by Joshua Guess
After a long, aimless drive to lose any tails, I made my way to where I kept my blackmail evidence against Russey. Of all the places I’d tucked away things like money and weapons, this had to be the most secure. Untraceable. A location where even being tracked down wouldn’t reveal anything to the person tracking me.
The best solution I could come up with was to not hide everything in some derelict building or under Russey’s nose like some damn movie cliché, but in plain sight. So I went to the bank. My bank, as a matter of fact. A safe deposit box at a location I regularly visited was perfect.
I managed to get in a few minutes before the place was supposed to close for the day. Luckily everything I needed was in a small bag. Recordings, transcripts, lots of handy material. In and out took less than ten minutes.
I grabbed a sticky note from a teller on my way out. I sat in the car for a bit, writing out the names of the investigators assigned to various cases that would lead back to Russey. From there it only took a few minutes during a brief stop at a coffee shop where I could use the Wi-Fi and the borrowed laptop of a depressed author drowning his writer’s block in cups of java five dollars at a time.
Once I had numbers for the police in question, I drove to a particular spot and made some calls.
Or rather, I tried to.
I sat on top of a building across the street from Jen’s car. The bag of blackmail material was in the trunk. I planned on watching until one of the detectives showed up. I knew enough about police to know that of the seven on my list, at least one of them would jump at the chance for a gimme even if it was provided by a mysterious tipster.
Yet I sat there with the phone in hand and hesitated. I knew why, but knowing did nothing to push me into action.
Everything that had happened so far could be covered up. I was a fixer. I knew that even if circumstances were pushing the boundaries of what my knowledge and skill could clean up or distort, we were still in the territory of possible. The last five years of my life were dedicated to doing it well. Time and effort have a sort of momentum, and it was this fundamental disagreement which stopped me.
A big part of me rebelled at the idea of burning it all down. Of seeing that work destroyed. Because if I did this, there would no doubt be police watching and maybe even actively searching every remaining Russey property. Tre Fratelli would definitely have a police presence tonight. The item at the very top of the bag was a recorded conversation between the three Franklin brothers talking after hours about the details of their arrangement with Russey. Idiots.
I knew I had to do it. There was no question. Like any plunge it just took a few minutes to work up the nerve.
“Detective Smith, please,” I said after I dialed the first number.
Watching the cops show up was fun. I popped the trunk remotely as the unmarked cruiser slowed, then walked toward the back of the building. I was a little worried they’d move too slowly, so I’d thrown in a story about being a Russey employee with cold feet after finding out the boss was planning a big job with a lot of potential civilian casualties.
I broke the back off the phone and removed the battery, tossing them toward different corners of the roof. There were several more in my pockets, all activated and ready to use. The one Kate had the number for was tucked into my jacket, reserved solely for an emergency on her part and hopefully never used.
It might seem wasteful, but this kind of over-preparation was a big part of how we managed to stay under the radar. How many criminals were caught because they killed with a knife and kept it after cleaning? The expense of guns made people keep them despite how laughably simple it was to forensically match bullets. The badly prepared made incriminating calls from their own cell phones and committed a thousand other sins of ignorance.
I didn’t need to stay free for long, but those habits ran deep.
Using another of my phones, I called a number etched into my brain from hundreds of uses, at least one a day. After listening to the short introduction, I spoke.
“It’s after six right now, Tom,” I said. “I’m sure you know how long today has been. So how about tomorrow at noon, we meet up. Have a talk, see where it goes. I’ll be in that place where we did the landscaping five years ago.”
After ending the call, I broke that phone apart too. This time I ground the handset under my heel. I didn’t want anyone stumbling across it and putting it back together. On the off chance Russey managed to trace the number from the voice message service, I didn’t want some civilian being tracked down and killed.
There was a lot of work to do in slightly less than eighteen hours. Russey would be organizing everyone he could get in touch with between now and then. The police would hopefully interpret this activity, assuming they were watching, as proof of imminent violence. Which it would be. Just not the kind they expected from the story I’d given them.
I climbed down the ladder running from the roof to a second floor landing and hugged the wall.
It wasn’t a random building, obviously. Parking the car at some arbitrary location would have worked, but not as well. Having tackled Russey’s information services, the next item on my list was to weaken the organization’s muscles. I’d killed or injured a bunch of people, but I was still outnumbered to a suicidal degree.
Knowing what your enemy is going to do and roughly when they’re going to do it are crucial pieces of information to have. Inside this building was the main armory, held under a Russian nesting doll of false identities. As soon as shit hit the fan, Russey would have had people here around the clock. The armory was certainly occupied.
The door next to the ladder opened on a hallway. I briefly wondered, as I pointed my gun through the open door, whether the men stationed in the armory knew the police were outside. Not that it mattered.
I inhaled deeply, then bellowed through the door. “The fucking cops are here!”
Then I emptied the magazine into the wall at the other end of the hallway. No one was harmed; the wall in question was lined with steel on the inside. Much as I wanted to watch the show, risking arrest wasn’t ideal. I shut the door and slipped a padlock through the metal loops welded to it. I’d picked this building for our armory for this very feature, reasoning that an escape route to the roof was never a bad thing to have.
I scampered back up the ladder an dashed back the way I’d come, vaulting from one roof to another. The shouting voices and calls for backup faded in the distance.
Half a block away, I raced down a fire escape and stopped for a second at the bottom to catch my breath. That was when something slammed into my lower back like a freight train, knocking the wind out of me in a wheezing oomph as I hurtled forward.
I didn’t go far. Caught off guard, I didn’t have time to brace myself against being rammed into the dumpster sitting near the ladder. I did manage to tuck my head at the last second, taking the brunt of the impact on the side of my jaw and temple rather than face first.
“Fucker,” I choked as I whipped an elbow back. Whoever hit me was ready for it, the strike hitting nothing but air. Two powerful, rapid punches rained onto my kidneys like hammer blows.
The pain buckled my knees and sent me sprawling on my belly. One hand held me partially up, but only in a technical sense as most of me was laid out flat. My other hand was wrenched back, a cuff slapped on it with a ratcheting noise.
This was not a cop, or if it was they were terrible at their job. They hadn’t identified themselves. I wasn’t inclined to be gentle at that moment, and decided not to give them the benefit of the doubt. With a Herculean effort, I flexed my body against the restraining grasp on my left wrist and donkey-kicked.
A strangled cry was followed immediately by a release of pressure as whoever it was coped with the heel of my shoe crushing their testicles. I pushed to my knees, still feeling the radiating throb across my back with two bright stars of burning pain in the middle.
When I spun myself around, I found Stephen. He looked terrible and angry in a way t
hat struck me as biblical. He was in the middle of sweeping his gun toward me, the bloody lines on his wrist from the zip ties earlier that morning standing out brilliantly.
As he was trained, his index finger was alongside the trigger guard. It was instinct. My own took over on sight of the threat, and that probably saved my life. The pain in my back was so deep and powerful it disrupted rational thought, so the hundreds of hours of practice burned into my muscles picked up the slack.
My hand shot forward and wrapped around the pistol, thumb jammed through the trigger guard and pulling forward. It looked insane, and it was incredibly dangerous. If Stephen thought to push the gun rather than pull back, my own thumb would probably engage the trigger and I’d shoot myself in the face.
But Stephen, fighting his own powerful hurt, didn’t think rationally. He acted as people caught off guard will usually do and pulled the weapon to get it away. While he did, I pushed forward and slapped my other hand over his, capturing the finger trying desperately to push my thumb out of its space.
I grabbed the finger and twisted it back, snapping the bone. Stephen’s struggles altered on a basic level, going from murderous strain to a clear flight response. He let go of the weapon and kicked at me to try to create distance.
Which I was fine with, so I let him. The gun came with me. As he skittered backward on his ass, injured hand cupped in the other, I ejected the magazine. In a series of quick, efficient motions I also cleared the chamber and removed the slide before tossing the pieces to either side.
I stood. The pain was still there, now joined by a harmony of smaller hurts in my knees and face beating in time with my pulse, but it was somewhat muted. My head was remarkably clear, the chain of logical consequences unfolding without effort.
I had to stop Russey, which meant I had to get away. I had to go through Stephen to do that.
“Third time’s the charm,” I muttered, my voice low but filled with violent certainty.
22
Then
I pulled the bag off the head of the squirming, terrified man. The gag split his face, forcing his mouth almost as wide as his eyes. He knew enough to understand that by seeing my face, he was well and truly fucked.
“Hi,” I said. “I bet you know why you’re here.”
‘Here’ was the boathouse situated thirty feet from the back door of a rental cabin. No one had rented it, which made it ideal. About half of the other cabins dotting the huge property were occupied, but this one was closed for repairs. I knew because I was on the crew of contractors hired to fix them, one of the many odd jobs I took on to widen my knowledge base and skill set. Normally I would have avoided mixing the civilian and crooked parts of my life, but the isolated location and easy access to water made it perfect.
I gestured around the room. “You probably also know what all this is about, I’m guessing.”
The man’s eyes flicked from me to his surroundings. What he saw drew a garbled squeak, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t fill me with a little joy.
No boat was in the boathouse. The wide open space where the boat would enter was closed, its folding door secured tight and a foam baffle attached to its bottom. The water flowing under and through the space looked black below the terrified man.
His chair was screwed into several heavy timbers and suspended over the water. That by itself was enough to make anyone tied to it shit themselves inside out, as a fall would lead to certain death by drowning. Yet somehow I thought the other details were what did it for the man, whose name was Alan Burns. Alan took in the sheets of plastic draped over every surface but for the battered toolbox off to my right.
“I’ve never killed anyone before,” I said. A flicker of hope danced in Alan’s eyes at the words, and I could nearly read his thoughts. Frustration that he was gagged, that was obvious. If he could speak, his practiced tone and facile mind could find a gap in my defenses and wedge it open with words. Oh, yes. He could chatter his way out of it if only he could speak.
I shifted my weight on the empty drywall bucket serving as my seat. “I’ve come close once or twice, you understand. I’ve been doing this nearly two years now, and you can’t work for hire the way I do without having your share of scrapes. I’ve shot a few people who ended up living. A couple knife fights—and man, who even gets to say that, right? Most people live their whole lives without even getting into a brawl in a dive bar, but I’ve been in more than one actual knife fight in less than twenty-four months. Crazy.”
I shook my head, a wry smile on my face. It was an expression I’d learned to cultivate, one my acting coach helped craft and hone to perfection. It made me approachable and trustworthy. It highlighted my features in a way that emphasized the more innocent aspects of them. It rounded my cheeks, crinkled the corners of my eyes, and softened the harsh frown lines that had begun to form around my mouth.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I told him. “There’s one man I would have killed. Still will, if I’m being honest with you. But just when things started to look up, he went and got deployed somewhere way too classified for me to have a snowball’s chance of figuring out. But I’ve learned to be patient. I even started seeing a therapist, can you believe that?”
Alan managed a look of friendly, even jovial, surprise so apparently genuine that even knowing what he was, I almost believed it myself. Surely not, that expression said. You? Why, sir, you’re a shining example of mental health, my current circumstance as your bound prisoner in a murder hut notwithstanding.
I found myself enjoying the ability to say what was on my mind. It was unique, considering the secrets I had to keep, and oddly freeing. My therapist couldn’t know about the shady side of my life, obviously, so there was a lot I had to keep in check. “Do you know what she told me, Alan?” Alan shook his head, by all appearances eager to hear what Dr. Wilkins told me.
“She said I needed to pick up a hobby,” I said with a rueful shake of my head. “A hobby! She wasn’t wrong, though. I figured that much out way before our first session. That’s why I started taking classes in all kinds of things, from mechanical engineering to human anatomy.”
As I said this, I casually reached over and flipped the top of the toolbox open. I left it there, returning my attention to Alan.
“I did some time working with plumbers and other craftsmen, learning a bit of this and that. In the last two years I’ve done crash courses in something like twenty different trades. I’ve taken classes on everything from chess—yeah, they teach a class on it down at the community center, believe it or not—to reading body language. Tons of stuff.”
Alan stared at me. Not intently, as would have been perfectly understandable given the situation, but like he couldn’t quite figure me out. Hard to blame him there.
I repositioned myself on the bucket and put my elbows on my knees. “You might wonder why. Truth is, I need to keep myself busy. Really busy. I need to have so much going on that I can’t think about what happened a few years back. To a lesser degree, staying busy helps me to cope with what I’m doing now.” I waved a hand around at the plastic sheeting. “The whole criminal-for-hire deal, you know?”
Now another strain of fear blossomed to life on Alan’s face, a dawning of comprehension. Until that moment he probably hadn’t put much logical thought into the why of his situation, not really. Being kidnapped and tied up has a way of narrowing your focus.
“This guy I want to kill? He got drunk and wrecked his car into my wife and daughter,” I said. “He didn’t kill them on purpose. I know that intellectually, but that doesn’t make me want to kill him any less.”
I leaned forward, letting the casual expression fall away and meeting Alan’s eyes. His skin was greasy with sweat, the sour smell of it overwhelming the peaty aroma of the water beneath him. “I’ll be the first to admit I’m hesitant when it comes to killing someone, much less murdering them in cold blood. I think most people would be. But for me it’s to a point where I was starting to wonder whether I had it in
me to kill even to save my own life.”
I reached into the toolbox and pulled out a cloth-wrapped bundle which I rested on one knee. Alan’s eyes moved to it magnetically, as if drawn by an irresistible gravity.
I laid a hand lightly on the cloth. “But you know, Alan, when I got word someone was looking to pay to kill you, it got my attention. First I thought, man, who would order a hit in our little town? I have to go out of state on jobs a lot of the time. So I asked around.”
The fabric unfolded beneath my fingers. The movements weren’t melodramatic or practiced. I just unwrapped the hard object inside. “That’s when I heard what you did.”
I raised the knife and showed it to him, shaking it a bit to catch the thin light from the naked bulb dangling over us. It was the only source of light thanks to the black fabric over the windows, but it was enough. “You used this.”
The blade transfixed Alan. Figuratively, that is. He couldn’t take his eyes away from the weapon, an item he had surely thought beyond recovery.
“I decided to look into it, so I took the contract on you,” I said. “I think you already know you were fairly sloppy, Alan. The family suspected you even if the cops couldn’t find anything to base a warrant on. Fortunately for me, I don’t have that limitation. Friend of mine managed to crack the GPS in your car. Bet you thought you were smart, leaving your phone behind. Once I knew a general location, and knowing you’re in pretty bad shape physically, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to find the body.”
I sat the knife back on my knee, then leaned forward again. “I’m going to take that gag off now. We’re a quarter mile from the nearest occupied cabin, so no one will hear if you scream. I’d advise against it anyway, though. I have a headache and I’m not in a good mood.”