This time, I got Dolly some new orchids, for inside the house. Those were my own idea. I know I should have left the nursery stop for last, to keep everything fresh. But I had to get Dolly’s surprise done first—I wasn’t sure how late I’d be out looking for what I needed. So I misted everything down real good, and covered it all with a dark mesh tarp.
As it turned out, I had to drive quite a distance until I found the place I wanted. They’ve got a lot of those places in a city about ninety miles away, and they all kind of look alike. Either the glass in the windows is all blacked out or there’s no windows at all.
The guy at the desk didn’t look up when I came in the door. That’s part of his job, same reason they don’t have security cameras in those places.
I found what I was looking for easy enough—there was a big selection.
I paid for what I bought the same way I paid for Dolly’s plants. I don’t have any credit cards, and I don’t have a checking account.
Dolly didn’t say a word about how long I’d been gone. And she loved everything I brought back. I took the other stuff I’d bought down to my workshop.
8
I knew who he was. Just like I knew Alfred Hitchcock hadn’t been his first one.
I didn’t need his name, because I had his path. His kind, they always move in straight lines. You may not know where they’re going, but you always know where they’ve been.
The local paper keeps the crime reports on a separate page. Not big crimes, like an armed robbery or a murder. Around here, something like that’s so rare it would make headlines. The Crime Beat page is just a printout of the entire police blotter. Drunk driving takes up most of it, with some domestic violence sprinkled in. Lately, a lot of meth busts, too. But you also see things like shoplifting, disorderly conduct, urinating in public … any petty little thing you could get arrested for.
The library has a complete archive, going all the way back for years and years. I read three years’ worth. Found seven little notices that qualified: five “animal cruelties”—no details; it wasn’t that kind of newspaper—and two fires they called “arson, unsolved.”
After I marked the locations on my close-terrain map, I could see they were all within a two-and-a-half-mile area. You wouldn’t need a car to cover that much ground, no matter where you started from.
I started leaving the door of my den open all the time, even when I wasn’t around.
Under the bookshelves, there’s a cabinet. It has a lock built into it, but I sometimes forget to use it. You can tell that by looking—the key would still be in the lock, sticking out.
There’re magazines in there now. All kinds, from Soldier of Fortune to Playboy to the stuff I bought on that last visit to the city.
It took a couple of weeks for one of those new ones to go missing. Whoever took it would never notice that I had removed the staples and replaced them with a pair of wire-thin transmitters.
Those transmitters were real short-range, but I was sure I wouldn’t need much. I knew he was close.
9
Dolly was asleep when I slipped out that night. Rascal was awake, but he kept his mouth shut. He gave me a look, so I’d know he wasn’t sleeping on the job.
When I picked up the signal, I didn’t try to track it to the exact house—I wasn’t dressed for that kind of risk. All I really needed was the general area, anyway. The library had a city directory, and every school yearbook, too.
The high school was closed for the summer. There was no security guard. The alarm system was probably older than me.
The guidance counselor’s office wasn’t even locked.
I could tell it was a woman’s office without even turning on my fiber-optic pin light. Whoever she was, she kept her file cabinets locked. Cost me an extra fifteen seconds.
Jerrald had a thick file. He’d been evaluated a number of times. I kept seeing stuff like “attachment disorder.” I skipped over the flabby labels and went right to the stone foundation they built those on—the boy had been torturing animals since he was in the second grade.
The counselors wrote that Jerrald was “acting out.” Or “crying for help.” Some mentioned “conduct disorder.” Some talked about medications.
To read what they wrote, you’d think they knew what they were talking about. Every one of his “behaviors” always had some explanation.
But I knew what Jerrald was doing.
Practicing.
10
The counselors had done all kinds of things for Jerrald. Individual therapy. Group therapy. Medication.
The most recent report said he had been making real progress. Jerrald was keeping a blog. I knew what that was from those kids Dolly always had around—a kind of diary they keep on their computers, so other people can see it.
I read some of Jerrald’s stuff the counselor had printed out. Torture-rape-murder. The counselor said that the blog was a good outlet for Jerrald; a “safe place for him to vent.”
Jerrald’s English teacher said his writing showed real promise.
I knew what promises he was going to keep.
I left the school the same way I’d left Alfred Hitchcock’s body in the woods.
11
You never work angry—that could get you killed. The best way to keep anger out of your blood is to always do it by the numbers. First, secure the perimeter. By August, I knew Jerrald’s parents were going on vacation. To Hawaii. They were taking his little sister with them, but not Jerrald. He was eighteen, more than old enough to leave on his own for a couple of weeks.
I don’t know whose idea that was. Or, I guess, whose idea they thought it was.
12
The newspapers said Jerrald must have been building some kind of bomb in his room. A pretty serious one, too—it blew out the whole back of his house, where his bedroom was.
They brought in the FBI. Anytime a high school kid gets caught with heavy explosives, they figure it for a terrorist plot. If that doesn’t pan out, they look for a Columbine connection.
It was the FBI that told the local TV people the bomb was probably a crude, homemade device. “Very simplistic,” their expert said. “You can get instructions how to build one on the Internet.”
They printed parts of Jerrald’s blog in the papers, and the Columbine connection was all over it. He was obviously a very disturbed young man, most probably the target of school bullying.
13
The town had a big funeral for him. A lot of kids were crying. Dolly went too; some of the kids really wanted her there.
I didn’t go. I was out in the deep woods giving Alfred Hitchcock a proper burial. The way he would have wanted it.
for Zak
BLOOD TEST
“Don’t put that on!” the gray man driving the generic-looking gray sedan hissed at the much younger man in the passenger seat.
“The boss said—”
“What the boss said was, I’m in charge.”
“Yeah, but—”
“The cops see a guy driving around this hour of the night, wearing a ski mask in the middle of June, they make up some excuse—busted taillight, smeared license plate, doesn’t matter—and they pull us over.”
“They got to have probable cause—”
“Where’d you hear that, from one of the big-time gangsters last time you were in the county tank? The cops tell the judge how they found us both wearing latex gloves, with a couple of unregistered pieces under the seat, and the judge, he’s going to, what? Toss out the case?”
“That’s why the boss has lawyers, man. He said no matter what happened, he could always—”
“You know what we’re supposed to do tonight, right?”
“Yeah. We’re going take out that—”
“That’s the job, understand? That’s what we have to get done. That’s what a job is, something you have to get done. You think we could go ahead and get it done after we got stopped by the law? Gun-felony bust, this town, even if some bought-and-paid-for judge e
ventually kicked us loose, they’d hold us for twenty-four hours, minimum, just waiting on arraignment. You think the boss is gonna like paying out a bunch of bribes instead of paying us?”
“I—”
“You never get impatient. That’s a rule you can’t break. We put the masks on just before we go in, understand? That way, anybody spots us back of the joint, they make us for a couple of drunks, or maybe we’re trying to wait on one of the girls when they come out.”
“I don’t see why we got to do it right where he—”
“You want to learn, the first thing you learn is, pay attention. This is a job, all right? It’s work. And part of every job is doing it the way the client wants it done. Where he wants it done, when he wants it done, and how he wants it done, understand?”
“The boss—”
“The boss is the client.”
“Yeah, yeah. I got it. But why does he want it done like this?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“Hey, I’m just trying to learn, okay? You’re supposed to be the big pro, right? The boss said I got to do this one with you, so I’m doing it, ain’t I? I mean, I could do it myself, but—”
“Only you never have.”
“Everybody’s a virgin once. Even you. When was your first one, about a hundred years ago?”
“More questions?”
“I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“Yeah.”
“Look, after tonight, you ain’t going to have to put up with me, okay? The boss said, I do this one with you, I pass the test, I’m blooded in. After that, I can work on my own. Just like you.”
“That’s between you and the boss.”
The gray car rolled past a free-standing one-story building set in the middle of an unlit parking lot. The building had no windows; its slab-sided monotony was broken only by the glowing red outline of an impossibly proportioned woman and various other promises, wrapped around three sides of the building in streams of neon:
XXX TOTALLY NUDE XXX GIRL-GIRL SHOWS XXX PRIVATE ROOMS XXX
The gray man checked his watch, said, “Four-fifteen is the time we move. We’ve got a seven, eight minute margin. We’ll pull into the back, sit there for a minute, make sure it’s clear.”
“What’s the big deal, a few minutes either way?”
The gray man made a sound of disgust, but didn’t speak. He slowly wheeled the gray sedan around the back of the strip joint, positioning it carefully at an angle so he could watch both the back door of the building and the streets that ran along either side of the parking lot.
“Yeah, well, I guess you ain’t perfect, pal,” the younger man said. “I heard you did a real long stretch a while back.”
“Is that right? What else did you ‘hear’ about that?”
“I heard you did almost twenty years. For a contract hit.”
“It was seventeen and change. And it was for a homicide—nobody ever proved it was paid for. In fact, I’m still on parole; I pulled a Life for that one. But it looks like you didn’t ‘hear’ anything you could use.”
“What’re you talking about, man? I’m not planning on doing no seventeen years.”
“Nobody plans on doing time. It’s how you do it, that’s the test.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I went down by myself. Just me, nobody else. You following me?”
“Sure. You didn’t rat nobody out.”
“Which is why I’m still working for the same people, see? Like I said, that was a test. And I passed it.”
“You did all that time, and you’re still doing … this?”
“If I was a plumber, and I did seventeen years inside, what would I do when I got out, be an architect?”
“The boss should’ve taken care of you. I mean, seventeen years …”
“I was the one who got caught, not the boss. So I was the one who had to do the time. That’s the way it works.”
“But he did take care of you while you were—?”
“Everyone makes their own arrangement. I made mine, and I stuck to it.”
“Big deal. I—”
“Put that away! No smoking on the job.”
“Why not? We ain’t playing with gasoline, here.”
“We’re not playing at all. They can get DNA from saliva.”
“Fine! Jesus, look, how come it’s gotta be exactly four-fifteen.”
“Because that’s when he’ll be in the back office.”
“The bouncers—”
“They’ll all be out front. He likes to bring a couple of the girls back there with him when the last shift’s almost over, and he doesn’t like to be interrupted.”
“The back door might be—”
“It’ll be open.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Sometimes a man’s on more than one payroll.”
“You mean one of the bouncers—?”
“It’s time,” the gray man said.
He opened the door. The sedan’s interior light did not come on. The gray man stepped out into the night, slipped the ski mask over his head, and motioned for the younger man to do the same.
The gray man reached under the front seat and extracted a blued steel semi-auto. By the time the younger man joined him, holding a similar weapon, the gray man was screwing a long tube onto the front of his pistol. Again, the younger man copied each move.
They walked casually to the back door of the club. No lights shone on the back side of the building. The gray man held his weapon straight down, dangling by his side, and used his free hand to turn the doorknob. Slowly. It yielded.
He stepped inside, the younger man close behind.
To their left, a sign said DRESSING ROOMS. The gray man turned right, walked a short length of hall, then turned right again, heading for the farthest corner of the building. He motioned for the younger man to stay back a few steps. The only sound was the music coming from the front of the strip club.
The gray man stepped through the door of the dimly lit office. A pudgy man with a red face was sprawled in an office chair. He was fully dressed, but the pants of his suit were puddled around his ankles. A skinny brunette with improbable breasts knelt in front of him; a heftier blonde with a more believable chest stood slightly to one side, as if waiting her turn.
“Anybody screams, everybody dies,” the gray man said.
All three pairs of eyes magneted to the silenced pistol he was holding.
“You,” he said, pointing to the kneeling brunette with the pistol, “get up. Go over and stand with the other one.”
The brunette got up without a word. The gray man nodded. The younger man walked over to the two women, stuck his pistol awkwardly in his waistband, and handcuffed the women together, using two cuffs on each wrist and crossing the chains.
“Turn around and face the wall,” the gray man told them.
They did it, moving in sync as if accustomed to being yoked together.
“Where’s the rest of it?” the gray man asked the man in the office chair, indicating a half dozen lines of cocaine on a hand mirror resting on top of the desk.
“In the safe,” the man in the office chair said, his voice tired and resigned, just on the edge of boredom.
“Get it.”
“Sure,” the red-faced man said, scrambling to pull up his pants as he rose. “Whatever you—”
“Open the safe,” the gray man said.
As soon as the red-faced man started to turn the safe’s dial, the gray man stepped close to him and fired a single shot into the back of his head. The red-faced man dropped. The gray man knelt next to him and put a bullet into each eye. Then another into his right ear. Each shot made a splaat! sound, inaudible outside the office.
The gray man stood up, unscrewed the silencer, and pocketed each half of the disassembled weapon in a separate pocket of his coat. Empty-handed, he motioned for the younger man to move away from the women.
“Hey, wait a minute,” the yo
unger man said. “You know what the boss said.”
“Shut up.”
“The boss said ‘no witnesses,’ man!” the younger man whispered harshly, nodding his head urgently in the direction of the handcuffed women, who were still facing the wall. “We got plenty of time. No reason I can’t have a little taste of that stuff, first.”
“No.”
“No? The test is whether I can follow orders, right? Well, the order was ‘no witnesses.’ You were right there when the boss said it. He didn’t say nothing about not—”
“When the boss said ‘no witnesses,’ he wasn’t talking to you; he was talking to me.”
“So? What difference does that—?”
“All right,” the gray man said. “But hurry it up. And give me that piece—you’re gonna need both hands free.”
The younger man handed his pistol to the gray man, and turned toward the women. The gray man briefly examined the weapon in his hand, shook his head, flicked off the safety, said “Hey!” very softly. The younger man turned. The gray man shot him between the eyebrows. The gray man knelt next to the body and added three more bullets, exactly as he had done to the man in the office chair.
The gray man took the pistol he had used to kill the club owner from his pocket and reattached the silencer. He put the weapon on the desk, his movements sure and unhurried. Then he stripped off the surgeon’s gloves he had been wearing, being careful to turn them inside out, revealing still another pair of gloves underneath. He removed the single-layer gloves from the body of the younger man, pocketed them, then regloved the body with the outer gloves he had removed from his own hands.
Satisfied, he wrapped the younger man’s hand around the pistol used to kill the club owner. He broke down the younger man’s weapon and stowed the separate pieces.
The gray man got to his feet. “You know the story you have to tell,” he said to the handcuffed women. “And what happens if you don’t.”
They didn’t answer him. He hadn’t expected them to.
The gray man walked out of the office, down the hall, and out into the night, pulling the ski mask off his head as he moved. The gray sedan was gone. A black sedan was parked in its place, engine idling quietly.
Mortal Lock Page 15