Ricci was jolted back to the reality of the firing range, this time by his heart’s heavy beating. He’d gotten caught somewhere between past and present again, as if they had converged around him in a kind of dizzying overlap — the dashed, rudimentary lines of the target figure’s face becoming the sharply defined features of the Killer as Ricci first saw them years ago. He had never gotten his chance at that savage monster inside Earthglow, but there had been a time long before that, when they had grappled hand to hand in yet another faraway place, fighting to an impasse at the Russian Cosmodrome. There, as in Ontario, the Killer had escaped him, vanishing into the benighted Kazakhstan mountains amid the fierce, final combat of what would be logged in Sword’s mission files as Operation: Shadow Watch.
Now Ricci stood with his hands wrapped around the butt of his gun. The Killer had started to retreat, backing slowly away down the lane, using the hostage figure as a shield, keeping her in front of his body. He was about a foot taller than Screaming Woman, easily a foot, and Ricci was convinced he could take him down nice and clean, do it without so much as ruffling her hair. One shot to the head, over and out. But there would be an undeniable risk to Screaming Woman. Say the Killer was holding her at gunpoint, the weapon’s snout pressing into her back. Say he had a knife against her throat. Ricci knew her situation was chancy even if his marksmanship was true. A slight jerk of the Killer’s hand, an automatic dying spasm, could result in Screaming Woman becoming what Ricci had called a civilian casualty when he wore a detective’s badge. On the force, protection of the innocents overrode your pursuit of the guilty. When losses occurred it was despite every intent and effort to avert them. But would a loss in this case be unintentional or incidental?
Ricci stood there with his hands around the gun, its trigger a tease to his finger. The finger moving slightly back, increasing its pressure—
“Tough choice. Good thing you don’t have to make it.”
Ricci turned his head toward the sound of Nimec’s voice. He had stepped over from his firing lane, the earmuffs off, goggles down around his neck, his Beretta already holstered at his side.
Ricci looked at him but didn’t say anything. His features were blank.
“Didn’t you hear the beeps?” Nimec said. He was tapping his unprotected ear. “We’re done.”
Ricci stared at him in silence a while longer, his Five-Seven still held out, the pupils contracted to black pinpoints in his ice blue eyes.
Then he looked back down the firing lane.
The lane had gone completely dark, its target and hostage figures fixed in position. A lighted red sign high on the back wall was blinking the words:
AUTO TIMEOUT
Ricci slowly lowered the gun and slid it into his leather.
“Yeah,” he said. “Done.”
Quiet hung over the room, as rife in the air as the smell of discharged ammunition.
“Tom, we need to talk,” Nimec said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Here’s fine.”
“It might be better to do our old usual tonight. Sit down in my pool room over a couple of Cokes.”
“Here’s fine,” Ricci repeated, his tone no more expressive than his features.
Nimec almost felt as if he’d phoned one of those automated customer service lines and gotten stuck on the starting option. He studied the rough, jutting angles of Ricci’s face and shrugged.
“There’s some general stuff I’d like to cover,” he said. “With me going to Africa, it’ll be you in charge—”
“And Thibodeau,” Ricci said. “He’ll make sure I remember to pull the store gate at night.”
Nimec inhaled, exhaled.
“Thought I rated better than that sort of comment,” he said. “You were gone a long time. I know what it took for you to leave. How much it took out of you to come back without finding our man. But we have to put it away for now. Move on.”
Ricci nodded, seeming to look straight past Nimec at some point several feet behind him.
“Sure,” he said in his null, automatic tone. “Got anything to mention besides?”
Nimec considered whether to push ahead. Though Ricci had returned from his alligator hunt three months ago, it mostly felt as if he were still elsewhere. And that sense of his continued absence just intensified when you tried stepping close to him.
Finally Nimec shook his head.
“Maybe later,” he said, and glanced at his wristwatch. It was almost eight P.M. “I’m driving on over to HQ. There’re lots of odds and ends that need wrapping up before my trip, and I might as well get some things done while the building’s quiet. You want to stay, work in some more practice, that’s fine with me. I won’t worry about you pulling the gate afterward.”
Ricci stood without moving and watched as Nimec turned to leave the room.
“Pete,” he said.
Nimec paused near the door, looked at him.
Ricci nodded toward his darkened shooting lane.
“I’ve got a question,” he said. “Strictly about procedure.”
“Go ahead.”
“That hostage situation before the timeout,” Ricci said. “If you’re in my place when it comes up, how would you handle it?”
Nimec thought about it a second, then shrugged again.
“Hope to God I never have to find out,” he said.
The personal ads appeared on the first Thursday of every month in newspapers throughout Europe. Although each entry was different from the preceding month’s, its content would be identical to those printed on the same date in various countries and languages. In Italy the personals ran in
For some time now the recipient of these secret contacts had rented a luxury suite in a restored nineteenth- century home on the Gran Via in central Madrid. Built as a manor for relatives of the second Bourbon Restoration king, Alfonso XII, it was now occupied by an apartment hotel of four-star excellence and high discretion, appropriately named La Casa Real — The Royal House. This was the busiest part of the city, and he had once explored the idea of settling into the quieter but equally lavish Barrio de Salamanca east of downtown. Both had residences to his liking, and cost was not a factor. His sole concern about Gran Via had been the dangerous number of eyes that might slip onto him. In the end, however, his instincts snarled at the soft faces of the
