Horns of the Devil - Jeff Trask [02] Read Free

yet?”
    “Yeah,” Sivella winked. “I called Bill Patrick at the US Attorney’s office right after you radioed from the scene. Told him we needed his best on this one. It’s Jeff Trask. Any objections?”
    Carter shook his head. Trask was the best he’d seen in the US Attorney’s office, with the possible exception of Bob Lassiter, and Lassiter was dead now. Trask was the best choice Patrick could have made. Aggressive, no-nonsense, and smart as hell.
    “No, and I don’t think Agent Doroz will have any, either.”
    “Good. Let me know when you hook up.”

    August 9, 6:20 p.m.
    From a chair in the back of his favorite restaurant in Georgetown, Jeffrey Ethan Trask, Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, looked around the room. His back was to a wall, as usual. No Jack McCall sneaking up from behind. I won’t make the Hickock mistake. Wild Bill violated his rule only once, and it killed him. He opened the filing cabinets in his mind and allowed the images and data to flow freely, waiting to settle on one in order to control the cacophony of his thoughts. The music being piped in was cycling through some late fifties hit parade and early sixties soft rock.
    That music will do for now.
    He had always found the songs to be a soothing way to focus when his mind wasn’t concentrating on a task at hand. He closed his eyes and challenged himself to name the next song in as few notes as possible. It took him just two. “It’s All in the Game.” Tommy Edwards’ biggest hit. Number one on the charts for six weeks in 1958. Lyrics by Carl Sigman, music by Charles G. Dawes, who happened to be vice-president under Silent Cal Coolidge. The only hit ever to be co-written by a vice president of the United States.
    Trask smiled. His command of trivia had earned him many a t-shirt or free drink in bars scattered across the South while he was an Air Force JAG traveling prosecutor.
    He was waiting for the next song to begin when he saw her enter from the street. He felt himself smiling. No trouble focusing now. She was still the most perfect thing in his life, the anchor in all the madness. Five-five and a nicely proportioned one-hundred-and-twenty pounds, dressed in black slacks and a teal blouse that perfectly set off her deep brown eyes. All the file cabinets in his head remained closed when she was with him. Lynn kissed him as he held her chair while she sat down.
    She saw his fingers drumming on the table.
    “What song is running through that fevered brain of yours?”
    “ My Girl. Temps.” He smiled.
    “Yeah, I’ll bet.” She rolled her eyes.
    “Whenever I see you,” he said. “How’s the new job?”
    “Not bad, I guess. I’m going to have to get used to the support role and not being an active street agent.”
    Trask smiled again and shook his head.
    “What’s the big joke?” she asked.
    “ I’m going to have to get used to the idea that I’m married to an old retired woman.”
    Lynn Preston had been a Special Agent with the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations. She had worked several long-term undercover operations, invariably resulting in perfect conviction rates and sending many military drug-dealers to spend hot summers and bitter winters at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Trask had met her at a base in Florida where she had done one of these undercover stints. That operation had generated dozens of courts-martial and a very strong mutual attraction. Trask had left the air force after fourteen years of active duty to become a federal prosecutor. Lynn had been reassigned to Andrews AFB, Maryland, and a chance meeting there on one of Trask’s monthly days as a JAG reservist had led to their marriage a few months later. She had stayed on active duty for the retirement, but left the moment her twenty years were up. She’d just landed a job with the FBI as an analyst.
    “You forget that I enlisted when I was six,” she quipped.
    “You look like that might be