Free The Mozart Conspiracy by Scott Mariani Page B

looked up expectantly with his big black head slightly cocked to one side, the rubber ball clenched in his powerful jaws. The gentle Rottweiler was old for his breed but Kinski kept him in shape.
    ‘Give it, then,’ Kinski said gently. ‘One throw, and then we’re out of here. Should never have come here in the first place,’ he added.
    The dog dropped the ball delicately in his hand. It was slimy with saliva and mud. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ Kinski said to him. ‘Chasing balls all day would suit me just fine. Better than the shit I have to deal with, believe me, my friend.’ He tossed the ball away into the long grass and watched as the dog thundered after it, sending up a spray of frosty mud.
    Max hunted around for the ball, snuffling in the reeds. He looked hesitant, pawing the ground and turning his big head this way and that.
    ‘Don’t tell me you’ve lost it again,’ Kinski called out in exasperation. He walked over and searched among the reeds for a glimpse of blue rubber among the frosty grass and mud. The dog had flattened a lot of the rushes searching for the ball. ‘Nice going, Max,’ he muttered. ‘You know, those fucking things cost eight euros each, and how many is that you’ve lost now? Du Arschloch .’
    There were cigarette butts in the mud. Kinski drew his hand away, thinking of hypodermics. Fucking junkies shitting the place up.
    But then he looked more closely. He picked one up and examined it. It wasn’t a cigarette butt. It was a spent cartridge case. The brass was tarnished and dull, green in places. The rusted primer was indented in the middle where the firing pin had hit. Around the bottom of the case’s rim were stamped in tiny letters the words 9mm Parabellum—CBC.
    Who’s been firing nine-mil out here? Kinski thought. He rummaged in the grass. Max stood over him, watching fixedly. He bent back a frosty clump and found another. It was just the same. Then another, and then two more, lying half-buried in the yellowed roots. He pulled the grass back in fistfuls and kept finding more. After three minutes’ searching he’d gathered up twenty-one of them, using the end of a ballpoint to pick them up and lay them in a little pile.
    Twenty-one was a lot of brass. All lying in one spot. That meant a single shooter, firing all the shots from a fixed position. Too many rounds for a standard pistol, unless he was using an extended magazine. It was more likely a burst from a fully automatic weapon, about a second and a half from a typical submachine gun. Serious. Disconcerting.
    He examined each cartridge case carefully in turn on the end of his pen, careful not to handle them. They all had the same scrape marks where they’d been slotted into a tight-fitting magazine, and the same slight dent on the lip where they’d been violently spat through the ejector port. The scent of cordite was long gone. He dropped the cases one by one in a small plastic bag and stored it in his jacket pocket. He straightened up. He’d forgotten the ball. He estimated the throw from the ejector and tried to figure out where the shooter might have been standing.
    A thought began to form in his mind. There was nobody about. He reached down and brushed the dog’s head pensively with his fingers. ‘Come, boy.’ They walked back to the car. He opened the hatch and Max bounded inside, tongue lolling. The spare wheel was strapped to the inside wheel arch, and he unfastened it. He rolled it back down to the lakeside.
    The fog was thickening all the time, and when Kinski sent the spare wheel trundling out across the frozen lake all he could see was a fuzzy patch of blackness against the grey ice. The wheel rolled to a halt, then fell over and lay still. The ice held its weight.
    He reached inside his jacket and popped open the thumb-strap of his holster. He flipped off the safety on his service SIG-Sauer P226, looked around him, then fired at the ice where the wheel lay. The flat report of the 9mm