Blood Flag: A Paul Madriani Novel (41 page)

Lillian told me that Tony was so angry that he beat her. Whenever he disappeared after that, she never called the police again. She told me that Tony had a violent temper, but that she still loved him. She was certain that sooner or later he would come home.

I didn’t tell her what was happening. I was afraid that if Tony decided to call home or connected with Lillian by text, she might warn him. Battered women are often protective.

Inside the kitchen, Joselyn and I are doing the final prep for dinner. The entire time Tony hovers over us. Joselyn tells me she’s amazed that he is doing as well as he is given everything he’s been through, the accident with the rental car, and the time he spent in the hospital. She tells me that according to Tony, Lillian wanted to fly out with him for the visit, but she was too busy with the girls in school.

I uncork the wine and hand the bottle to Tony. “Would you mind putting that out on the dining room table? Also there’s some wineglasses on the shelf. You’ll see them out there. Put one for each of us on the table. Thanks, Tony.”

“No problem.” He takes the bottle and pushes his way through the kitchen’s double swinging door.

The second it slaps closed behind him I skate across the kitchen to Joselyn at the sink. I grab her by the arm.

She turns. “What’s the matter?”

“Tony’s the killer,” I tell her.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been with the FBI all evening. They’re outside the house. He killed his father, Bob Brauer, and Sofia.” I don’t even have time to mention Walt Jones or the headless body in Las Vegas. Tony is racking up bodies, and I’m concerned that ours may be added to the growing list.

I hear him coming this way, footfalls across the hardwood floor in the dining room. By the time he gets to the kitchen door I’m back at the island getting ready to slice the French bread. I see him looking into the kitchen through the little square window in the door. Joselyn is still standing at the sink sideways, looking off into the distance as if she’s stunned or getting ready to sleepwalk.

He comes through the door a second later and says, “Can I help with anything else?”

“Yeah, you can take the hot water kettle and plug it in out by the table. We’ll have some tea later with dessert.”

He listens to me, but he’s looking at Joselyn. Something is wrong and Tony can smell it.

“When you’re done with that you can take the bread out. Why don’t you grab one of those baskets?” I point to the top shelf in the hutch against the wall.

Slowly Tony turns, walks to the hutch, and grabs one of the baskets. He brings it to me. The entire time he’s looking at Joselyn, who’s standing sideways, leaning with her hip against the sink, a paring knife in her right hand dripping water onto the tile at her feet. “What’s wrong with her?”

“What’s that?”

“Joselyn. She doesn’t look well.”

“Oh, I think she’s OK. She has a headache. I think I delayed dinner too long. If we hurry up and eat she’ll be fine. She’s has a touch of hypoglycemia.”

“Really.”

I unplug the electric water kettle and hand it to him. I tell him to put it out on the table and plug it in. I’ve never done this before. In fact I’m not even sure if there’s an outlet close enough to reach. I’m hoping it will take Tony a while to find out.

He takes the kettle and walks slowly and reluctantly toward the door. He looks at Joselyn standing at the sink like a statue and then flashes a quick glance at me.

I pretend not to notice as I play with the French bread that’s already sliced in the basket. When the swinging door closes I wait a couple of seconds before I creep over and take a peek through the square window to make sure he’s gone into the dining room. As soon as I’m satisfied I race over to Joselyn at the sink, take the knife from her hand, and splash some drops of cold water on her face. Finally she shakes her head and looks at me.

“Snap out of it,” I tell her. “We have to keep it together. I think he’s armed, but I’m not sure.”

“How did you find out?”

“Zeb Thorpe,” I tell her.

“Is Zeb here?”

“Outside somewhere. Listen, sweetheart, do something. Stand at the sink, wash your hands, but try to look busy. I’m gonna try to get you out of here.”

“Not without you. Not unless we go together,” she says.

“All right.” There is no sense arguing with her. There isn’t time. I’m hoping that all the electronics are working and that Thorpe and his people are listening. As I turn my head to the right and glance over my shoulder I see Tony standing there, peering through the window in the door. He’s smiling like some mad entomologist busy studying two bugs under glass. I wonder how long he’s been there.

He pushes his way through the door, stands there, and says, “She’s lookin’ much better. It must have been something you said. Maybe you wouldn’t mind sharing the secret with me?”

Obviously long enough. The buttons on his cardigan sweater are open halfway down his chest. His right hand is inside gripping something I can’t see. But it’s not hard to imagine.

“Well,” says Tony, “ you went to a lot of trouble, so we may as well sit down and eat. Be a shame to waste a good meal like that. And besides, you can tell me all about it over dinner.”

SIXTY

T
ony arranges everything as we sit down to eat. His own version of the Last Supper. Our dining table is rectangular, solid oak, and almost eight feet long. Tony takes the seat at the head with his back to a solid wall. He’s a careful man.

He places a large blued revolver on top of the linen napkin next to his right hand. It looks like an old .44 Magnum. It has a long vented barrel, seven or eight inches if I had to guess. There is some wear on the bluing, so it’s not new. Whatever the make, from the look of the bore of the barrel and the size of the chambers in the oversize cylinder, the piece is big enough to do the job, even if your sport happens to be shooting locomotives.

Tony tells me to sit in the chair next to him, on his left. This arrangement places the two of us seated on the angle at the corner of the table, ninety degrees of separation. It places the pistol well beyond my reach. Tony’s entire body is between me and the ten-pound hand cannon resting on the napkin. And yet it’s close enough so that if I give him any trouble, Tony can’t miss. He could hold me off with one hand while he put holes in me with the other. At least that’s the theory. This is a whole new side of the man, one I’ve never seen before. The careful, plotting killer whose choreography of murder demands a well-designed and engineered edge.

On the other side from me, just to the right of Tony’s chair, the gurgle of the electric kettle plays background to the drama he is directing at the table. It seems he found a place for it, plugged into a wall outlet right behind where he’s sitting.

The fact that Tony hasn’t patted me down for weapons causes me to regret that I didn’t take Thorpe up on his offer of the ankle holster and the snubbed-up .38. With that, and seated up close to him as I am here, I would have had a fair chance of turning Tony into a gelding from underneath the table.

“Joselyn, why don’t you take that chair right down there.” He gestures toward the seat about four feet away from me on my side of the table. “That way you can serve all of us. You don’t mind, do you? Of course you don’t. You’ve got a good woman there, Paul.” He gives her a lusty look. To Tony, this is woman’s work, serving food.

Of course, he couldn’t possibly grasp Joselyn’s full measure, the depth of her passion and the flavor of her fury, unless she gets up behind him with something sharp in her hand. Joselyn doesn’t say anything but the look in her eye, the burning resentment and the boiling anger for what Tony did to Sofia, could melt the steel on the pistol next to his hand. I can feel the heat of her anger register on the surface of my skin. But Tony can’t sense this. To him women are interchangeable widgets. He thinks Joselyn is Lillian. She might be, but only if you mistake a cobra for a garter snake.

Tony is a fool if he thinks he can safely allow Joselyn to move freely around the room while she serves him. She doesn’t know the plan and hasn’t talked to Thorpe. The first chance she gets she’ll try to stick a fork in Tony’s eye.

“Do a lot of shooting, do you?” I look at Tony.

“Some,” he says. “Do you like the gun?”

“How long have you had it?”

“I bought it yesterday. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

It’s what I thought. I know nothing of Tony’s marksmanship. But if had to bet, I’d take wagers that he’d have trouble trying to hit the wall on the other side of the room with the bazooka that’s on the table. It’s a foolish piece, often purchased by foolish people, trying to overcompensate for things they don’t have. They’ve seen too many movies.

The kinetic energy of a single round from a .44 Magnum would no doubt be lethal even if it impacted only your big toe. But if Tony happened to miss on the first shot, then it’s a whole new game. If the recoil from the initial round didn’t take his head off, the punishment he’s going to absorb from behind the sights on each successive shot is going to play havoc on his aim. He could put a lot of big holes in the walls of our house before he was lucky enough to hit anything he aimed at.

If Joselyn and I could move fast enough after the first well-aimed shot, Tony would get only five more, all of them rattle-bangers, before the FBI moved in and waxed him.

It’s clear that he has no idea what he’s dealing with. Otherwise he wouldn’t be sitting here calmly preparing to dine while FBI snipers are measuring the distance from his hairline to his chin. I suspect that Tony assumes I came home alone without a police escort because he was here with Joselyn and whatever suspicions I might have were sketchy at best, based only on the fact that he showed up on our doorstep so unexpectedly.

“Tony, listen, why don’t you give it up? It’s over.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Blood Flag. It’s done.”

“How much do you know?”

“Not much.”

“Where’s the key?”

“I told you, it’s at the office. Let’s you and I go get it.”

“What, and leave Joselyn here alone? You must think I’m stupid.”

“I don’t understand. We were just sitting down to have a friendly dinner and you pull out a gun. What the hell’s happened to you?”

He looks at me like he’s confused, as if perhaps he might have misjudged the situation. His problem is, how to do you pick up Big Bertha from the table put it back in its holster and say “never mind”?

“Why don’t you and I just go get the key?” I try again.

“No. There’s too many of us.”

Suddenly I understand his dilemma. Joselyn is in the way. I have access to the office safe, where Tony thinks the key is located. He needs me, at least for the moment. But Joselyn is excess baggage. Tony plans to leave a body behind. I’m praying that Thorpe is listening to this and that he has arrived at the same conclusion.

Thorpe watched on the screen inside the command vehicle half a block away, live video from the tiny pen lens in Paul’s shirt pocket. He got fleeting images of the side of Pack’s body, his head from time to time, and a couple of still images his technicians snapped of the handgun on the table. They knew now what they were dealing with, assuming there weren’t any other surprises.

He listened to the calm chatter on his headset, the three teams of snipers surrounding the house as well as the increasingly sparse conversation from inside on the other channel. He could sense that things weren’t going well. That it hadn’t turned into an outright hostage situation with lights out and barricaded furniture was simply because Pack didn’t realize how much they knew. Toselli’s headless body and the DNA under his fingernails had brought the FBI and local authorities to Madriani’s doorstep.

One of the sniper teams was perched on the back side of the roof on the house next door with the heavy-barreled Remington resting on a sandbag right at the ridge of the roof. Authorities had quietly evacuated the houses surrounding Paul’s home.

From what Thorpe could hear, the man on the roof next door had the best angle for a shot. But he couldn’t get a clear bead on a head or center-chest shot because of where Tony was seated. He got occasional glimpses of the assailant’s hand near the handgun and his other arm near the hostage, the lawyer sitting next to him. The image came through a sliding glass door. If he could get him to stand, there was a high set of windows through which the sniper might get a perfect shot. If all he did was wound the man, the suspect would push back against the wall and take out his wrath with the handgun on the two hostages.

Thorpe told the man he had a green light to take the shot the second he got a clear target.

The sniper came back on the channel saying, “I won’t have a target unless we can get him up out of that chair.”

“Darlin’, we’re waiting. Why don’t you serve up the food?” The way Tony looks at her, I can’t tell if he wants to eat or if the moment has come. I know that if he makes his move to kill her and thin out the crowd, it will happen with lightning speed. Tony isn’t a talker. The fact that he’s killed so many people and has done so with such efficiency tells me that. The instant Joselyn gets out of her seat and reaches for the plate of pasta I begin to sweat.

Half a beat later, the phone on the table in the living room rings. Joselyn and I look at each other.

Tony says, “Who could that be at this hour?”

Joselyn replies, “We won’t know until I answer it.”

It rings again. Tony looks at her. He has a problem. If he allows it to go unanswered and it’s a relative or a friend who knows we’re home, it might cause them to check on us. He looks at me, tries to read my mind, and before I can say anything the phone stops ringing. It rolls over to voicemail. It’s an old system, the kind where you can hear messages and screen calls. But whoever is calling doesn’t leave a message.

Tony starts to relax and the second he does, it rings again. Whoever it is knows we’re home. He has no choice. “Go ahead and answer it.” He pushes his chair back, starts to get up, and then stops. “Is there any way to turn the speaker on so we can listen in?”