CONTENTS
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
About The Author
The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by J.D. Rhoades
Reissued in 2015 by Polis Books
Cover design by 2Faced Design
eISBN 978-1-940610-20-7
60 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10010
www.PolisBooks.com
Also by J.D. Rhoades available from Polis Books
The Jack Keller series
The Devil’s Right Hand
Good Day In Hell
Safe And Sound
Devils And Dust
Breaking Cover
Broken Shield
To the memory of Brent Hackney, 1948–2005. Reporter, press secretary, and editor. Brent was the first person who read my writing and gave me a weekly column in the Southern Pines, North Carolina, Pilot. He was also one of the first to suggest I write a novel.
Still, to quote Mark Twain, he was a good man, and he meant well. Let it go.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the past couple of years since my first novel, The Devil’s Right Hand, came out, I’ve been fortunate to meet and hang out with the wonderful and supportive people who make up the crime fiction community. A list of all the folks who’ve offered encouragement would take up several pages, but here’s a partial one: Duane Swierczynski; Ken Bruen; Jason Starr; Allan Guthrie; Jon and Ruth Jordan of Crimespree Magazine; David Thompson and McKenna Jordan of Murder by the Book in Houston; Janine Wilson at Seattle Mystery Bookshop; Toni and Steve Kelner for crash space, pep talks and the tour of Boston; Laura Lippman for sound advice and excellent company on a long journey; J. A. Konrath for his generosity in sharing the things he’s learned about the business end of writing; Tasha Alexander and Kristy Kiernan (aka The Honorable Companions); Nathan Singer; Bob Morris; Pat Mullan; Stephen Blackmoore; Lori G. Armstrong; Victor Gischler; Sean Doolittle; Chris Everheart; Kim Mizar-Stem; Stacey Cochran; and, of course, David Terrenoire. See you on the road, my friends.
As far as the research goes, thanks to Chris Wilson of Cape Town for pointers on Afrikaner slang and idioms; and to former Staff Sgt. Mark “Markey D” Ivey, currently of Darmstadt, Germany, for laughs. Yo, respect…
Thanks also to my long-suffering webmistress at jd.rhoades.com, Beth Tindall.
Play with murder enough, it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it.
—Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest
CHAPTER ONE
You’re lucky one way, you know,” the man said. The accent was clipped, the vowels oddly pronounced, so that the words came out You’re luggy one wuh, you nuh. People tended to mistake the accent for Australian. But he was an Afrikaner, a descendant of the Dutch pioneers who had struck out into the South African wilderness in the 1800s to escape British rule. He was originally from the harsh, arid plateau known as the Karoo, although he hadn’t been there in a long time. His name was DeGroot, and he was worried.
“Some people actually enjoy this type of thing,” the man went on. The naked man tied to the heavy wooden chair in the middle of the room said nothing. He tried to stare straight ahead, but his eyes kept darting to the table where DeGroot had laid out his tools. The room was empty except for the table, the chair, and the plastic sheeting covering the floor. The man in the chair could hear the harsh crinkling sounds of the Afrikaner’s boots on the plastic as he walked around.
“I don’t enjoy it,” DeGroot said. “But you do what you have to.”
The man in the chair hated the way he was sweating. He hated how he desperately wanted to know what it was that DeGroot was doing behind him. There was the snap of a switch and a high-pitched whine. A sharp, electric smell filled the air. He felt the Afrikaner step up behind him, felt the man’s breath on his ear.
“I scheme your training’s like mine,” DeGroot said. “Everyone’s got his limits. Everyone talks eventually.” He stepped around to face his captive. He was holding a pair of wires in his hands. The wires ended in a pair of large alligator clips. The other ends were somewhere behind him.
“You tell yourself you’ll be different. You’ll be the one who holds out.” The man smiled, almost sadly. “It’s who we are. We’re the best.” He was opening and closing the clips absentmindedly as he spoke. The man in the chair stared with horrified fascination at the jaws opening, closing, opening, closing…
“But in the end, we’re human,” the Afrikaner said. “Flesh and blood. We’re all the same underneath. We hurt, we bleed, we scream, and”—he looked directly at his prisoner—“we talk. It takes longer for some than others, but we do. So save yourself some pain, eh? Tell me. Where’ve you been? And who’ve you been talking to? And most important, where’s your key?”
“I haven’t told anyone,” the man in the chair said. “I swear it.”
The Afrikaner shook his head. “I wish I could believe you, boet. We’ve been through a lot together already. But I can’t take any chances.” I kint take inny chanzes. He stood up and approached the man in the chair, the electrodes clenched open in his hands. “Don’t feel bad about screaming,” he said. “It’s not like anyone can hear you, way out here.”
***
There are few places hotter than a tarpaper roof in the late summer in North Carolina. The small group of men working around the tar kettle were stripped to waist, the skin of their backs and chests cured to the color of old leather by the twin blasts of the sun from above and the waves of heat shimmering up from the sticky black goo they spread around the chimney that stuck up from the gabled roof. They were mostly silent, moving with an economy of motion. It was too hot to move fast, and they didn’t know one another well enough for small talk to come easily. Mostly they kept their heads down, concentrating on the job of spreading the tar evenly. They looked up, however, as the ladder that leaned against the side of the building shook and rattled. Someone was coming up. They looked at each other curiously. The whole crew was already at the top; they were expecting no one else. All work and motion stopped as they turned to see who was invading their space.
As they watched, a head came into view, followed by a pair of broad shoulders. The man who clambered off the top of the ladder was tall and lanky, with shoulder-length blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. He straightened up and looked at the men standing silently by the edge of the roof. His gaze took them in, one by one.
Finally, he
stopped, his eyes fixed on a wiry dark-haired man who had moved to the middle of the group as if trying to lose himself in the tiny crowd.
“Afternoon, Edward,” the blond man said in a soft drawl. “We missed you in court the other day.”
The other men looked at Edward, then moved slightly aside. He was the newest member of the group, and no one felt inclined to try their luck against the dangerous-looking interloper. They were especially disinclined to stick up for him since he had previously introduced himself as Gary.
Edward looked from one of his coworkers to the other and saw no help there. He looked back at the blond man and squared his shoulders.
“I ain’t goin’ back,” he said.
“Yeah,” the blond man said. “Actually, you are.” He advanced on the smaller man calmly, moving as easily as if he were on level ground. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a set of handcuffs. Edward looked desperately one way, then another, then over the edge of the roof. He turned back to the blond man.
“Fuck you,” he said, and ran off the edge.
It wasn’t meant as a suicidal move; in lunchtime small talk, the other men had regaled Edward/Gary with the story of how one of them had lost his footing, slid off the edge of a roof, and landed on his feet without any ill effect other than a sore ankle for a few days. Edward didn’t have that kind of luck; he never had. He screamed as he landed, his ankle breaking with a sickening crack. He rolled over onto his back, howling like a wounded animal, pulling his knee up to his chest in a futile and belated attempt at protecting the shattered joint. He looked up to see a short Latino man standing over him. The man was in his mid-forties, with deep brown eyes and a thin mustache that drooped on either side of his mouth. He was holding a shotgun pointed at Edward.
“Hold still,” the man said in a soft Spanish accent. “We will get you a doctor.”
Edward screamed again, the tears of pain and frustration rolling down his face. Dimly, through the haze of his own agony, he heard the metallic rattling of someone coming down the ladder. He looked up to see the blond man standing over him. The blond man turned to the Latino and held out his hand silently. The Latino man sighed and handed over the shotgun. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He riffled through the contents for a moment, then pulled out a bill and handed it to the blond man.
“You were right,” he said. He shook his head.
“I usually am, Oscar,” the blond man said, not unkindly.
“What?” Edward snarled. “Right about what?”
The Latino man shrugged. “I did not think anyone would be stupid enough to try to escape by running off a roof. Mr. Keller here bet me five dollars I was wrong.”
“Fuck you,” Edward said again.
Keller pulled out a cell phone. “Look, you want me to call an ambulance before we run you in or what?”
***
The man with the rifle tracked the progress of the red Jeep Grand Cherokee as it wound its way up the mountain. Even at this altitude, it was beginning to heat up, but he paid no attention to the sweat that ran down his face. The huge rifle was heavy and awkward, but the rifleman moved easily with it. He kept the crosshairs of the telescopic scope locked on the tinted windshield, his finger resting lightly on the trigger. As the Jeep reached the bend in the road, the man’s finger tensed ever so slightly.
The Jeep stopped. The headlights flashed once, twice. The rifleman relaxed the pressure. If the Jeep had not stopped and signaled, he would have put a .50-caliber bullet into the driver’s side window, then another into the engine block. Each of the rounds was the length of a man’s hand and traveled at three thousand feet per second. The rifle was originally designed to disable vehicles at extended ranges; against flesh and bone it wreaked terrible damage. The rifleman had seen the weapon cut a man in half at fourteen hundred yards.
As the Jeep approached the cabin below him, the rifleman saw a flash of movement at the edge of his field of vision. He swung the rifle to bear, his finger taking up the slack on the trigger again. The crosshairs centered on the back of a blond head. He tracked the figure of the small child running across the tiny yard in front of the cabin. She was about five years old, dressed in a light-blue flowered dress. The rifleman held the sight on the girl for a long second. He blew out the breath he had been holding and let off the trigger. He kept his eye to the sight and focused again on the red Jeep. It pulled to a stop in a cloud of dust. A man got out. The rifleman swung the scope to bear on the passenger side. No one got out. The driver was alone. The rifleman took his eye away from the scope. Only then did he wipe the sweat from his brow.
“Shit,” he said under his breath. A slight breeze blew up and he closed his eyes, savoring the coolness on his flesh. He opened them again and looked out over the vista before him.
He was standing in a rusting steel hut at the top of an abandoned fire watchtower. The tower itself was situated atop the highest of the local mountains. His vantage commanded a view of hundreds of square miles of forest that covered this part of the Blue Ridge. The ever-present haze that gave the mountains their name was light today. It obscured his view only slightly. The tower and the cabin at its base were far enough from the main road that even the muted whisper of traffic that most people tune out at the edge of hearing was gone. The silence of the ancient hills seemed to be a noise in itself, an emptiness that roared at him from the valleys below. In that enormous sound that was not a sound, the Jeep door’s opening and closing seemed muffled, as did the voices that followed. One was high and childish, the other one deeper.
It was a voice the rifleman knew as well as his own. But it was only one voice and he had hoped to be hearing two. He sat down on the wooden floor of the tower and leaned against the steel side. The massive rifle lay across his lap.
The tower vibrated slightly as the man below mounted the steps that spiraled up from the bottom of the tower. The vibration grew stronger as the second man drew nearer, until his head poked up through the hole in the middle of the floor.
“Anything?” the rifleman said.
The second man shook his head. He climbed the rest of the way into the observation deck. He walked over to the side and looked out.
The second man was tall and broad-shouldered, in contrast to the rifleman’s wiry compactness. The second man was light-haired and fair-skinned, where the rifleman was dark-haired and Mediterranean-looking. Yet there was an indefinable similarity between them that occasionally led people to ask if they were related or even if they were brothers. In some senses, they were.
“We’re going to have to call DeGroot,” the rifleman said.
“He’s not going to like this,” the second man replied.
The rifleman lifted up slightly and fumbled in his pocket for a coin. He pulled one out. “Call it,” he said as he flicked the coin into the air with his thumb.
The second man smiled slightly. “Tails.”
The rifleman caught the rapidly spinning coin out of the air with one hand and slapped it down on his other wrist. He took his hand away. “Heads.”
The second man grimaced. “I’ll make the call. You get to feed the kid. I got groceries.”
The rifleman sighed. “Spaghettios again.”
“It’s all she eats.” The second man smiled tightly. “And we’ve eaten worse.”
***
The bells hanging on the doorknob jingled. Angela Hager looked up from the counter as Keller and Oscar entered the front door. Keller gave her a thumbs-up as he placed a sheaf of paperwork on the counter. She picked it up. Her hands were covered by soft black leather gloves.
“Did he give you any trouble?” she asked him.
“Nah,” Keller said. “But he didn’t do himself any good.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“He ran off a roof,” Oscar Sanchez said. “Trying to get away.”
She arched an eyebrow at them. “Why would he do that?”
“Because he’s a dumb-ass,” Kelle
r said. “If he wasn’t a dumb-ass, he wouldn’t have run in the first place.”
“If you can spare me,” Oscar said, “I am going upstairs for a bit.”
Angela looked concerned. “Is the leg acting up?”
Oscar shrugged. “It hurts a bit, yes. But it is better than it was.”
“There’s some ibuprofen in the medicine cabinet,” she said. “Take some of that.” Oscar only nodded. He went up the stairs to the small apartment that he shared with Angela. She winced slightly at the sound of his halting tread on the stairs. She turned to Keller. “So how’s he doing?” she asked.
“Not bad,” Keller said. “He still underestimates how crazy or stupid some of these jumpers can get.” He fished in his shirt pocket and pulled out the five that Oscar had handed him earlier. “By the way,” he said, “slip this back into his wallet sometime.”
She took the bill, looking at it quizzically. “What’s this for?” she asked.
“Oscar didn’t think Edward would be stupid enough to try and run off a roof to get away. I bet five bucks that he would. But I was just doing it to make a point.”
Angela tried to hand the bill back to him. “It won’t work,” she said. “He’ll know. He knows exactly how much money he has. To the penny.”
Keller shrugged. “He needs it more than I do,” he said. “What with trying to get his immigration problems straightened out. He’s got a good lawyer, and good lawyers cost money.”
She grimaced. “You got that right,” she said. She sat down in the chair behind the counter and massaged her temples as if her head hurt. “And he’s gotten back to the idea of bringing his sons here from Colombia. And that’s going to cost another fortune.” She shook her head. “But you know how he is. He made a bet. He lost. If you try to give it back, he’ll think you’re patronizing him. And he’ll be impossible to live with for days.”
Keller came around the counter and sat down. “So how do you feel about having his kids here?” he said.
She gave a short, sharp laugh. “Boy, there’s a can of worms.”
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