by Chris Holm
“Hey, boss?” It was Littlefield, the equipment tech from the van. In his hand was Thompson’s phone. “This thing’s been going nuts for twenty minutes straight.”
“It’s just my sister,” she said. “She’s been texting me all day.”
Littlefield shook his head. “Nope. These were calls— from HQ, it looked like.”
“You were snooping around my phone?” Thompson asked, a bit too sharply.
“I glanced at it, is all,” he said defensively. “Figured it might be important.”
He handed her the phone. Five calls, all from Thompson’s supervisor, Assistant Director Kathryn O’Brien. Five calls, and not one voice mail.
Thompson called her back. Told her the op went fine.
“I’m glad,” O’Brien replied, “but I’m not calling about the op. There was a shooting two nights ago in Miami. I want you and Garfield to go down and check it out.”
“Yeah, I saw it on the wire. Some old guy gunned down in broad daylight. But why me? If it’s federal, I’m sure the Miami office can handle it. Shootings in Miami are a dime a dozen.”
“This wasn’t some random shooting, Charlie. It was a hit.”
Thompson felt a tingle of excitement—the kind of rush that meant a case was on the verge of breaking. “And the vic?”
“A Corporation enforcer by the name of Javier Cruz.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“Any witnesses?” Thompson asked.
“You tell me, Special Agent—that’s kind of your job.”
“We’ll be on the next flight down.”
“I thought you might be,” O’Brien said.
Thompson was smiling when she ended the call.
“What was that about?” Garfield asked around a mouthful of God knows what.
“We’re headed to Miami,” Thompson replied. “It would seem my ghost has struck again.”
6
The bell that hung above the entrance of the Bait Shop clanged as the door swung open and a gust of chilly salt air blew in from the streetlit night, rattling bottles and settling atop the scuffed copper bar. Just a couple miles inland, it was a stultifying summer night in Maine— windows thrown open, fans on high—but the city of Portland was blanketed in fog, the bank extending the length of Casco Bay.
The fog had put a damper on the night’s business. Like any of the bars in Portland’s Old Port—a historic district of renovated fish piers and nineteenth-century architecture— the Bait Shop was usually hopping all summer long, Sundays included. It wasn’t as swanky as the tapas place around the corner, or as much a mainstay of the bar-crawl scene as the Irish pub just down the street. And unlike half the places in town, it didn’t have a deck, ocean-view or otherwise. But it did have Lester Meyers behind the bar, and the man was known to have a heavy hand with the drinks— which made the place a hit with locals if not tourists.
Tonight, though, the place was so dead that Lester closed up around ten thirty, ushering a couple shitfaced lobstermen out into the night, where they were forced to make their way home with exaggerated care over the old paving stones. Then he’d killed the neon in the window, and locked the doors—which is why it was odd to hear that bell clang.
Lester, who’d been behind the bar breaking down his garnish station, craned his neck to see over the bar and past the chairs that sat upturned atop the tables. But try as he might, he couldn’t see the door from where his wheelchair sat. The bitch of being four feet tall, he thought. After twenty-eight years, four months, and thirteen days of being a solid six-two, his brain had never quite adjusted to the change.
“Sorry, pal,” he called, “we’re closed.”
Lester sat and listened for a moment, but if there was anyone there, he couldn’t say—and after six years with Special Forces running black ops throughout the mountains of Afghanistan, his ears were as attuned to subtle cues as anybody’s could be.
He gripped his wheels and rolled himself backward just a hair to see if he could get a better look. As he did, he could have sworn he heard a rustle of fabric.
He stopped.
It stopped.
He rolled another couple inches, and there it was again.
“Look, this ain’t funny,” Lester said. He put on some speed—whipping a quarter-spin as he passed the end of the bar and drawing the Beretta M9 Velcroed to the underside of his chair, so that when he came to a halt, he was facing the door head-on, his gun sight trained on...nothing.
He sat like that a moment, lungs and limbs searing from the sudden exertion, but then a sound behind him made him start.
The sound of a beer bottle being opened.
Lester spun, his gun hand swinging toward the noise, and coming to a stop aimed precisely at the bridge of Michael Hendricks’s nose.
“Hiya, Les.”
Lester let his hand drop. “Jesus, Mike—you scared the hell outta me! I coulda shot your fucking face off. Which—I don’t mind telling you—mighta been an improvement. You look like shit. You get out okay? Was worried I stayed in the system too long after all and got you nabbed.”
“Nope,” said Hendricks. “Job went fine. Your trick with the lights worked like a charm.”
The fact was, though Lester’s hack worked perfectly, Hendricks wished they hadn’t had to go that route. He preferred his kills to be a little less of a tightrope act than the Cruz job had been. If he’d had his druthers, Cruz would have been in the ground long before he ever got within striking distance of Morales. But then, he hadn’t had much time to prepare; Morales had taken his sweet time scraping together Hendricks’s fee.
Michael Hendricks had a unique business model. He didn’t accept contract kills. Didn’t work for any criminal organization. And he never killed civilians. He only hit hitters. He wasn’t the kind of guy you called if you wanted to pop somebody who’d pissed you off or done you wrong. In fact, he wasn’t a guy you called at all—he called you. And when he did, you’d be advised to take the call, because it meant someone, somewhere‚ wanted you dead.
Morales’s hesitation was understandable. It was clear he thought at first that Hendricks was trying to shake him down—and even for a billionaire, two hundred thousand dollars isn’t exactly chicken feed. But the price the Corporation had placed on Morales’s head was $20K, and Hendricks’s rate to make a hitter disappear was ten times the hitter’s payout. Always up-front. Nonnegotiable.
The smart ones paid. The ones that didn’t weren’t around too long to regret it. And until the text came through from Hendricks’s bank in the Seychelles six hours before Cruz was to make his move, Hendricks had no idea which Morales would prove to be.
Guess he’d done his homework. There were plenty of rumors of Hendricks’s existence for those who knew where to look—not to mention examples of his handiwork. And now Edgar Morales would live to piss off the Corporation another day. Most hired guns wouldn’t touch a job that got a predecessor popped, for fear they’d wind up meeting the same fate. Killing was a whole lot harder once you took away the element of surprise—and the scrutiny a failed attempt attracted from law enforcement made finishing the job damn near impossible.
Still, Morales ought to consider beefing up his personal security for a while. Or maybe flee the country in one of those fancy charter planes his company owned until things back home cooled off. Hendricks’s services were one-time offers; in his business, it didn’t pay to offer lifetime guarantees.
“Cruz wasn’t any trouble?” Lester asked. “I hear tell he was supposed to be one nasty motherfucker.”
Hendricks shrugged. “Emphasis on was.”
“Then why the holdup getting back? And what’re you doing here? Not that I ain’t happy to see you—but I figured you’d be eager to get home.”
“Needed to recharge my batteries,” said Hendricks, too dismissively. “Decided I’d take my time. Drive up the coast. See the sights.”
“Yeah, you look recharged,” said Lester, his words dripping sarca
sm. “This drive of yours didn’t happen to take you through Virginia, did it? Past Evie’s place, maybe?”
Of course it did. And of course Lester knew it. In all the world, the only person left who really knew Hendricks was this man—now that Evie thought him dead.
“She looked good,” Hendricks said—his expression pained.
“It’s Evie, dude—of course she looked good.”
“How far along is she?”
Damn it, thought Lester—so that’s why Mike came straight here, instead of going home. He decided to play dumb. “Come again?”
“Don’t pull that shit on me, Les. You really expect me to believe you didn’t know? You and Evie are Facebook friends. She and Stuart,” he spat, as though the man’s name was an epithet, “invited you to their fucking wedding.”
“Ain’t like I went,” he said, giving the chair a twirl. “Not much for dancing these days.”
“How far along, Les?”
Lester sighed and looked at his lap. “Gotta be five months now, almost. She’s due in January. And shit like this is exactly why I won’t let you see her feed.”
Hendricks set his beer down on the bar. Hard. Foam rose and ran over, like the bile rising in his throat. He kept the latter down by force of will and mopped up the former with a bar rag.
“Look, I’m sorry, man, but what did you expect? Poor woman thinks you’re dead. She went outta her head mourning you—we all did. The day you walked through that door,” he said, nodding back toward the front of the bar, “it was like the clouds had parted; you got no idea the weight of guilt you lifted offa me when you came back. I know you’ve got your reasons for not seeing her, and as much as I think you made the wrong damn choice, I understand it ain’t my place. But you can’t leave a girl a widow at twenty-six and not expect her to move on.”
“I didn’t,” Hendricks said.
“You didn’t what?”
“Leave her a widow.” It was true. They never married.
Lester snorted in dismissal. “Why, because you didn’t have a fucking piece of paper? You think that mattered to her? You made a promise, and so did she. The rest is nothing more than, you know, fodder for the bureaucrats.”
Lester was right. Of course he was. But it didn’t mean that Hendricks had to like it.
Hendricks and Evie met their sophomore year at Albemarle High, which was nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Evie’s parents were Southern upper-crust types; her father taught law at the university, and her mother didn’t work, insisting a woman’s place was in the home. Home was a sprawling redbrick mansion Evie’s three-greats granddad built before the War of Northern Aggression, as her family still called it, and her mother’s idea of playing housewife was bossing around the team of servants it took to tend it. Hendricks— then a skinny kid in ill-fitting thrift store clothes—had never seen such opulence. Evie’s parents were genteel enough in their disdain for him to hide it behind a veneer of Southern charm—supposing, perhaps, the whole affair would blow over soon enough.
By the time Hendricks’s relationship with Evie reached the six-month mark, her parents weren’t speaking to him.
And when, after graduation, Evie agreed to marry him, they weren’t speaking to her, either.
Evie and Hendricks ran off together—just hopped into his old pickup truck and headed north. They moved into her father’s family’s summer cabin in New Hampshire, unused for decades on account of Evie’s mother’s disdain for the wilderness. That summer, Evie worked weekends slinging soft serve, and Hendricks—who aimed to enlist as soon as his eighteenth birthday came around—picked up the odd construction gig. They had barely ten dollars between them and not a care in the world, lounging and laughing and making love in their shabby forest home.
They talked of using his meager soldier’s salary to get Evie a degree. They talked of making it official and starting a family once his tour of duty was through. They talked of nothing at all for what seemed like days, lost in lust and love.
Looking back, it was hard for Hendricks to imagine how it could have all gone wrong. How he could have gone from love-struck, duty-bound kid eager to fight for God and country to cold-blooded killer-for-hire.
Truth be told, the progression was simple enough. But simple wasn’t the same as easy.
There was a dream that plagued Hendricks every time he closed his eyes. No matter how hard he tried to change the outcome, it always played out the same way.
In the dream, Hendricks is a fresh-faced patriot straight out of basic training—a soldier so green, he barely knows which end of his rifle is which. He brims with pride as he’s given his first assignment downrange: guard duty for a dignitary and his family. The dignitary is a kindly older gentleman, beaming as he introduces Hendricks to his wife and children and thanks him for his protection, his dedicated service.
The men arrive at nightfall. Silent. Lethal. Clad in black, cowards operating in darkness. He watches, helpless, as they kill his brothers-in-arms; the dignitary he’s sworn to protect; the dignitary’s family.
He’s helpless because his throat’s been slit, a vulgar smile, warm blood pooling on the floor beneath him.
And as his life slips away—just before he returns gasping to the waking world—he can sense the fresh ghosts of the cooling dead all around.
Hendricks is that soldier every night—honorable and dying—but in life, he never was.
He was the black-clad man who killed him.
In boot camp, Hendricks was identified as having certain qualities. Qualities the military finds valuable in a covert operative. To this day, he wasn’t sure what put them onto him. He supposed it could have been his instinctive understanding of military tactics, his knack for firearms and bladed weapons, or his talent with shaped charges. But it seemed likelier to him their barrage of psychological examinations revealed some dark aspect of his psyche, like the shadow of a tumor on an X-ray, that told them he was the killing kind.
Whatever it was, they weren’t wrong. Hendricks took to the training like a dog to the hunt, and why wouldn’t he? Special Forces was his chance to make a difference. To tip the balance. To make the world safe for democracy.
But his idealism didn’t last long.
The job itself proved just the antidote.
His was a false-flag unit, operating under orders of the US government, but without the safety net of military backup or diplomatic support. They specialized in missions the details of which the Pentagon didn’t want to see the light of day.
Most of those missions were political assassinations.
Even now, Hendricks was forced to admit he and his team had done some good. Many of the threats they neutralized were legitimate. But some weren’t. Some were murders, pure and simple.
Hendricks honestly couldn’t say whether that dignitary needed killing or not. He could say they didn’t need to kill his wife and kids. Or his entire security detail, who weren’t any more a threat to an elite team of commandos than the wife and kids had been.
But they did. They killed them all.
Hendricks wasn’t sure why—given all he’d seen and done—the young soldier was the one who haunted him. He’d kicked the door in to find Hendricks standing over the dignitary, knife in hand, and Hendricks got to the kid before he could unsling his rifle from his shoulder. Cut him ear-to-ear, clean through his windpipe, and listened to his strangled cries as he died. Poor kid looked so surprised, Hendricks recalled, as if he couldn’t square exactly how it had come to this. For that matter, Hendricks couldn’t square it, either—but something told him that would’ve been cold comfort to the boy as he lay dying.
Maybe Hendricks felt some kinship with him. Maybe he’d just had his fill of taking orders from those who refused to get their hands dirty. Hell, maybe it was the phase of the fucking moon.
Whatever it was, after he killed the kid, Hendricks withdrew into himself. He stopped writing Evie. Stopped calling. He didn’t figure he w
as worthy of her love on account of what he’d done.
He wanted to die. To disappear. And when a roadside bomb outside Kandahar destroyed his unit, Hendricks got his wish.
They were returning back to base after a mission. Recon in the hills just north of town. Seventy-two hours without rest and a sort of delirious exhaustion set in. Lester was running point—walking ahead of the team’s two Humvees to scout the unmarked dirt track on which they were traveling. Hendricks was tasked with bringing up the rear, slowly surveilling their perimeter.
As the Humvees rolled past a stand of brown scrub brush, Hendricks spotted something. A rustling in the bushes. Protocol dictated he radio ahead to halt the team and investigate, but he didn’t. It was probably nothing, he thought. Turned out, he was right—as he crouched to peer into the underbrush, he found it was just a common hare, fleeing as they approached.
Then the high-desert stillness was ripped apart in a fury of light and sound, of flaming metal and flying rock. An improvised explosive device, Hendricks later learned. In the scant moments before consciousness failed him, he thought it was the wrath of hell.
Turned out Lester had been asleep on his feet. Maybe if he hadn’t been, he would have seen the warning signs. Then again, maybe not. It was the dead of night, after all, and Afghani rebels had been waging war against various occupiers for over thirty years—they’d learned a thing or two about disguising booby traps along the way. Odds are, not a man alive could have spotted that device in time.
Not that knowing that helped Lester sleep at night.
By some standards, Les was lucky: he only lost his legs. The men in both Humvees lost their lives. It was the first of the two that set off the device—two bricks of C-4 packed all around with shards of rock—but when the bomb blew, it threw the first vehicle backward onto the second, collapsing both vehicles on themselves and leaving nothing to bury back home. Hendricks was thrown some thirty yards from the roadway and knocked unconscious. He stayed that way for days, buried beneath a layer of ash-gray dirt.