Retribution

"Yes. It's less messy in there. Professional hits, I'm sure. She's in the upstairs hall. Bullet between the eyes. Still has the cell phone in her hand from the 911 call, although she'd already pushed a panic button, which is why the local cops got here so fast."

"You said 'hits'," Whitehall asked, his voice almost a whisper. He was looking a little white around the gills. He'd been humping the woman the previous afternoon.

"Yes. Collateral damage—maybe. The maid got it in the foyer. But the maid had a gun in her hand. Chances are good she was more than a maid."

"And this guy?" Hardesty asked, gesturing at the guy in black on the ground at the bottom of the entrance stairs. It wasn't lost on him that he had a Ruger SR22, with a silencer attached. in his hand. There was another pistol in a holster in his armpit too. From what Hardesty could see, it might be a Glock G30S. Another government issue piece?

"We don't know who he is, and I'm not sure we're going to know," Crane said. "We sent in prints already and all sorts of bells went off and we were blocked out of the system. I guess we both know what that might mean. Anyway, the cops arrived fast and this guy came out of the house with a gun waving, but it must have jammed or something, because the cops brought him down before he could do any more damage."

"I guess we better look inside," Hardesty said. As he and Whitehall mounted the stairs, Crane got a call on his cell phone and walked off into the yard to take it. His responses that the detectives heard before they got in the house were distinctively profane.

"I think I'm going to be sick," Whitehall said, as they stood over Maria's body in the upper hall. "If I hadn't taken the Ruger from her, it would at least have been a fair fight."

"We don't know that. It's just as likely that she wouldn't have used the time to call in the cops fast enough for him to be taken down. Then we'd never know. You know we're not going to get any farther with this, don't you? That we're not going to know who he is. At least we know he's dead. And it explains some things to me."

"What things?"

"The whole setup at the boathouse. We thought Maria took them out, mad at Talmadge for fucking around with young men and at Victor for letting him do it."

"We did?"

"I did. Didn't you? She's the one who had a gun to fit."

"Yeah, I guess I did."

"But what we had wrong, and we'll be able to prove that, is that it wasn't her Ruger SR22 that did them in the boathouse. The stiff out there on the lawn did that one too—with the .22 he's got in his hand. And putting a man at the scene rather than Maria makes the rest of it fall into place. The other night Jan mentioned a guy hanging around Talmadge who might be this stiff. Kim mentioned him too when I questioned him. Talmadge knew the shooter and I'll bet the meet at the boathouse wasn't just for Talmadge to go kayaking on Christmas morning. They met—Talmadge, Victor, and this other guy. Then Talmadge gave the shooter privileges with Leslie in the backseat of the Mercedes while he changed in the boathouse and got the kayak out.

"The shooter was there to do more than meet with Talmadge and play hide the sounding rod with his rent-boy, though. He was there to terminate whatever arrangement Talmadge had—probably with the Russians through Victor. The shooter popped Leslie while playing with him and then came to the river's edge and popped Talmadge and Victor. What he did in the two days after that was cleanup. Kim, the Russian goons looking out for Maria, and Maria—and the maid just because she answered the door—or maybe because she answered the door with a gun. It's what makes sense. And there isn't much doubt what agency would be included in whatever Talmadge was doing and then interested in ending it with no one left to talk about it."

"So, what are we going to do?" Whitehall asked.

"You're going to go into the bathroom and soak your face in cold water—you are looking green around the gills. I'll think about options for as long as they let me think about them, which shouldn't be long . . ." He brought Glen's attention to the black Escalade parking in front of the house that they could see through the fan window above the door in the foyer. ". . . and probably not much longer than it takes us to walk out of the house again."

The late arriver was the Secret Service agent Hardesty had already met at the boathouse crime scene and then again in Crane's office. He was talking with Crane, whose jaw was set. Other black vehicles were showing up and men in black were coming out of them. Crane had already pulled the policemen and detectives who had been at the scene away from the body at the bottom of the steps. Crane was holding the Ruger SR22 that had been in the shooter's hand in a plastic bag.

"I'll just say it, although I don't have to," the Secret Service agent said to Hardesty as he and Whitehall walked up to him, "that this isn't our operation in any sense of the word. We were just called in to clean it up as quietly as possible. Tell him, Captain Crane."

"Upstairs has called us off on this, Hardesty," Crane said. He didn't sound happy, but he sounded resigned. "From our perspective we will have gotten our man, though. There's that. We need to be happy with that and not make it go any further."

Hardesty was hearing him loud and clear. They had their shooter of the citizens who were important to them and he wouldn't be doing any more shooting—in fact some men in black were already rolling him into a body bag. Others were working at the Russian van. If they made waves on this, there could be more collateral damage. This was bigger than the D.C. police department.

"And the gun in the plastic bag?" he asked Crane.

"Agent Smith here wants to maintain good will. He knows we want to be satisfied beyond a shadow of doubt. We've been lent this gun to do ballistic tests to assure ourselves this was used at the boathouse. Then I have to give it back to him. It's the best he can do. It's going to have to be good enough for us, Hardesty. Right?"

"Sure, Captain," Hardesty said. He recognized that this was as good as it was going to get. He had another reason not to make waves, though, and the faster he got to that the better, so, to Crane's surprise, he just saluted to Crane and the agent and dragged Whitehall off with him to their car.

He dropped Whitehall off at the squad room to get Larry busy doing the ballistics tests on Maria's gun and then hightailed it back to his apartment.

He found the apartment empty, with a note from Toby that he was out on a job with a visiting German industrialist and would, no doubt, be bringing the guy back to the apartment later. So, business as usual there with Toby.

But it wasn't Toby he wanted. He left the apartment and went down the hall to Paul's apartment.

At his knock and after a yell who he was, Paul told him to come on in. Paul and Jan were on a sofa, both naked other than short silk robes. Jan was in Paul's lap, sideways, with his legs streaming out along the sofa and his arm around Paul's shoulder. Paul's hand was lost in the folds of Jan's robe, but from the rustling there it was evident that Jan was getting a hand job. This obviously was preliminary to something else, as Paul's plow belt was bunched on the floor in front of the sofa.

"I've got to talk to Jan about where he goes from here," Hardesty said. "I don't think he can go back to Justine's now."

"Great minds," Paul said. "Jan and I have been talking. He doesn't want to go back to Justine's and I don't want him to go back. He's agreed to live with me here. I have connections. I can keep him in clients as wealthy and as safe as Justine's done—and probably with fewer physical demands on him."

"You'd become Jan's pimp?"

"I'm retired and have time on my hands. Can you see any reason why I shouldn't?"

"Well, I understand it's against the law and there are police arresting people for it in D.C."

They both laughed.

"Then you think it's a fine idea, I take it."

"There are complications. Jan has to become someone else."

"We've already decided he has to stop being Jan. Conveniently that's not his real name anyway. He's Dean. Dean Burton. From Atlanta. No small town where everyone knows you. It's a nice name, isn't it? He has kept that documentation."

"Is that who Justine knows him to be?"

"No, Justine doesn't know who I really am," the young man who no longer was Jan piped up. "She thinks I'm someone else altogether."

"Well, I guess it can do for now, but we'll get you a whole different background and name. You'll have to lay low for a while. Someone may be looking for you who you don't want to find you. Luckily I think it will be people who aren't supposed to track down people in the United States, so maybe it won't be easy to find you. Can you stay hidden for a while?"

"Yes, I guess I can," Dean said, sounding a bit dubious.

"I think the problem is that our little friend here is highly sexed," Paul said. "If I can't hook him up with outside clients for a while, I guess we'll have to have inside clients for him. I can do my part, but I'll need help."

"Well, if you need the help . . ." Hardesty said, with a grin.

"We were about to use the plow belt when you came in," Paul said. "Perhaps you'd like to start helping with that right now. What do you think, Dean?"

"Yes, please," Dean said, with a smile.

"But you haven't worked out a price structure for him yet, have you?" Hardesty asked Paul.

"For you, for now—and because I've been using Toby for free—mercilessly, I might add—this could be a gift. A Christmas gift."

"I've already had my Christmas gift from Jan," Hardesty said, smiling at the young man, who grinned back.

"But this isn't Jan. This is Dean now," Paul said.

"That's true. And I suppose we could say it was a New Year's gift."

"It's not New Year's yet. I'm sure Dean will be interested in your attentions at New Year's too, eh, Dean?"

"New Year's Eve and New Year's Day both," Dean answered, licking his lips in anticipation.

"That certainly makes sense to me. Anything to help, then. I have vacation time coming to me. We could start now and just work our way right through New Year's Day," Hardesty said, as he started stripping down. Mission accomplished, he reached down and picked up the plow belt. "Where? In the bedroom?"

"Why not right here?" Paul said. "I would like to watch. Compare techniques and all, you know. You first with your technique, which I understand can be quite demanding, and then perhaps you'd like to see mine, which I think is distinctive for its duration."

"Sure, I have all evening. Toby is going to be using the apartment."

"Have you done a double with the plow belt?" Paul asked, as he handed the young man up to Hardesty.

"No, do you know how that works?"

"But of course."

Dean moaned as Hardesty bent the young man over the leather strip on his belly, grasped the two handles, and flipped Dean over, lifting both his feet and his hands off the floor.