Patriot acts ak-6 Page 21

  That's what I told myself, at least, until we'd parked back in the lot of the Wilmingtonian and I was out of the car and Alena was joining me.

  "The car at four o'clock," she said, not indicating it in the slightest. "That car was behind us all the way here."

  It had parked some sixty feet away, and there was a man getting out of the vehicle, and already I didn't like what I was seeing. It wasn't that he was big, certainly no taller than either Alena or myself, but there was something in his carriage that reminded me immediately of Dan. As he turned towards us I saw his right hand going into his jacket, and I liked that even less. If he was going for a gun, we weren't going to be able to do much but run or bleed. But the hand came out as smoothly and quickly as it had gone in, and there was no gun in it that I could see as he continued on his line towards us.

  I put a hand on Alena's back, turning her and myself towards one of the five buildings that made up the Wilmingtonian Hotel, and, specifically, the suite we'd taken.

  "Coming up from behind."

  "So you give him our back?" Alena muttered.

  "I want you inside," I said.

  "You're being a fool."

  She stopped and turned around and so I did, too.

  The man had closed to about twenty feet. Both of his hands were visible, at his sides, but he was focused on us, and as we faced him he called out, saying, "Pardon me, I beg your pardon." He had a deep voice, not quite from the gravel at the bottom of the quarry, but not many feet above it, either.

  "Can I help you?" I asked.

  He slowed his approach, easing off and giving first Alena, then me, a quick eyeballing. His expression wasn't hostile, but it wasn't in neutral, either. Wary, perhaps. His skin had the rich warmth of a good tan or a Mediterranean heritage, and given the absolute black of his hair and the deep brown of his eyes, I was leaning to the latter. Maybe Italian extraction, more likely Sicilian. He was wearing khakis, with a black T-shirt under his open coat, and the coat itself was almost the same brown of his eyes, and thin, as if optimistic at the promise of spring. When I checked his feet, I saw he was wearing boots rather than sneakers or loafers, and that the boots had a squared toe. The clip to a folding knife hung over the lip of his left front pants pocket.

  He was military, or he had been, and I wondered for a moment if this wasn't another of Sean's friends.

  "You dropped this," he said to me, and then he closed the rest of the distance, extending his right hand.

  "I don't think so."

  "Yeah," he said. "You did."

  Then he showed me what he was holding in his hand.

  It was a picture of Natalie Trent.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  His name was John Panno, at least according to his driver's license and the business card he showed us when we got into our suite. The license had been issued by the State of Maryland. The business card had come from a firm calling itself Phoenix Resource Consultancy. Apparently, Phoenix Resource Consultancy didn't have a street address, just an e-mail address and a phone number. I didn't recognize the area code on the phone number.

  "Another fucking contractor," I said, handing the card back to him. In my other hand, I was holding the photograph of Natalie.

  "PRC is not Gorman-North," he said, easily.

  "No, it's the People's Republic of China. You might want to change your name."

  "Eight fucking months I've been watching Cape Fear Marine and Yachts. Eight months waiting for one of you to make contact with Louis Woodburn. Eight. Fucking. Months. You couldn't have maybe connected the dots a little sooner?"

  I turned the photograph of Natalie in my hand. It had a date written on the back in script, and it wasn't Natalie's handwriting. If my memory was right, the date would've been roughly around the time we'd gone into business together. I flipped it around once more, examining the picture. It was a candid, reduced to walletsize, caught while she was grinning at someone who wasn't the photographer.

  I set the photo on the antique coffee table in the center of the sitting room portion of our suite, then stared at Panno, seated on the couch beyond it. He returned the stare evenly, as if telling me that whatever I might have thought of myself, he wasn't impressed.

  "The picture got you in the door," I said. "Doesn't get you farther than that."

  "How far do I need to go?" he asked. "Considering that you've got most of the law enforcement in the country coming down on your ass at this very moment, I mean."

  Alena, seated to the side in one of the high-backed easy chairs, leaned forward. "You've been waiting eight months, you say. Why here?"

  "It's where he told me to look." Panno hadn't moved his gaze from me.

  "Who?"

  "Who do you think?" He flicked his eyes to the photograph, then back to me. "Her father."

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Alena look to me for verification.

  "It's possible," I told her. "Elliot Trent was Secret Service before he started Sentinel. He even worked the presidential detail at one point. He has connections in D.C.-intelligence, military-and I'd be surprised if some of them weren't at a high enough level that they could have dug up the protocol for him."

  Panno shook his head slightly. "You don't know anything about him, do you?"

  "I know enough."

  "Trent was Army Intelligence before he went to Treasury. He's got more connections than you have hairs on your ass."

  I glanced at Alena. "See, it's the sophisticated level of conversation you get from soldiers that makes me miss the Army most."

  "He wants to talk to you," Panno said.

  "Me alone or the both of us?"

  "You, specifically, though the conditional was that, if she was with you, she was to come along."

  "He retired," I said. "Trent. He sold Sentinel, packed it in."

  "Last year. He had another heart attack. He's had three since she died. He's not going to run much longer."

  The news bothered me, more than I would have expected. There was no love lost between me and Elliot Trent; there never had been, and I knew that there never would be. But the knowledge that he was dying brought a deeper sadness than I'd have imagined. He'd lost his wife, he'd lost his daughter, he'd given up his business. What else was there for him to do now but die?

  Except, apparently, hire a contractor from an organization I'd never even heard of before to watch Cape Fear Marine and Yachts in the hopes that we would, one day, show up. If Panno wasn't exaggerating, if he'd really been on the job for eight months, that was quite a feat; someone should have noticed him, and if no one had, he'd done it very well, indeed.

  I decided he had to be exaggerating, and turned away from him and Alena, running a hand over my mostly bare scalp. New hair was already coming in, and it felt like needles against my palm.

  "Mr. Trent wants to talk to you, Kodiak. I'm supposed to take you to him."

  "What does he know?" I asked, turning back and pointing to the picture of Natalie, resting faceup on the coffee table. "About how she died?"

  "Almost all of it," Panno said. "It's taken him the better part of three years, but he's got almost all of it, now, from Gorman-North on up."

  "He knows who bought it? Who put it into motion?"

  "He knows that you were involved." John Panno tilted his head slightly to include Alena. "Her, too."

  None of us spoke for a second.

  "He hates your guts," Panno added. Then he smiled a smile that said based on that endorsement alone, he was going to, as well. "I mean, he really hates your guts."

  "Yet he still wants to talk to me."

  "Like I said."

  "About?"

  "That's for him to say."

  "Where is he now?"

  "He's got a house near Peden Point, maybe ten, fifteen miles away. He came here about a month after sending me down to watch for the two of you. Wanted to be close by if you finally showed up."

  Panno waited a moment, to see if either Alena or I had any further questions, t
hough I suspect, if we'd had, he wouldn't have answered them. Then he leaned forward, scooping the photograph in his right hand, making it vanish beneath the breadth of his palm. There was damage to his knuckles, scarring from one or more punches that had hit teeth, perhaps, rather than jaw. He slid the photograph carefully back into the inside pocket of his jacket, then got to his feet.

  "I'll take you to him," John Panno told us.

  Alena was staring at a point on the carpet, her brow furrowed. She glanced up to him, then moved the look to me, and I could see she was more puzzled than curious. Her association with Trent was negligible, and her only dealings with the man had left her unimpressed. It was Natalie she had bonded with. It was Natalie who might have become her friend if she had lived.

  "Come on," Panno said. There wasn't impatience in his voice, just the command. "He knows you're here. I've already called him. He's expecting you."

  "All right," I said, giving Alena my hand and helping her out of the chair. "Let's go see just how much Elliot Trent hates me."

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  Elliot Trent hated me quite a bit, it turned out. I knew this, because the first thing he said to me was, "You don't deserve to be alive."

  He said it softly, and he said it with conviction, and he said it in my face, and when I didn't respond immediately, he repeated it.

  "You don't deserve to be alive," Elliot Trent said.

  The last four years or so since I'd seen him hadn't been kind, and Panno was right: It was the last three of them that had really done the trick. He still stood ramrod straight, still had the head of steel-gray hair, the same eyes, but they were sunken now, in a complexion that had gone sallow, and that beneath the porch light of his beach house home verged on jaundice. New lines had multiplied from the old on his face, and the sunken eyes, while still sharp, were shot through with broken veins. They burned with ferocity and hatred, and they dared me to answer him, and since what he had said to me twice now was probably very true, I didn't respond.

  He grunted, contemptuous, then turned and led the way for Alena and me to follow into the house. Panno took up the rear, and like everything else he'd done, there was nothing threatening to it other than his position.

  As if Alena and I would have agreed to come this far only to make a break for it at the last moment.

  Trent led us down a hallway, turning off into an open sitting room that afforded a view of the beach through three large bay windows. The walls had that whitewash-plank feel to them, the trim along the windowsill painted in a moss green. Everything in the decor and coloration should have been cheerful, but instead it felt melancholic, the way beach houses always do. There was a desk against one wall with a PC, switched on, and shoved beneath it was a plastic milk crate stuffed full of papers. Two framed photographs flanked the computer on either side, and at first I thought both were of Natalie, then realized only one was; the other was a portrait of his late wife.

  Trent moved into the room, then turned, staying on his feet. He motioned to the various seating options, the easy chairs and the love seat, then put his attention on Panno.

  "There's chili on the stove, get some food in you."

  "We feeding them?"

  Trent snorted.

  Panno left the room the same way we'd entered it, leaving Alena and me standing at its entrance. Trent waited another few seconds, then repeated the refrain for a third time.

  "You don't deserve to be alive." This time, I was sure that, along with me, he was including Alena in the declaration.

  The view from the windows was spectacular. The house was off a street called Loder Avenue, and I could look out the windows and see the darkening beach in the sunset, the barrier islands disappearing beyond in the diminishing light. Come hurricane season, Trent would have a front-row seat.

  Alena surprised me by speaking up, saying, "I am sorry for the loss of your daughter, Mr. Trent."

  Trent's mouth worked slightly, as if he was searching for his teeth with his tongue.

  "Was it your bullet?" he demanded. "Is that what you're trying to say to me, it was your bullet that killed her?"

  "We didn't kill Natalie," I said.

  "Yes, you did." It was a growl. "You didn't shoot her, but you sure as hell did kill her."

  "You're wrong," I said. "And if you think that I had the power to make Natalie do anything she didn't want to do, you're deluding yourself. She went her own way, and she always did. She walked away from you and Sentinel. If she had wanted to, she would have walked away from me, too."

  "But she didn't." Trent glared at me. "She chose you over me, and you let her die."

  I should have let it pass. He was her father, and it was his grief, and if anyone was entitled to rage at the injustice of it all, it was Elliot Trent.

  "No," I said. "You don't get to accuse us of that, me of that. You've got your guilt because you think you drove her away, you lost her, you're welcome to it. You earned it. You don't like me, fine, you never have. You hate me-fine, maybe I've earned that, too. But I don't own Natalie's death, and neither does Alena, and if that's what you've been waiting eight months or three years or all your goddamn life to say, then we're done here."

  I turned my back on him, started out into the hall. After a fraction, I heard Alena moving to follow me.

  "Don't you leave," Trent said.

  I didn't stop.

  His voice was hoarse, and pained with the strain of the volume he put upon it. "Dammit, Atticus, don't leave!"

  Panno had appeared in the hallway to my left, coming out of the kitchen. He'd removed his jacket, and I saw that his T-shirt was actually a muscle shirt, missing its sleeves. There was light from the archway, and it spilled out, and I could make out a tattoo on his upper arm, a Chinese dragon in faded color. He had a bowl of his dinner in one hand, was eating a spoonful of it with the other. He didn't look like he was going to try to stop us.

  "You don't blame me for that," I said, without looking back at Trent. "You don't blame Alena, and you don't blame me."

  Behind me, I heard the creak of a chair, the sound of him taking a seat.

  "No," he said, and he sounded as tired as I'd felt this same morning. "No, all right. That's fair."

  I turned, and Alena and I moved back into the sitting room. Trent tracked us as we came back, then indicated the love seat. Alena took it, and I followed.

  "It's hard to remember that she was precious to people other than me," Elliot Trent said. "And it's difficult to accept that she was precious to people I dislike as much as the two of you."

  "Just had to throw that in there, didn't you?" I said.

  "I'm not going to pretend." He pointed at Alena with his right index finger, as if trying to stab her in the heart. "She's a murdering bitch, and you're her partner now, or so they say. Even if you weren't, I know what you did for her, I've learned that much, at least. She's a killer, no matter how she tries to change her stripes, and now you're one, too. Two of The Ten, sitting side by side in front of me. If you think I like that, it's you who's delusional, not me."

  Beside me, Alena didn't move. She wasn't looking at him, instead focused on the view out the bay windows. The room felt like it was growing darker, despite the lamps that burned on the wall and in the corner.

  "You've gone to a lot of time and a lot of trouble to speak with us, Mr. Trent," Alena said. "Perhaps you'd like to come to your point?"

  "In a moment. Given the time and the trouble I've taken, I'm allowed an indulgence or two. I've been waiting for this for almost three years."

  "Panno said it was eight months," I said.

  "This has been eight months, since the only thing I had left to go on was Drama's 'Mr. Collins' bullshit."

  "And before then, Elliot?"

  "Why did you come back?" he demanded, and it was as hostile as anything he had said to us before. "You and Drama, you were gone. No one would have ever found you. You could have stayed hidden until your sins finally found your address, you could have d
ied from old age before anybody knew you were still even alive. Why did you come back, Atticus?"

  "I had something to do."

  "And is it done, now? Have you done it? While you were killing Matthew Bowles in Montana and wrapping the Lynch PD's pants around their fucking ankles, have you managed to do what you set out to do?"

  "Not yet."

  "Because you don't know how. Do you? You're missing that one little piece you need, and you haven't the first idea where to find it."

  I stared at him, trying not to hope that he had what Bowles had died without sharing.

  "We want the same thing," Elliot Trent said. "We want the son of a bitch who murdered my daughter dead."

  Panno returned, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand, carrying a bottle of Budweiser in the other. He took the chair at the desk, turning it so he could watch the three of us while we spoke. Outside, night had dropped the curtain, and when there was silence in the room, all of us could hear the sound of the waves on the beach.

  "Explain him," I said to Trent after Panno had settled himself.

  "John's the son of a friend," he said. "He's going to help you out."

  "We don't want his help."

  "You're getting it whether you want it or not. I don't care how good she is, how good you think you are, you're going to need his help. He's got connections, he's my man on this, and the trouble you're in at the moment, you need both those things."

  "Just give me the name," I said. "I'll handle the rest."

  He laughed at me. "Simple as that, huh?"

  "Simple as that."

  "No." Trent shook his head. "You think if it was that simple, I'd need you? I'd need her? You don't have the first idea who you're going after."

  "He's in the White House."

  Trent reacted to that, mildly surprised. Panno gave a slight shake of his head.

  "And that doesn't scare you?" Trent asked. "That doesn't make you pause? What if I told you it was the President of the United States, Kodiak? What if that was the name I gave to you? Would you still be so full of yourself, so damn stupid, you'd take that on?"