by Thomas Perry
“I guess you want somebody killed.”
Holcomb’s yellow eyes showed nothing. “I’m offering a tryout. I’ll give you some training. It’ll take about three months. I’ll pay you a thousand a week while that’s going on. Any day you wake up and want to quit, you quit. No questions asked. If you last three months I’ll decide whether I want to give you the next course or just shake your hand and give you your last thousand.”
“Why no questions?”
“I said the job’s not for everybody. It’s nothing against you if it’s not for you. I won’t have a problem with you as long as you keep your mouth shut.”
“I’ll try it,” Moreland said.
“Fine. Meet me at the big mall down the street at eight in the morning. Be near the Sears store.”
Joey Moreland showed up at the mall at eight. The mall’s stores didn’t open until ten, so the other people arriving in the lot were a few floor polishers and some trainees in the fast-food places in the food court. There was a big turnover in those jobs, so none of the others, who were about his age, was curious about a newcomer.
At two minutes after eight, a black car with tinted windows drove up about a hundred feet from the others and stopped. After a moment, Joey Moreland walked over and prepared to look in through the windshield, but the passenger window rolled down before he got there. He could see Holcomb in the driver’s seat. “Get in.”
He got into the passenger seat and Holcomb drove off. “It’ll take an hour to get there,” Holcomb said. “When we get there we’ll spend the day. Who’s waiting for you at home?”
“Nobody.”
“No parents?”
“They live in another state.”
“Which one?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“No girlfriends?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Keep it that way for now,” Holcomb said. “I figured since you do night work you probably aren’t tied down. But we may want to do a little traveling, and it’s better if you don’t have to explain anything to anybody.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t seem inclined to argue.”
“Not about that. Anybody can see the sense of it.”
“Good start,” said Holcomb.
They drove out to what Holcomb called The Ranch, which was a vast expanse of land northeast of Santa Clarita that was all steep canyons and spiky peaks, with rocky shelves the size of houses jutting from the ground at a forty-degree angle. There was a tangle of dirt roads, or maybe one road that wound around to various places on the property.
The only excuse that Moreland could see for calling the place a ranch was that there was nothing on it but two buildings. One of them was a cinder block rectangle with a large sloping canvas tarp stretching a couple of feet above it on poles. That kept it in shade and provided a shaded area beside it where Holcomb had placed a picnic table. The second building was long and narrow like the first, it had a steel door at each end and no windows. It was buried in dirt and gravel nearly to its roof.
They began with firearms instruction. Holcomb went to the long, narrow building and selected a pair of .22 rifles, two .22 semiautomatic pistols, earphones, and some paper targets. He put two paper targets up on posts a hundred feet away, handed Moreland a rifle, and said, “We begin at the beginning.”
Holcomb could rapidly place ten rounds in a one-inch bull’s-eye from a standing position. Joey Moreland was less consistent, but not a bad marksman. Holcomb said, “This is the cheapest and simplest way to learn the basics. Do everything right today, and you’ll still do it right in a month when it’s harder. There’s no recoil to speak of, and not much noise. With the rifle, learn to concentrate and control your breathing. What makes you shake is carbon dioxide. Before you fire take a couple of deep breaths, blow the last one out, aim, and fire.”
They fired for a couple of hours. Then they switched to pistols at fifty feet. “Keep your trigger pull steady and sure, so you don’t drag the sights off target. Know at what point it will fire.” After each magazine was emptied, they walked to their targets and examined them.
They stopped every half hour and drank water from a large cooler. Holcomb said, “You’re doing okay. Just make sure that no matter how tired you get, you’re keeping all of your attention on willing that bullet through the bull’s-eye.”
In late afternoon Holcomb taught him how to break the rifle and the pistol down and clean them. He was watchful to be sure Moreland did everything as it should be done, that the weapons were truly clean, and that each had the even gleam of a thin layer of gun oil on it. As with the shooting, he did everything Moreland did.
Next Holcomb took him inside the rectangular building. The inside was like the interior of a house, divided into a few rooms with white plasterboard walls and imitation wood laminate floors and powerful air-conditioning. He turned it on and said, “Now we start getting in shape.”
There was an exercise room at the back of the house, and they went in and began lifting weights and doing pull-ups, push-ups, and various strengthening exercises. As the sun was showing signs of disappearing over the next ridge, Holcomb took him outside. They jogged along a narrow, winding trail that took them up to the top of the ridge. By the time they descended, the sun had set, and the shadows below the hills were chilly.
Holcomb drove Moreland back to the mall where his car was parked. As Moreland got out of the car, Holcomb said, “You can leave the car at home tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at the bus stop around the corner from your apartment at six.”
The daily instruction continued and grew more demanding. After Moreland mastered the .22-caliber guns, Holcomb replaced the pistol with a nine-millimeter Beretta and the rifle with a .308. After they had lifted weights for a week, Holcomb added more weights to the bar. After they had jogged the uphill trail to the ridge for a week, Holcomb turned it into a race. Everything they did the first week got harder the second, and kept growing more demanding after that.
Moreland learned to fire a shotgun effectively and became aware of its limitations. Forty yards was about the top range for a kill; but close in, there was nothing with more power. The spreading of buckshot didn’t do anything to make up for a poor aim at any range. Next Holcomb began the long process of teaching Moreland hand-to-hand combat. They began with techniques for fighting another unarmed opponent, then moved through disarming a man with a knife or a club, then settled on the more common task of using those weapons to kill a man.
Each week on Friday evening, Holcomb would hand Moreland an envelope with a thousand dollars in it. The next morning they would go to work again at six. After a few weeks they drove to a combat target range a few miles away, and practiced firing at pop-ups and silhouettes that skittered across their line of sight. Every day included the strengthening exercises, the aerobics, and the fighting practice. Day by day, Moreland grew stronger, faster, and more tolerant of minor discomfort. He became better and surer at clearing jams, taking apart weapons, and assembling them.
After six weeks Holcomb changed the starting time to early afternoon and the end of the day to three a.m. so they could engage in what he called “night maneuvers.” He simply said, “Suppose you’re hired for a hit. You want to do it at noon or two a.m.?” The answer was obvious.
Holcomb taught Moreland about night vision goggles, infrared scopes. They ran in the dark. Moreland noticed immediately that for everything he did in the dark, he was slower, required more concentration, and was more prone to accidents. Holcomb said, “The trick is to make the dark work for you, not against you. The only way is to practice.” The longer they worked in the dark, the more comfortable Moreland became. He learned to “cheat the dark,” as Holcomb called it, by taking a look at a place while it was still light and making a mental map. He learned to use his ears and to deny an opponent the same sense by
moving in silence.
At the end of the twelfth week, Moreland was a formidable fighter with a variety of weapons, who could operate comfortably in difficult environments. On Friday of the twelfth week, Holcomb drove him to his apartment, and handed him an envelope with a thousand dollars in it. He said, “I’ll call you.”
Joey Moreland waited. He waited a week, expecting the phone to ring at any moment. He considered driving out to the ranch, but he was sure that Holcomb would not be overjoyed that Moreland had decided to get in touch again. After the first week he pretended he had stopped waiting. He resumed his strenuous exercises, ran in the city at night to keep his senses sharp, and began going to a local firing range for pistol practice.
At the end of two months, Holcomb called him. “Are you alone? I’d like to come see you.” An hour later he was at the door of Moreland’s apartment. When Moreland opened the door, Holcomb looked him up and down, then strolled into the apartment. He looked around him, and walked into the bedroom, where Moreland’s pistol lay on top of the dresser. He picked it up, removed the magazine, cleared the round in the chamber, looked down the muzzle, sniffed it, closed the chamber again, and set it down. He said, “The lessons weren’t wasted. You ready for a job?”
The next day they began the drive to Santa Fe, where Moreland killed his third man while Holcomb watched from his car. When Moreland asked what his cut would be, Holcomb said, “It will always be fifty-fifty, no matter who pulls the trigger and who watches the street.”
The partnership lasted for over two years. The jobs came from a man Holcomb talked to only when the man called him on the telephone. He was called “the Broker.” Moreland answered the phone once when he called. The voice of a man in late middle age said, “Are you Joey?”
“Yes.”
“Then take down this information. The target is Ronald Miller. No special problems for you. He lives at . . .” and he gave an address in Denver. “He needs to be gone by the fifteenth of this month. The price is forty thousand.”
When Holcomb drove his pickup truck along the narrow road to the ranch buildings, Joey came outside to wait. Holcomb pulled up next to him with the truck window rolled down. “What’s up?”
“The Broker. He called with a new job.”
Holcomb nodded. “I told him it didn’t matter anymore if he talked to me or you. It’s the same and it saves us time.” He got out and began to unload groceries from the bed of the truck.
After a second, Joey pocketed his note and helped. As they stepped into the house, Joey said, “He asked if I was Joey.”
“Makes sense.”
“I didn’t know he knew my name.”
Holcomb set his bags on the kitchen counter and stopped. “It’s the way the business works. He has to be able to tell his middlemen that he knows the person who will do the job, so he can guarantee they’re competent. He’ll never tell them who we are, or us who they are, because that’s what makes him important. It would also piss off people who kill for a living. But he has to be sure we’re good enough. If we get caught or leave a target alive, his middlemen might kill him to cut their only connection with us.”
“I guess it’s okay,” Moreland said.
“It’s got to be,” Holcomb said. “Without the Broker and the middlemen, we’d have to deal with customers. They’re the most dangerous part.”
“Who are the middlemen?”
“People somebody might ask about getting somebody killed. Bartenders in the right kind of bar, lawyers, a few low-level guys who run businesses for the Mafia, a few cops, gamblers, fences. Just guys who run into unhappy people sometimes.”
After each job they went back into training while they waited for the next job. Holcomb was approaching fifty, and he claimed to be trying to fight the passage of time. He said that each year that passed without his noticeably losing strength, speed, stamina, or nerve was a great victory for him. Training with him gave Joey the body and mind of a fighter.
Most of their assignments were in Southern California, Nevada, or Arizona. They drove to most jobs in a small SUV, stole a set of license plates from the state they were visiting, did the job, and drove home the same night. Sometimes they would have to spend a week or two stalking the target.
From Holcomb Joey learned that the safest way for two men to operate was to show up at the target’s house at night, take him from his home quietly, drive him off to a remote area in the desert or the mountains, kill him, and bury him there. They buried a dozen men in various parts of Joshua Tree National Park during this period, and others in other wilderness areas. But most of the time there were complications that made such simple and direct methods impossible. They had to spend time watching a man until he was alone and vulnerable, and then shoot him.
They worked together for over two years before Holcomb made his mistake. They were in downtown Los Angeles waiting in a car for a man named Lewis Hartmann to come out of the Bonaventure Hotel. The Broker had tipped them that Hartmann had a meeting set up with an associate for that evening after midnight. Moreland and Holcomb saw him at the same time. He came to the doorway and handed a ticket to the valet parking attendant, who trotted off to bring the car up from the parking levels.
The idea was that Joey Moreland would wait until Hartmann was in his car and driving off. Then he would pull up beside Hartmann at a red light. Holcomb’s side window would already be open, and he would extend his arm and fire a round into Hartmann’s head. Holcomb would jump down from the SUV, set Hartmann’s transmission in park, and open the car’s trunk. Joey would help him put the body into the trunk, then get into Hartmann’s car and drive off. Holcomb would get into the SUV and follow. All this would take no more than ten seconds.
Moreland pulled up beside Hartmann’s car. He saw Holcomb lift his pistol from his lap and extend his arm toward Hartmann’s side window, but then something happened. There was a scrape and a clatter. It looked as though Holcomb had hit the gun against his door on the way up, but the sure thing was that Holcomb had dropped his gun. It fell from his hand and out the window between the two cars. Holcomb flung the door open and jumped out to pick it up, but Hartmann had seen all of it too. He produced a gun of his own and fired three rapid shots into Holcomb, then raised his gun to fire at Joey.
Just as Hartmann’s eyes and his arm rose, Joey fired three shots through Holcomb’s open door into Hartmann’s upper body. Hartmann slumped over, half in and half out of his car, and the car began to drift into the intersection. As he struggled to free himself from his seat belt, the car gained a little speed, so it was going about five miles an hour when it went up over the curb and hit the railing of the freeway overpass at Temple. Hartmann flew out of his seat toward the windshield; the air bag inflated and punched him out onto the ground.
Moreland dragged Holcomb into the back of the SUV, slammed the door, and drove. He could hear Holcomb’s labored breaths hissing in and out, a raspy sound that was almost a groan. By the time Joey was driving the SUV up the long dirt road onto the ranch, he couldn’t hear Holcomb anymore. When he opened the hatch and touched Holcomb’s carotid artery, there was no pulse. He used Holcomb’s bulldozer to dig an eight-foot trench, then pushed him out the back of the SUV and covered the trench.
It wasn’t until two nights later that he heard the police cars coming up the dirt road. He looked out, saw the red and blue lights in the distance, and set out on foot along the trails he and Holcomb had used. When the trails ran out, he kept going into the backcountry. Before dawn he reached a road he knew led to the freeway. When he reached the freeway he turned right and followed it all the way into the city. He was on his own, but he had learned a profession.
13
As Moreland worked to get Kelly more interested in him, he remembered things he had learned from hookers, the most important being that women who were paid to have sex got tired of men. He didn’t blame them. There were
johns who would call a girl up and talk dirty from the first sentence. Some would try to take control. So many escorts had had men take their cell phones away that nearly all of them carried two. Nearly every escort got beaten up by a client once or twice a year. Even if clients weren’t brutal, they were often rough and impatient and demanding.
The first time he had called an escort was right after Holcomb had died. He had been living with Holcomb for months while they worked their way down the latest list from the Broker. They had killed six men on the Broker’s latest list over a period of sixty days. During that time they had never left the ranch except to kill somebody.
Moreland had never stopped paying rent on his apartment while he’d worked with Holcomb. At times he thought he was doing it because he didn’t want to move his belongings. But when he arrived there this time he stayed indoors, sleeping and eating beside his computer. He read all the references to their botched hit outside the Bonaventure. After a week he was sure the police had a theory that involved Holcomb’s shooting the victim, taking off in the SUV, and stopping at his ranch to change vehicles, but dying before he could do any more.
Moreland spent weeks in his apartment, leaving only to get food. Finally he went on one of the big Web sites that rated escorts by city, and began to search for the right kind of girl. It took him only a few minutes of looking to find Rebecca Coleman. She had the same strawberry blond hair, the white skin, and the long legs that he liked. He called her and asked if he could make an appointment. They met at her apartment.
Later she told him she’d liked him because on that first appointment he had surprised her. He was quiet and polite on the phone. When he arrived he was clean, wore clean clothes, and was a little shy. He made love to her the way Mindy had taught him. It never occurred to him to try to bargain her price down, and when he left, he gave her a tip and said, “Thank you.”
He called her again a few days later and made another appointment. She told him to come at nine, which was early for her. When he got there, she seemed to have been thinking of all the ways to try to please him. She made an unceasing effort from nine until nearly midnight, when he asked if he ought to leave. She kissed him and said, “Please don’t leave. I haven’t got any other clients tonight.”