by Sam Sisavath
After Jack collapsed in front of the window, Walter quickly lowered his gun hand and took a step toward Allie, saying, “Allie, wait—” when the door behind him crashed open. A man in a suit ran inside and tackled him, and they went sprawling to the floor.
No, no, Allie! Let me explain! Allie!
Walter lost his grip on the gun and grunted with pain, slamming into the carpet, the rifle slung over his back digging into his flesh. The man was bigger, stronger, and he scrambled up first, straddling Walter’s chest and pinning him to the floor with his weight. Walter struggled, but it was like trying to push off a boulder.
The guy produced a gun and shoved it against Walter’s forehead. “Move and I blow your brains out,” the man said, his face contorted, ugly, and flushed red.
Walter didn’t think the man would actually blow his brains out, but the guy might not know who he was. For all he knew, the man might think he was Jack, and to go through all this only to get shot by accident wasn’t something he was willing to risk, so Walter lowered his hands and sighed.
“Smart,” the guy said. He removed Walter’s gun and stood up.
A second figure—taller than the first, and thinner—appeared in the open doorframe and walked over. Walter lay still, too tired to get up. He spent the next few seconds processing how to proceed.
The tall man crouched next to him. “Walter, I’m Monroe. We talked on the phone? The handsome guy over there is Barnes.”
“That’s Walter?” the man named Barnes said.
Monroe produced his cell phone and showed it to Walter. His employee picture was on the screen. “Yup.”
“Shit, I almost blew his head off,” Barnes said.
Monroe chuckled. “Good thing you didn’t.”
“Close call…”
“Good help is hard to find,” Monroe said, smiling down at Walter. Then he stood up and extended his hand. Walter grabbed it and let the man pull him up. “We heard two shots, thought you were in trouble,” Monroe said. “Sorry about the door.”
Walter looked over at the window, but Allie was gone.
Of course she was gone. She’d seen him murder Jack right before her eyes. He’d run too if the woman he was dating did that. There was no telling how long she’d been standing out there before he noticed her. How much had she heard?
“What happened to your head?” Monroe was saying.
Walter nodded at Jack’s body.
“What’d he do, tune you up?” Monroe asked.
“He sliced off half of my left ear.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
Just mentioning the ear made it tingle, and he touched the bandage over it, grimacing from the contact. It had stopped bleeding, but it still hurt—even more so when he paid attention to it. There had been surprisingly little blood after Walter first cut off the piece, but the pain had been unbelievable. He had screamed and, at one point, cried like a child. He would have been ashamed of it if Lucy and Allie had seen or heard him, but thank God they weren’t at the house when Jack decided to “incentivize” him into working.
Walter focused back on the window. “She was outside…”
“Who?” Monroe asked.
“Allie.”
“Your girlfriend,” Monroe said. He flicked at his cell phone’s screen with his forefinger and showed Allie’s employee picture to Walter. “She was inside the house, too.”
Walter stared disbelieving at him.
Allie? Inside the house earlier? But wasn’t that when it sounded like all hell was breaking loose?
“Inside?” Walter said. “When was Allie inside?”
“The shooting earlier. That was her. She and the dog popped out of the basement. Killed two of my guys before they ran off.”
“Allie killed two of your guys?”
Monroe nodded and narrowed his eyes at him. “You didn’t know she was capable of something like that?”
“Allie’s a secretary…”
“Maybe, but the woman I saw back there knew how to handle a gun. Shot one of my guys point-blank while he was trying to zip up his pants, if you can believe it, then shot another one when he chased her into the basement.”
“You let her go?”
Monroe jerked a thumb at Barnes. “I’m all out of fresh bodies, except for that guy. She could stay down in the basement the entire night, for all I care. You were always the priority, even more so now after our little chat. But it looked like she climbed out, snuck around the house.” He looked almost impressed when he added, “That’s a hell of a woman you got there, Walt.”
Walter turned back to the window, replaying the look on Allie’s face after she saw him kill Jack. She’d looked shocked and confused. He wondered if her expression was anything like what was on his face at the moment.
“I gotta tell you, Walt, I’m not someone who changes sides in the middle of a job,” Monroe was saying behind him, “but if you’re not bullshitting me about the money involved…”
“I’m not,” Walter said.
“I believe you, because you definitely wouldn’t want to lie to me, or Barnes here.”
“It’s just money,” Walter said. “There’s more than enough to go around.”
“Good to hear it.” Monroe nodded at the laptop, lying in pieces on the floor. “I take it that doesn’t matter anymore?”
“Not anymore…”
He could feel Monroe’s and Barnes’s eyes on him as Walter walked over and picked up the handgun he had dropped.
How much did they really know, he wondered. They were mercenaries, which was exactly why he knew he could convince them to see things his way. Men who slaved for the Almighty Dollar were easy to sway, especially when the numbers were this high.
Walter felt better with the gun in his hand, something he never thought he’d say in a million years, until tonight. Not that he was delusional enough to think he could shoot it out with the two of them, but there was something to be said for not being completely helpless. And he had proven to them, with Jack, that he was fully capable of violence, too.
“Where is it?” Monroe asked. “Where’s the money?”
“Cyberspace,” Walter said. “Every cent that I took from Gorman and Smith.”
“And you can get your hands on it again?”
Half of it, because the other half belongs to someone else, someone who would probably shoot me if he finds out what I’m doing right now, Walter thought, but he said instead, “Absolutely.”
*
If he thought the guest bedroom was a mess, the living room was like a war zone. Most of the furniture was overturned and shredded, there were bullet holes in the walls and floor and ceiling, and glass was sprinkled everywhere, crunching under his shoes as he walked out of the bedroom hallway and through the house. Red splatters covered the floor and walls and furniture, and Walter gagged slightly at the unmistakable smell of blood in the air.
“Sorry about the mess,” Monroe said.
“What happened?” Walter asked.
“Your girlfriend and the dog happened. I think I nicked it, but it managed to escape through the front door when this moron opened it.”
“Hey,” Barnes said. “I didn’t know it was waiting on the other side.”
“That’s one smart dog,” Monroe said to Walter.
He nodded. The dog’s name was Apollo, and it was Allie’s. They’d come as a package deal, though of course he didn’t know she had a dog until the third date. Walter had a hard time believing the animal that always slept in a corner of Allie’s apartment and barely acknowledged his presence whenever he stayed overnight was capable of turning his house into…this. But he’d seen what Apollo had done to Jones, one of Jack’s people, because the body was still in the other guest bedroom when he had walked past earlier.
“Who is she?” Monroe asked.
“Who?” he said.
“Allie.”
“She was my friend’s secretary at Gorman and Smith. We started dating five months ago.”
“That’s it? Her résumé didn’t say anything about being a gun pro?”
Walter shook his head.
Monroe didn’t look as if he believed him, but he didn’t push the subject.
“How did she get into the basement?” Walter asked.
“Through the back window,” Barnes said. “I wanted to go in after her, but boss man here said to hold back.”
“You were the prize,” Monroe said.
You mean the money I stole from Gorman and Smith, Walter thought, but he said, “I have to find her.”
“Later,” Monroe said. “First, let’s talk turkey. How much are we really talking about here, and how does it work? How do you access the money?”
“Forty million.”
“Twenty for you, and twenty for me?”
“Twenty for me, but you’ll have to split your twenty with him,” Walter said, nodding at Barnes.
Barnes, leaning against the foyer wall, whistled. “Goddamn. Looks like we picked the right night to make the switch, boss.”
“And you’re willing to part with twenty million?” Monroe asked Walter. “Just like that?”
“Half is better than zero,” Walter said.
Monroe chuckled. “Good answer. So tell me how it works.”
“That’s the part you don’t get to know.”
“Wrong answer. I want all the details or you’re going back into the city, where I hand you off to my employers.”
Walter shook his head. He didn’t know where the courage came from. It definitely wasn’t from the gun stuffed into his waistband.
“Twenty million,” Walter said, willing his voice to remain as steady as humanly possible. “That’s your share. My only insurance that you keep your word is what’s in here.” He tapped his temple. “If anything happens to me, every cent of that twenty million goes forever unclaimed by you and Barnes. You can either leave today with more money than you’ve ever dreamed of, or you can keep doing grunt work for people in exchange for chump change. It’s your choice, but I know what I would choose.”
Monroe narrowed his eyes at him, but didn’t say anything. Walter wondered if the man was trying to decide if he could interrogate the answers out of him, and how much it was going to hurt. For him, anyway. He had a feeling Monroe had done much, much more for way, way less in the past.
Barnes broke the tense silence. “For ten million, you can keep your nerd secrets.”
Monroe flashed a forced smile. “Barnes has a way with words.”
“So we have a deal,” Walter said.
“It would appear so,” Monroe said, and stuck out his hand.
Walter flashed the mercenary a cocky smile, praying his hand wasn’t shaking too noticeably when he clasped Monroe’s and shook it. “I guess this means the two of you are working for me now.”
Monroe grinned back at him, with all the enthusiasm of a snake measuring up his latest victim.
“I guess so, boss man,” the suited mercenary said.
Chapter 17
“Lucy, your dad’s a liar and a killer. Now let’s go home!”
Yeah, right.
It didn’t matter how long she thought about it; it still didn’t make any sense. What had she really seen back there, at the house?
Walter. And Jack.
Then Walter shooting Jack.
Walter shooting Jack.
She stopped and looked back in the direction of the house. It was somewhere behind those two large trees, but of course she’d been walking in a daze for the last few (Ten? Twenty?) minutes and might have been halfway back to Lucy by now without realizing it. That is, if she was even going in the right direction.
Apollo had stopped too, and sat on his hind legs, waiting patiently for her.
She looked back at him. “You saw what Walter did, too, right? It wasn’t just my imagination?”
The dog bent over and licked himself.
“Gross, Apollo.”
She looked behind her again. Walter was back there, maybe even still standing over Jack’s dead body. So who were the other guys with the Uzis?
Allie almost laughed out loud. She had thought that as the night dragged on, things would become clearer. If anything, they had only gotten muddier. If she was confused about what was happening before, that didn’t hold a candle to the insanity of the last hour. The smartest thing she could do now was return to Lucy and get the kid out of here. They didn’t have a car—she’d even checked the two-story house’s attached garage—but there was a road somewhere out there. Besides, “out there” was better than hunkering down in a shuttered house if the men in suits (and Walter) came looking for them.
“It’ll be great,” Walter had said. “It’s the perfect chance to get to know each other better.”
He’d really meant it was the chance for her to connect with Lucy, because even a blind man could see the drama that played out whenever she and the teenager were in the same room together for longer than a few seconds.
Or maybe that wasn’t what Walter had meant at all. After tonight, after what she had seen, she didn’t know anything anymore.
“Should have stayed out of the woods,” she said out loud. “Nothing good ever comes from going into the woods. Right, boy?”
Apollo stopped licking himself long enough to look up at her.
“Thanks. Glad we’re on the same wavelength.”
She turned around and continued through the woods, back toward the house. Back to Lucy.
She probably had ten minutes, give or take, before she reached her destination. Ten minutes, give or take, to figure out what to tell Lucy about her dad.
“Guess what, kid? Your dad’s not who we thought he was! He’s a liar and a killer, and God only knows the real reason he brought us out here in the first place!”
Yeah, that was probably not going to work, either.
*
As it turned out, she didn’t have to worry about what she was going to tell Lucy, because she could hear the sounds of fate taking that option away from her just beyond the tree lines. She knew what they were before she saw the bright LED headlights sweeping across the woods, making her drop to the ground on her stomach as they flashed overhead.
Apollo, trailing behind her, did the same thing.
After about ten painstaking seconds of trying to convince herself to get up and run in the other direction, she did get up, but crab-walked the rest of the way to the tree line. She looked out in time to see the tall man in the suit—the same one who had tried to shoot Apollo back at the house—sliding out of a familiar looking SUV in the well-lit front yard of the two-story house. A second man, also wearing a suit, climbed out of the driver’s side, but didn’t move away from it. Instead, he stood behind the open door and waited as his tall partner walked forward.
Apollo trotted over and sat down next to her, and together they watched the tall man stop halfway to the house and looked back toward the SUV.
“This is your show, boss man,” the tall man said to someone back at the car. He wasn’t talking to the one at the driver-side door. “What now?”
One of the SUV’s back doors creaked open, and a third figure emerged. She had no trouble recognizing the white bandage wrapped around his head.
Walter.
He’d led them here. Right to her and Lucy.
Her heart raced at the sight of him, all the questions she had been turning over in her head on the way over here rushing back in a tidal wave, more confusing now than ever.
“Let me do the talking,” Walter said as he walked past the tall man, toward the front porch.
“What if they’re not here?” the tall man asked.
“It has to be this one. My only other neighbors are miles away in the other direction.”
“If you say so, boss man.”
‘Boss man?’
The tall man in the suit stood back and allowed Walter to approach the house by himself. The man looked around the yard, until he was suddenly peering in her direction. She t
ook an involuntary step backward, moving further into the shadows, even though she was sure he couldn’t see her given the distance between them.
Probably.
The man kept turning until he was looking at another part of the woods. She breathed easier, but stayed where she was.
Walter was now on the front porch and looking through one of the windows, before moving over to the door and knocking on it. He probably noticed right away that the doorknob was busted, that the only thing keeping the door closed at all was a shoe rack on the other side.
Instead of pushing his way in, Walter leaned toward the slight opening and shouted, “Lucy! Allie! It’s me! Can you guys hear me? You can both come out now! It’s safe! I promise, it’s safe!”
Goddamned liar, she thought, as his voice echoed in the night air.
There was no movement from inside the house, and Allie held out hope that Lucy wouldn’t respond, that she would know something wasn’t right when Walter showed up with two strangers in an SUV.
Be smart, Lucy. Something’s not right. You can see it, can’t you?
But all that optimism quickly vanished when a figure appeared from the far side of the building, and a voice shouted, “Dad!”
Allie sighed as she watched Lucy run toward Walter, who hurried down the steps and opened his arms. The girl practically jumped into them. The two of them looked like the picture of a happy family reunion, except, of course, Allie knew better.
Who are you, Walter?
She heard a low, rumbling growl and looked down at Apollo, sitting next to her. He only had eyes for the two suited men at the SUV, and she wondered if he recognized the one who had tried to shoot him back at the house.
“Easy, boy. There’ll be plenty of time for that later. Promise.”
Apollo looked at her for a second before turning back to the men in suits.
She did the same thing, when she noticed the one back at the SUV was leaning against the hood of the vehicle, looking through a pair of binoculars. The lens seemed to be glowing neon green, and the man was looking right at her.