Another movement on the video feed caught Evan’s attention. An SUV turning in to the parking lot from the westbound lane. It idled up in front of reception. He refocused his gaze on Katrin. “Like your speech now?”
She almost smiled. “Yes. And when they’re tilted, their feet point in.”
“Tilted?”
“Off their game. Lacking confidence. But you can’t always see beneath the table, so…” A one-shouldered shrug. “Most important is reading the patterns.”
No one had exited the SUV yet. Through the thin walls, Evan could hear it idling outside. The briefcase lens gave him a nice clear side view on his cell-phone feed but no angle on either license plate. The windows were not tinted, and there were two men in the front, having a discussion. Nothing alarming. Yet.
“Some players go hyperaggressive and bluff hard and often, even when they’re card dead. You can scoop a lot of pots if you know when to call them. And sometimes it’s smart to bluff—and lose on purpose. It’s money well spent if it shows you’re unpredictable. Think of it as a business expense that’ll pay dividends in future hands. That’s the thing about poker. You’re not playing your hand. You’re playing the other guy’s hand.”
“And that,” Evan said, “is what we’re going to do with the people who killed your father.”
Her mouth parted slightly, and he watched the realization roll across her face.
A purple Scion now entered the parking lot from the eastbound lane, followed by a second SUV. Evan leaned forward and plucked up his phone, palming it for a better view as they turned in.
Neither had a license plate.
The Scion parked at the edge of the lot near the street while the second SUV crept forward.
Evan stood up.
“What?” Katrin said. “What?”
“Did you make a phone call from this room?”
“No.”
The SUV coasted past the other one down by reception and headed through the short drive toward the rear alley.
“You didn’t leave? Step out even for a second? Open the door to any delivery guys when you ordered food?”
Evan kept his eyes glued to the video feed. The driver and passenger doors of the first SUV opened, and two men exited. Muscular builds, black T-shirts, light on their feet. Given their bearing and cropped hair, Evan pegged them for ex-military.
“No. No. What’s going on, Evan?”
The men rested their hands on hip holsters but did not draw. They spread out in the front parking lot just as headlights swept the sheer curtains in the rear of Room 9 next door. The second SUV, arriving in the alley. The men were pinning them in, front and back.
It was impossible that Evan had been tracked—he’d been too careful. Which meant that Katrin had alerted them. And yet there was no denying that sniper round aimed through the restaurant’s window directly at her heart.
Her pale skin had grown paler. She stared at him, her lips pressed together, thin and bloodless.
The headlights in the back alley halted, the vehicle just shy of Room 9. The wide perimeter set by the men in the front parking lot encompassed all three adjoining rooms. Which meant they’d likely been tipped.
Evan grabbed Katrin roughly and spun her, frisking her. Whether he trusted her or not, he had to protect her right now. The Tenth and most important Commandment was seared into muscle memory: Never let an innocent die.
He found nothing.
“What are you doing?” Katrin said. “You’re the one who just got here—like last time. You’re the one who was probably followed.”
“Under the bed,” he said.
She obeyed, vanishing beneath it, the dust ruffle fluttering into place after her.
Pistol drawn, he stood in position before the chair, peering through the hinge-side gap of the door into Room 9 to his left. A shadow eased barely into view in the lower corner of the rear window, the outline of a gun distinct behind the sheer curtain. The silhouette showed a canister ballooning from the tip of the barrel—a homemade suppressor, likely jerry-rigged from an oil-filter cartridge. Untraceable, intended for onetime use.
An assassin’s tool.
A glance at his phone showed the two-man team in the parking lot staying put, holding position. Which meant the assault would come from the rear, through the windows. The men in the parking lot were there to put Evan and Katrin down if they tried to flee through the front door. Exhaust wisping from its tailpipe, the Scion remained at the property’s fringe, the overwatch position of whoever was running the mission. The shooter from Chinatown, waiting back at a sniper’s distance?
Evan’s operational priorities clarified. Which angles to cover, who to take out first, best means of egress.
From beneath the bed, Katrin’s jagged breathing came audible, and he shushed her as quietly as he could manage.
The form at Room 9’s rear window lowered out of sight. Evan strained to listen for footsteps moving through the alley. He lifted the Wilson, rotating it slowly across the back window directly behind him, gauging the shooter’s crawling progress as he passed beneath the sill of Room 10.
At the appropriate interval, movement sparked in Evan’s narrow view into Room 11 to his right. The shadowed figure, easing onto his feet again.
A quiet scraping back in Room 9 reached Evan’s ears, and then came a muffled pop of the window lock. The partner. A black-gloved hand, ghostly beneath the wind-fluffed curtain, gripped the pane and slid it soundlessly upward.
They were entering the rooms on either side simultaneously.
* * *
“What’s the point of calling me in if you’re gonna keep me in the car?” Candy said.
“Let the field team take the first charge,” Slatcher replied. “I’m the backstop. You’re on cleanup. That is your specialty.”
Candy made pouty lips. “And here I was hoping we’d be getting our hands sticky like old times.”
Wedged behind the wheel of the Scion, Slatcher refocused on the text messages scrolling across his right eyeball. More precisely, at the messages projected from the high-def contact-lens display. Top Dog was talking, and when TD talked, you listened.
Top Dog loved his toys, especially ones that enhanced secure communications. His latest and greatest was wearable technology. The fully pixelated contact lens projected images so they could be perceived with ease. Supposedly molding the liquid crystal cells into a spherical curve had been a bitch, but that wasn’t really Slatcher’s concern. His concern was keeping the goddamned thing from drying out in the middle of a mission.
TD’s last text message scrolled: IS THE AREA CONTAINED?
Slatcher lifted his hands and typed in the air on an imaginary keyboard. His reply appeared in a two-foot float off his face: YES. PERIMETER ESTABLISHED.
He wore radio-frequency-identification-tagged press-on nails to type and send messages literally out of thin air. There was no end to the beauty tech products in Top Dog’s bag o’ tricks.
Beside him Candy twirled her hair, whistled the chorus from “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
ARE BOTH TARGETS CONFIRMED?
NOT YET.
WHEN?
One of his men in the front parking lot looked back at the Scion, gave a little nod. Slatcher’s fingers danced a few inches above the steering wheel.
NOW.
* * *
Keeping his eyes on the black-gloved hand reaching through the window of Room 9, Evan reached behind him and lifted the briefcase from the nightstand. He stepped through the adjoining door into 9 and crouched, setting the briefcase quietly on the threadbare carpet just past the threshold. Katrin’s sideways face, tight with panic, filled the gap beneath the dust ruffle. She was trembling. Over the bed and through the opposing doorway, the rear curtain of Room 11 billowed up into view, then drifted out of sight again. The window, penetrated.
Evan made a calming gesture to Katrin, a slight sink of one palm toward the floor. Then he pulled back into Room 9.
The intruder
readied for entry. One glove gripped the edge of the window frame, braced. A boot rose into sight, slipping through the curtains. Evan gauged the man’s position, moving to the blind side. He flattened against the wall next to the window, his back pressed to the drywall.
It had to be silent.
If there were shots, if the intruder shouted or fell back through the window, the team in the parking lot would crash the front doors.
Evan laid his pistol within reach on the carpet and eased open his Strider knife. It gave the faintest click when the black-oxide blade locked.
The menacing bulb of the suppressor sliced through the curtains. A broad shoulder swung into view next, straining beneath the T-shirt.
Evan held position.
The lead boot pointed now, toes feeling for the carpet. Sweat sparkled on the band of the man’s neck, in the back of his buzz-cut hair. Veins stood out on his hand and wrist, his grip firm on the pistol.
Evan could have reached out and tapped his shoulder.
The faintest tremble came from the floorboards two rooms across—a boot setting down in Room 11. Evan sensed it more than heard it. He felt a pull to Katrin, hiding one room over, soon to be within reach of the second intruder.
First things first.
He held his focus on the man before him, eliminated all else. Painstakingly, the man drew his upper torso through the curtains and shifted his weight onto his lead leg. He shot a quick glance at the open adjoining door as he drew his other foot through, but Evan remained sunk back in his blind spot.
The man’s trailing knee came to his chest, the foot clearing the sill. He eased it to the floor. Straightened. Started to turn.
Evan slid behind him, gripped the back of his head, and whisked the blade across his throat. The man corkscrewed stiffly onto his heels, their bodies aligned chest to spine, a full-body seal to muffle any sounds of struggle. Evan tipped the man’s head down hard, chin to chest so the lungs wouldn’t suck and give away their position. The gun tumbled from the limp fingers, and Evan caught it midway to the floor as he sank the man’s bulk to the carpet.
Evan deposited him soundlessly on the floor. His heels scraped quietly against the carpet. His eyes rolled up at Evan, the sclera pronounced. His lips guppied, but there would be no sound, not with what had been done to his trachea. The puddle from the severed carotid expanded out and out, wreathing his head like a halo.
Evan moved soundlessly to the brink of Room 10, halting shy of the adjoining door’s frame and extracting his RoamZone from his pocket. The briefcase sat open on the floor just back from the threshold, the pinhole lens in the lid feeding his cell screen a tilted swath of the room—seam of wall and ceiling, headboard of the bed, top half of the doorway to Room 11. A head whipped through the frame as the man entered Room 10. The edge of his shoulder remained. He was standing beside the bed under which Katrin hid, but Evan couldn’t make out his orientation.
Not the view he needed.
Evan reached toward the threshold with his shoe, nudging the back corner of the briefcase as delicately as he could manage, all the while keeping his eyes on the shifting video feed on his phone.
The side of the man’s neck came into the frame. His cheek. One eye. Two. Evan had his head in frame and little more.
The man was scanning the room, not yet noticing the infinitesimal movement of the briefcase in the shadows beyond the threshold.
Evan’s palm was sweating against the hardened-rubber cell case. He watched the feed, debating whether to attack or lie in wait.
Then the man sank from sight.
Evan strained to make out a sound, heard nothing. Was the man searching under the bed? He couldn’t afford to wait to find out. With the toe of his shoe, Evan pressed on the briefcase lid, the view in his hand scanning as it tilted down. The bedspread came into sight, one nightstand with a lamp—then the man. He squatted by the mattress, pistol aimed beneath the bed, his other hand reaching for the dust ruffle.
On the tiny screen, Evan made out Katrin’s canted head beneath, the flash of her eyes, her open mouth wavering, not yet screaming. The pistol swung, centering on her head.
Evan kicked the briefcase across the threshold into Room 10. It spun on the carpet, rocketing behind the man, the feed on Evan’s phone whirling vertiginously. At once the blocky heels of the man’s boots loomed large on Evan’s screen, the briefcase seemingly stopping right behind him, and his left foot began a startled pivot.
Evan took a single giant lunge through the doorway, grabbing the man’s gun hand as it swung to meet him. He caught the inside of the wrist and raked the arm in violent outward rotation, snapping tendon and bone. Already his knife hand was rising, that tanto tip tapping up the man’s bared torso—smack-smack-smack—each blow placed between a different set of ribs.
The look of surprise on the man’s face was pronounced—he was elite, not cannon fodder, and dying clearly wasn’t in his playbook.
The gun floated to the bed, bouncing twice, and Evan tilted him down softly onto the mattress on top of it.
Katrin was looking up at him from beneath the bed with an expression he couldn’t at first place. Maybe horror.
He held one finger to his lips, extending his other hand to her.
She rolled onto her back, throwing up a hand, and he clasped it around the thumb and whisked her out and onto her feet. A wet gurgling sounded from the bed.
“My God,” she said, too loud. “Is he…?”
The front window exploded in at them, the pistol reports setting his ears ringing. Evan pivoted to protect Katrin, shards showering his back. Her mouth pressed to his chest, her scream vibrating his skin through his shirt.
He propelled her into Room 11. Sweeping aside the curtains, he half flung her out into the alley and hopped through after her. A crimson feather lay across one porcelain cheek, a stud of glass glittering in the skin.
“Your briefcase,” she said. “What about—”
He grabbed her hand, yanked her toward the carport and the waiting Taurus. They jumped in, and he pulled out and down the alley. He accelerated to the first intersecting street, then veered right and stopped, idling behind a Norms Restaurant. A few of the patrons were hustling out onto the sidewalk, craning in the direction of the gunshots. Others rushed to their cars, shielding their kids.
“What are you doing?” Katrin said. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Why’d you stop?”
He took his foot off the brake, letting the car creep forward, forward, until he could make out the motel parking lot one block over. The purple Scion remained, still perched in its spot right off the street.
He pulled the RoamZone out, the feed still active. A worm’s-eye view of the Room 10 carpet, strewn with broken glass. “Did you recognize that man?” he asked.
“No.”
“Never saw him before?”
“No.”
On the feed, a set of boots approached, and then the view carouseled, bringing a rugged face into close-up. One of the men from the first SUV. Behind him, sprawled across the bed, a pair of legs shuddered.
“How about him?” Evan asked.
“No,” Katrin said. “I swear.”
The man touched his ear. “We got two down, Slatch. Well, shit, one and three-quarters. Gonzalez is fucked.”
The other half of the transmission was not audible.
Behind the man another voice shouted, “Clear!” His partner swept by in the background, barreling across into Room 11. The bark came again: “Clear!” He ran back into the main room. “Looks like they split through the alley. Does he want us to pursue?” The partner cocked his head, looking directly at the lens. “The fuck?”
“Can we please get out of here?” Katrin said.
Evan shot a look up the block at the Scion, but it gave up nothing, just the glare of the midday sun off the windshield. Whoever was behind the wheel was waiting for the field team to confirm the targets’ presence, letting them absorb the higher risk.
They’d absorb mo
re than that.
Katrin again: “What are we waiting for?”
On Evan’s phone the second man approached now, shoulder to shoulder with his partner. They leaned in, peering at the briefcase.
“This,” Evan said, and keyed a code into his phone.
From a block away came a resonant boom. The feed went to static. A few onlookers shrieked. But Evan wasn’t watching them.
He was watching the Scion.
At last a tall, bulky man emerged from the driver’s seat and stared across the parking lot from behind the open car door. His hands rose and squiggled in the air before him, as if he were playing an imaginary piano.
From the passenger side, a woman emerged. Big floppy hat, sunglasses, shaggy blond hair. The row of rooms was out of view, but smoke wafted across from where Room 10 once was.
The man and woman did not rush to check out the aftermath. Already they were scanning the street, parked cars, the windows of neighboring buildings. Focused not on the explosion or the lost men but on the surrounding area. They were accustomed to diversionary tactics, to secondary attacks, to reading the chessboard.
The big man swept his gaze up the street toward the diner. Before it reached Evan, he dropped the car into reverse, eased back behind the diner, and U-turned for the freeway.
24
Fucked-Up Date
The green freeway signs of the 10 flashed overhead as Evan sliced between two trucks, gunning away from the coast. He had to get Katrin to a secure location, and right now anything beyond his direct control was not secure. Which meant that he was going to do something he’d never done before.
He was going to take a client to one of his safe houses.
He was certain he hadn’t been tracked to the motel. So then how had he and Katrin been located? His mind shuffled through possibilities, replaying particular images from the motel as though they were movie clips, slowing them down, freeze-framing to check details. This was an added benefit of mindfulness meditation—it enhanced recall and helped to heighten awareness. That was the aim when meditating or fighting or lifting the latch on his mail slot: to see everything as if for the first time.
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