box down, and crossed his skinny arms. “You’re what, FBI?”
“Why would you think that? The FBI only deals with federal crimes. You committed any of those? Extortion, auto theft, crossing state lines in the commission, Mann Act, drug trafficking, wire fraud, insurance fraud, spying, credit card scams?”
“No.” Click’s smile widened.
“Who did you follow to the Westin, Click? Or should I call you Ferny Ernest?”
“You don’t have a warrant, do you?”
“Why would I need a warrant?”
“To come in here.”
“You opened the door to me.”
“I know the law. You forced your way in by pointing a gun at me.”
“Knowing your rights will come in real handy when the cops ask if you understand your rights.”
“You know who my lawyer is?” Click blustered.
“It’s probably Ross Laughlin. Your father’s lawyer and crime boss or partner, depending on who you ask.”
The smile melted. Click was trying not to look worried, and he wasn’t terrible at it.
“Answer my original question,” Winter said. “Who were you following? And by the way, I already know the answer.”
“Who was I following?”
“Judge Fondren.”
A sudden tic almost closed Click’s right eye.
“I don’t even know who that is.”
“You know very well who he is. And you know his daughter and her baby were kidnapped, because members of your family did it at your father’s direction. That’s why you were following the judge, and that’s why you thought I might be with the FBI.”
“That’s crazy. My father is a legitimate businessman.”
“Kidnapping’s a federal crime that carries the death penalty for everybody involved in the conspiracy. . if the Dockerys are murdered. If they aren’t, it could be probation for somebody who was only following a federal judge around and calling in that information to others. There’s always phone records, positioning locators on cell towers, voice-pattern identification, surveillance cameras, and wiretaps all together pinpointing who did what to whom and where.”
“Arrest me then,” Click challenged, smiling again. “You got proof, take me in. I know my rights.”
“Arrest you? You aren’t listening to me. I am not a cop or an FBI agent. I couldn’t arrest you if I wanted to. You’re missing the whole point.”
“What is the point?”
“I don’t have a badge, so you don’t have any rights. If you tell me where the Dockerys are, you’ll live. If you don’t, I’m going to move straight up the Smoot family tree, clipping off every diseased limb I come to until one of your kinfolk is smart enough to tell me.”
“You don’t scare me.”
“I know you’ve been threatened by people with guns before.”
“I sure have.”
“You think Sarnov would have shot you if you hadn’t gone belly-up and agreed to join up with his firm?”
This tic fully closed Click’s eye.
“Not fifteen minutes ago, Serge Sarnov sat right there on the couch and said that your family abducted the Dockerys and that they are going to kill them. I have it on audio and video tape.”
“Why would something some Russian I never laid eyes on before says to me mean anything? The man broke into my house.”
“I’m going to ask you nicely where Lucy Dockery and her boy are, and you’re going to tell me. If they are where you say, I’ll turn you loose. If they aren’t, I’m going to ask again, but not nicely.”
Something flickered beyond Click’s right shoulder. Max Randall’s illuminated face seemed to be floating out in the darkness. As a gun rose to Randall’s shoulder, Winter kicked out, sweeping Click’s feet out from under him and falling to the floor as he did so.
There was a flash outside.
The window shattered and large fragments of glass blew into the room and showered the two prone figures.
Winter knew immediately that the weapon was an MP5-SD. There’d been a total lack of sound except for the thuds of the rounds punching through Sheetrock and the high-pitched whines of the ricocheting subsonic 9mm rounds. Grabbing Click’s ankle, he dragged the skinny young man into the hallway. As he pulled the boy, a second shooter opened up and the recliner spewed chunks of cotton and foam rubber as rounds chewed into it.
One of the shooters whistled, and Winter heard their feet as they fled across the stone patio.
“Want to live, don’t move a muscle,” Winter ordered, and got to his feet.
Gun in hand, Winter vaulted through the empty window frame and sprinted around the house in the opposite direction the assailants had taken, figuring they might be lying in ambush around the corner.
As he rounded Click’s house, Winter saw their running shapes and aimed at them, but there were too many houses behind the fast-moving men, and he didn’t want the immediate attention that firing a gun in this neighborhood would bring. The two shooters jumped into an SUV parked half a block away. It roared off, leaving Winter standing on the sidewalk in front of Click’s house, pelted by the rain.
He remembered Click’s Smith amp; Wesson and the rounds in the trash can. “Christ,” he mumbled and ran back toward the house, praying he wouldn’t have to kill the kid, or take a round in his chest for losing track of the fact that Click was the enemy.
The front door was standing wide open, and Winter knew he hadn’t left it that way. He’d been flanked.
45
“Oh my God,” Click pleaded, “don’t shoot me! Please, please. .”
Winter turned the corner and aimed at the back of the person who stood aiming a gun down at Click’s upturned face. The young man lay on the hallway floor on his back. In one hand he held the unloaded Smith, and in the open palm of the other, a pair of bullets. Click had been stopped from loading the handgun by the unblinking eye of a large-bore FBI-issued Glock.
“Shoot her!” Click yelled when he spotted Winter.
“I thought you left,” Winter said, putting his SIG in its holster.
“Did you see who did this?” Alexa asked.
“One was Max Randall. The other shooter was too large to be Sarnov.”
Alexa snatched Click’s gun away from him, slipping her own into her shoulder bag. She looked into the den and shook her head slowly. “What the hell were they using?”
“Where did you come from?”
“I found your truck empty and I was standing at the front door when I heard glass breaking. I came in and found Ferny Ernest here loading his piece.”
“A pair of MP5s firing subsonic rounds, noise suppressors. That the sort of weapons the good colonel was dealing?”
Alexa nodded.
“So, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I had an epiphany. I doubled back.”
“I didn’t see your car on the street.”
“Parked on the next street and cut through the Lathams’.”
“What was this epiphany?”
“I figured you planned to do something insane and that I should be with you so I’d know what you
