The Interloper

by Dave Zeltserman

  “Yeah? What about Melanie Hartman, the target you gave me?”

  Barron shook his head sadly at Willis. “She’s the exception. You’re always going to have exceptions. But goddammit, Willis, you should understand this better than anyone. I saw your folder. You were a top sales rep for your industry when you were laid off. How much luck did you have finding another job? And guess what? Since you’ve been with us the situation has only gotten worse.” Barron forced a toothy smile and in a more chummy manner added, “We all make mistakes, Willis. I can understand you flying off the handle the way you did, but now that you see how things really are, how about we try to fix this? It’s not too late.”

  Willis stood rubbing his jaw with his left hand as he considered what Barron had told him. For a while he forgot that Barron was there. When his gaze shifted to meet Barron’s, he shook his head.

  Barron sneered in contempt. “Then what the hell is it that you want? To kill me? Are you that pedestrian? Is that what you think you need to do to make everything alright?”

  “I want names,” Willis said. “Your boss, anyone else above you, any of your fellow supervisors.”

  Barron’s sneer turned into more of a look of self-righteousness. “You’re not getting anything from me,” he stated.

  “You have a family, don’t you, Tom?” Willis said. “I could hurt them if I had to to make you talk. I’ve already killed a lot of people thanks to you. A few more won’t matter.”

  Barron shrugged indifferently. “Do what you have to.”

  Willis lowered himself so he sat on his heels and was eye level with Barron. “I’m guessing after Johnson called you, you had time to send personnel to your home while you were running out of the office. One or two men aren’t going to help. Unless you sent a lot more than that to protect your family, I’ll be able to get to them.”

  “Again, do what you have to.” Barron had looked away from Willis, but he turned to meet Willis’s gaze, his own eyes every bit as much steel as Willis’s. “Unlike you, I’m a patriot. I’ll sacrifice whatever I have to for this country, including my family.” With defiance burning in his eyes, Barron added, “There’s not a damn thing you can do to make me talk.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Willis went to work. After fifteen minutes, it was obvious that he wasn’t going to get anything out Barron, and he stepped away.

  Panting, Barron yelled at him in a croaking voice, “You’re a coward, Willis! You don’t have the stones for a little torture! How the fuck did you ever kill twenty-five men?”

  Willis didn’t respond. He left Barron yelling at him as he walked back to the attached garage. Bowser sat sulking in the backseat gnawing angrily at the rubber ball. Willis put his hand under the dog’s muzzle and ordered him to drop it. The dog complied.

  “I’ll be back in one minute,” Willis told him, and he left the dog again in the car. When he walked back in the foyer, Barron was still yelling at him, his voice more hoarse, a triumphant glee in his eyes.

  If he had been in a high-budgeted action movie Willis might’ve come out with some catchphrase, such as ‘I’m laying you off,’ and then pump several bullets into Barron’s brain. But it wasn’t a high-budgeted action film, so instead he ignored Barron’s insults and simply walked over and pinched Barron’s nostrils closed. When Barron opened his mouth to gasp for air, Willis shoved the rubber ball deep in there while still keeping the nostrils pinched shut. Less than a minute later, Barron slumped to the side dead.

  Willis had already made peace with what he was going to do next. He had names for two other supervisors, as well as knowing that Colonel Jay T. Richardson ran The Factory. Maybe he’d be able to get more names too from Barron’s cell phone. He was either going to work his way up from the bottom or down from the top, but one way or the other he was going to do what he could to blow up The Factory and put them out of business. He would have to abandon every aspect of his past life, but he was fine with that. It wasn’t as if he had any connections to anyone or anything. He would also have to live on the fringes, rob, or commit other criminal activities to survive and fund his war against The Factory. He had decided he was fine with that, too. Besides, it wasn’t as if he had any choice. He wasn’t going to commit any more murders for The Factory, not after discovering the truth. If he ran they’d hunt him down until they found him. If he fought back he’d have a chance, and if nothing else, Willis was a pragmatist.

  He left Barron lying dead on the floor. He didn’t bother pulling Bowser’s ball out of the dead man’s throat figuring he could buy Bowser another one. Instead he walked back to the garage, and got in Barron’s Buick Regal. Bowser growled out one of his pig grunts as Willis pulled the car out of the garage and drove away, almost as if he were asking whether Willis was done yet. Willis nodded, although he was far from done. First off, he was going to have to dump the car and get another one under a fake name. It shouldn’t be that much of a problem. But that was only the first of many things he was going to have to do.

  He felt tired all of a sudden. More so than he’d felt in a long time. He needed to go back to his rented shack and rest for a day or two. He and Bowser had a long road ahead of them.

  Part Two

  The Dame

  Chapter 1

  The poker game they were going to hit had been underway for two hours in the neighboring hotel suite. Seven men of different shapes and sizes sat around a circular table, all of them intent on their cards and their bets. It was supposed to be a mob game, but one of the men was a major league ballplayer, another a well-known actor. Also hanging around were three other men who were there presumably to provide protection, although they performed other errands as necessary, such as pouring drinks. All three of the muscled thugs were built more like small bulls than men with thick bodies that showed barely any neck and all of them looking stiff and unnatural in their suits. All three were also packing. Two of them sat reading the newspaper, the third stood stone-faced as he watched the game. Dan Willis had earlier broken into their suite when it was empty and strategically hid surveillance cameras, each of them no bigger than a quarter, and he now watched the suite on a computer monitor that was split into three screens. At different times, he’d been able to make out bulges that showed holstered guns on all three of the goons acting as protection. He hadn’t yet been able to tell if any of the players were carrying.

  In the same room with Willis were three other men: Pruitt, Lowenstein, and Hack, although Willis didn’t know whether these were their real names or not, nor did he care. The name they had for him was Burke. Although he had paid a lot of money for a safe cover identity, he was no longer using Willis, even for his criminal activities. The Factory was looking for him. He couldn’t afford to risk any crew members he worked with giving up his real name to the authorities if they were picked up. So now he had two cover identities; Jack Connor, which he used as his civilian identity, and Burke, with no first name given, for his criminal associates.

  Pruitt sat on a sofa on the opposite side of the room, a hard sneer frozen on his narrow face. He had harsh, bony features and a sallow complexion, and his right knee bounced up and down as if he were aching for violence. He was in his mid-thirties, on the short side at five feet six, and thin and hard as a knife blade. A bundle of raw nervous energy waiting for an opportunity to bust loose. In contrast to him was Lowenstein; a large man of about fifty with an overall softness about him, who sat like a Buddha on the same sofa as Pruitt, his eyes crinkling good-naturedly and his lips pulled up slightly into an amused smile. Rounding out the team was Hack, who stood with his back to the room and an eye pressed against the door’s peephole. He was in his late forties, a mostly nondescript man with thinning hair, slight build, and a fair complexion. Just a face in the crowd who, if he entered a room, you’d barely be able to remember later. Hack turned from the peephole to tell them that the room service cart was heading their way.

  “About time,” Pruitt said, his voice high-pitched and nasally. In a
jerky motion, he grabbed the ski mask laying on the sofa next to him and yanked it over his face. As he popped up off the sofa, he grabbed the .40-caliber handgun that he had earlier stuck inside his waistband, and slid the safety off.

  Willis shook his head. “Not yet.”

  Pruitt had taken a step toward the door. He stopped and gave Willis a hard stare. His voice got tighter and more high-pitched as he demanded to know why not. “The plan we agreed to was to follow room service into the room.”

  “One of the players is in the bathroom.”

  Pruitt froze for a long moment before turning to Lowenstein, his eyes darkening under his ski mask. He knew as well as Willis that they couldn’t hit the game while one of the players was locked away in the bathroom, but he was too hyped up to allow himself to back down.

  “Is this joker in charge now?”

  Lowenstein only looked more amused than before as he asked Pruitt to sit down. “For Chrissakes, Charlie. You’ll get your chance to bust some heads soon enough. Relax for now, okay?”

  Pruitt stared bug-eyed at Lowenstein, the other man’s humoring and dismissive tone only seeming to infuriate him more. “So you’re saying he’s in charge,” he forced out in a strangled voice.

  Lowenstein sighed heavily before telling Pruitt that he wasn’t saying anything of the kind.

  “That’s exactly what it sounds like,” Pruitt complained, his tone now more injured than angry. He pulled his ski mask off. “We plan the job, we fund it, and we let him in as a favor to help him get his feet wet, and now you’re letting him call all the shots?”

  Lowenstein’s eyes took on a more glazed look as some of his amusement dried up. “Chrissakes, Charlie, he’s not calling the shots, okay? But he’s had good ideas and what he’s saying now makes sense,” he said. “So stop it. We don’t have time for this.”

  What Pruitt said was technically true. They knew the place and location of the game, and that there would be at least a hundred grand for them to take. And they added Willis to the crew at the last moment. But their plan was to hit the game in fake police uniforms, which probably would’ve ended with everyone getting shot up; the players, the hired muscle, and the crew hitting the game. Willis insisted on checking out the hotel and the suite before agreeing to do the job. It was his idea to break into the suite ahead of time so he could hide surveillance cameras, as well as use the neighboring suite for their operations. If he hadn’t planted the cameras and set up surveillance, they wouldn’t have known about the armed protection, or the combination to the safe that sat in the hotel suite—the same safe that now held all the money for the game.

  If the safe had been one of the ubiquitous electronic room safes that almost all hotels provide these days, it wouldn’t be a problem not knowing the combination. One of Willis’s souvenirs from his time with The Factory was an electronic gizmo that looked about the same as an iPod and could reset those electronic safes. But the safe was a real one with tumblers that was cemented to the floor, and without the combination the job probably would’ve been a bust no matter how they did it. Maybe they could’ve tortured or scared the combination out of the player that had it, but only if they had enough time and knew which player it was. It was also Willis’s idea to skip the cop uniforms and follow room service into the suite, and while that was no longer going to work, they could still get into the suite whenever they wanted thanks to another souvenir of Willis’s from The Factory—a device that looked a lot like a credit card and could override the electronic lock on almost any hotel room door. So now the plan had to be to wait until the player left the bathroom and they could catch the muscled thugs off guard enough so that they could take over the suite without shots being fired.

  Pruitt sat back down on the sofa, but continued grousing over his perceived injury of letting a nobody like Willis take over their heist. As far as Pruitt knew, Willis had a military background but was completely green as far as heists went. While it would be Willis’s first robbery, he was far from green after his time with The Factory. Willis could’ve corrected Pruitt’s misunderstanding concerning his lack of experience, but he didn’t bother. For a brief second, he considered getting up and smacking that borderline psycho upside his head and then walking away from the job, but he stayed put. The score was going to be an even split, and he needed the money. His buying a cover identity cost him a good chunk of what he had, and he was finding that living outside of society was far more expensive than he had anticipated. While the lack of professionalism that Pruitt and the rest of the crew showed bothered him, the job was shaping up to be quick and simple regardless. He would have to trust that he could keep these clowns in line once they hit the poker game. After making up his mind to continue on with the robbery, he focused his attention solely on the computer monitor, and Pruitt’s complaining became little more than a nasal drone buzzing in his ear.

  The room service cart must’ve reached the neighboring suite. Willis watched the way the room’s inhabitants responded as the hotel employee knocked on their door. No reaction from any of the players, nor from the two thugs reading the newspaper, neither of whom bothered to look up. The thug who had earlier been standing as if he were a stone gargoyle watching over the game, showed no change in expression as he moved to the door and glanced out the peephole. Without any hesitation, he opened the door and walked out into the hallway. Willis couldn’t tell what was going on there since he hadn’t planted any surveillance cameras in the hallway, but guessed that the thug was sending the hotel employee on his way and that he’d be wheeling the cart in himself. Seconds later, the door opened and the thug wheeled the service cart into the suite, and only seconds after that, Hack let them know that the hotel employee had walked past them. Willis told him to get the employee and bring him back, and to keep it quiet. Hack nodded, slipped on his ski mask, and had a Beretta 9mm pistol out of a shoulder holster as he slipped out of the room. When he returned less than a half minute later, Willis, Pruitt, and Lowenstein all had their masks on and their guns out. The surveillance cameras now showed that the two thugs who had been reading the newspaper in the neighboring suite were busy handing out food trays to the poker players. It was time to hit the game. Willis told the hotel employee what he was going to say when he was brought back to the other room and what would happen to him if he screwed things up. The clerk, a young kid with a lean scarecrow-like body, looked terrified but he nodded his understanding. After that, they were all moving out into the hallway with the hotel employee being half-carried by Hack and Pruitt.

  Once they got to the other suite, Willis knocked on the door and prompted the hotel employee to repeat what he had earlier told him to say. The same muscle as from before opened the door, his eyes widening slightly on seeing that the hotel employee was no longer alone. Before he could do anything more than reach for his gun, the clerk was shoved hard into him and Pruitt and Willis were moving quickly past him into the suite. While the thug tried to disentangle himself from the hotel employee, Lowenstein zapped him with a stun gun, sending him dropping to the carpeted floor. Lowenstein moved past him, leaving Hack to secure the man and the hotel employee with plastic cuffs.

  No more than two seconds elapsed from the moment the hotel suite door was opened to Willis and Pruitt racing into the suite with their guns drawn. None of the players, nor the two remaining muscle, had time to react. One of the thugs dropped the room service tray he was holding. He had started reaching for his gun, but as he caught sight of the 9mm Glock that Willis pointed his way, his hand slowed. In several quick bounds, Pruitt raced over to him and struck him above his ear with the butt end of his gun. That made the thug stumble and wince, and the second blow from Pruitt sent him to the floor. The third thug didn’t move until Willis signaled him with his gun to get on his knees. The man did it, all the while holding a room service tray.

  “Fingers interlaced behind your head,” Willis ordered softly. “And all of you in the game, same thing. Not a peep from any of you unless you want your skulls
cracked opened.”

  All of them complied. While Willis and Pruitt covered them with their guns, Lowenstein and Hack used plastic cuffs to secure the paid muscle and then the players, each of them being cuffed with their hands behind their back. For a few seconds, the major league ballplayer looked like he wanted to be a hero with the way his eyes were shining, but Lowenstein made a tsking noise and the sight of Lowenstein’s stun gun kept the ballplayer from making a move. It took less than ninety seconds to secure the room. Once that was done, Hack went to the safe to retrieve the money while Willis went around the room collecting the surveillance cameras he had hidden earlier, and Pruitt and Lowenstein gagged each of the players and muscle. Hack had already gagged the hotel employee after he had cuffed him. Another four minutes and they were done. Hack had the money packed away in an overnight bag, and he told the rest of them in a hushed whisper that a quick count showed over a hundred and ten grand. After that, they left the suite, all of them going their separate ways with Lowenstein taking the bag with the money and the surveillance cameras. The ski masks were also added to the bag. They had all worn leather gloves from the moment they entered the hotel, so there were no fingerprints to clean up, but Willis still had to go back to the neighboring suite to collect the laptop computer.

  Chapter 2

  Willis wasn’t happy about the next part of the job where they’d be entrusting the money to Lowenstein until they could meet to divvy it up, especially since the job went smoothly and quickly enough where they could’ve divided the money before leaving the hotel suite. Although, maybe not. As Lowenstein had told Willis earlier, things can turn sour in a heartbeat if you hang around any longer than you need to. Maybe someone on the hotel staff realizes that it’s taking longer than it should for the guy delivering room service to report back, or maybe a guest walks past the suite and hears something that makes them suspicious, or maid service walks in and surprises them, or any number of other things that could complicate the robbery if they don’t leave as soon as they can. It didn’t matter. Willis had agreed to that part of the job and he knew it was nonnegotiable; he also took the precautions that were available. It was doubtful, anyway, that Lowenstein would try a double-cross. Not only would he have Willis hunting him down if he did, he’d also have to contend with Big Ed Hanley, who was Willis’s agent for the job and was owed ten percent of Willis’s take. While Lowenstein might not realize how dangerous it would be to double-cross Willis, he had to know the trouble he’d be buying if he messed with Hanley. In a way, Lowenstein leaving with the money was a good thing. It put more risk on him and less on the rest of the crew. If the police had been tipped off about the job, Lowenstein would be the one to get picked up while the rest of them would have a better chance of slipping past the cops.