped green in the pair of maroon Uggs he'd taken to wearing when he'd exited the world. He flinched at the sound of a cricket in the grass, and nearly collapsed at the mating call of a male frog in the water hazard. He shouldn't have been afraid. This was what he had wanted, what he had planned, and now at the end of his journey he felt the rapid heartbeat of fear and wondered if he could find the courage to sustain him.

There was a flutter of leaves in the carefully tended woodland surrounding the green. Wind, or man? He froze close to the flag and heard the pounding of his own heart. There was a breeze, and it whispered terror in the leaves, making his eyes sharpen against the moonlight. It was too soon.