The Interloper

by Dave Zeltserman

  Willis removed his finger from the rifle trigger. He needed to know which one it was—whether his target was a traitor who had almost infiltrated The Factory, or if he was a field worker, like Willis, who was now tagged for termination. It was possible the man washed out during the interview process, but it was also possible that he had been assigned to another training squad. That Willis hadn’t seen him again during his three-month training program didn’t mean that the man wasn’t currently connected to The Factory.

  Willis’s target was like a leaner and better-looking version of himself. Two years younger than Willis, same height, and about twenty pounds lighter. His name was Mark Foley and he had the same similar rough features that Willis had. Willis watched as Foley and his bull terrier jogged out of sight, then pushed away the branches that were covering him, grabbed the blanket he’d been using, and fixed the area to erase any evidence that he’d been there. Then he moved further back into the woods so there would be less chance of that bull terrier sniffing him out. He wanted to time Foley’s run.

  Chapter 7

  Willis returned early the next morning to the woods outside of Foley’s house, setting up further back. Like the previous morning, his target left the house at six thirty to go on his morning run with his bull terrier. This time, Willis had set up deep enough into the woods where he had to use binoculars, and while the bull terrier let out a couple of grunting-like barks, he made no attempt to take off in Willis’s direction. Once Foley and his dog were out of sight, Willis approached the house. The other day, Willis had tried researching his target’s background and found precious little about him online other than a résumé that had been posted four months earlier. All Willis could glean from that was that Foley held his last position for nine months before being laid off four months ago, and that he had been working as an account executive for an advertising agency.

  The Factory never included background information on their targets. Only a name, a photo, an address, and whether the target lived alone or not. Most of the time, although not always, they provided security alarm information. According to what they had posted on the bulletin board for Foley, he lived alone, which was inadequate. They should’ve known about the dog so they could’ve warned Willis about it. If they missed that, it was possible they could also have missed a new girlfriend or other recent overnight company. Willis was careful not to make any noise as he used his burglar picks to break into Foley’s house. He saw that Foley’s security alarm had been activated. He used the code that The Factory had provided and that did the trick in disarming it. The fact that the alarm had been set meant no one else was there, but Willis still moved quietly until he verified that. Then he went about looking for evidence that would indicate whether Foley was an insurgent who needed to be eliminated or a Factory field agent that needed retiring. While he found out that Foley was divorced and paying child support to his ex who now lived on the other side of the country and that Foley had served in the Marines, he didn’t find anything to answer the big question. It didn’t surprise him that Foley was ex-military. He expected that The Factory recruited mostly ex-military. He also found Foley’s day planner and noted the time and location of a meeting that Foley had scheduled in two days.

  Yesterday, Foley had been gone for an hour and fifteen minutes for his run—if that was what he was really doing. It was possible that he was instead meeting a contact with the insurgency. Whichever it was, Willis was giving himself forty-five minutes to search the house and then he’d get out of there, and when his watch buzzed him that his time had expired, he reset the security alarm and left the house. He didn’t bother going back into the woods. If Foley was running the same route as the other day, Willis would be able to watch him from his car.

  *

  Willis spent the next day watching Foley without learning anything. He could’ve ended things easily by waiting in the woods with his rifle and blowing Foley’s head off as he went for his morning run, but he didn’t do it. He gave himself the excuse that he wanted to get the truth out of Foley, find out which it was with him. But if it was just that, Willis could’ve slipped into Foley’s house when the man went on his run, then put the dog down when they returned and have plenty of time to interrogate his target. But he didn’t do that either. Instead, he chose a much riskier and more difficult plan, and one where he’d be throwing away his bonus. He didn’t understand why he was doing that. He wasn’t one for sentiment. So what was it? Why was he so reluctant to kill a man’s dog in front of him?

  The following day while Willis drove to the location so he could carry out his plan, he cursed himself out for the harebrained scheme he had settled on. He swore to himself that he wasn’t going to take any chances. If any glitches showed up, he’d abandon the plan and take care of his assignment the smart way by waiting inside the target’s home the next morning for when Foley and his bull terrier would return from their early morning run. Since he knew about Foley’s scheduled appointment, both the time and place it would be, he was able to make a good guess on the route that Foley would drive. He had scoped out the area and found a more or less deserted stretch along that route that was made up of abandoned warehouses. Once he got to that deserted area, he pulled over and waited for Foley. If Foley drove by and there was no other traffic, Willis would go through with his harebrained scheme. If Foley took a different route, then that would be that and Willis would have to take care of the matter the next day.

  Willis sat anxiously for twenty minutes, cursing some more for the sentimentality he was showing. Time was running out. If Foley was keeping his appointment and driving along the route Willis expected him to, he should’ve been there already. Willis was right about how deserted the area was. In the twenty minutes he’d been camped out there, only eight other cars had passed him. He was about to give up when he spotted Foley’s car in his rearview mirror.

  Willis swung into action then, pulling away from the curb as Foley passed him, then gunning the engine so he could catch up to Foley and force him off the road and onto a side street. The street was even more desolate than the main drag with only boarded up factory buildings with shattered windows, leading to a dead end. Foley had to swing the front end of his car onto a sidewalk littered with garbage and broken glass to keep from being hit. Willis angled his car behind Foley’s to keep him boxed in.

  They both left their cars at the same moment, Foley’s door slamming shut, Willis’s closing quietly. Foley was hot under the collar and too angry to realize what was happening and that he was already little more than a dead man. With his right hand clenched into a fist, he took two steps towards Willis, shouting, “What the fuck is your problem?” Then he stopped as he noticed the tire iron Willis held. He started smirking then as if he thought it was only a robbery and the joke would be on Willis when he saw how little money he had, but the smirk died quickly. Just as Willis had recognized him the other day through the end of a rifle scope, Foley must’ve realized why Willis looked familiar and where he had seen him before. Almost as if a switch had been thrown, his color paled. In a scared, panicky way he looked around and realized he was trapped with buildings on both sides and behind him and Willis in front of him. For an instant, it looked like he was going to try running or fighting, but then his eyes deadened and he stood glumly with his shoulders slumping. Without much to his voice he asked Willis what he was waiting for.

  “Are you working for The Factory?” Willis asked.

  Foley laughed. It was a weak laugh, not much to it. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why me?” His eyes shifted away from Willis and his head lowered as if he were waiting for the executioner’s blow.

  “Why?” Willis demanded. “Because either you’re a traitor or you’re one of us and you screwed up badly. Which is it?”

  Foley shook his head in response, his eyes cast down toward his feet. Willis moved in to hit Foley with the tire iron. Foley tried blocking the blow with one arm while stepping toward Willis so he could elbow him in the groin, bu
t Willis had been expecting some sort of move from his target, and so he moved quickly and swept Foley’s feet out from under him, sending him hard onto the pavement. Then he smashed the tire iron into Foley’s right knee, shattering it.

  “Which is it?” Willis demanded again.

  Foley lay on his back and grabbed his damaged knee, his eyes squeezed shut, his face locked in a rigor of pain. Then in response to Willis’s question he started laughing a wheezing, sickly laugh.

  Willis hit him several more times with the tire iron breaking more bones with each strike, but all Foley did was laugh his sickly, wheezing laugh that sounded more and more like a broken garbage disposal that was about to die out. He refused to answer Willis’s questions. They’d been on that side street for no more than three minutes, and while it seemed unlikely anyone driving by would notice them, especially with the way they were blocked out by their parked cars, Willis decided he’d been there long enough. There was always the risk that some curious cop might drive by. Besides, it was appearing even less likely he’d get anything out of his target. With a couple more blows from the tire iron, he finished Foley off.

  After moving his car, he swung Foley’s older model Ford around so it was parked properly and the rear of it was left less than a foot from Foley’s body. After popping the trunk open, he first wrapped Foley’s head with a towel so he wouldn’t get any blood on himself, then he dumped Foley’s corpse into the trunk and closed it. After that, he pulled the remote for Foley’s garage door opener off the sun visor.

  When Willis got back in his car and drove away, he started cursing himself for what he was going to do next, which he knew made no sense. Why should he care whether a dog starved to death or died of dehydration? It was stupid to put himself at risk like he was going to be doing. It was only more sentimentality on his part, and he didn’t understand it and was disgusted by it, but he still drove back to Foley’s house.

  As he pulled into Foley’s driveway, he used the remote to open the garage door, then drove in and shut the door behind him. He then used Foley’s keys to open the door connecting the garage to the house. He knew there was only minimal chance that he had been seen driving into the garage. Foley’s house was at the end of a cul-de-sac with woods bordering it, and Willis had watched the area long enough to know that at that time of the day the neighbors would be at work. Still, even though it was only a small chance, it was more than he should’ve been willing to take.

  From the back of the house, a fierce barking and growling started. Willis entered the security code on a panel next to the door to disable the alarm system, then followed the noise to a laundry room where the bull terrier was crated. Even though the dog was seventy-five pounds of solid muscle and had a powerful jaw that could kill, Willis wasn’t concerned. Dogs were pack animals and Willis would be the alpha male within any pack of dogs or men. With a steely eye fixed on the dog, he ordered him to stop and the dog submissively obeyed him. Willis opened the crate and the dog came out meekly, his tail between his legs.

  Willis originally was going to let the dog out of the house so the animal could find someone to take him in, but instead Willis started doing something even stupider that could put him at an even greater risk. He found a garbage bag in the kitchen and went through the house throwing all evidence of the dog’s existence into the bag. Dog food, treats, toys, water bowl, food bowl, leash, photos, anything he could find. As he did that, the dog followed close to his heels. Once he had the bag filled up, he went back to the crate, collapsed it, then carried it and the bag into the garage. He put the bag in his trunk and the collapsed crate into his backseat. He opened the passenger seat, and the dog jumped in. Then using the remote, he opened the garage door, drove out into the driveway, closed the door, and drove away.

  It was more than stupid. If the police discovered Foley had a bull terrier, then the dog could end up leading them straight to Willis. If anything about that was reported on the news, Willis would find a place to dump the dog. But the police might hold that information back, and still be looking for the bull terrier as a way to find Foley’s murderer. If the police caught Willis with Foley’s dog, what could he tell them? That Foley sold the dog to him? Maybe, but it was still stupid and sentimental of him to be doing what he was doing, and if The Factory ever found out about it they’d terminate him on the spot for his stupidity and recklessness.

  Willis grimaced severely as he tried to understand why he was taking the chance he was with absolutely nothing to gain from it. He noticed the bull terrier staring at him with an accusatory look, as if he suspected what Willis did to his owner. Willis turned his grimace to the dog, and the dog looked away.

  Chapter 8

  Later, Willis reported to Barry how he handled the assignment and that it might be a few days or longer before the police discovered the corpse. During his report, Barry remained quiet, and he let the silence build for a half a minute after Willis finished before commenting how it seemed as if Willis had chosen an odd way to complete his assignment.

  “Interesting,” Barry said, as if he were musing over the issue, although at the same time letting some annoyance slip through. “You have your target living alone on the end of a cul-de-sac bordering woods. I would’ve thought a home invasion gone bad would’ve been a more natural way to do this job. Or perhaps you could’ve simply hidden in the woods with a rifle. Very interesting that you would choose this riskier method with potentially more exposure.”

  “I thought killing him as a result of a road rage incident would be more believable to the police,” Willis said flatly. “A home invasion wouldn’t have made much sense to the police, nor an execution-style murder.”

  “Oh, come now. A home invasion could’ve been looked at by the police as the perps picking the wrong home, possibly mistaking the target’s home for that of a drug dealer. And nothing at all wrong either if the police had been led into thinking it was a paid hit.”

  “I thought a road rage killing made more sense,” Willis said stubbornly.

  Barry must’ve been running a stress analysis test on Willis’s answers, and was satisfied enough with the apparent truthfulness of them to let the matter drop. He asked instead whether the target had said anything to Willis while Willis was beating him to death. Barry had to be suspicious of that. Maybe he later discovered his screw-up of how Willis and Foley were in the same van together when they were taken to The Factory interview and training center. But he also had to be thinking that if Willis’s plan was to torture Foley to extract information from him, it would’ve made more sense to do a home invasion and have the time and privacy to get whatever information he wanted.

  “Nothing consequential,” Willis said. “He didn’t have much time to say anything. I shattered his jaw with my first strike so he wouldn’t be able to shout for help.” Willis paused, then added, “I recognized him. I think he might’ve recognized me also.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My target was in the same van as me when we were driven from Norfolk International Airport to The Factory headquarters.”

  There was a pause from Barry before he mentioned that some sort of mistake had been made. While his voice implied the right tone of irritation and surprise, he was lying.

  “You shouldn’t have been assigned to him,” Barry said. “I’ll look into how that happened.” Another long pause. Then Barry asked, “You weren’t interested in questioning your target about that?”

  “Not particularly. Should I have been? The way I figured it, he was an insurgent who almost infiltrated The Factory.”

  “That’s true,” Barry confided. “He washed out during the interview process for other reasons. We didn’t learn about his connection with the insurgency until recently.”

  “It’s a good thing he washed out then.”

  “Good thing is right.” Barry was satisfied enough with Willis’s answers to let the matter drop. He told Willis the bulletin board had already been updated with his next target, and when he finis
hed this one he could have three weeks off for vacation. “I’d have to think some extra cash would come in handy for whatever trip you have planned. So let’s see that you get your bonus for this assignment, okay, Willis?” He ended the call before Willis could answer him.

  The dog was lying on his side by Willis’s feet, an eye fixed on Willis. Willis reached down to scratch the dog behind his ear and the dog consented to let him do it. The fur was coarse like a brush bristle, the skull as hard as a brick. From his conversation with Barry, Willis felt certain that The Factory had no idea that Foley had had a dog. The dog let out a little pig-like grunt and rolled over onto his back, offering Willis his chest, and Willis complied by scratching it. He had returned home five hours earlier, and for most of that time the dog had a miserable time adjusting to his new surroundings. He was unable to lie quietly and got up every few minutes so he could whimper or let out some of his pig-like noises, then he’d walk to the door and scratch it. Willis had tried feeding him, but the dog had no appetite. He also tried driving the dog three towns over to a woodsy area to take him for a walk, but the dog only plopped himself down on the ground and moped. When Willis was a liquor salesman in Akron, he lived in a small apartment. Once he was hired by The Factory and he understood what his job was going to be, he decided to rent a house in a rural area where he wouldn’t have neighbors snooping around or prying into his business. There wasn’t another house within a quarter of a mile of where he was living, but even so, he wasn’t going to take the dog for walks near his house, at least not until he knew it was safe and the police weren’t broadcasting that they were looking for a man with a white bull terrier. Better to drive to that remote woods area.