The Target (30 page)

“Because Ramsey could get killed like my daddy.”

“That's true,” Dr. Loo said slowly. “But you see, Emma, anything can happen to anybody in the world at any time. I'll never forget when Princess Diana died so tragically. I'll never forget the shock of it, the realization that none of us has any guarantees on anything. Life is one day at a time and trying to enjoy each day we're given. You've got to discover the knack for doing that. Do you understand?”

“That was different,” Emma said. “Bad people are after us. It isn't just bad luck.”

“You understand all too well,” Dr. Loo said. “Okay, let's look at it this way. Ramsey and your mom want to give you a home. They want the three of you to be a family. They love you and want you to know that they'll always be there for you.”

Emma sighed. She looked for a very long time at Ramsey, saying nothing, just studying him. Then she looked at her mother. Then, she turned back to Dr. Loo, and smiled. “I think Ramsey will make me a good papa. He already loves me bunches.”

“He does, does he?”

“Yes. He went crazy in San Francisco when that bad man grabbed me again.”

Molly had told Dr. Loo on the phone what had happened on the beach.

“Were you scared?”

“Yes, but it was over so fast. Ramsey said I saved myself again.”

“What did you do?”

“The man hit me real hard, but I stayed awake. I bit him through his shirt, in the side. He's kind of fat around his stomach. I bit him real deep. He jerked and I got unburied by his coat. Ramsey saw me and the man had to drop me.” She turned to Ramsey. “I wish you could have caught him.”

“Me too, kiddo.”

Dr. Loo spoke alone to Emma for a while and then they drank champagne, Emma drank her Dr. Pepper, and they all accepted congratulations from the staff there and two waiting patients.

One of the patients, an old man with a severe eye twitch, said, “I saw a blurred photo of you, Judge, in one of the rags. You were hugging a little girl.”

“No,” Emma said loudly, holding her piano really hard to her chest, “he was hugging
me.
He was upset.”

 

“
N
O
,
I didn't see anyone,” Mason Lord said to Detective O'Connor. He paused, sucking in his breath with a sudden twinge of pain. He shot a hit of morphine into his vein by pressing the medication button.

Detective O'Connor waited until he saw the pain clear from Lord's eyes. “No shadows, no warning, nothing?”

“No. Gunther and I were just coming from a friend's office. We'd had a little chat with him. A good fellow, a politician.”

“His name, sir?”

“State Senator Quentin Kordie. Don't worry about him, Detective, he wouldn't try to shoot me. We're simply friends, that's all.”

“Very well. Now, sir, who knew where you would be?”

It was obvious to Molly that her father had thought about that. She hated the calculation in his eyes, the drawing of pain as he sorted again through the few people he believed had known where he would be at that particular time.

Finally, Mason said, “A number of people knew, but, of course, only people in my organization.” He paused, pumped another hit of morphine into his vein, and said, “If I've got a traitor in my midst, I'll deal with it, Detective.”

“No, Mr. Lord, this is a police matter. It's called attempted murder.”

“Then you know who's behind it, Detective. Rule Shaker.” He shook his head in bewilderment. “He's never been frankly stupid before. The moron.”

Detective O'Connor rose from his chair. “It seems to me, Mr. Lord, that if indeed Mr. Shaker was a moron and did try to kill you, then you've got a big problem. You seem to be well protected for the moment. Naturally, I assume that Rule Shaker has heard that you're still alive. If you're right, I can imagine what he's saying right now.”

 

R
ULE
Shaker wasn't saying anything. He was standing close to the huge glass window in his office that looked out over an endless stretch of desert. He hadn't ever wanted a view of Las Vegas. He lived in a city of kitsch. He wasn't about to look at it unless he had to.

The desert was clean, the air pure, so hot that all life sheltered during the hottest part of the day. Including people. He couldn't see a single soul in that vast expanse. He turned slowly as Murdock said, “Rudy's still hanging out at that motel in Oak Park, waiting for orders.”

“Let him continue to wait. I hear that Lord is getting stronger every day in that hospital. He's going to live.”

“That's the word,” Murdock said, uncrossing his legs. He'd gained weight since he'd gotten back from Germany. He hadn't liked following Louey Santera around, but that's what Mr. Shaker had ordered him to do and that's what he'd done. Now he was home and could eat all the KFC he'd missed in Germany. He'd put on six pounds since he'd returned.

“Is there anything you'd like me to do, sir?”

“I'm thinking about it, Murdock. For the moment, we'll
just let him lie in his bed, feel lots of pain, and think about his transgressions.”

“Mason Lord doesn't believe in transgressions,” Murdock said. He studied his boss, the man who'd taken him out of the street six years before and trained him to be one of his forward men. Yes, he was one of the FM now, a group everyone important had heard of. He was respected and admired. He should get the six pounds off.

Mr. Shaker wasn't tall and aristocratic-looking like Mason Lord. Nature had shortchanged him, topping him off at a mere five foot seven inches. But he was a fit little man, hard and lean. He dressed beautifully, mostly in handmade English suits from Savile Row. But he was cursed with a swarthy complexion, flat black glass for eyes, scary eyes that made him look like a Middle Eastern terrorist or a religious fundamentalist, and a five-o'-clock shadow that started at nine o'clock in the morning. Actually, he looked like the Hollywood stereotype of exactly what he was: a crime boss. For all that, the man had more women than he could reasonably keep up with. Murdock suspected it was danger that brought the women. For all his smallness, Shaker looked like danger. He'd heard that Shaker had serviced two women the night before, and he was fifty-eight years old. Amazing.

Service. Murdock liked that word. He wished he could service women the way Mr. Shaker did. Maybe if he lost the six pounds, they'd come around him a little more here the way they had in Germany. Of course they'd wanted to use him to get close to Louey Santera, the little slime.

“He believes in transgressions, all right,” Rule Shaker said. “Just not in his own. Let's just wait and see. Tell Rudy to keep alert. I'm going to have my helicopter fly out over the desert now. It's time to scatter Melissa's ashes.”

“That's what she wanted, sir?”

Rule Shaker said, “Melissa was twenty-three. She didn't even know there was such a thing as death.”

T
HERE WERE SIX
bodyguards on duty around the clock, three shifts, one man always in the hospital room with Mason Lord and another outside his door. Mason Lord didn't trust the cops to do the job.

He said to Detective O'Connor, “If I'm not paying someone, then I can't be sure he's working for me.”

“Fine by me,” Detective O'Connor said. “It'll save the taxpayers some money. In Chicago, the good Lord knows they need a break.”

The mainstream media finally got bored and left, but some paparazzi, hoping for another strike on Mason Lord, stayed on speculation of blood and gore. They were like a plague of locusts only not as benign, said one of the hospital administrators. They camped out at the Lord mansion, too. One of them got a shot of Emma sitting in the shade of a big rhododendron bush in the garden of the estate, playing her piano. It was taken from a goodly distance, a bit on the blurred side, from magnification, but it was still clearly Emma. She'd been labeled as the
Granddaughter of Crime Lord.

When Mason Lord saw the photo, he said quietly to
Gunther, “How clever the play on words is. Isn't it odd? It's this photo that has broken my patience, my indifference. Get the name of the paparazzo who took the picture.”

 

J
UST
after lunch that day, Eve Lord came out of the living room into the grand foyer to hear Ramsey say to Molly, “There's no reason to stay longer. Your father is over the worst. We all know who likely shot him and there's not a thing we can do about it. As to the actual person who pulled the trigger, the cops are on it. Chances are slim we'll ever know. This could mean that the violence will escalate. I don't want us here if it does, particularly Emma. Let's get married. Let's go home.”

And Molly, frumpy plain Molly with her wild red hair and too-skinny body, gazed up at the big man whom Eve would take to bed in a minute, stared up at him like she wanted to eat him, and she probably did. Then she laughed and jumped into his arms. She clearly caught him off guard, but he was fast, managing to catch her and bring her tightly against his chest, his arms locked around her. She wrapped her legs around his waist. Then he laughed and swung her around. “Home,” she said, kissing him once, twice, a half dozen more times. “I like the sound of that.”

Slowly, he slid her down the front of his body. When she was standing, staring up at him, laughing, he leaned down and kissed her mouth. Molly's hands were on his shirt. She looked ready to rip it off him.

Eve cleared her throat. “I see there's more going on here than a little friendship.”

“Yes,” Ramsey said, lifting his head, releasing Molly slowly. The taste of her was still fresh, still drawing on him, the memory of her body was still warm against him. “You can congratulate us, Eve. Molly and I are going to be married.” They hadn't told her before. It felt a bit on the indecent side to tell that to a woman who'd nearly been made a widow.

“Congratulations,” Eve said. She looked down at Molly's waistline. “You pregnant already?”

“No, I'm not,” Molly said. “Getting in that condition would be kind of hard, what with Emma sleeping in the same room, don't you think?”

“I would say that in my experience, men always find a way. My former fiancé nailed me once in the coat closet with his family not six feet away.”

Ramsey laughed. “Then he deserves to be a former.” He hugged Molly to his side. “Is Emma eating chocolate-chip cookies in Miles's kitchen?”

Eve pulled on soft pale cream leather gloves that matched her silk dress. “Not chocolate chip, but her new favorite—peanut butter. Mrs. Lopez was chattering about it. I'm going to see your father, Molly. Does he know about this?”

“Yes, we told him last night.”

“I see. So I'm the last to know. Will you two be here when I get back?”

“Depends,” Ramsey said. “You want to bring back something to celebrate?”

“Sure,” Eve Lord said, then called out, “Gunther, I'm ready!”

 

I
N
the
Chicago Sun-Times,
on the bottom of page ten of Section A, there was brief mention of a man who had been found just off Highway 88 between Mooseheart and Aurora by a passing motorist. The man had been beaten severely, but was expected, in time, to make a full recovery. His cameras had been crushed and left beside him. The newspaper called him a freelance photographer, but bottom line, what he was, was a paparazzo.

 

“
I
think we should pack our meager belongings, grab Emma, and hop a plane to Reno. I was thinking Las Vegas, but Rule Shaker's there, and I can't quite handle getting
married anywhere near to where he is. I don't want any more magazines or tabloids with pictures of Emma. She saw the one in the
National Informer.
She'd made out some of the words before I managed to get it away from her. I just pray she hadn't gotten to the part about her playing the piano as well as her murdered father, Louey Santera. Can you begin to imagine the field day the media will have if we get married either here or in Harrisburg at my folks' place? They always find out, no matter how careful you are.”

“Oh, God!” Miles came running out of the kitchen, a dishcloth in his hands. “Thank God you're both here. I just don't believe this. Somebody just tried to kill your daddy again, Molly. Oh God. Where's Gunther? Where's Mrs. Lord?”

“Is he all right, Miles?”

“Yes, he is. That was one of the guards we hired to protect him in the hospital. The guy fired from the building across the way—a good hundred and fifty yards—right through the window. He wounded a nurse who was taking your father's blood pressure.”

“That's an enormous distance,” Ramsey said.

“Is the nurse all right?”

“Took off a lot of her right ear; she bled all over everything, which made everyone believe that your father had been shot, but yeah, she's fine.”

Ramsey squeezed Molly's hand. “I guess we'd better get to the hospital. Miles, will you make certain Emma is never out of your sight?”

“No problem, Ramsey.” He'd been wringing his hands, but now at the mention of Emma, her need to be protected, he instantly calmed down. By the time Ramsey and Molly were out the front door, Miles had pulled himself together. Emma stood beside him. He was holding her hand.

Detective O'Connor from Oak Park and two detectives from the CPD were in Mason Lord's room when they arrived.

“Show them in,” Detective O'Connor said. Introductions
were made quickly. Miles was right. There was blood everywhere.

“Ears bleed like stink,” one of the CPD detectives said. He pulled on his own ear and Molly realized the bottom part was gone. He'd never be able to wear pierced earrings. She nearly laughed. She was losing it.

She slipped her hand around Ramsey's. He looked at her briefly, saw her too-bright eyes, and slowly, very slowly, pulled her closer. “It's all right,” he said quietly, his mouth nearly touching the top of her head. “It will be just fine. Breathe slowly, that's it.”

The hospital window was shattered. Two technicians were busy very carefully extracting the bullet from the wall just about ten inches off the floor. The woman was using tweezers.

Detective O'Connor looked tired and harassed, but that wasn't anything new. She felt tension between him and the other cops. He told them in his concise way, “Nurse Thomas was standing right next to your father, taking his blood pressure. Suddenly he seemed to weaken and fall back against the pillow. Nurse Thomas immediately leaned over him, holding on to him, when the shooter fired. If your father hadn't gotten suddenly weak, if the nurse hadn't pressed him down even more, shielded him, all those things, then the chances are good that your father would have gone down this time, Mrs. Santera. At the very least he would have been wounded. The bullet went through Nurse Thomas's earlobe, downward. The bullet slammed into the wall less than a foot above the floor.”

Molly leaned over her father. “Dad, Ramsey and I are here. You're all right, thank God.”

“Yes,” Mason said. “I'm fine, Molly. Actually, I've got to be the luckiest bastard in Chicago. As for Nurse Thomas, I'm going to cut her a nice check for her bravery.”

They turned to see the technician holding up the bullet. “It's fairly intact,” she called out. “Enough for identification.”

“Excellent,” one of the Chicago detectives said. “We'll do a comparison between this one and the one they found on the scene over on Jefferson after Mr. Lord was shot. Are you Judge Ramsey Hunt?”

“Yes,” Ramsey said. “It seems likely the bullets will match, but unfortunately it won't tell us anything else.”

“At least we'll verify that we've got just one perp here,” Detective O'Connor said.

Molly, who was staring at that smashed window, said, “He blew out the window. I remember all of us mentioned the possibility, but the closest building is so far away. At least one hundred and fifty yards, probably more.”

“I'm not blaming Gunther,” Mason said, the first words he'd spoken in a good ten minutes. There were seven people in the room, most of them talking. The instant he spoke, everyone shut up and turned toward him. He continued in that calm cool voice of his, “I remember when you were looking out that window, Molly. I remember you were one of the people who brought up the possibility, but none of us considered it a threat. We underestimated him. Technology just keeps racing forward, and this time, our brains stayed behind. We're getting old and careless, Gunther. The guy had a clear shot at me through that damned window.” He leaned back against the pillow, closing his eyes.

Gunther said, “That's why we've moved the bed away from the window.” He was pale and tense, as close to distraught as Molly had ever seen him. He added, “One thing we do know is this guy has to be a world-class sniper. I've known of maybe half a dozen guys who could have made that shot through a closed window.”

Detective O'Connor said, “We'd like you to provide us with the names of all the men you know who would be capable of such a shot.” He paused a moment, running his palm over his bald head. “You know, if Mr. Lord hadn't fallen back on the pillow at that particular instant . . .”

Gunther nodded, then said to Mason, “We're getting another room ready, sir. It's being seen to right now. No one
will know the new room number. There won't be any window that has a building within a mile of it.”

Mason laughed, then coughed. He was silent a moment, controlling the pain. “Gunther, you know a secret is impossible when more than one person knows about it. It'll get out, but it won't matter, because I'm going home.”

 

“
T
ELL
me how you're feeling, Emma.”

“About what exactly, Dr. Loo?”

“Well, your grandfather came home from the hospital this morning. How is he?”

“I heard Miles say he's really tired and weak. Eve didn't want me to get near him because I'm a kid and I make noise, only I don't, not much. I think she kept me away because she doesn't like me much. Then I saw his face when they were carrying him in on a stretcher. He looked all gray and old. I never thought he was old before. I always thought he looked like one of those movie stars in the old movies Mama likes. Yes, he's all black and white.” Emma paused, easing her piano down across her legs. She added, “This morning he looked old. I didn't say anything. There were people everywhere. I think three of them were doctors and they were all around him.”

“How is your mother dealing with all this?”

Emma thought about that. She lightly touched the piano keys but didn't make any sound. Her dark hair, normally in a French braid, was loose this morning. Emma had some of her mother's naturally curly hair. It swung over, hiding most of her face as she said, “Mama's really quiet. I think she's scared. She's been scared for a long time now. She's scared about me. She doesn't want to leave me alone. Neither does Ramsey.” Emma sighed. “Sometimes I'd like to be alone, but I know they worry if I'm ever out of their sight. But that's not often.” She raised her head, pushed her hair back, then looked toward the closed door. Molly and Ramsey were in the waiting room. “I'm really glad that we're getting married, though.”

Dr. Loo smiled, unable not to. Despite everything, this child was one of the lucky ones. She figured that Molly and Ramsey would love Emma so much she'd have no choice but to heal. “When are you all going to get married?”

“I heard Mama say that we couldn't leave for another day or so.” She lowered her voice. “I think we're going to elope.” Dr. Loo nearly laughed aloud this time, restraining herself when Emma sighed again, that too-adult sigh that made Dr. Loo wish for a tantrum, or at least the threat of one. She remembered Ramsey saying the same thing. What was going on here?

“Do you want to elope, Emma?”