Gundown (8 page)

Her fear released in a rush of sad relief. She knelt and brushed his hair, and then gathered him in her arms and held him close. He was so thin, so fragile. She whispered, “Oh, my brave Timmy.”

She rocked him and murmured the lullaby she’d made up to get him to sleep when he was little. “Good night, Timmy, it’s time to rest your sleepy head . . .” She let the silence take over. Tears ran down her cheeks, but she just couldn’t let him go.

Chloe’s voice came. “Mommy?”

Oh, God. Hoping her voice wouldn’t expose her crying, she said, “Coming, sugar.” Jewel laid Timmy down and wiped her cheeks. She leaned forward and kissed his forehead.

Jewel went to the living room, put her purse over her shoulder, and extended the pull handle on the suitcase. “C’mon, Chloe.”

“Where we going, Mommy?”

“A better place.” She hoped. Oh, Lord, she hoped.

Chloe started for the bedroom. “I want to say goodbye to Uncle Timmy.”

Jewel caught her arm. “He’s . . . already there, honey.”

She left the apartment door unlocked and stopped at Juana’s for a long hug and to leave her enough of Murphy’s cash to put Timmy to rest.

Hours later, as their Greyhound bus rolled westward into Iowa, Chloe slept with her head on Jewel’s lap. Jewel stared out at the green, rolling country and mourned Timmy. A sensation of weightlessness from being freed of the chains of his dependence shamed her, but she knew herself, and she knew she would leave that behind. She had two tickets to Oregon, a foreign land with strange new ways and a promise.

What Are We Coming To?

A cold snap had hit Washington D.C. The city’s famed cherry blossoms were brown and rotten on the trees. They matched Marion’s mood perfectly. The humidity had returned to dismal, the new crime stats she’d seen on CNN were disastrous, and rush-hour commuters were demented.

Four blocks from her office in the Department of Justice building on Pennsylvania Avenue, traffic slowed to a slug’s pace. Finally, it crept past a parked ambulance, its lights flashing, and she saw a blanket-covered body on the pavement near the curb. Paramedics were loading a second body on a gurney into the ambulance. Two detectives interviewed people on the sidewalk.

When Marion came to a cop directing traffic, she stopped and lowered her window.

The cop, sad-faced and fiftyish, said, “Keep moving, ma’am.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Please keep—” He peered at her. “Oh, Ms. Smith-Taylor. Didn’t recognize you. It’s a drive-by. Third one this morning.”

She shook her head. “What are we coming to?”

The cop sighed. “I try not to think about it.”

Already weary by the time she arrived at her office, Marion collapsed into the big leather chair behind her desk. Her gaze slid across the masses of law books that filled her walls. So many laws. So many lawbreakers. She stared at two-foot stacks of files detailing vicious crimes that made her job, with one exception, depressing.

The one exception walked in and shut the door behind her. Suzanne carried a half dozen fat file folders, a handful of pink message slips, and a small Priority Mail box. Her blond hair bounced just above her shoulders as she strode to the desk and set her burdens on the one clear spot. She peered at Marion, and a look of concern shadowed her expression. She stepped behind Marion’s chair, and her cool, strong fingers massaged Marion’s stiff neck and shoulder muscles.

After a few minutes, Marion sighed, then swiveled and pulled Suzanne’s head close to place a soft kiss on her lips. “Thanks.”

Suzanne stepped to the side and studied Marion. “You’re not sleeping again.”

So the makeup hadn’t disguised the purple bags under her eyes. She shook her head. “It was a dream about Noah Stone. First there’s this nice, earnest face. Slowly, his gray hair turns brown, and his mustache darkens and gets smaller and rectangular . . . and suddenly he’s Hitler, haranguing a mob.”

“You think the Alliance is that bad?”

“Not on the surface.” Marion turned to her computer and launched a browser. Typing in www.theallies.org, she was soon at the Alliance’s home page, complete with a multicolored logo and the words
I promise to help, the best I can
.

Suzanne leaned forward to see, her hand a delightful warmth on Marion’s shoulder. The faint scent of the perfume Marion had given Suzanne for Christmas brought up pleasant memories of— No, save that for later.

Marion clicked links to flick through a series of essays written by Noah Stone and other members. “I’ve been through the whole site, and all they talk about is how to work together, their philosophy, and their agendas for change.”

Suzanne pointed to an ad offering a free book. “There’s a name I recognize.” The book was
Justice Through Truth and Advocacy,
and the famous name was Edgar Aaronson, a former Supreme Court chief justice. The coauthor was Noah Stone.

Marion said, “Yeah, I want you to send for it. Aaronson was one of my heroes in law school. Maybe there’s a clue there.”

Suzanne made a note. “Will do.”

Marion clicked on an icon of a pistol with the universal “no” circle and crossbar over it. It took her to the Alliance approach to eliminating lethal firearms and replacing them with defensive guns. “Look at this . . . Who can argue with wanting to get rid of handguns and assault rifles?” She’d read the Alliance’s ideas, but didn’t see how they could really work, long-term. On the flip side, a militia “patriot” had taken a shot at Stone in Chicago, so maybe he was doing something right.

Suzanne said, “Okay, so what’s so wrong with the Alliance?”

“God only knows, and She isn’t telling.” She thumbed through the messages and found a cluster of governors there. “And what are the leaders of California, Washington, Colorado, and Idaho up to?”

Suzanne took the top folder from the stack she’d brought in. “Well, my guess is the new FBI crime report.”

Marion rolled her eyes. “They’re calling to complain about Oregon again.”

Opening the folder, Suzanne scanned a printout. “I bet you’re right. Oregon’s crime numbers are down for the fifth month in a row, and their state crime rates are up even more than the rest of the country.” She looked up. “Do we know why?”

Marion knew half the answer. “It seems crooks are leaving Oregon and setting up business in nearby states. What do the governors want me to do, close the borders? I can’t exactly call Oregon up and tell ’em to stop getting rid of their criminals.” Her Noah Stone nightmare came to mind. “You know, Hitler’s Germany had a really low crime rate, too.”

What Marion didn’t understand was why more and more crooks were slipping out of Oregon. She hit her desk with a fist. “What is it? Why’s their crime rate dropping as if Superman were on patrol? The reports I get say more than a third of the citizens are already armed with those little defensive guns the state pushes, but I don’t see how that explains it—all over the rest of the country there are more guns on the street than ever, but the result is just the opposite! Every study shows that more guns mean more violence—except, now, in Oregon. It’s going down.”

Suzanne moved to the front of the desk, picked up the Priority Mail box, and held it out.

Marion shifted her gaze to the box and raised her eyebrows. “And that is . . .”

Suzanne’s smile warmed Marion. “Something from Joe Donovan.” She shook the box as she handed it over. It rattled.

Inside, Marion found an example of the “stopper” weapons that, according to Donovan’s last report, were taking over the state. Supposedly nonlethal, the little pistol made of red plastic fit readily into her hand. It would also fit easily in a pocket or purse. Three small-bore barrels were stacked one over two. There was no trigger, though; in the place she expected to see a hammer were three buttons—one red, one white, one blue, arranged in a triangle that matched the positions of the barrels.

Three Ziploc baggies were tucked into the box. They held bullet-like objects and were labeled “nap,” “tangle,” and “whack.” “This must be the ammunition Joe wrote about.”

She slid the contents back into the box and set it in a desk drawer. “Call Cy Ligon over at the FBI and ask him to pay me a visit. He might claim he’s too busy, but tell him I’ve got a new weapon I need analyzed. That’ll get him.”

Marion swiveled and gazed out the window. A siren wailed below, and an ambulance zigzagged through traffic. A quick image of a sheet-covered body flashed into her thoughts. “I passed another shooter crime scene on the way in this morning.”

Suzanne said, “What are we coming to?”

“I said the same thing.” Marion turned back. “Did I tell you about Charlie?”

“That cute little old security guard at your apartment house?”

“Yeah. Mugged right in my foyer. He’s in the hospital with stitches and a concussion.”

“And you moved to Georgetown to be safe.”

“Where is safe, anymore?”

Marion returned to the Alliance website and clicked on “About Us.” After skimming Noah Stone’s story about the idea for the Alliance coming to him as a result of a study group in a church, she gazed at his face. Was there a religious connection? Was that what he was hiding? What were his ambitions? How did he profit from destroying constitutional protections?

When Cy Ligon arrived an hour later, she was surprised at how paunchy and graying he had become—but his eyes were as lively and intelligent as ever.

He said, “Long time since Quantico, Marion.” They’d become friends when they’d gone through the FBI academy together. Though their careers had taken different paths, him staying with the Bureau and becoming a weapons expert, and her moving on to Justice after a few years as a field agent, they’d stayed in touch.

“Yeah. A little too long, I think.”

“Knowing you, you didn’t call me just to hash over old times.”

“I’ve got a little puzzle I think you’ll like.” She led him to her desk and handed him the stopper along with the ammo.

He grinned. “Hey, a stopper.”

She should have known Cy would be on top of this. As he turned the pistol over, peered into the barrels, and opened the chambers, she said, “You know about them?”

“Weapons are my life. From what I’ve heard, these are kinda fun and relatively harmless.” He picked up a baggie and took out a cartridge, a brass casing with a paper tube in the place a slug would ordinarily be. He opened the tube and poured little balls the size of BBs into his palm. “They call this one ‘nap.’ These beads contain carfentanil, an opioid eight thousand times stronger than morphine. A tiny dose is sufficient to knock out a human, and the drug has a wide safety range. They break on the skin like little paint balls. A good choice for dimming someone’s lights, if not knocking them out.” He poured the little balls and the casing back into the nap baggie.

She said, “With so many people in Oregon using these as ‘nonlethal’ defensive weapons, I want to know if they can kill.”

Cy’s eyebrows lifted. “Interesting question.” He took a tangle cartridge from a baggie, a casing with a white ball in the place of a bullet. “This’s an adhesive material that expands and will bind, let’s say, someone’s legs or arms. You can’t break or cut it. Comes off with a spray that dissolves it.”

He pulled out a whack cartridge, another tube, this one with a plastic cap at one end. “Whack, here, is a mix of pepper spray and a chemical that triggers mental confusion. Your eyes clamp shut and you can’t think straight. I don’t see converting the whack cartridge to lethal—any killing spray can blow back on you. Tangle could kill someone if you shot enough onto their face to suffocate them, but that’s pretty hit-or-miss.”

He held up the baggie of nap cartridges. “This little baby, though, is all kinds of opportunity. The right poison and this can be a deadly delivery system.”

“You want to see what you can do and get back to me?”

“I don’t really have the time for this, Marion.”

“I know, but . . .”

He smiled. “But it’ll be fun.” He opened his briefcase and tucked the stopper and ammo into a compartment. “What’s this about?”

“The Alliance.”

He nodded. “Noah Stone.”

Surprised, she said, “You looking at them?”

He shrugged. “Everything we see appears clean. The way they turn out the vote, they seem to be do-gooders with muscle.”

“On the surface, yeah, but what worries me is where their so-called reforms could take this country.”

He shrugged. “All I know is that since they got going good our caseload in Oregon keeps dropping.”

But Hitler’s Germany had a really low crime rate, too.