“Two dead piggies in the street!”

Mitch squealed, a pretty good imitation of swine, actually, and Denny joined in until their voices echoed up the empty stairwell. Both of them were drunk on how well it had gone. What a rush!

“And you know who the hero of the story is, right, Mitchie?” he asked.

“Nobody but us, man.”

“Damn straight. We did it ourselves. A couple of real live American heroes!”

Chapter 7

THE SCENE OUTSIDE Taberna del Alabardero was a total zoo when we got there. This was no ordinary hit or rubout. I knew that much without even getting out of the car. The radio had been blaring about a long-distance hit, from a gunman that nobody had seen, firing shots that nobody had heard.

And then there were the victims. Congressman Victor Vinton was dead, along with Craig Pilkey, a well-known banking lobbyist who had recently dragged both of them into the headlines. These homicides were a scandal wrapped in another scandal. So much for quiet times in Homicide.

Both dead men were the subject of a federal inquiry regarding influence-peddling on behalf of the financial services industry. There were allegations about backroom deals and campaign contributions and all the wrong people getting rich — or richer — while middle-class citizens had continued to lose their homes in record numbers. It wasn’t hard to imagine someone wanting Vinton and Pilkey dead. A lot of people probably did.

Still, motivation wasn’t the first question on my mind right now. It was method. Why the long gun, and how did someone pull this off so effortlessly on a crowded city street?

Both bodies were covered on the sidewalk when my buddy John Sampson and I reached the awning in front of the restaurant. Capitol Police were already there, with FBI on the way. “High profile” means “high pressure” in DC, and you could all but cut with a knife the mounting tension inside that yellow perimeter tape.

We found another of our own, Mark Grieco from Third District, and he briefed us. Given all the noise in the street, we had to shout just to hear one another.

“How many witnesses do we have?” Sampson asked.

“At least a dozen,” Grieco told us. “We’ve got them all corralled inside, each one more freaked out than the last. No visual on the shooter, though.”

“What about the shots?” I asked in Grieco’s ear. “We know where they came from?”

He pointed over my shoulder, up Eighteenth Street. “Way over there — if you can believe it. They’re securing the building now.”

On the north corner of K Street, a couple of blocks away, there was a building under some kind of renovation. Every floor was dark except for the top one, where I could just make out people moving around.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “How far is that?”