“Can you have her meet you someplace in between and swap cars there?”
“That’s a good idea. I’ll be there in an hour. Maybe less. If there’s a problem, I can’t reach her or she’s out with her kids somewhere, or whatever, I’ll call you.”
“Leave a message on the secure site. My phone will be out of commission.”
“Right, okay.”
“We’ll meet you in the lowest level of the parking garage. Away from the elevators.”
“Got it. See you soon.”
I clicked off and disabled and pocketed the phone. Larison, Treven, and Dox had moved out from between the beds and away from each other. Everyone’s arms were loose and their hands open. They looked liked gunslingers in a western a half-second away from drawing.
“What the fuck is going on?” Treven said.
I didn’t like the accusatory tone I heard in the question, and reminded myself to be extra calm in my response. Four armed, dangerous, and suddenly distrustful men in a small room…if things got out of hand, it was going to be very bad.
“You were right,” I said, looking at Larison. “Horton set us up. Shorrock has been replaced by one of Horton’s guys, and Finch is about to be replaced by Horton himself. The government just issued some kind of all- points terror alert saying the four of us killed both of them with cyanide. We were just put on the presidents’ kill list. And they know we’re in D.C.”
“Horton and that damn cyanide,” Dox said. “So that was just supposed to incriminate us and sound scary to the public, too?”
I nodded. “Yeah. And the hell of it is, I never even used it. And no one else…”
I stopped, realizing I’d missed something obvious. Dangerously obvious.
Treven’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
I didn’t answer. I realized there were three people who thought I’d used cyanide on Shorrock: not just Horton, but also Larison and Treven. Either one of them, or both, could have mistakenly told Horton that I’d used the cyanide. That would have given him additional confidence to order the faked toxicology reports. He would have believed there really would be evidence of cyanide if anyone examined the corpses more thoroughly.
“Then how did you do Shorrock?” Larison said. “The way you did Finch?”
I was struck that despite the tension in the room, he could remain so detached and professionally curious.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. But if Larison and Treven were working for Horton, they wouldn’t be on that terror alert, right? Unless the idea were to make it look like we were all in the same boat, when in fact…
Treven tensed. In my peripheral vision, I saw Dox spot it, too.
There was a blur of movement, and an instant later all four of us had our guns out. Treven and I were pointing at each other. Dox was aiming at Treven. Larison had the muzzle of his angled toward the floor, but his head and eyes tracked from Treven to Dox to me and back again.
“You think I had something to do with this?” Treven said. “I’m as fucked as you are.”
I saw his hands were as steady as mine. “Put your gun down if you want to get unfucked,” I said.
Treven said nothing.
Larison’s head kept tracking. He looked like a rattlesnake trying to make up his mind about in which direction to strike.
I thought we had maybe two more seconds before the tension boiled over. I couldn’t figure out a way to stop it.
Suddenly, Dox brought the muzzle of his Wilson Combat up to his own neck. “Hold it,” he said. “The next man makes a move, the nigger gets it.”
I blinked and thought,
“Drop it,” he said. “Or I swear, I’ll blow this nigger’s head all over this town!”
He looked from one of us to the other, his eyes wide in faux lunacy.
Larison started to grin, then guffawed. “All right,” he said. “You win. You win.” He eased his pistol into the back of his waistband and held up his hands.
Treven glanced at Larison, then his eyes went back to Dox. His pistol stayed on me. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.
“Good Lordy-Lord,” Dox said, his voice a falsetto now. “He’s desperate. Do what he say! Do what he say!”
“You’re crazy,” Treven said, but he lowered his gun a few inches. I did the same.
“What,” Dox said, “y’all never saw Blazing Saddles? Cleavon Little? I always wondered if it’d work for real.”
Treven’s gun dropped a little more. “You’re crazy,” he said again.
Dox kept his own gun in position at his neck. “Well, it’s a film, you see. A very fine film, in which-”
“I know the movie,” Treven said.
Dox took the gun from his neck and slid it into the back of his waistband. “Well, maybe the part you’re missing, and this could be due to the subtlety of my delivery, is that two seconds ago we were on the verge of committing a big old group suicide here. Besides hoping to get y’all to come to your senses, that’s what I was trying to demonstrate. You see, placing my weapon to my own neck was a metaphor-”
“We get it,” I said, slowly lowering my gun. Treven did the same.
“I’m waiting for someone to thank me for not doing the campfire scene,” Dox said.
Larison was still grinning, and I imagined this was the first time he appreciated just how cool Dox could be when the shit was hitting the fan. And how much method there was to his hillbilly madness. “Oh baby, you are so talented,” he said, and it was incongruous enough to make me realize it must have been another line from the movie.
“And they are so dumb,” Dox said, confirming my suspicion. They both laughed, and I thought maybe they would be okay now. He wasn’t a man you’d want to fuck with, but laugh at Dox’s jokes and chances were good you’d have a friend for life.
Treven, though, was still an open question. I slid the gun back into my waistband. Treven hesitated, but then followed suit.
“Let’s try to stay chilly,” I said. “We have enough people trying to kill us just now without doing the job for them.” Dox and Larison were still laughing, so the message was mostly for Treven. And, I supposed, for myself.
I briefed them on my conversation with Kanezaki. We all agreed that, overall, our safest move was to stay put until we met him in the garage.
“I should have known these targets and this thing were too big for them to leave us alone afterward,” Dox said. “I let the damn money cloud my reason.”
No one spoke. Dox looked at Larison. “I believe you’ve earned the right to say ‘I told you so.’”
Larison shook his head. “The question is, what do we do now?”
“Exactly,” Treven said. “Wherever your guy takes us, all right, we’re out of the crosshairs, at least for the moment, but what do we do then?”
I turned to Larison. “You said you had a way of getting to Horton.”
He nodded. “If you’re really ready to hear it.”
I looked at him. “I am.”
“Okay, then. We’re going to need your friend’s car. Not just to get out of the area. To get back to Los Angeles.”
Larison briefed us on the vulnerability he had discovered. It was Horton’s daughter.
“She’s a film school grad student at UCLA,” he explained. “Name is Mimi Kei. Parents are divorced and she uses her mother’s maiden name. The mother’s Japanese.”
“But I checked him out on Wikipedia,” I said. “When you first mentioned his name, in Tokyo. There wasn’t much outside a few highlights of his military career, but it said he’s divorced with no children.”
