was walking to the gallows.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A stone’s throw from the Secret Service motorcade that was always staged and ready to go in the event of an emergency, Ronnie Garcia leaned on the open door of her Impala. Thibodaux stood beside his motorcycle, fiddling with the strap on his helmet. Quinn had hung back to make a quick call from the Secret Service office landline.
“Can I ask you something?” Garcia said to Thibodaux, chin resting on the back of her hand.
The hulking Marine glanced up, nodding slightly before turning his attention back to the inside of his helmet. A robin hopped in the grassy shadows behind him.
“Knock yourself out.”
“Director Ross told me you and Quinn haven’t been working together much more than a couple of months. Seems to me like you’ve been friends forever…”
“I assume you’ve never been in the military?”
“That’s true.” Ronnie felt a pang of regret for having to answer that way.
“Well, beb, you get a different sort of relationship with someone who you know you can count on-someone who’s spilled blood to save your life…”
Quinn came down the hill a moment later. Garcia found herself happy to see him, but disappointed that her conversation about him had come to a stop.
“Palmer wants us to get together in the morning and compare notes without the Bureau and Agency big dogs in the mix.” Quinn looked at Garcia. “He’d like you there as well.”
“Sounds good.” She looked at her watch. “Not much more to do this evening. You guys ever eat?”
Thibodaux slid into his black leather jacket and checked his watch. “Well, hell, but don’t a kidnap attempt and a double bloody murder make the day just zip by,” he said. “I got a Lamaze class with my child bride in an hour and a half…”
“Are you kidding me?” Quinn turned to Garcia, chuckling under his breath. “The guy’s got six sons and he still has to go to classes….”
“I know. Don’t rub it in.” Thibodaux hung his head like a dejected schoolboy. “I expect it’s her way of making sure I come home for more than just the fun part of the process.”
“Sounds like a smart girl,” Garcia said. “How about you, Agent Quinn?”
“I could eat,” he said. “But lose the Agent stuff. Plain old Quinn is just fine-or Jericho.”
“Bueno.” She smiled broadly, showing a mouthful of gorgeous teeth, startlingly white in contrast to her coffee-and-cream complexion. “If you like Cuban, I know a great place in Silver Springs. Best moros y cristianos this side of Havana. It’s not too far from here.”
“I suppose I’m game.” Quinn shrugged, remembering what Kim had told him: We’re divorced. Start acting like it.
Garcia nodded at his BMW. “I assume that’s got a GPS.”
Quinn tapped his helmet with an open palm. “I’ll keep up.”
“Cubano’s. Tucked in just off Georgia Ave.” She gave him the address. “I’ll go ahead and get us a table.” Apparently not one to futz around once a decision was made, Garcia shut her door and tore down the circle drive, leaving a whirlwind of fall leaves in the wake of her tires.
Thibodaux sauntered over to Quinn like an uncle bearing advice. He rested a broad hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “You mind yourself now, bro,” he said as both men gazed down the road after the departing Veronica Garcia. “Take it from me-and I’m an expert on such things-that gal will suck a hickey on your soul before you can say batshit.”
Quinn raised a wary eye. He wanted to change the subject so he reminded the big Marine of the tight rein Mrs. Thibodaux had on his language. “We’re getting near the end of the month, Jacques-Camille only gives you five non-Bible curse words every thirty days. I’m no religious scholar, but I’m pretty sure batshit doesn’t make the cut for the Good Book.”
“You just watch yourself, l’ami.” Thibodaux threw a thick leg across his bike. He turned the key, paused a moment to let the electronics run through their cycle. “I have to go meet Cornmeal at that baby-birthin’ class, but you listen to me. I know a thing or two about bad women. I’m tellin’ you, that sexpot Cuban is one bad jolie fille.”
“Don’t be such a pessimist, Jacques,” Quinn said.
Helmet visor flipped skyward, Thibodaux looked Quinn square in the eye. “Oh, I’m being optimistic, brother. A bad woman can be a mighty good find.” He pressed the start button and the GS growled to life. The opposing cylinders ripped happily as he gunned the throttle with a toothy grin. “I’m just not sure you’re ready for such heady doin’s.”
Four blocks away, Nona Schmidt slouched behind the wheel of a faded maroon Nissan Sentra parked under a row of trees. She watched in disgust as a pompous-looking blond man in a herringbone jacket came down the white concrete side steps of the Norwegian Embassy to let his little fuzz-ball dog take a dump across the sidewalk, next to the street. Bastard. All that sovereign ground of Norway just inside the ivy-covered wall and he had to let his stupid dog tootle over to crap in America. Schmidt thought about getting out and hitting him in the head with the ball-peen hammer on the floorboard but decided against it, reminding herself that she had more important duties across the street. Her blue eyes homed in on the twin gates leading out of the Naval Observatory.
A shiny black Impala made the slow S turns around the concrete exit bollards, then stopped, waiting for traffic. The dark woman whom they’d seen earlier with Quinn was driving. To Nona’s horror, she came straight across Massachusetts Avenue.
The sight of the woman brought on a wave of instant panic. No one had expected they would come out this way. They’d gone into the Observatory grounds on the Georgetown side. That’s the way they were supposed to leave.
Nona picked up the radio from the seat between her legs. She wore extra-short cutoff jeans everyone called Daisy Dukes. Her pale thighs were bare-and now covered in gooseflesh that made the wispy blond hairs on her skin stand on end from worry. She turned the radio speaker-side up but kept it low in her lap and out of sight the way her boyfriend Scott had taught her. He was in the National Guard and knew everything about tactics. Her daddy liked him for that at least.
“I think they may be coming this way,” she hissed, trying to keep her lips as still as she could, looking like a bad ventriloquist. “The spic lady in the Impala just drove by me, going”-she consulted the map in the seat beside her-“north.”
“Sit tight and wait for the motorcycles,” her brother, Bobby, came back. He was set up with Scott in the parking lot of the Whole Foods Market on the opposite side of the circle, a half mile away. “If you see them, sing out and we’ll come runnin’. You stick close, but don’t let ’em see you. Remember what those bastards did to Uncle Walt.”
Nona nodded into the radio, then, remembering she had to speak out loud said: “okay… roger…” She was every inch the patriot but this tactical stuff gave her the heebie-jeebies.
Sitting off Embassy Row, where every other building belonged to some country besides America, filled her with righteous indignation. The Embassy of Finland was a half a block to her left. Azerbaijan was behind her. Nona didn’t know if Azerbaijan was the good guys or the bad guys, but it pissed her off that they had their own little piece of sovereign real estate smack in the middle of the U.S.A. Iraq, Iran, Belgium, and even the papist Vatican had little cancerous toeholds. It made her sick.
American to the bone, she even hated driving the Jap car, but Scott had reminded her of the need for operational security. They had to blend in driving around D.C. She thought it an awful thing how in the nation’s capital, you had to drive a foreign job not to stick out. Her brother’s 1981 Ford Bronco, designed and built in the good old U.S.A.-now that was a truck. She drummed both hands on the wheel, wishing she was in the Bronco-
