State of War

Junior fired first, twice, pap-pap! and at four feet, he would have had to try real hard to miss.

He didn’t miss.

Junior found that he was breathing fast and sweating even harder.

Why did he do that? He must be crazy!

Of course, Junior now had problems of his own. If the man was wired, Junior was in deep trouble. There was only one way out of this hole in a car, and he sure wasn’t going to try to run on foot.

They’d be on him like ducks on a june bug any second now, if the congressman was wearing a wire, and what Junior didn’t want was to have a gun in his hand when they came charging over the hill. A good lawyer might get him off, but waving a gun in the faces of a bunch of ticked-off feds was sure to save the government the cost of a trial.

He holstered his piece, stood straight up, and looked around.

Nobody screaming and hollering, “Get him, boys!” No PA from a helicopter telling him to “Freeze!” Nothing but the hot wind and a buzzard way up, circling something that was probably dead a long time before the congressman bought it.

Junior waited another minute. Two. If they were coming, they should have been here by now.

Another minute passed. Maybe they weren’t coming. Maybe he ought to see why the congressman there had been trying to get Junior to say something. Or if he actually had been trying to do that.

He went around to the passenger side and opened the door. There was a fair amount of blood, but he was used to working around that, and it took only a minute or so to turn out the dead man’s pockets and find what he was looking for.

There was a little electronic pen-sized device clipped inside Wentworth’s shirt, and it was recording. Junior hit the replay button, and sure enough, everything the two of them had said was on it, plus the two gunshots.

Junior wiped the recording and stuck the pen in his pocket. He’d destroy it first chance he got, but he didn’t want to leave it lying around anywhere near this place.

He shook his head. What an idiot his guy had been! He was just going to record the conversation on his own, no backup? What, did he think he was James Bond or somebody? He must have not expected any trouble, otherwise he would have had that little pistol — looked like a chrome-plated Beretta.25, a poor choice in a gun — closer to hand.

The congressman obviously didn’t know how these things worked. He couldn’t simply blackmail Junior and balance the threat. Wentworth had a whole lot more to lose. Unless maybe he was getting a divorce or something anyway, and he didn’t care if somebody knew he was getting a little on the side?

Junior sighed. Well, it didn’t much matter now, did it? The congressman was dead, and so was this deal.

Better clean it up a little, if he could, then split.

Junior used a handkerchief to pick up Wentworth’s hand, which still had the Beretta in it. He pointed the gun at the opening on the driver’s side and capped off a couple of rounds. He dipped the handkerchief in the dead man’s blood until he had sopped up a fair amount, then, holding his other hand under it so it wouldn’t drip, he walked around to the driver’s side, stepped back a couple of feet, then squeezed the sodden handkerchief.

Blood oozed out and pooled on the dirt.

Junior walked about fifty feet away, heading toward the desert, and squeezed some more blood out.

A third time, another fifty feet, and the last of the blood made another little puddle on the dirt.

He scuffed the ground a little, but it was mostly rocky, so not much in the way of footprints showed.

So the congressman got killed, but he had returned fire, maybe even shot first, and he’d hit somebody. Somebody with the same blood type, so Junior hoped it wasn’t one of the rare ones. But at least when they first found Wentworth’s body, they’d think they were looking for somebody who had gotten shot, and hospitals had to report bullet wounds.

There wasn’t anything he could do about the rental car’s tire tracks. It wasn’t going to rain out here anytime soon, so the tracks would be here, and you could count on the fact that the FBI would be in on this. They’d know what kind of tires they were pretty quick, and probably what kind of car, too. At least he had rented the car under a phony name, and in L.A., so it would take them a while to trace it, if they could.

He had his travel bag in the rental car, and he’d lose the shoes and the clothes he was wearing when he could. He didn’t need to stop for gas anytime soon, and he’d drive up to San Francisco to turn the car in. That way they wouldn’t have a rental at LAX that had the same number of miles on it from there to here and back.

What bothered him the most, outside of the fact that he was going to have to tell Ames he had been forced to kill a United States congressman, was that he was going to have to lose the Ruger. He didn’t have a spare barrel with him — he hadn’t planned on shooting anybody — and how stupid would he be by putting a gun that could be traced to a homicide of a VIP into FedEx or UPS or even the U.S. mail? If somebody opened the package and found a gun, they’d probably go straight to the cops. The ballistics boys at the FBI would sacrifice a goat to their gods or something when they got that news. They’d have half the G-men in the country waiting for Junior to come by and pick up the package.

He’d have to make do with just the one until he could get a replacement. He hated that.

But, done was done. Best he get going before some hiker or nature type happened along and spotted this scene. By the time the sun went down, Junior wanted to be a long way from here.

And he surely wasn’t looking forward to telling Ames about this. The man would have a kitten when he heard it. For sure. What a screwup, and not even his fault.

23

Dutch Mall

Long Island, New York

Mitchell Ames was angry. Junior had blown it, and he couldn’t figure out how. It was a simple job, something Junior had done dozens of times. How could this one have gone so wrong?

“Look,” Junior continued, “the man was nuts. He came out of the glove box with a gun. What was I supposed to do, let him shoot me? It was him or me.”

“You killed a United States congressman, Junior. Do you have any idea what kind of heat that is going to cause?”

“Yeah, I know. Like I said, I had no choice except to let him kill me.”

Ames sighed. “All right. It’s done. Obviously, I’m not happy about it, but there’s nothing that can be done about it now. The next question is, how clean are you on this?”

“Nobody saw me. The car is four hundred miles away from where I rented it. The clothes I wore, shoes, socks, everything, got burned. I wiped the gun clean, I stripped it down, and it’s in pieces scattered on the bottom of San Francisco Bay. I flew with fake ID, in and out of Atlanta, and switched both planes and IDs there.”

“What about the pictures?”

“I burned them up, too, disks and everything, and scrubbed the stored files off the computer. I didn’t just erase them, either, but made sure to overwrite the sectors with other data so no utility in the world could re-create them. Not even Net Force. It’s all gone. I’m telling you, anything that might tie me to the man is gone.”

“What about the woman?”

Junior frowned. “What about her?”

“Where is she?”

“Down in Biloxi lying on the beach I reckon. No problem there. She was a part of it, but she can’t say anything to anyone. She’d go to jail if she did.”

Ames frowned. “Junior, don’t be stupid. You’ve been in prison. You know how this works.”

Junior ducked his chin and shook his head stubbornly. “Joan would never give me up to anyone. Never.”

Ames sighed. “Sooner or later your friend is going to be arrested for something. She’s a bad girl. If it’s a soliciting bust, it won’t be a problem, she’s in and out, but what if they catch her with serious dope on her? Or