Want To Play (Monkeewrench)

with blue, sightless eyes, wearing bloody Armani. The side of his head that faced her was utterly gone, inside out, as if someone had pulled off his ear like a pressure cap, letting his wonderful brain spill out.

No, no, no. Grace felt an anguished, outraged wail threatening to rise from her throat, and knew that that sound, if she let it come, would be her surrender.

So she looked away from strong curled hands that had touched her with tenderness, dead eyes that had loved her once and forever, and let the hatred come instead, filling her up.

She moved silently, quickly, boots barely scuffing as she crept around the desk, past the elevator don’t look! toward the stairwell, gun held at arm’s length, leading the way.

The door opened fast, but Grace was faster, down on one knee, holding her breath, finger increasing the pressure on the trigger until she felt that tiny tug of resistance that came a hair’s breadth before firing . . .

. . . and then Diane stepped clear of the door and froze, staring down at the muzzle of Grace’s gun.

She was in heavy sweats and her running shoes, a canvas purse slung over her shoulder. Her blond hair was snagged up in a ponytail, and her face was flushed and twisted and terrified. ‘I . . . I . . . I . . .’

Grace jumped to her feet, grabbed Diane’s arm, and pulled her against the wall, all the while keeping her eyes and gun trained on the door as it eased closed. ‘Goddamnit, Diane . . .’ she hissed close to her ear, ‘did you see anyone? Harley? Roadrunner? Annie?’

Diane made a tiny, keening noise in her throat, and Grace felt her start to collapse next to her. She jerked her eyes away from the door for a second, saw Diane staring at Mitch’s body in the elevator, her mouth open and her breath coming very fast.

‘Look what you did, Grace,’ she whimpered. ‘Look what you did.’

Grace flinched as if she’d been slapped, looked down at her gun, then realized what Diane must be thinking. ‘For God’s sake, Diane, I didn’t do that!’ she whispered frantically, jerking Diane to her other side, standing between her and the awful thing in the elevator. ‘Listen to me, we don’t have time, there’s a deputy downstairs, did you see her?’

Diane was moving her head, trying to see past Grace to the elevator. Her eyes were wild, open too far, a circle of white showing around the blue.

Grace shook her arm. ‘Don’t look at that, Diane. Look at me.’

Empty blue eyes slid slowly to Grace’s. They seemed pathetic, resigned, as ruined as Mitch’s head. ‘What?’ she asked dully.

‘Did you see anyone downstairs?’

Diane’s head went up and down. ‘Woman cop.’ Her throat moved in a convulsive swallow. ‘She’s dead . . . messy . . .’

‘Oh, God.’ Grace closed her eyes briefly. ‘What about the others? Harley, Annie . . .’

Diane shook her head mindlessly.

Jesus, Grace thought, she isn’t even blinking. I know where she’s going. I’ve been in that place, I remember. She pinched the skin of Diane’s arm hard enough to make her gasp in surprise and jerk backward.

‘You hurt me.’ It began as an anguished whisper and crescendoed to an awful wail. ‘You hurt me you HURT ME YOU HURT ME . . .’

Grace slammed her free hand over Diane’s mouth, pushing her back against the wall, hissing into her face. ‘I’m sorry. I had to do that. Now listen to me. I have to go downstairs. I have to find Harley and Roadrunner’ – and please God let Annie not be here; let her be safe outside, standing in line at the restaurant, impatient and pissed and sassy and alive . . . ‘Do you understand, Diane? I have to go, and I can’t leave you up here alone. You have to come with me, behind me, all right? I won’t let anything happen to you, I promise.’

Because this time she had a gun, by God, and this time she was ready. No one else was going to pay with their life for the dubious privilege of being part of hers.

‘We can’t go, Grace.’

‘We have to go. Just for a little while.’ Grace was thinking fast, talking fast, feeling precious seconds tick away, cursing the imagination that saw Harley and Roadrunner and Annie somewhere downstairs, bleeding to death while goddamned stupid selfish Diane . . . She stopped and took a breath, redirected that good, strong anger away from Diane, back toward the killer.

‘Come on, Diane. It’s time to leave,’ she said reasonably. ‘You told me that once, remember? And you were right. Remember?’

Diane blinked at her. ‘The hospital.’

‘Right. I was in the hospital, and you told me that sometimes we just have to walk away from things. That everything would be better if I just went away. And that’s what we did, remember . . .’

‘But . . .’ Diane looked at her helplessly. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. We weren’t all supposed to go.’

Grace felt a tiny hitch in the world. ‘What?’

‘You were supposed to go. Not me, not Mitch, just you, but then everybody went, everybody had to follow Grace and I had to go, too, and now see what you’ve done?’ She was crying hard now. She dug in her purse for a tissue and pulled out a silenced .45 and stuck it in Grace’s chest.

47

Magozzi bit the inside of his cheek as he took the turn onto Washington on two wheels, tasted blood while he waited an eternity for four tires to find the pavement again, then jammed his foot against the floorboards.

They slid sideways to a stop in front of the warehouse in time to see Halloran spread-legged in front of the little green door, emptying his clip at the lock with booming explosions that sent shrapnel flying all over the place. The trunk was popped on an MPD unit parked across the street, and a young patrolman was sprinting toward Halloran with a twelve-gauge and a tire iron.

Magozzi and Gino were out of the car before it stopped rocking after the hard stop, doors left hanging open, coattails flapping as they ran for the door. Magozzi grabbed the shotgun barrel and jerked it down before Halloran started shooting. ‘No! It’s steel! Wait for the ram!’

Halloran darted wild eyes toward him, then grabbed the tire iron and started hammering it into the crack where steel door met steel frame.

Magozzi froze for an instant, paralyzed by hopelessness, hearing a chorus of sirens coming in from all different directions. ‘Fire escape,’ he said suddenly, and started to run for the side of the building before the words were out of his mouth. ‘Take the front!’ he yelled at Gino over his shoulder, just as the toothy grill of a fire department emergency vehicle nosed around the corner.

One minute for the ram, he thought. Maybe two. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay . . .

His cell phone rang when he was on the fire escape and Tommy yelled into his ear. ‘Leo! I found it! It’s Mitch Cross! James Mitchell is Mitch Cross and D. Emanuel is his wife!’

Magozzi pounded up the metal stairs and threw his cell phone over the railing.

All the air had left Grace’s lungs in a rush, as if the sudden pressure of the .45 against her chest had pushed it out.

She hadn’t been ready after all. Her own gun was pointed off to the right, still trained on the stairwell door, and through the shock and the fear she was thinking, She could fire two rounds into my heart before I could swing the Sig around . . .

Diane was looking at her with the empty, soulless eyes Sharon Mueller had seen in those last seconds before the bullet found her throat, eyes that Grace had never seen before. The waterworks had stopped the second she’d pulled out the .45. ‘I brought the big gun today, too,’ she said quietly. ‘I like the .22 better, but I needed to be sure. You have to be really close with the .22. Really precise.’

It took a long moment for it all to sink in. Oh, sure, quiet, proper Diane who was squeamish about guns and who never so much as raised her voice had just shoved a .45 into her chest, but until the moment she mentioned the .22, the thought that she was the Monkeewrench killer had never entered Grace’s mind.

‘Oh no.’ Disbelief spilled involuntarily from lips that felt thick and useless, from a mind that was threatening to stop altogether. ‘You? You killed all those people? My God, Diane, why?’

‘Well, self-preservation, I suppose.’