to sit down?”
“Nah. I’ve been sitting a lot lately. Let’s get this over with. What do you want to show me?”
“Some documents I think you’ll find interesting.”
He hands him an envelope that contains copies of the copies he’d given Madden.
“The first person is actually Kristen,” he says, watching Jim’s expression grow more disturbed the longer he scans the pages. “The second one, as you can see, is you. And for some reason, you appear to have both contracted Chlamydia at exactly the same time.”
Jim looks up and scouts the area, and sees Billings off to the right.
“Who gave these to you?” he asks in a low voice.
“Someone who doesn’t like you,” he says.
“Who?”
“I know what happened, Jim. You had sex with Kristen that night at the party. She was passed out, and you had sex with her.”
“She was not passed out.”
“We have a witness. A witness has come forward.”
“Who?”
He’s supposed to say “one of your fraternity brothers,” but before he can, something hits him on the back right side of his head and pitches him forward. He’s out before he hits the ground.
Both Madden and Carolyn hear the thud in the van.
“What was that?” he says, speaking into his walkie-talkie.
“What was what?” Burns asks.
A moment of silence, then they hear Jim’s voice again.
“What are you doing? Are you out of your mind?”
All kinds of noise on the line: Sounds of rustling, the microphone getting bumped and jostled.
“I don’t have a visual,” Burns says.
Through the rustling, heavy breathing, then another voice: “You dimwit. He could be wired.”
“Is he?” Jim asks.
Madden says, “Burns, I need a visual now.”
The other voice: “You’re a lucky bastard.”
Burns replies, “Come again, Hank?”
“Get him out of there,” says Carolyn.
“Fuck, dude, not with the gun again,” comes Jim’s voice.
“Burns, he has a weapon,” says Madden.
The other voice: “I told you I’m not going down for this, Mr. P. And I meant it.”
“Please repeat,” Burns says.
All the voices were overlapping, confusing Madden. “Get him out,” he shouts and just then he hears Jim say, “Go fuck yourself.”
Madden doesn’t wait to hear what C. J. Watkins says next. Nor does he wait for Jim to pull a boxcutter from his pocket and say, “I’ve had enough of this shit,” or for Watkins’s gun to go off. No, by then he’s already flung the van door open, jumped out, and is running.
The sound of the shot, though muffled by the silencer, brings Cogan back to consciousness. Lying on his side, he can’t move at first and his vision is blurred. The first words that come into his head are probable concussion, and opening and closing his eyes groggily, he sees, at a strange angle, flashes of the bottom half of someone, and down on the ground, the backside of a body. He hears groans and forces himself to roll over a little to the right and get up on his knees.
“Ah, just in time,” he hears a familiar voice say, and looks up to the see C. J. Watkins standing over him, holding a gun by his side. That seems odd, but what seems odder is that he has surgical gloves on his hands.
“Do you mind holding this for a second?”
Before he can respond, Watkins takes his right wrist and jerks it upward, causing him to fall on his side again. He presses the gun to his palm, holding his hand over his fingers.
“Sorry, dude,” he says. “But sometimes you gotta take one for the team.”
Madden is a terrible sight coming out of the bushes, propelled forward wildly. His platform shoe tosses out in front of him like an anchor attached to a Bungee chord that yanks him ahead in short, awkward bursts. When Burns, looking a little bewildered, sees him, he drops the dog leash and starts running, too. He may have had better form, but Madden, aided by a downhill incline and a twenty-yard head start, manages to reach the east entrance first. There, in the shadows, he sees a figure aiming a gun at a figure lying on the ground.
“No!” someone cries out and almost simultaneously Madden aims his gun with both hands and shouts, “Freeze!”
But instead of freezing, the figure turns toward him. At that second, he only sees the gun swinging toward him at an angle perpendicular to the ground. And just as he’s about to come into its line of fire, Madden squeezes his trigger.
Later, he’ll wonder whether C. J. Watkins intended to shoot him.
The figure that Watkins was aiming his gun at was not