The Way I Die

by Derek Haas

“Yeah, well.” I toss a stick in the fire. “Maybe that’s for you and not for me.”

  I’m up early, doing sit-ups and push-ups, when Josh enters the room and sits on the bed, watching me. I ignore him, hope he gets bored and leaves, but he sits on the bed with owl eyes, his legs dangling above the floor.

  “What?”

  “Just sitting,” he answers.

  “Sit somewhere else.”

  He stands, moves over a couple of inches, and sits back down again. I continue with my sit-ups.

  “Are we going to go back to school?”

  “You’re taking a break.”

  “What about homework?”

  “No homework.”

  “What about science fair?”

  “No science fair.”

  “Can’t Dad email Ms. Hoang and find out what we have to do, and we can work on it from here?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  I stop, mid sit-up. “Are you a kid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you a lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “Then quit asking me questions and just accept what I say.”

  “You’re funny,” he says.

  “No, trust me, I’m not.”

  “Even that’s funny,” he says and giggles.

  I go back to the sit-ups.

  He slides down on the floor, hooks his feet under the bed, and tries to keep up with me.

  His father pokes his head inside the door. “Josh. What’s up?”

  “Exercising,” Josh grunts as he struggles to get his elbows to his knees.

  “Come on out of there and don’t bother Mr. Copeland.”

  Josh does one more sit-up and then hops up and claps his hands together. “I did ten,” he says.

  “Nine,” I say without breaking my rhythm.

  “Maybe it was nine,” he says to his father as he takes his hand and walks out of the room.

  Archie arrives at ten the next morning with his best commodity: information. We stand in the foyer. He has his fedora in his hands, and I hold a file he put together on Watts. “This is it?”

  “All I could get on short notice. I mean, it’s a lot of backstory Loeb already gave you, but there’s a little more detail in there. The problem is we don’t know when he got into Portland, where he’s flopping, what he’s driving, whether he got his guns here or brought them with him.”

  “What do you have?”

  Archie sneers at me, shakes his head. “I was trying to find a junction point, but I ain’t got one.”

  “I can’t sit and wait.”

  “He ain’t gonna find this place.”

  “I’m not insulting you Archie, I’m just saying if we play defense, we could be here a long time, and the longer we sit, the weaker our defense gets. It’s just the way it is.”

  “So whatchoo thinking, Copeland.”

  “A mistake.”

  “What d’you mean a mistake?”

  “I mean we need Boone to make a mistake and I put down Watts when he comes.”

  Archie’s eyes light up, seeing it. “I feel you,” he says. “The problem is . . . if Watts is as reckless as reported, he’s liable to take a whole bunch of people with him biting on our trap, right? You know I’m right.”

  “So we keep it as controlled as possible.”

  Archie moves his head from side to side like he’s a judge’s scale settling on the balance. “Control the chaos, huh.”

  “If we can.”

  “That’s never worked out too well in our favor when we tried it before.”

  “Doesn’t mean we stop trying.”

  Archie spreads his lips into a smile, his teeth catching the light, twinkling.

  “What?” I ask.

  “There he is,” he says, and shakes out a Camel.

  We can’t go back to the car wash, Archie tells me. He heard chatter cops are sniffing around the joint so the owner closed up shop, declared “maintenance problems,” and took a trip to Florida.

  Archie calls Curtis, who calls a guy, and Peyton and I go out to meet him.

  We’re at a rest stop near the Oregon-California border, watching for a truck to go by so we can follow it to a private location. Rest stops are good for making contact but not the best place to conduct business. State patrols check them regularly and if you linger too long, you’re bound to drum up suspicion. We stopped and got some tacos from a gas station store, those things looking more and more like mini-malls these days.

  Peyton attacks a burrito. “This surprises me,” she says between bites. “I didn’t figure you for a fast-food guy. I mean, this stuff goes right to my ass, but it’s just so good. I’ve seen you eat since we started, just coffee and garbage, and you still look like . . .” she gestures at me.

  “Genetics,” I say, although I met my father and that hypothesis doesn’t hold.

  “Must be,” Peyton says. “Your ticker or your metabolism or whatever it is they call it must be just going tick-tick-tick-tick-tick all the time. It’s not like that for me, let me tell you. First, the things I like to eat are . . .”

  A semitruck with a trailer rolls by and blasts twice on its horn as it switches lanes.

  “There’s our ride,” I say, and Peyton and I hop off the picnic table and climb into my sedan. We follow the truck for a couple of miles. The side reads “Rainbow Party Rentals” and on the back are “How’s My Driving?” and “This Vehicle Makes Wide Right Turns” signs. There aren’t many cars on the highway and I haven’t seen a police cruiser since we left Portland.

  The truck’s turn signal blinks and we follow without making it too noticeable. He turns right down a country lane, and we wait five minutes and follow. “Keep your eyes peeled,” I tell Peyton.

  “For what?”

  “You’ll know.”

  A few miles of a winding, wooded road and I think maybe I missed it but then Peyton says “There,” and I see where she’s looking. The front grille and bumper of the semi poke out from behind a burned-out, abandoned remnant of a farm equipment sales office. I ease the rental into the gravel lot and swing around behind the building so I’m parallel to the truck, blocked from any eyes on the road.

  A bearded man with half-moon crescent eyes sits on the back bumper of the rig, smoking a cigarette and swiping his finger on an iPad. He stands as we park and approach.

  “Okay,” he says. “Curtis tells me you need some gear.”

  “She does,” I say, and nod at Peyton.

  He opens a door cut into the big bay doors on the back of the truck and helps her onto the bumper and inside. I follow, and the man enters behind us.

  Phosphorescent lights come on like we’re inside a store, which is more or less where we stand. “Okay, look, everything we have is custom made but generally modeled after a brand you’ve heard of. What’re y’all looking for? Tac gear? Ammunition? Rifles, revolvers, semiautomatics, fully automatics?”

  As he continues, the lights flicker and brighten, illuminating the trailer until we see an impressive arsenal of weapons and gear. Each wall is covered floor to ceiling with drawers, pegboards, clothing racks, and shelves like we’re inside a Walmart.

  The salesman has an impressive Southern accent, drawing out his vowels as he runs down the equipment. “Okay, so what we got here is a Kevlar tactical bulletproof concealable security vest. That’s got one and a quarter pound of areal density. Real nice. That’s full coverage. Look at that. Front, back, both sides. It’s got trauma plate pockets with a self-suspending ballistic system. You like it, I’ll throw in a tactical response helmet with a polystyrene liner and three-millimeter polycarbonate face shield. Maybe you need it, maybe you don’t. Someone’s firing at your head . . . yeah, you’re gonna need it. There’s top of the line and this is above that.”

  Peyton fingers the gear, squints at me. “This is nicer than anything we had at the LAPD.”

  “You’re right about that, siste
r. No tax money’s paying for what we got.”

  He continues down the center, gesturing to his left and right. “Up there we got our version of the Arsenal Strike One. It’s got a seventeen-round detachable magazine and a nice short recoil. Fit your hand like a glove. Ours is like Coca-Cola, even better than the real thing, you ask me.

  “Okay, maybe you want something with more bite. Here’s our take on a Sig P227. That’s a .45 caliber. It’s gonna hold seven plus one and will put a hole through anything you need to air out. You want more than that, I can put you on a sprayer, but you look like you’re concerned with precision rather than suppression. Am I right? You don’t gotta answer. I know I’m right. Go with the Strike One.”

  Thirty minutes later, Peyton is the owner of brand-new body armor minus the helmet and two handguns, one semiauto and a revolver she can keep in her boot. We take a knife belt too and no money exchanges hands because Archie and Curtis have an understanding.

  The Southern salesman closes the back doors, locks them up, tips his cap our way, and I’m expecting a “Pleasure doing business with y’all,” but he gives us an “Okie, dokie, pokie” instead, hops into the cab of his semi, fires it up, and rolls out of there.

  Peyton helps me load the new purchases into the rental sedan.

  “Okay,” she says as she shuts the trunk. “Just who the fuck are you?”

  We eat bagel dogs from a food truck parked in a vacant lot between little houses east of downtown Portland. There’s a propane heater next to a picnic table so we take seats and dig in. “I kept saying, damn, this guy must be CIA or some other alphabet but it didn’t really work with the way you carry yourself. I’ve never met a contract killer before so I just don’t . . . I didn’t know.”

  “Hmm.”

  “How long?”

  “A long time.”

  “How many?”

  “A lot.”

  “You ever get caught?”

  “No.”

  “How do you even start in something like that?”

  “Just like this.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Someone who did the job talked to me the way I’m talking to you.”

  “Oh.” She puts down her bagel dog. “Ohhhh. Oh, no. Sorry, man. If that’s what you’re thinking . . . that ain’t me.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  She picks up her food again, puts it back down. “That’s just not me. What I told you before, about what happened to Miguel. That was a one-time deal. That was a personal thing.”

  “Okay,” I repeat. My bagel dog is almost gone. I don’t know what they add to the bread, but it’s delicious. The food trucks in the Pacific Northwest know what they’re doing. I stand and toss the paper tray into a trashcan and head back toward the car. “Let’s go.”

  Peyton hasn’t moved, her eyes far away. What she’s seeing—the future or the past—I have no idea.

  “Hey,” I snap, and her eyes drift to me. “I said, ‘Let’s go.’”

  She gets up and follows me to the car, dazed.

  She leaves her wrapper and Coke can on the table, forgotten.

  The trick is to give away Boone’s whereabouts without making it too obvious we’re setting a trap. Knowing Keith Watts’s penchant for casualties, it would be best to lead him somewhere isolated. Innocents are innocent, and I’m not in the business of killing people who aren’t in the game. It’s not moral . . . it’s practical. Each person who dies has friends and family members who want answers. Once, a bystander in Paris was run over as a direct result of my actions and his brother turned out to be a crime lord who put a price on my head. It got messy from there. Lesson very much learned.

  Upstairs, I knock on Boone’s door and he answers with a frown, his face drawn, like the events of the past month have aged him years. I pull out a drop phone and hold it out to him.

  He looks at me, wary, like I’m offering a poisonous snake.

  “Who do you trust at your company?”

  “Uh, my CFO, Donald Blake. My head of IT, Jessica Chen.”

  “Who don’t you trust?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think.”

  “Louis Newman, head of sales. Big gossip. Always in everyone else’s department, telling them how they should do their jobs. I should’ve axed him a long time ago but I put it off.”

  “Call him. Tell him for reasons you can’t explain, you had to duck out for a bit. And you need him to meet you in Forest Park at the hiking trailhead at 9 P.M. Make up something he needs to bring to you, a laptop, a file, whatever sounds plausible.”

  “Okay. Is this bait? Like you’re baiting the killer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why do you think he’ll go for it?”

  “I’m guessing that Piotr Malek has someone in your company feeding him information. If it’s not Louis Newman, it’s someone else, but he’ll hear about it and blab.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s what I would’ve done. If I can’t find the target, I find someone the target is in contact with and go through him.”

  Boone shifts uncomfortably, then takes the phone from my hand. He tries to do it quickly so I won’t see his hand shaking.

  “When this is done, you can keep that phone and check in on your business for real. But let me eliminate this threat and buy enough time to remove future threats completely.”

  He nods, nods some more. “I’ll call him right now.”

  Archie drops me a mile away, and armed with a trail map, I swing into the park and hike to find the best view of the parking lot. I wear a brown and green hoodie with brown pants that might as well be camouflage in the forest. I can’t believe how green the park is this time of year, but a light dusting of rain just as the sky darkens provides me with the answer. I’ll take the green over the endless whiteness of Michigan anyday.

  No stars tonight, no moon, and though the parking area is surrounded by an equestrian village, a nature center, and a couple of bathrooms, dense forest presses in on it like a shroud. I timed my arrival with Boone making his call, so Watts can’t beat me to the lot if he takes the bait.

  Cars come and go in fits and starts, like the rain, but no one suspicious emerges.

  A couple of hand-holding hikers, a teenager on his mountain bike, a group of parents and children here to ride horses enter and exit the lot. They park, they move out, they return, they drive away, and as the park closes, the lot empties. I hole up in a thick copse on the top of a hill with plenty of cover, and I’m seated, low to the ground, with no trail nearby, opposite the equestrian center. Someone could flank me, but it’d be impossible to know I’m here with my back to a tree trunk. My watch reads ten till nine.

  Archie will drive into the lot at five after. If another car is here, he’s to park along the far side of the area, flash his lights, and see what reaction he gets. He’s in the vulnerable position of this plan, but he insisted on taking it.

  Twin cones of light sweep the forest and a Buick rolls into the parking lot slowly, like a child entering an unfamiliar room. The car is nice, one of the luxury series, befitting the head of sales of a multimillion-dollar company. It circles the small parking area a couple of times, and when its headlights bounce off the restrooms and illuminate its own windshield, I make out a single driver, no one else in the car. He’s got a full head of hair but that’s all I can see before the headlights cycle past like a prison spotlight and the windshield darkens again. The car circles into a U-turn and backs into a spot. Dammit, I can’t tell if it’s Watts driving the Buick or if it’s what’s-his-name the head of sales. The car cuts its engine, then its lights, and faces the entrance to the parking area like a dragon in a cave.

  I steal a glance at my watch. Five past nine.

  The engine of the Buick tink, tink, tinks as it cools. My ears perk up and I’m watching for movement in the forest around me in case Watts has the same idea I had, my eyes long since adjusted to the dark. Nothing. No animals twitching, no ow
ls hooting, just a dark heaviness above the treetops that seems to close down like the lid of a coffin.

  Archie’s SUV eases into the lot and stays on the north end, away from me, per the plan. If Watts makes a move, I can slip in behind him and put him down. Pop, pop, and take him out before he knows he was set up.

  Archie parks thirty yards away from the Buick and points his headlamps directly at it, so the driver has to shield his eyes with his forearm. It is an amateur’s gesture, the gracelessness of it, and it makes me think this is the head of sales after all, running the errand Boone assigned him.

  Archie flashes his high beams twice, and the man in the Buick leans over to the passenger seat, then opens the door on his side and climbs out holding what looks like a laptop, but it’s hard to tell. He keeps his eyes shielded with his forearm as he takes a hesitant step toward the SUV. His build is soft, not that that means anything. I’ve seen contract killers in all shapes and sizes.

  “What the hell, Matthew?” he calls out, and I’m convinced this is the guy Boone called, and maybe I was wrong, maybe this prick didn’t blab to anyone, maybe he’s innocent. We set the trap but the fox never crept into the henhouse. And if that’s the case, then Watts has a different plan of attack or isn’t as good as I thought.

  Head of Sales continues across the lot like a moth pulled to a candle, clearly holding a small computer and not any type of weapon, clearly not the guy we are hoping for, when a new set of headlights wash over the lot.

  A park ranger’s truck, a giant four-by-four, green, with Park Service printed on the side in reflective yellow letters crawls into the area like a shark in a lagoon. It has one of those side-mounted spotlights, and it illuminates Archie’s window and then splashes Head of Sales so he’s lit up from both sides. I don’t know what this ranger usually breaks up in a state park right before closing time but I can’t imagine this looks good. The ranger opens his door to step down from the driver’s side of his truck, and when he does, the side-mounted spotlight swings with the door. The light cuts across the Buick’s windshield, and I catch movement inside the car that wasn’t there before.

  A second man in the back seat, head hunched, watching.