The Quiet Game

"Who the hell are you?" Leo asks, keeping the derringer in my face.

Kelly's suntanned face remains calm, as though he were listening to a soothing piece of music. "I'm the man who's going to end your life unless you take that gun in the house."

"Bullshit," Leo grunts. "Get the fuck off my property."

"I'm here to do a job, sir," Kelly says in the same lazy voice. "Don't make yourself part of it."

At last Leo really looks at Kelly, and the muscles in his jaw tighten. He has vastly multiplied his family fortune by accurately judging men's characters. And whatever he sees in Daniel Kelly's eyes convinces him that today is the wrong day to tempt fate. He lowers the derringer.

"You just made yourself part of my job, sonny." He raises two fingers in a little toodle-loo gesture, then turns and walks up the broad steps of his mansion.

"Livy," he says without turning around. "Your mother needs you."

"I'm coming." She steps toward me and tries to take my hand, but I pull it away. "Make a public apology, Penn," she pleads. "Please. Do that, and I'll convince Daddy to drop the suit."

"It's too late for that."

She looks at me sadly. "You can't play my father's game and win. Not in this town. Not in this state. Nobody can. You could lose everything you have."

"You've got a short memory, Livy. Your father lost his case against mine twenty years ago, and he's going to lose this one."

"That was different. It was a weak case to start with."

"Then why did he take it?"

Unreadable emotion flares in her eyes. "I don't know. But I do know you nearly fainted when he told you that man had been arrested. He was your last hope, wasn't he? He was your case. If you walk into that courtroom Wednesday, you'll be like a lamb going to slaughter."

I step back from her, trying not to think of Peter Lutjens. "That's my problem. Your problem is a lot bigger than that. Your whole life is built around some secret tragedy whose real victim is a girl crying alone in a room three miles from here. What are you going to do about that?"

Her eyes go cold again. "Nothing. And you'd better not either." She turns and walks up three steps, then looks back to me. "Don't say I didn't warn you about the trial."

This time she goes all the way up and through the massive door.

I get into the BMW and start to leave, but Kelly pulls his Taurus in front of it, blocking my way. Then he gets out and comes around to my window.

"Boss? To an objective observer, it looks like you're trying awful hard to get killed."

"I've learned some upsetting things in the past half hour. I haven't even begun to understand them yet. All I know is that I want to nail that son of a bitch more than anything I've ever wanted in my life, other than to save my wife from dying. And that was beyond my power."

"Maybe this is too," Kelly says gently. "I wouldn't mind bringing that bastard down a peg myself. But things seem pretty seriously stacked against you. Sometimes you've got to pull back. Regroup. Fight another day."

"No," I say doggedly, perhaps stupidly. "If I let the momentum die, Marston and Portman will never pay for whatever they did. Any evidence that exists will disappear." Althea Payton's words sound in my head like a ghostly refrain. "If not now, when. You know?"

A skeptical grunt. "Yeah, maybe."

"I've got one shot left, Kelly."

"What?"

"Dwight Stone. He knows the truth. He could bring down the whole damn temple."

"Caitlin says he won't testify."

"He wants to help me. I know he does. But he's got a daughter in the FBI. That gives Portman total control of her life, and by extension, Stone's."

"So, what can you do?"

"I'm going back to Colorado."

The old Kelly smile returns to his lips. "Well… I was ready for a change of scenery anyway."

"Do we still have FBI surveillance covering us?"

"I've seen them three times today. They're good."

"That's okay. You're going to keep them nice and busy for me."

"Yeah, and…? How do we lose them?"

"We don't. This time I'm going alone."

CHAPTER 34

The American Eagle ATR plows into a trough of turbulence, drops like a stone, then catches an updraft from the Rocky Mountains below and settles out again. I and my fellow passengers are thirty miles from Crested Butte, Colorado, and I can't wait for the wheels to hit the runway. When I flew out of Baton Rouge, it was ninety degrees. When I changed planes in Dallas, it was sixty-eight. In Colorado there's two feet of snow on the ground, my plane is three hours behind schedule because of the unexpected storm, and the only thing I know about ATR aircraft is that they fly like hogs with ice on the wings. But that isn't the only reason for my anxiety. In less than an hour I will be face to face with former special agent Dwight Stone, the only man on earth who can give me what I need.

The desire for revenge I felt when I attacked Leo Marston at Tuscany yesterday seems trivial now. I am a different man than I was yesterday. The past I thought I knew is dead. Because last night I faced a truth so terrible I can hardly accept it even now.