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SEATTLE (Friday, Nov. 30, 2012, noon) — Three weapons were kept in the locked box under his bed. Weapons he never intended to fire again but kept anyway. The two weapons he’d smuggled out of the Marines were still in the box; the third, the Glock was gone. The pennies on the corners of the box were still there. Rocking back on his heels, Mac thought about what that meant. Whoever is behind all this knows me, he thought, chilled. Knows my habits. Not even Donnelly could have researched this. He thought about the Glock, its history. Should be clean. No way to link it to... anything; no prints of his on it. Still, he was being set up and the knowledge of it sat like a lump in the pit of his stomach.
Then he checked the rest of them: the 38 in the brace of the bed in his room. In the kitchen pantry was a 12 gauge, and another 9 mm was in a wicker basket under an end table in the living room. Readily available to a man who might need one in a hurry.
Lindy rolled her eyes and humored his paranoia, as she called it. He wondered if she was trying to reach the shotgun in the kitchen when the men caught her.
So...somewhere in the city was his Glock, probably a weapon in an attempted cop killing. He winced. He hadn’t asked Lindy what time she’d been tied up. Obviously, she’d been in that chair for some time, if the men had time to beat her up, get his gun, shoot Donnelly and still be at Johnnie’s by 10 p.m. He did a slow burn at the notion that she’d been injured that long without help. One more item on his list to get payback for.
The telephone rang while he sat there thinking. He let it go to the answering machine. Then Mac recognized Danny Brown’s drawl. “Mac. I need you. Are you there? Pick up the phone. Mac, listen. I’m in trouble. Big time trouble. I...’
Mac picked up the phone. “Yo.”
“Mac, I’m at the airport. I need you.”
“SeaTac?”
“Please Mac, I’ll explain when I see you. For old times’ sake?”
Mac grunted. He didn’t do that nostalgia bit. But for curiosity’s sake? “I’ll be there in thirty,” he said.
Mac sorted through the backpack he used for work; left the reporter's notebooks, recorder, laptop, backup battery, charger, pens, pencils, a small camera, a thumb drive, a USB cord. He took out the file folders on the two stories he was working on and tossed them on the desk in his room.
Then he added the tools of a former trade: extra 9 mm ammunition, a razor-sharp box-cutter, and the 9mm with no serial number. Buried at the bottom, he could still reach them, but they weren't noticeable if someone looked in the pack. He tossed a workout towel over them.
Danny Brown, he thought. It’d had been years since he’d seen him although Danny routinely sent a Christmas card. About the only one Mac ever got.
“The girl in the picture,” Mac said out loud.
He went downstairs and picked up the picture of the girl he’d been given last night. It looked a bit worse for the wear, but still had that haunting familiarity. He’d seen the picture before — not the girl. Danny Brown’s kid sister. What was her name? Kristy?
Kristy had been 16 when Danny enlisted, and she had written her older brother faithfully. Danny would take out the picture and pass it around to the others in the fire squad as they’d sit out in the Afghanistan mountains and he’d read her latest letter. Sometimes they’d hear the same letter six, seven times before they’d get mail and Danny would have a new letter. For four guys barely out of their teens, she’d had all the value of a pinup girl and a reminder of home, mom and apple pie—even for Mac who had never had home-made apple pie in his life.
She’d be 25, now? Something like that. So, what were these thugs doing with her picture from 10 years ago? Why would thugs bring a picture he might recognize? Why risk that? Any picture would do for their purposes. Wouldn’t it? Mac frowned, mulling that over.
He was on his way to the door when someone knocked. He unzipped the backpack, putting his hand on the 9mm.
“Who is it?” he called across the room.
“Stan Warren.”
Mac silently padded across the room, peered out a window. Warren had stepped back from the door to be easily visible. Mac opened the door.
“What do you want?”
“Can I come in?” Warren said patiently.
“Got a warrant?”
“I just want to talk, for God’s sake.”
Mac looked at him, still in a tailored white shirt, dark suit, dark shades in his pocket. He glanced out the street, noting the car he assumed Warren was driving. It hadn’t been there a bit ago anyway. “Can I see some ID?” Mac asked politely, still not opening the door far enough for Warren to wedge himself in.
“We were introduced just this morning!” Warren said heatedly.
Mac waited.
Warren smiled faintly. He reached in and pulled out a blue folder with a gold shield. “Well? Now can I come in?”
“We can talk on the porch, FBI Agent Warren,” Mac said. He let his gun fall back into the backpack. “Make it quick, I’m on my way out.” Glancing quickly around the neighborhood, Mac stepped out on the porch and gestured toward two wicker chairs. He took the one where he could most easily dive for cover if someone started shooting from the street.
Almost absent-mindedly, Warren adjusted the other chair to give himself a similar advantage.
“So, you’re not who Rodriguez told Leatherstocking you were,” Mac said conversationally, his eyes on the street, not the agent. “Brave man to lie to that attorney.”
Warren shrugged. “Who gives a damn who some attorney thinks I am.”
Mac glanced at him. “Most of the local cops know better than that. Shit, even if they are perfect, he wins most times. But you’re not a local cop. Not even a local FBI agent.”
Warren’s eyes narrowed. “Call the Seattle office. They’ll ID me if you don’t believe me.”
“Oh, no doubt you’re FBI. You’re just not Seattle FBI. Hell, you don’t even know how to park properly on a hill,” Mac said disgustedly, motioning to the car on the street. “You’ll be lucky not to be chasing that thing down the hill the way you’re parked. No, I’d guess D.C. myself. You got an East Coast attitude. ‘We’re not in the habit of calling up the newspaper and volunteering information,’” Mac mimicked. “So just what is a D.C. agent doing investigating the attempted murder of a local cop?”
“You seem to know it all,” Warren said. “You tell me.”
Mac looked at him consideringly. “Not enough time to fly you out here for this. You had to be out here already on something. Something that crossed this investigation. And you had enough clout to invite yourself in. So, what does bring you to the hills of Seattle, Agent Warren?”
Warren half-smiled in appreciation. “Not bad for a punk reporter,” he said. “Let me tell you a few things. First, if you’ve got any notion of going Rambo on this, forget it. You’re in way over your head, no matter what kind of bad ass you think you are.”
“And exactly what am I supposedly over my head in?” Mac asked.
Warren ignored the question. “Second. You left things out in your story this morning. You’ve got a bump on your head as if someone slugged you with a blackjack. Your hands are scraped, and you’re moving a bit stiff. Now I don’t think you got that at Donnelly’s; I don’t figure you for that hit at all. But it’s time you told what did happen. Then let the pros handle it.”
Mac looked at him for a moment. “You think you’re tough enough to handle whatever this is?”
Warren grimaced. “Me personally? To be honest, I’m not sure. But the institution of the FBI? We’ve got the resources to handle almost anything.”
Mac snorted. “After Waco? Ruby Ridge? You got more faith in institutions than I do.”
“I don’t care what stories the cops tell about you when you were a kid. I don’t care that you were a Marine. These men are professionals.”
“Right.”
Warren was silent for a moment and then said slowly, “Donnelly didn’t have just your juvenile records. He had records from Vallejo, your military records, your college file. He had a clipping of every goddam story you’ve written. That man was collecting a profile on you.”
Mac frowned. “For who? Not for Seattle P.D. Who else was he working for?” When Warren didn’t answer, Mac thought about it. “Who else did he have files on?”
Warren didn’t answer that either. “You’d best be thinking about all the stuff you’ve got to explain to Rodriguez—he’s going through that file and taking notes.”
He stood up, pulled a business card out of his pocket, and handed it to Mac. “When you realize you’re in over your head, try to call me before you end up in the bed next to Donnelly,” Warren suggested. He walked down the steps and over to his car. The agent paused, checked out the other cars on the street and how they were parked before getting in and driving off.
A careful man, Mac noted as he watched him leave before returning into the house. He attached his pager to his belt and picked up the phone to dial the office.
"Hello," Janet Andrews said.
"It's Mac. You still got sources in D.C. from your bureau days there?"
"Some. The Examiner bureau has plenty. What's up?"
"You know that Stan Warren who sat in on our meeting this morning? Well, he's not a local cop. He's FBI. And more than that, he's a D.C. FBI agent. What does that say?"
"FBI. That explains a lot.” Janet paused. “How did you find this out?"
"He paid me a visit," Mac said, tucking the phone under his chin. He zipped up the backpack. "I figure someone can check him out. Find out what he is working on."
"Yeah, someone should be able to find out. You at home?"
"Gotta go the airport. I'll be on my pager."
"Take a cell phone."
Mac rolled his eyes. "And broadcast everything to anyone?"
Janet snorted. "Anyone who'd bother to be listening. All right. I'll page you when I hear something.”
Mac set his backpack between the seats of his 4-Runner, making sure he could get into it easily. He pulled out of the garage, drove down the hill, detouring around construction on the overpass and getting on Highway 99 through the west side of Seattle. He automatically avoided the congested I-5; they could just rent it out for parking as useful as it was as a freeway.
Danny Brown, he thought. It was typical Danny that when he got himself into a mess, he'd come running for Mac to bail him out. Always had. And damn if he didn’t keep bailing him out. Mac sighed and focused on his driving.
Mac drove quickly, confidently. He didn’t speed, stayed with the flow of traffic. You could get noticed, speeding. In his drug-running days, he’d learned not to get noticed. His eyes stayed on the road; his mind was in a different time and place.
Danny Brown. Troy Maxim. John Blankenship. The four of them were a fire team in Marine Recon for two years. Did some stuff in Texas then were transferred to the Afghanistan. Saw each other through two years there, back stateside for a bit, then Blankenship applied for embassy duty and got it. The group was split up. But for two years, there were three men Mac could rely on absolutely. He bet his life on it more than once.
Good times, bad times. Mac shook himself out of the memories, got on 518 to the airport. He still heard screams in his nightmares sometimes, felt the heat, saw the waviness of the horizon as heat rose from the sand. Sometimes the screams were from the men who had died out there. Sometimes the screams were his and no one came.