The Guilty - Jason Pinter [33]
muffled by the door.
Amanda unlocked the door and opened it. Jack was breathing heavy, the trenchcoat seeming to weigh him down. He
took off his hat, a few loose gray hairs sticking to it.
"You must be Miss Davies," he said.
"That's right."
"Charmed." He took her hand, kissed it as he looked into
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her eyes. She smiled demurely. "Henry here talks about you
nonstop."
"Is that so? Well, at least one man here can call himself a
gentleman." She led him into the apartment. "Can I get you
a drink, Mr. O'Donnell?"
"Please call me Jack. And I'll take a Jack as well, if you
have one, on ice." Amanda and I looked at each other. "It's
been a long day."
Amanda disappeared into the kitchen. She came back
with a glass full of brown liquid over ice. "Seagram's Seven.
All we had."
"Do nicely," Jack replied. He moved over to the couch, let
out a groan as he sat down. "How you holding up?"
"Me?" I said incredulously.
"Heard you were at the Franklin-Rees building when...it
happened."
"Nearby," I corrected. "I'm holding up fine. Jeffrey
Lourdes is the one who was shot."
"Murder has a ripple effect, gets a lot of people wet," Jack
said. "You better than anyone should know that."
Jack took a sip of his Seagram's. His cheeks were red, eyes
tinged with veins. I wondered whether he was simply fatigued
from taking the stairs, or if that Seagram's wasn't his first
cocktail of the evening.
"I'm fine," I said. "Really."
"You know they haven't found a quote at the scene of
Lourdes's murder," Jack said. "The first two were left in such
prominent locations, either he dropped the whole thing, or..."
"Or he just didn't have time."
"You have to wonder, really, what kind of person walks up
to a man in broad daylight and shoots him in the head."
"Same kind of person who shoots an unarmed woman and
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a cop from a distance," I said. "They're not dealing with your
average run-of-the-mill lunatic. This guy has an agenda."
"You think so?" Jack said.
"Well, look at his targets. Athena Paradis, Mayor Perez and
Jeffrey Lourdes. Remember, Joe Mauser was a mistake. All
three of those people are celebrities, in some form or another.
He's not killing random people, he's killing people whose
deaths would pretty much dominate news coverage. I mean,
just look at the Metro papers the last few days. Athena,
Mauser and tomorrow Jeffrey Lourdes will be everywhere."
"What do you make of the gun?" Jack asked, another nip
of brown disappearing down his throat.
"I really don't know," I said. "Seems like he's using some
sort of antique, something with a meaning. Don't quite know
what yet, but Amanda has a contact from school who might
be able to shed some light. I spoke to Lourdes's assistant at
the scene. She got a quick glimpse of the killer and a partial
of the murder weapon. Unfortunately she couldn't ID the
actual shooter, and her police sketch is more vague than a
Rorschach. Because of the chaos at the Franklin-Rees building, the guy was able to escape in the stampede."
"Mayor Perez, Athena Paradis and Jeffrey Lourdes," Jack
said. "Not exactly three people you could imagine having
brunch together on a Sunday morning."
"But someone sees them fitting in the same pattern."
"In this city," Jack said, "there's no shortage of people like
those three. People who hog the front page. And though our
great police force is locked up tighter than my grandma's
cooter when it comes to terrorism, there's no defense for a
sick fuck who wants to kill one person at a time."
"Lourdes," I said, "was surrounded by a hundred people
when he died. His shooting caused a stampede. It couldn't
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have been any easier for the killer to disappear than if Scotty
had beamed him aboard the Enterprise. "
"Nobody disappears," Jack said, swallowing the last of the
whiskey. "It's our job to find out what rug they're hiding
under."
"I'm on it," I said. "You know the last quote he used. When
he killed Joe Mauser." I'd told Jack about my tip.
"I'll let them know what bad