followed by a bullet tearing into his body.
No shots came.
No bullets landed.
The storm pummeled down but no one killed him.
He got to a boxcar, made his way underneath to the other side and ran to January.
She wasn’t there.
“January!”
No voice called back.
“January, where are you?”
She didn’t answer.
He searched, first frantically, then methodically.
She wasn’t where he left her.
She wasn’t at the parking lot.
She wasn’t at the boxcars.
She wasn’t anywhere.
He crumpled to his knees and put his face in his hands. The storm raged down, nipping at his skin with sharp little teeth.
He didn’t care.
January was gone.
She’d been taken.
He’d let it happen.
73
The B-17G Flying Fortress was a bomber equipped with four Wright supercharged Radial engines and a distinctive roar that could be heard two countries away. For much of the war, Wilde sat in the rear turret of that firebird with his hands on the trigger of a 50-caliper machine gun. Most of the men he’d killed in his life got killed from there. Although they got taken from a distance, they weren’t necessarily impersonal.
Wilde would watch the flames and smoke and death spirals.
He would picture their terror.
He didn’t regret doing it, even today.
He didn’t enjoy it though.
Not then.
Not now.
Not tomorrow.
Since the war he’d taken two additional lives, both fully justified, both with his back against the wall in a him-or-them situation. The events of last night brought that number to three.
“Had it coming.”
Those were the exact words of Casey Ballard, the barrel-chested, yellow-cigar-teethed homicide detective who responded to the scene last night for all of fifteen minutes, just long enough to ask a few questions and get the body out of there.
The words were true.
The guy had it coming.
No question.
No doubt.
Still, Wilde’s heart wasn’t quite right, exactly like it wasn’t quite right when one of his 50-cal presents found their mark. It wasn’t quite right even though London was alive this morning because of him and only because of him.
He got to the office early, just as the sun crept into the sky. He took a shower, changed into fresh clothes and sucked down coffee and smoke. None of it cleared his head. He couldn’t get the dead man’s face out of his brain.
He needed to know the guy’s name.
So far, that was still a mystery.
The man carried no identification.
London didn’t recognize him.
Neither did the cop.
He was in his mid-thirties with a rough, no-nonsense face. That’s all Wilde knew about him; that and the fact that he died with a bullet in his neck.
Alabama showed up an hour later wearing a pre-caffeine face. She headed for the pot, filled up and took a noisy slurp. Then she looked at Wilde over the edge of the cup and said, “So, how’d it go last night?”
Wilde wrinkled his face.
“Not good.”
He filled her in.
She listened without interrupting then said, “The guy actually stabbed at her head with a knife?”
Wilde struck a match.
“Right.”
The smoke snaked towards the ceiling.
“Why?”
Wilde waved the flame out and tossed it in the ashtray.
“What do you mean, why?”
“He was after the map, right?”
“Right.”
“So how was he going to find it if he killed the only person who knew where it was? It doesn’t make sense. I could see him going there to interrogate her. I could even see him killing her after she told him where it was-but before that? No, no way.” A beat then, “Something funny’s going on.”
Wilde tapped a cigarette out and lit up.
He blew smoke.
“You love complicating my life, don’t you?”
“That’s not the question.”
“Okay then, what’s the question?”
“The question is, why aren’t you on your way over to the little lawyer’s house to ask her point blank what the hell is going on?”
“Why, what do you think she knows?”
“I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that she’s keeping it from you, whatever it is.”
74
