A Wild and Lonely Place Read Free Page A

I often told myself on those dark, lonely nights when my misdeeds caught up with me.
    I told myself that now, crossed the sidewalk, and pushed through the building’s lobby entrance. The armed guard at the desk
     looked up from his closed-circuit TV monitors, surprised. “Mr. Ripinsky’s not in the office this week, Ms. McCone.”
    I set my bag and briefcase on the desk and went over to the security gate. “I’m here to see Mr. Renshaw.”
    “Sorry, he didn’t tell me he was expecting you.” He made a cursory check of my things, then buzzed me in. Let me get your
     badge.”
    Since Hy had struck his deal with Renshaw and Kessell last winter, they’d kept my photo I.D. on file with those belonging
     to frequent visitors to the San Francisco offices. Not that I used it all that much; Hy seldom used any of RKI’s facilities,
     preferring to work out of his ranch in Mono County or the cottage we jointly owned on the Mendocino coast. He was, in fact,
     at the cottage right now, and I planned to join him on the weekend.
    The guard handed me the badge, and I attached it to my lapel. “Mr. Renshaw’s in the projection room,” he told me. “You know
     the way?”
    I nodded and went through an unmarked door and down a long white corridor.
    Renshaw was waiting for me in the last row of padded chairs, his feet propped on the one in front of it like a teenager at
     a double feature. I half expected him to be clutching a grease-stained bag of buttered popcorn. Wordlessly he indicated I
     should sit beside him, then fiddled with the buttons on the console between us. The lights dimmed and the projection screen
     shimmered.
    I’d sat here before, in this exact place, the day he told me he intended to kill Hy.
    “Do you mind if we go over the chronology of these bombings?” he asked.
    “That wouldn’t hurt.”
    A slide flashed onto the screen: a large, austere building, its windows blown out. Glass and rubble littered the foreground,
     and a military guard stared down at it as if he wondered where it had come from.
    Renshaw said, “Brazilian Embassy, Washington, D.C. March, nineteen ninety. The bomb was in a package delivered by mail, postmarked
     D.C. No fatalities, but the clerk who opened it was disabled.”
    A second slide replaced the first, showing a plain sheet of paper that bore a single sentence:
VENGEANCE IS MINE.
The letters were Italic—Palatino Italic, to be exact. Joslyn had told me they were a brand of rub-on lettering commonly sold
     in art and office-supply stores from coast to coast.
    “His message isn’t very original,” Renshaw commented, “but he makes his point. This was also postmarked D.C., arrived at the
     embassy the day after the bombing. No fingerprints, nothing distinctive about the paper or the envelope.”
    “As was the case with what they recovered of the packaging the bomb came in.”
    The next slide showed a black Lincoln Continental standing in front of a restaurant called Fino. The car’s doors had been
     blown off, and a body in a dark suit lay twisted on the backseat, legs extending toward the bloody pavement.
    I said, “Also D.C. August of ninety. The car belonged to the Saudi Arabian ambassador. He and some of his attachés were inside
     the restaurant. The package was on the backseat; apparently the driver noticed it and investigated. The same message, in the
     same typeface, on the same stationery stock, was delivered to the embassy the following day. Again postmarked D.C.”
    Renshaw clicked slowly through the next few slides. “He hit the office wing of the Pakistani Embassy in November of that year.
     No fatalities, same message the next day. Now we move to New York City.”
    Another slide: a torn-up living room. Large mirrors on its walls were shattered; their shards reflected a jumble of ruined
     furnishings. A primitive wood carving stood in the foreground, decapitated.
    I said, “Co-op apartment in the east eighties belonging to an official of Ghana’s United