“Around what time would this have been?” he said.

Reyland smiled.

“Oh, around seven Friday last.”

“Oh, yeah, now that you mention it,” Gannon said after a pause. “As a matter of fact, I was out on Lexington that night. But I didn’t shoot any law enforcement people.”

“Is that right?” Emerson said. “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” Gannon said, looking at him. “That night I was only killing reporter-murdering scumbags.”

Reyland smiled even wider. He had nice clean white teeth. Dimples.

“Funny,” he said, swiveling to and fro in his chair. “Now for something not so funny. Agent Emerson, if you would do the honors.”

“It would be my pleasure,” Emerson said, smiling as he stood in his razor-creased khakis. He walked past the small kitchen into Gannon’s back bedroom. A moment later when he came back out, he was dragging something heavy.

It was a man.

A short naked black man, and he was covered in blood.

78

Emerson dragged the little black man over among the cracked shells.

It took a full thirty seconds of looking at the swollen, broken face to verify it was Sergeant Jeremy.

The bald man laughed as he dumped out what was left of the peanuts over Sergeant Jeremy at his feet.

“You sons of bitches!” Gannon said, wild-eyed, stepping forward.

As he did this, Sunglasses clocked him hard with the gun in the temple. As Gannon put his hands to the spot, his right leg was kicked out from underneath him and he fell backward. He landed hard on his ass, banging the hell out of the back of his head against the tight hallway’s Sheetrock wall on the way down.

Gannon’s lower lip split as Sunglasses kneed him explosively in the face a few times. Then the barrel of the gun was jammed painfully in his ear.

“You have a choice here, Mike,” Reyland said, standing as Emerson dragged Sergeant Jeremy back into the bedroom.

“An end-of-life decision actually,” he said as he crunched over the shells.

He crouched down until they were eye level.

“We can either take you and your friend back into that bathtub of yours and get busy slowly lopping you into pieces small enough to wash down the drain. Or you can tell me where our property is.”

Gannon stared down at the tile. A drop of blood from his split-open temple plopped down onto it. Then another drop from his lip followed it. One of his lower teeth was loose. He could actually move it with his tongue.

He looked up at Emerson as he returned from the bedroom alone.

Then he finally played the only card he had left.

“I have a video of the people on the plane,” Gannon said, looking up into the bald man’s gray eyes. “I had a GoPro camera when I dived down. It shows the FBI director, the black guy, and the other two white guys. It shows their faces. All close-ups. That’s what you want, right? That’s what all this is about?”