Black Ghost

by Freddie Villacci Jr

  Not consulting with Tidwell had been a big mistake; he knew that now. He figured he would just clean up a loose end by taking out Gabriel. Cleaning up people who were sloppy at their jobs was what he had been brought into this project to deal with. After all, when someone became a liability, he took them out of the picture, just like he had done with the hacker kid. The hell of it was, he was the one who had been sloppy this time. Harold Bender informed him of his investigators finding Hernandez. Phil saw that he had to make this the DEA’s problem. He had to make sure Hernandez wasn’t taken by the FBI, not knowing what the little crazy psycho knew.

  But Phil had messed up. And was there now a price on his head? Probably.

  He had left a message for Tidwell on Saturday, but the normally punctual congressman had yet to call him back. Utah wasn’t sure what his next move would be. It all depended on whether he was now considered a loose end that Tidwell and Parelli wanted to clean up. If Tidwell didn’t contact him by the end of the day, he would have to assume he was.

  “Dammit!” He gripped the steering wheel with such intensity that his knuckles turned white. Teeth clenched, Utah glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, muttering, “I should’ve sent in twenty men to kill that sick Mexican psychopath.”

  Three knocks on the driver’s side window startled Utah. His heart raced at the sight of a tall, well-dressed man motioning for him to roll down his window. Utah couldn’t get a good look at his face, but noticed the outline of a handgun under his suit coat. He was no match for an enemy in a fast draw.

  Instead of opening his window, he cracked the door open slightly, holding the handle with a tight grip, just in case he needed to thrust the door into the man’s body to buy him some time to draw his weapon.

  “Phil Utah?” the young man asked.

  “Who’s asking?”

  The man began to reach for his weapon. Utah lowered his left shoulder and pushed on the door open with all his might. The door flew open, but the other man side-stepped it easily, looking bemused.

  “Who were you expecting?” he asked, then flashed a wallet full of credentials. “Mack Maddox, FBI.”

  Utah felt a flood of relief. “What the hell are you doing sneaking up on me like that, kid?” he barked, trying to regain his composure.

  “I didn’t sneak up on you. Who did you think I was?”

  “I just had five good men killed, so a stranger packing heat makes me a little jumpy.” Utah pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the perspiration off his forehead. “You just never know when it’s going to be your day.”

  “Sorry about your men.”

  “Yeah. It’s a tragic shame.”

  “I’m assigned to the case involving the victims Gabriel killed in Chicago. I wanted to see if I could help in any way. Do you think we could talk for a couple minutes?”

  “Not right now, kid, okay? I’ve got a lot of things on my plate. I’ll tell you what though, give me your card. Once I deal with … I’ll help you out.”

  “Fair enough,” Mack said, and handed Utah one of his business cards.

  67

  The floor-to-ceiling window of Tina’s Flower Shop shattered under a barrage of bullets. The gangbangers had finally gotten their act together.

  Bic reached deep into his beat-up cardboard box and pulled out a fully automatic M-16 rifle. He stood and sprayed several rounds into the vehicles that the gang members were using for cover. Windows burst and bullets pocked the car bodies with lines of large black dots. Looking forward, Bic located Barron’s limousine about three car lengths in front of him. He charged toward the limo, wildly spraying bullets in all directions.

  Barron’s limo driver tried to flee, but he made it only two steps out of the vehicle in the gangbangers’ direction before he was mowed down in the crossfire.

  Bent down behind the limo, Bic reloaded his M-16. Bullets from the gangbangers continued to clank into the big car’s chassis. Bic figured they were firing shotguns and handguns, and one of them was shooting a small automatic weapon, probably an Uzi. Their bullets wouldn’t make it all the way through the limo.

  He stood suddenly, firing several bullets over the limo’s roof and into the vehicles in front of the gangbangers. The weapon kept the men pinned down, and their vehicles already looked like they had been through Armageddon.

  Bic bent down and pointed his M-16 inside the rear door window of the limo, which had already been blown out. Henry Barron lay curled in a fetal position on the floor, his back to Bic. A dozen or so incoming slugs hit the side of the vehicle opposite Bic, and Barron frantically covered his head with his arms.

  With the rifle resting on the bottom of the doorframe, Bic fired a tight pattern of bullets through the interior of the limo and out the other window into the vehicles protecting the gang members. While holding the M-16 steady with one hand, he continued to pepper the gangbangers’ position with an occasional short burst. With his other hand, he pulled a raw pork chop wrapped in wax paper out of a side cargo pocket of his BDU pants.

  He unwrapped the wax paper and tossed the cut of meat into the limo. “It’s pork chop-eatin’ time,” he said solemnly.

  Bic then grabbed his weapon with both hands and shot several more rounds at the vehicles in front of the gangbangers; as he did, he dipped the barrel of the gun downward. Five slugs zipped through the interior and blew out Henry Barron’s spine.

  Bic turned and squatted with his back up against the car. He released the empty clip and reached for another.

  Shots clanked into the limo only feet away from Bic. The two gangbangers who had originally gone east were now behind him to his left at a forty-five-degree angle, shooting from the entrance of one of the storefronts up the street.

  Bic fired at the two men, and they retreated expeditiously into the sunken entranceway as the bullets whined off the marble cladding around them. Bic took the opportunity to dart deeper into the street, making his way east toward the intersection while he alternated fire between the men across the street and the two in the store entrance.

  Bic took a position behind two vehicles that had collided and formed a V in the middle of the street. In this position, the men to his right and left were both at forty-five-degree angles to him, but Bic had cover from a vehicle on each side. He was aware he had put himself into a flanked position, but his intentions were to eliminate one of the two groups immediately. As he reloaded, he noted he had four magazines left, and presumed the men behind the vehicles were also running low. They had been returning fire with substantially less vigor lately.

  Bic crawled out from behind the car and fired toward the men behind the vehicles. This time, with his different angle, he aimed at the pavement underneath the vehicles. The bullets skipped off the pavement, clanking into the underbellies of the vehicles—and from the sound of the screams, he had hit a couple of gangbangers, too.

  His watch alarm vibrated. 6:10. Time to leave the scene before the cavalry showed up. He popped up and ran toward the entranceway where the two gangbangers had been taking cover, spraying it with M-16 fire. The bullets slammed into the stone like miniature sledgehammers, relentlessly pounding the hard rock into pebbles.

  Bic rushed into entranceway and turned the corner firing, his bullets chewing the gang members to bloody rag. Then he nonchalantly retreated west down the sidewalk, toward his original position. Having reloaded his weapon as he walked, he turned every ten paces and shot a round of suppression fire back toward the main concentration of gang members.

  He returned to his cardboard box, then bent down and pulled out a duffel bag. He tossed the bag over one shoulder and continued down the sidewalk before abruptly turning right down a long, wide alley.

  He stopped halfway down an alley. Behind a dark blue dumpster was his Ninja street bike. He dumped his gun and his gangsta outfit in the dumpster and mounted the vehicle.

  He drove the bike out of the alley, made a right turn and then opened up, heading west. A half-mile down
the road, he entered the traffic flow on I- 35 and left the scene.

  68

  Mack walked away from the vehicle to an exit, thinking that something was very wrong with Phil Utah. He looked back and thought: For a man who doesn’t have any time to talk, you’d think he would’ve started his car by now.

  While in the elevator to the ground floor, he decided that his first step would be to find any connections between Utah and Heather and Loretta in Chicago. It never sat well with him how eager the DEA had been to take over “handling” Hernandez. Had Utah been going after him for a different reason?

  As he exited the elevator, Mack called Caroline to have her see if there was any connection between Utah and these killings. The call went directly to voicemail. She ditching me again?

  Mack left the parking lot with a scowl. All around him people dressed in shorts and T-shirts were window-shopping and enjoying the 80° weather, but Mack saw only gloom. He made his way to a gourmet sandwich shop he had seen earlier.

  As Mack walked, something Utah had said popped into his mind: You never know when it’s going to be your day.

  Wasn’t that true? thought Mack, looking at the people passing by with more care, taking extra notice of the little subtleties of the people around him.

  A man to his right, walking in the same direction as him, was holding a woman’s hand. Neither the man nor the woman wore wedding bands, but he noticed a tan line on the man’s left ring finger. Had he taken his wedding ring off? Was this man having an affair?

  A woman walked toward him in high heels, her calf muscles flexing tight with every step, trying to maintain balance. She didn’t usually wear heels; so why was she wearing them today? She’s going somewhere she doesn’t usually go, or doing something she doesn’t usually do, he thought. What is it?

  A man behind the woman looked “off” to Mack in his preppy, soft colors. He had the strut of a street thug—and his cargo pants didn’t exactly nail the preppy look. The guy also had crude tattoos on the hands below his knuckles. This man is hiding something.

  Or was he? Mack shook his head. Could make yourself crazy thinking like that. As the man with the strut passed, he spat a sunflower seed shell from his mouth.

  Mack took a step and the bottom fell out of his stomach. He stopped, turned, and picked up the seed. He regarded it in a kind of fog, smelling the faint peppery sour smell in the air. He then saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Gabriel Hernandez!

  Mack reached for his weapon, yelling, “Freeze! FBI!”

  But the man before him was already facing him.

  Mack froze.

  His mind screamed draw your weapon, but his arm didn’t respond. And in that split second of hesitation, the preppy man reached into his pockets; pistols instantaneously appeared in both of the man’s hands.

  The preppy grinned coldly. Mack’s gun was barely clear of his arm holster. The last thing Mack knew before the man shot him was the writing across the knuckles of his right hand, clearly visible now: Gabriel.

  Two slugs struck Mack simultaneously in the chest.

  As he flew backward, gun soaring into the crowd, a final thought echoed through his head before it smacked against the concrete:

  I guess today’s my day.

  69

  Bic sat in the leather chair of the majority shareholder and CEO of Kempco Oil, one of the world’s largest privately-owned oil and natural gas companies, in a plush executive office on the 33rd floor of the Kempco Building in Dallas. He looked across the vast cherrywood desk stretched out before him, out to the two banks of tall windows that stood in for two of the office’s walls, and lost himself in the abundance of stars decorating the night sky. He leaned back, feeling more relaxed than he had in days.

  And in that moment of contemplative relaxation, he began to question what he had become—or scarier, whether this was who he really was all along, someone who needed to kill to fill a deep, dark desire.

  It wasn’t the sort of thinking he often allowed himself. He had started out killing thugs and other killers, but had somehow devolved to murdering innocent people solely for money. Was the money just an excuse he used to fulfill some perverted desire to kill? Did Gracie’s mission to find a cure even matter to him?

  The spray of stars in the window blurred and vanished, replaced by his own faint reflection in the glass. For a moment, he saw his father in that reflection. An anger alloyed with pure hatred overwhelmed him as he thought about the day he would finally get his hands on that evil man.

  He bent over and took the sealed pork chop out of his backpack. He put it on the cherry wood desk as his eyes became moist. He did what he did because of his father. Whatever else Bic Green might have become in his life, the day his father forced him to witness the brutal murder of mama, he had made Bic into a soulless killing machine. Bic was going to find his dad, one way or another. If the old man was still alive, Hawk would eventually track him down. And if he was dead, Bic knew now he would settle this score with his father one day in Hell.

  This was no grand epiphany. He had known this from the very day his mother had been killed.

  Clarence Green would never escape from him.

  70

  Jonathan Killebrew sat at his desk reading The Wall Street Journal as he did every morning when he arrived in the office. But today he couldn’t get past the front-page headlines.

  In his late sixties, Jonathan retained the strong jaw and broad shoulders he had sported back when he played football at the University of Texas. He looked ten years younger than his age and worked hard to maintain that. He kept his gray hair short and spiky and tousled forward in a nod to the current fashion. His stylish red power tie set off his crisp, white dress shirt perfectly.

  He was devastated by the murder of his good friend Henry Barron. Henry had helped him work through the sudden death of his wife Melody only a few years ago. And had counseled him to keep his company and acquire more assets when oil prices crashed, rather than sell it as he intended. He’d recouped a fortune in the oil recovery all because of Henry.

  Jonathan wanted to do something special for Henry’s family. “Shirley,” he said into the intercom.

  “Yes, Mr. Killebrew?”

  “I need your help. Come in here for a second.”

  Killebrew’s secretary entered his office through one of the two oversized twelve-panel cherry doors.

  “Shirley, did you see that Henry Barron was killed yesterday?”

  Her eyes glistened slightly. “I did. Are you ok, sir? I know how much he meant to you.”

  “I’d like to do something for his family,” Jonathan said stoically.

  “Beyond just flowers, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you help me think of something?”

  “I’ll give it some thought and let you know, sir.”

  “Thank you, Shirley,” he sighed. She nodded and left.

  Jonathan stood slowly, feeling every one of his years, and walked over to a mahogany table on the other side of his office. He sat in one of the two dark leather chairs to consider how he could best eulogize his friend.

  When sitting still didn’t help, he went to his private bathroom. All hunter-green marble and matching wallpaper, with solid gold fixtures and a shower. The private bathroom was a small indulgence that he allowed himself.

  He turned on a faucet, leaned over, and splashed his face. The cool water was an instant relief.

  When he turned, he found he wasn’t alone.

  71

  “Where the hell did you come from?” Jonathan asked the big, bald African American man standing before him. The intruder, in sunglasses, had a satchel hanging from his shoulder. He wore one of the navy-blue jumpsuits maintenance employees in the Kempco Building wore. Even aside from the bulky satchel over his shoulders and the sunglasses indoors, in the sixteen years Shirley had worked for him, she had never let anyone into his office unannounced—not even famil
y.

  Jonathan’s eye saw his conference room door open. “How did you get in here? My secretary…”

  “Was called away,” the man said in a deep, detached voice.

  He tried to keep his voice calm, despite the menacing figure before him. “The maintenance crew is not authorized to be here unless… called for.” He paused, licked his lips, and said softly, “What are you here for?”

  “I’m here for you to make a choice.”

  “I’m calling security.” Jonathan strode toward his desk phone, pausing only a moment before the two new items on his desk: an iPhone and a small item wrapped in butcher paper.

  “That is certainly one choice,” the black man said. The calmness and strength of his voice gave Jonathan further pause.

  He had just lifted the phone from the cradle when the man’s hand touched his. It was large and delicate. Jonathan withdrew his hand as if it’d been burned.

  “Hear me out,” said the man.

  There was something about this man, so full of dread, that compelled him to replace the phone back in the cradle. “If we’re going to talk,” he said, “I need to know your name.”

  “Bic.”

  “What do you want from me, Bic?”

  Bic pulled a silenced pistol from his satchel and pointed it at Jonathan as he said, “You cooperate and take your own life. Or, if you choose not to, I’ll take your life, and then your daughter’s and her family’s.”

  The iPhone on the desk suddenly rang. Bic motioned with the silenced pistol for Jonathan to answer the call. Jonathan’s hands trembled as he hit the connect button.

  Numb with terror, Jonathan watched a live FaceTime video of his daughter and three grandchildren playing in their backyard pool. Dear God, he thought, this is real. His eyes welled up as his mind overloaded with emotion. “This is some kind of sick prank?” he managed to choke.