“That makes them your targets. I’d like for you to take out as many as you can.”
He laughed again.
“Actually, truth be known, I’d like for you to take out every damn one of them. But it won’t be easy. As soon as the first two or three disappear without a trace, the others will start taking precautions. They’ll beef up their security. They’ll stop leaving their ranches. They’ll hire their own guns for protection. They’ll become untouchable.”
“No man is untouchable.”
“That’s what I was hoping you would say, Mr. Luna. That’s why I went looking for you specifically. Because I heard you’re capable of doing what others couldn’t do.”
“Not many of my targets get away.”
“That’s what I heard. This project will be different from any you’ve done before. Who you kill first and how you kill them is totally up to you. As more and more of them die, it’ll get harder and harder to kill the rest. I understand that and accept it as unavoidable. You may find yourself in a position of taking a break occasionally. Maybe disappearing for a few months sometimes and letting the remaining targets get complacent and careless again.”
“How much time do I have to finish the project?”
“As I said, the specifics are up to you. But there’s a fat bonus for you if you can wrap up this project completely within three years.”
It was Luna’s turn to chuckle.
“We’re already discussing bonuses and we haven’t even negotiated my fee yet.”
“I never negotiate, Mr. Luna. Not with anyone. I merely offer what I’m willing to pay. If it’s not acceptable, then I move on and make other arrangements with someone else. It’s the way I’ve always done business, and it’s worked quite well for me.
“As I said, your services are unique. And word has gotten back to me that you are the best. Therefore, I have made my offer to you so generous that there’s no way you’ll turn it down.”
“That’s nice to know, Mr. Townsend. But I’d still like to hear it.”
“One hundred thousand dollars a head. A total of one point two million if you can get to all of them. I will have a trusted courier find you and bring you a hundred grand, in gold bullion, after each man dies. Your bonus, if you complete this project within three years of today’s date, will be an additional million.”
Luna smiled.
“Mr. Townsend, I won’t insult you by bickering. It is indeed a reasonable offer. And I do indeed accept your terms. Is there any way in particular you’d like to see them go? I can go easy on them, or I can go hard. If you’d like for them to pay for any past transgressions.”
“I’m not a bitter man, Mr. Luna. I don’t bear grudges and I never try to get even. I only want these men out of my way so I can continue to build my empire. How you dispose of them is up to you.”
Luna emptied his glass and got up to leave.
Townsend said, “One last thing. This is the last time we can be seen together, until the last of them dies. Once they start dropping, those still alive will be pointing fingers at each other. I don’t want any fingers pointing in my direction. The last thing I need is someone saying that a man seen leaving the scene of one of the murders looked an awful lot like a man seen visiting me at my ranch a few weeks or months before.
“I want to appear to be as innocent as a newborn babe. I plan to pretend to be just as scared as everyone else. I’ll go to ground here at my ranch and stay here, just like the others. The only man who will know for sure I’m behind the murders will be the last one you’ll kill. Because he won’t have anyone else to blame but me.
“And his days will be numbered, so it won’t matter much.”
“Yes, sir. Not a problem at all, Mr. Townsend.”
“If you finish the list… if you kill all twelve, you can come and see me personally to collect your bonus. Until then we can’t be seen together. In fact, when you come to collect the bonus, I may well have some additional work for you to do.”
Luna smiled.
“I’ll listen to your offer. But I reckon if I kill all of them and collect the bonus, I’ll likely hang up my guns and retire.”
“Oh? I’ve heard it said that a hitman never retires.”
“This one will. I’ve got my sights set on a beautiful three story house in a little town near Austin. The same town I told you about earlier. Of course, it’s occupied now, by a fat little man I despise with every fiber of my being.
“But nobody lives forever. And he’ll be my very last hit.”
Chapter 52
Red was frustrated and wanted to lash out. As she’d entered the city of Lubbock two days before, she’d noted the city limit sign boasting a population of a quarter of a million people.
She’d panicked just momentarily, wondering how in the world she’d find Luna in such a sea of humanity.
She needn’t have worried about the population. Only a few thousand had survived.
But she still hadn’t been able to find him.
Luna had gone to ground, and was seemingly keeping a very low profile. Not that she expected to just bump into him in the streets. No, Lubbock was too big a city for that. Although now very sparsely populated, the survivors didn’t clump together in one part of town like they did in most cities.
Lubbockites seemed to relish their elbow room. Every part of town had pockets of survivors, as well as a smaller number of isolationists: those who seemed to hate everybody and kept exclusively to themselves.
Red’s strategy was a simple one. Mrs. Montgomery had told her that Luna loved his whisky.
So Red had walked up and down the main thoroughfares throughout the city, looking for the neighborhood bars she knew would be there.
And one by one she went inside to inquire about a tall thin man of Hispanic descent, with shoulder-length black wavy hair and a pronounced mustache.
More than once she’d heard a noncommittal, “That fits the description of a lot of men. Everybody is skinny these days.”
Her response had always been, “Not everybody is on a horse, with a second pack horse in tow.”
That much was true. Even in west Texas cattle country, horses were a rarity within the city limits.
But the negative responses and shrugs she got seemed to be genuine. She got the sense that no one was hiding Luna from her.
She saw very few women on the streets of Lubbock. Apparently most of them hadn’t survived. Maybe they were on the front lines of those caring for the plague victims. And maybe they caught the brunt of it as an unjust payment for their efforts.
Red knew she was a beauty, although she’d never professed to it. She knew that in a city where men outnumbered the women ten to one or better, that those men would move mountains to curry her favor.
She knew that if they’d seen Luna, they’d have given him up in a heartbeat just to score points with the good-looking red-head walking about town asking about him.
And that was the true source of her frustration.
The whisky card was the only one she had to play. There was no longer a police department in Lubbock, so she couldn’t go there for help. She couldn’t think of any other way to find him other than by his habit of being a heavy drinker. Yet after two days of walking into bars and asking the very same questions, she was no closer now than when she’d walked into town.
She had no choice but to stay on the same course. And when she finally ran out of bars? She didn’t know what her next move would be.
She’d worked her way through most of the city, starting on Avenue A on the eastern side of town and working west.
It was on Slide Road, where it intersected with 50th Street, where she saw a Morgan and a Bay tied to a post beneath a covered sidewalk. Sitting close to them was a boy of about fifteen, leaned back in a lawn chair, his back against a nearby wall.
In his lap was an AK-47 rifle.
Red grew excited. It was the first time she’d seen horses anywhere in Lubbock, and they were the same breeds as Crazy E
ddie’s horses.
It just couldn’t be a coincidence.
She walked up to the boy and struck up a conversation.
“Wow! Here’s something you don’t see very often. Are these your horses?”
The boy was a typical teenager, with raging hormones and a love for pretty girls. Pretty girls were in short supply in and around Lubbock these days, so a pretty red-head twice his age was an acceptable substitute.
Red caught his eye and turned his head. And left him just a little bit tongue tied.
He stumbled over what should have been a simple answer to a simple question. But he turned it into an adventure.
“Um… uh… no. I mean, yes. I mean no, they’re not mine. But I’m in charge of them, so yes. Sort of. I mean someone is paying me to watch them.”
He turned the shade of an overripe beet and was embarrassed that he couldn’t impress the pretty woman with his command of the English language.
Red pretended not to notice.
“Really? I’ve always loved horses. I have one of my own, back in Blanco. Her name is Bonnie. She’s a Morgan too, like this one, only a couple of shades darker and a couple of hands taller. Maybe I know the man who owns them. What’s his name?”
“I… I don’t know. I mean, he told me, but… I can’t remember. Gosh, you’re pretty.”
He hadn’t intended to blurt out his thoughts. It just happened sometimes to awkward teenagers who struggled to find words that weren’t pure nonsense. Sometimes the brain tried to help them out by transferring their thoughts into words, but usually did them no favors.
He turned an even darker shade of red and suddenly felt a need to examine his shoelaces.
Red understood. It wasn’t so long before when she was an awkward teenager herself.
She actually felt bad for him, and tried to help.
“Well thank you. That’s so sweet of you to say. What is your name?”
“J… Jacob.”
She held out her hand, thinking it might calm him a bit.
“Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Jacob. My name is Debbie.”
It wasn’t a lie. Debbie was the name her mom and dad gave her, although only a handful of people in Blanco knew that fact.
“The man who’s paying you to watch your horses… I might know him. What does he look like?”
“I don’t know, a little taller than me. A Chicano like me. Wears a black hat all the time.”
“Is he bald headed and fat?”
“No. He’s skinny. And he has long hair.”
“No, he’s not the man I was thinking of. Do you know where he’s staying?”
“Yes. In that hotel over there. It’s the only hotel left in town. Actually it used to be apartments, but somebody chased all the residents out and made them leave their furniture behind. Now it rents by the day.”
“Interesting. I need a place to stay. Maybe I’ll get myself a room too. I want to look around a little bit more first though.”
He stared into her face like he was in love.
But she broke the spell.
And possibly his heart too, when she bid him goodbye.
“It was nice meeting you, Jacob.”
“Maybe we’ll see each other around town.”
She smiled.
“I’d like that. Goodbye, now.”
Red disappeared into the crowd and intentionally walked completely out of his sight. She’d walk down a block and then double back, approaching the hotel from the opposite direction twenty minutes later. She’d take up a position far enough away from Jacob and the horses to remain fairly hidden while she shifted into surveillance mode.
Jacob went back to sitting in his chair and watching the horses.
Only now he had a grin on his face and a pretty girl to daydream about.
Chapter 53
Red took up a position in the shade of an abandoned convenience store half a block away. From her new vantage point she could make out the two horses and the front of the apartment complex where the boy said the horses’ owner was staying.
A light pole halfway between them blocked her view of the boy himself, save his feet sticking up in the air from his leaned back chair.
She wondered if she’d made a mistake in asking the boy about the man who’d ridden in with the horses. Surely he’d mention her to the man, and Luna would be on to her. She had the sense he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed by any means. But there couldn’t be too many red-headed women out there looking for a tall man with two horses. Even Luna, she reckoned, could put two and two together and realize she’d come for him.
Of course, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
She rather liked the idea of making him sweat a little.
She took off her boots and then her socks. If she was to be stuck in the same spot for hours she might as well let her feet breathe.
Her blisters had pretty much turned into callouses and weren’t bothering her as much as they had been. Her boots were well broken in now, and that helped a bit. But she was distressed to see that the soles of her boots had worn awfully thin from all the walking. If they wore too much more, she’d have to replace them. And she didn’t much relish the thought of having to break in a new pair of boots.
By chance, she chose that exact moment to look closely at her surroundings. Directly across the street, sandwiched between a drive-through car wash and a boarded up Wendy’s, was a shoe store of all things.
She decided, why not?
Now, Red was a cowgirl and a tomboy most of the time. Her preferred footgear was a comfortable old pair of boots, worn so long that the leather had softened and had conformed to the shape of her feet.
But boots came in most handy on horseback. Or when walking through heavy woods or brush in snake and scorpion country.
On city streets, or when walking for great distances, boots weren’t quite so sensible.
She decided to go and take a look inside the shoe store.
It looked like a war zone. The aisles were covered with empty shoe boxes, trampled flat.
Telling the shoe preference of the looters was easy. All the racks marked “Men’s Athletic Shoes” were barren. So were the end caps with “Nike” and “Jordan” signs hanging over them.
Conversely, men’s and women’s dress shoes, or what Red used to call “church shoes,” were still there and still more or less lined up neatly on their assigned shelves.
The children’s shoes had been picked through, but were mostly intact as well.
The women’s athletic section was mostly untouched. Apparently women thieves were more finicky than their male counterparts. The nicer models of shoes were gone, and only the cheaper ones or the ugly ones remained.
Red selected a pair of white running shoes with pink stripes. She chose them not necessarily for what they looked like, but because the insoles were soft and conforming and would be great for her aching feet.
When she walked out of the store a few minutes later, new shoes on her feet and walking much better, she left something behind.
On a shelf toward the back of the store.
On a lowest level of a six shelf unit, mixed in with little girls’ dress shoes, was an old pair of Roper boots, their toes scuffed and worn by three years of wear and tear.
She didn’t want to have to carry them around while she was in Lubbock. They’d take up way too much room in her backpack. And she didn’t have a better place to hide them.
But she didn’t think anyone would bother them much, on the off chance they even happened upon them in the back of the store. She’d retrieve them when she left town.
She left something else in the store as well.
To a casual observer, it wouldn’t even be noticed. A small pile of tiny silver shavings, carved from one of her silver dollars, on the center of the manager’s desk in the store’s back office.
It was a small gesture, sure. And it would almost certainly never make it to the manager, who was probably long dead anyway.
/> It would almost certainly make it into the pouch of a rare looter who’d recognize its value, and would probably be used to trade for food or whisky or ammunition.
And that was okay. For its real purpose wasn’t to pay for the shoes. Its real purpose was to ease Red’s mind and to rid it of guilt. Even though the world had changed dramatically in the year since the world went black. Red still felt guilty about taking merchandize out of a store without paying for it.
Even a store that would never open for business again.
It was just the way Red was. The way she was raised. A red-headed spit of a girl raised in a tiny Texas town with a set of morals and values few others could match.
It was just Red being Red.
She stepped back into the sunlight and surveyed her surroundings.
She hadn’t missed much, she decided. There were very few people on the streets, and those she saw were busy with the day to day chore of surviving. Scavengers looking through abandoned cars for anything they could eat or drink. Others coming out of deserted storefronts carrying bags of merchandize they could use or trade for something else.
It was surreal, and reminded Red of an old television show she used to watch about the zombie apocalypse.
Except, of course, that these were humans, every bit as much as she was.
They were just more desperate.
She crossed the street and took her position back at the convenience store, this time under the gas pump canopy. She thought it odd that after more than a year, the pumps still reeked of gasoline.
She could once again see the boy and the front of the apartment complex, and cursed under her breath.
She had missed something rather important after all.
One of the horses was gone.
Chapter 54
She was taking a calculated risk and she knew it. But she didn’t want to waste any more time waiting for a man who was obviously coming back for his second horse, but who might not do so for hours, or even days.
She entered the door marked “Hotel Office and Desk” and walked up to a tired old codger who was seventy if he was a day.
Too Tough To Tame: Red: Book 2 Page 17