C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-NINE
The apartment building was old but well kept up, and its location near Dupont Circle meant that it was also expensive. There was never any shortage of tenants, however, despite the high rent. A number of very well-paid lobbyists lived here, along with various legislative aides and deputy assistant undersecretaries from the different cabinet departments, most of whom came from wealthy families that had paid for their educations at Harvard and Yale and helped them secure their positions in the government, where they could help pass legislation that raised taxes and spending in a never-ending spiral and implemented regulations that made it virtually impossible for small businesses to comply and generate any profit at all.
But that was all right. As long as the middle class made any money at all, the government could just keep on taking it.
And foolish sheep that they were, the average citizens would allow the government to keep on doing just that, Ryan thought as he rode up in the elevator with a couple of young men who looked barely old enough to be out of the exclusive prep schools they had no doubt attended.
“Senator Bascomb's going to introduce the bill next week,” one of them was saying to the other.
“What's it going to do again?”
“Create a commission to study the commission on equitable distribution of healthcare benefits and also empower the secretary of health and human services to establish new guidelines to cut off coverage for non-viable patients.”
“Non-viable meaning?”
“Anyone over the age of seventy. Although I'm trying to persuade the senator that he can get away with a provision lowering that to sixty-eight.”
The second legislative aide laughed.
“And we used to accuse the other side of wanting to turn Granny out into the street to let her die.”
“I know! And people actually bought it!”
As the two of them snickered, Ryan thought about how easy it would be to reach over and snap their necks, one at a time. He would be doing the world a service, he told himself.
But if he left their bodies in the elevator, he ran the risk of having them discovered, and that might interfere with the job that had brought him here. He didn't want that.
So when the elevator stopped on the third floor and the two young men, still telling themselves with smug satisfaction how smart they were, stepped out of the car, Ryan just smiled and said, “You fellas have yourselves a good night now.”
They glanced back at him, obviously wondering why some middle-aged nobody was even talking to
them
, the best and the brightest of yet another generation of self-proclaimed best and brightest, and walked off never knowing how close they had come to death.
The door closed and the elevator rose smoothly toward the fourth floor, where Ryan's target lived.
His employer hadn't been happy that he was still in Washington instead of in Texas dealing with John Howard Stark, but Ryan operated on his own timetable, always had and always would. Anyway, it was a lucky break that he was here, because there was another little mess that needed to be cleaned up.
And cleaning up was his specialty, after all.
The elevator stopped again and announced in a sleekly modulated, recorded female voice, “Fourth floor.” The door opened and Ryan stepped out.
His footsteps made no sound on the thick carpet in the hallway as he looked for apartment 407, finding it four doors up on his left. Before he could knock on it, the door of one of the other apartments on his right opened behind him. His first impulse was to look back and make sure he hadn't walked into some sort of setup. Probably some of his contacts in the government lost sleep at night from worrying that he knew too much. They might have decided it would be better just to get rid of him.
But if the door opening was entirely innocent, as it probably was, then he didn't want to show his face to whoever was back there.
He kept walking, going past 407 so that no one could testify that he'd stopped there. He heard footsteps receding behind him. A man said, “We've got plenty of time to make it. The reservation isn't until nine.”
“Sure, plenty of time,” a woman said. “If nobody else is on the streets of Washington tonight. That's
bound
to happen.”
“Why don't you just let me worry about it, okay?”
“Fine.” The woman's voice was chilly. “You won't hear me say anything else about it.”
Ryan smiled faintly as he heard the elevator door open. That was going to be a tense ride down to the lobby, he thought.
When the elevator closed, he swung around and started back toward 407. The corridor was deserted now. He'd already made sure there were no security cameras in the hallway itself. While he was in the elevator he had kept his head turned so that his face would be partially obscured from the camera in there, without being too obvious about what he was doing. The same was true in the lobby downstairs.
The two legislative aides he had ridden up with might remember him, especially since he had spoken to them. That had been a dumb move, he told himself. They had annoyed him, though. Anyway, a couple of self-centered brats like that might remember him vaguely, but they wouldn't be able to describe him. Ryan knew from experience that eyewitnesses were notoriously unreliable, even when they supposedly were paying attention.
Ryan stopped in front of the door to 407, took a pair of skin-colored latex gloves from his coat pocket, and pulled them on. He knocked on the door.
Ten seconds later, the target opened it. Ryan recognized him right away from the photo that had been emailed to him. The man had been young and handsome once, with thick, unruly dark hair. Now that hair was thinning and shot through with gray, his waistline had thickened considerably, and there were pouches of weariness under his eyes. He said, “Yeah? Can I help you?”
Ryan reached under his coat and took out a manila envelope.
“Josh Mumford?”
“That's right.”
“I've got a delivery for you.”
Ryan was too old and too well-dressed to be a messenger, although in today's ruinous economy, you never could tell. People took whatever jobs they could get.
Everybody liked to get packages, though, and since Mumford worked at the Justice Department, he probably had documents delivered to him fairly regularly. He said, “Oh, thanks,” and stuck out his hand to take the envelope.
Instead of handing it over, Ryan dropped the envelope and grabbed Mumford's wrist. He jerked the man toward him, at the same time taking a syringe and hypodermic needle from his pocket. He stabbed the needle into Mumford's neck just below the jawline and shoved the plunger down. It should have been an awkward maneuver with Ryan's missing thumb and finger, but he had done this often enough that he had no trouble with it.
Death happened so fast Mumford's eyes barely had time to widen in surprise before they began to glaze over.
Ryan pulled Mumford closer and got an arm around him to hold him up. He kicked the envelope into the apartment and wrestled Mumford out of the doorway, then heeled the door closed behind him. He pulled the needle out and put it back in his pocket.
The computer on Mumford's desk was on, and the swivel chair in front of the desk was turned toward the door. Ryan carried the dead man over and lowered him into the chair. Mumford's head sagged forward. Ryan turned the chair so that Mumford was facing toward the monitor again.
A top-notch medical examiner might notice the needle mark, but given its location the chances were that it would be mistaken for a tiny shaving nick. Ryan saw several similar tiny marks on Mumford's neck. Anyway, there wouldn't be any reason for anybody to be suspicious. The drug in the syringe mimicked a heart attack so closely that it was almost undetectable. Just looking at Mumford, he appeared to be a prime candidate for cardiac arrest, and he would be found in front of his computer, where a lot of people were found dead these days.
Facebook was up on the monitor screen, Ryan saw. He patted Mumford lightly on the shoulder and said, “Should've updated your status while you had the chance, amigo. And you shouldn't have hacked into things that were none of your business.”
He looked around, made sure he hadn't left any signs of his presence, and left the apartment, setting the lock on the door and easing it closed behind him. He was just starting to turn away from it when the elevator door opened a few yards down the hall and a man charged out of it.
He wasn't attacking Ryan, though. He was muttering to himself instead, saying, “If she wouldn't pester me all the time, I wouldn't forget my damn walletâ”
He looked up and saw Ryan standing in front of the door to Josh Mumford's apartment.
Ryan reached into his pocket, took out a small automatic barely bigger than the palm of his hand, and shot the man twice in the forehead. The shots halted the man's momentum in midstep, and he wavered before pitching against the wall and sliding to the floor. Blood began to pool under him and soak into the carpet.
Ryan uttered a heartfelt curse. This was an unlucky break. Even unluckier for the guy who was going to miss his late dinner reservation after all.
The man didn't have his wallet, clearly, because he'd left it in his apartment and come back to get it. But he had keys to a Lexus in his pocket. Ryan took them to make it look as much like he could as a robbery. Having a guy killed in a mugging almost right outside the door of another guy who'd died of a heart attack about the same time might set off a few flares, but the cops wouldn't be able to prove anything.
Nobody emerged from any of the other apartments. The gun didn't have a noise suppressor on it, but it was pretty quiet to start with. Ryan walked along the hall to the stairs. No cameras in the stairwell. He shook his head. For a building in the nation's capital, they didn't take their security seriously enough. Of course, that worked to his benefit, so he wasn't going to complain.
Five minutes later he was driving back toward his own place in Georgetown, somewhat irritated that the night's work hadn't gone perfectly. Life was full of unexpected developments, though, and all a man could do was adapt to them.
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
Stark hoped there were no other law enforcement emergencies in the county tonight, because every available deputy was here at Shady Hills, along with Sheriff George Lozano himself.
“I warned you this would happen, Stark,” Lozano said angrily as they stood beside his SUV that was parked not far inside the gate. “Damn it, I warned you!”
“It sounds like you're more worried about those men who tried to kill us than you are about the law-abiding citizens of this park,” Stark snapped back at him. He had just about lost all his patience with Lozano. He didn't believe the sheriff was in bed with the cartel, but with the politician's instincts that had gotten him elected in the first place, Lozano didn't want to rock anybody's boat too much, either.
Ambulances moved back and forth steadily from the retirement park, transporting bodies to the morgue. The first thing the EMTs had done was to stabilize and load up the wounded to take them to the hospital in Devil's Pass. Deputies went along to guard all of them, including the residents of the park. An outraged Sheriff Lozano had declared that until a full investigation had been conducted, he was going to consider everybody here a possible suspect in numerous crimes. Hallie had protested that the residents had been acting in self-defense, but Lozano had told her to take that up with the district attorney.
“Don't worry,” she'd told him with an angry snort of her own. “I will.”
Now Stark and Lozano were meeting one on one, and the air was thick with anger on both sides. Even so, Stark wasn't expecting what happened next.
“You're under arrest,” Lozano said. “Put your hands behind your back.”
Stark's eyebrows rose in surprise.
“Under arrest?” he repeated. “What the hell is the charge?”
“Inciting a riot, for one thing. This bloodshed might not have happened if you hadn't armed these people and stirred them up into a killing frenzy.”
“You've got to be joking,” Stark snapped. “Those thugs showed up and started shooting at us first. We just returned their fire.”
Lozano shook his head and said, “That's not how the survivors tell it. According to them, they were just driving by the parkâon a public road, I might addâwhen the residents opened fire on them. That's on you, Stark.”
“First off, that's a blasted lie, and second, what about the ones who came in the back? They drove a pickup right through the fence. That's
trespassing
, at the very least,” Stark said with a thick note of scorn in his voice.
“And that may be all we can prove against them. Again, you can't work up a bunch of old geezers so they start shooting at somebody for knocking down a fence.”
Stark knew that Lozano was being willfully obstinate. The sheriff wasn't stupid; he knew what had happened here. But for reasons of his own, he was bending over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to the invaders.
Maybe he
was
being paid off, Stark thought.
Or else Lozano was just scared of what might happen if he openly defied the cartel. The sheriff had a teenage daughter and son, Stark recalled, along with a very attractive wife. He had seen a picture of the whole family in the newspaper after the last election.
Stark could feel a little sympathy for Lozano if the man was frightened about what might happen to his family. But that didn't excuse Lozano's failure to do his duty. If you were going to be in law enforcement, some risk always went along with the job.
“You're really going to arrest me?” Stark asked.
“Damn right I am. Now turn around.” Lozano rested his hand on the butt of the holstered revolver at his side. “Or are you going to resist?”
“I'm a law-abiding man,” Stark said. He turned away from Lozano and put his hands behind his back. He felt metal bite into his skin as the sheriff snapped old-fashioned handcuffs onto his wrists.
“Hey! Hey, what the hell are you doing?”
That shout came from Hallie, who had gone off to check on some of the residents of the park. Stark looked over his shoulder and saw her running toward him and the sheriff.
“Stay back, Ms. Duncan,” Lozano told her. “Mr. Stark is under arrest, and you don't want to be interfering with me right now.”
“Under arrest?” Hallie said, obviously flabbergasted. “What in the world for?”
“We'll decide that later after I've talked to the DA.” Lozano took hold of Stark's arm and turned him toward the SUV. “Come on.”
“Wait a minute! He's my client!”
“You can see him after he's been booked.” Lozano opened the rear door and told Stark, “Get in.”
“John Howard!”
“It's all right, Hallie,” he told her. “I'll see you at the jail.”
“But . . . but this is crazy!”
“These days, it seems like everything else in the world is, too,” Stark said. “So I suppose we shouldn't be surprised.”
Â
Â
Stark was booked into the jail in Devil's Pass. Instead of putting him in the holding tank with the drunks, Sheriff Lozano had him placed in a cell by himself.
“No need to put you on suicide watch, is there?” Lozano asked through the bars of the door after it slid shut and locked.
Stark snorted and said, “Not hardly.”
“Fine. You'll have a chance to talk to your lawyer and post a bail bond in the morning. It's too late to take care of that tonight.”
Stark nodded. He sat down on the bunk and tested the mattress with his hand.
“You may not know this, Sheriff,” he said, “but I've spent the night in places that were a whole heap worse than this.”
Lozano started to turn away, but he paused and said, “You brought this on yourself, you know.”
“I suppose you could look at it that way. But the way I see it, I didn't have much choice in the matter. Somebody had to help those folks at Shady Hills. If it hadn't been me, it would have been somebody else.”
Stark wasn't sure that was completely true, though. He wasn't certain anybody else would have been so blasted stubborn. His wife, Elaine, had told him more than once that he could give any mule in the world a run for its money when it came to hardheadedness.
Lozano grunted and said, “I'll see you in the morning.” As he walked away from the cell his footsteps echoed from cinder-block walls painted an ugly, institutional green.
Stark leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. He hadn't been frightened, but he'd been concerned about being placed in with other prisoners. It probably wouldn't have been too difficult for the cartel to send somebody after him in those circumstances. Lozano must have known that, too. Stark was the sort of man who was willing to rely on himself and take his chances no matter where he found himself, but it didn't hurt anything to decrease the odds against him.
The lights dimmed but didn't go out. He stretched out, rolled onto his side so that he was facing the wall, and went to sleep.
Â
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By ten o'clock the next morning he was walking out of the jail a free man, at least for the time being, with Hallie at his side. The judge had set his bail at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but several bail bondsmen were champing at the bit to write the bond for him. Paying the bail for John Howard Stark was good publicity, Hallie had explained.
Because Stark was news this morning. Big news.
She showed him the huge headline on the local paper:
BATTLE AT RETIREMENT PARK.
Stark's picture was on the front page, along with an even larger photo of the two burned-out vehicles. They really did look like something from a war zone, Stark thought.
“What did they wind up charging me with?” Stark asked.
“Inciting a riot, disturbing the peace, assault with a deadly weapon, and attempted manslaughter,” Hallie said.
“And bail was only a quarter of a million? I got off light.”
“Oh, it's not over. The DA hasn't decided whether to charge you with manslaughter or murder in the deaths of those fourteen thugs.”
“Wait a minute,” Stark said. “I didn't kill all of them myself.”
Hallie shook her head.
“It doesn't matter. According to the law of parties, you planned the whole thing, so you're just as responsible for their deaths as whoever actually killed them.”
“Which nobody really knows, since it was in the thick of battle.”
“That's right. But Jack Kasek and the other volunteer captains are going to be arrested and charged, too, under the same statutes.”
“Blast it, that's just not right!” Stark said.
“No, it's not,” Hallie agreed. “But from the looks of things, John Howard, you'd better get used to the insides of courtrooms and jail cells, because you're going to be seeing a lot of them.”