They watched a couple walking past, laughing and apparently a little drunk. He walked to the back of his car and opened the trunk like he might be giving her a going-away present. He returned with the weapon she’d liked the best: a Browning Buckmark URX Micro .22 long. It had such a great grip feel, and it had been modified to fit a small snap-and-twist silencer.
She thanked him. “It’s beautiful.”
He smiled. “We’ll have a celebratory drink when you solve your problem and show up in Vegas again.” He handed her an envelope. “Your target’s location at this moment, and for the past three weeks.”
They shook hands. He got back in his car and she walked over to the one they’d provided for her. Once the job was done, she’d already decided to clean out her condo and move to Vegas. As ready as she felt, she knew the real proof would come when that kill moment arrived. That would be the final test.
You are nothing yet, she said to herself. You have to prove yourself. Then we’ll see.
7
Inside the thick, cream-colored envelope—so old-fashioned, yet so cool and so professional—a picture of Charlie. Addresses. Timeframes. Description of his car. Details, most of which she already knew. She was, of course, to destroy it after memorizing the details, but she still found she was half-tempted to keep it. But she didn’t. In a digital world, they were old school. But in a world where everything could be tracked that was digital, this was right.
There was a room waiting for her at a motel three blocks away, under a different name. As a newbie they were, no doubt, watching and judging.
***
Just before she fell asleep, just for a moment, it scared her that she might not have that state of mind, that killer instinct, when it mattered. That all this training might go to waste. To bolster her determination, she decided to first go to Jess’s grave.
She drove south the next morning, and by ten-thirty, she was back at the cemetery. She faced the grave in the massive sea of heroes. It was an intense, powerful moment. The sky filled with sun, glistening off the graveyard studded with the shrines of the dead.
She apologized for what she had been, and what she’d brought down on him.
“I wanted your strength because I lacked my own, and it got you killed. And with you, I died. I am not that woman you knew. But I owe you, and I will make that payment.”
Her visit was not a tearful breakdown. It was one of short, cold resolve. When it was over, she knew it was time. She still had to prove herself. Prove who she was. Or discover it was false.
When she was finished, almost feeling clean for the first time in a long while, she drove north on I-5, then took the Palomar Airport exit west to Coast Highway. It was early afternoon, the traffic heavy but moving.
Familiar with the coast road, Viera stayed well within the 35 MPH speed limit and stopped for pedestrians crossing the street from or to the ocean. The police, former colleagues of her husband’s, were omnipresent in the area. It was a stomping ground for soldiers from Camp Pendleton, the largest Marine Corps amphibious base in the nation.
She took a room in a motel four blocks off the main intersection of Carlsbad Boulevard and Village Drive. Viera stayed in her tracking mode. Her disguise was excellent. She could walk into him and he wouldn’t recognize her.
Charles Meltzer loved the ocean, and, of course, the girls on the beach who came with it, the bars where he made his catches. She’d lived here with him for nearly two years. Him and his habitual cheating, his buddies…his intimidating, threatening, blaming persona. And she’d played that game all too well. It was the one she grew up with. Her history. Not her future.
She watched Charlie’s movement for the next three days. He had an office in a complex off Carlsbad Boulevard. He spent only a few hours there in the morning. Then he went out to lunch with clients. Later, he typically went to the beach for a jog. He hit the bars at night. Scored only once in that time, a shaggy blond with a high cackle.
Tracking him on foot, later on a bike she’d bought with cash, she worked to keep her own profile to a minimum and never put herself in a compromised situation. It might have been difficult, uncomfortable, even, before her training but seemed now to be second nature.
At night in bed, she imagined the kill moment, wondered how it would feel, how she would react. Charlie—the stalker, the hunter—was now the hunted. She liked that. But she never forgot for a moment.
They are always hunting you.
To prepare for the critical moment, she bought a small pack that fit around the bike’s top tube, where she could carry a weapon with silencer attached and get to it quick.
It’s all about critical exposure. Patterns are what you look for. Habits that define a person’s daily life. In those patterns, you seek the time and place. When found, you wait until the target enters this moment of critical exposure.
Riding the bike along the oceanfront south of downtown Carlsbad, she worked out in her mind how she wanted to do it, now that she was getting familiar with his habits. She was glad to be near the ocean. Nothing soothed like the lapping waves and the graceful flight of pelicans riding in formations on the thermals and the dark figures of surfers in the water, facing the sunset and hoping for just one more perfect wave.
After four days, she knew where. She wanted him alone, in a back parking lot right behind his favoring watering hole. He’d killed Jess in a parking lot, and she wanted to return the favor.
Charlie, right on schedule, went into the bar at nine that night and was there for a little over two hours. He then left and hit another bar nearby before heading back to his apartment. It wasn’t right. Too many people at the critical moment in the parking lot.
She was patient. The opportunity she wanted presented itself two nights later.
She rode down to the ocean, then back, and positioned herself in the dark at the back of the parking lot, where she found his ’Vette parked in one of Charlie’s usual spots. She couldn’t be seen unless someone was right there. She waited.
He came out and was talking to a heavyset man in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. They laughed at something. The man Charlie was talking to went back into the bar, and she rode the bike around to where her ex was just getting into his prized ’Vette. His babe machine.
With her bike helmet, her low-cut riding jersey, and her tight pants, to him, she would be hot stuff.
“Nice ’Vette. What year?” she asked, her voice saucy, hot as her outfit.
He smiled. “It’s a two thousand twelve. Great ride.”
“Hi, Charlie,” she said.
His smile faded as he sought to locate her in his vast memory bank of females. He seemed a little confused.
With her hand in the pack, the Buckmark .22 firmly in hand, she said, “Darlin’ you don’t remember me? I’m offended.”
He stared. “Yeah, well, I’m sure—”
“No, you aren’t sure,” she said with a thin smile.
She wondered if this would be the moment she would fail. The moment she would discover it was all wrong. That it was all a delusion, she had what it took to pull the trigger.
Her heart should be pounding, her breath constricted, her fear flaming through her. But none of this came about. She was ice, collected, so sure of her purpose, she didn’t question herself or the situation. This was the moment of truth. And it wasn’t anything like she thought it might be.
She smiled now as Charlie fought to figure out what was going on. Hers was a smile he knew. And it shocked him.
“Hi,” Viera said.
“Wait a minute. You—”
“Yes.”
This was the moment he should go for his weapon, whether in his glove box, belt holster, ankle holster. He couldn’t. He couldn’t believe. It was impossible for him to accept that he was about to be killed by the very woman he had so ruthlessly beaten down verbally and physically. Couldn’t be. Had to be some other explanation. A nasty, mean game of some kind.
She uttered one of his favorite phrases: “Kill it before it m
ultiplies.”
And that was the defining moment of awareness. That’s when she shot him in the forehead.
He was dead instantly, of course. The bullet hit skull, brain, then the back of the skull. He snapped back and then kind of sank down—like the life force had just vaporized and he was now nothing but litter.
But she shot him one more time in the temple to make certain, then returned the weapon to the pack. Later, she would change out the barrel, leave the bike for some kid in another city. She reached in and touched his face.
“I only regret,” she said quietly, “That you had but one life to give to your victims.”
8
Two hours after the hit, the woman who knew herself as Viera Ferran drove up over the Cajon Pass through the Santa Ana Mountains toward Hesperia.
She had a very hard time relating to her history as Becca Renato, even as a memory. The experiences of her life were there, but she could no longer relate to them, or to the emotions. It was to her as if she’d lived a nightmare and now was awake.
Maybe things would go bad, but for right now, with the car windows down, the night air silky warm on her face, the traffic deliciously light, all she felt was just a sense of freedom, of release.
After another hour she pulled into a rest stop and took a walk on a sandy rise and stared at the starry sky. She waited for some terrible reaction to come. Guilt. Remorse. Some sort of horror.
Nothing happened.
Later, she thought, it will probably hit me later.
Is this what a soldier feels like?
Did she have a ‘beast in the heart’ as some old song her father used to play said?
Or was she really a cold blooded killer?
Later, she thought again. Later she would know.
***
Viera drove toward Vegas and felt an increasing nervousness about her kill. Did she make mistakes? Did she leave behind something that could be traced? Had she passed—what to her was—the final exam? Would Duncan be proud of her?
When she drove into the neon fire that was Vegas, the questions were still there and she didn’t yet know the answers.
She called the number she’d been given. Left a cryptic message.
Now she had to wait.
The next morning, over breakfast at the Golden Nugget downtown, she read the Vegas Review-Journal. The story of the killing in California wasn’t even there. And if it did appear in a later edition, it would be minor here in Vegas.
She went to her smartphone and checked the internet news channels. It was there, of course. A former detective found dead outside a bar. No witnesses. No known motive. Nothing.
Viera Ferran paid attention to her reaction, and realized she had smiled with satisfaction.
That’s the moment she knew.
Yes. Yes, I’m good.
Still she needed final confirmation from her mentor.
Finally she got a call back. It wasn’t Duncan.
She was told to meet her contact in a quiet side-bar across the street at the Horseshoe Casino, the former Mint.
When she walked in and slid into a booth, a man joined her.
“I do okay?”
He nodded. “You did fine. Why are you here?”
“I was to meet—well, the reality is, I want in.”
He stared at her. “In what?”
“I want to work. I thought I’d be meeting—”
“You want to work doing what?”
“What you said I was ‘fine’ at doing.”
He nodded. “Sit tight.,” Then he slid out of the booth and walked off, pulling out his cell phone as he went.
She wondered if she was being incredibly stupid, naïve, maybe a little crazy. Maybe they’d laugh at her. Tell her to get the hell out of there.
The man returned ten minutes later. She wondered if he was on some kind of routine that kept him so thin. He wore expensive clothes. She didn’t remember him from training.
“What do you want from us?” he asked.
“I don’t want to go back. I want to work at what I’ve been trained for. I think I can be an asset.”
He studied her intently. “You did a very professional job,” he said. “But you were highly motivated. Going beyond that…this isn’t the movies. It’s a different deal. How can you possibly know this is for you?”
He wasn’t hostile, just looking for an answer.
“The experience began as personal. But in the end there was something else. A discovery about myself. There are people out there who can only be dealt with outside the system. I think I could be very helpful. I think I have some qualifications. Maybe ones I didn’t know I had. They say that the best luck a person can have in this life is to discover they have a calling. Well, I have.”
It was a little startling to her. This open admission. But it was very true. She felt like she was auditioning for a very important ‘dark world’ job. A job where the targets were the worst of the worst. “I was very professional about it,” she said with pride. “This is my calling. I know it. I feel it to my bones.”
“Why do you think this? How do you know this?”
“I just do. I did what I did without regret, remorse or any emotion besides that of having done a good job. Yes, initially, it was about the target. But not in the end. It was about the process. The hunt. The prep. The tracking and thinking and deciding how, when, where. That was, in the end, far more fulfilling. Nothing in my life has ever been as certain. It’s who I am. Who I want to be.”
He studied her a moment, then left her again.
Fifteen minutes later he returned. “Stay in town. You’ll be contacted.”
He nodded and left and that was it for two days.
***
She played some slots, walked in casinos with too much disgusting smoke, watched every move of everybody near her.
They’re always hunting you.
Maybe she was now a problem. Somebody that might cause them issues. But she really didn’t think they’d see her that way. She had high expectations. But maybe they were illusions.
If they accepted her, she knew she would happily dispose of her past life. The condo, her belongings, her cat, her car. She wanted a completely new life.
Two days went by before she got the cryptic call she was waiting for.
She was to go out to a location near Red Rock Canyon where a man would meet her.
***
On the way it became very simple to her. Either she was going to be in, or she was a problem and would be killed.
She knew who she hoped would be there to invite her in. The idea went beyond excitement, beyond anything she had ever experienced. She desperately wanted acceptance in this most powerful, dark and deadly elite profession. It erased her past and had to be her future, her real life. I’m the most serious true believer they’ll ever recruit. They have to accept me.
What was strange, she thought, as she drove out into the desert north west of Vegas, was how comfortable she felt with the transformation. That she’d harbored this possibility within, but never knew it was there.
This career that lay ahead of her would have been unimaginable to her so short a time ago. And she realized that deep inside, at the very foundation of her being, she had what it took if they would just accept her.
When she reached the location, it was a nothing little desert plant business sitting on the road that led the tourists on a Red Rock sightseeing tour.
Viera parked in the shade of a tree at this little oasis of plants for sale that was, at the moment, closed.
She saw a man sitting in a black Cadillac. He looked at her and nodded. He got out and walked around back past some trees and pots and bushes and statues.
She joined him.
He turned to her. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” she said. Is he going to kill me?
He reached in under his thin leather jacket to where a man like him would have his weapon and her gut tightened and her hand moved toward her weapon in her
shoulder bag.
His hand came out and it wasn’t’ a weapon. It was a familiar envelope.
“Your first assignment. Good luck.” He handed her the sealed manila envelope. “Welcome aboard. Anything you need to know, you will know in time.”
He walked away.
Moments later she saw the Cadillac pull out and head back toward Vegas.
Viera was so excited she wanted to scream, but refrained.
Holding the envelope clutched in her right hand, she went back to her car. I’m in, she thought. I’ve been accepted.
She held the envelope, hefted it, shook her head. An assignment! How cool.
Only so many moments in life really matter, she thought. This was one that would determine the direction and meaning of the rest of her life.
She thought of the funeral, the horror of that. Then of the justice two bullets had won. And the fact that she’d delivered them. So empowering.
With a grim smile, she opened the envelope to see who her first assignment would be. Her first professional hit.
She was careful not to damage the envelope. It was a precious moment. Her baptism was over. Now for her future. Hardcore. She pulled out a photo.
Her heart skipped a couple beats.
No! No!
Something was terribly wrong. Duncan. Her Duncan!
The picture came with a note saying she could find him in Provo attending a Zane Grey conference.
Viera Ferran stared at the photo of the man, the man who’d brought her in, trained her, turned her into the woman she now was. And she couldn’t help but react to the terrible irony. Duncan had trained his assassin.
KILLING FREDDIE
* * *
1
As I turned up through the parking lot of the school athletic field that Saturday to drop off my angels, seven and eight years old, for soccer practice, I saw the car that seemed to have been following me stop out on the street.
I had first spotted the BMW at the new Shell station where I’d gassed up on my way to pick up the girls from my estranged wife. The driver had swung around and parked at the far end of the station near the air pump.
The Murder Option Page 3