“Not if we sedate them first. Then we give them speed. They’ll be little time bombs.”

“You want us to do all this? Why? What do we gain by it?”

“How the fuck do I know? The Marine gets a surprise.”

“It’s pointless. It’s nuts.”

“We’ll do it,” Russell said quietly. “Then we leave.”

“Sure,” Thackrey said. “Then you leave. Fly off to Thailand, or wherever you’re going.”

Victor snorted. “While you get a head start.”

“Oh, I’m not leaving yet,” Thackrey said. “I’ve got one more task of my own.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m going to find my way into Lieutenant Mahler’s house.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not at all. I’ll bet you I get in and out before he finds me.”

“What on earth for?”

“Because I can. They invade my privacy, I invade his. Anything, boys, to fuck with their minds.”

Chapter Twenty-One

(i)

(WEDNESDAY, 9:15 P.M.)

Tom Woodhouse parked his Honda and walked back toward Mahler’s car.

As Mahler watched, the retired detective moved with a slow, uneven gait. Knees gone to hell. But even in Tommy Woodhouse’s prime, quickness had never been his gift. It was something else.

Mahler remembered a 10–66, suspicious subject call, years earlier, when a junkie with an Oakland Raiders neck tattoo suddenly lifted a Ruger from a hoodie pocket. Mahler could still picture how Tommy stood, two feet from the junkie, not moving at all—three cop guns drawn behind him, calmly talking, minute after minute, voice barely above a whisper, until the kid handed him the gun.

The old man climbed into the passenger seat. “Okay. I’m here. You going to tell me why we had to meet in a car instead of my living room?”

“It’s better this way.”

They sat in the dark. Even three feet away, Mahler could not see Woodhouse.

“This the book club you always talked about?” Woodhouse asked. “How’s that plan of yours to read all of Thomas Hardy’s novels in order? Start with Far from the Madding Crowd, wasn’t it, all the way to Jude the Obscure?”

“It’s…something else.” Mahler leaned across Woodhouse and reached into the glove compartment. He removed an object wrapped in a towel and laid it on the console. As he opened the towel, the glove compartment light revealed a darker glow—the barrel of a handgun.

Woodhouse looked down without touching the gun. “I saw lots of guns on the job, Junior. I don’t ever need to see another one.”

Mahler clicked off the light. “It’s a Browning 22 with a suppressor. I found it at a crime scene a few years ago and never logged it into the system. Brand-new. Unregistered. Never been fired. Serial number filed off. Doesn’t exist.”

“Clean gun. So what?”