Page 107 of Sting
“Okay,” Wiley said. “Friday night. What really went down? Why you’d call Ms. Bennett to the bar?”
“I’m coming to that.” Suddenly struck with a wave of dizziness, he propped his elbow on the table and tunneled his fingers through his hair. He was tempted to rest his forehead in his palm and close his eyes. But, afraid he’d be unable to reopen them, he lowered his hand, ignored the throbbing in his side, and plowed on.
“When I talked to Mickey from Mexico and he told me that Josh Bennett was on the loose, I figured he was the target we’d been contracted to hit. Then I got here. Shocker. Bennett’s sister was the target. Killing a woman? Jesus.” He shook his head. “Underscored just what a cowardly scumbag Panella is.
“But I had to appear indifferent to Mickey so I could stay cheek by jowl with the asshole and learn what I could. Mickey and I spent all day Friday following Jordie around Tobias. She went home around six. We watched her house for a while. It looked like she was tucked in for the night.”
“We had a sheriff’s deputy surveilling her,” Wiley said.
Shaw scoffed. “And doing a piss-poor job of it. He’d just as well have had a Maglite on his head. I spotted him right away, and I couldn’t believe he didn’t mark Mickey and me.” Looking at Jordie, he said, “You knew he was there, didn’t you? You shook him on the way to the bar.”
“Go to hell.”
He ignored the putdown. “Doesn’t matter now, I guess.” Turning back to his FBI colleagues, he continued, “Mickey and I went to a diner for supper, and that’s when he laid out the plan.”
“Plan A?” Jordie said with insincere sweetness.
Shaw looked at her, but didn’t respond. Wiley asked, “What was plan A?”
Shaw went back to Wiley. “To hit her early the next morning at her house. Make it look like a burglary turned deadly. Dumbest idea I’d ever heard and told Mickey so. It was rushed, rash, and breaking into her house was an engraved invitation to leave evidence.
“But Mickey said that was the plan. End of discussion. That’s when I realized that I’d be left dead, too. He’d brought me in specifically to take the fall. The clock was ticking. I had to stop it.”
“By calling her?” Hickam asked. “Why didn’t you tip the sheriff’s office, or us?”
“I’ll get to that,” Shaw said, hedging. “I went along when Mickey suggested we grab a drink at that joint before checking into a motel. Before we went inside, I excused myself and followed the arrow pointing around back to the toilet.” He looked at Jordie. “That’s when I called you.”
“How’d you know how to reach her?” Wiley asked.
“Panella had given Mickey the skinny on her, everything, including her cell number. Mickey shared it all with me ’cause he thought I would be dead in a few hours, so what did it matter?”
“So back to why you called her…” Wiley said, leading him.
“Mistakenly, I thought that crossing paths with her the night before the hit—especially with a local cop on her tail—would rattle Mickey and Panella enough to cancel it. At the very least postpone it. Which would have given me time to hang with Mickey, work from the inside, possibly track down Josh and, more particularly, Panella. But, instead of telling us to back off, Panella ordered Mickey to go ahead, to pop her then and there. I couldn’t let that happen.”
He paused and locked eyes with Jordie, willing her to remember what he’d told her before sending her out to Joe Wiley.
She said nothing for a moment, then a terse “Thank you for saving my life.”
“You’re welcome.”
But he was far from forgiven. Still seething, she grated out, “Why did you do the rest of it?”
Without excuse or qualification or missing a beat, he answered. “Because I want that goddamn fucking Panella.”
When he’d appeared in the open doorway, Jordie had barely contained a cry of joy. Now she wanted nothing more than to scratch out his damn lying eyes.
“I have nothing to do with Panella,” she said. “Since you have the skinny on me, you should know that. Once Mickey was out of commission, why didn’t you tell me you were FBI? Or just leave me there and drive away?”
“Because your brother is a friggin’ fugitive, Jordie. You’re the one and only link to him, and Panella is at the end of that chain.”
“In other words, you decided to use me as bait.”
“Okay. If you like that word better. I called you to the bar primarily to jinx the hit. But it served a dual purpose.”
“What was the other?”
“To test your loyalty to Josh. I dropped his name; you burned rubber getting there.”
