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He’d met him.
He’d found out.
The orange glow guttered across Devine’s smooth, boyish features. “I heard Tenpenny get away.”
“Oh,” Evan said, “I wouldn’t worry about him.”
Devine nodded once slowly, a downward tip of the chin. “Have you decided”—for the first time his voice trembled, but it was so slight that it might have been a figment of Evan’s imagination—“what you’re going to do about me?”
Evan stared at him.
The ARES felt snug in his hand, a part of himself. A 4.5-millimeter press of his trigger finger would restore his presidential pardon.
“You have a code, too,” Luke said. “Before God.”
Evan broke eye contact just for an instant, but Luke keyed to it.
“Of course there’s a God,” Devine said. “Because there’sme.”
On Evan’s knee the ARES stayed pointed at Devine. The fire roared and roared, and it was as if they were at the edge of the world on some godforsaken frontier and the flames were all that were left to fend off the darkness.
It took concentration for Evan to pull himself to his feet. Pistol at his side, he stood facing Devine over the trapped soul in the glass table.
Devine was his own center of gravity, everything around him enigmatic and complex, obscured by shades of gray. One thing was certain: He was willing to extort and manipulate tofurther his own ends. He was willing to employ soldiers who were known murderers. He kept eyes on everything that happened in his orbit and inside his citadel. He’d built the game board, set up the pieces, stoked his sphere of influence to the point of mortal ignition. It seemed clear he hadn’t known about the murders committed right under his nose. He’d insulated himself behind a wall of his own making. And yet insulated he was. It was rage-inducing, corrupt, and unjust in more ways than could be tallied.
But he had neither pulled the trigger nor given the order.
Evan’s hand tightened around the grip of the ARES, the checkering of the Simonich gunner grips biting his palm. An urge overwhelmed him to raise the pistol and put three rounds through the man before him—two in the chest, one in the head. He let it rage through him and finally abate.
“One day you’ll cross the line,” Evan said. “And I’ll be there.”
Luke made no show of relief, but Evan saw his chest deflate as he eased out a breath. “I’d expect nothing else.”
Evan turned his back on Luke Devine and the 9-mil.
He figured Luke was not the kind of man to shoot him in the back.
His supposition was correct.
Rath had made it another few feet, his fingertips nudging the edge of his gun. He couldn’t move beyond that. He was sobbing dryly, pitiful broken cries.
The swath of blood from his gutshot detailed the painstaking progress he’d made in the past half hour.
Evan’s Original S.W.A.T.s tapped across the marble of the dark foyer. The lights were still off, but he could see more clearly now, ambient light coaxing texture from the darkness. At his back the waterfall rushed and rushed.
Evan reached Rath and paused, staring ahead at the door. Rath’s head was turned, and he breathed moistly, fogging the marble near Evan’s boots. Evan stood, his shadow long, the reflection of the fluttering water washing over him and the polished Calacattamarble. He held the ARES aimed down at his side parallel to his thigh, the muzzle hovering three feet above Rath’s temple.
“Thisis how it ends,” Evan said.
He shot Rath through the head and walked out the lofty front door into the swirling mist.
61
Strong Woman
Candy was waiting for him on an easement running alongside the neighboring estate in a Yulong white Range Rover she’d borrowed for precisely this occasion. She’d already changed from her cop-stripper getup into a wardrobe befitting a mogul’s steely wife, a tennis leisurewear outfit that also somehow passed for evening wear.
He hauled himself into the passenger seat, and she just looked at him. “Baby wipes in the console,” she said. “Your face.”
