rest of them. All flash and no substance. Although I have to give him credit for mapping out my use of your journalism to decide on who needed to be eliminated. But I have a feeling that was your work. Am I right?”
Nick opened his car, climbed in and closed the door to create a vacuum of silence.
“Christ, Redman. What are you doing, man? You’re shooting people in the streets. That’s not your training. I saw your work too. This is not what you do,” Nick said, guessing at the words to use, trying to juggle what he knew with how he thought the sniper might be thinking.
“It’s not what any of us were trained to do, Mullins. I went to war and killed innocent people, did everything the opposite of how I was trained. And now look at yourself. I’ve read every story you did on those scumbags over the years. You were the truth. And now you gave it up too. You handed it over.”
Nick was silent. Had he copped out by quitting? Was the sniper right?
“OK, Mike. Maybe I did. But do you want to set it straight?” Nick said, scrambling to keep him talking, truly falling back on his training. “You and I could talk. We could do an interview. I’d get it out straight from you, tell the story the right way. The truth, like you just said.”
There was the sound of a deep chuckle in the cell earpiece. The guy was laughing.
“See? You and I are a lot alike, Nick. You can’t help but be the newsman. I can’t help but pull the trigger. It’s what we do,” Redman said. “I’m not after publicity, Nick. I don’t need any stories. Like I told you, I’ve got one more shot, tomorrow. One more piece of business, and it’s for you. Then I gotta move on. Then I’m gonna get on with my life, Nick. And you can too. Don’t you see? We’re a lot alike, you and I.”
Nick felt the conversation slipping away. He’d lost interviews before, had them stop before he had the answers he needed.
“Wait, wait, Mike,” he nearly yelled into the phone. “What do you mean, for me? Who’s for me, Michael? The Secretary of State doesn’t mean anything to me, Michael. I only wrote that quote. It wasn’t me that said it.”
There was no response. But no dial tone either.
“Is it Walker? Do you know about Walker, Mike?”
Nick’s voice was still rising, reverberating in the closed space and buffeting back on his own ears.
“Hey, don’t put this on me, Mike. I’m not out for retribution. Mike!” Nick slapped his right hand against the steering wheel in anger and frustration. “Redman?”
Three electronic beeps and the line went dead.
Nick sat back in his seat and stared out at the horizon. And then dialed Hargrave’s number.
Chapter 32
At six fifteen the next morning Nick was sitting in his car, parked next to the Dumpster, down the street but well within view of Archie’s Tool Sharpening Shack.
After talking with Hargrave, he’d gone home last night and had dinner with Carly and Elsa and tried to put on a clear-headed, smiling act. But when he went quiet in the middle of a conversation about his daughter’s science lesson on the African desert’s effect on forming hurricanes, she looked up and saw his eyes staring out through the window. She turned to Elsa, but the nanny only shook her head and said, “It’s OK, Carlita, he will be back.”
They pretended not to notice and in a few minutes Nick was back, rejoining the discussion as though no lapse had occurred.
Later in the evening Nick helped with Carly’s math homework and then gave her an early good-night kiss and went out to the patio. He slept in the chair and, almost as if an alarm sounded, he woke at five AM, took a shower and drove to this spot.
At six thirty he began to squirm. Walker was late and he had never been late so far. Light from the east was starting to glow and a dusty gray was rising into the sky. He was leaning forward, anticipating the headlights of Walker’s car, when a sharp tapping of metal on glass caused him to jump.
At the passenger window was the face of a man, a long flashlight tube in his hand. Nick was confused for a second. No one had ever approached him before. The flashlight snapped against the window again and now Nick could see the badge displayed