Blowout

right?”
    “Yes, I’m all right, Dillon. I’m all right.”
    Günter was smiling. “You don’t screw with me, you hear? I am as much a professional as you are. When I ask you a question, you don’t smart-mouth me, you got that?”
    “Yes, I’ve got that.” Sherlock knew the numbness would fade soon and her arm would be on fire. But the wound wasn’t bad, he’d just wanted to scare her. His quiet threat of more violence scared her more than the bullet that had already torn through her flesh.
    Savich said, “Put the gun down now, Günter. There are a dozen more FBI agents surrounding the house. It stops here, now. There’s no way out for you.”
    Günter stared at him. “You set me up at Bethesda? And here in your own house?”
    “Yes, that’s right. I underestimated you once. I wasn’t about to do it a second time. Put down the gun and we can end this without any more killing.”
    Savich saw the instant Günter believed him, the instant he knew it was over for him. Something in his eyes went dead and flat. He was suddenly afraid that Günter would shoot both of them before he could be stopped. He had to keep him talking. “Tell us why you murdered Justice Califano, Günter. Why you murdered Danny O’Malley and Eliza Vickers. Why you still want to kill Elaine LaFleurette. This is your chance to tell us and the world. Tell us who was working with you, it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
    Günter continued to hold his gun locked on Sherlock’s chest. “You want the truth? All right, I’ll tell you a bit of truth.”
    He paused, his eyes calm now, resigned, and Sherlock would swear she saw relief there as well. He continued in a slow voice. “I am actually impressed with you, Agent Savich, as one professional to another. But the end must come for all of us, me, Califano, you—the difference is that while you have chosen it for me, you did not choose this ending for yourself. But I have. I knew some time ago my life was coming to an end. The only question was, how to end the drama, how to make the exit?
    “Do you know why I chose the name Günter Grass? Because my father was born in Danzig, as Grass was, and Grass wrote The Tin Drum, the story about where, and what, I came from. His Oskar’s world crumbled, and he built a life for himself with what skills he had, as I did. The Nazis literally sacked my parents’ home, destroying everything. Near the end of the war, it was a Polish judge who condemned my father to death. To save herself and me, still in her womb, my mother degraded herself, and slept with that judge, and so I am here. After my father’s death in front of a firing squad, my mother moved in with that judge. And then she married him, married the man who’d killed my father. She betrayed my father and slept with that monster. I never forgot. When I was seventeen, I became the judge and the executioner and avenged my father. I garroted both of them, just as I did that whore Eliza Vickers and her confidant Daniel O’Malley.
    “I called myself Günter in a long-ago life. Let me tell you about that Günter. For a very long time he killed to earn his bread. It was the only thing at which he was truly skilled, the only thing he had a taste for. All of his targets deserved to die—they were evil people, drug dealers, revolutionaries, fanatics, terrorists, or just simply criminals who’d corrupted those around them. And of course there were the dishonest judges who accepted payoffs, who kept mistresses. But he tired of cleaning up society’s mess and being hunted for it all the while. And so Günter ceased to exist, and I came here and became an American.
    “I thought it an act of fate—the complete turning of the wheel, if you will—when I saw Justice Califano kissing a young woman in the middle of the day in a small park, the two of them standing in the shade of an oak tree. There was no one else around. Except for me. She was laughing, kissing that old man’s mouth, her hands pressed against him, between them. This man was not just any corrupt judge like my stepfather—he was a Justice of the Supreme Court!
    “I watched them, and felt my rage build until I wanted to kill both of them right there in the park, but I knew that would be foolish and dangerous for me, and because I must be sure. And so I followed them to a condominium. I found out the young woman he was taking advantage of was one of his law clerks. I saw soon enough that he had obviously turned this young woman