"Do you remember coming here as a kid?" asked Kurtz, sipping his coffee and watching what little movement there was in the cavernous space. Many of the mothers seemed morose and sullen, their kids hyperactive.
"I remember stealing stuff here as a kid," said Rigby. "The old women would scream at me in Polish."
Kurtz nodded. He knew other kids from Father Baker's who'd come up here to grab and run. He never had.
"Joe," said Rigby, setting down her coffee mug, "you didn't ask to meet to ramble on about old times. Did you have something you wanted to talk about?"
"Do I have to have an agenda to have coffee with an old friend?"
Rigby snorted slightly. "Speaking of old friends and agendasyou know another ex-con named Big Bore Redhawk?"
Kurtz shrugged. "Not really. There was some guy in Attica with that absurd name, but I never had anything to do with him."
"He seems to want to have something to do with you," said Rigby.
Kurtz drank his coffee.
"Word on the street is that this Indian's been hunting for you, telling people in bars that he has a grudge to settle with you. Know anything about this, Joe?"
"No."
Rigby leaned closer. "We're hunting for him. Maybe the grudge he had with you got itself worked out in that parking garage and Peg O'Toole. You think we should question him?"
"Sure," said Kurtz. "But the Indian I remember in Attica didn't look like the twenty-two caliber type. But that's no reason not to talk to him."
Rigby sat back. "Why'd you invite me here, Joe?"
"I'm remembering some of the details of the shooting."
Rigby looked skeptical but kept listening.
"There were two men," said Kurtz.
The detective folded her arms across her chest. She was wearing a blue oxford shirt today and a soft, camel-colored jacket with the usual jeans. Her gun was out of sight on her belt on the right. "Two men," she said at last. "You saw their faces?"
"No. Just shapes, silhouettes, about forty feet away. One guy did the shooting until I hit him. Then the other grabbed the twenty-two and started firing."
"How do you know it was a twenty-two?" asked Rigby.
Kurtz frowned. "That's what you and the surgeon told me. That's the slug they pulled out of O'Toole's brain and found next to my skull. What are you talking about, Rigby?"
"But you weren't close enough to make out the type of twenty-two?"
"No. Aren't you listening? But I could tell from the soundphut, phut, phut ."
"Silenced?"
"No. But softer than most twenty-twos would sound in an enclosed, echoing space like that. Sort of like they'd dumped some of the powder in each cartridge. It wouldn't make much difference in muzzle velocity, but it sure cuts down on the noise."
"Says who?" asked Rigby.
"Israel's Mossad for one," said Kurtz. "The assassins they sent out to get payback for the Munich Massacre used reduced loads in twenty-twos."
"You an expert on Mossad assassins now, Joe?"
"No," said Kurtz. He set the remaining half of the donut aside. "I saw it in some movie."
"Some movie," said Rigby and nibbed her cheek. "All right, tell me about the two men."
Kurtz shrugged. "Just like I saidtwo silhouettes. No details. The guy I hit was shorter than the guy who picked up the pistol and kept firing."
"You're sure you hit one of them?"
"Yeah."
"We didn't find any blood on the garage floorexcept yours and O'Toole's."
Kurtz shrugged again. "My guess is that the second shooter crammed the wounded man in the backseat of their car and took off after I went down."
"So they were shooting from behind their own car?"
"How the hell should I know?" said Kurtz. "But wouldn't you?"
Rigby leaned closer, her right elbow on the counter. "I sure as hell wouldn't use a twenty-two to try to kill two people from more than forty feet away."
"No, but I don't think they planned to shoot so soon," said Kurtz. "They were waiting for O'Toole to go to her car just past where they were waiting. Then the shooter would have stepped out and popped her from a couple of yards away."
Rigby's dark eyebrows went up. "So now you know they were after the parole officer, not you. You're conveniently remembering a lot today, Joe."
Kurtz sighed. "My car was down the ramp to the right. The shooters were on the ramp where O'Toole's car was parked."
"How do you know that?"
"She was walking in that direction," said Kurtz. "We both saw it on the tape." He braved another nibble of donut.
"Why two men but only one shooter?" hissed Rigby. They'd been whispering, but they were speaking loudly enough now that one of the waitresses in red polka-dot flannel
pajamas looked over at them.
"How the fuck should I know?" Kurtz said in a conversational tone.
Rigby plunked down a five dollar bill for the two coffees and donut. "Do you remember anything else?"
"No. I mean, I remember pretty much what we saw on the security videotrying to drag and carry O'Toole back to the door, or at least behind that pillar, and then getting hit."
Rigby King studied his eyes. "That bit about rescuing O'Toole, risking your life to carry her to safety, didn't strike me as the Joe Kurtz I used to know. You were always the living embodiment of the theory of sociobiology to me, Joe."