The Killing Kind

by Chris Holm

  That was fine. Useful, even.

  Alexander Engelmann had a busy night ahead of him.

  “Pardon me,” said Engelmann, “but I was wondering if I might have a word.”

  It wasn’t the man’s words that chilled Edgar Morales to his core, nor his polite, well-modulated tone—a tone that implied moneyed good grace and lent an angular quality to his words, a voice suggesting that while he was clearly fluent, this man was not a native English speaker.

  What chilled Edgar Morales was the moment itself, for it was four in the morning, and the words had roused him from sleep. He opened his eyes to find his bedroom dark and still, the security panel on his wall blinking green to indicate all was well. But he hadn’t imagined that voice—a voice that signaled to Morales that all his precautions had been for naught and that his life would end tonight.

  Ever since Cruz’s attempt on Morales’s life, Morales had spent his nights in his Bayside Village condo out on Fisher Island. He’d bought the place years ago when his company’s value first reached a billion, seduced by the cachet that accompanied the address. What better sign was there you’d made it than living on a man-made resort island that boasted the highest per capita income in the nation? For a kid who grew up poor on a dodgy street in Goulds, the allure of joining Miami’s most exclusive community was too great to pass up. It had taken him a while to find a suitable abode, because he’d restricted his search to the city-facing bay side, ignoring Fisher Island’s ocean-side properties entirely. After all, what was seeing the sunrise over the Atlantic compared to the glint of the sunrise off the skyscraper that bore his name?

  In the days since his mysterious benefactor rid him of his Cruz problem, however, his six-thousand-square-foot condo had taken on a new significance for him, beyond signifying his arrival as a businessman. Situated as it was on the uppermost floor, with views in every direction and every access point monitored by a security system so stateof-the-art the Pentagon couldn’t afford it—not to mention the fact that it was on an island with no auto access whatsoever, and ferry access limited to residents and invited guests—it had become his fortress, his island stronghold. The man who saved his life had warned him the Corporation would likely try again, and having witnessed Cruz’s grisly demise, he took that warning to heart—even augmenting his already formidable security with a team of trained sentries. His neighbors, no doubt, thought he’d gone off the deep end, another Howard Hughes type unable to handle the pressures of so much wealth. But to hell with his neighbors—better to be a live eccentric than to be thought of well while dead.

  “Who...who are you?” he stammered, his voice hoarse from fear.

  “Who I am is of little consequence to you,” Engelmann replied.

  “My guards—”

  “Are, at present, indisposed.”

  “You mean...,” Morales began, only to find he could not summon the words.

  “If you’re asking did I kill them, the answer is no; I’ve not been paid to kill them. I merely rendered them unconscious so you and I would not be interrupted.”

  “But you are here to kill me.”

  Engelmann smiled. “That depends upon your level of cooperation. You see, I’ve not been paid to kill you, either.”

  Morales digested the man’s words. “If you’re not here to kill me, why’d you sneak into my bedroom?”

  “I need to ask you some questions. About what happened to one Mr. Javier Cruz.”

  “You mean the man who died outside my building?” Morales asked. “I don’t know; I wasn’t there.” It was a foolish lie, given the circumstances, but it was a reflex, nothing more. He’d repeated that lie to countless detectives and reporters in the past three days, before instructing his legal team to shut down any further inquiries on the subject.

  Engelmann tsked in the darkness. “Mr. Morales, I think I’ve thus far treated you with decorum, even respect—I’d appreciate it if you would afford me the same courtesy. I may not have been paid to kill you, but hurting you I’d do for free.”

  Morales stiffened. He swallowed hard, his mouth dry as sand. “Of course,” he rasped, fumbling for the bedside table. “I’m sorry. If I could just turn the light on, so I can take a drink of water—”

  “I’m not an amateur, Mr. Morales. I removed your firearm from the drawer before I woke you. And I suspect if you think long and hard about it, you’ll realize it’s in your best interest if you never see my face.”

  Morales slumped in his bed, defeated.

  “Good,” Engelmann said, as if something of import had been decided. “Now, Cruz.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want you to tell me how you contacted the man who killed him.”

  “I—I didn’t!”

  Morales heard a metallic sching as a blade slid free of its scabbard. His heart slammed painfully against the wall of his chest.

  “I did caution you against lying, Mr. Morales.”

  Hands on his face. In his hair. Yanking his head back. Morales cried out—wordless, animal. For a moment, he thrashed against his assailant’s grasp, but then he froze as he felt the point of a blade dimple the tender flesh beneath his left eye.

  Morales had no idea how the man could be so precise in such utter darkness. The blade’s tip did not pierce his skin. It just rested there, so gently that it tickled, but the man’s iron grip on the back of his head made it clear it would take little effort to drive that blade into his eye.

  “Now,” the man said, “I’ll ask again. How did you contact the man who killed Cruz?”

  Morales tried to withdraw from the blade—by instinct more than volition—but it was no use. “I told you,” he said, his manner more pleading than correcting, “I didn’t—he contacted me!”

  Morales braced for the pain to come, but it never did. Instead, the man withdrew, leaving Morales once more alone on the bed, gulping air as he willed his drumroll heart to slow.

  “He contacted you.” It wasn’t a question; Engelmann was certain Morales would not have lied to him just then— he had a better sense of self-preservation than that.

  “That’s right. The guy showed up in my office one day—no appointment, no nothing—and told me there was a bounty on my head.”

  “Did he say how he knew this to be true?”

  “He said he had his sources.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “No, of course not. But he had details—land deals I’d made that weren’t yet part of the public record. Communications from the goons in the Cuban Mafia about all the trouble I was causing.” He paused, then, wondering if Engelmann would take offense at his thoughtless characterization, but Engelmann said nothing. “He had the when and where, the who and how, and he knew how much this Cruz dude was getting for his trouble. Said for ten times as much, he’d make Cruz go away.”

  Ten times the price on the target’s head. A tidy profit to be sure, Engelmann thought, smiling. The more he learned of his quarry, the more he liked the man. “How did you know he was not conning you? That he wasn’t shaking you down, as your American mobsters are so fond of saying?”

  “I didn’t. But he told me I didn’t have to decide right away. Said I should sleep on it—as if anyone could sleep when they know there’s a price on their head. I hired a PI firm, had them snoop around. It seemed his information was sound.”

  “How long before the hit did he come to you?”

  “Three days.”

  “Did he give a name?”

  Morales shook his head. Even in the dark, Engelmann got the gist. “I don’t suppose it would have mattered if he did,” he said. “Your building, I assume, is wired for video, is it not?”

  “Yeah,” Morales said. “It is. Only the thing is, the day this guy showed up there was some kind of glitch in the software, and we lost the whole day’s feed.”

  “Of course you did. Can you describe the man to me?”

  Morales thought about it. “Nothing much about the guy stood out, really,” h
e said. “Not too short, and not too tall. Six feet, maybe a little less. Brown hair, short. Muscular, but lean.”

  “Race?”

  “White.”

  “What about his station?”

  “I don’t follow,” Morales said.

  “The way he carried himself. Would you say he sounded moneyed or poor, upper class or lower, educated or uneducated?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. He came off smart, I guess, but working-class. The kind of guy if you met him, you’d think he worked with his hands.”

  Engelmann thought a moment about the description Morales had provided. “Would you say he had a military disposition?”

  Now it was Morales’s turn to ponder. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I would.”

  “Excellent. I must say, Mr. Morales, despite a rocky start, you’ve proven yourself most helpful. So, true to my word, I leave you to the remainder of your night.”

  “Thank you,” Morales blubbered madly, relieved at the realization he’d live to see the sun rise on his building at least once more. “Thank you.”

  “Think nothing of it,” Engelmann said. “Besides, I’ve no doubt the Corporation will send someone along to kill you once the attention generated by their last attempt dies down. Sleep well, Mr. Morales, while you still can. And if I were you, I’d consider hiring better guards.”

  Engelmann left as quietly as he’d arrived. Morales listened for a long while to be sure he was really gone. Eventually, Morales climbed out of bed, stepped over the unconscious guard outside his bedroom, and crossed the great room to his wet bar. With shaking hands, he poured himself a hefty belt of scotch. It was a Macallan Fine Oak 30 Year Old, and it had set him back two grand. He’d been saving it for a special occasion.

  9

  “So,” Hendricks said, “any chatter?” He and Lester were sitting at a table toward the back of the Bait Shop’s dining room, Hendricks sipping on an Allagash between bites of pastrami on rye, and Lester nursing a club soda with lime. It was a little after noon. The Bait Shop was closed. The blinds were drawn against the light of day, and the bar’s lights, save the one above them, were unlit.

  “Here and there,” Lester replied, sliding a file folder thick with printouts across the table. “Nothing too promising. Family business, mostly. Infighting.”

  Hendricks opened the folder and flipped through the papers in silence. His line of business wasn’t the sort you advertised on Google or in the local Yellow Pages. Any point of contact, physical or electronic, was a potential liability—a chance for an interested party to track his movements and pinpoint his location. Which is why Hendricks insisted on initiating contact with potential clients, rather than the other way around. Half the time, the folks he approached had no idea they’d been marked for death until Hendricks told them. Some refused to believe him. Some believed him but decided to go it alone. Some bought in right away. The ones who declined his services didn’t always come to a bad end, but their survival rate was less than stellar. Those who paid fared significantly better. In the three and a half years he’d been doing this, he’d yet to lose a single client.

  The key was identifying them early enough to scout the job and make the proper approach. Early on in his career, Hendricks had simply tailed known hitters and identified their targets by hanging back and watching—but that made his margin for error razor thin and damn near got him killed a couple times. One particularly nasty job ended with his client safe, his target dead—but not before the bastard buried an ice pick three inches deep in Hendricks’s chest. After four days holed up in an abandoned warehouse, trying to keep the bleeding under control while he waited for the antibiotics he’d boosted from a veterinary clinic to take effect, Hendricks decided it was time for a new approach. That’s when he brought Lester in.

  Back in Afghanistan, Lester had been the tech-head of the unit. There wasn’t a system he couldn’t hack, a wire he couldn’t tap, a cipher he couldn’t crack. And when the grit and wild swings of temperature between heat of day and aching chill of night got the better of their equipment, Lester never failed to jury-rig a fix. A handy talent when you’re four days out from your nearest base to resupply— and no less handy if you intend to kill people who kill people for a living.

  Every criminal organization on the planet had some kind of underground communications network. The Russians, for example, favored the old classified ad routine, hiding coded messages in Craigslist posts and the tawdry personals you see on the back pages of alternative weeklies. The Armenians buried lines of garbled nonsense in the source codes of various Internet forums they own—a basic substitution cipher any twelve-year-old with a knack for puzzles could solve, if he or she knew where to look. But no twelveyear-old would waste their time right-clicking and combing the HTML of some random muscle-car chat room.

  Lester would, though. Or, at least, his systems would.

  The Korean network, he identified in weeks. Ditto the street gangs of LA, who were anything but subtle in their messages. The Polish and Lithuanian families—who used anonymous remailers bounced off half a dozen proxy servers around the globe—took longer. But the Holy Grail of mob communications, the toughest nut to crack, had been the Council’s. All but the most stubborn or paranoid of their member organizations used it, and why wouldn’t they? It was safe, reliable, and damn near impossible to hack—their very own illegal information superhighway.

  Take the printout Hendricks was glancing over now, for instance: a set of race results from Northville Downs, a small-time harness track about a half hour west of Detroit. Big winner of the day was a mare named McGurn’s Lament.

  Only there was no such horse as McGurn’s Lament. And if you were to try to make sense of the day’s stats, you’d find that they’d resist sense-making. That’s because those stats aren’t stats at all.

  They’re a book code.

  The Council’s member organizations have been passing messages this way for years. Got their fingers in a half a dozen race sites so they could spread the bogus results around, avoid raising any hackles. They used made-up horses as code names indicating the nature of the message—Brown Beauty if they were moving heroin, Luscious Lady if they were talking whores, and so on—with the pertinent details encrypted in the results that followed.

  McGurn’s Lament signified a hit. An in-joke of sorts, Hendricks supposed. McGurn had been Capone’s chief hitman, the guy responsible for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. He was gunned down himself a few years later, in the middle of a frame of tenpin. If you saw the name McGurn’s Lament, you knew the numbers that followed were code for a target’s name—and if you were lucky, an address. Even money said whoever that name belonged to wasn’t long for this world.

  It worked like this. Say the horse wearing number thirty-eight came in sixth. That meant the sixth letter on the thirty-eighth page was the one you wanted. Big enough block of numbers, you could encode damn near any message you liked. Any message like a name and an address. Any message like take your time or make it look like an accident. And because nearly every letter of the alphabet appears in dozens of places throughout the course of any book, there’s none of the repetition code-breaking programs rely upon to work their mojo. Unless you knew what book the code was referencing—right down to the exact edition—there was no way you were ever going to crack it. At least, that’s what Lester kept on telling him once he’d identified the code itself.

  Unless you get me the goddamned book, Mikey, he’d told Hendricks, ain’t no way we’ll break this thing.

  So Hendricks got him the book.

  Granted, it took him the better part of two years—and if his target hadn’t slipped, he might never have discovered it. Said target was a made guy who was picking up a little freelance wetwork on the side. Hendricks took him alive, and after a couple hours’ cajoling—and enough sodium amytal to make half a cell block sing—the guy told him what he wanted to know in return for ending him quick.

  Turns out, it was the 1969 first edition of The Go
dfather.

  Never let it be said the Mob doesn’t have a sense of humor.

  After several minutes of poring over Lester’s printouts, Hendricks gave up. “You know I’m lousy at reading this stuff,” he said. “You want to tell me what exactly I’m looking at?”

  “The first one’s a series of dispatches from the Chicago Outfit. Urgent, by the sound of ’em. Seems they’re looking to pop one of their own on the quiet—a capo’s nephew. He runs a nightclub the Outfit uses as a front to peddle Molly—but word is, the guy ain’t right. He likes cutting on women. They’re worried his extracurricular activities put them at risk, and they’re sick of cleaning up his messes.”

  “Pass,” Hendricks said. He was no fan of organized crime, but one thing most old-school outfits had going for them was their disdain for crime of the disorganized variety on their turf—even if it was committed by one of their own. Anybody who cut women was a rancid pile of human garbage, and as far as Hendricks was concerned, there was no point saving someone who wasn’t worth saving. If Chicago wanted to take out their own trash, it was best to let them do it without a fuss.

  “Yup. Good riddance, says I.”

  Hendricks took a bite of his sandwich—the bread toasted to crunchy perfection, the pastrami juicy and delicious—and washed it down with a sip from his pint. “What else you got?”

  “The Los Angeles mob just put a hit out on some gangbanger out of Long Beach. Nobody’s accepted the contract yet, so the details are a little light on the ground.”

  Hendricks ate in silence for a moment. “You got a name on the target?”

  “Yeah, and not much more. Born Irving Franklin. Receives mail at his grandma’s place. Doesn’t seem to have a fixed address.”

  “Arrest record?”

  “Vandalism. Petty theft. Possession with intent. The arresting officer on the latter rolled up a crew of corner boys who call themselves the Savage Prophets, and he was one of ’em.”