Want To Play (Monkeewrench)

‘Settle down. I talked to Mitch, he’s on his way over. When we’re all together, we’ll find a way to talk her into it.’

The elevator rumbled up a few minutes later and Mitch emerged, looking wild-eyed and worse than anyone had ever seen him.

‘Good Lord, Mitchell, what is the matter?’ Annie asked.

He gaped at her. ‘Are you kidding? You mean aside from the fact that there’s a killer stalking Grace, the company is going bankrupt, and we have to disappear and start all over again?’

‘Yeah. Aside from that.’

Mitch collapsed into a chair and dragged his hands down his face. ‘Christ. I told Diane we were thinking about leaving and she just freaked. You know what this means, don’t you? She’d have to stop painting. She’s at the top of her career, she has stuff hanging all over the world, and now she’s going to have to drop off the face of the earth and give it all up.’

They were all silent for a moment. It was Roadrunner who finally spoke. ‘You know, Mitch . . . you don’t have to go. You’re married. You have obligations the rest of us don’t. Your family’s got to come first.’

Mitch looked aghast. ‘This is my family. This has always been my family. If Grace goes, if the rest of you go, I go.’ He pressed his palms into his eye sockets. ‘Shit, this is such a fucking mess I can’t believe it. I’m not even supposed to be here. I promised Diane I wouldn’t come here today. I gave her my fucking word. And the minute she left for the gallery, I snuck out like some guilty, FUCKING KID.’

‘Jesus, Mitch,’ Roadrunner said. ‘Take it easy. You’re going to have a heart attack.’

‘I should be so lucky. Anyway, I can’t stick around for long. I’ve got to get back home before Diane does. Where the hell are Grace and Harley?’

The elevator started down, answering a call from below. ‘That’s them,’ Annie said. ‘And before they get up here, you should know that Grace said she doesn’t want to go.’

They’d had a meeting like this once before, Grace remembered. Only that time the others had all been standing around her hospital bed in the psych ward at Atlanta General. She’d been young, scared out of her mind, half in the bag from whatever tranquilizers they had dripping into her arm, and images of Libbie Herold bleeding to death on the other side of that closet door had still been playing on the inside of her head. In that state, she probably would have gone to the bunker with Hitler if he’d told her to.

But not this time. This time she was just too goddamned tired. She wanted it over, one way or the other.

‘Damnit, Grace, it’s different this time!’ Harley was pacing around their circle of chairs, smacking a beefy fist into his palm, making the dragons on his arms twitch and ripple. ‘He’s totally focused on you. He was in your backyard, for chrissake! This time you are the target, can’t you see that?’

‘That’s why I don’t have to run this time, Harley. This time it’s my risk, and only mine.’

‘Grace.’ Roadrunner leaned forward in his chair and grabbed her hands with long, bony fingers. ‘We could just go for a little while, until they catch him, then we could come back. It wouldn’t have to be forever.’

Grace squeezed his fingers and smiled. ‘If I disappear, he disappears, just like last time. And then maybe I’ll have another ten years of looking over my shoulder before he finds me again, and then it will start all over. The cops are getting close. Let’s give it another day or two.’

‘The cops are hopeless!’ Roadrunner said. ‘They were all over the Megamall and look what happened! And how about the paddleboat? You should have seen the men they had down there, and they didn’t do a damn bit of good!’

Harley stopped pacing and looked at Roadrunner. ‘Are you telling us you were down at the paddleboat landing when that guy was killed?’

Roadrunner gave him an irritable look. ‘Obviously not, or I would have seen the killer. By the time I got there the cops and the security people were already there.’

‘You stupid shit, are you crazy? Do you realize what they would have thought if they’d seen you there?’

‘I just wanted to make sure they had it covered, that’s all! I didn’t want anyone else to die!’ Roadrunner shouted, and for a minute it looked like he was going to burst into tears.

Grace patted his hand and smiled at him.

By the time Magozzi called to tell Grace Deputy Sharon Mueller was on her way, Mitch was in his office gathering paperwork to take home, Annie was across the street picking up takeout from an Italian deli, and the rest of them were hard at work on the only thing that remained for them to do – tracing the e-mails.

There was a hissing sound as Harley opened his second beer. ‘We’re going to get this son of a bitch,’ he muttered at his monitor.

44

Halloran sat in the driver’s seat of the cruiser, listening to the crackle of static from his shoulder unit, feeling like a coiled spring about to shoot through the windshield.

The minute the warehouse door had closed behind Sharon, the radios had stopped working, and he’d panicked. He’d jumped out of the car and run across the street to the MPD unit parked there, scaring the hell out of a blond kid behind the wheel who looked about ten years too young to be wearing a uniform.

‘Oh yeah,’ Becker said after Halloran’s hurried explanation. ‘We have a lot of trouble with reception in some of these old buildings. Some kind of metal they used to reinforce the concrete plays hell with the radios. Should clear up when she gets upstairs where there are some windows.’

So now he was waiting, counting seconds in his head like a kid trying to figure out how far away lightning was. She’d do a walk-through of the big downstairs garage before going upstairs; that was a given; but goddamnit how long would that take? She’d already been in there three minutes and forty-four seconds.

Sharon had locked the shoulder radio transmit key in the ‘on’ position before she left the car, and on her way to the intercom box next to the big warehouse door, she’d heard Halloran say, ‘I can hear you breathing.’

Something like a mild electrical shock – startling, but most certainly not unpleasant – had run through her body when he’d said that. She smiled now, remembering the feeling.

She’d heard the radio start to clutter up the minute the door closed behind her, and figured she had about five minutes to check the garage and get upstairs before Halloran started shooting his way in.

For two long years she’d felt nothing coming off him except the indifferent waves of a man who worked hard to keep whatever he was really feeling under tight control. But in the last few days she’d poked a big hole in that indifference and let the caveman out. Never mind that she could outdraw, outshoot, and probably outfight the guy, for all the difference in their sizes. Halloran felt a primitive compulsion to protect her, and Sharon felt a primitive compulsion to let him. That, she figured, was the way it was supposed to be.

She didn’t like the garage, although there was no reason she could find to feel that way. It was well lit, spotlessly clean, and completely devoid of shadowy nooks and crannies. She could see damn near every inch of it without taking a step, and there was no reason in the world to expect that anyone else was down there; but still, she felt uneasy.

She held her breath for as long as she could and listened to the tomb-like silence.

Nothing.

There were two cars parked near the back wall: a black Range Rover and a Mercedes, both silent, both dark. A mountain bike and a big Harley Hog leaned on their kickstands nearby.

She dropped to a crouch and peered beneath the cars, feeling a little silly for doing it. And when she stood up again, she did something even sillier. For the first time in her life outside of a target range, she unsnapped her holster, lifted out the big 9mm, and chambered a round. The unmistakable ratcheting echoed in the big empty space, and just the sound of it embarrassed her a little.

Better safe than sorry, she rationalized, sweeping her gaze along the back wall as she started to walk toward it. There was a freight elevator in the center that had rumbled down as she entered, with interior lights that showed it was empty behind the wooden grate.

In the back left corner was a man-sized door marked STAIRWAY. In the right corner was another door with a black-and-yellow high-voltage sign on the front.

Cars first, she told herself, then the doors, and why the hell are my