Wet Work: The Definitive Edition

by Philip Nutman

  Traffic hummed softly in the distance. Lang, the team’s surveillance specialist, reported there’d been little movement around the house all day. A member of the Cali cartel and one of the rogue DEA agents had taken a walk around the grounds. Other than that, they stayed inside.

  “Security’s lax,” Lang had stressed when Corvino arrived and they sat down to go over the layout of the house. “They have one guard patrolling the garden every half an hour.

  “It’s pathetic,” he added contemptuously. A former top security analyst for Great Britain’s MI5, Lang had advised the SAS on the Iranian hostage siege in London back in the mid-seventies. One of the many jewels in his surveillance and strategy crown. As far as Corvino was concerned, the simpler the better, and if the Cali Cartel were getting cocky, screw ‘em.

  The face of his Glycine Airman wristwatch showed 08:51 P.M. Corvino ground out the cigarette and entered the bedroom.

  Dean Harris lay on the bed staring at the ceiling, chewing gum. The former SEAL commando looked expectantly at Corvino as he entered.

  “Ready?” Corvino said, picking up an Ingram MAC-10 nestled in a shoulder holster from the bedside table. Once it was in place, he donned a casual, thin black cotton jacket.

  “Is the Pope Catholic?” Harris mouthed through the gum.

  Corvino waited for Harris to switch off the bedside lamp before he opened the door connecting the two bedrooms.

  Skolomowski, Corvino’s back-up, sat in an armchair in the corner quietly sharpening the large blade of his survival knife. Lang sat on a fold-out chair in front of the window, his eyes glued to night vision binoculars standing on a tripod.

  “Status?”

  “Someone went into the bathroom around ten minutes ago. Five of them in the living room right now. The guard does his rounds on schedule.”

  “Too easy,” muttered the Pole, examining the blade of the knife. “No challenge.”

  “Jesus, Skolly, what do you want, downtown Beirut?” Harris snapped as he placed four magazines of ammunition in the belt beneath his jacket. “Makes a change to have a simple hit.”

  Much as he didn’t like the Pole because he enjoyed killing, Corvino agreed with Skolomowski. The assignment was insultingly simple for a group like Spiral, Black Ops’ crack hit team.

  We could use local talent, Section Chief Ryan Del Valle had noted to Corvino during the pre-op briefing, but Hershman insists.

  Corvino had sat without speaking in Del Valle’s office. Orders were orders, but he’d silently questioned the necessity of sending top operatives to carry out such a basic mission—execute four members of the Cali Cartel, main suppliers of cocaine to the U.S., and two rogue DEA agents who’d turned, taking with them ten million dollars of unmarked agency bills. Terminate with extreme prejudice, extract the money, and depart.

  “Time to move,” Corvino said, consulting his watch. It was 8:55.

  “Synchronize. Eight fifty-five—”

  “And twenty-five seconds,” Lang added.

  “Check,” Harris said.

  “Check,” said the Pole, sheathing the knife.

  “Let’s go.”

  Harris headed for the hallway. Corvino followed.

  The stairs creaked as they descended to the first floor. The old house had stood empty for several months until a few days ago when Mitra Alonso, the team’s local contact, had leased it from a real estate company in downtown Panama City.

  As they reached the door, Harris paused, pulling a silver dollar from his pocket. The coin had a small indentation near the circumference where a .38 bullet had hit during an operation in Boston back in ‘92. Their target had been an IRA cell whose members were shipping Semtex to Britain. The mission had been one of the few blots on Spiral’s almost perfect record; a terrorist had escaped, murdered a bystander on a Cambridge street, and nearly killed Harris, who took a bullet in the shoulder and would have received a second in the chest if the slug hadn’t hit his wallet.

  Harris held the coin up and kissed it. Corvino smiled faintly at the superstitious act. He found it impossible to believe in anything but himself and his skills as an assassin. There was no God, no Fate, just the ability to kill and survive.

  “Finished?”

  “Sure.” Harris opened the door.

  All the houses in the area were set well back from the street, fronted by high walls or a thick screen of trees to insure privacy. As they reached the sidewalk Corvino glanced around casually. To an idle observer, the two men could be friends heading off for a night out at a bar. They strolled across the deserted street, their weapons concealed by their loose jackets.

  The Cartel safe house was surrounded by an eight-foot white brick wall, the entrance an ornate iron gate with an electronic lock operated by a manual switch on the other side. They approached the entrance slowly. Harris stopped, removed a pack of Marlboros from his pocket, offered one to Corvino. Playing along with the act, he declined. As Harris lit the cigarette, Corvino scanned the street. Clear, he nodded, linking his fingers into a foothold, tossing the cigarette to one side. Corvino lifted and Harris reached the top of the wall, swinging himself over with the grace of an acrobat. Corvino heard his partner drop lightly on the other side of the wall. Within seconds the gate clicked open and Corvino slipped inside.

  “If the guard’s on schedule, he’ll be here in two minutes,’ Harris said.

  Corvino nodded in the direction of the house.

  They broke from the wall’s cover, sticking to the patches of shadow cast by the trees. Twilight had slipped into night, a full moon riding low in the sky behind the house, but the strange light of the comet illuminated the front yard. They moved silently across the two hundred yards to a clump of bushes near the front door. Somewhere inside, a radio played, faint strains of classical music leaking from an open upstairs window around the right side of the house. The wall lamp next to the front door was switched off, and the front of the building was shrouded with shadows.

  Harris slid a stiletto blade from a sheath on his belt as he blended with the shadows. Corvino removed a silenced 9mm from beneath his jacket, clicking the safety off as he took up a position on the opposite side of the front door.

  9:02 P.M.

  They waited.

  9:05 came and went. Lang had said the guard made his circuit at five and thirty-five past the hour, always walking clockwise around the building.

  At 9:10, Corvino shifted slightly, relaxing his shoulder muscles. Where was the guard? Other than the faint echo of music, he could hear no signs of life from inside the house. He knew from the house’s floor plan that the main living area was at the rear. He decided to reconnoiter the left side. Signaling his intentions to Harris, Corvino crept silently through the shadows. He paused at the corner, crouching down, and risked a look to confirm the coast was clear. Nothing. Light spilled from a window two hundred feet away. The living room. He slipped around the corner.

  When he reached the window, he listened intently. Just the radio or sound system, whatever the music was coming from; Chopin’s Nocturnes, he now realized.

  Angling himself to peer in diagonally through the glass, his face away from the rectangle of light, he froze.

  A thick streak of gore decorated a white wall, and a bloody corpse lay beside the couch.

  What the hell?

  He ducked down, adrenaline racing through his body. Positioning himself on the other side of the window, he risked a second look.

  The rest of the room was an abattoir. Blood and entrails were strewn across the polished wood floor. A mutilated body he recognized as one of the DEA agents sat slumped in the far corner. Another lay under a mahogany table in a fetal position.

  Before he could absorb the details, a cold hand grabbed the back of his neck, slamming his head against the wall.

  Corvino’s vision exploded into a nebula of white stars.

  ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA,

  SATURDAY, MAY 27.

  9:10 P.M. EST.

  The sixth beer buzzed
through Nick Packard’s brain and everything was sweet: the unseasonably high humidity ceased being uncomfortable, and the fact Sandy was leaving in the morning made the night’s promise more intense. He mouthed the lines “I want to dive into your ocean” along with the Eurythmics CD playing on the stereo.

  Sandy gently stroked back a stray strand of blonde hair from her face as she sipped her glass of chardonnay. Leaning over the candle-lit table to toast him, she smiled and he felt a chill run up his spine.

  God, I love you.

  In that instant he wanted to dive into her ocean, to swim in his wife’s sea, to drown himself in the fragrant smell of the light patina of sweat coating her slim body, to immerse himself in her soft, firm contours and never surface. But that would come later. There was still plenty of time. The night, as the saying went, was still young.

  She raised an eyebrow along with her glass.

  “To you,” she whispered.

  Nick lifted the bottle of Rolling Rock.

  “To us.”

  Glass and bottle touched lightly and Sandy smiled again.

  God, how I love you, he thought again as he looked at her slightly crooked front teeth. He’d always loved her smile more than any of her other physical attributes: the slender legs she felt were too thin, the full breasts she considered too large, the slight bulging curve of her abdomen which she could never banish either by religiously dieting or working out at the gym. Sandy joked she had a body like Jamie Lee Curtis—which suited Nick—”and she doesn’t think she’s attractive either,” she’d said one night as he was massaging her back. Now he called her Jamie whenever she was down on herself. But that smile…it could break your heart and make your dick hard all in one. A lusty smile, yet sensuous and gentle. For an instant he was back in twelfth grade at Van Buren High in Arizona, Mrs. Feldman’s lit class, struggling through the words of Chaucer, with Bonnie “the Witch” Feldman explaining the significance of the Wife of Bath’s gapped teeth. They symbolized lust, she’d informed the largely inattentive class, provoking laughter.

  Lust.

  Nick felt a familiar stirring in his beach shorts and smiled his best poor man’s Tom Cruise grin in return. An image of Lynne Hernandez came to mind, the two of them making out on the football field at dusk, back when he was innocent, still a boy pretending to be a man in Scottsdale, the two of them laughing over nothing as teenagers do.

  “…listening?” Sandy said, a slight edge to her voice.

  “I’m drunk. That last beer just put me over the line.”

  She stared coolly at him for an instant. He’d been drinking a lot lately, he admitted to himself. She hadn’t said anything, but her disapproval wasn’t hard to miss. He knew his drinking made her think of his father, Trooper Will Packard. Six foot three inches of alcoholic, belligerent Arizona cop. Not a good person to think about.

  Sandy forced a smile.

  The night was too precious to worry about anything. It was a celebration, and—

  “Not too drunk, I hope,” she said, her voice tinged with promise.

  “No.”

  “Good. This’ll sober you up.”

  She plucked a banana from the fruit dish. He watched with mock disinterest as she slowly peeled it, exposing the tumescent flesh, lowering her mouth to its tip with painful slowness, gently running her tongue over her top lip before inserting the fruit.

  “Stop. Don’t—”

  Sandy continued to swallow the banana.

  “Okay! I’m drunk. But not that drunk,” he laughed.

  She bit down as he placed the bottle on the table. He pushed the dirty plates to one side, reaching over to touch her arm.

  “Come here.”

  A faint breeze made the candle flutter, the flame swaying drunkenly.

  “Where?”

  “Here,” he said, slapping his thigh.

  She came to him. Another chill ascended his spine as she slipped onto his lap, her right arm encircling his broad back, her firm ass crushing his erection, exciting the rising heat in his groin. Her sweat smelled sweet, clean, feminine. He sniffed it like a wine connoisseur savoring the bouquet of a fine vintage. He kissed her ear. It was slightly salty. But she didn’t respond to his soft kisses.

  “How do you feel?” she asked wistfully.

  “Happy,” he said softly, nuzzling her ear lobe.

  “About Monday.”

  He paused.

  “Like a kid about to go to school for the first time.”

  He didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to think about her leaving for New York in the morning. Didn’t want to consider guns, badges, uniforms or what it was really going to be like out there on the streets of D.C. with crackheads, hookers, welfare cases, crazy people roaming the streets, arguing, fighting, dealing, killing each other. One hundred seventy murders in five months. Nothing they’d taught him at police academy would mean shit out on the streets. No, he didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to taste her lips, feel her body wrapped around his. But the fragile moment, the delirious buzz, was broken, pushed back by the sudden intrusion of past ghosts, present fears.

  Sandy disengaged herself from his embrace and walked across the small dining area to the window. The phosphorous luminescence of the comet lent a tragic cast to her face as she gazed out into the yard. Party sounds hung in the stagnant night air. The Williamsons next door were having a barbecue. As the CD came to an end he could hear Denise Williamson’s shrill laughter and the pop of a champagne cork, but the festive mood didn’t carry with the noise. Behind Sandy’s cheerfulness and subtle sexual taunts lay great sadness. And fear.

  Her mother, a sweet, fine woman like her youngest daughter, was dying of colon cancer in a private room at Beth Israel Medical Center, hooked up to IVs, a sanitary bag and an EKG, two steps from death. And tomorrow, Sandy would be gone, heading north on Amtrak’s noon Metroliner.

  I should be with her, Nick thought.

  But duty called. Not the duty of a loving husband or devoted son-in-law, but the obligation of a rookie cop about to face his future on the mean streets of Washington. Nick rubbed his hands across his face. He got up, gently pushing the chair back so that the legs didn’t scrape on the hardwood floor. Sandy hated that.

  What do I do now?

  A lifetime of holding his emotions in check, keeping deep feelings safely under lock and key—away from the verbal and physical attacks he’d endured from his father—caused him problems in difficult situations, leaving him tongue-tied and hesitant, uncertain how to respond to the pain of others. Shit, she was his wife.

  You’re thinking too much, kid, his father’s admonishing voice echoed in his head.

  He picked up the beer bottle, downed the last mouthful, and went to her.

  Sandy stood by the window with her arms crossed, hugging herself as if cold. He paused behind her, hesitant, searching for the right words. His mind felt as empty as the six Rolling Rock bottles standing on the table; his mouth dry, inarticulate.

  “Hon?”

  She continued to stare up at the magnificent celestial body bathing the night sky a pale, eerie green. It wasn’t just the fact her mother was nearly gone; Sandy had been opposed to Nick’s career choice for most of their two-year marriage. Though she’d said nothing in the early days, he’d sensed the disapproval. As he’d progressed through the Academy, her thoughts gradually became vocal, at first spoken tangentially during small arguments over domestic matters—like leaving the toilet seat up—then directly as he entered his last year at Henderson.

  I don’t want to be a widow before I’m thirty, she’d said one day while they were riding horses at her Uncle Steve’s ranch in the Carolinas. I don’t want to lose you to the streets or the pressures of a cop’s life.

  But he had no choice. He had to prove that he was a better man than his father—that not all cops were embittered bullies poisoned by cynicism, and self-hatred.

  Nick reached out, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder.

  “Hon.”
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  Sandy turned, tears in her eyes. She looked like a Romantic painting, her face framed by the pageboy bob, the comet’s weird luminescence causing the tears to glisten like diamonds as they threatened to spill from her eyelids, her lips tremulous with emotion.

  “Hold me.”

  He embraced her. Words weren’t necessary. If his verbal vocabulary had failed him, his body language did not. Sandy clung to him with the need of a small child seeking reassurance from a parent. It’s going to be all right, he nearly said. But that was a lie. It wasn’t going to get better, only worse. Her mother was dying a painful death, and nothing he could say or do would make any difference. All he could give was himself and hold her tightly.

  Sandy melted into his arms, her breasts warm against his LA Raiders T-shirt and the taut muscles beneath. Her hair brushed his cheek. The smell of apple shampoo was clean, sweet. She looked up at him, lips parted. The tears were under control. She kissed him, at first slowly, then with passion. He responded, squeezing her supple body against his, their tongues entwining.

  He was swimming in her sea.

  Sandy ran a hand down his back to clasp his ass, urging him deeper, her tidal rhythms guiding their movements on the bed. He drew her body upwards as he eased his motion from a circular grind to long, slow thrusts, supporting their mutual weight on his elbows as she wrapped her legs around his waist, soft groans emerging from her throat each time her hips pushed against his. Then the undertow took him and he was submerged. It was sooner than expected and he slowed his pace. Sandy nipped at his shoulder, gasping, urging him on, deeper, deeper. Like a sailor lured to his death by the singing of the Lorelei, he gave up the struggle and began to drift down towards the depths of primal feeling. As he reached bottom she cried out, her own spasms cresting along her stomach as waves of orgasm brought mutual release. The viselike tension in his groin abated, and he began to float towards the surface bringing her with him, blood pounding in his ears, his muscles going limp as the tide washed them to the beach and the soft dunes of post-coital intimacy. He moved to disengage but she clung to him.