Prayer for the Dead by David Wiltse

under the door covering—the armrest was rigged to come down and I could pull it out and take care of Sal. But halfway there, Tony got a little bit smarter. I don’t know what it was, but suddenly he tells me to stop and he opens the door and kicks Terry Dwyer onto the highway and off we go again. So much for the rapport. Maybe there weren’t enough cameramen on the highway, so Tony had a chance to remember he was in deep shit. Whatever, all of a sudden I have Tony’s shotgun in my ribs and Sal’s got the Kalashnikov right back where it belonged.
    “We get to the airport, and I am driving very carefully now, believe me. I keep working on Sal, asking him to keep the AK-47 pointed away but he’s not buying it anymore, and when we hit the tarmac with all the airport lights and about a thousand more cops and the roar of the jets and the hostages in the back starting to wail because it looks like they’re going to have to escort our boys to Libya, old Sal’s discomfort level goes up about ten more notches. If I had sneezed, he would have blown my head off.”
    Becker stopped abruptly and returned to the window. After staring blankly for a few moments, he turned to Gold.
    “That should do it for today,” he said.
    “What happened just now?” Gold asked.
    Becker said, “This has been at least an hour; that’s enough for now.”
    “What made you stop? What did you remember?”
    After a pause, Becker said, “I saw Sal’s eyes. In my mind, I saw them very clearly. Clearer than yours. I haven’t had any reason to study yours.”
    “And?”
    “You know the most distinctive thing about his eyes? It wasn’t that they were scared or concentrated or dangerous. They were trusting. They didn’t trust me, or the situation, but you could see that this was the kind of guy who would normally trust people, things, life. He trusted his nitwit friend, Tony. He trusted in the ability of the assault rifle to intimidate me and everybody else. It wasn’t that he expected events to take an orderly progression; he’d been on the short end all his life, but even on that end, there were things you could trust. You could trust that might makes right, for instance. You could trust that a man with a weapon in his ribs and an automatic rifle point-blank to his head is not the man who is going to try anything to harm you … Once a man trusts you, once he thinks he knows what you’re going to do, he’s yours.”
    Becker started toward the door.
    “What did you do?” Gold asked.
    “It’s in your file.”
    “The file just says you shot him.”
    “That’s all I did.”
    “But why?”
    “Why? He was in the act of committing a felony with a deadly weapon. He was kidnapping eight American citizens, he was …”
    “But why you?” Gold interrupted.
    “I was supposed to.”
    “If Dwyer had been with you to take care of Tony. But even then you had contingency plans; there were snipers all over the place. The copilot was an armed agent, so was one of the stewardesses …”
    “That’s not all in the file. You did a little research.”
    “I told you, I wanted the assignment. Why did you go ahead with it? You could have just let them get out of the limo, and no one would have blamed you. Why did you do it?”
    Becker grinned at him from the doorway. “You’re going to have to work harder than that,” he said and left the room. He eased the door closed behind him.
     
    Dyce was startled to find the man lying in his living room. His mind had been so filled with his encounter with Helen that he had forgotten about the presence of the man. Even his resolve while shopping that he would not do this again had slipped his mind. The girl—woman—he did not know what to call her, how to think of her. She was probably not as young as he thought; women weren’t for some years. It was only when they reached their forties that women began to look their age and men looked younger. But there was something so trusting and simple about her