Page 57 of Pro Bono

“Yes, I am,” Ollonsun said. “I headed us for this a long, long time ago. It was my fault. I admit that. But now is a different situation. We have wives and children who depend on us, and need us. These people are endangering our lives and the futures of our families. It comes down to: Are we going to let our enemies kill us, or are we going to make our enemies die instead? Simple. We have guns. We have tonight. After that, we’ve got nothing.”

“I don’t know, Pat. This feels really drastic.”

“Ron, you told me less than five minutes ago you had begged your cousin’s widow for a gun to kill yourself. That’s not drastic?”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“Pick me up in your car. I need to get some things together.” He hung up and waited for a few seconds for Ron to call back and abandon him, and then went to the garage and picked up the unopened can of turpentine from the row of paint, brushes, rollers, and things leftover from the painters.

Patrick Ollonsun and Ronald Talbert sat in Talbert’s black SUV about two hundred feet from Charles Warren’s condominium. Ollonson said, “The ones on the first floor have to be one, two, three, and four. Then it goes five and six in front, and seven and eight in back. Second floor, right front has to be his.”

“His lights are still on,” Ollonson continued. “He’s probably working late up there, figuring out how to destroy somebody else’s life. I readthat he’s big in the divorce business. He’s even probably up there getting ready to sleep with the latest divorcée.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Talbert said.

“What? You hadn’t thought of that yourself? Do you think after you lose Francesca she’s just going to stop living or dissolve into thin air? She’s young and pretty and healthy. She’ll have about fifty years of life ahead of her. She’s also going to be a woman with three kids and a mortgage, and she’s nowhere near stupid.”

“I just didn’t need that right now.”

“Maybe knowing it in advance will help. I factored it into my misery inventory as soon as I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get past this Vesper Ellis thing. I’ll bet Christina has been thinking about a future without me even before this. She’s been talking to me in a sort of snide way for months. And she keeps buying this incredible lingerie and wearing it—the low-cut, clingy kind you can sort of see through. I think she’s reminding me what a prize she is, and at the same time, telling me what a disappointment I am. Wait until she knows everything.”

“Fran hasn’t been that way at all.”

“I’m not losing sight of the fact that Warren is hurting Fran and Chris too, maybe more than us. Speaking of that, you did bring the keepsake you asked your cousin’s widow for, right?”

“It’s in the glove compartment,” Talbert said.

“I hope you thought ahead to buy some ammunition.”

“Tim had a box of it on the same shelf of the gun safe, so she gave it to me too.”

“I hope you thanked her.”

Talbert didn’t want to relive the searing experience of asking her and then feeling her contempt, so he said simply, “I did.”

Ollonsun opened the glove compartment and took out the pistol. “A Colt Python .357 Magnum. That ought to do it.” He opened the box to reveal the bullets. They made Talbert think of hornets in their compartmented nest. Ollonsun said, “I’ll load it for you.” He opened the cylinder and pushed six bullets into it and then clicked it back into the frame. “There. All ready to go.”

They watched and waited. At seventeen minutes after twelve the timer in the living room socket clicked over to the next minute and the light in the window went off. At twenty-three minutes after, the timer in the spare bedroom clicked and cut the power to the reading lamp there, and that window went dark. “It looks like he’s going to bed,” Ollonsun said. “Let’s give him a little time to actually get to sleep before we make our move.”

“That’s one of the things I’ve been wondering about,” Talbert said. “What, exactly, is our move?”

Ollonsun shrugged. “We’ve lost our jobs, we’ve lost the chance to work in finance again. But the worst thing is still on the table. Right now, the odds are that both Great Oceana and Founding Fathers are going to decide that their best hope is trying to pay off the clients and make it like nothing ever happened. The problem is that even though the bosses see it that way, this woman and her lawyer are refusing to let it go away. I did everything I could to avoid things getting to this point, but now the only way to make our problem go away is to make the people go away. You know that now, right?”

“I guess I do. But frankly, I started by shaving little slices off some accounts that the owners never even missed. And it seems like no time at all, and here I am with a loaded gun in my glove compartment waiting to murder a man I’ve never even seen. And then her too, right?”

Ollonsun sighed. “You may recall that I hired people to just scare them off, so we had a chance to avoid it coming to this.”

“You gave them my money, and all they seem to have done was disappear with it.”

“I’m just saying that my motive all along was to avoid getting ourselves directly involved. But sometimes you have to do what’s necessary to survive.”

“Yes,” Talbert said. “I think that’s true. And it’s why I’m here. I think we should decide exactly what the plan is before we go get him.”

“We have to be open-minded. I brought the turpentine and a lighter in case there’s a chance to make it look like a household fire. Even having it look like arson would do, because arsons are usually done by the owner for insurance. Not only would Warren be a suspect, but so would the other seven condo owners.”

“That’s a problem, though. We might be killing eight people, or however many people live in the building.”

“We have pistols. We can shoot him. A lawyer like him must have a hundred enemies. It’s possible he has a gun too, so we can’t hesitate. We find a way into his place, rush into his bedroom, and open fire right away. The .357 magnum you have has much more stopping power than a nine millimeter like I have, but that means it will have a kick, so be prepared for it. Hold it in both hands and put a round in his chest. Ideally the second round goes into his head, and we go out whatever way we came in. We can take a few seconds to steal whatever we can see—his wallet, watch, computer, that kind of thing.”

---