Джеффри Дивер - The Final Twist

“What was she looking for?” Russell said.

“I don’t know. How would I know?”

Shaw said, “Call him back.”

“What?”

“Call Spilt back.” Shaw nodded impatiently, and Barney did as told.

Shaw took the phone from him.

“Barney,” came the urgent voice on the other end. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”

“Jimmy,” Shaw snapped. “Listen to me. Barney’s okay. So far.”

“Oh, Jesus,” the manager gasped.

Russell touched his own ear, and Shaw too heard the siren in the distance.

Goddamn it.

“Jimmy, I need you to do two things.”

“The fuck’re you? You the nephew of that bitch who—”

Shaw put the phone on speaker and glanced at the manager. “Two things, Jimmy, if you want your friend to be okay.”

Barney called, “Please, Jimmy. Do whatever he asks.”

“Okay, okay,” came the voice.

“First, we’re going to hang up and you call nine-one-one back and tell them it was a mistake. Somebody was playing a joke on you. Or something. Be credible. Then call me back.”

Russell was on his phone. He lifted it toward Shaw.

“And, Jimmy,” Shaw said, “we’ve got a scanner here, police scanner. We’ll know if you don’t do it. And that means you can say goodbye to Barney, and we’ll come visit you too.”

“Jesus, no, no, no! I’ll do it. I’ll do it!”

“Call. The. Police.” Shaw disconnected.

What Russell was displaying probably wasn’t a scanner app. More likely, Shaw guessed, he’d be speaking with Karin, but she would be patched into the city’s emergency frequencies.

Fifteen, twenty seconds later the sirens stopped and Russell, listening into his mobile, nodded.

Just after that, Barney’s phone hummed.

Shaw glanced at it and answered, punching the speaker button once more. “Okay, Jimmy, good job. The second thing you need to do. Answer some questions. Then we’ll leave you and your buddy alone. Are we happy with that?”

“Yes, yes, anything.”

“Tell us exactly what happened that day our aunt came to the warehouse.”

“The hell are you?”

Barney cried, “Jesus, Jimmy! Answer the man’s question. He’s got a gun. Are you fucking crazy?”

“All right, all right. It was some weekday morning, I was the only one working. You know for the past fifty years the place’s just been a repository. Nobody brings stuff in or takes it out. Your aunt comes in and asks for some records. I tell her it’s not like a library. Only polite. I was real polite to her. Before I can release anything, I need a form filled out at city hall. She says she doesn’t have time. And she’s with this guy who’s acting weird, twitchy, you know. They both scared me.”

“Did he look like a rat?” Shaw asked.

“Yeah, kinda.”

Russell: “What did she want?”

“Judicial records, she said. Judges’ files. I tell her again I can’t do anything without the form from city hall or the state, filled out proper. I tell her to leave and that’s when she pulls a gun. The guy with her puts handcuffs on me.

“I tell them I don’t know where judicial files’d be. She asks me how they’re organized and I tell her by year. She says that’s good enough. So, we go in the back and, and I point them to the year she wants, nineteen oh-six. And they both start going through everything, throwing stuff all over the floor. This goes on for an hour, maybe less but it seemed like an hour. Then she finds something and is like, ‘Goddamn. At last,’ or something.

“They look at me like they’re deciding to kill me, not to kill me... Jesus. I’m begging them. She says, ‘We were never here.’ I just nod. I can’t even speak. Then they leave.”

“What was it she found?” Shaw took over the questioning.

“I have no idea. I didn’t ask. They were ready to shoot me!”

“Was it a single sheet of paper or a bound document?”

“One page.”

“Judicial records. So, a court decision?”

“No, we don’t have those. They’re published anyway. They could’ve found those in a law library or online. She wanted correspondence, notes, anything in judges’ individual files.”

“You call the police?” Russell asked.

“Of course not. They knew where I worked. They might come back.”

Shaw said, “Listen, Jimmy. Just forget we talked to you.”

“You fucking bet I’ll forget.”

Shaw disconnected and set Barney’s phone on the desk.

Russell held up the peashooter of a gun. He hit a button and pulled the slide off. “This’ll be in one trashcan outside, the magazine in another.”

Shaw was amused. Maybe this was playbook procedure in some circles. Ebbitt Droon had done the same thing with Shaw’s weapons in Silicon Valley not three weeks ago.

As the brothers walked to the door Shaw looked back.

Barney held up his hands, as if he were a surrendering soldier. “I get it. I get it. Just like your aunt — you were never here.”

The new safe house wasn’t bad; it certainly was in a better neighborhood than the one in the Mission.

Located in picturesque Pacific Heights, in the northern part of the city, the two-bedroom suite was in a sandstone apartment building whose front windows offered views of the Bay, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge and Sausalito, where some of the faint, distant greenery might have been Earnest La Fleur’s yard.

The building was three stories high and represented classic 1960s architectural style, no frills, functional, uninspired.

The suite featured three escape routes — front stairs, back stairs and windows overlooking the roof of the one-story bicycle shop next door. Neither Shaw nor his brother had studied parkour — the leaping, sprinting and diving art of urban gymnastics — but they practiced tumbling and how to land safely when jumping from heights. Shaw was inspecting this particular exit now: out the open window he could look down and see tarred roof about eight feet below.

The safe house complied with Ashton’s rule: Never be without an escape plan . (The accompanying dictum, Never be without access to a weapon , was taken care of, given the firepower the brothers carried.)

“Here,” Shaw said, handing his brother a box of nine-millimeter ammunition.

Russell glanced down.

They were safety slugs, specially made to penetrate flesh but not exit and continue their path, injuring bystanders. The bullets would go through a piece of Sheetrock, if you missed your human target, but they lost deadly muzzle velocity soon after. In a setting like this new structure, where innocents might be just feet away behind walls and doors, they were a necessity.

Russell, though, looked at the ammo with a frown. Maybe he was thinking he was a good enough shot that he wouldn’t miss and endanger anyone else. Maybe he found it helpful to shoot through walls and doors sometimes, in spite of Ashton’s proscription:

Never fire a weapon when you don’t have clear sight of your target...

“We have to,” Shaw said.

“Not a firing solution I’m comfortable with. That’s not standard procedure.”

And his brother did not reload.

“Up to you.” Shaw himself ejected the rounds and replaced them with the blue-tipped bullets. He was thinking: The brothers had worked well together on the investigation so far — especially their choreographed performances at the warehouse. Now tension seemed to have returned.

You don’t want to be doing this, do you?

Just, we should get it done...

Shaw wondered if the resentment about Shaw’s tacit accusation regarding Russell’s role in Ashton’s death was surfacing.