“Sort of.”
“Sort of?” Hillman looked irritated as he licked his thumb, rubbed it in the coke, and jammed it against the inside of his bottom lip. “Did he, or didn’t he? Or do I have to go drive over there and slap it outa him?” He wiped his nose. “Or outa you? I’m not as nice as I look, you know.”
“Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “Neither am I.”
His grin was back. “You sure I don’t get to see you in a bikini? Come over here and sit down. My lap’s got an empty parking spot with your name on it. You want a drink or something?” He gestured to a bottle of Tito’s vodka on his desk. “Come on, let’s do a couple of lines and have a drink. We can party for a bit and wait for Leo. Better yet, maybe that loser won’t show up at all. Never been at a party that dweeb wouldn’t make worse.”
“What was it about the Mercedes?” I asked. “Why go after the people looking for it?”
“What do you know about any of that?” Hillman said. He looked suspicious for the first time. “That’s big-picture shit. Nothing to do with your cute little ass.”
“It’s got everything to do with me. I was the one looking for it.”
His eyes narrowed and his hand moved, but I was expecting that and my Beretta was already out. “Don’t,” I told him.
The warning didn’t register. Maybe he was still expecting bikinis and birthday cakes. His hand kept moving.
Although it was too fast for the eye to see, the bullet from my gun shattered the coke mirror, gouged across the desk, spun off, and lodged into the back wall. Hillman cried out in pain and surprise as he was speckled with broken glass and white powder. “Jesus!” he yelped. “What the hell was that?”
“Right now, I just want to talk,” I said. “But you tried to have me killed. So for the record, I reserve the right to change my mind about the talking part.”
Hillman shook his head, eying the scant remains of his cocaine. “Goddamn Leo. I never should have trusted him to do anything important.” He looked up to me. “What do you want?”
“I want to learn why you wanted me dead. And your hands on the desk,” I added, “or you’ll get the worst manicure of your life.”
“Who says anyone wanted you dead?” He scratched his nose and looked around jumpily. “Maybe you’re being paranoid.”
“A roomful of men with guns made that kind of obvious.”
Hillman folded his hands on his desk. “You don’t know who you’re messing with, do you?” He answered his own question. “You wouldn’t be, if you did.”
“Five points for the tautology, but it doesn’t answer my question.”
He blinked. “Astrology?”
“Forget it. Who I’m messing with is exactly what I’m trying to find out.”
He wiped a drop of blood from his chin, where a bit of glass must have nicked him. “That tells me you’re soft-headed or flat-out nuts. The guys I work for won’t just kill you.” He stared up at me. I could see a smidgeon of white powder caked against the inside of his nostril. “You get that, right?” he continued. “There’re worse things than dead. Way worse. They’ll run you up and down the circuit like a goddamn rodeo pony. By the time they’re through with you, you’ll be selling three-dollar blow jobs in Kansas City at fifty percent off and thanking every poor bastard who comes along to sign up.”
I said, “There’s an image.”
“I’m being fucking serious!” Hillman exploded. “These guys are into everything and they run this area! They got a hand in every pie in the whole damn bakeshop. You’re crazy to be going anywhere near them.”
“Keep talking. What’s with all the moving trucks outside? Your friends in the moving business, too? Is that one of the pies?”
He paused a fractional moment and then spat on the floor. “None of your concern.”
I raised my gun for emphasis. “You don’t get to say that right now.”
“I don’t?” Hillman’s eyes had changed. There was something new in them. His posture was different, too. More confident. More confrontational. Bolder. His hands drifted off the surface of the desk.
He wasn’t afraid anymore.
The floor creaked behind me.
I realized why Hillman was no longer afraid.
There were two men behind me.
* * *
They had snuck up through the doorway. Maybe they had been in the second trailer. I kept my gun on Hillman as I turned my head. Two burly men, big and mean and mad, dripping menace like cheap cologne. Each had the same tattoo as Hillman’s.
One of them spoke up. “What do you want us to do with her?”
Hillman looked happier now. He leaned back in his chair and smirked. “Oh, I’m gonna think of all kinds of things—”
His smirk faded.
He stopped speaking.
The two men who had snuck up on me each craned his neck. As if sensing something behind him. The one on the right craning right, the one on the left craning left.
Smiles dripped off their faces like candle wax.
Each wondering about the massive hand draped over his shoulder.
Hillman was looking not at the hands but at the face above the hands. A face towering almost a half foot above his two guys. A smiling, ferocious face, eyes blazing with animosity. A face promising all kinds of imminent harm.
Buster’s hands lifted as he seized each of the men by his outside ear. His face contorted with effort as in a trio of concussive motions he slammed their heads together three times. Dense, dull sounds. Like an ax splitting hardwood.
Both men went down.
I was watching Hillman.
Predictably, he went for whatever was in his drawer once again.
I shot the phone on his desk. It exploded in a shower of plastic fragments. Hillman was a bit unluckier, this time. A two-inch shard of plastic embedded itself into his cheek. He screamed in pain as Buster grabbed him.
“Now,” I said, “we’re going to approach this from a different angle.”
30
“Personally, I think you look better upside down,” I observed. “Almost dashing. But maybe that’s just me. What do you think, Buster?”
“I think he looks ugly as a broken teakettle.”
“Sorry,” I said to Hillman. “Hung jury, here.”
Hillman didn’t find it funny. Even swinging from side to side and upside down, he managed to spit at me.
The gesture earned him a tremendous slap from Buster that sent him groaning and spinning back and forth. The tubular frame he hung off creaked as he swung. The heavy bag had been about 150 pounds. We had replaced it with Hillman, who was closer to two hundred, but hopefully the frame could handle the extra weight. So far it was holding up. His wrists were taped behind his back and the top of his head swung a few inches above the gravel. His two friends were still in the office, taped in tandem, head to toe. We had used a whole roll of packing tape. They wouldn’t free themselves anytime soon.
“You’re both dead!” Hillman screamed. His eyes bugged up at us. “Do you understand me?”
“I’ve had four ex-wives tell me that,” said Buster as he stuck a Camel in his mouth. “Yet here I stand.” He lit the cigarette. “And my ex-wives were a hell of a lot scarier than you.”
“He’s not kidding,” I said. “I met one of them. She was terrifying.”
Hillman glared at Buster. “If you let me go, I won’t tell them what happened. I swear. You can get away. It’s not too late.”
“Who’s them?” I asked.
Hillman’s eyes were still on Buster, his voice now almost plaintive. “I mean it. I’ll say it was a break-in, some local kids or some shit. My guys will keep quiet.”
“Talk to her,” said Buster. “She’s calling the shots. And you’re lucky she is, and not me, because I’m hungry and pissed off and don’t really feel like talking to you at all. If it was up to me, I’d run that truck over you a few times, get you nice and two-dimensional, and then go try to find a good steak somewhere in this hick tow
n while your nearest and dearest spent the day looking for a pancake-shaped coffin.”
Hillman looked to me. “What do you want?”
“I told you. I want to know why you wanted us dead.”
“Go to hell,” he said.
“I saw your tattoo. Who is Mr. Z? Do you know him?”
His face tightened. “You’re asking dangerous questions.”
“So you do?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure about that?”
“As a goddamn heart attack.” The plaintive note had left his voice. His face looked like a soldier digging into a trench.
I crossed my arms and looked down at him. “You need to understand something. I believe in proportional response.”
“One of the many differences between us,” Buster put in with a grin. “It’s the Y chromosome, I bet you anything.” He had taken Devin’s sawed-off shotgun and was tapping it against the palm of his hand. It was a twelve-gauge, double-barreled, shorn to about eighteen inches of barrel. To see him, Buster could have been a poster board for the virtues of unrestrained confession. If I had been Hillman I would have started at my great-great-grandfather’s sins and gone down the family line from there.
But Hillman was tough, or stupid, or both. He kept quiet.
“What I mean,” I continued, “is that I don’t hurt people unless they hurt someone helpless or try to hurt me first. And I don’t escalate—not unless someone else does first. Think of it as a poker game. I don’t raise, ever. But I always match.”
Hillman didn’t look like he was following. “Poker. Sure, whatever.”
“I’ve always stuck to that,” I told him. “Proportionality. Not to sound pretentious, but it’s sort of my career philosophy.”
“Not mine,” Buster said. “My career philosophy is more set the bastards on fire, burn it all down, and piss on the goddamn ashes.”
Hillman didn’t look impressed. “What is this, good cop bad cop?”
“If we were cops, you’d be a lot safer right now,” I said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that normally, I wouldn’t want to do anything disproportionate to what you’d done. And even though you’re honestly a bit of a creep and a bit more of an asshole, I haven’t personally seen you be violent or abusive. Which counts for something.”
“Great. Then your poker rules or whatever should say to let me go.”
“On the other hand, you did try to have us killed. Proportionality kind of goes out the window when it comes to attempted murder.”
“See?” Buster smiled. “Deep down, she’s the bad cop, too.”
Hillman started to say something. I shook my head. “Hold on a second. This is the important part. Because I do my best to behave proportionally, I would like to avoid things becoming unpleasant. But like I said, you did try to kill us, and I feel like that gives me a certain latitude.” He was still on the verge of saying something, so I held up a finger. “Almost done. By latitude, I mean a freedom to act without feeling too guilty. Anyway,” I finished, “you were trying to tell me something?”
Hillman glared up at me. “Women,” he said. “They always love to talk.”
I stepped behind him, kneeled down, and broke his left pinkie.
Fingers were easy enough to break. Sideways was easiest. Very little force was needed. Fingers were easier than toes, which, being shorter, were harder to grip, or arms and legs, with far bigger bones. I’d always found it was more mental than physical. A ten-year-old could break a finger, strength-wise. It was more about being clinical, not getting squeamish. Maybe everyone had their own way of doing things, their own little tricks. Whenever I had to break a finger, my trick was that I closed my eyes just before, and pretended I was snapping a small, dry branch. That always helped. It was no good picturing the actual bone cracking under the skin, not unless you were someone who took pleasure in the act, and then the whole twig thing probably didn’t apply. Certain people probably snapped twigs wishing they were fingers. I was glad I wasn’t one of those people. I’d break fingers if needed, but it was never my favorite part.
Hillman screamed for a minute, but settled down eventually.
“You were saying?” I prompted.
He called me a series of foul names. He seemed to be working his way through the alphabet. He had reached the C’s when I broke his other pinkie.
There was more screaming and swearing, more jerking and flopping around. The chain rattled and the metal frame creaked.
“The ring fingers will be worse,” I warned. “Sometimes it takes me two or three tries. They take longer to heal, too. More trouble all around.”
“You goddamn b—” he snarled.
“Here we go.” I took his left ring finger in my hands. “Ready?”
The finger started to bend.
“Wait! Wait! Please!” he begged. “I’ll talk!”
I paused, my hands still on his finger. “Yeah?” His crooked pinkies were swelling terribly.
“I’ll tell you! No more fingers!”
“I’d say do another two or three to be safe,” advised Buster, lighting another cigarette. He looked more relaxed, as though bashing the bodyguards’ heads together had let off some steam.
“No!” yelped Hillman. “I’ll talk!”
I stepped around to his front and looked down at him. “The Mercedes. What was it?”
His words were slow and reluctant, but he talked as promised. “I didn’t want you dead. I was following orders. That particular vehicle belongs to a VIP in our Organization. When they heard that someone was looking for it, that was all they needed. These guys don’t take chances even in the best of times, and lately they’ve been spooked. Definitely not the best of times, right now.”
“What spooked them?”
“Business took a hit recently. A lot of unwanted attention. Everyone’s been running on fumes trying to get things moving smoothly again.”
“Why drive a stolen car if you’re spooked?”
I’d never seen someone shrug upside down, but Hillman managed it. “We get more cars than the dealerships. Drive something for a couple of months, swap it out, drive something else. We all do it. Call it a perk of the job. Another month or two and that Mercedes will be on its way to China or Brazil.”
“That’s why the ninety-day dealer plates work,” I realized. “By the time they expire, you get a new vehicle with new tags.”
Buster said, “They probably have a dozen guys at a dozen different dealerships hooking them up.”
I asked, “Who told you to kill us?”
Hillman blanched. “You don’t want to know. Honest.”
“I do,” I said. “Honest. Was it Mr. Z? Did it go that far up the chain?”
“Can you take me to a doctor?” he begged. “My fingers are really starting to hurt.”
“Not quite yet.”
“I’m just a guy doing a job,” Hillman said, sounding plaintive again. “I don’t know any Mr. Z, I told you!”
“You sure? He looks like an evil John Belushi. He’s hard to forget.”
“I don’t know him!”
I changed direction. “If your bosses were holding someone hostage, where would they take them? Where would they keep them?”
Hillman’s face squeezed in pain. “I don’t know. They have dozens of sites all over. Maybe more. Maybe hundreds.”
“Like where?”
“What is wrong with you?” Hillman shouted. “You’re chasing people you should be running away from!”
“What spooked them?” I asked again. “You said something spooked them. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Something went wrong—that’s all I know.”
“Wrong with what?”
He paused, squinting up at us. “Logistics.”
I pointed over at the moving trucks. Something tugged at my mind. “What are those trucks for? Drugs? Weapons? What do you put in them? Where do they go?”
“We—” Hillma
n stopped himself and looked up at us, his eyes crafty. “You’re never gonna let me go, are you?”
“That depends on you.”
“You can’t,” he said. “I get it. And even if you did, my boss would think I talked, and that’s a hundred times worse.”
Buster was trimming a hangnail with his folding knife. “That’s a very negative attitude. Try to focus on the bright side. You’re still alive and swinging.”
“You can’t let me go,” Hillman repeated. He spasmed, as though he was about to be sick. Too much stress, too much coke, maybe. I hoped he wouldn’t have a heart attack. “I should have realized that right off,” he said, convulsing once more.
“Relax,” Buster told him. “You’re not dead yet.”
Hillman’s right hand whipped around. Somehow, he was holding a small pistol. The barrel was lined up with Buster’s chest. I managed to kick his arm as a crack split the day’s quiet.
Buster gave a low grunt and staggered backward.
There was a rush of unsettled wings as the row of crows above us flapped into the air.
Hillman had managed to hold onto the gun. He twisted to turn it on me, eyes wild and triumphant, as I stepped forward and kicked him in the face.
He dropped the pistol and hung motionless, limp arms scraping the ground.
I was angry at Hillman. I kicked him again. Then I ran to Buster. He was sitting on the ground, wincing, face two shades paler. “That tricky son of a bitch,” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“The arm.”
I looked at the wound. The gun had been a small-caliber .22. The bullet appeared to have gone clean through the meaty part of his upper left arm, missing the biceps muscles. Blood pulsed out of the small hole.
“Hang on,” I said. I ran into the trailer’s bathroom, washed my hands thoroughly, and emerged with a roll of paper towels, more tape, and Hillman’s vodka, which Buster eyed greedily.
“Easy,” I said, as he took a swig. “Save some for your arm.”
I spent a few minutes doing crude first aid, pressing and taping layers of paper towels against his arm. Blood soaked quickly through the first layers. I added more towels, pressing steadily, until the flow of blood stopped.
One Got Away Page 24