A gun muzzle emerged at the edge of the door, followed by the rest of a largecaliber revolver gripped by an even larger left hand overgrown with thick brambles of black hair. Jasmine threw herself to the floor as the muzzle found her. I fired two shots through the hollow-core door; the pistol dropped to the floor and clattered away. Pressure on the pantry door ceased immediately. I jumped back, pulling the door with me. There, bent double on the floor, a tall, muscular man clad in Levi's and a navy blue T-shirt cradled his arms around his belly and moaned softly. He rocked himself gently as a severed artery siphoned the life from his body and flooded it across my terra- cotta tiles. Blood filled a small crater dug by the solitary round the man had accidentally fired when the opening door hit Jasmine. He had obviously assumed we had continued on into the garage when he'd sprung his ambush and run into us instead.
Jasmine stood up and joined me, her face oddly composed and her eyes working to take in everything.
'Get his gun,' I said.
Jasmine followed my gaze and picked it up.
'Forty-four Magnum,' she said, holding it with an easy familiarity.
'Know how to use that?'
'I'm a civil rights lawyer from Mississippi. What do you think?'
'Good point.'
I looked down at the man on the floor. 'He could have a friend. Shoot anybody that's not me.' I moved cautiously toward the garage with the
Beretta ready. The garage was small, cramped, and left few places to hide. I cleared it quickly, checking behind the towers of boxes and even inside the refrigerator.
'Okay, time for 911,' I said reluctantly when I got back to the kitchen.
'Done already!' Jasmine waved her cell phone at me. 'On hold.'
The big man lay still now, his skin whiter than a kosher chicken and surrounded by an enormous pool of blood that no longer expanded.
'He's gone,' I said.
'But you're a doctor.'
'Even if I gave a damn, he's a goner. A severed aorta empties a body faster than you can count seconds on one hand. Come on.' I clicked the safety on the Beretta and headed for the garage. 'Let's see if we can find anything in my suit they missed.'
I made my way through the mess to the cabinet holding sandpaper and painting supplies and grabbed a box of latex gloves. I pulled out a pair, then offered the box to Jasmine.
She shook her head. 'It's my mother's blood. I don't mind touching it.'
The way she said it made me feel guilty for getting the gloves in the first place. Jasmine placed the. 44 Magnum on my workbench, then picked up the bloody suit coat. I couldn't think of anything to say so I slipped on the gloves and went to the kitchen. I leaned way over the pool of blood, not wanting to step in it, not wanting it on me or my clothes. The body lay on its left side, which made it easy for me to pat down both rear pockets and the right side.
Nothing. I struggled him over on his back and found the left-side pocket empty as well. The man was a cipher.
'Brad!' Jasmine's voice reached me loud and excited. I turned. She stood at the garage door holding up a scrap of plastic smaller than her pinky nail.
'It's a MicroSD card,' she said, walking over to me.
'Of course! Flash memory data storage.'
She let it drop into my hand. Small wonder I had overlooked it and so had my assailants.
'How did you find it so fast?'
'I knew what to look for. Mom wouldn't give you the whole Blackberry. So I-' She cocked her head like a person listening to unheard voices.
'One moment, please,' she said into her cell phone and handed it to me.
'It's for you,' she said.
CHAPTER 22
Darryl Talmadge's collapse on the VA hospital floor dominated Clark Braxton's flat-panel computer monitor. The General pushed his Aeron chair back from his black granite slab desk to give Frank Harper a better look.
Harper studied the image, leaning one bony hand on the brilliantly polished desk and the other on his polished briar cane with the brass knob cast from melted shell casings he had collected from the sands at Juno Beach. Braxton resisted the impulse to remove the old doctor's hand from his desk and polish away the residue left behind. He loathed having other people's bodily oils on his belongings.
Instead, the General studied Harper's faint trembling. Secretly, Braxton had learned Harper's new palsy had lately begun to overwhelm the Parkinson's medication. Despite this, Harper's back was straight and his bearing sufficiently military and his intellectual capacities still useful enough to warrant Braxton's continued association.
'Would you like a chair?' Braxton made sure not to sound overly solicitous. When Harper shook his head, his sparse, down-fine, white hair swayed, then landed in disarray. Chaos irritated Braxton and he turned toward the window. The General stared at his own well-crafted image in the glass, mirrored by the darkness beyond. His frown deepened as he visualized the well-remembered view down the hill- his hill. Braxton's frown embraced the small brushy patch at the base that belonged to a stubborn son of a bitch in the ersatz Spanish stucco McMansion on Oakville Crossroad who kept jacking up the asking price.
That brushy patch remained the sole piece of his hill he had not been able to acquire. The arrogant bastard had let the land go to hell, didn't even have the decency to plant grapes on it. The parcel left a breach in security and posed a severe brush-fire hazard.
A recurring fantasy visited him now, replaying images of a solitary jog through vineyards glowing with the faint green haze of spring. Corning round a row, he confronts the stubborn landowner and settles the dispute with a lethally honed grape knife, crescentcurved and wicked with serrations. Braxton's frown vanished as he unzipped the man from sternum to scrotum. Then the General smiled, visualizing the first sip of wine made from the grapes fattened on the man's blood. 'That happened awfully fast.'
Reluctantly, Braxton turned back toward Harper. On the flat-panel display, a burst of white coats and scrubs exploded into Talmadge's room. The phone on Braxton's desk rang then; Braxton hit the pause button on the video stream, freezing two uniformed MPs in midlunge.
'Braxton,' the General barked into the mouthpiece. He tilted his head as he listened.
'Ben, how many times do I have to tell you, price is not the issue?' Braxton dosed his eyes for a moment and squeezed the bridge of his nose.
Harper watched the microtremors ripple across Braxton's jaw that indicated he needed to adjust the General's medication. Harper had trained himself to see the symptoms where others couldn't. That's why he and he alone treated the General. The speed with which the tremors intensified now alarmed him.
'Just get me the fucking wine, Ben!' Braxton's voice carried a deep, honed menace few ever cared to provoke. 'This is my collection and it is incomplete. Incomplete! Do you know what that means? It means this collection is worthless-worthless-without that 1870s solera vertical…
'Yes, I know I've already spent millions, but this is not about the money; this is about having a complete collection. Complete!'
Braxton listened for a few more seconds. 'Ben, I am paying you for results. Get me the collection or get the hell out of my life!'
Harper looked discreetly out the window as Braxton struggled not to slam down the receiver. The dosage and formula of the General's drug cocktail had become increasingly complicated with week-to-week and sometimes daily adjustments needed. Neither the General nor any other person knew how much effort Harper put into keeping one of his oldest surviving patients on an even keel.
After hanging up the phone, Braxton restarted the Talmadge video. After Braxton's microtremors subsided,
