Deadly Assets (Badge of Honor 12)

Payne met his eyes and nodded slowly.

“One who embraces,” O’Hara added, gesturing with his drink, “what Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War: ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’”

Payne, putting his drink back on the bar, saw that the bartender had left on the bar, next to a stack of cocktail napkins and short plastic straws, the TV remote control. He reached for it, then thumbed keys to change the channel to Philly News Now. Then he slipped the remote in the pocket inside his dinner jacket.

“There,” he said, smiling broadly. “That’s better.”

He saw, almost immediately, Daniel Patrick O’Connor’s head jerk as he looked toward the TV. O’Connor made a face, then began motioning for the bartender’s attention.

—

As Payne and Harris approached the yellow crime scene tape, Raychell Meadow came clomping up in her high heels toward them.

“Sergeant Payne!” she called out, holding on to the brim of her Action News! ball cap. “It’s good to see you again! Can I have a moment of your time?”

Again? We’ve never met, Payne thought.

She held out the microphone, sticking its black foam tip to just beneath his chin. Her video cameraman came in close with his lens, framing Payne with the smoldering stage in the background.

“What is your comment,” Raychell Meadow said, “on being declared Public Enemy Number One by Reverend Josiah Cross, who now appears to have been shot after publicly demanding your resignation from the police department?”

Payne looked her in the eyes, made a thin smile, then turned to Tony.

“Detective Harris, feel free to speak with the lady. Or not . . .”

Payne then smoothly ducked under the yellow police line tape and began marching purposefully toward the red door of the ministry, where some of his small crowd of undercover officers stood. He saw, on the smoldering stage, the lectern with his burned poster.

“Sergeant Payne!” Raychell Meadow called.

Payne, without turning or breaking stride, held his right hand up to shoulder height, fingers spread wide.

Harris thought: Is he about to fold everything but his middle finger . . . on camera?

Payne waved once, then put his arm back down to his side.

Raychell Meadow looked at Harris.

“Detective?” she said. “What do you—”

“No comment.”

And then he ducked under the yellow tape and moved with purpose to catch up with Payne.

IX

[ ONE ]

Queens Club Resort

George Town, Grand Cayman Islands

Saturday, December 15, 6:35 P.M.

“I’m going to kill him!” H. Rapp Badde Jr. shouted right after snapping closed his Go To Hell flip phone and then almost throwing it out into the shimmering Caribbean Sea.

The sun hung low in the western sky, an enormous sphere slowly sinking toward the horizon. Its rays, bathing everything in golden hues, cast long shadows across the five-star resort.

Guests of Queens Club, most carrying drinks, were gathering up and down the sugar-white sand beach to await what promised to be yet another glorious tropical sunset.