The Gray Zone (16 page)

“Jesus, Jake.”

Jake glanced up at Joyce, irritated.

“What?”

“Where the fuck
are
you?” Joyce leaned across the table and rapped Jake on the forehead with her knuckles.

“In Buckley’s Tavern,” Jake grunted, even more irritated.

There was a moment of silence. Jake swigged his beer and watched the bartender serve a man who had gray hair that grew down to his shoulders. Joyce finished off her bourbon on the rocks.

“Goddamnit, Jake,” Joyce said finally. “You snap out of this or I’m quitting. I mean it.”

Jake had been hitting a wall the likes of which he had never known before. He needed to find Kelly Jensen but had no idea how. Porter’s grave was still fresh, but already Suzanne had launched herself into a full-fledged campaign for the Senate seat. She had retained Alana Sutter but hadn’t asked for Jake’s help. Jake’s emotions were so fried that he hadn’t even been able to get enraged over not being asked to do a job he didn’t want to do in the first place.

Joyce had never seen Jake this detached. She was the only person in his life who could have suggested he was edging toward depression, but even she hesitated to call his attention to it.

“You can’t quit.”

“Try me.”

“You’d miss my winning personality too much.” Jake tried to smile charmingly, but it came out flat.

“You want my honest opinion?” asked Joyce.

“When haven’t I?”

Joyce hesitated. “I know you’re grieving—”

Jake exhaled, exasperated. “Cut the crap. That’s not like you.”

“I
am
cutting the crap,” Joyce said defensively. “I think you need to give this a rest for a few days. Get your bearings back.” She hesitated again. “Maybe back off on the freelancing.”

Jake’s glare cut through the dank tavern air.

Joyce pressed ahead. “Porter would have wanted you to do what you do best. Not play detective, going off on your own like this.”

Jake did not like to admit it, but he knew she was right. He sighed.

“Who is she, Jake? Who’s this girl you’re looking for?”

Jake opened his mouth to answer, then shut it again. Just then,
his BlackBerry jittered sideways across the table. Raising an eyebrow at Joyce, he flipped it open.

“Brooks.”

Joyce watched Jake’s face change. Whatever he had started to open up about was closing over again.

“You’re sure? Surrounded?”

Jake listened for another second. “I’m coming. I can get a chopper.”

He flicked his phone shut and stood up. “They’ve got her surrounded,” said Jake over his shoulder. “I’ve got to get there for the arrest.”

* * *

Kelly watched the teller go into a back room and shut the door. She tried to act nonchalant, but her eyes ticked nervously around the lobby. She heard a helicopter fly overhead. After about three minutes, Kelly’s heart started to pound. What was taking so long? She remembered another one of Todd’s phrases from her past: “Timing is everything. An unusual delay means you walk!” Kelly snapped Joan Davis’s purse shut and took a step backward. Suddenly she felt a hand on her arm.

“Ma’am,” said a man’s voice, “could you come with me, please?”

“What is this about?” demanded Kelly, staying in character to keep the liquid fear out of her stomach. The man gripped her arm and led her into the back room. The bank teller was gone. “Please, sit.” Kelly obeyed, and the man sat opposite her. He looked directly into her eyes.

Then Kelly bolted for the open door, reaching her hand into her purse.

* * *

Jake leaped out of the helicopter and ran, crouching, toward the police car. An officer knelt behind each of the four open car doors. The SWAT team had surrounded Steingart’s desert compound, which consisted of a main house and some crumbling outbuildings. As directed, the FBI agents and other uniformed men held their fire. Two more helicopters thudded overhead, hovering.

Suddenly a voice came out of nowhere—a woman’s voice, amplified.

“I … AM … THE PROTECTOR!”

The captain lifted a megaphone. “Stacy Steingart, you are surrounded. Come out with your hands on your head. There’s no other way out of this. Come out here and talk with us. You have nowhere to go.”

“You don’t scare me with your institutional protocol. I’m an American-made killer. You made me.”

Jake’s heart thumped. What was she talking about?

“You force us out of our homes, lock up our parents in prisons, institutionalize us from birth until death. You call it ‘protective custody.’ But instead of protecting, you abuse and neglect us. You turn us into criminals. When we turn eighteen, you throw us out to the streets with no education or choices and nothing in front of us but drugs, prostitution, and crime. We’re jailed for the smallest offenses and institutionalized permanently. Our only alternative is to join your military and be trained as killers. Guess which one I chose?”

A blaze of bullets ripped out through a window. Jake dropped behind the left rear bumper of the squad car. The SWAT team shrank against the walls of the building.

“Steingart! Put down your weapon and come out with your hands on your head,” barked the captain again through his megaphone. “That’s an
order.
”

Steingart’s sound system crackled. She was laughing. The sound carried well, as though she had outfitted her home with a public address system, complete with microphone and speakers. As though Steingart had planned this standoff.

“YOU were my parents!” she shouted. “I was a ‘ward of the state.’ YOU are the state. Every one of you. Senators and congressmen most of all. You are my parents. If there was really a justice system, instead of the multimillion-dollar child welfare system you benefit from, you would all be liable for abuse and neglect.”

Jake held his breath. Kelly/Stacy was strangely eloquent. But the weirdest thing of all was that she could have been reading from a speech made by Porter Garrett. Why had she killed him, when he had supported her, believed the same things?

Jake saw the lead cop nod at the men behind him and duck through the front door.

“Steingart, you’re leaving us no choice,” warned the captain on the megaphone. “Come out now.”

Steingart ignored him. “Porter Garrett was no different from any other politician. He was worse. Using us to try to win the election.”

Jake tasted bile, hearing her name his friend with such hatred in her voice.

More bullets rained out. One of the cops clasped his arm and fell. The SWAT team rushed into the house.

“Call me a suicide bomber!” yelled Steingart one more time. The words fell into the dust. Silence. Then a massive explosion of firepower. Jake hunkered down flat against the desert sand as the bullets sprayed.

When he thought about it all later, it seemed remarkable that more people hadn’t gotten hurt. Especially after he walked in with the captain, once the SWAT team gave the all-clear, and saw that Steingart had been blasted back against a wall, spread-eagled, blood pouring from several bullet holes in her torso. An arm had been
partially ripped off and hung uselessly at her side. Her black hair was wild and greasy and clotted with blood and tissue. Dead eyes stared, unseeing, from her face. What was left of her body showed her to be compact and wiry, small and strong.

Jake stared and stared and then turned away, shaking his head in an effort not to react publicly in some grotesque way—vomiting, crying, laughing. In the horror of the scene, the explosive mixture of adrenaline and testosterone, he felt a profound relief.

It wasn’t Kelly. Stacy Steingart was someone else.

He acknowledged to himself that he was also feeling something new just as viscerally. Jake had seen his share of death over the course of his career, but he had never felt such an
electrifying satisfaction
about it.
Bloodlust
was the only word for it—this woman’s blood in exchange for Porter’s. Jake picked his way around blood and tissue on the floor and went outside. Somewhere nearby a dog barked incessantly. Jake lit a cigarette to calm his shaking hands and watched police officers swarming around the scene. He was sure that after a few days of conducting fingerprint, DNA, and tissue analyses, the investigation would incontrovertibly identify Stacy Steingart as Congressman Garrett’s killer.

* * *

The security guard at the bank grabbed Kelly as she ran by and forced her to the floor. He twisted her arms behind her back.

“Amazing.” He shook his head as he studied her face, which looked nothing like the image he held before him. “Here’s your ID.” He lifted the document in front of her eyes. “And here’s mine.” He flashed his badge.

Kelly knew her number was up but remained cool and calm. “Excuse me. Where is the restroom?”

“For you? In jail!” the man crowed. “You have the right to remain silent …”

Years ago, her husband had prepared her for this moment. “Freeze!” he had taught her. “Freeze every emotion that could give you away!”

Instantly, Kelly numbed her emotions—the way she used to do during the interminable practice runs. “No matter what they ask you, you say nothing. No emotions, no voice … Remember, you are a
first-
time offender, so the law is on your side!”

Kelly didn’t resist. She simply closed her eyes and let herself be dragged into the police car.

* * *

Jake flicked his cigarette into the sand and ground it out with his heel. His phone vibrated.

“It’s me,” said Joyce, her voice odd. “They got your Natalie St. Clair/Kelly Jensen et cetera, et cetera. She’s in Long Beach.” Jake’s stomach tightened. There was a crackling on the line, dead air cut through with static.

“Jake?”

“I’m listening.”

“Does that mean anything to you?”

Jake hesitated. “Yes,” he admitted.

“She’s the girl?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s something strange.”

Jake tapped another cigarette out of the pack. He was buzzing, still pumped from the shoot-out and knowing that Porter’s killer had paid with her life. “What?”

“She says that you’re her lawyer. She says you represent her.”

KELLY KEPT HER EYES SHUT TIGHT. SHE FELT HER wig being pulled off. Someone washed her face clean. She was a toy, a rubber doll. Her time in custody so far had been no worse than any other in her large catalogue of dark moments. None of it mattered. She didn’t mind being pushed and pulled. Her senses were shut off. She felt nothing.

A social worker came to her cell and asked if she had children, but she refused to talk. Then she was led to a room. She heard a man asking her to open her eyes. Obediently, she opened her eyes and stared blankly into midair. The small room she was in had a table and a few other chairs like the one she was seated on. The two windows on the far wall were covered with beige, wide-slatted blinds. Acoustic tile like rotted-out cheese lined the ceiling. A dry-erase board hung on the brick wall opposite the windows.

“What’s a beautiful girl like you doing robbing banks?” the man asked.

Kelly found a place on the ceiling where a leak had left a coffee-colored stain. She followed its contours with her eyes and said nothing.

“You need the money?” he pressed. “Couldn’t get enough ‘dates’?”

Kelly bit the inside of her cheek and continued staring at the ceiling stain. She wasn’t about to rise to any of his bait.

“By the way, you look great as a blonde,” he said.

She remained silent.

“How about some coffee? Cigarette?” The detective leaned against the wall, his arms crossed over his white button-down shirt and bright tie. Kelly could detect the effort he was making to warm his voice. She didn’t answer, and still didn’t look at him.

“My name’s Hal Weaver. Care to introduce yourself?”

Silence.

Weaver sighed. He paced to the door, acted like he was reconsidering, came back, and sat in a chair across the table from her.

“Look, you’re obviously part of an interstate check fraud ring. That’s a
federal
offense. You can get some very hard time for that.”

Kelly didn’t move a muscle.

Weaver spread his hands on the table and started drumming his fingers. The gray vinyl—covered pasteboard was battered. His thumb found a triangular gouge and started worrying it.

“Listen, I cleared the room and shut off the tape. This is off the record … We can be useful to each other.” Kelly heard his smile—the creak of cheekbones, the suction of his lips pulling off his teeth. She pressed her hands, prayer-style, between her knees and sat up straight in her chair. Her head was cocked at an angle and her eyes followed the arc into the air, as though she were a Renaissance cherub peering innocently up toward heaven. The pose or the silence finally got to Weaver.

He put his face a half inch from Kelly’s. She felt his angry exhale, smelled stale coffee and grease on his breath. But her mask didn’t crack.

“This is your last chance. Don’t you have anything to say?”

Calmly, Kelly spoke. “I have the right to remain silent.”

Weaver slammed his palms on the table. Kelly didn’t flinch. For the first time, she looked him in the eye. He glared at her, then turned away and leaned against the windowsill. She saw his jaw, in profile, grinding violently.

The door opened and another man—small, pale, and thin, wearing a white T-shirt under a black leather sports jacket—sauntered in. He walked around the room, inspecting Kelly from every angle.

“Have we met before?” he asked.

Kelly said nothing.

The small man continued to stare at her.

She looked blankly at the ceiling stain.

“Mind-boggling,” the man muttered. He jerked his head at Weaver. “Got something interesting to show you out here.”

As the men left the room, Kelly exhaled soundlessly through her mouth. She was determined to give them nothing. Jake Brooks would get her message. The one thing that threatened to crack her was not having a daily report about Kevin and Libby. She had talked to Holly hurriedly after her arrest, and now she just had to believe they were still in the trailer park, lying low.

Kelly was alone in the room for about fifteen minutes. She could hear cars swishing by outside the windows. A faint hum, the pitch of a computer or refrigerator, issued from somewhere out of sight. Some footsteps passed by the door and faded away.