“We’ve got to get rid of the other two. Can’t leave any witnesses alive,” he said.
Fierro nodded. He knew it was true. Lina and Carmen could tie him to the murder of Marisol. And Choey to that of Amparo. Oh, they’d swear by the cross and the rosary and all the saints never to breathe a word of what had happened here. People will say anything to save themselves. But the eternal truth applied: Only the dead tell no tales. He realized that he was still holding his gun leveled hip-high, where he’d been holding it when he shot Marisol.
He swung the muzzle toward Lina, shaking his head sadly. What a waste! Trust Choey to screw things up so it had to come to this. No way around it, though. What had to be, had to be.
Something hit Fierro with the force of a thunderbolt, and before he realized he’d been struck, he was dead. Stone dead before he hit the ground.
The flat crack of a rifle report sounded somewhere in the black hills east of the campfire.
Before the echoes fell still, there was a second shot. Simultaneous with it was a juicy thud like a sledgehammer hitting a side of beef, the sound of a round tagging Gomez. The impact knocked him sprawling, gut-shot with a tennis ball-sized bullet hole.
Fierro and Gomez had been downed one-two, one right after the other, bang-bang! Came a pause then, one lasting several heartbeats, not long, just long enough for Choey to realize what had happened to his sidemen and to grasp the implications for himself. Not long enough for him to do anything about it, though.
One might almost have thought that the unseen shooter had done so deliberately, to let Choey know that his time had come. Choey looked around madly for cover, for some avenue of escape. He opened his mouth to scream.
Bang! The shot tagged him dead center, knocking him back against the boulder. He bounced off it and measured his length facedown in the dirt.
The third shot’s echoes died away. In the silence, the wood on the campfire hissed, sputtered, and crackled. That was all.
A hundred yards or so to the east, from where the shots seemed to have been fired, the stark black foothills and the slightly softer black of the canyon mouth remained unbroken by a single gleam of light or hint of motion.
Time passed; the stillness remained unbroken. he phantom shooter was just that—a phantom, unseen as the wind. Choey Maldonado, Fierro, and Gomez were dead. Lina and Carmen were alive, alone with night and the desert.
Night, the desert, and Death.
TWO
Too many cooks spoil the broth, or so the old saying goes.
And too many hunters?
That was the question for Steve Ireland. He had time to think it over, plenty of time, because he was on a hunt and the one thing a hunt requires is patience. Hunting is mostly a waiting game, waiting for the time and the place and the prey to align in the optimum combination for a sure kill.
Steve’s hunting ground wasn’t a wilderness far removed from civilization, not this time, although in the past he’d tracked his prey in jungles, forests, mountains, and deserts. Tonight, though, he was doing his hunting in a big city; in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.
He was a manhunter but no lawman; at least, no lawman officially recognized by any civilian judicial authority in the land. He wasn’t the type who brings ’em back alive either.
Steve Ireland, a few months short of thirty, was six feet, two inches tall, rangy, long-limbed. Lean to the point of gauntness, he was hollow-cheeked with sharp, jutting cheekbones. His hair was dark and needed a trim. His face was stiff, strangely immobile, all but the eyes. Deep-set eyes were alert and darkly glittering in that clean-shaven, frozen face.
He wore a lightweight utility vest, baggy T-shirt, wide-legged pants, and sneakers. His clothes were dark-colored but not black; they looked more dingy than sinister. Tucked into his waistband over his left hip was a 9mm Beretta semiautomatic pistol worn butt-forward, for a cross-belly draw. He liked it that way for a city kill.
The untucked T-shirt was worn over the piece, an impediment to speedy access but necessary for concealment. The utility vest also cloaked the weapon. Some spare clips were tucked into the pockets; at the back of the neck, a custom-made sheath held a long, slim, stilettolike throwing knife that ran down vertically between his shoulder blades. He was a dead shot who happened to also have a real facility with knives.
Whether the prey be man or beast, hunting is hunting. The rules are the same. The predator goes where the game is.
Steve stood in an alley between two brick buildings, across the street from the main entrance of a topless bar. It was after midnight on a midweek June night.
Washington, D.C., is a place of many parts. When the average citizen thinks about the capital, the first impression that usually comes to mind is a vista of stately white monuments, broad thoroughfares, and massive government office buildings. The bar wasn’t located in that part of town.
Washington is also the site of a sprawling inner city, an urban ghetto of teeming tenements, dire poverty, and rampant crime, including one of the nation’s highest murder rates. The bar wasn’t in that part of town either.
It was in a fringe area near the river but not in sight of it, a seedy, rundown marginal industrial zone on the edge of the warehouse district. There were a lot of gas stations, auto parts stores, some machine shops, a couple of trucking company lots, a tire regrooving place, and the like.
Doors were made of solid metal, windows were netted by protective antitheft grilles, walls and chain-link fences were topped with strands of razor-barbed concertina wire. After dark, the legitimate establishments were locked up tight, alarm systems switched on, and their personnel made fast tracks for points elsewhere.
A lack of residential properties and a broad-minded local zoning board had encouraged the rise of a number of leisure-time entertainment venues generally not welcomed in more finicky neighborhoods: a head-banging heavy metal music club, an adult emporium peddling triple-X-rated magazines and DVDs, some gin mills, and a couple of strip joints.
One of the latter was being dogged by Steve Ireland. No mere hole-in-the-wall dive, it aspired to a certain kind of gritty grandiosity. A one-story, shoebox-shaped structure with a flat roof, it and its adjacent parking lot occupied most of a city block. One of its narrow ends fronted a four-lane boulevard; that’s where the main entrance was located. Above it, a red neon sign bannered its name: The Booby Hatch.
Unlike most of the other buildings in the area, the club’s parking lot was not fenced in. It didn’t need to be. The management was wired into the territory’s organized crime syndicate and paid for protection. Muggers, thieves, vandals, and other malefactors knew better than to ply their trade here. Crooks being what they are, though, every now and then one would be too dumb or greedy or strung out to obey the prohibition; swift retribution was sure to follow, and another corpse would be found in a vacant lot, to be labeled by police and press as a “gang killing” and just as swiftly forgotten by officialdom, if not by the lawbreaking elements at whom the object lesson was directed.
A parking lot attendant stood on watch during operating hours, mostly to make sure that no hooker tricks or drug deals were consummated on the grounds. The syndicate had an in with the cops, but there was no percentage in allowing the kind of action that gives the vice squad and liquor-licensing authorities a pretext to hike the going payoff rate.
Some hustlers were allowed in the club, as long as they were reasonably discreet and presentable and took their johns off premises to do their business. That okay came with an obligation to kick back a certain percentage of their fees to the management. They were a draw, too, bringing in male clientele and getting them to spend plenty on overpriced, watered-down drinks. Club dancers weren’t allowed to date customers as a matter of policy, to keep management from catching heat from the vice boys. Although back rooms were maintained for select dancers to intimately entertain special friends and associates of the owners.
The street outside was well traveled day and night, mostly by cars
and trucks in a hurry to get somewhere else. Police cars cruised back and forth at regular intervals, pausing to roust street hookers and pick up falling-down drunks and cart them off to the city jail.
When prowl cars came rolling along, Steve Ireland faded a few paces back from the alley mouth where he was keeping vigil, melting away into the inky darkness that dwelt in the narrow passageway between two buildings. They were commercial buildings, closed for the night, with narrow slitlike windows set high in brick walls, pale oblongs wanly glowing from dim lights burning within.
The boulevard was lined with heavy-duty street lamps that flooded it with a harshly unnatural, blue-white-tinged glare. But it penetrated no more than a few feet into the alley, which was stuffed thick with black darkness.
The wall on Steve’s left was lined with a couple of trash bins filled with cinder ash and metal scraps and shavings from the machine shop within. He ducked behind them when patrol cars came making their slow, sharklike glide along his side of the street.
His car was parked nearby where he could get it into action fast. He could have kept watch from inside it, but he preferred to be out here, where he could move around and stretch his legs. A lone man sittting behind the wheel of a parked car in this neck of the woods would attract too much attention from the law and street people.
Besides, until recently, he’d been cooped up for months in a small room in a private clinic, recuperating from critical injuries sustained during an overseas mission. He’d had enough of that to hold him for ten lifetimes.
It felt good to be outside in the fresh air, such as it was. Washington is built on what used to be swampland, and flaunts its origins throughout most of the year with heavy humidity. This late June night, the air was so thick and damp and hazy that it plastered haloed rings around street lamps and headlights.
There were dark bands of wetness under his arms, and his shirt hung limp with sweat. From long habit he went jungle-fighter style, wearing no undershorts beneath his pants and hanging free and loose.
The occasional street hookers who went strutting along the sidewalks took advantage of the sultry night air to peel down to the minimum, tube tops and short-shorts, the better to flaunt what they had. The turf was more or less off-limits, but a steady stream of them trolled the pavement, gambling on getting picked up by a cruising john and getting in his car and away before attracting the notice of a cop. They were on fairly safe ground as long as they kept moving and didn’t linger in doorways or on street corners.
Other denizens of the nighttime world made the rounds: winos, crackheads, lush rollers, bone thugs, penny-ante drug dealers, homeless derelicts, and crazies. Now and then, they would wander into the alley, nearly stumbling into Steve before becoming aware of his presence. When they did, they got out fast. One look was all it took to realize he was up to serious business they wanted no part of.
His vantage point gave him a clear sightline on the club’s front and parking lot. The front entrance was the only way the customers entered and exited the building. There were fire exits in each of the long side walls, and a back door that opened onto a loading platform, but they were off-limits to all but staffers, to prevent any deadbeats from trying to beat the house after running up a hefty bar tab. The oversized, hulking goons that served as bouncers and club personnel weren’t being paid to let anyone pull a fast one on them.
The parking lot had a single entrance/exit that accessed the street. Steve knew the layout of the club; he’d been in there earlier tonight while dogging his quarry, and he’d made sure to survey the layout of the joint. Not that he expected his man to execute any evasive maneuvers; Quentin simply wasn’t the type. He didn’t know he was being followed and even if he did, he wasn’t built for any kind of action that might scuff up his expensive, Italian-made tasseled loafers.
Durwood Quentin III, to give him his full monicker. A multimillionaire with a kink for the down-and-dirty side of the street. With his money, he could have been playing around with high-fashion models or high-line, five-thousand-dollar-a-night call girls.
Instead, he prowled the low-down side of the capital’s nighttime world, making the rounds of strip clubs, titty bars, and hustler dives, the raunchier the better. He also had a tendency to top off the evening by picking up street hookers and knocking off a quickie in his car. With some of the hard skanks he’d been dallying with, he was lucky one of them hadn’t cut his throat for his wallet and watch. Which would have saved Steve Ireland some trouble.
Steve had become an instant expert on Quentin’s wayward ways because he’d been tailing him on his forays for the last few nights, after first drawing the assignment to neutralize the financier.
Know your target, learn his pattern to find his point of maximum vulnerability, and strike. That was how Steve Ireland operated, and he was very good at his job. Or at least, he had been, before the hazards of war had put a serious hurting on him and laid him up in a recovery ward for the better part of six months. He was just getting back into harness with the Quentin sanction.
It wasn’t until tonight, though, that he’d learned that someone else was also on Quentin’s trail. A combination of luck and skill had caused Steve to spot the interloper before the stranger had spotted him. It takes one to know one, and Steve had tagged the other as a hunter, too.
Earlier, when Quentin had first exited his expensive Georgetown townhouse and pulled away in his car to begin his nightly prowling, Steve had been surprised to notice a second car take off after Quentin’s Cadillac and start following it. The newcomer was a black Crown Victoria.
Steve nosed his machine in line after the other two and brought up the rear. The night air was hot, muggy, but the air conditioner was off and the windows open. He liked it better that way. It kept him in closer contact with his surroundings than if he’d been sealed inside a closed car with the AC on.
Quentin drove across the Rock Creek Bridge into the city proper, trailed by the two tail cars, the Crown Vic and Steve’s machine, a nondescript dark-colored late-model sedan. There was plenty of traffic and Steve was a skilled shadower, so he had no trouble keeping tabs on his quarry and the unknown second party who’d interjected himself into the scene. Steve didn’t even have to stick too close to Quentin; all he had to do was keep his sights on the Crown Vic that was following the Cadillac.
The three cars threaded a maze of streets named for the letters of the alphabet and the states of the union. Steve used all of the shadower’s tricks, sometimes fading back, other times passing both vehicles and letting them overtake him, occasionally pulling over to the curb and switching off his lights for a few beats to make it look like he’d reached his destination, then falling in behind a van or truck and using it as cover to switch on his lights and resume the pursuit.
Several times, he caught a glimpse of the Crown Vic’s driver and lone occupant, a big guy with close-cropped dark hair and a mustache. Only a glimpse, though; he didn’t want the other guy to get too good a look at him and realize that the tailer was being tailed. Steve had an advantage in that he’d followed Quentin for several nights previously and had a pretty good idea where he was going; the sequence of stops might vary, but the ultimate destination remained the same.
Like an iron filing drawn by a magnet, the Cadillac traced a course away from the blocks of federal office buildings and well-lit monuments, arrowing toward the raunchier side of town, a vice district in all but name.
Of course, that was all a matter of perspective, Steve sourly reflected; to the taxpayer, the whole governmental apparatus could be considered a vice district, the difference being that unlike the politicians, the screwing the hookers gave you was a lot more straightforward and honest.
The shadow man who was tailing Quentin injected a new variable into the equation, one that Steve didn’t like so well. He’d already gotten a feel for Quentin’s habits and rhythms, and had pretty well worked out how and when he was going to carry out the sanction. The newcomer was a complicating factor, and t
hat never boded well for an operation. For one thing, it indicated that a third party was involved.
Steve was operating solo on this assignment, but he was part of a larger apparatus; the same could be true of the stranger.
Durwood Quentin III was a person of interest to any number of outside interests, official and otherwise. He had a blueblood pedigree. His people were Old Money; he’d attended the right prep schools, graduated from an Ivy League college and postgrad business school, and been slotted into a fast-track position in a prestigious Wall Street brokerage house. He’d married a former debutante, the heiress to a considerable fortune herself, and fathered a couple of kids on her. He belonged to the right clubs, played a good game of tennis and a fair game of golf.
He’d had all the advantages, but inevitably, his true nature had asserted itself and brought him to his present delicate condition. He was a plunger and long-shot bettor with other people’s money, namely his clients’ financial accounts. He had the temperment of a degenerate gambler, always doubling up and redoubling on ever riskier speculations, finally descending to outright fraud and chicanery.
He’d posted spectacular profits at first, at least on paper, but came a day when he couldn’t make a margin call, and the entire towering pyramid of options and hedges and credit-default certificates and junk bonds had all come tumbling down like a house of cards.
His family were big-money contributors to the current administration in the White House; their clout had kept him from being prosecuted by the Securities and Exchange Commission for stock fraud. By then, his marriage was already long defunct; his compulsive womanizing had seen to that.
The Quentin name and family conections still counted for something, Durwood using them to land himself a post as CEO of Brinker Defense Systems, a Washington-based defense contractor. There was no such person named Brinker associated with the company, as it turned out; the name was an inside joke cooked up by its founders, alluding to the fact that they skated on the brink of solvency and legality.
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