by Dan Ames
The lawyer opened his briefcase, turned it sideways and pulled out a gun.
“A verdict has been reached,” he said.
“What the fuck?” Dawson said.
“Instead of a judge, a guilty plea was accepted by an officer of the court. Someone called…The Commissioner?”
Dawson’s face blanched.
The lawyer pulled off his moustache, smiled, and shot Dawson in the throat.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
Nicole
A GUNSHOT ROCKED the air around Nicole’s head. She ran to the edge of the trail and peered down. Tristan was on her feet, her gun in her hand. The other attacker was on his back, his chest a bloody mess.
Tristan looked at Nicole as Sal shot past her. Nicole spun on her heel in time to see Sal race down the trail in the direction the long-haired freak had gone.
Now Nicole had no choice.
She had to protect Sal. She ran, following a thin cloud of dust and dirt that still hung in the air.
From below, she heard Sal howl. Nicole couldn’t tell if it was from pain or if he was attacking.
She charged down the hill, the thick, sharp chaparral brush cutting her legs and arms as she went. She stumbled and fell, rolling down the final few feet of the grade until she came up on her feet. Both knives were still clenched in her hands. Her breath was short and rapid.
She spotted them immediately.
The man was on his back, Salvatore on top of him. The dog had the man by his throat. The long-haired coward had a stone in his hand and was clubbing Sal on the head with it. Even from where Nicole stood, she saw that the blows were weak.
Blood gushed from Sal’s head.
The man looked at Nicole. His eyes were a cool blue fire and Nicole couldn’t tell if he was laughing or if the power of Sal’s jaws clamped on his throat were forcing the man’s mouth into a lopsided leer.
Nicole held the knives at her side. She looked down, saw blood all over her hands and arms.
She looked back up toward the rise. No one was there.
“Help me,” the man said.
She saw a bubble of blood pop from the man’s mouth.
The stone dropped from his hand.
“Sal,” Nicole said.
The big Doberman shifted his body but didn’t let go of the man’s throat.
“Sal, that’s enough,” Nicole said.
Thick red blood, part of it frothy, gushed from the man’s mouth. His eyes rolled back into his head.
“Drop it,” Nicole commanded, her voice low and firm.
Salvatore looked at her.
And then he lifted his head.
And when he did, most of the man’s throat came with it.
“Good boy,” Nicole said.
Salvatore wagged his tail.
Nicole sat down in the dirt.
And cried.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
Blue Blood
DOUGLAS HAMPTON PULLED up in the big BMW outside an office complex in Long Beach, California. The building was fifteen stories, and the parking lot was occupied by mostly Toyotas and Hondas.
The sign read Sycamore Hills Business Park.
Hampton had sent the email address associated with the obviously non-existent Alpha Delta Entertainment to the woman in IT at Hampton Industries who claimed she could tell him anything from an email address.
Within minutes, an address had popped up on his Blackberry. From the Holiday Inn in Omaha, he had made the trip in less time than it would have taken for the average person flying to get to the airport, check in, make the trip, and get off the plane. The BMW had a V-12 and he had a built-in radar detector.
Now, he looked at the office building. Sycamore Hills. Yeah, right. More like, Depressing Suburban Shithole.
The sight of the building infuriated him and it took a moment for him to understand why. If this was the headquarters of The Commissioner, then he, Douglas Hampton, had been blackmailed by some pissant loser who made his living in a low-rent shitty Long Beach office building.
Hampton watched the activity around the complex. He quickly garnered that business was slow at Sycamore Hills.
A UPS truck pulled up and the jackass in his little brown uniform ran in with a package and a few minutes later ran back out. A fat woman with a cell phone pressed to her ear walked out of the building, got in a rusty Ford Explorer and drove away.
He knew the issue would be security cameras. Even these sucky little white trash office buildings had security cameras nowadays.
Hampton put the BMW in gear and cruised past the front entrance. He spotted one security camera, trained down at the entrance. He drove around the building, spotted a side door, no camera. In the back of the building was another door and a wider loading dock, one security camera, aimed in the general direction of the two doors.
So it would be the side door. And if they hadn’t bothered to put a security camera over the side door entrance, he was reasonably confident they wouldn’t have one in the hallway that led to the side door.
He parked the BMW, opened the glove compartment and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He didn’t smoke on a regular basis, but found that lighting up was a great way to stand outside somewhere without attracting any special attention.
He walked to the building’s side door, fired up the cigarette and waited.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN
Mack
Oscar Williams walked Mack out to his car. They both nodded at the two Florida Sheriff deputies parked at the break in the circular driveway.
Upstairs, an FBI agent was keeping Adelia company.
“I figure between a Marine sniper, an FBI agent, and half a dozen cops, she’ll be safe,” Oscar said.
Mack smiled.
“How’s Adelia doing?”
Both men knew what it was like to kill another human being. And how it took a long time to recover from. But they both also knew Adelia.
“She’ll be fine. I’m taking care of her, while she takes care of Janice.”
“You know, I offered to find someone else to take care of Janice,” Mack said.
Oscar waved his comment away. “She wants to be here. She told me she didn’t want to go back home and sit there, thinking about it. This will help her recover faster. You know how it goes,” he said.
Mack knew he was right. They shook hands. Oscar went back to the house. Mack fired up his car and drove down the winding driveway, waving to another cop as he passed.
He turned on to the busy street and headed for the airport.
And Nicole.
•
MACK WAS NEVER comfortable in Los Angeles, even though he never generalized about cities. To a lesser degree, most cities had similar structures and dynamics. In general, he saw them as varieties on a theme.
But there was something about L.A. that always made him feel unsettled.
Now, he drove along Sepulveda toward Santa Monica. Like nearly every day he’d ever spent in L.A., it was clear and sunny, warm and dry. People drove much faster than Mack. He was passed by a half-dozen cars within the first minute on the road.
He turned on the radio and tried to find a station that played some classic rock. He was not successful. So he turned the radio back off.
It was hard for him to imagine Nicole choosing this as the place to put her life together. He typically thought of Los Angeles as the location where people’s lives become unraveled.
If she managed it, she would maybe be the first person in history to come to this city deeply wounded and become whole again. Los Angeles as a mecca for healing. Mack tried the idea on for size and quickly shook it off.
He checked his watch. It was one o’clock in the afternoon – late enough for him to be able to check into his hotel. He’d chosen the Le Merigot Hotel on Ocean because he’d been there before and liked it. Plus, it was right across from the legendary Chez Jay bar and restaurant where he loved to go for a beer or three and just walk back across the street to the hotel when he was done.
He turned onto Pico, and crested the small rise, pleased as always to see the Pacific Ocean. If he put the pedal down on his rental car, he could zoom all the way down and crash onto the beach and drive right into the water.
Instead, he braked when he got to Ocean Avenue, drove halfway down the block and swung over to the Le Merigot’s driveway. He pulled up in front of the hotel and let the valet open his door.
His phone rang and he pulled it from the pocket of his sportcoat.
He looked at the display.
He read the name and number three times.
It was Nicole.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
Blue Blood
Douglas Hampton thanked Christ that a woman finally opened the side door to the Sycamore Hills office building and stepped outside to light a cigarette. He had smoked his first, and was about to stub out his second on top of the garbage can next to the door.
He glanced at her, took in her short skirt, high heels and reading glasses hanging from a lanyard.
He slipped the butt of the second cigarette into the inside pocket of his sportcoat. He had a feeling there would be cops arriving before the day was through, and he didn’t need cigarettes with his saliva by a side door where someone may or may not have remembered seeing a strange man. A handsome man with a Kennedy head.
He turned and caught the door before it closed, giving the woman his back. No need to show her his face. Because she would remember it, for sure.
Hampton used the stairs to climb to the fourth floor. Elevators were bad news. Almost always a security camera at the main intersection.
The address sent to him by his computer person at Hampton Industries told him The Commissioner’s office was on the fourth floor, suite 420.
He spied a set of restrooms near a water fountain and stepped into the men’s room. He took out the two cigarette stubs and ran them under cold water before dropping them into a toilet and flushing them. He went back to the sink and washed his hands, then used a paper towel to open the door
Hampton went down the hallway to suite 420. Just as he thought, the sign did not read Alpha Delta Entertainment. It said Vincent Caruso, attorney-at-law.
Hampton smirked. A lawyer. Of course. Only a lawyer would have come up with all this blackmail shit.
He reached down and used his handkerchief to open the door.
He stepped inside.
There was a reception desk with no one sitting behind it. A few chairs and a table with some magazines.
Hampton walked to the reception desk. A telephone sat to one side, a legal pad and a pen were on the top of the desk.
Like the rest of Sycamore Hills office park, business was not good at the Caruso law firm, Hampton thought. Or maybe the guy’s extortion business cut into his legal practice.
“Hello?” Hampton called out.
He heard a desk chair swivel, the rustle of clothing and a man appeared from the doorway behind the reception desk.
“Can I help you?” he said.
Hampton learned nothing from the voice. The Commissioner had clearly altered his voice during the presentation back in the Omaha Holiday Inn.
Instead, Hampton studied the man. He was not what Hampton had expected. Short, slightly pudgy in the middle, with a cheap shirt and tie and glasses that looked like they came from a Sears optical department.
“Hello, Commissioner,” Hampton said.
The man looked at Hampton. He squinted. “Commissioner? I’m not a commissioner, I’m an attorney-“
Hampton shot him.
Truth be told, he’d been a little bit wary buying the cheap gun in the ghetto. He wasn’t an assassin. Sure, he’d gone trap shooting before, done some plinking in the private hunting club. But he mostly liked to kill with his hands. And he preferred the victims be young, blonde, attractive and bound.
Fat, middle-aged lawyers weren’t his thing.
So he overcompensated a bit and emptied the entire gun into Vincent Caruso’s chest. It was a small gun with a homemade silencer – a small plastic bottle that had been clamped over the end of the barrel.
It still made a lot of noise.
The man flopped onto his back, his Wal-Mart dress shirt covered in blood. Hampton stood over him. No, the asshole was definitely dead. His eyes were wide open and blood was dripping into them. Hampton figured he must have started shooting higher because the bullets seemed to start in the man’s chest, then went to his neck, and one hit his forehead.
Hampton looked around. He wanted to quickly go through the man’s desk and computer, but the shots had been much louder than he expected.
He sat down at the man’s desk. A document was open on the screen.
He skimmed it without touching the keyboard. Plaintiff. Real estate transaction. Long pages with numbered paragraphs.
Hampton used his handkerchief to open one of the desk drawers. Files. With names. He opened one of the files. More legal documents.
Hampton felt a rage building inside him. This guy had to be The Commissioner. The Omaha Holiday Inn’s conference room had been booked with an email from this company, this office.
Maybe there was another employee here. Hampton jumped up and raced into the next room. It was a small kitchen with a little fridge and a microwave. One table with one chair. He used his handkerchief to open the fridge. Empty except for a small jar of mayonnaise and half a loaf of bread.
Fuck. He didn’t have time for this.
He wiped the gun clean, went back to the dead man and dropped it on his chest.
“Fuck you,” he said to the corpse.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
Nicole
SHE WAS COLD. Despite the heat and the dry, unfiltered air of the high hills, Nicole felt surges of chills race up her body then back down again. Her forehead broke out in a cold sweat. She felt thirsty.
She thought she might pass out.
“Miss Candela,” the cop said. She turned and looked at the man approaching her. He had just gotten briefed by the first LAPD cops on the scene.
“Shaun Greenwood, LAPD, Homicide,” he said.
“I’m cold.”
He turned and gestured to a paramedic, who came back with a blanket. They went to the ambulance, and sat down on the bench in the back.
The air around Nicole seemed heavy and dense. It was hard to breathe. The homicide detective was saying something to her, something about the dead men and her idea of what happened and why.
Why. Such a simple word she thought. But impossible to quantify. Why had Jeffrey Kostner tried to kill her so many years ago? Why had she survived? And why had these men now tried to kill her?
“Ms. Candela, can you hear me?” the man said.
More people were in the ambulance, someone flashed a light in her eye and it hurt, but she didn’t flinch.
They had Tristan in another ambulance, and one dog-lover in the group had tended to Sal’s wounds.
Was this all because of her? Maybe some people gave off a scent that attracted evil. No matter where they went or what they did, bad people came to them like moths to a light.
In the space around her, she heard someone talking about shock. Someone said “FBI.”
Nicole turned and looked out the back doors of the ambulance.
A man stood in the swirling dust and the flashing lights of the ambulance and multiple LAPD squad cars. He wore a plain dress shirt and blue jeans. He looked calm and unremarkable.
To Nicole, he looked like an answer.
An answer to the question.
Why?
She got to her feet, pushed away the hands that tried to hold her down and she seemed to float down the steps of the ambulance and then she was in the arms of Wallace Mack.
CHAPTER NINETY
The Commissioner
HE SAT in the hotel room and waited. It was a nice room. Partial view of the ocean. The Commissioner could barely glimpse the Ferris Wheel on the Santa Monica Pier and in the distance, the hills of Malibu where he had his taste
ful little beach house and all of his various toys.
There was a king bed in the hotel room, and a very tasteful wing chair. A large, plasma screen television. A mini bar.
The Commissioner looked at the bed. It had fresh white sheets, a thick white comforter and about ten pillows piled up against the sweetgrass headboard.
He was tired, no question about it. Racing from one city to the next was exhausting. He had spent much more time on getting in to see and kill Roger Dawson, a.k.a. Truck Drivin’ Man, than he had originally intended. But whenever you were going to operate in an area filled with law enforcement, you had to be patient.
He wondered if the Messiah had run out of patience in completing his assignment. It was one of the tougher ones, he knew that from experience. Nicole Candela would not be an easy target, and information was already trickling in that a failed attempt on her life may have occurred in the hiking trails of Santa Monica State Park.
The Commissioner looked again at the bed. He pictured Nicole Candela naked, on her hands and knees, her ass in the air. He pictured himself finishing the job that should have been taken care of back in the woods by Jeffrey Kostner.
Kostner, what a fucking idiot.
No, Nicole Candela had survived this long because he’d let her survive.
But all along, he knew that the day would come when he would have his way with her.
And that day would come very, very soon.
He heard the key card slide into the slot in the door and he smiled in the dark.
The figure walked into the room and flipped the light on.
“Hello Douglas,” he said.
The Commissioner smirked as Douglas Hampton froze in the middle of the hotel room.
“I knew it,” Hampton said.
“Yes, you killed an innocent man,” the Commissioner said. “You like them innocent, but he wasn’t your type, was he?”
Hampton walked into the room and sat on the edge of the bed.
“No, fat white guys aren’t my type. But you know that.”
The Commissioner nodded. “Yes, I do know that. I also know that you broke the rules of the tournament. You tried to find me instead of working on your next assignment.”