“I know you didn’t mean to hurt Roberts—”
“Fuck Roberts. He’s just another goddamn weight around my neck. You all are. Arguing about money, equipment, days off, time off, pensions—it’s never enough. Nothing I ever fucking did was enough for any of you, and you know what, I don’t have to give a shit anymore. I’ve taken care of myself, and I’m not sorry, and now I’m going to take care of you—”
There was just an instant, a split second, of dropped attention, that gun listing off to the side as Stan continued to rant.
Slow motion. It always happened in slow motion, didn’t it.
Knowing that he was seconds from his own death, José pulled his trigger, and the bullet discharged—and given that he was just a few feet away from point-blank range, there was no question of that slug not hitting home in the center of Stan’s chest.
The impact blew the man back off his feet, the headlights’ harsh illumination making him look like he was in a Marvel comic strip, a super-villain in a cheap suit and a bad tie taking justice right through the heart.
With a sickening thud, he bounced off the trunk of his own car and slumped to the pavement, his body ending the roll on its back, facing the heavens above.
José stayed where he was, the smoke from the barrel of his gun rising up, the smell of the powder in his nose. Then he got his phone out of the pocket that he’d have put a handkerchief in if he’d been that kind of a man.
Before he called for help and backup, he turned off the microphone recording he’d triggered on the unit just as he’d entered the driveway. After that, he stared at Stan for a moment and then slowly lowered his weapon. The man’s mouth was working, so José went over and knelt down.
Last words, and all that. Guess he was hoping for an oops-I-take-it-all-back.
It was just autonomic function, however, muscles in the neck and face spasming randomly. The hit had been right in the center of the chest. José couldn’t have done a better job if he’d been a surgeon with a scalpel.
Looking down at his phone, he had to put a numeric password in because he hated the new kind with facial recognition. When it became clear that his hand was shaking too badly to hit the keys in the right sequence, he decided to just make an emergency call to the police station.
’Cuz this sure as shit was an emergency.
Except his fingers were still trembling—and he had a thought: If he couldn’t put in four digits for a password, why did he think he could do seven? Or maybe even ten if the local 518 area code was needed?
He was concentrating on the phone screen so intently . . .
. . . that he didn’t see Stan marshal his last strength . . .
. . . to lift his gun right up at José’s head.
Stephan Fontaine.”
As Rio spoke up, Lucan looked away from the lineup of cutesy pie shops and well-tended restaurants he was driving them by.
“Who are you talking about?”
“Stephan Fontaine. The columns.” She pointed up a hill. “Head there. I think I know the house.”
“Roger that.”
He had no idea where they were, but Rio was in charge, telling him in no uncertain terms which turns to take, where to go. And he knew, without seeing any big houses yet, that she’d taken him to the right neighborhood. From the streetlights with their graceful arches, to the trees that had been planted alongside the sidewalks, to the complete and utter lack of litter, it went without saying that they were in rich people territory.
As he piloted the piece-of-shit Monte Carlo up the rise, the estates started—and they were in the same exact vein as the white birthday cake he’d gotten from the memory banks of that dealer.
“Who’s Stephan Fontaine?” he asked.
“He’s this philanthropist who moved to town a couple of years ago. He’s always in the papers and on TV for giving away money? He’s got his name on a wing at St. Francis hospital, and he endowed a chair in economics at SUNY Caldwell. He’s done a bunch of other stuff, too.” She glanced over. “But he lives in a house with columns. Six of them. There was an article in the Caldwell Courier Journal about the renovations he did on this mansion he bought. And the house is up here.”
So Lucan kept going. And as they went along, in the back of his mind, he was missing her already.
It seemed ridiculous to be mourning Rio’s loss while she was right next to him. For fuck’s sake, he could reach right out and touch her—not that he would. He’d terrified her enough.
He was such a prize.
“Here! Stop!”
He hit the brakes and looked across the car’s beat-to-shit interior. “That’s it. That’s the house.”
The mansion was set far back on a rolling lawn, behind a set of sturdy gates and a stone wall that was federal-penitentiary-worthy. The columns were indeed six, right across the front, tall as evergreens and more than capable of holding up the pediment and slate roof above them.
It was exactly as the memories of that dealer out on the street had detailed.
“Service entrance,” Lucan said. “Let’s go around back. That’s how the guy would get on the property when he came to visit.”
It took them some time to find an alley cut-through in the street, and then he trolled by the back of several estates, staring into the trees and wondering how many hidden cameras were tracking this old junker as it violated the pristine neighborhood’s roadway.
“Is this it?” Rio asked as she leaned into the windshield. “This entrance here.”
“Yeah.”
Lucan pulled into a service port on the far side of the rear gate. There was a carriage house locked in by the stone wall, and through the iron bars of the fence, he could see a pool area, and then the back of the mansion.
“How do we get in?” she murmured.
“It’s not going to be a problem.”
“But how are—” She stopped herself, as if she were remembering the way the drug dealer downtown had been handled. “Okay, let’s do this.”