Cut Out (9 page)

Lieutenant Donna Giannini made her way through her old domain, Homicide, on the way to the little cubicle where she’d been exiled. She wasn’t replacing anyone—her job was done only during the day. She was a short, slender woman with black hair, slightly tinged with gray, cut tight against her skull. She wore black slacks, flat shoes, and a thick sweater. Her Mediterranean ancestry showed up clearly in her olive skin.

Giannini paused at the table holding the large coffeepot, retrieved her mug, and poured herself a generous dose of the strong brew. As she turned to leave, Vince Lorenzo spotted her and gave a yell. “Hey, Lieutenant!”

“Yeah?” Giannini didn’t like Lorenzo, and she knew he didn’t particularly care for her either. She waited, her right hand curled around the warmth of the mug. It was a game—it always was—Lorenzo had his feet on his desk, expecting her to come over. She held her ground, knowing, by virtue of her rank of lieutenant and his of sergeant, that he should come to her. The only problem was that she was a lieutenant without a following, which made everyone question her position.

Lorenzo gave it ten seconds, then swung his legs off the desk and lumbered to his feet. He shifted through the mess of papers on his desk and extracted a message slip. Beer belly leading the way, he shuffled over to Giannini. “Got a strange message for you.” He scratched his head. “This guy—he’s called about six times. I told him you wouldn’t be in until about seven thirty, but he sounded kind of upset.” A smirk played around his mouth. Giannini could almost read his mind as he speculated about her personal life.

“Can I have the message, please?” Giannini asked patiently.

“Oh, yeah.” He proferred the piece of paper. “He wouldn’t leave his name,” he added.

She looked at the scrawled message. “Remember ices at Antonio’s? Stickball at the school?”

“Kind of weird, eh?” Lorenzo asked, his curiosity now clearly in the open. “He said he’d call back.”

“Did he say what he was calling about?” Giannini asked, half her mind already in a long-ago place.

“Nope.”

“He calls again, you put him through right away.”

“I go off shift,” Lorenzo said smugly.

“Then make sure you brief Carter and the rest of the guys on the day shift,” she snapped. Without another word, Giannini left Homicide and walked down the hallway to the former supply closet that now served as her office. She spun the dial on the padlock and swung open the door. Once inside, it was impossible to close the door, because the chair, when pulled out from the desk, was in the way. She sat down and looked at the message, her thoughts shifting backward through the years.

Antonio’s had been the corner grocery store in the neighborhood where Giannini grew up. It was a treat to buy one of the nickel Italian ices there. And then, after getting an ice, she’d walk down to the playground at the public school and play stickball—using a broom handle and a Spaulding rubber ball in the inner-city version of baseball. The strike zone was marked on the side of the school with chalk. It was pitcher against batter—scores made by blasting the ball over the chain link fence.

Several people from Giannini’s childhood could have left that message, but she knew instinctively who it was—Tom Volpe. That name brought a rush of conflicting feelings—memories of hot, lazy summer days spent talking, lost in the innocence of youth, flanked by the harsher memories of entering adulthood and divergent paths. The last time the two had talked was more than four years ago, Giannini remembered.

The phone startled her out of her memories, and she grabbed the receiver in the middle of the second ring. “Giannini.”

“Donna, do you know who this is?”

Giannini recognized the voice, but she didn’t understand why her old friend wouldn’t identify himself. “Yeah, I know who it is. Listen, To—”

“Shh!” Tom hissed, cutting off Giannini. “Don’t use my name.”

“What’s going on?”

“My sister’s in big trouble and she needs help.”

“Your sister?”

“Yeah—you remember her, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I remember her. What kind of help does she need?”

“She says people are trying to kill her. She says someone already killed her husband and they’re still after her.”

Giannini frowned. “Why are you calling me? Why don’t you call nine-one-one?”

“She’s not here in Chicago.”

This was getting crazier, Giannini thought. “Well, where is she?”

“North Carolina.”

Giannini took a deep breath. “Let’s go back to the original question—why are you calling me?”

“She says she can’t trust anyone. She called me, and the only person I could think of who might be able to help is you.”

“All right,” Giannini said, playing along. “What can I do?”

There was a long pause, and Giannini recognized it for what it was: her friend had not thought this through.

“She needs protection. She says there have been two attempts on her life in the past twenty-four hours.”

Giannini leaned forward in her chair and grabbed a notepad and pencil. “Take it slow and tell me what happened.”

“I can’t. Not on the phone.”

“It isn’t bugged,” Giannini assured her friend. People watch too many crime shows on TV, she thought.

“I can’t count on that. The last call my sister made almost got her killed, and she told me not to let out her identity over the phone.” The voice hurried on. “Listen, she’s in North Carolina. Can you get down there?”

Giannini tried once more to get some facts. “Who tried to kill her?”

There was a pause. “The Outfit.”

Giannini frowned. “Why? Listen, you’ve got to tell me something about what’s going on.”

A long sigh. “Okay. I’ll trust that this line is clear. Remember the big trial we just had this summer involving The Outfit?”

“Torrentino?”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

“My sister’s married name is Cobb.”

All of Giannini’s senses went on alert. She’d followed the trial—everyone in Chicago had. And she knew who Philip Cobb was, but she hadn’t heard anything about a wife being involved. She wondered why the feds weren’t taking care of this.

“Can you make it down there, Donna?”

Giannini thought furiously. “It would take me a while.”

“She may not have a while.”

“How about if I contact the feds? They can get someone to her much faster.”

“No! She said definitely not. She already tried that once.” The voice on the other end sounded desperate.

Giannini’s thoughts settled on a possible solution. “I’ve got an idea.”

“What?”

“I’ve got a friend who might be able to help your sister. Can you get hold of her?”

“She’s calling me back in thirty minutes.”

FORT BRAGG, NORTH CAROLINA

29 OCTOBER, 9:04 a.m.

The new Special Forces academic facility, or ACFAC, as it was called by those who worked there, was one of the most strangely constructed buildings Riley had ever seen. His office was on the fourth floor on the east end of the building, the only stairs that went from the first to the fourth floor on the east end began in the back of a classroom that was usually in use, thereby making the stairs effectively worthless. His other options were to take stairs in the center of the building or the lone elevator on the east end.

That was only the beginning of what disgusted Riley with his modern Fort Bragg workplace. Another problem with the design of the building became immediately noticeable as Riley pushed through the heavy fire doors that opened onto the offices for 1st Battalion, 1st Special Warfare Group. The work area was a large open room, more than a hundred yards wide and deep. To designate company and individual work areas, the powers that be had simply installed six-foot-high blue partitions, to form numerous cubicles each with space for two desks back to back. It was easy to get lost in this maze; in addition, everyone was too close together, with the chain of command all sitting within spitting distance. It made a free spirit like Riley uncomfortable.

Despite the advantages of being in a modern building, Riley and all the other worker bees missed the old World War II barracks that SF had used at Fort Bragg. In those aging, unattractive buildings, they’d had the latitude to design and modify the interiors any way they pleased.

Riley threw his small backpack onto the crowded desk and slumped down into his chair as he eyed the training schedule hanging on the cubicle wall. His team—Team 3, direct action—was on the light part of its teaching cycle, having just finished the mission planning and field training exercise at Camp Mackall. One of his noncommissioned officers (NCOs) had to teach a target analysis class later in the week, but other than that, there was nothing formally scheduled. Riley planned to give the five NCOs assigned to him some days off, and he would use the time to update lesson plans and outlines—a chore no one enjoyed.

A Company was broken down into four teams—direct action, strategic reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, and unconventional warfare. When a student officer reported to Fort Bragg for the Q-course, he’d already passed the biggest hurdle to becoming Special Forces qualified—the three-week Selection and Assessment (S & A) course at Camp Mackall. S & A was modeled after the selection course used for Delta Force, which in turn had been modeled after the course the British used for their Special Air Service (SAS). It was a land navigation course that involved marching many miles through the North Carolina wilderness with a heavy rucksack on the back. The participants were not told what the time limits were from point to point, or how many points they would have to complete, which increased the physical and mental stress as the days and nights went by.

Passing S & A allowed a student to become slotted into the Q-course, and that was where Riley and his team took over. A Company handled the incoming officers; B through E Companies took over the enlisted specialties from weapons man through commo man. Several months were spent learning the individual specialties, then the surviving students were assigned training teams and sent to Camp Mackall for a final training exercise called Robin Sage. For the students the course was a one-time grind. For the instructors it was a never-ending rotation, as the long-range training calendar on the wall of Riley’s cubicle constantly reminded him.

Riley stared with consummate distrust at the laptop computer he’d been issued when assigned to A Company. Every officer who came in as a student to A Company was issued one of the computers for use during the course. Riley imagined that somehow it helped training, but he would have preferred to see each student issued a 9mm pistol and spend the sixteen hours learning to operate that weapon instead of a computer. Riley often joked with the commander of A Company, Major Welch, that he was going to put his computer in his rucksack on the next jump and see how it fared.

The phone rang and Riley ignored it. He made it a rule never to answer the phone in the company area. Usually the company training NCO up front handled all calls, and Riley didn’t see “secretary” listed anywhere in his job description. Besides, phone calls usually meant something was screwed up; in the army nobody ever called to say things were going well or as planned.

The phone kept up its insistent braying, past the normal three or four rings. Riley gave it eight, then reluctantly picked up the receiver. “A Company, 1st Battalion, Chief Riley.”

“Dave, it’s Donna.”

Riley’s feet swung off his desk in surprise. Giannini had never called him at work. “What’s up?”

“I’ve got a friend who’s in trouble and she needs help and she’s down in your neck of the woods.”

Riley digested the run-on sentence without a blink. “What kind of trouble?”

“I don’t know. She says someone killed her husband and now they’re trying to kill her.”

“Sounds like pretty big trouble,” Riley commented warily. “Sounds like police-type trouble.”

“I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, Dave, but I think she is in big trouble and needs help. She may have professional killers after her, and there may be a reason why she can’t go to the police.”

“Where’s she at?”

“Gordontown. It’s about five miles from I-85 just below Greensboro.”

Riley twisted in his seat and glanced at the map tacked on the wall. Many of the exercises in which he was involved were run off the Fort Bragg Military Reservation, particularly one called Troy Trek, which covered almost a hundred miles in and around the Uwharrie National Forest, in central North Carolina. He spotted Gordontown on the northwest side of the national forest.

“Yeah, I see it. How do I contact her?”

“You don’t. She contacts you. I passed on to her what you and your truck look like. You go to the center of town and park outside the courthouse, across from the police station, and she’ll link up with you.”

“What’s going on?” Riley asked. “Why all the secrecy? If someone killed her husband and is trying to kill her, why doesn’t she go to the cops?”

“She says she doesn’t trust the cops. I don’t know too much about what’s going on. When you meet her, ask her what the story is and straighten all this out.”