Chapter 97
I HADN’T SEEN him in more than a decade, but he had not aged a bit and still looked like an overgrown choirboy, with pale pinkish skin, a pleasant pie-shaped face, and a riot of curly orange hair. But the eyes gave the lie to everything else, hard and dark as sapphires even if his lips were smiling.
“Guy Carpenter,” I said when I saw him in the chair usually reserved for me in Del Rio’s hospital room.
Carpenter was dressed in boat shoes, khakis, a white polo shirt, and a blue Windbreaker sporting the logo of a country club in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With the Titleist ball cap on his head, he looked ready for thirty-six holes. I knew better. He’d never been in a country club in his life, unless it was one constructed especially for bad-asses, which he most definitely was.
“Jack Morgan,” Carpenter said, getting to his feet, shooting me a winning smile, and shaking my hand while those hard sapphire eyes danced over me, making me feel oddly expendable. “Been following your career since the ’Stan.”
“Can’t say the same about you.”
“Yeah, well, I was always better suited to the shadows than you were. How long did you last at the company?”
“Two years,” I said. “Difference of philosophy.”
“I figured that,” he replied, then laughed and shook his head. “Isn’t it strange the way life unfolds? The unexpected turns and twists?”
Del Rio spoke up from the bed. “You come here to tell us something, Guy, or get all touchy-feely about life unfolding in its grand arc?”
“He hasn’t changed,” Carpenter said to me, throwing a thumb Del Rio’s way. “Even with a broken back he hasn’t changed.”
“Not a bit,” I replied.
Carpenter’s smiling face fell then, and I saw the darkness I’d glimpsed several times in Afghanistan when Del Rio and I were charged with moving him about the country on missions we never fully understood.
He went to the door and shut it, then jammed a chair under the doorknob. “That nurse is a real pain,” he said. “I figured she might try to interrupt our business just to get her jollies.”
“You were always a quick study,” I said.
“Dartmouth will do that for you,” Carpenter replied before looking at Del Rio. “Those fingerprints you sent me?”
“Yes?”
“They don’t exist.”
“And that’s why you flew three thousand miles to see me?” Del Rio asked.
“I heard your back was broken.”
“Bullshit,” Del Rio said.
“Whatever,” Carpenter replied, his face hardening. “Those fingerprints belong to no one, and because the three of us go way back, I thought you’d want to hear me say that in person. Take it as a warning if you want, but don’t try to find someone who doesn’t exist.”
“Wait,” I said. “Warning from who?”
“People with far more reach than I’ve got,” Carpenter said. “Spooky, spooky spook people.”
“Did Rick tell you where the fingerprints came from?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, no,” he replied. “But it doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, but it does,” I said.
I told him everything, described seeing the four dead bodies on Malibu Beach, the killings in the CVS, and the explosion on the Huntington Beach Pier. Then I described how a drag-queen shooter playing Marilyn Monroe on skates killed six at Mel’s Drive-In before a granny who would have been the seventh shot him dead.
“This is our first serious clue as to who is behind No Prisoners,” I said. “We need your help or eight will die tomorrow.”
Through all of it, Carpenter had listened impassively, as if he were hearing the plot of a new action movie and not the gruesome details of an actual mass-murder spree.
When I was done, he blinked several times, rubbed his fair cheeks, and pursed his lips. “I read about some of this,” he said. “No Prisoners?”
“That’s the handle,” Del Rio said. “You recognize it?”
Carpenter shook his head.
“But you know those fingerprints,” I said. “Otherwise, I don’t see you coming here at all, as compassionate a man as you are. And I don’t think that warning was coming from any triple-spooky people. I think it’s coming from you.”
Carpenter thought that was funny but said, “No one ever said you were a dummy, Jack. But from me or whoever, take it as fair warning.”
Del Rio said, “There are twenty-one people dead. Innocent people. Eight more may die. Women. Children. Doesn’t that kind of thing get through to you? Or are you so jaded by your life in the shadows that nothing gets through anymore?”
To my surprise, Carpenter’s face cracked and the hard bravado fled, and he honestly seemed to age right in front of me, his eyes hollowing and his cheeks sagging. He said in a weary voice, “These kinds of things get to me more than you could ever imagine, Rick. The things I’ve seen? The stuff I know? I haven’t slept right in years.”
“High time to get some of it off your chest,” I replied. “Either that or the twenty-one people dead here in L.A. are going to become a permanent part of your nightmares and obsessions.”
Carpenter’s shoulders hunched and he gazed at me as if I were Jacob Marley’s ghost, showing him the length and weight of an invisible chain that threatened to hang from him for all eternity.
“I don’t want that,” he said quietly.
“Then tell us what you know,” Del Rio said. “Help us stop these killings.”