The Big Bad Wolf

controlled shudder and spin.
    “Jesus Christ!” Mahoney shouted from the passenger seat.
    “Thought you were HRT,” I said.
    Mahoney laughed. “All right then, partner! Let’s go get the bad guy!”
    I steered the sedan through the bushes and found myself on a steep hill dotted with large rocks and trees. When the first branches cleared, I still had limited vision because of all the other trees. Then I saw the Porsche smack into a midsize oak and carom to one side. The car slid sideways another fifty feet before it finally stopped.
    Sphinx was down.
    Let’s go get the bad guy!

Chapter 108
    MAHONEY AND I WANTED Sphinx, and it was personal with me, maybe with both of us. I let our sedan roll another fifty or sixty yards. Then I braked and the car stopped. Mahoney and I jumped out. We almost slid down the steep hill, which was slippery with mud.
    “Crazy son of a bitch!” Ned Mahoney shouted, as we stumbled ahead.
    “What choice did he have? He had to run.”
    “I mean
you. You’re
crazy! What a ride.”
    We saw Brendan Connolly lurch out of the damaged Porsche. He held a handgun aimed our way. Connolly fired off two quick shots. He wasn’t good with a gun, but he was shooting real bullets.
    “Son of a bitch!” Mahoney fired a shot and hit the Porsche—just to show Connolly that we could shoot him if we wanted to.
    “Put the gun down,”
Mahoney shouted.
“Put the gun down!”
    Brendan Connolly started to run down the hill, but he was stumbling a lot. Mahoney and I kept gaining on him until we were only thirty yards or so behind.
    “Let me,” I said.
    Brendan Connolly looked back over his shoulder just then. I could tell he was tired, scared, or both. His legs and arms were pumping in a disjointed rhythm. He might work out in some gym, but he wasn’t ready for this.
    “Get back! I’ll shoot!” he shouted—almost right into my face.
    I hit him, and it was like a speeding tractor-trailer back-ending a barely moving compact. Connolly went down, rolling crazily. I stayed upright. Didn’t even lose my balance. This was the good part. It almost made up for some of our misses and failures.
    Connolly’s ignominious roll finally stopped after twenty feet, but then he made his biggest mistake—he got back up.
    I was on him in a second. I was all over Sphinx, and it was where I wanted to be. Mano a mano with this bastard.
He had sold his own wife—the mother of his children.
    I threw a hard right-handed shot into the bridge of Connolly’s nose. The perfect shot, or close to it. Probably broke it, from the crunch I heard. He went down on one knee—but he got up again. Former college jock. Former tough guy. Current asshole.
    His nose was hanging to one side. Good deal. I threw an uppercut into the pit of Connolly’s stomach and liked the feeling so much I threw another. I crunched another right into his gut, which was softening to the touch. Then a quick, hard hook to his cheek. I was getting stronger.
    I jabbed his broken nose and Connolly moaned. I jabbed again. I looped a roundhouse at his chin, connected, bull’s-eye. Brendan Connolly’s blue eyes rolled back into his forehead. The lights went out and he dropped into the mud and stayed there, where he belonged.
    I heard a voice behind me. “That how it’s done in D.C.?” Mahoney asked from a few yards up the hill.
    I looked up at him. “That’s how it’s done, Natty Bumppo. Hope you took notes.”

Chapter 109
    THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS were quiet—disturbingly, maddeningly so. I found out I was being assigned to headquarters in Washington, as deputy director of Investigations under Director Burns. “A big fat plum,” I was told by everybody. It sounded like a desk job to me, and I didn’t want that. I wanted the Wolf. I wanted the street. I wanted action. I hadn’t come over to the Bureau to be a desk jockey in the Hoover Building.
    I was given a week off, and Nana, the kids, and I went everywhere together. There was a lot of tension in the house, though. We were waiting to hear what Christine Johnson was going to do.
    Every time I looked at Alex my heart ached; every time I held him in my arms or tucked him into bed at the end of the day, I thought about his leaving the house for good. I couldn’t let that happen, but my lawyer had advised me it could.
    The director needed to see me in his office one morning during my week off. It wasn’t too much of a problem. I stopped in after I had dropped the kids off at school. Tony Woods,