The Specter

by Saul, Jonas

  “Then you can tell me what I want to know.” Aaron lifted his head up and to the side. “Everything okay out there?” he shouted.

  “Yeah. We’re all good,” Daniel called back.

  Aaron reasoned that Daniel probably brought his bouncer into the main area to stay close to the rest of them after all the customers had filed out and he had locked the back door to the club.

  “Tell me,” Aaron said to the bouncer. “What happened three nights ago?”

  “I have no idea—”

  Aaron cut him off with a violent pull of his arm, the man’s air tube all but shut down. He didn’t gag or choke as air couldn’t move in or out. The man’s face reminded Aaron of a fish gasping on the dock. Both of the bouncer’s meaty arms clung to Aaron’s forearm, but in his current lock on the guy’s neck, no amount of force could budge it.

  “Wrong answer,” Aaron said.

  The DJ moved away from his music panel.

  Aaron turned fast and addressed the wiry man. “Don’t!”

  The DJ stopped.

  “Sit!” Aaron ordered through clenched teeth as he released the airway of the man in his arms. The DJ dropped and sat in the corner of his little booth. The man in Aaron’s arms coughed and gagged until he got his breathing back under control.

  Something loud banged in the bar area.

  “What was that?” Aaron yelled. He couldn’t have this fall apart. He needed to stay anonymous because he knew this wouldn’t go over well if his attempted murder trial jury heard about him attacking a strip club and using his obvious talents, yet again, to subdue and hurt members of the public. It would frighten the jury to have him on the street.

  “Nothing,” Daniel answered. “We found a waitress in the bathroom. She’s cool now.”

  “Okay.”

  Aaron forced down a gag at the smell coming off the large bouncer.

  Of all the customers they ordered out of the building, one of them would have called the cops by now. He figured he probably had five minutes or less. He needed answers before time ran out. “Tell me what you know. Speak now, or down you go.”

  “Okay, okay,” the bouncer said.

  “Good boy. Start talking.”

  The bouncer cleared his throat. “Fuck you.”

  “Wrong answer.”

  Aaron increased the pressure of his grip. The bouncer fought hard, his hands clawing at Aaron’s forearm, but Aaron held firm. In less than a minute, the bouncer was out, as if sleeping off a drunk. He released him and stood.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  The DJ put up both hands in protest. “No, please don’t.”

  “How old are you?” Aaron asked standing over the DJ.

  “Nineteen.”

  Aaron saw a small puddle forming under the kid.

  He just pissed himself.

  “Were you working three nights ago?”

  The kid nodded hard and fast.

  “Who was here? What happened? Did you know my sister, Joanne Stevens?”

  He nodded again.

  “Speak.”

  “A rich man with an accent came in here looking for the Weeks brothers. He said he was their friend and said he was told by Frank Weeks to enjoy the pleasures of the dancers that the Weeks brothers used routinely. Your sister,” he leaned away, as if expecting a smack, “and Jan Elliot were always with the Weeks brothers. Both girls were bought for the week by the rich guy. As I understand it, they agreed to a price with the owner here and both dancers left with him. I heard they were taking them on a cruise or some shit.”

  “What was the rich guy’s accent?”

  “I think it was British.”

  Somewhere at the back of the club, Aaron heard another loud crash.

  “What was that?” Aaron shouted, frustration in his voice. He felt like he was all nerves. The pressure of incoming police versus the need to find out what happened to his sister made him feel heady with the rush.

  “Don’t know,” Daniel shouted back. “I’ll go check it out.”

  Aaron stepped away from the spreading urine. “Anything else?” he asked the DJ.

  The DJ shook his head.

  “Think. What else can you tell me about the rich guy?”

  “Nothing. He was loaded. Dropped a lot of cash and left with the two dancers. He had, like, an entourage with him. Two mean-looking guys watching everything. That’s it.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “Like I fucking know. You think I memorize everybody in and out of here?”

  The kid has a point.

  “Joanne’s dead now.”

  The kid’s eyes widened. Then they filled with tears. “You serious, man? No way. No fucking way.”

  “Very serious. And I think that British asshole did it. Be ready. The police are going to come asking questions because it’s a murder investigation now and not just a missing persons case—”

  The DJ’s eyes moved to something behind Aaron in the doorway.

  Aaron spun and dropped, his hands up, ready for anything.

  He wasn’t ready for the gun in the man’s hand, or the bullets that came out of it.

  Jackson followed Hugh inside the back door of the House of Lancaster, gave Hugh his weapon and stopped to set the first explosive to go off five minutes later. He figured that was enough time to deal with whoever was left inside and for him and Hugh to get out.

  Then he ran to the front doors, secured them with the legs of a metal chair slid into the bars of the handle and set his second explosive, also for five minutes.

  MP5 in hand, ready to fire on whoever challenged him, he turned down the short corridor that led to the main part of the club.

  Hugh had been quiet and fast. He already had three guys, and a waitress on their knees, hands on their heads, lined up in front of the bar. Three large men, Jackson assumed were the bouncers, lie knocked out in different positions on the floor around the foursome. Jackson wasn’t sure if they were already knocked out or if Hugh had handled it.

  Hugh motioned across the room to the DJ booth and told Jackson that he was going there and to watch the four on their knees. Jackson brought his MP5 around and aimed it at the four people who would be dead shortly. But he had to wait as Hugh wanted to surprise the men in the DJ booth. As far as he could tell, not another soul was in the strip club except for, what he could discern, at least two muffled voices coming front he DJ booth. No music played.

  Hugh silently traversed the floor, scattered with chairs and tables littered with half-empty, lonely beer bottles.

  Jackson watched as Hugh walked up to the door of the DJ booth and raised his gun. Hugh’s weapon began firing, but Jackson didn’t see anything more. Something smashed into the side of his head so hard, he lost his balance and lifted off the ground.

  When he landed, the MP5 had fallen from his grip, his back ached and he coughed like the wind had been knocked out of him. His mind raced, trying to figure out what hit him.

  The smallest of the three men who had been on the ground stood over him, smiling.

  How did I not see him? I had my weapon trained on him. Who the fuck is this guy?

  The little man launched off the ground and landed on Jackson hard.

  All the lights of the strip club blinked out for Jackson.

  Aaron moved on instinct and years of hard training. His mind had already taken in the whole DJ booth. He dove under the DJ desk, the only place to hide from an assault coming through the door. He slid into the wall under the desk, banging his shoulder hard. He didn’t care, as long as the bullets weren’t hitting him.

  The young DJ wasn’t so lucky. Bullet after bullet cut into him, his body dancing on the floor. With the shooter preoccupied with the DJ, Aaron wondered for a brief second why the shooter just didn’t bend over and shoot at him. But he dismissed the idea as self preservation kicked in.

  He did all that he could think of in the moment. He reached into the open and grabbed the leg of the DJ’s office chair on wheels, which sat two feet
away. He maneuvered it to aim at the door and shoved it at the man with the gun. He crawled out from under the desk and dove across the floor toward the sleeping bouncer. Every second he waited for the bullets to hit him, but none came.

  When he landed on the bouncer, he grabbed the large man’s arms in the strongest vice grip he could and twisted, rolling onto his back with the bouncer’s heavy body rolling on top of him for protection.

  He knew his next move would only be successful if he continued with his forward momentum. He thrust his foot toward the man in the door, using the bouncer’s body as shelter.

  The weapon silenced as the man stepped back, out of Aaron’s reach.

  He’d failed. He cringed and waited for the inevitable, his heart in his throat.

  “Move the big man off you,” the shooter said. “Or I will shoot through him and into your face.”

  Aaron waited a heartbeat. He had tried. There was nothing else he could think to do. The only weapon he had was his hands. He didn’t have a knife or a gun. He was out of options.

  He eased the bouncer off and stared into the eyes of the man Aaron had hit in the throat at the airport that morning. The same man Aaron saw on camera taking his sister out of her apartment building.

  Anger coursed through him. The man with all the answers stood right in front of him. The man who kidnapped Joanne and probably killed her.

  “Stand up,” the man ordered as he gave Aaron space.

  He knows I’m dangerous.

  Aaron got to his feet, slowly, methodically, every muscle in his body ready to take the man out. “Why?” he asked. “Tell me. Why’d you do it?”

  The man offered a crooked smile. “Vodka. Believe it or not, it’s all about vodka. But you have to tell me how you knew. What brought you to the airport this morning and now here? Tell me everything before I kill you.”

  “One day, when you die, your life will flash before your eyes. You should’ve made that movie worth watching.”

  Before the shooter could react, something knocked him into the doorframe so hard Aaron heard the wood crack. Aaron dropped and dove aside as the man’s weapon went to full automatic fire again.

  Then it stopped as Alex drove his foot into the man’s face and throat.

  “Enough!” Aaron shouted. “Don’t kill him.”

  Alex stopped instantly.

  “I asked you guys here to help. I couldn’t live with myself if you were up on murder charges.” Aaron got to his feet and brushed himself off. “Oh, and thanks. You saved my life. I owe you.”

  “That’s why you brought us,” Alex said. “I’m here to help.”

  Aaron wondered how he would explain this to the police. The DJ was dead. The bouncer was now bleeding in three spots as the second round of bullets caught him in his sleep. It looked like he wouldn’t be waking up again.

  They had to leave, disappear.

  “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  He started out of the booth with Alex on his heels when an explosion rocked the building from somewhere by the back door.

  “What the fuck?” Aaron yelled, covering his ears.

  The lights flickered and dust drifted down from the tiled ceiling.

  “We have to get out of here,” Aaron yelled. Two tables over, he spotted the shooter’s driver from the airport. Daniel and Benjamin nodded toward Alex, who shrugged and smiled.

  Alex, always the top of his class, the most dangerous.

  They owed their lives to Alex, but the celebration had to be postponed.

  He spied an exit sign in the far corner to his right.

  “Come on,” he said as the distant wail of police sirens resounded throughout the building.

  Another explosion knocked them all to their knees. The lights went out. Aaron balanced on a chair and got to his feet. The battery-operated emergency lights flickered on above the exit door. There was enough light for Aaron to see that all of them were holding hands now, including the waitress from the bathroom.

  I wonder if she knows anything.

  He guided them to the exit door and kicked it open as police cars roared into the parking lot.

  “Follow me,” he shouted behind him as everyone released each other’s hands.

  The emergency vehicles were lining up at the front of the building on The Queensway, multicolored lights flashing across the walls of the buildings on the street. Only two cruisers had come to the back of the building so far. A fire had started by the back door where most of the customers came and went. He quickly deduced that the two men from the airport that morning had shown up with explosives, intent on removing the rest of the evidence that the British guy was ever there.

  The waitress had run away, heading up the street toward the flashing lights. He motioned for his friends to follow him. Getting to Daniel’s camper van was now out of the question.

  He led them across the street, away from the burning strip club, toward his car a few blocks over, wondering what the hell was so special about vodka that so many people had to die.

  He resolved that he would find out at all costs because Joanne deserved better.

  Chapter 14

  Clive Baron reclined in his plush La-Z-Boy chair, grabbed the remote and flipped on CNN as Jessica, his assistant, fixed him a vodka. He hadn’t heard from Jackson or Hugh since he landed at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow and met his driver, who took Jessica and him on the over thirty-kilometer ride to his central Moscow condo. A disposal team stood on standby to clean the plane and have it readied for whenever Clive would need it again. That meant all the garbage, including a drugged-up young man who happened to succumb to the barbiturates in his system. The disposal team worked for Clive personally. None of them protested the good money or the good life he offered them. Going along with that, they didn’t protest certain jobs they had to clean. It was that or they would find themselves being cleaned one day in the most unusual way.

  Two security men met him at the door of his condo and escorted Clive and his assistant upstairs. During the rest of the flight, his cell phone had remained quiet. No call to his private line or his encrypted line and no message from his men in Toronto that the mission was complete when he got to the Moscow condo.

  Absolute silence.

  He changed the TV channel and brought up the Internet where he began following the Toronto news agency’s Twitter accounts. CP24 and the Toronto Sun were the two he felt were most accurate, tweeting in real time.

  As he browsed the tweets to see if there was anything on the House of Lancaster explosion, Casa Loma’s grisly find or the apprehension of his men, he thought about his early departure from Canada.

  Maybe he should have stayed behind to make sure everything went as planned. He had the utmost confidence in his ex-Mossad men, but with no phone call, he wondered if they had failed in some way.

  Clive thought back to his early days. Hustling kids in grade school, beating others up just to take their wallets to finance a night out. He had a few run-ins with the law, but for the most part, the kids of his day didn’t want a repeat beating for ratting him out.

  By the time he hit seventeen, Clive had buggered and killed three different boys. After losing control on the first one and taking what he wanted by force, he learned at an early age that the broken and bleeding fifteen-year-old lying with his pants around his ankles in the alley had to remain silent about what had happened to him. There was only one way to guarantee absolute silence. Clive strangled the boy with the boy’s own belt, wiped his hands off, cleaned himself up and walked away.

  Six months later, the police were still hunting the man who had raped and killed the boy in the alley. They had even interviewed the boy’s friends, Clive included, but suspected no one so young. It was eight months later when Clive did it again, and again he got away with it.

  On his seventeenth birthday, after his third murder, he decided that the only way to enjoy all that life had to offer him would be with money. He had watched the O.J. Simpson court cas
e, all the while knowing that Nicole had to have been murdered by O.J. He saw how O.J. played with the glove and how his legal team created reasonable doubt. He had recently read that O.J.’s legal team was under suspicion for tampering with the glove in some way.

  Clive learned one thing from those days: it was all about money. If Clive had enough money, he could deal with any problem he ever encountered.

  He also knew the difference between the rich and the poor was that the rich decided to be rich. So Clive decided to go after money like a predator hunting impalas.