Harlan Coben

by The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

  Forty-four feet away, known murderer and terrorist Maher’s textbook gesture equaled gun! FBI Special Agent Ted Harris drew his service weapon, pushed an old man out of the way, acquired his target—fired three booming shots.

  Panic exploded. Screaming. People tried to run. Dive. Hide.

  “FBI!” yelled Ted. “FBI!”

  Shots one and two blasted Maher off his feet.

  His third bullet crashed into a metal heating grate above an exit.

  Sami fought through the scared, silent mob toward where Maher sprawled on his back as combat-shuffling toward him came Ted, his eyes on what the suspect had pulled from his vest, still held in his right hand: only a cell phone.

  Maher rose on his elbows, vaguely heard “Don’t move!” Saw his white shirt reddening. Felt phone in his right hand. Saw brother Sami scrambling through the huddled crowd to save him. Maher smiled blood. Saw Sami stumble, crawl closer. Maher’s right thumb hit speed-dial as he raised a weakening left thumbs-up.

  Sami screamed, “No!”

  In the city, Zlatko stood outside a green door, left hand pushing a buzzer while his right hand held a pistol tied to four other murders as he terminated a loose end who ran downstairs to the peephole he’d blurred with street slush.

  In Ronald Reagan National Airport, soldier John Herne huddled with blondish, black-leather-coated Cari Jones. Beside them was redheaded, blue-uniformed, airline service rep Lorna Dumas pulling Amy Lewis and teddy bear closer to the shelter of an empty wheelchair rigged with a cell phone programmed to block every call. Except one.

  They all heard ring!

  The Hitter

  Chris F. Holm

  FROM The Needle: A Magazine of Noir

  THE PLAZA SHIMMERED in the midday heat, flush with handsome brown-skinned people bedecked in the garish red so favored by their nation’s ruling party. They awaited the appearance of their newly reelected leader, a paunchy smile-and-haircut of fifty who fancied himself a revolutionary, and whose trademark fatigues always looked as clean and pressed as any banker’s suit.

  I awaited his appearance too, from my perch four stories above the square—my nerves jangling as they always do before a job, my rifle stock held flush to my shoulder in anticipation of the coming shot.

  He was late.

  Despite the wait and the oppressive heat, the crowd seemed jovial enough. Not exactly a surprise—everyone for blocks around had been screened six ways from Sunday to ensure a pretense of unity and good cheer. To ensure the cameras caught none of the starving, the torture-scarred, or the dissidents spurred to violence by the widespread reports of election fraud that, though suppressed here, were plastered across every newspaper in the Western world.

  Lucky for me, their screening wasn’t perfect.

  If you want to kill somebody badly enough, no screening ever is.

  Some below waved flags of yellow and green. Some held small children atop their shoulders as they jockeyed for position. Most laughed and whooped along to what I could only assume were charming ditties about the triumph of the proletariat, written in a language I didn’t speak and blasted through the PA so loud it shook droplets of sweat loose from the tip of my nose. As they fell, they tapped a lazy rhythm on my hotel room’s window frame. Reminded me of a radiator cooling, or the ticking of a watch in need of winding.

  As if I needed reminding it was past time.

  As if my itchy trigger finger wasn’t reminder enough.

  I trained my gun sight on the PA for a moment, entertained the thought of quieting the fucking thing for good. But then, why prematurely pierce the plaza’s good cheer?

  No. Best to wait.

  And I was very good at waiting.

  I’d been staying here a week. In this tiny island nation, in this tiny sweat-lodge room. I watched the election on the rheumy black-and-white bolted to the wall in the corner. Watched UN officials cluck their tongues as, one by one, all challengers conceded. Watched last night’s drunken dancing in the square as party loyalists celebrated the only result that ever would have been allowed, all the while wondering if any of them suspected they were standing in the very spot their leader was to die.

  I watched it all atop a mattress made lumpy by dint of the M40A3 sniper rifle I’d stashed inside it on my first day here. Sliced it open at one end with a blade taken from one of my own safety razors, stitched it back up with a sewing kit sent up by the front desk. One never knows who might wind up poking around one’s room, after all—and in a nation where the courtrooms sit suspiciously empty given the number of executions carried out, one can never be too careful.

  For a moment, the PA fell silent. Then the bombastic strains of a victory march blared from its speakers. The crowd hushed in anticipation, and then erupted in cheers as their fearless leader bounded up the stairs to the bunted riser and headed toward the podium, all waves and gleaming teeth.

  The music built to a thundering crescendo. The crowd seethed with ecstatic frenzy.

  I exhaled a measured breath, willed my drumroll heart to slow.

  He reached the podium and stood hands raised, palms out—a mock plea for quiet. The crowd raged on, as he no doubt hoped they would. The victory march continued.

  My body still, I sighted my target and squeezed the trigger: three pounds’ pressure—no more, no less.

  A crack like thunder echoed through the plaza. When Haircut heard the shot, he hit the deck. The man had a survivor’s instinct, I’ll give him that—he reacted a full second before anyone else in the square. But ultimately, his gesture of self-preservation was futile; by the time you hear the gunshot, the bullet’s come and gone.

  Lucky for him, he’s not who I was aiming for.

  When my target’s head exploded in a mist of blood and brain, spattering the face of a young girl who sat on her father’s shoulders beside him, the crowd contracted. For just a heartbeat, they were one—hunched together, a cornered animal, trying in vain to assess this sudden threat. Then the little girl began to scream, and the crowd’s reaction tipped the slope to panic.

  They pushed against each other—clawing, scrabbling, anything to get away from the mess of ruined flesh that, seconds ago, had been a man. As if he were contagious. As if they might be next.

  Armed security materialized as though from nowhere at the perimeter of the square, their weapons brandished as they locked down the plaza’s exits. A couple warning shots to dissuade the charging masses, and the crowd diverted as one like a flock of birds in flight.

  More gunfire, a strangled cry—these from the sole guard manning a secondary entrance to the plaza—and the perimeter was breached. The guard disappeared beneath the surging crowd, and his brothers-in-arms responded by turning their rifles on the crowd. A chopper thudded overhead, no doubt to spirit Haircut and his detail away from the melee. Never mind he knew damn well the threat to him had passed; being caught on camera watching helplessly as your citizens rioted before you was bad business for a despot.

  And riot they would, until the lot of them were locked up or dead or far away from here. Which is why the soldiers should have said to hell with orders and let them flee the square. But most of them were kids—green, untrained. They didn’t know any better. They didn’t know some orders were best ignored.

  I turned from the window, stretching and rubbing grit from my eyes. I didn’t need to see the rest—I’d seen enough of these scenes over the years to know that’s how they always play. Pop a leader up onstage and the crowd will scatter, sure, but deep down, they know they’re not a target.

  You want to see real panic, pop a member of the crowd.

  Not that panic was my goal. My goal was to get paid. Panic was merely an inevitable side effect. And that which one can reliably predict can be used to one’s advantage—say, for example, in making one’s getaway.

  I left the gun. I left the room. I left the hotel. I left the country. The details of my egress, I won’t bore you with; they’re more prosaic than you might expect. After all, no head of
state had died that day—just some lowly schlub nobody’d ever miss. Hell, by the time my plane was wheels-up, Haircut had gone before the cameras to calm his panicked nation and commend his security detail for detecting and eradicating so imminent a threat as said schlub posed.

  You’d think it’d sting, watching someone else get credit for your kill, but the eight hundred grand in my bank account was salve enough to soothe my wounded ego.

  In the days that followed, Haircut and his ministers painted the deceased as a supporter of the far-right fringe, out of touch with the mainstream and spurred to violence by Haircut’s landslide victory. When all was said and done, two dozen so-called coconspirators saw the business end of the firing squad for the part they’d played in the botched assassination.

  It was a tidy justification for a bit of housecleaning, but it was bullshit nonetheless. You don’t call me if you want to pop an amateur. In fact, you don’t call me at all—I call you. And when I do, you’d be well advised to take the call.

  See, I hit hitmen.

  Which means if you hear from me, someone wants you dead.

  That smear of brain matter I left back in the square? Former triggerman for the Varela cartel by the name of Juan Miguel Garcia. Went freelance a few years back. Hired to hit Haircut by a consortium of sugar manufacturers, if you can believe it. Seems under Haircut’s tutelage, the state reclaimed a hefty chunk of land that had belonged to them, and they thought perhaps new leadership might be more inclined to negotiate its release.

  Not that their reasons matter much to me. Everybody’s got a reason to kill. It’s the ones who’ve got the means to that I keep tabs on.

  It’s the ones who’ve got the means to that I end up putting in the ground.

  Garcia’s benefactors set the price on Haircut’s head at eighty K. I asked Haircut for ten times that. My biggest payday yet—but then, ten times the hit’s my going rate, and it’s nonnegotiable. The smart ones pay. The ones who don’t aren’t around long to regret it. Haircut did some homework, ponied up. Now he lives to subjugate another day, and Garcia gets a dirt retirement. And me and my eight hundred grand live happily ever after.

  Or at least, that was the plan. Seems that in my line of work, happily ever after is hard to come by.

  Just ask Garcia.

  The sun shone blinding orange over my front left fender as I pushed the rented Beemer past seventy, just back from the Garcia job and heading southwest from Dulles into the rolling Virginia countryside. A few miles east of Morgantown, I slowed. I parked the Beemer on the shoulder atop a gentle rise and watched the sun set behind the rambling buttercream farmhouse nestled in the woods across the road.

  The lights inside the house were on, and through the French doors that led out to the deck, I could see Evie in the kitchen making dinner. Long and lanky in a tank top and low-slung jeans, with an easy grace and a smile to match, she chopped and diced and measured and stirred, pausing occasionally to brush her hair back from her eyes and chatting all the while with someone just out of sight.

  Her husband, no doubt.

  The fucking bastard.

  Not like I can blame the guy for stealing my wife away from me; by the time Evie met Stuart, she thought me years dead. And my grandma always used to say you meet a girl who looks as good in jeans as Evie does—a girl who can eat a burger with her elbows on the table and look like a lady doing it—you hold on to her forever. I didn’t listen.

  Guess Stuart was the type to mind his grandma. Well, that, or he worked out that lesson all on his own—and either way, it made him a better man than I’ll ever be.

  Of course, the fact that he was a mechanic and not a hardened killer didn’t hurt in that regard, either.

  Still didn’t mean I had to like the guy.

  Evie held a spoon out for Stuart to taste, and he stepped into sight, first taking the proffered bite, and then wrapping her in his arms and twirling her around. Her peals of laughter carried through the open kitchen window—melodic, beautiful—and took me back to the summer we graduated high school. We were only just engaged—Evie working weekends slinging soft-serve, boot camp still three months off for me—with barely ten bucks between us and not a care in the world, lounging and laughing and making love at my family’s camp not three miles from here.

  Then I noticed the roundness of her belly in profile as the man who wasn’t me swung her round and round, and my nostalgia hardened into something cold and sharp in my chest.

  Evie was pregnant.

  Which would have been a cause for joy if it were mine.

  If Evie didn’t think me dead.

  If, all those years ago when faced with this path, this job, this empty life, I’d instead chosen to be a better man.

  You’re probably wondering how it all went wrong. How anyone could go from happy and laughing to watching from the outside as some other guy gets to live his life. How anyone could go from fighting for God and country to killing for money. And truth be told, the progression was simple enough.

  Mind you, simple’s not the same as easy.

  Picture a fresh-jaced patriot of eighteen, straight out of basic training. Kid we’re talking about’s as green as can be—he barely knows which end of his rifle is which.

  Picture him pleased as punch at being selected to pull guard duty for a visiting dignitary and his family. Said dignitary comes across as a kindly older gentleman, beaming as he introduces his wife and children to the kid, and thanking him for his protection, for his dedicated service. Looking back, that dignitary probably wasn’t a day over forty-five, but as young as this kid was, he may as well have been a hundred.

  Now picture how that kid might react if he saw the dignitary and his family slaughtered before his very eyes—taken out not honorably in battle, as a man should be, but instead by cowards operating in darkness.

  I don’t have to picture it. I see it every time I close my eyes.

  I was not that kid.

  I’m the guy who killed him.

  See, back in boot camp, I was identified as having certain qualities. Qualities the military finds valuable in a covert operative. To this day, I’m not certain what specifically put them onto me, but whatever it was, they weren’t wrong. I took to the training like a dog to the hunt, and why wouldn’t I? Black ops was my chance to make a difference. To tip the balance. To make the world safe for democracy.

  Yeah, I know how it sounds. But I enlisted in the weeks after 9/11. Back then, the Kool-Aid was flowing pretty freely, and that kind of naive, pie-eyed thinking was the norm among us grunts. But don’t worry—I didn’t think that way for long.

  The job itself proved just the antidote.

  We were a false-flag unit, operating under orders of the U.S. government but without the safety net of our nation’s military backup or diplomatic support. Think back on the giant fucking mess our nation made of Iraq and Afghanistan these past eight years, and on our lapses of judgment and common decency along the way. Now think on the fact that what you know about those conflicts is what our leaders let you know, and you can begin to guess the nature of the missions we were sent on—missions our government worked hard to ensure would never see the light of day.

  I don’t mean to say we didn’t do some good. Many of the threats we neutralized were just that. But some of them weren’t. Some of them were just people we killed.

  Hell, when it comes right down to it, all of them were just people we killed. Some of them just warranted killing, is all.

  I couldn’t honestly tell you if that dignitary needed killing or not. I can say we didn’t need to kill his wife and kids. Or his entire security detail, who weren’t any more a threat to us than the wife and kids had been. Hell, most of them weren’t much older than his kids. But we did. We killed them all.

  Well, my unit did, at least. Me, I froze up after I slit the young guard’s throat. He’d kicked the door in to find me standing over his friend the dignitary, knife in hand, and I got to him before he could unsling his rifle from his
shoulder. Cut him ear to ear, clean through his windpipe, and listened to his strangled cries as he died. He looked so, I don’t know, surprised, as if he couldn’t square exactly how it had come to this. For that matter, I couldn’t square it either—but something tells me that would’ve been cold comfort to him as he lay dying.

  There were other missions after that. Other kills. But that kid was the one who broke me. I don’t know—maybe I felt some kinship with him. Maybe I’d just had my fill of taking orders from those who refused to get their hands dirty. Hell, maybe it was the phase of the fucking moon.

  Whatever it was, after I killed the kid, I withdrew into myself. I stopped writing Evie. Stopped calling. I didn’t figure I was worthy of her love on account of what I’d done. I’m pretty sure I was right on that count.

  I wanted to die. To disappear. And when a roadside bomb in Kandahar made chop suey of my unit, I saw my chance to do just that.

  Turned out it was easier than I expected. There was no formal inquiry into the bombing, no attempt to recover the dead. And why would there be? They bore no emblem of our government, and officially they didn’t even exist. They were simply left to rot in the desert, disavowed in death as they would have been in any other failure.

  This gig hitting other hitters started out as retribution, I suppose, or some misplaced sense of justice. I guess I figured once you agree to hit somebody, you deserve whatever’s coming to you. That ridding the world of people who kill for a living was some kind of public service.

  Yeah, I get the irony of the situation.

  But whatever my reasons at the outset, eventually this job became just that—a job to me. Something I did because I was good at it. Too good to walk away.

  Something I did because I didn’t know how to do anything else.

  Or maybe that’s bullshit, and I kept at it because I figured one day somebody was going to turn the tables on me and put me in the ground.

  God knew I deserved it.

  And God knew I wasn’t going to do it myself.

  From my vantage point across the country road, I watched Evie’s house for hours—the house I helped to pay for, funneling Evie blood money through a dummy trust set up to look like a struc tured settlement for the widows of war dead who fell victim to faulty body armor. Like some half-assed act of charity could make up for what I’d done to her—leaving her a widow at twenty-three.