by Chris Holm
About the Author
Chris Holm is an award-winning short story writer whose work has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, and The Best American Mystery Stories. His critically acclaimed trilogy of Collector novels, which blend fantasy with old-fashioned crime pulp, appeared on over forty Year’s Best lists. He lives in Portland, Maine.
Also by Chris Holm
The Collector Series
The Big Reap
The Wrong Goodbye
Dead Harvest
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Mulholland Books
An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Chris Holm 2015
The right of Chris Holm to be identified as the Author
of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form
or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher,
nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN 978 1 473 60614 2
Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 473 60615 9
Ebook ISBN 978 1 473 60613 5
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For Katrina—again, or for the first time
Nor is there any law more just, than that he who has plotted death shall perish by his own plot.
—Ovid
We can’t all be saints.
—John Dillinger
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
1
The streets of downtown Miami shimmered in the evening heat, the summer air rich with spice and song. Neon and rum and the warm ocean breeze conspired to make the city thrum with lurid anticipation. It was, after all, a Friday night in one of the most vibrant cities in the world. Still, no one who walked that night beneath the broad modern portico of the Morales Incorporated Building suspected they’d briefly occupied the spot where a man was about to die.
Edgar Morales pushed through the revolving doors of the gleaming steel-and-glass building that bore his name and stepped onto the sunbaked concrete. After a day spent in climate-controlled comfort, the hot breath of the city set him sweating. He checked his watch. It was precisely six thirteen p.m. Most days, Edgar’s car would come around to pick him up at precisely six fifteen—but today was not most days. Today Edgar’s car would not be coming, for it had been disabled. Fixing it would delay his driver long enough to leave Morales exposed so that the man the Corporation—as the Cuban Mafia calls itself—sent to kill him could complete his task.
He wasn’t exposed enough for Michael Hendricks’s taste.
Hendricks watched Morales through the telescopic sight of his M40A3 sniper rifle from his perch some four blocks down the street. His vision was distorted slightly by the tinted window through which he peered, and by the stolen Escalade’s vibration as its AC labored to cool its spacious interior. Hendricks had found the vehicle in a long-term parking lot at Miami International a few hours back. Gleaming black with chromed-out rims, an enormous cabin, and tinted windows all around, it made the perfect downtown Miami sniper blind. He would have preferred to set up in one of the many towers that faced Morales Incorporated—shots from above were less likely to encounter an obstruction prior to finding their target, and both witnesses and routes of egress could be more easily planned for and controlled—but that damned overhang shielded the entryway from view at such an angle. So instead, he made do, slipping a valet a hundred bucks for the privilege of parking in the far corner of a boutique hotel’s parking lot, which had decent sight lines to the building’s entrance. Time was, a hundred bucks could have gotten you a room in this town—but not anymore, and certainly not at this address.
He’d been sitting there for an hour watching traffic roll by, the AC blasting in a vain attempt to keep the heat and humidity at bay. The air was so heavy and still, the strips of fabric he’d tied to the street signs to serve as wind indicators hadn’t moved since he’d first parked. The lack of wind was to Hendricks’s advantage. Wind was second only to gravity in its ability to alter a bullet’s trajectory, and since its force was not constant, it was far harder to account for. But he’d need to take the humidity into account. Air this water-laden was sure to slow his bullet down—enough, at this distance, to lower his point of impact by three full inches. Three inches could be the difference between a kill shot and a graze.
This muggy weather was disgusting, Hendricks thought, much like the cup of café con leche that sat undrunk in the cup holder beside him—thick, cloying, and sticky. And the palette of the city grated on him— everything was canary and coral and aquamarine. Hendricks missed the dark greens and cold blues of northern New England, where even the hottest summer sun failed to warm the deepest hollows of the forest, and the water ran cold all year long. Miami was beautiful, sure, but that beauty was as garish and artificial as the siliconed women who walked its streets.
Everything about the place felt insincere.
Best to get the job over with and get out of here.
Through his scope, Hendricks watched Morales look left and right, surveying the busy street as if for his missing ride, and then descend the wide concrete steps toward the curb. Men in business suits jostled for position beside bronzed women in skimpy beach gear, waiting for the crosswalk light to change.
“We’re a go,” Hendricks said. He turned the key in the ignition, cutting the engine but leaving the battery engaged. The world around him went silent, and the car’s vibration stilled. “Tell me you’re in the system.”
“I’m in,” came
the reply through his Bluetooth, “but understand, the security is first-rate. It cycles through its diagnostics at five-second intervals. If any unauthorized command is detected, an alarm is triggered. And if that happens, the cops’ll be at your position in minutes.”
“You saying you can’t do it?”
“I’m saying once you give the go-ahead, you’ll have three seconds, no more.”
“Guess I’d better make those seconds count,” Hendricks said. “On my mark.”
Morales reached the curb. Hendricks pivoted his rifle first left, then right, taking in the scene through his scope. He gave a nod of satisfaction at what he saw and lowered the passenger-side front window, sighting his target through the opening, his weapon’s bipod steadied against the leather sill.
“Mark.”
At once, the lights for blocks around changed so that the intersections were red leading to this stretch of road, and green leading away. As traffic cleared in front of the Morales building, the light at the crosswalk changed as well, and the crowd around Morales stepped out into the street.
“Three,” said the voice in his ear.
Hendricks drew a measured breath and held it. His body processed the complex math behind the shot by instinct, making fine adjustments to account for the heat, air pressure, and distance from sea level. His heart beat slow and steady in his chest.
“Two.”
His body motionless, Hendricks squeezed the trigger— three pounds’ pressure, no more, no less.
“One.”
A crack like thunder echoed down the street.
When Morales heard the shot, he hit the deck. Hendricks had to hand it to the guy, he had good instincts—he reacted a full second before anyone else in sight. But ultimately, his gesture of self-preservation was futile; by the time you hear the gunshot, the bullet’s come and gone.
Lucky for Morales, he wasn’t Hendricks’s target.
Hendricks’s target was Javier Cruz—the hitman the Corporation had sent to kill Morales. A button man for the Corporation since their early days running bolita rackets out of Little Havana, Cruz’d killed more men than he could count.
Not that anyone would know to look at him. Those he passed on his stroll down Brickell toward Morales Incorporated were like as not to smile at the kindly old Cuban man in his crisp white guayabera shirt, raw linen pants, and straw fedora. They had no idea his steel gray mustache hid beneath it the grisly scar of a lip split by a policeman’s baton, or that the policeman in question hadn’t lived to see the sun rise the following morning. They didn’t realize the limp in his gait wasn’t age or sciatica, but the result of two lead slugs fired off by the wife of a local politician who’d made it his business to disrupt the Corporation’s. She woke to find him in her bedroom while her husband was out of town, and if she hadn’t been so beautiful—or so very, very naked—perhaps Cruz wouldn’t have allowed her time to reach the gun in the nightstand. She buried two bullets in his leg, and he buried her in half a dozen spots the state over, leaving only a bedroom full of blood and a ring finger for her husband to find on his return, resting atop a photo of their four daughters. That man never spoke a word about the Corporation again.
Those Cruz passed didn’t know they were in the presence of a monster. But unfortunately for Cruz, Hendricks knew.
And unfortunately for Cruz, Hendricks never missed.
When Hendricks pulled the trigger, Cruz’s head exploded. For a moment, what was left of him stood there, inches from Morales, a steel blade gleaming in his hand— his bloodied fedora fluttering to the ground behind him. Then his body slumped to the sidewalk like a dropped marionette.
As the gunshot’s echoes died, the night was filled with the sounds of panic. The shriek of voices and tires both. The bleat of car horns. The wail of a distant siren fast approaching. Everyone within earshot had been trained by one awful news report after another to await that second shot, or third, or fifth. Trained to wonder if they’d prove another victim in the killer’s tally.
Hendricks, on the other hand, calmly withdrew the rifle and raised the blackened window. He knew it would take them several minutes to determine where the shot had come from—more than enough time for him to make his escape.
“You get out of the system clean?” he quietly asked.
“Who do you think you’re talking to?” the voice in his ear replied. “They’ll never even know I was there.”
“Good,” said Hendricks. “Signing off.”
“Safe travels.”
At the curb outside his office building, Edgar Morales scrabbled to his feet, ashen and trembling. Though he tried, he couldn’t tear his gaze from his would-be killer’s corpse. If he’d had any inkling it would come to this when he’d begun buying up cheap tenements in Miami’s dodgy Goulds neighborhood with an eye toward gentrifying the area—and cleaning up a stronghold of the Corporation’s narcotics sales in the process—his altruistic streak would have taken a backseat to his healthy sense of self-preservation. But he hadn’t known, any more than he’d known until this very moment that he had no stomach for killing, even in self-defense.
His phone rang in his pocket. Morales flinched as if slapped, and then answered.
“H-hello?” he said.
“Are you all right?” Hendricks asked.
Morales hesitated. As a point in fact, he was pretty fucking far from all right. But instead, he told Hendricks, “Yes. I trust my payment was received?”
“If it wasn’t,” Hendricks said, “you wouldn’t be around to ask me that.”
Morales laughed—brittle, barking. “That’s not exactly a comforting thought.”
“Well, just think: now you’ve got your whole life to come to grips with it. Pleasure doing business with you.”
And then the line went dead.
2
It was a cool August night on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, and Jean-Luc Vian’s château was alive with candlelight—a glimmering jewel nestled in the crushed velvet of the French countryside, its rich greens fading to black as the soft light gave way to darkness. The grounds were bedecked for a grand party, and the flagstone drive— which led from the rural one-lane road, past the massive iron gates and guest quarters, and up to the main house— was lined with luxury automobiles. BMWs and Mercedes, mostly, interspersed with a few Jaguars, a Bentley, and even one god-awful yellow Lamborghini, the last driven by that boorish football player Caravagas that Vian’s wife had insisted he invite.
No doubt that deceitful cow had by now lured the man to one of their many bedrooms, Vian thought, where their exploits would join those of her prior dalliances as the talk of every dinner party from Paris to Haute-Savoie.
If it weren’t for the fact that she was daughter to the foreign minister, his pride would have insisted he leave her long ago. Theirs was a marriage of political and social expediency, not love—a fact that was too well known amid the corridors of power for Vian’s taste.
Then again, Vian thought, for all her faults, at least she was enjoying the party. He, on the other hand, apparently had work to attend to, having been summoned by text to dial in to an emergency conference call—though what could be so pressing at this late an hour, his employer didn’t say.
Vian punched his security code into the keypad on his office door, waited for the electronic whir as the lock disengaged, then stepped inside. As he shut the door behind him, the lock engaged once more, and the sounds of the string quartet and drunken laughter dropped away, deadened by his office’s soundproofing.
It wasn’t until he raised the lights that he realized he was not alone.
“Who are you?” Vian asked the man in French. “How did you—”
“—get in here?” his uninvited guest ventured, his own French excellent but accented. “Mr. Vian, there’s no need for a man of your breeding and intellect to be so trite—or so dreadfully sincere. You don’t really expect me to answer your first question, do you? And as to your second, I suspect if you ruminate upon it for a m
oment, you could save me the tedium of explaining.”
So Vian ruminated upon it. It made no sense. How could this man have breached the gate and slipped past all his guards? Vian was sure he hadn’t been invited, for his employer—who, in addition to supplying his personal security detail, ran background checks on all attendees of Vian’s parties—had sent along the dossiers they’d compiled for everybody on the invite list just yesterday, and this man was not among them.
Perhaps he’d bluffed his way through, then. Certainly, the stranger was dressed for the role of partygoer, in his slim black suit, crisp dove-gray shirt, and matching tie. He was seated in Vian’s own leather desk chair, his black oxfords propped atop the desk. Black kid gloves graced his slender hands.
But bluffing alone could not have gained him access to this room—only Vian had the access code. Well, Vian, and his employer, who had installed the door locks, the encrypted phone and Internet connections, and the soundproofing as well.
And then, at once, Vian understood. The late-night summons. The lack of dossier on this man. The breach of Vian’s inner sanctum.
It seemed the terms of his employment had been reevaluated.
The stranger noted with some satisfaction the change in Vian’s expression from puzzlement to despair. “Sit down,” he said, withdrawing his feet from the desk and plucking a silenced firearm off the blotter as he rose.
Vian did as the man instructed, dropping heavily into one of the high-backed chairs that faced the desk from this side.
“Good,” the man said, a smile dancing across his face. “Now: tell me why I’m here.” That face was neither young nor old—oddly wise, yet unlined, as though he’d never in his life encountered a troubling thought. His hair was sandy blond, perhaps interspersed with white, perhaps not. Vian was struck by the fact that—despite the dramatic circumstances of their meeting—if he passed this man on the street a month from now, he probably would not recognize him.