Net Force Read Free Page B

one handgun.”
        She kept her voice level, as if talking about sports stats. She came from a family of expressive Bronx Italians who wore their hearts on their sleeves and who laughed hard or cried hard as needed. It was tough to keep the emotion from her words-she’d liked Steve Day and his wife-but it was her job.
        “Boyle and Day both returned fire. Boyle managed to get off twelve rounds, Day three. Porter has come up with a couple of deformed handgun slugs found on the street whose impact shapes indicated they hit something harder than Kevlar and bounced off. He’ll have to run the nose prints to be certain, but-”
        Alex cut her off. “The assassins wore armor, probably military-grade ceramic or spider-silk plate. What else?”
        “Over here.”
        She led him to a spot behind Day’s body. The coroner’s people were bagging the corpse, but Alex didn’t spare them or his friend a glance; he was all business now. “Day’s brass was found there, there, and over there.” She pointed at small chalk circles a few meters apart on the street. She moved a couple of steps, and pointed at the street again. “There’s a small, congealed blood ooze, right there, and a spray pattern of blood and brain tissue angled that way, behind the blood,” she said. She waited, knowing he would make the connection.
        He made it. “Somebody tagged one of the assassins, despite the armor,” Alex said. “Day would have known to shoot for the head. But the killers took the body.”
        “D.C. Police have set up roadblocks.”
        He waved this off. “This was a professional hit. The shooters won’t get caught in a roadblock. What else?”
        She shook her head. “Until we get the lab work, I’m afraid that’s about it. No witnesses have come forth. I’m sorry, Alex.”
        He nodded. “All right. Steve-Commander Day-ran Organized Crime for a long time. Crank up the system, Toni. I want to know everything about everybody Day ever talked to in his tenure at OC, anybody who had a grudge. And anything current we are working on. This looks like a New Mafia operation, it’s their style, but we don’t want to overlook anything.”
        “I’ve already got teams on it,” she said. “Jay Gridley is running the system stuff.”
        “Good.”
        He stared at the street, but his eyes were focused on something a million miles past it.
        She wanted to reach out, to put her hand on his arm, to help him carry the sudden load of pain she knew he shouldered, but she held her ground. It would not be appropriate here and now, she knew, and she did not want him to close that door, to turn away from her if she offered comfort. He was a good man, but he kept himself bottled up, never let anybody get too close. If she was ever going to slip past his iron wall, it would have to be with the greatest of care and subtlety. And, she knew on some level, it would be unfair to use the death of his friend to do it.
        “I’ll go with Porter to the lab,” she said.
        He nodded, but otherwise did not respond.
        
        Michaels stood in the middle of a run-down street in the middle of a run-down night, beset with the stink of burned gunpowder, hot camera lights and death, the sounds of police radios and working investigators, the buzz of onlookers held at bay by bored street cops. In the background in the distance, the whine of a maglev passenger train passing at speed, dopplering its way toward Baltimore.
         Steve Day was dead .
        It hadn’t really sunk in yet. He’d seen the body, seen that the light behind Day’s eyes was gone, leaving nothing but a shell, a hollow form where nobody lived any longer. Intellectually, he knew it, but emotionally, he was numb. He’d known other people who had died, some of them close to him. The reality of it never became true until days, weeks, months later, when you realized they were never going to call or write or laugh or show up at