by SJ Varengo
“Thanks, Wall,” Nicole said. She didn’t pronounce the nickname as though she were just cutting the “y” from Wally. She pronounced it like “wall” as in one of the four holding up a house.
As Nicole stepped onto the front porch of the comfortable-looking house, a lovely young woman, slender with dark hair pulled into a ponytail, threw open the door and her arms. “Coley!” she called, embracing her. Dan figured she was in her early thirties, and thought that her face was kind, if a little careworn. “Who might this be? New Cleaner?” she asked, noticing Dan.
“Actually, this is Danny,” Nicole answered.
Again Dan saw the briefest expression of surprise before the smile returned. “Well, I guess it’s about time we met you and put a face to the million and a half stories I’ve heard!”
“You must be Darlene,” he said, accepting her handshake.
“Must I? Couldn’t I be Princess Grace today?” She laughed. Dan liked her immediately.
“If your husband hadn’t told me your name, I might have mistaken you for her!”
Darlene turned to Nicole and said conspiratorially, “Oh, Coley. He’s as slick as pig shit.”
“Still remind you of Grace Kelly?” Nicole asked him, laughing.
“Come on in. I got tarts!”
“Wally told me. I can already taste them! Wait, Dan. Wait until you experience this woman’s tarts. It will change your life.”
“Today would seem to be the day for that sort of thing.”
Darlene, already heading to the kitchen, caught the comment. “I take it the news has broken?” she asked Nicole.
“It’s not really news.”
“Damn sure was to him, I’m guessing!”
“A little, yeah,” Nicole answered.
“Yes, to ‘him,’ it was... news,” Dan said, a little uncomfortable being talked about as though he was elsewhere.
“Putting it mildly, huh, Dan?”
“Yeah. A lot to wrap my head around.”
“Oh, don’t try to do that all at once. You’ll hurt yourself. Come on.” She put the tarts, which Dan had to admit smelled so good that the aroma alone was like a meal, and a carafe of coffee, along with cream and sugar and four cups, and walked into a room from which Dan heard familiar sounds.
In what turned out to be a living room, two young girls, twins from the looks of it, were playing Gamma Warriors on the PS4. It was one of the latest releases from Dsoft, Dan’s company.
“Abby, Vic, say hello to Mr. and Mrs. Porter.”
In a perfect, “I’m trying to beat this level” monotone, the girls said in unison, “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Porter.” To Dan, it sounded a little too much like the little girl ghosts from the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, but he let it go.
“We’ll be in Dad’s study if you need us,” Darlene said.
“Okay.” Again Dan stifled a shiver.
Darlene led them into the next room, which Dan assumed was the study to which she was referring. It had a desk, a few well-stocked bookshelves, and some comfortable looking chairs. However, when she set the tray down, she walked to one of the bookcases and partially pulled out a red-covered volume on the top shelf. There was an audible click, and the entire case moved a couple of inches outward. Darlene pulled on the side, revealing a door to a second study, this one smaller but equally well appointed. Picking up the tray, she stepped aside to allow Nicole to enter. After a confused pause, Dan followed.
Again she set the tray on a table that was centered between three chairs and a love seat, all upholstered in a matching cream-colored fabric. Nicole, seeing Dan’s deer-in-the-headlights expression, took his hand and sat on the love seat. He followed. As he looked around, he saw that this room also had a desk, but unlike the tidy one in the outer study, it was scattered with papers, a large computer monitor, and what appeared to be a good deal of communications equipment. A couple more monitors were mounted on the walls. Dad’s study had some mojo working. Darlene moved to swing the door shut, but before she could, Wally reached his hand through.
“Hold on there, sugar-lips. Don’t close me out.”
Dan was impressed and a little sickened that Wally had finished his... task already, but the women thought nothing of it. He came in and shut the door, which sealed with another click.
“So what happened?” he asked Nicole.
“Well, the end result of my morning jog somehow shifted in the trunk and knocked over some cans of interior latex. My heroic husband, not wanting my car to get paint all over it, opened the hatch and saw... what was there.”
“It’s not there anymore, Dan, if that helps any.”
Dan managed a weak smile and nodded. “Thanks.”
“I suppose you realize that your life is never going to be the same,” Wally said, looking Dan straight in the eyes. “Now that you know what the Clean Up Crew is really all about, you’ve got to decide what you’re going to do with that information.”
“Wally, a little tact and a few less RPMs,” Darlene said. “The poor man’s head is swimming.”
“I realize that, and believe me when I tell you, I’m thinking about your well-being, Dan, when I say this. I assume you love your wife?”
“Of course,” Dan said without hesitation.
“And you know her to be a genuinely good person?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then I’m going to ask you to understand that what she does...” He made an all-inclusive circular motion with his hand. “...what we all do is vital to the security of nations, is in the name of all that is right, and represents an attempt to bring justice in cases where normal channels either cannot or will not. Your wife is not a murderer. She’s not a serial killer.”
Dan blanched at hearing the term he’d used an hour or so earlier.
“She’s a warrior on the front lines,” Wally said, sitting back.
Darlene reached over and put a hand on Dan’s knee. “You must have a million questions,” she said. “We’d like to try to answer as many as we can for you.”
Dan looked from face to face and saw genuine concern and support. His first question was posed to himself. These people don’t seem like nut-jobs, do they, Dan?
Nicole put her arm around his shoulder. “You need to do this, Danny. You need to ask all the questions you have, even if you think you’re going to hurt my feelings or whatever. All the ones you weren’t able to ask me earlier or have thought of since then. It’s important.”
“Okay,” Dan said. “I guess I’ll start with how do you decide who to kill?”
To his surprise, Wally burst out laughing. “That’s a great opener!” he said. “And probably one of the trickiest to answer. There’s actually several ways a person becomes a mark. Because we deal with the covert arms of several world governments, often the person is someone that has been identified a threat to a given nation. In many cases, these governments don’t want to leave their DNA at the scene, so to speak. They need to appear completely uninvolved.”
“So it’s like spy stuff,” Dan said, immediately realizing how stupid he sounded. No one blinked.
“In those cases, it’s exactly like spy stuff,” Wally said. “And those sorts of assignments make up the lion’s share of what we do.”
“The other main source of our work,” Darlene continued, “is what I call ‘private justice.’ There are many, far too many cases of people who have been horribly wronged, and who have not been given the assistance and support promised to them under the law. Loopholes, deep pockets... those sorts of things allow of lot of really shitty people to get away with a lot of really shitty things. There is an entire branch of CUC that monitors that sort of stuff.”
“CUC?”
“Clean Up Crew looks good on our vans and letterhead, but it’s a pain in the ass to say time after time. We tend to abbreviate. You’ll also hear it called ‘the outfit,’ ‘the company’...”
“I’d think the CIA might come down on you for copyright infringement.”
“We
actually have a pretty healthy relationship with the CIA,” Wally said. “Believe it or not, there are even certain things they don’t want to dirty their hands with. More than one assignment has come down from them. Through unofficial channels, of course.”
“But back to private justice,” Darlene said. “There are people in the outfit who keep their fingers on the pulse of that sort of situation. In fact, the thing you found today was just that sort of assignment.”
Dan rankled slightly. “It was a man, not a ‘thing,’” he said.
Nicole shook her head. “No, Danny. That was not a man. A man does not hire someone to wipe out his entire family. A wife, three kids under the age of seven, even his dog. Unfortunately for him, his wife miraculously survived, and I say ‘miraculously’ because the mode chosen to wipe out the family was a ‘gas leak,’ which blew the house sky high. She lived, and while at the hospital, there were two additional attempts on her life. And that was right here in Denver,” she said. “Our home town, Danny.”
“I remember hearing about that. Terrible thing. But the news said it was an accident.”
Wally nodded. “To all appearances, it was. But one of our people found it odd that the husband was not at home when the explosion occurred, which was in the middle of the night. He was a man of well-established habits, which did not generally include being at the office at 3 a.m.”
“We did a little digging,” Darlene said, “and it quickly became apparent that he’d orchestrated the whole thing. While the police and the fire department were busy establishing his alibi, we were checking paper trails and following the money. That’s why we got someone into the hospital the night she was brought in, and that’s how we know that at least two different times someone was in her room to finish the job. Our ‘nurse’ made an unscheduled visit both times and the would-be murderers left, making excuses and without doing what they came for.”
“This all happened, what, two... three months ago? Right?” Dan asked.
Darlene nodded.
“So why didn’t you bring the evidence to the authorities?”
“We absolutely did,” Wally said firmly. “To more than one of the ‘authorities.’ And that’s where deep pockets come into play. This bastard was so well connected that the evidence was either misplaced, rejected outright, or ignored. The woman was badly maimed and will never walk again. She lost her children and was forced to go into hiding once she was well enough to leave the hospital. She’d told her mother a couple of weeks before the explosion that she was afraid something was ‘going to happen’ to her and the kids, and it was her mother, ultimately, that convinced us that as long as this scum was walking on the planet, her daughter wasn’t safe.”
Dan turned to Nicole. “So what did you do?”
“As Wally said, he was a creature of habit, and one of his habits, as I learned by tailing him for a few weeks, was an early morning run. Coincidentally, one of my habits as well.”
“Don’t I know it! You’ve been trying to get me to join you for years.”
“It wouldn’t kill you,” Nicole said, smiling.
“Apparently, that’s not a definite. It killed that poor bastard,” Dan said, pointing in the general direction of the pigpen and therefore the wood chipper.
“He was not a ‘poor bastard,’ Danny. He was a monster. And, yes, it was his clockwork-like morning run that did him in. I learned his routes and knew that Saturday’s run brought him north to Marshall Lake. Actually, he liked to go between the lake and Cowdrey Reservoir, which was convenient, as it has a little more tree cover than around the lake. I got there before him, waited in the trees, ran a trip line across his path, and when he came through, I got him down, over powered him, and took him out.”
“His eyes were still open, Cole. They were looking up toward the bullet hole.”
“Yes. He saw it coming.”
“Jesus.”
“The details are rarely pretty,” Wally said. “Neither is the clean up afterwards. That’s my department. Me and people like me. All round the world. We’re the ‘Erasers,’ as opposed to Cole, who’s a Cleaner.”
“Just how big are you guys?” Dan asked.
“A much easier question to answer,” said Wally. “There are six hundred people who are directly affiliated with CUC worldwide. Only forty do what Nicole does. That’s why there’s so much travel involved.”
“Not franchise oversight after all, huh?”
“No, I don’t travel to make sure the offices are clean and there are enough paper clips,” Nicole said, laughing as she used the reason she’d given to the kids once when they asked why Mom had to go Europe and miss J.J.’s high school play opening night. She’d made it back in time for the second performance, causing Dan to realize that her level of efficiency at creating bodies seemed to equal Wally’s at making them go away.
“That means there are over five hundred people in support roles. There are Controllers, Handlers, Researchers, Erasers like me who made things disappear, as well as Chameleon operatives, who step in to just about any situation to shield vulnerable individuals, like the ‘nurse’ we put in the hospital to protect the wife of the mark you found, and other people who will be telling her right about now that she doesn’t have to stay in the safe house anymore.”
“These sorts of jobs occur all too often,” Nicole said, “but the majority, as Wally said earlier, are more ‘semi-official.’” She hesitated, then added, “Like the one I’m headed to next.”
“What?” Dan blurted. He was taking baby steps towards dealing with the body in the Lexus’ trunk, and now she was heading out to do it again?
Wally explained. “There is a man in Bucharest who is the head of a ring of human trafficking slimes that needs to be put out of business.”
“Bucharest? Like in Romania?” Dan stuttered.
“That would be the Bucharest I’m referring to, yes.”
Dan turned to look at Nicole. “That’s too dangerous! You can’t go.”
Nicole’s face softened, and she leaned over and kissed Dan on the cheek. “That reaction right there is the exact reason I’ve kept this a secret from you for all these years, Danny. It wasn’t that I necessarily thought that you’d object to what we were doing, not if you were shown the whole picture. But I knew you’d try to stop me on the grounds that you thought the risk was too high. I’m not going to lie to you. Every assignment has my death as a potential outcome. But I’ve been doing this a long time, Danny, and no one’s managed to take me out yet. Have there been close calls? Yes, a few...”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Good, because I wouldn’t tell you anyway. But my point is that even though I’m fully aware of the danger, I’m going to keep doing this. I have to. Because this is work that needs to be done.”
“Even jobs like this one have an element of private justice,” Darlene said. “The women who are being bought and sold by this man are human beings, with mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sometimes with children of their own. There are hundreds of them in this monster’s pipeline. Thousands, maybe. But each one is an individual with a life story that’s being stolen from them.”
“Did you ever see The Godfather?” Wally asked.
Dan nodded. “It’s one of my favorites.”
“It’s a great flick. But do you remember the opening, when the undertaker comes to Don Vito to get revenge for his daughter?”
“Bonasera,” Dan said, naming the character.
“That’s the guy. Now he went about it all wrong, and he pissed Vito off a little bit, but in the end, he got the justice he sought. We’re like the Corleones in this regard. We can get things done that others can’t. Of course, we’re not an organized crime family, but you see, don’t you? You see that what we’re doing is bringing justice where those who should be bringing it don’t, for whatever reason?”
Dan was silent for a long moment, but finally, he nodded. “Yes. I get it. But I still don’t want Nicole going to Romania to take
out a human trafficker.”
“So come with me, then,” said Nicole, as much to Wally’s and Darlene’s surprise as to Dan’s.
“Coley, I don’t think—” Wally began.
“No, hear me out,” she interrupted. “There’s no reason he can’t. He’s retired, the kids are away at school, and he knows now. Why not come with me and see the world?”
“See the world?” Dan asked. “I don’t think this will be much of a sight-seeing visit, will it?”
“Not primarily. But, Danny, Bucharest is a beautiful old city. And the time I’ll spend working won’t need to take up all of the time we’re there. If all goes well, I’ll catch him off guard and—”
“If all goes well,” said Wally. “If all goes well. Dan is not trained, Coley. He’s not an operative. He’s not an asset. He’ll be a liability to you.”
“Nonsense,” Nicole objected. “He’ll add a layer of cover if nothing else. Romania is an old country with old-fashioned mores. A woman alone will draw more attention than a woman on the arm of her husband. Especially since I’m after a guy who preys on women to begin with.” She turned back to Dan. “Honey, this could be the beginning of a whole new phase in our lives together. What do you say?”
Dan blinked his eyes. For a moment, he had no words. This seemed to him to be the final shock to his system. His wife was an assassin and had been since before he met her. She’d killed a man in the wee hours of this very day, and now she was heading to Europe to kill someone else. A horrible person, without doubt, but a person all the same. A human being. Drawing breath, eating lunch, watching TV... until Nicole made him stop drawing breath. Yet her conviction, and that of these two other apparently sane, normal people made him believe that perhaps what they were doing was needed. Was right.
“Well, at least that way, I’ll be able to make sure you’re safe,” he said at last.
Nicole smiled, though she seriously doubted he’d be able to do much in the way of keeping her safe. Still, she felt for the first time since Dan had walked into The Home Depot earlier that things were actually going to be okay.