R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning (21 page)

MEYER HAD slept through Jax’s visit to the Macaulay residence and the sleeping interrogation upstairs in the master bedroom. He’d arrived the day before and Amanda had picked him up at Denver International. She hadn’t been happy to see him but he forgave her. His presence never meant good things, he understood that. He
was
hoping someday that might change.

It was close to noon and he was just getting dressed after finishing the first truly hot shower he’d had in three months. There was a soft knock at the door.

“You decent in there?” Amanda said.

“One second,” Meyer said, and put on a polo shirt that was quickly tucked into his jeans. No official business today. “Sure, come in.”

Amanda opened the door and handed him a steaming cup of coffee with cream. “I just heard from Bobby finally.”

“Thank God,” Meyer said. “Where is he?”

“He’s on his way to my office.”

“The FBI?”

“Yep. Said he needs my help and he wants you to come, too.”

Meyer was jetlagged beyond reason and would much rather have crawled right back into the comfy downstairs guest room that doubled as his cousin’s home office. He swigged the hot coffee. “I’m ready when you are.”

“There are scones on the table downstairs. I just need to grab my cell, badge, etcetera, and then we’ll take off.”

Meyer turned to leave and Amanda followed. On her way out she noticed Meyer’s used towel lying in a crumpled mess on the wood floor. When she leaned over to pick it up, she glanced at the tattered sticker on his luggage.

Missoula International Airport. 

Melissa was quiet driving back to the city, probably wondering the same thing I was: when would my brother wake up? We were a few miles from the city limits on top of Lookout Mountain cruising fast with lights on down Interstate 70 when our curiosity was ended.

“Brother. You never told me about the countermeasures. Smart man,” Jax said, still sounding groggy from the KO gas.

“Can’t take credit,” I said. “Bum made the upgrade after our fishing trip.”

“And it wasn’t like we were Facebook friends or anything deep like that.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m your brother,” he said, laughing. “Who else would I be?”

“You don’t sound like Jax. You look like him, but not quite. What are you, some kind of duplicate?”

“People aren’t their bodies or their voices,” he said. “Listen to you, always the thinker. You should have read more of the Romantics. Less Asimov and Nietzsche.”

“If you were my brother, I wouldn’t have to cuff and hogtie you like a common dirtbag.”

“You need to because you’re finally coming around, not because I’m a criminal.”

“Coming around?”

“Stop talking to him,” Melissa whispered. “I don’t like him. He sounds like my dad did.”

“Daddy’s dead,” Jax said.

Melissa spun around in shock and anger. “Fuck you, you—
dirtbag
.”

“Nice mouth,” he said. “Maybe Rule was right to tear old Dad’s heart out and show it to him.”

I hit the brakes, skidding to a stop along the shoulder of the Interstate. I turned around and drilled my own eyes into his.

“You say another word to her and I will come back there and KO you myself. Talk to me or no one at all.”

“So I can tell
you
how her father went out like a sniveling coward?”

I got out of the car, opened the back door, clutched the fabric of his shirt, and began pummeling him with my fists. Over, and over again until he was bloodied and broken and barely conscious. “Say it again. Come on, do it. I’ll fucking kill you and leave you in the trees for the scavengers, you demon cocksucker.”

Jax lay on the backseat, silent but for the spitting of blood from his tattered mouth. I waited. I wasn’t kidding.

Nothing.

I got back in the car and drove back onto the roadway.

Melissa looked horrified and I knew at that particular moment there wasn’t anything I could do to wipe away the terror because she was likely as scared of me as of anyone else.

We reached the office of the Denver FBI just after Amanda. She didn’t need to explain the Melissa Grant situation, even to a team of accountants with weapons. I shouldn’t have been so hard on them or glib, but I couldn’t shake the inexplicable surety that whatever happened in the next twenty-four hours was either the end or the beginning of everything. I needed law enforcement I could trust and I needed them in force.

That was the next stop. I could not risk climbing any further up the FBI chain; I had already asked too much of Amanda, essentially harboring a kidnap victim (although I had not told her what I knew—or at least suspected on good authority—about Spencer Grant, most-wanted).

“Meyer,” I said, and embraced my priest cousin. “I’ve missed you.”

“And I you, Bobby.”

“I need you to come with us,” I told him.

“Bobby, only you can wield the weapon of our ancestry.”

“You know that’s not true. You can’t have forgotten Tilson Wayne. Any member of our clan—”

“You and I both know that a cousin is weak blood at best, and that I am too much of a weakling and, I admited, a coward, to do what must be done.”

“Meyer, that’s just not true.”

“It should be you, Bobby. Under the circumstances,” he slid his gaze up and back, toward Jax, or whatever he was.

“Then you, old friend, are charged with keeping my girl here safe.” I pulled Melissa to me. “You’ll find no more trustworthy a man, even if he is a priest,” I told her.

“Count on me for that. I’ve got the best cop in the city with me,” he said, smiling at Amanda.

I turned to her. “We can still rearrange this. We haven’t gone too far, not yet.”

“Don’t even think of pulling me out of this,” she said. In addition to loving me, she’d watched her comrades die mercilessly at the hands of our bad guys.

“Just thinking of you and your career,” I said.

“I know.”

I kissed her and grabbed Jax by the cuffs and led him out into the descending night.

“You want
what
?” said Len Brighton, sitting behind the desk at the S.W.A.T. and Violent Fugitive Unit headquarters.

“You and a dozen men and women you’d trust with your family’s lives.”

“Bobby. You know I respect you, but—”

“Len, you’ve now seen some of what I have. I know you trust me, though you might have a hard time admitting it. These creeps hurt Bum Garvey. They’ve killed children. But I need this off the clock.”

Len was old–school. He was too much like me and I was counting on that cop factor, way down in his soul. The law enforcement officers, or LEOs, who cared about justice above protocol.

“I have a dozen, maybe a few more,” he said. “But my guys are worth three of yours any day of the week.”

“I don’t doubt it for a second,” I said.

I gave him the coordinates of the abandoned parking garage. “I just need an external perimeter. Containment. But it may not be easy.”

“Walk in the park,” he said, but I heard the tremolo of unease in his voice.

I had one more call to make.

As I drove Jax, my brother, the
thing
—I didn’t know what to call him—across the city, he was silent for a while and I was grateful. Too bad it didn’t last.

“I’m not myself,” he said, and I took it as a poor attempt at humor.