Crosshairs

by Harry Hunsicker

  “What kind?” She lit a cigarette and blew a jet of smoke into the empty room, right past the Professor’s head.

  “Do you have anything organic?” He tried to keep his breathing shallow.

  “Sorry.” She smiled. “We’re fresh out of Tree Hugger Lager.”

  “Oh, well. I must be going anyway.” The Professor covered his mouth and coughed before he held up a key. “I’m in Unit A.”

  “Sure. See you later, then.” She twisted one of the rings in her nose.

  The Professor walked to a small alcove at the rear of the bar. The two doors on the left smelled like urine and pine cleaner. The one on the right opened onto a tiny landing. Stairs led upward toward the rear of the building.

  He took them two at a time and stopped when he reached the top, pausing to listen for any noise or movement. A narrow hallway was in front of him, three or four doors on either side.

  At the far end of the corridor, an exit door opened and the passenger from the Lincoln Navigator stepped out. He wore a Dallas Mavericks ball cap and a white ribbed undershirt.

  “Yo.” The man wasn’t as young as he’d looked in the SUV

  The Professor smiled and nodded. His room was the first one on the left. He headed that way.

  “They told me to watch out for you.” The man moved like a leopard down the hallway, fluid, stalking.

  “I think you have me confused with somebody else.” The Professor shrugged and raised his eyebrows in confusion. He stopped at his door, still trying for the befuddled-suburban-white-guy effect.

  “One large.” The man pronounced “large” as “larch.”

  “I-I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” The Professor put the key in the dead bolt but kept his attention focused on the man a few feet away.

  “Said they’d gimme one lar—I mean one thousand.” He stuck his right hand in the front pocket of his oversized jeans. “A thousand bucks for me to call if somebody that looks like you shows up on my streets.”

  “Looks like me?” The Professor frowned and flipped the lock.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “Old white-bread dude, glasses.”

  “You definitely have the wrong fellow. No one ever looks for me.” The Professor wrinkled his face in a sheepish grin and pushed the door open but didn’t enter. He was surprised but strangely content. Someone knew about him and had made inquiries in various parts of town where he might have a safe house.

  They were presenting a challenge. The stakes were higher than he’d been told.

  “You give me two grand and I forget I’ve seen you.” The man held out his free hand.

  “Two thousand dollars?” The Professor took a half step back. “Surely this is a joke of some sort.”

  “You saying there’s something funny about me?” The man frowned. “I need two large from—”

  The Professor crushed the thug’s windpipe with his fist.

  The man grabbed his throat and wheezed. He bounced from wall to wall like a hyperactive pinball, making more noise than was acceptable under the circumstances.

  The Professor snatched an arm and pulled him into the tiny unfurnished room, closing the door quietly. He eased the man down to the floor and watched as he died, his body slowly stopping the struggle for the oxygen that would never come.

  After a few moments, the Professor went to the window-mounted air conditioner and pulled off the intake grill. From a small slot underneath the condenser unit, he removed a manila envelope wrapped in plastic and opened it.

  Three sets of ID. Driver’s licenses. Credit cards. Insurance information, even movie rental and library cards. Also passports, two American, one Irish. And the maximum amount of cash that could be carried and not attract the attention of the authorities in case of a search: $9,950 in used, high-denomination bills.

  From the closet on the other side of the room, he removed several sets of clothing, each different in style and cost. He stuffed them, along with the envelope, into a small duffel bag.

  Next, he went to the freestanding gas space heater in the bathroom and removed a Sig Sauer .40-caliber taped underneath the bottom. He slipped that into the bag, too.

  Before leaving, he took a last look at the man on the floor. Dead, unseeing eyes stared at the stained plaster ceiling.

  The Professor headed to the stairs.

  The driver of the SUV sat at the bar, a bottle of Stella Artois in front of him. He and the girl in the ANARCHY T-shirt looked up as the Professor stepped into the room. No one else was present.

  The Professor pulled the silenced Ruger from his waistband and shot the African American in the forehead.

  The bullet, a high-velocity .22 hollowpoint, didn’t penetrate the man’s skull, an unfortunate side effect of using a small-caliber cartridge that could be silenced easily. The man stayed standing, eyes open and staring in confusion as a tiny stream of blood trickled down his face.

  The Professor fired again, the bullet striking just to the left of the man’s nose. The target dropped to the floor, the beer he’d been drinking falling over on the bar with a clink almost as loud as the suppressed gunshot.

  The bartender gulped. Her mouth opened in a wide, perfect circle.

  The Professor fired again.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Anita Nazari’s hunter green Range Rover breezed through the northbound booth leading onto the Dallas Tollway, the pay-as-you-go highway that split the top half of the city in two.

  I was in the passenger seat, watching the concrete slide by. We hadn’t spoken since leaving the hospital parking lot. I hadn’t even told her where to take me, and she hadn’t asked.

  Most women would agree that I’m no expert when it comes to the emotions of the fairer sex. Even so, I sensed Dr. Nazari’s mood as very dark. The clues were all there. Stifled crying. Muttered curses at slow-moving traffic. Excessive horn use.

  “What kind of doctor are you?” I said.

  “I have enough money.” She swerved into the far left lane and jammed her boot on the accelerator. “You’ll be paid.”

  “If I take the job.”

  No response. She turned on the CD player and the interior of the luxury auto filled with what sounded like Gregorian chant.

  “Nice tunes.” I fiddled with the seat controls until the back reclined a few inches.

  “I’m a researcher. I specialize in immunological disorders.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you know about fear, Mr. Oswald?”

  “Call me Hank.”

  “Avoiding the question, are we?” A faint smirk crossed her face.

  I avoided the urge to make a smart-ass response. I did in fact know quite a bit about being afraid. Fear was good, if you could manage it. Fear gave you an edge, that extra dose of adrenaline that could keep you off the coroner’s slab.

  However, I sensed that fear was managing Dr. Nazari, not the other way around.

  “Where are you from?” I said.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Why don’t you drop me off at the next exit.” I returned the seat to its original position.

  “No, please.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I was born in Tehran.” She turned down the volume of the music as we passed the glass towers clustered at Preston Center. The traffic began to grow heavier as lunchtime approached.

  “When did you get out?”

  “My family left two years after the shah fell, 1981.” Her tone of voice changed, the hostility replaced by something like resignation.

  “Must not have been a pleasant time.”

  “No.” She shook her head slowly. “From one dictator to another. You can’t imagine.”

  I reached over and turned off the music. “Why do you need somebody like me?”

  She didn’t speak for a mile or so. Then, “The first e-mail came about a year and a half ago.”

  I nodded.

  “It said, ‘Sophie must die.’ I didn’t think anything of it. Lots of strange peopl
e out there, you know?”

  “Sure.”

  “The next day I returned home and found my daughter’s favorite doll in my bathroom, its head ripped off.” She took several deep breaths before continuing. “In the context of the e-mail, the name meant nothing to me.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “My daughter’s doll. She’d called it Sophie.”

  We were both silent for a few moments.

  “Who had access to the house?” I said.

  “No one.” She looked at me for a second before returning her attention to the traffic. “The next e-mail came maybe a month later, from the same address. It read, ‘Hello.’”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then?”

  “Another few months go by.” She switched lanes and accelerated past a BMW ragtop. “A cryptic reference to a certain chemical substance. Again I failed to place the significance.”

  I waited for her to continue.

  “An experiment in my lab, ruined. The data was backed up, of course, but a point had been made.”

  “Nothing is safe,” I said.

  “Yes. A common theme in my life, I’m afraid.”

  “What sort of research do you do?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me. I was awake for most of my tenth-grade biology classes.”

  “In the past my work concerned the molecular interactions between lymphocyte receptors and their ligands.” She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “After that I designed a protocol for experimenting with the prion agents of the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.”

  “Wow.” I whistled once. “That was you that did that thing with the sponges?”

  “Yes.” She sounded perplexed. “I’m surprised you’ve heard of the process. It’s very technical—”

  I held up a hand. “I was joking. I didn’t understand a word you said.”

  The smile that had been forming on her face disappeared.

  “Let me ask the same question a different way,” I said. “Is there a lot of competition in what you do? Anybody out there trying to stop you from succeeding?”

  “No. Much to the chagrin of my employers, there’s little interest in my work.”

  We rode in silence for a few miles.

  “What do they want?” I said. “Do they ask for anything?”

  “That’s the worst part.” She maneuvered around a Suburban full of kids, a harried-looking blonde behind the wheel, talking on a cell phone. “They never say.”

  The cloud cover increased the farther north we went, an ugly blue-gray swath like bruises on the battered sky.

  “Another one came two days ago,” she said. “It concerned my daughter. A gift was delivered for her birthday. Rather unexpectedly.” She explained the details. I asked a few questions and quickly figured that the person initiating the action had to be close by, using a remote control of some sort. Too risky that the device might have been set off by a passerby.

  Neither of us spoke for a while. The traffic slowed more as we got to the LBJ Freeway, the inner loop of the city, an eight-lane, perpetually clogged highway bordered on each side by office towers and shopping malls.

  We were slowed behind a Dodge minivan, the back of which was plastered with stickers for a nondenominational church in southern Dallas County that allegedly had ten thousand members.

  Anita Nazari pushed a shock of dark hair out of her face and looked at me. Her eyes were wide but betrayed nothing. “Will you help me?”

  I returned her stare. “I’m out of the business.”

  “My daughter is ten years old.”

  “What about her father?” I said. “Most things like this are traceable to a disgruntled ex-spouse.”

  “My husband died a long time ago.” She paused. “He was in your special forces. All I know is that it was combat, in the Middle East somewhere.”

  I didn’t say anything. The image of Mike Baxter dying in a cramped hospital bed scrolled across my mind. I thought about a girl growing up without a father to protect her.

  The traffic eased and we drove past the Galleria shopping mall.

  “You were in the service, right?” Anita said.

  I nodded.

  “Did you see any combat?”

  “Where are we headed?” I stared out the window. A few drops of rain splattered on the glass.

  “My house. In Plano.”

  I sighed. “Start at the beginning.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Professor parked the stolen Ford with the corpse in the trunk in front of Plano City Hall, a four-story monolithic building located on Avenue K, near the older downtown section of the otherwise shiny and new suburban city. The relatively new government structure seemed out of place with the kitschy storefronts and cobblestone streets of the touristy downtown area.

  While driving north after leaving his now-compromised safe house in Dallas, he’d debated moving the hastily hidden body of the contractor to a more secure place. In the end, he’d decided the risk of a second disposal outweighed the risk of discovery by the authorities.

  He stepped out of the car and pulled on a tweed sport coat before walking through the front doors and into the foyer of the city building. The entry chamber was open and well lit, with marble floors and pale walls. Along one side of the room was a row of black-and-white photographs, images of stern-faced Caucasian men looking stonily into the camera. He walked closer and saw that they were the mayors of Plano, presented chronologically.

  In the middle of the room was a large round counter, like a kiosk, behind which sat a young African American woman wearing a telephone headset. He approached her with his most disarming smile. “Where can I find the department that handles building permits?”

  “Go down there.” The woman pointed to a hallway by the front entrance. “Last door on your left.”

  The Professor thanked her. A few moments later he pushed open a glass door marked PLANNING AND ZONING/BUILDING PERMITS and entered a large office zigzagged with cubicles.

  He asked a dull-eyed young man behind the front desk about building permits.

  “What do you want to know?” The man spat a mouthful of brown saliva into a small Styrofoam cup.

  The Professor tried to suppress his nausea. “I need to check on the permits for a house that is under construction.”

  “Gimme the address.” The man flipped a piece of paper on the desk, dropping a pencil on top.

  The Professor wrote down the information.

  The man tapped on a keyboard for a few minutes. “Construction’s been halted. Looks like no insurance for the contractor.”

  “So no one has been working on the site?”

  “Nope.” The man shook his head. “Not legally anyway.”

  “Could you give me the name of the contractor and the owner?”

  “Sure.” The man spat into the cup again before scribbling a few lines of text on the piece of paper. “That all you need?”

  “Yes, thank you.” The Professor picked up the paper and headed toward the door.

  “Hey, mister,” the man said.

  The Professor turned around.

  “Where’d you get those shades? They’re cool.”

  The Professor touched the designer frames on his temples. The lenses were lightly mirrored, appearing to be clear but not so. He had noted a similar style recently, worn by a young male country-and-western singer of ambiguous sexual orientation.

  “I, uh, bought them at the mall.”

  “Which one?”

  “You wouldn’t know it.” The Professor smiled. “It’s in another place.”

  Anita Nazari lived on a street of dreams, a serene strip of concrete near the pinnacle of the American nirvana. Carefully manicured lawns surrounded shiny new houses in the suburbs, far from the troubles of the inner city.

  But not far enough.

  She pulled to the curb in front of her home and stopped the car when it was even
with the slate sidewalk leading to the house. She got out. I did the same.

  “Nice place,” I said. The stucco had been painted a lemon yellow. The front porch was covered by a two-story archway, the curve at the top matching the arc of the front windows.

  “The school system is good here.” Anita walked to the front of the house.

  “Where’s the jack-in-the-box?”

  “There.” She pointed to the city-issued garbage can sitting at the end of the driveway by the street. “Actually, it’s probably not anymore. They’ve already picked up the trash.”

  “You didn’t save it?”

  “Why on earth would I do such a thing?” Her voice became shrill. “A reminder of the threat to my only child?”

  “Oh, I dunno. Evidence, maybe?” When her face paled at my remark, I shrugged and tried to look like it didn’t matter.

  Anita Nazari closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “If it doesn’t interfere with your investigative technique, why don’t you come inside?”

  I followed her into the house, marveling at the sameness of current residential architecture.

  Stairs in the middle of the entryway, next to a hallway leading back. To the right was a dining room. To the left was a small living room opening onto a wood-paneled library, its shelves all but empty. Between the two rooms was a wet bar.

  Lots of expensive molding everywhere. The dining area had padded walls, the fabric a patterned green silk. The floor was dark hardwood, roughly finished to look like it belonged in a peasant farmhouse and not a million-dollar suburban home.

  I imagined what the back half would look like. A vast open area, family room on one side, designer kitchen on the other.

  Without speaking, Anita walked down the hallway.

  I followed her into a vast open area, family room on one side, designer kitchen on the other. The rear of the house overlooked a covered brick patio with a built-in grill. Beyond that was a swimming pool.

  “I simply must have the name of your decorator.” I strolled around the family room and checked out the fifty-inch LCD screen hanging over the stone fireplace, trying to suppress my envy.