The Triggerman Dance

"Joshua—that's perilous. It's stupid and it's . . . homicidal. Holt plans to kill her, and John, too. You know it."

He allowed himself the smallest of smiles. "Therefore, we have a reasonable assumption that a crime is about to take place. On those grounds, we can be there to prevent it. We'll take hit for conspiracy to commit the murder of Susan Baum. We'll add Rebecca later."

Her silence tried to accuse him, but Joshua Weinstein's conscience was beyond reproach. He was beginning to feel invincible now. He felt as if he had banged his head against the wall, and the wall had given.

"John is willing," he said.

"Of course he is. He needs Wayfarer just as bad as you do.

He looked into Sharon's level brown eyes and saw the terrifying evenness of her common sense, the endless flat line of he moral horizon—good above and bad below and nothing in between.

She went to the kitchen and poured herself more coffee. When she came back she sat at the far end of the sofa, away from Joshua and the cat.

Joshua could sense the envelope of tension around her, palpable as the buzz in a prison.

"I don't know what the right thing to do is," she said.

"Welcome to the human race."

"Fuck you and your hatred, Josh."

"It makes a better light than your doubt does."

"I don't like the doubt, either. It makes for weakness an< indecision. It's paralyzing. But this is the first time since coming to the Bureau that I haven't felt right about something. Some thing big, I mean. If this goes wrong, Josh, it goes wrong big."

"Then I'll be looking for work in the private sector. Maybe Holt could use me. I might open my own little dry cleaning business."

"You might be dead."

Thoughts of his own mortality couldn't dent him. The joy of victory, even the thought of victory swept the fear from Josh's mind. He looked at Sharon now, at her face behind the rising steam from her coffee cup. She's beautiful, he thought, isn't she? In a different way than Rebecca, but beautiful just the same.

"I'll do it alone, Sharon."

"Do you want me there?"

"Of course I do."

"I'm afraid of doing the wrong thing. Of getting someone innocent killed. Aren't you?"

"No."

"You should be." "It scares me that I'm not. So I'll do it alone."

"No, you won't. I won't let you. I never considered that, even for a second."

chapter 36

John had just ended his conversation with Joshua when he heard the cottage door open and close. He was upstairs in the cottage loft. His hands were jittery as he replaced the cellular unit under the sink cabinet, pressing it down into a box of cleaning products between two sponges of roughly the same size and laying the rubber gloves over them.

"Val?"

"No such luck, Bun-boy."

He heard footsteps across the hardwood floor. He quietly closed the cabinet and went downstairs.

Lane Fargo sat in the living room, an open Sports Illustrated draped over a crossed knee and a paper grocery bag beside his leg. He looked at John with his standard expression— mean spirited and noncommittal.

"Come to borrow some Pepto?" John asked. There was something in Lane Fargo so easy to detest.

"Not exactly."

"You still look a little peaked from Uganda. Bed rest, plenty of fluids."

"Feel great, actually. I've made some solid formulations lately."

"A firm stool can't be overpraised."

"Always talkin' shit, aren't you?"

Fargo tossed the magazine to the coffee table, uncrossed his legs and stood, never taking his eyes off of John. He made a fast sighing sound as he turned. John studied Fargo's dark, shadowy face. The vein throbbing in Fargo's neck and the one throbbing in his forehead kept the same cadence. His black widow's peak made him look simian. He had on his black t-shirt again, and the shoulder holster with the automatic jammed up along his rib cage.

"Look, Lane. You couldn't put me with Joshua What’s his name or Rebecca Harris, so why don't you just cave in and admit you were wrong? I'm clean. I won. Valerie kind of likes me, too. Go home and weep."

"That was the past," he said. "You beat me at it, like you beat me out at Olie's that day." At this, Fargo's dark visage crimped into a mock frown. "I'm more interested in the present, the right-now. Like in what happened to Snakey."

"Not him again."