Dues of Mortality (37 page)

“
So’s
an Angus steak and Swiss, which I never got to finish, thanks to your
boy, Northrupp,” Silas retorted.

“
Who?”

“
Northrupp,
the guy who’s been going over that video for you.”

“
Northcutt?
Marcus Northcutt?”

“
Yeah,
right. That’s him.”

“
Northcutt
was using your IDVantage? When?”

“
This
afternoon, during my lunch break. I appreciate him not wanting to cut
into my off-time, but he kind of canceled-out his good intentions
when he accidentally closed out the software I was trying to update.
Set me back a good hour’s worth of work.”

“
What
was he doing?”

“
I
assumed he was lifting a set of prints from that revolver he had with
him.”

“R
evolver?”

“
Yeah,
an old .38 he picked up somewhere. Can you believe it? Haven't seen
one of those in a long time.”

Roberts
nodded. He ripped the wrapping off his dinner and stared at it. It
was heavy with filling and had a crust that looked like glazed
cardboard. He recalled talking to Northcutt for at least ten minutes
earlier in the afternoon, long after Silas’s clockwork lunch
break. He hadn’t said a word about finding an old .38.

“
Silas,
are you absolutely sure that’s what he was doing? I mean, did
you get a look at what he was working with?”

“
I
know my guns, Robbie. I came back a little early from lunch to check
up on the software’s loading and I got a look at it when I
walked in, just before he stuffed it into his pocket. Hope he got
whatever it was he was trying to get, because he forgot to rewrap it
in the baggie he had with him.”

He
forgot? Northcutt?
He’d sooner forget how to start
his car than make that kind of mistake with evidence, least of all a
suspect weapon. Roberts gripped his chin. It sounded more like
Northcutt had been startled by Silas; like he wasn’t expecting
him to come back when he did, and didn’t want him seeing what
he was working on.

Roberts
narrowed an eye. He suddenly wanted to know exactly
where
the
gun in question had come from. Glenda Jameson had been rescued
downtown by a guy with a revolver. She wasn't a fan of guns, but her
father was a hunter. According to her, she had enough rudimentary
knowledge of them to know a thirty-eight when she saw one.

“
Well,
no need to hassle him about it if you see him, Silas,” Roberts
said. “I’ll be sure to talk to him.”

Miles
Gabriel entered Wallace’s office just in time to catch the
nauseating bray from the adjoined room. As he approached its door,
the moaning and grunting became louder until it climaxed in a ghastly
wheeze that signaled the end of the vicious exercise against the
natural order. “Ugh,” Gabriel grunted and choked back a
plash of bile. He then knocked on the door.

“
Who
the hell is that?” Wallace yelled from inside. His stricken
voice pierced the door like static.

Gabriel
shook his head. The old man knew exactly who it was; no one else
would have dared interrupt. After several seconds, the door opened to
Jerome Wallace, standing sweaty and shirtless, wearing only his
trousers. Gabriel immediately averted his eyes. Whatever was good
shape for a man of sixty plus years, he supposed Wallace was in, but
that didn’t make the sight any easier to take home.

“
Sorry,”
Gabriel said insincerely. He peered over Wallace's shoulder to see,
Mai Ling Chow, seated on a corner of the room's bed replacing her
bra. She looked annoyed. Wallace had barely let her get her panties
back on before opening the door. The egotistical old shit had
wanted
Gabriel to see her in a state of
undress. To Mai Ling's dismay, Wallace probably even wanted
her
to be humiliated
as
much as
he
wanted Gabriel to be jealous.

“
We
have to talk,” Gabriel said.

Wallace
sighed as if he knew Gabriel was about to piss all over his
post-coitus parade. He huffed past the lawyer and into an adjacent
bathroom without a word.

Gabriel
watched unenthusiastically as Chow retrieved her black skirt and
cream colored blouse which were strewn by a small waste-can with
the—“Ugh”—
condom
slung over the rim
like a dirty sock. She dressed with no particular hurry. If she was
nettled about being half-naked in front of Gabriel before, she seemed
completely fine with it now. In fact, he might as well have been a
stick of furniture for all she cared of his sentiments. When she was
done, she even sidled past him, slinking like an alley cat with her
tail in the air. For the right price, he could be next.

It
was just over a minute before Wallace emerged from the bathroom
buttoning up his shirt. He'd wiped himself down with a washcloth and
splashed some cold water on his face. However, his cheeks were still
red as a beet from the afterglow.

“
Ms.
Chow,” Wallace said, stopping her short of the office door. “be
sure to confirm my meeting with the mayor for Friday.”

“
Yes,
sir,” she replied and then walked out.

Wallace
beamed. “Five months I’ve been waiting to bone that,”
he said to Gabriel.

“
Isn’t
that about how long she’s been here?” Gabriel asked.

“
Yep.”

“
What
took you so long?”

Wallace
laughed. “Not as young as I used to be; what can I tell you.
She’s worth it, though. Last night I almost pasted her to the
ceiling.”

“
Thank
you, Jerome,” Gabriel sighed. “I have put on a few pounds
and I’ve been looking for a reason to skip lunch.”

“
I’ll
probably have to buy her a car or something to keep things cool
between us. I’d hate to have to fire her. She actually does a
damn good job. Suppose there had to be a brain in there somewhere.”
Wallace moved to behind his desk, where he sat down and spun in his
chair like a little kid at Six Flags.
He planted his feet and
peered out the window. There were no less than three major
construction projects within plain view. One dedicated, as always, to
the expansion of BioCore. “
Look
at it, Miles. Twenty years ago, the sight of a trolley packed with
ignorant tourists in this town could have only been a punchline for a
joke that started with a duck, a rabbi, and a hooker walking into a
bar.
But now...an entire
city is experiencing a life it never believed possible...not until I
came along.” Wallace shook his finger in the air. “And
never
has
it been more jeopardized than right now.”

Gabriel
tugged at his ear. He knew where this was going. “Not as much
as it could have been,” he said.

Wallace
rotated his chair, exposing his profile to Gabriel and poignantly
pressed an index finger into his cheek. “You’re right.
I’ve made mistakes. And one of the biggest I've made was
listening to you when you suggested that I refrain from dispatching
anyone against the good senator.”

Oh,
Jesus, here we go
,
Gabriel thought.
That
“ingenious” plan of replacing Beaumont before the vote
.
How many reasons did Gabriel have to rattle off to prove it wouldn’t
work? They would never have gotten close enough to procure a viable
helping of DNA. Beaumont rarely traveled alone and was fanatical when
it came to protecting his genetic material. They also couldn't just
kill him. Wallace had suggested that as well. He figured if it looked
like a drug overdose or something of that nature it would discredit
Beaumont. It was a dumb idea. Beaumont—love him or hate him—had
a doggedly loyal following of voters. If the man died from so much as
a coronary, it would be suspicious and may have potentially martyred
him. Sure, he had a perpetually disheveled appearance; tabloids all
over the country loved to needle him about it—said it looked
like he was
on
something. But Beaumont ate right, took supplements, exercised and
kept biannual physical checkups. His shlubby appearance was just a
way of psychologically separating himself from the rest of the
beltway boys.

No.

Beaumont
was more idea than man. And ideas were cloaked in the armor of God.
Finding its chink would take the tools of a craftsman. Gabriel
started to speak.

“
I
hate Americans,” Wallace said. “They're idiots. Their
attention span is for shit! Just last year that lefty human nut-sack
was dodging press rumors about Maguire and now he's back stronger
than ever! In less than two weeks, the United States Senate will
likely pass a bill that will have every one of my labs crawling with
bureaucrats jamming their noses in my files and their microscopes up
my ass. That chicken-shit president will sign it and oversight
committees will be in here investigating my experiments and tagging
DNA samples. I don’t need to tell you what will happen if they
discover exactly
who
it is
that I’ve
got little pieces of in the fridge. The Jameson woman, still, has not
been found nor has Richard Kelmer, so they both remain a potential
threat. And I am no closer to stopping the passage of that bill than
I was before. Have I left anything out?”

“
Just
this,” Gabriel said and produced a Nanopod from his pocket. He
hit play and it belted out a male voice they’d never heard.

“
...fucking
asshole! Do you even have a conscious? No, for that you'd need a
brain! I knew it! I knew you were full of shit as soon as I saw your
face, you...”

Gabriel
stopped the playback.

“
Your
ex-husband?” Wallace joked.

“
Very
funny,” Gabriel said. “And that's not the important
part.” He fast-forwarded the recording.

“
...crazier;
you or me? Okay, okay, I'll get you some extra cash, but this is it,
you got it?”

“
Thank
you, Benny,” a second voice said.

“
Unbelievable.
All these years I never got a 'thank you' from you for anything and
I'm already sick of hearing it. I hope you're at least sure about
what you're doing.”

“
I’m
not sure of anything, except it’s the best lead we’ve
got. She's pinning all her hopes on finding this Kelmer guy. I pray
she’s right. Look, I gotta go. The plane’s landing in ten
minutes. Thanks again.”

Wallace
licked his lips.
“Miles, tell me I can take only
good things from what I just heard.”

“
His
name is Xavier Hawkins. He’s a former Army MP, dishonorably
discharged. Served overseas, most recently during the Syrian
uprising. He was taking up residence at a veteran's center, being
treated for substance abuse, until he just wandered away. The man he
was talking to was his brother, a Dr. Bennet Hawkins, who lives in
Shaker Heights. The plane he was on was a Qantas red-eye to Seattle.”

Gabriel
preened victoriously, an involuntary curl snaking up the corner of
his mouth. Less than two hours after learning Xavier Hawkins's
identity from Marcus Northcutt, Gabriel had surveillance on Bennet
Hawkins's property. Tapping the doctor's comm-hub on the outside of
the house was tricky, but the ex bureau man he'd hired was top notch.

“
So
he
is
a bum,” Wallace noted.
“She’s being aided by a fucking
bum
.”
There had to be more to it, he thought. He never bought that shit
about truth being stranger than fiction. If this was truth, it would
make it to the
New
York Time’s
bestseller
list. “What's this about Seattle?”

“
I
think they’re looking for Kelmer, and maybe going to meet him,”
Gabriel said.

“
You're
kidding!”

“
I’ve
already got people working on a location. So far, we know Kelmer’s
flown out to Seattle at least three times in the last year. We should
have something before the end of the day.”

“
So
they could be taking us right to him.” Wallace shrugged. “Shit,
it never even occurred to me that she, herself, would go looking for
him. She's got more guts than we thought.” He squeezed his eyes
shut and sighed hotly. “Damn it! I gave orders to feed a
company line about Kelmer being fired to anyone who called here
looking for him. I was afraid it would be more cops. She could have
called here days ago and led us right to her.”

“
I'll
check with reception before I leave.”

Wallace
eased back in his chair, looking much calmer. He shifted his gaze to
focus on an inverted desk-pendulum that swayed devotedly beside his
holo-blotter. He pinched its top between his thumb and forefinger.
“The second you get a location, I want their presence
verified...and all of them gone.”

Gabriel
fought this time to keep the corners of his mouth level. “And
the deal?”

“
The
deal will still go through as planned. We just have to make sure it’s
done clean; no trace of evidence, and I mean not a scrap. And make no
mistake—I mean that literally—I want them
all
erased
this time! No more screw ups!”