by Dan Ames
Immediately, Tallon sensed a slight dip in the noise level around him.
“Nope,” the bartender said, and walked away.
Tallon understood that it was, in fact, that kind of bar. It wasn’t a problem, in his mind. There were plenty of people to talk to here, and someone was bound to know Fackrell. If the bartender wasn’t the talkative type, no big deal. He’d find someone who was.
Tallon swiveled on his bar stool and surveyed the room.
He could always spot former military and his eyes were immediately drawn to a table with two men and a woman.
The woman was looking directly at him.
Tallon nursed his beer and continued to study the room. A new song came on the jukebox – Up Around the Bend, by CCR. One of his favorites. It had been a theme song for the original frogmen in Vietnam.
He finished his first beer and ordered another. He was about to check his cell phone for messages when the door to the bar opened.
Two men stepped inside and Tallon watched their eyes, which first spotted the bartender, and then slid over to Tallon.
He knew instantly what had happened.
The bartender had put out word that someone was looking for Fackrell, and these two were going to make sure Tallon stopped asking questions.
The men were both big, one slightly taller than the other. The shorter man was significantly wider, with thick arms and a face that looked like it had seen plenty of bar fights.
These guys were enforcers, through and through.
They started toward him.
20
The compound was nestled in the foothills of Mexico near Morelos, home of the South Pacific Cartel, or Cartel del Pacifico Sur, as it’s known locally. They had once been considered among the most vicious, ruthless and violent of the Mexican cartels, but after a series of government crackdowns, arrests, assassinations and being outmaneuvered by more creative competitors, the criminal enterprise had dwindled down to a few diehards over the past five years.
Now, they had a very small piece of the marijuana trade. It was high-volume work, without the big paydays associated with heroin and cocaine.
But it was work.
And it was money.
In a country where jobs were hard to find.
As the midday sun baked the already brown land into rocky brittle, a few men stirred. The sound of a jeep approaching added the only sign of life to the thin air. A man with an automatic rifle walked to the gate that blocked the compound’s only entrance. A perimeter fence, designed to prevent unintentional visitors from being killed, encircled roughly a quarter-mile of inner grounds.
The fence was electrified and equipped with cameras every few hundred yards.
The man with the rifle recognized the jeep, saw the driver was his favorite nephew, and he triggered the gate to open.
Bringing with it a cloud of dust, the jeep entered the compound and the gates began to slowly retract. The rifleman’s nephew swung the jeep into the courtyard and shut off the engine. He hopped out, and began to retrieve canvas bags from the vehicle’s bed.
As the gates were almost closed, the man with the rifle heard a different sound, now audible with the silence restored when the jeep’s engine shut off. It was high-pitched, monotonous and sounded totally harmless. Like a fan belt on an old pickup truck going bad.
The gate clanged into place, momentarily obscuring the sound of something else in the air. Something steady and mechanical.
The man with the rifle began walking back toward his nephew and the jeep. His pace quickened as he approached, noting the sound ahead was much clearer, as if something was–
An explosion blinded the man, bright orange and red flashed before him.
A terrific whump filled the air.
He staggered and saw his nephew’s body blown apart. Arms, legs and torso all flew in different directions. When the shockwave hit the man, it lifted him into the air where a large, jagged piece of metal from the newly destroyed jeep hit him in the chest, ripping apart his insides and nearly severing his body into two neat pieces.
He hit the dirt in a cloud of dust, blood and fire.
21
Lauren Pauling studied the woman across from her.
Gina Brody was either an intense woman, or a woman under a great deal of stress. Probably both. They were still in Pauling’s office, and she hadn’t been able to extricate herself from the conversation just yet.
Gina had just told Pauling that her husband wanted to kill her.
That could cause some degree of anxiety among most people.
“Why do you say that he wants to kill you?” Pauling asked. Gina had just stated that her husband, Logan, wanted to kill her because he claimed she was having an affair with an ex-cop, Joe Pritchard.
“A woman knows,” Gina said.
Pauling fought the temptation to roll her eyes.
“I’m sure you have some very strong intuition,” Pauling said. “A court system, however, requires proof. Hard evidence.”
“Well, he said so,” Gina said. “Isn’t that good enough?”
“So he came right out and said that he is going to kill you?”
“Practically!” Gina said. “Something like that.”
Pauling knew a good hedging when she saw it.
“Does he carry a gun?” Pauling asked, trying to catch the woman off guard.
“How would I know? Everything he does is a big secret. All I know is that he said if he ever found out I was cheating on him, it would be the end of things for both me and the guy.”
“The end of things? That could mean all kinds of things. The end of the marriage. The end of the relationship. The end of trust…”
“Trust? Give me a break. My husband never trusted me from day one.”
Pauling felt herself start to get trapped into the role of marriage counselor, which was the last thing on earth she ever wanted to be. It was time to take control of the interview.
“Have you stated your concerns to the police?”
“Of course. Joe’s a cop. I told him all about it.”
“No, I mean, formally,” Pauling said. “A written, formal complaint that would serve as evidence in a court of law.”
Gina looked at the ceiling. “No.”
“Okay. That’s where you start then. Go to your local police station and let them know what you told me. Better yet, bring along some proof.”
“No, out of the question.”
Gina shook her head and the muscles in her neck flexed with the movement.
“Why is that?” Pauling asked, even if she already knew the answer.
“Joe’s line of work wouldn’t allow it.”
“I thought you said he’s a police officer.”
“He works in internal affairs.”
Pauling felt like she was missing something. “What does that have to do with filing a complaint?”
Gina let out a long breath. “Look, I can’t go to the cops. It will cause problems for Joe. That’s why I’m here. I want to hire you to get proof that my husband is trying to kill me, and first, I want you to make sure he can’t follow through on his plans. And then I want you to have him arrested and locked up in the slammer for good.”
Pauling was about to explain that she wouldn’t take Gina Brody’s case for a variety of reasons. One, her caseload was too full. Two, her husband had already tried to hire her. Three, this wasn’t her type of case. And finally, four, she could provide some good referrals.
But then the former Mrs. Brody did something that changed everything.
“The only proof I have is something I overheard him say on the phone when I was eavesdropping. He was talking to somebody about Joe and I and I heard him say something about putting the plan in place. But he had a name for it. It didn’t really make sense, but I wrote it down afterward.”
Gina took a small slip of paper out of her purse and pushed it across the desk toward Pauling. She glanced down, read it, and failed to register what she saw. So she read th
e two words again. And then a third time.
Operation Reacher.
22
Tallon was fascinated by the dynamics.
Here he was, in a podunk North Carolina town, just hours after his arrival, and he was about to get into it with a couple of thugs.
Had they been stationed nearby, just waiting for someone to come along asking about Carl Fackrell?
Of course not.
These bruisers were locals. On good terms with the bartender who by the looks of things had their phone number on speed dial.
They stopped short of Tallon and the bar instantly quieted.
“So you got the call and came running, huh?” Tallon asked before they could say anything.
The tall one’s eyes shifted over toward the bartender, as if blaming him for Tallon putting the obvious flow of action together. The shorter, thicker guy never took his eyes off Tallon. He was doing his best to intimidate.
It wasn’t working.
“We heard you were looking for information and we have some for you,” the tall one said. “Outside.”
Tallon laughed. “What is it, a physical copy of something? That’s why it’s outside? You can’t just tell me?”
“Nope,” the shorter one said.
“Take it outside, Paul,” the bartender said, having worked his way back to the end of the bar by Tallon. Paul was the tall one because he nodded in response.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Age before beauty,” Tallon said, gesturing for them to lead the way out of the bar. As they walked, Tallon glanced ahead of him.
He had two real options.
One, was the pool table. No one was playing at the moment, but there was a cue ball and another ball still on the surface. He could grab one or both of them, and use them to add to a well-timed punch. There was also a pool cue on the table, tucked in beneath the side cushion of the pool table.
The other option was a table that hadn’t been cleared and still held two empty beer glasses and an empty glass pitcher.
The pitcher intrigued Tallon.
It was the old-fashioned kind with a heavy, thick base, solid handle and spout. It would be heavy. Formidable.
When Paul and his short co-worker reached the door, Tallon grabbed the pitcher cross-handed, turning it so it was parallel to the floor.
Through the open door, Tallon began his swing. He brought it from below his waist, across his body, like a tennis backhand. The base of the pitcher crashed into the short man’s temple before he’d had a chance to turn.
The man and the pitcher both crashed to the ground. The would-be attacker stayed in one piece, but the pitcher broke into several large, jagged slivers of glass.
Paul had decided to try to end the fight right there. Instead of stepping in and throwing a combination of short punches, he took the redneck approach.
In other words, a big, slow haymaker that would have taken off Tallon’s head.
But Tallon ducked the punch, and countered with a straight right that hit Paul on the point of his chain. The tall man straightened up even higher, and Tallon added a left hook to the midsection.
Paul was in reasonably good shape and didn’t go down, which moved him up a notch in Tallon’s estimation. Paul managed to keep his balance, and responded with a serviceable left jab, which is what he should have started with. Considering that he’d just taken a good shot on the chin and really crisp blow to the body, the quality of the jab wasn’t bad.
But it wasn’t quite good enough.
And it was way too late.
Tallon deflected the jab, threw another vicious body shot with his right hand and when Paul folded, Tallon used a Muay Thai technique and grabbed Paul by the neck. Tallon pulled Paul’s head straight down while he brought his own knee up with power and precision.
The collision was spectacular. Paul’s face took a savage blow and it nearly folded in on itself, the nose broken, and possibly the jaw along with it. The sound was like a sledgehammer hitting a side of beef. Tallon had been told that in modern slaughterhouses cattle are killed with a pneumatic hammer. If that was true, it probably sounded something like what he’d just heard.
Paul joined his buddy on the ground just as the door opened behind Tallon.
He turned, expecting the bartender.
Instead, it was the woman from the table who’d caught his eye.
“I know why you’re here,” she said. “Let’s go.”
23
Kate’s route to North Carolina was circuitous. She’d turned in the rental car at the airport, after wiping it down, then received her travel information.
Her first flight was immediate, just in case there were any reports of trouble from Michael Tallon’s house and the cops were looking into what happened.
She didn’t think that was the case, but her boss clearly wanted her out of the area as fast as possible.
Her first flight took her to Dallas, and then she switched airlines and caught a flight from Dallas into Charlotte, and then a little commuter plane from Charlotte to Raleigh.
Once there, she picked up a new rental car and began the drive to the Outer Banks.
Kate had never been to North Carolina before and instantly didn’t like it. The humidity felt like a dirty, wet blanket. Being a woman with a few extra pounds, heat and humidity caused the problem of sweat. And sweat created body odor.
Not that she cared much, now.
William was dead.
Killed by a man named Tallon.
She took several deep breaths, letting the air out slowly. It was a relaxation technique she’d taught herself over the years, when the cold rage threatened to ignite, like a car bomb set off by a depressed accelerator.
In her mind’s eye, she pictured an image that brought her peace: Michael Tallon, naked, fastened spread-eagled on a bed, parts of his body bearing deep slash wounds and Kate herself, hovering nearby with one of her surgical-grade scalpels, ready to inflict more pain on the bastard who’d murdered her partner.
It was glorious, and she felt the endorphins wash over her. Or maybe it was serotonin, she wasn’t sure. Whatever the chemicals were, they made her feel good. Relaxed. Calm.
And eager to kill.
24
“Is that yours?” she asked, pointing to Tallon’s rental car.
Impressive, Tallon thought. Another nod to just how small the town of Whitford Beach was. Locals could pick out a rental car on the spot. Or maybe she’d seen him pull up.
He nodded and they climbed into the vehicle.
“Turn right,” she said.
Tallon followed her directions and glanced at her as he turned onto the narrow, two-lane road.
She was a dishwater blonde, with deeply tanned skin and hazel eyes. She wore cut off blue jean shorts, a T-shirt tied into a knot revealing a flat, tan stomach. The graphics on the T-shirt were advertising a concert for a band Tallon had never heard of. She had on throwback white Adidas sneakers with black stripes, without socks. Her arms and legs were tan, and she had the body of a surfer.
“Do you surf?” he asked.
“Yeah. Turn right up here,” she said, then glanced behind them.
Tallon had already checked the rearview mirror. As far as he could tell, no one was following them. But this was such a small town, someone didn’t have to be right behind them to be monitoring their route. People on cell phones in position around the area could simply call in, or text in, their location.
“What’s your name?” Tallon asked.
“Monica.” She had a strong face, a little wide, but with a narrow nose, pretty eyes and full lips.
Tallon waited for her to ask him what his name was, but she didn’t. Which most likely meant she already knew who, or what, he was.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Just keep driving,” she said. “Nice work back there, by the way.”
“Thanks.”
“Those two jackasses had it coming. For a long time.”
They had turned back onto the main road and went several miles without speaking. Ahead, a complex of four condominiums appeared on the west side of the road, meaning the cheap side. Where you had to cross the road to get to the ocean. It was a tale of two levels of real estate. The beach side homes were enormous with multiple balconies looking out over the ocean. Probably went for a few million each. On the other side of the road, the homes were one or two stories, and probably ninety percent cheaper.
Directly across the street from the condominium complex was a public access boardwalk, with steps leading down to the beach. There were parking spaces next to the wooden stairs.
“Turn right. Park by that Explorer.”
There was a spot by a silver Ford Explorer and Tallon guided his rental next to it.
“Follow me.”
They both exited Tallon’s vehicle and Monica climbed the stairs. From there, she strode confidently ahead, down the steps and onto the sand. She walked ahead, with Tallon keeping pace.
The beach was empty as the sky had turned overcast. It was later in the day and no one was catching any sun. A half-mile down the beach, a man was throwing a tennis ball for his dog to retrieve.
Other than that, they were alone.
The Atlantic was big water here, with four-foot waves and a pounding surf. There was plenty of sea grass, and the sand was a deep beige, lightly flecked with stones, not shells.
Monica turned and faced him. She looked over his shoulder.
Tallon understood she didn’t want anyone hearing their conversation. This way, she could keep Tallon in view, and make sure no one was going to interrupt them.
“Why were you looking for Carl Fackrell?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Don’t lie to me. I heard you say his name.”
“I said his name, but I’m not looking for him.”
She studied him, and then a shadow passed over her face, as realization sank in.
“Oh no,” she said. Her face was pale, and Tallon instantly knew that she was personally vested in what had become of the man who’d died on Tallon’s doorstep.