Double Tap by Steve Martini Read Free Book Online Page B

lets the ankle chains drop down over the tops of his canvas slip-on sneakers again and looks up at me to see if I’m following.
    “You have to understand, I’ve been doing this for a long time, watching people get killed and killing people.”
    “You
what
?” says Harry.
    “In the military,” he says. “It’s called combat.”
    “Oh. Right.”
    “I didn’t kill Chapman, if that’s what you’re thinking. I would never do anything like that. I know it’s hard for some people to believe. They think somebody’s trained to kill and it’s like a switch they can’t turn off. They get out of the military and they have to satisfy some itch to kill. It’s not like that at all. Most soldiers I know could live very contented and happy lives if they never saw another drop of blood as long as they lived. But it’s a funny thing: You pull a trigger in combat and they give you a medal. Do it in civilian life and they put you behind bars, or worse. But in this one it wasn’t me on their radar screen; it was her.”
    “Who?”
    “The victim. The murderee. Who else? Madelyn. Excuse me—Miss Chapman. It won’t do for me to be too familiar with the victim, her being dead and all, and me being the one supposed to have killed her.” He suddenly stops and looks at me. “She is still dead?”
    “Oh, she’s dead all right,” I tell him.
    “You had me going there for a moment. Thought maybe the people at Spook Central had come up with a new program to raise the dead. At least they haven’t changed that part of the script.” He takes a drag and exhales some smoke. “Of course they start swapping out bodies on us, no tellin’ where we’ll end up. Get me for doin’ JFK from the grassy knoll before they’re done. The fact I wasn’t born till years after the deed is only a minor setback for these people. Blink and they’ll change reality for you.”
    “You’re telling us the government had a hand in this?” I ask.
    “Who knows? Anything’s possible.”
    “How well did you know the victim?” says Harry.
    “Not well enough. Otherwise I’d probably have a better idea who killed her. As for the list of her boy toys, if you want that, you’re gonna want to call in a stenographer to keep from getting writer’s cramp.”
    “Sounds like you knew her pretty well,” I say.
    “We had our moments. I provided security. She provided the surprises. There was a fleeting period she fit me into her schedule between her morning massage and her eleven-o’clock staff meeting. She liked to be on top. In control. That was Madelyn, always on top and always in control. She’d be up there, jumping up and down like she was breaking some bronco, gripping the hair on my chest with one hand while she waved her little digital dictator in the air with the other. In between groans of ecstasy and elation, she’d lift the pause button and spout a quick memo on some new project or government contract so her secretary could type it up between bouts.”
    “So you
did
have an affair with her?” There was some brief testimony at the preliminary regarding allegations, but since the defense never put on a case in this regard, it was unclear from the transcript what the line to be taken at trial would be.
    “I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call it an affair,” says Ruiz. “Fact is, I probably wouldn’t have even mentioned it, except they have it on tape.”
    “Let me get this straight,” says Harry. “You had a sexual relationship with the victim and the prosecution has a videotape of this?”
    Ruiz makes a face, weighing and evaluating the terms used in the question, then shrugs his shoulders. “Yeah. That pretty much sums it up. It was one of those little cameras: you know, the kind about the size of an eraser on a pencil. Apparently one of our own people installed the thing in her office without checking. Caught the whole thing on tape. Unfortunately for me, the cops now have the tape.”
    I can already tell what Harry is