Double Play Read Free

weekend, and that he’d just forgotten our call Saturday.”
    “And the tracker?”
    “Either it coincidentally died or he removed it temporarily, not wanting anyone to know where he’d gone, which considering . . .” He cleared his throat. “I know you two had a romantic attachment and that Quinn is convinced your relationship with Jack is . . . temporary.”
    “So you thought he snuck up here because we’re screwing around behind Jack’s back?”
    “I had to consider that. Or simply that he was attempting to change your mind.”
    Quinn and I were still friends. Would he come out here unannounced? He
can
be impulsive, and if he got it into his head that he could fix this “Jack nonsense” by talking to me face to face, he might very well hop on a plane. I highly doubted it, though. Not while Jack was here.
    Except Jack wasn’t here.
    To say Jack and Quinn don’t get along is an understatement. The problem is ninety percent Quinn’s. Jack’s uncomfortable with Quinn’s hard-core vigilantism, but his real issue is Quinn’s complete disinterest in hiding the fact that he thinks vigilantism grants him the moral high ground. To Quinn, I get to share that ground with him because I mix vigilante jobs with “victimless” mobsters-killing-mobsters gigs. To Quinn, Jack’s the worst kind of criminal—one who kills for money he doesn’t even need.
    When it comes to the job, ideologically, I prefer the vigilante work. But I’m still killing people for money. There is no justification that clears that particular moral slate.
    I’ve come to a better understanding of my motives—the deep-seated need for the justice my cousin, Amy, was denied when she was raped and murdered twenty years ago. She wasn’t the only one raped that night, and I’m sure there’s some of my own rage there. I survived. Amy did not. And now with both her killer and my rapist dead, little has changed. I haven’t taken a job since, but I will at some point. I don’t kid myself on that. It has become part of me.
    That’s no excuse. In this, I’m closer to Jack. As a teen he’d been recruited by an organization that made the IRA look like Boy Scouts. He joined because his brothers had, and once the group saw his crack marksmanship skills, they made him a killer. When he tried to get out, they murdered his family. No surprise, then, that the kid who felt he was only really good at one thing—killing people—turned his rage into a career doing exactly that. Yet he never uses that as an excuse. He made a choice, like I did. There is no justification.
    Given Quinn’s opinion of Jack, it’s not surprising he’s convinced our relationship is just temporary bad judgment on my part. Really bad judgment. Quinn believes Jack took advantage of a low point in my life, smarting from our breakup and dealing with the truth behind my rape and my cousin’s murder. That means Quinn just has to wait for me to come to my senses. And this, not surprisingly, was why we were struggling to keep our friendship from imploding.
    “Jack isn’t here, as you may have noticed,” I said. “But I hadn’t told Quinn that and Jack left after Quinn would have arrived. Quinn didn’t disable his tracker or ‘forget’ his appointment. He wouldn’t. Ever. If he’s vanished . . .” I inhaled sharply. “We need to find him.”
    “Do you know what he was working on recently? As a Marshal?”
    I nodded. “He doesn’t give me details but he shares enough that I know what sort of cases he has. Nothing on his current roster is the type where someone would want to . . . to stop him.”
Kill him
is what I meant, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.
    I continued. “First thing we need to know is whether he got on that flight. Can you check—?”
    “We have. He didn’t check in or cancel it.”
    “Yet you followed his trail up here anyway?”
    “I had to be sure he hadn’t bought a new ticket under an alias on a different flight in to keep under