21
As Lucas and the marshals were meeting with the FBI, Claxson pulled John McCoy and Kerry Moore into a back conference room, shut the door, and said, “We’ve got a problem. Maybe all three of us, but you two in particular.”
McCoy and Moore glanced at each other, and Moore asked, “What’s the problem?”
The two younger men looked alike and, at the same time, not alike: both were an inch short of six feet and stocky, athletic, with tanned, nut-hard faces and hands. While McCoy was a strawberry blond, Moore had dark hair. The way they moved made them look like big-league second basemen.
Claxson took a deep breath and exhaled in phony exasperation. “It’s Davenport. He’s back here...”
“He ditched his wife?” McCoy asked. “Nice guy.”
“His wife is home and recovering. There was a newspaper story in the St. Paul paper; a columnist named Soucheray says he was talking to a cop and the cop told him that they’re now treating Last’s death as a homicide, not a suicide.”
Moore said, “Shit. How...?”
“The Soucheray column says Last had a heart problem. He couldn’t run half a block. Whoever hit Davenport’s wife’s car ran a couple of blocks—and fast. You know how Jim could run.”
“Goddamnit,” McCoy said. He stood up, walked around his chair, brushing a hand through his hair, and sat down again. “Nobody told us. That’s the kind of shit we had to know. Bad intel can kill us.”
“Yeah, well, Davenport’s back, and you know what happened next. Jim Ritter gets killed. We got an autopsy report off the Medical Examiner’s files...”
Claxson had that report in his hand and pushed it across the table they were sitting at to McCoy. “Looks like Jim was waterboarded and then shot up close, in the heart. Executed. He was looking right down the barrel when they pulled the trigger.”
Moore was incredulous. “You think Davenport and the marshals did that?”
“There’s no proof. All we know is, Jim disappeared and turned up in a landfill. But he was tortured first, and Davenport was here and he’s a killer. He’s killed eight or nine guys as a cop, and some of the killings were seriously questionable. He’s always done the hard-core stuff, which explains some of it... The point is, killing isn’t something that worries him.”
“We made a mistake when we went after his wife,” Moore said to McCoy. “When I was married, if somebody had gotten rough with Jeannie, I would have killed him.”
McCoy flashed a grin, and said, “Fortunately for that guy, he was only fuckin’ her.”
“Bite me,” Moore said, but he laughed. He then stopped laughing, and said to Claxson, “Maybe it’s time to get a job somewhere else. Like Niger. Go up the river for a couple of years.”
Claxson said, “That’s one option. The other option is, get rid of Davenport. We didn’t want to do it because it’d attractattention, but Davenport is the only one who’s got the personal... animus... to keep pushing this thing.”
Moore was skeptical. “So we put a .338 through his heart from six blocks away? That’d get some attention—and since they’re looking at us anyway...”
Claxson shook his head. “Can’t look like a pro killed him. Has to look like something else. An accident, a mugging, anything. We’re still thinking pushing him downstream a couple of months would probably get us out of it.”
McCoy and Moore looked at each other again, and McCoy said, “So if he just got sick—I mean, like really sick...”
“You got something that’ll make him sick?” Claxson asked.
“No, but somebody might,” McCoy said.
Moore was shaking his head. “That’s bullshit. We don’t know how to do that. The thing is, we got that lady on the books, the one riding with Smalls. If we get caught, if we get identified, we’re looking at the needle. If we’re gonna kill him, we do it when we got an exit plan. I’m not sneaking into some fuckin’ hotel without good intel, not knowing where the cameras are, and try some goofy idea like gassing him or giving him chicken pox or something.”
McCoy said, “You’re right.”
Moore said to McCoy: “I’m sayin’ Niger.” He looked at Claxson. “Unless you got something good in Syria, or with the Kurds.”
Claxson said, “We’re talking about the White House. We put this chick in there, knowing what we know, we can get anything we want. Anything. You want ten million bucks? No problem. Twenty million bucks? No problem.”
“Unless she knows a couple of more guys like us to remove that problem,” Moore said.
Claxson shook his head. “Never’ll happen. Money is easy. Killing all of us would be way too hard. And dangerous.”
They sat and looked at one another for a while.
