by Cole McCade
He waited long enough not to draw notice when he stood, then slipped out into the night.
He had plans to make, and loose ends to tie up.
* * *
HE TOOK HIS TIME, THIS time. He had time; Louis Delgado thought he was dead. So did the police, and if they sought a suspect in Louis Delgado’s murder they wouldn’t think to look for a corpse. He rented another hotel room, paid in cash under a false name, and spent his nights planning. Preparing. Scouting. He needed a safe kill site—one where he would leave no trace, where he could control the evidence forensics would find, where he would risk no witnesses. Half the Ravens was abandoned, depressed remnants of the economic collapse, and he chose an empty duplex house backed up on an old warehouse. No one would be in the warehouse by night to hear anything from the duplex, and the tottering fence was high enough to block any views through the window. Cobwebs filled the house, and spiders skittered out of the way as he brushed his way through the halls and walked them, dust stirring up with every step. The rooms were small, economical. Easy to clean.
Yes. This would be perfect, for now.
It was a start.
So, too, were the supplies he bought, carefully picking up odds and ends from various shops around town, not buying too many things in one place. Gloves. Tarps. Restraints. Thickly woven wire. Bleach. Lye. Knives—long, vicious hunting knives, carving knives, boning knives. Guns made too much noise, and left too much uncontrolled splatter. Knives were more…personal. More intimate.
And he thought he would like Delgado to feel this intimately. Gut-deep and visceral, and utterly inescapable.
A bulky Kevlar vest, too, bought from a military supply shop online and delivered to a second hotel room rented under a different name. Vin never even slept in the bed; he only retrieved the package, then made himself scarce without leaving a trace. He’d been reckless once, and gotten himself shot for it, the healing gunshot wound reminding him even now to take it slow. He was fine with slow. With patient.
Patience was a virtue, after all.
* * *
ONLY WHEN HE HAD PREPPED the kill room—a bedroom in the abandoned house, cleared of all debris with his supplies stocked at hand and the carpet torn up to keep from absorbing bloodstains—did he allow himself one last indulgence. It was late afternoon, just after opening, when he stepped into The Track again for the first time since the night he’d been shot. Too early for Gabriel to be up and weighing down a barstool; Vin had made sure of that, when he wasn’t ready to see Gabriel yet. He wasn’t here for Gabriel.
He was here for Gary.
The old man stumped behind the bar, muttering and cursing under his breath as he slung a crate of empty shot glasses onto the bartop. When the bell over the door jingled and Vin stepped inside, Gary glanced up—and nearly dropped the crate, the wood thudding down against the bar with a heavy crash of clattering glass.
“Fuck me,” he said, then proclaimed to the empty bar, “Fuck!”
Vin inclined his head. “An appropriate sentiment.”
“You’re supposed to be dead!” Gary jabbed a wizened finger at him. “It was in the fucking paper! Hart’s been in here drinking himself to fucking death! Does he know? Does he know you’re—fuck me, why the fuck—where have you been?”
“Recuperating. And no, Gabriel does not yet know. I will tell him myself, shortly. That is not why I am here.”
“Yeah? Well the why better involve paying coin, because dead men don’t get free drinks.”
Vin pulled his wallet from his pocket and extracted a bent and creased photograph of Serafina. He had one of each of his unit, but he didn’t know their families, didn’t see them every day hard-eyed and bitter like they were struggling not to cry and rage and shout at her for being dead and taking away so many missed opportunities. And Gary—Gary with his line of framed photographs of racehorses and newspaper clippings…
And not one of Serafina.
He lingered on her face, brown and square-jawed with a delicate nose and sparking eyes; the colors were somehow different now, washed-out, the memories no longer clamping on with such cruel iron jaws. He traced his thumb over the line of her jaw, then set the photo on the bar and pushed it toward Gary.
“You should have this.”
Gary stared down at the photograph. His puckered mouth trembled, then drew tight in a fierce scowl. He stepped back from the photo as if it would bite. “Why the fuck are you giving me this now?”
“In case it is my last chance.”
Gary squinted his glass eye. “You ain’t talking sense.”
“No?” Vin’s gaze flicked to the photos of the racehorses behind the bar. “They say the treasures a man keeps are the ones he loved most.”
Gary flinched, snarling, mouth opening—only to stop. Just stop, staring down at that photograph, the fury going out of him to leave only a tired, drooping old man with sallow skin and that rolling, rolling false eye. “Shows what you know,” he mumbled. “Sometimes the only way to love something is to let it go.” He picked up the photograph in trembling fingers. Wrinkles creased around his eyes and across his brow; his voice thickened. “I shouldn’t have let her go. I should have…I should have…”
Vin watched the play of emotions across Gary’s face, and wondered if he had ever told Serafina he loved her.
You never did. And now you never will.
You have a remarkable talent, Vincent, for leaving those you were meant to protect dead in your wake.
“That does not matter,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“How the hell can anything matter when there’s nothing left of your damned daughter but a photograph?” Gary tossed the fluttering scrap of paper down on the bar, staring at it bitterly. “Fuck, this don’t even look like her. My Serafina wasn’t fucking stiff uniforms and proper attention.”
Vin smiled slightly. “No. She was not.”
Gary slumped against the bar and dragged a hand over his face. His gaze darted to the photo, then to Vin, then the photo. Then Vin, lingering, pleading. “Tell me. Tell me how you knew her. Tell me who she was to you.”
Vin settled on a barstool and leaned on his folded arms, considering, sifting through his memories. Tell me how you knew her, Gary said, when how he knew her was a tortured scream and tears in her eyes, tears to match Vin’s own, suffering the mirror of his and their hands stretching across that hateful space to reach for each other but never quite touching. Those memories had stamped over everything that came before until they were as faded as old newsprint, and yet still…still he found a scrap here, a scrap there, anything that he could put in Gary’s desperately grasping fingers.
“She was made up of the streaks of sand on her cheeks, and the wisps of hair that would never stay in her braid. Cracked fingernails and a punch that could knock a man twice her size on his back. Books stuck into her duffel even on classified missions, and a poker tell she would swear was a lie even when her leg jittered hard enough to rattle the table.” And even if he didn’t want to feel anything, the loss was a quiet thing that crept up on him and strangled him in its grip, his throat tightening. “Her memory was lightning. She could tell you every type of revolver in use during World War II, the positions of every constellation no matter the season, or what you had eaten for lunch every day for months before. I never knew anyone more intelligent, and when she laughed it was as if she was laughing at herself and waiting for you to get the joke. She always smelled like gun oil, and her smile was lopsided to hide the scar on the corner of her mouth.”
Gary listened in rapt silence, like a child listening to a bedtime story. His breaths grew harsher, wetter, and he let out a rasping sound and wiped at his glistening eyes, coming away with damp streaks on the back of his wrinkled hand. “How the fuck did she get that scar?”
“Bar fight. Kabul.” Vin arched both brows. “We lost.”
A harsh, startled bark of laughter escaped Gary’s lips. “Fuck. That’s my girl.” He picked up the photograph again, the paper tremb
ling in his grip. “That’s my girl, all right.” He trailed off; his eyes darkened, his lips working several times before he managed tightly, “I miss her. I miss her, and I hate that you knew her better than I ever did.”
“You had your chance.”
“And I wasted it. I know.” Gary traced his fingertips over the face in the photograph, then exhaled heavily and tucked it into the breast pocket of his shirt. “I keep wanting to be fucking mad at Hart for not bringing her back, but I can’t. I can’t because I’m fucking mad at myself for not caring enough when she was here. Like there would always be another tomorrow, and I could just put it off again and again. It was always ‘next time,’ until there weren’t no more goddamned next times.” He stared at Vin. “How do you do it? How do you pick up and keep going?”
“I did not for a very long time,” Vin said. “But I have decided, for now, to live each day as if, by dawn, I might be dead.”
“Yeah?” Gary snorted. “How’s that working out for you?”
“Ask me in the morning,” Vin answered, and slid off the barstool. “If I survive the night.”
* * *
LOUIS DELGADO’S HOUSE WAS A squat adobe monstrosity with an Olympic-sized swimming pool, delusions of grandeur, and a highly complex security system. Situated on the border between The Rooks and Blackwing Downs, it was set far back on a mostly undeveloped and poorly tended tract of overgrown land. In the nights before his visit with Gary, Vin had staked out the house, parked in a different rental car every night, occasionally swapping out for junkers bought for five hundred off a nameless lot and parked from a different obscure vantage every time.
He never thought he’d have to use his military surveillance training again, let alone like this. But it was as much a part of him as his scars, and in trying to forget it he’d forgotten who he was. That night when he’d been shot, he hadn’t been himself. He’d been a reckless fool, trying to be anything other than the truth of himself:
A trained, methodical killer.
Television, films, and books liked to glorify the assassins and mercenaries, flashy gunslingers and sword-twirlers who stood off in open, public confrontations, noisy with explosions and gunfire and clashing blades. But it was the quiet killers, the methodical ones, who took their prey without being caught. They sought not recognition, but a simple and steady purpose.
And Vin’s purpose, right now, was to kill the man who had killed him.
He realized by the second night that he wouldn’t be breaking into Delgado’s house. The security system was wired to motion sensors that blanketed the entire grounds, and he never left alone; nor was he often alone inside the house, with paid muscle patrolling the grounds and stationed inside. But he often returned either alone or with the girls he’d hired for the night, his friends peeled off to their own pursuits and his bed only warm when he paid for it. Drunk, usually, sloppy and reeling. For a small window, during the thirty seconds after the chauffeur pulled away but before Delgado reached the code-locked gate within range of the security cameras, he would be vulnerable.
Vin didn’t need any longer than that.
Tonight he watched from the back seat of an old, rusted Toyota Tercel, its upholstery ripped but its engine brand new and running almost silent. He’d parked it under the shade of a tree, at the perfect vantage where he could stretch across the seat with a thermos of dark coffee and his head propped against one window, his boots against another. Like this, at a glance, he looked like a transient taking shelter in a broken-down wreck. It was impossible to be completely invisible, in a well-lit city constantly linked by the interconnected modern world. The key to real invisibility was to look like a different person every time—just another face in the crowd, easily forgotten by the busy human mind.
He would do it tonight, he thought. As long as Delgado was alone, he would do it tonight. Tonight the moon was a strange and sickly shade of green, a poison shade, and it seemed a night for doing the Devil’s work.
The evening had worn on toward midnight, then two a.m., before headlights turned onto Delgado’s street, the familiar bright flash of the limousines he hired to ferry him everywhere, as if he were too important for a simple sedan with blackout windows. The limousine pulled up to the curb. Vin sat up—slow, careful, nothing to draw attention with sudden movements—and watched as the driver stepped out, rounded the car, and pulled the door open. If Delgado had girls with him tonight, all bets were off.
But Delgado fell out of the limousine alone—reeling, his legs weak, pathetically drunk, practically an infant wobbling on knock-kneed legs. Disgust pulled Vin’s upper lip into a rictus. He curled his finger against the car door and eased the handle open without letting it click, slipping out on the far side, letting the Tercel mask his body. The limo driver watched with cool disinterest as Delgado reeled and stumbled; the moment Delgado pulled himself up onto the sidewalk, the driver turned his back, climbed back into the driver’s seat, and pulled away.
The street was empty—no other cars, no pedestrians, the limo’s taillights vanishing in streaks of demon’s-eye red. The moment they disappeared around the corner, Vin dashed from behind the Tercel, the bulky Kevlar under his coat hindering his movements but not slowing his stride. Two, three, four racing steps, each longer than the last, gaining momentum, until he felt for a moment blessed with angel’s wings with which to fly.
Then he caught Delgado from behind, hitting him with his full weight, forcing him down to the sidewalk. Delgado had no chance to cry out before Vin pulled a chloroform-soaked cloth from inside his coat and clamped it over his mouth. He pressed his knee to the small of Delgado’s back and bore down with all his weight; a hand to the back of his skull shoved his face down into the cloth. Delgado struggled, twitched, his curses muffled, his mouth moving against Vin’s gloved palm through the cloth, his limbs uncoordinated and clumsy. Pathetic, Vin thought again, and hated himself for the sin of pride that he was ashamed of his own carelessness, to let a man this weak nearly destroy him.
But he had survived. He had survived, and he would continue to survive as the living dead. Once this was over, it was over.
Delgado went limp. His eyes closed. Vin waited to ensure he was truly unconscious and not—what was the English term?—playing possum, then rolled him onto his back, looking down at his slack face. His mouth was wet with spittle, drooling down the side of his jaw, and Vin wrinkled his nose before hefting Delgado’s short, squat frame over his shoulder and lifting him up. His healing bullet wound protested with a twinge, still not wholly sealed despite more weeks for the flesh to regenerate, but he only needed a few moments before he was dropping Delgado into the trunk of the Tercel. He fit neatly into the compartment, almost too small a man for who he seemed to think he was.
“I should have known you would be easy,” Vin muttered, and closed the lid of the trunk on his captive prey.
* * *
KILLING WAS, MORE THAN ANYTHING, a waiting game.
Vin sat cross-legged on the floor of the kill room, surrounded by the dusty scent of abandonment, the stronger smell of the vinyl tarps he’d laid out on the floor, and the nearly overwhelming stench of urine after an unconscious Delgado had voided his bladder onto the tarp. Delgado remained unconscious, his breaths shallow and raspy, his body hog-tied with plastic ties, his ankles bound to his wrists. And so Vin waited—still and calm as he had once been during hours of prayer, cross-legged and meditative in the small stone prayer rooms of his church, watching the light of the moon play over the tall dark shadows within the room.
Yet now rather than speaking to God for guidance or counting out his rosary prayers, Vin replayed the night. The weeks of stalking, waiting, all leading up to this one small and simple moment. He could already see a few things he could have done better. The Kevlar vest was too bulky; for a little more money he could replace it with a simple, sleek Kevlar shirt, thermally bonded military surplus, that did the job just as well. Using vehicles had been a mistake; he’d left the Tercel in an aban
doned industrial lot and carried Delgado over a mile on foot to throw off any pursuit, but people remembered makes and models and license plates, remembered tall men carrying little squat bits of human filth even more. He’d been seen in too many public places, spoken to too many people; while he’d done everything he could to make himself invisible, a clever person willing to spend hours watching CCTV footage could still suss him out, or just the right curious nosy busybody aware of him at just the wrong moment…and then another innocent would be involved, another Nanette dead for Vin’s carelessness.
Even now, he was making mistakes. Waiting. Not for any particular reason, but simply because he wanted the moment to be right.
He wanted Delgado awake. Wanted to see the recognition in his eyes, before Vin killed him.
That would be the end of it, he told himself. He had his plan. Dispose of Delgado, leave Crow City, turn his back on his old life and start again as someone else. Let Gabriel think he had died, so that he would not come searching. Yet still he thought: of how he could have done this better, of how to do it right next time. Because there would always be a next time, always be men like Delgado, and to Vin it was worth selling his soul to the Devil to destroy yet another of his demons.
This wasn’t him, he told himself. This was some other creature. Some other creature that had been born when he’d torn off that table and ripped the man with the crooked tooth apart, and killing again and again just to relive that wouldn’t do anything.
He could stop this right now. He slipped his phone from his pocket and stared down at it; if he called Gabriel right now, he could pull back from this edge. All he had to do was dial that number and say I’m afraid of my own addiction, afraid of the dark drug that calls my name. I need you. I need you the way you need me, because if I do this…I will turn my back on us both.