by Jack Quaid
‘I’m Maria Garcia,’ she said. ‘And I have a problem. I have been led to believe that you are the kind of man who can get rid of…’ She paused as if searching for the right word. ‘Motherfuckers.’
It was true. Russell was known to get rid of motherfuckers on occasion.
‘This particular motherfucker is due to testify in court tomorrow morning at nine am. This is something we would prefer he wouldn’t do. We have reached out to him, tried to convince him, but he’s, ah, pigheaded,’ Garcia said. ‘You get rid of motherfucker for me?’
Russell scratched the stubble on his cheek and took his time about it. ‘If you’ve got a motherfucker problem. That sounds like your motherfucker problem, not my motherfucker problem.’
Garcia folded her hands on her lap and looked out the window. ‘I was told you would be amicable.’
‘I don’t know who the fuck told you that,’ Russell said. ‘I can think of a million reasons not to do this thing for you and not one reason to do it.’
Garcia motioned to the duffle bag sitting on the passenger seat next to Russell. ‘How about two million reasons?’
Russell glanced. The bag was open, and when he tilted his head, he saw slabs of cash. ‘Nope,’ Russell said with a shake of his head. ‘I can’t help you. Now if you could pull over to the side of the curb and let me out, I would appreciate it.’
For a long time, Garcia didn’t say a word, and the limousine continued down State Street. Then eventually she raised the back of her hand and tapped her diamond ring on the glass. Thirty-Eight pulled the car over to the sidewalk, and when it stopped rolling, Russell wrapped his hand around the handle, opened the door, and climbed out.
Winter in Chicago was brutal. Despite the overcoat, a gust of cold air cut through him. Russell wrapped his hands around his middle and watched as the limousine pulled back into the street and got lost in the flood of traffic.
He looked at his watch, muttered a profanity under his breath, and stepped off toward the train station.
He was late for Angus’s birthday party.
Like most of his friends in the late-1960s New Jersey community of Freehold, Russell was drafted into a war he didn’t support or fully understand. He had a knack for shooting and was assigned to the First Marine Division Sniper Platoon. He also had an attitude problem, so working alone in the middle of the jungle suited him and the Marine brass just fine.
Russell had become so effective at killing that the NVA had finally had enough and sent their best sniper, Bao Yen, to hunt him out. Now, Bao Yen was feared by any solider in an American uniform. There were men who refused to be promoted due to the simple reason that when Bao Yen started firing, he always aimed for the highest rank first. Intelligence came through that Bao was somewhere near Russell’s camp and waiting for him. Never fearful of a fight, Russell geared up and made his way out into the jungle. For three days and three nights, Russell and Bao played a jungle chess game of patience, nerve, and balls.
On the fourth day, Bao made a mistake. For a split second, the sun bounced off his rifle scope. It was only for a split second, but it was long enough to give away his position. That’s when Russell had him. He didn’t fuck around and squeezed the trigger, sending a .50 caliber round out of his M2.
Russell shot Bao through the scope of his rifle.
It didn’t even touch the sides.
The shot made him a legend.
By the time Russell turned twenty-one, he had amassed over three hundred confirmed kills and had a ninety-thousand-dollar bounty on his head from the NVA. The draft required him for three years’ service, but he stayed for the duration of the war and was one of the last few soldiers to be airlifted out of Saigon in 1975.
Sebastian Russell went into the Marines a tough kid from New Jersey and came out one of the most proficient and effective killers warfare had ever seen.
Then it was over.
No more shooting.
No more training.
No more killing.
In 1975 Sebastian Russell was just another unwanted vet on the streets of New Jersey. The friends he had before the war were strangers, and they went out of their way to pretend they didn’t recognise him when he bumped into them on the street. He knew why. Stories about him had filtered back from the war. Half of them were lies. But half of them were true too, and it didn’t take long for all those people welcoming him back to disappear.
Then there were the panic attacks. Before the war, he had never had one in his life. Three days after he stepped off the plane at JFK, he started to get the shakes and insomnia, and he couldn’t stay in a supermarket for more than a couple of minutes at a time before he started to look for the exits.
The tears were the worst. They came without warning and for no reason, and once they did, they wouldn’t stop. He cried waiting for a bus. He cried sitting at the bar at the Stone Pony, and he cried after making love to a girl he went to high school with who had two kids and a troubled marriage.
Russell didn’t understand. His old man was a WWII vet, but he was in a nursing home in Freehold, and when Russell tried talking to him about it, the old man couldn’t remember who he was, so he thought he just better keep the crying and the shakes to himself.
For three months he managed to hold down a job as a busboy, then there was a short stint as a delivery man for a local furniture store, and he even applied for the NYPD, but having three hundred confirmed kills on his resume didn’t bode well during the interview process. So Russell went back to the only thing he knew how to do. Kill.
A man with his skill set didn’t have to look hard for work. If you have the ability to make people dead from a mile and a half away, there’s always somebody who’s got someone they need to make dead from a mile and a half away.
No women.
No children.
No politicians.
No cops.
They were his rules, and he didn’t bend them for anyone.
After the first job, the shake in his hand disappeared. The panic attacks ceased, and the uncontrollable crying just simply went away.
There was no running and gunning for him. He planned every single last detail and every last moment down to the second. He didn’t like surprises. In his sort of business, surprises would get him killed. What he needed to be was prepared. He needed to be disciplined, and he needed to be calm. Anything else would get him killed. Before each job, Russell would work the target for weeks leading up to pulling the trigger. He would know every single last detail, from their day-to-day movements to whether they shook their dick with their left or their right hand after taking a piss.
After a couple of years, Russell had squirrelled away a few hundred thousand dollars and was able to only take on the jobs that weren’t complete suicide missions. A couple of jobs a year were enough to keep him going, and the rest of his time was spent in the museums and art galleries of the world. Despite wherever he went, there was always one place he kept returning to. Paris.
It wasn’t the city itself, although he did enjoy being there. There was a small cafe on rue Caulaincourt called Café Francoeur. The food was just average, and the coffee by the Paris standards wasn’t particularly good. Russell went to Café Francoeur every night at ten o'clock because of the waitress, Genevieve Brunett. For two straight months, Russell asked her out for a night cap after she finished work, and every single night for two months, Genevieve said no. Then when Russell was on the verge of giving up altogether, her answer was finally yes.
Genevieve Brunett was a Paris native. Her parents had her late in life, and by the time she was nineteen years old, she had lost her father to cancer and her mother to a broken heart. Genevieve was a true bohemian in every sense. Part model, part photographer, part jazz singer, and not committed to anything. She was the type of woman people wrote pop songs about. Two weeks after she finally accepted a date with Sebastian Russell, they were married. She called him ‘Jimmy’ because she thought it sounded more American. Nine months later, Angus
was born.
And for fifteen years, they had a good life. A nice house in Oak Park, Illinois, two cars, and a local community that thought Russell was just another regular, everyday kind of guy.
Genevieve knew what her husband was. At first he told her he sold machine parts for tractors and farm machinery, but she never fully believed that. He seemed too self-assured, cool, or confident to be content being a machinery salesman. So when Russell finally told her the truth, she wasn’t surprised.
‘Are they bad people?’ she asked.
He nodded, and that was all right with her.
Some part of her was even impressed that her husband wasn’t like all the other husbands in the neighbourhood with their nine-to-five jobs and beer bellies. To her, those men were dead inside. They didn’t know how well they had it, and as a consequence, they let life pass them by while they watched American football and reality television. Not her Jimmy. There was something about his line of work that made him enjoy every single minute he was home. He always bounced out of bed at three in the morning when Angus would wake for a feed. He would plan day trips to Six Flags, the lake, or wherever. He never lost his temper. He never lost his cool or the smile on his face. He knew that every moment could be his last, so there was no point wasting any of them.
Their life was perfect.
But nothing lasts forever.
Especially for an assassin.
Russell was forty-five minutes late when he cut across the lawn of his Oak Park home.
When he saw the front door was wide open, he unbuttoned his overcoat and wrapped his fingers around the Kimber .45 he had holstered at the small of his back and held it low by his thigh.
‘Is everything okay, Jimmy?’ a neighbour called out as he shovelled snow from his driveway.
‘Everything’s just fine. Go back inside.’
‘I saw your door was open.’
‘Go back inside, Jerry.’
Despite being back in his suburban Oak Park neighbourhood, with his station wagon, his dog, and his friendly neighbours, he wasn’t ‘Jimmy’ anymore. He was Russell, and Russell’s mind raced to the worst-case scenario as he stepped through the door.
He raised his weapon and carefully made his way down the hallway of his modest three-room, two-storey Tudor home that looked the same as every other modest three-room, two-storey Tudor home on the block.
He cleared each room, sweeping left to right in the event that somebody was in there, hidden and waiting. The dining room, lounge, and office all came up clear.
Then he reached the kitchen.
Genevieve had put up a fight.
The room was a mess, with a HAPPY BIRTHDAY banner hanging half-torn down from the wall and the cake on the floor that had been trampled throughout the room.
Russell crouched down and looked at the refrigerator door. There was a smear of blood and traces of hair from where somebody had taken a hit.
He dry rubbed his face.
The consequences of twenty years of killing had gotten him there.
Something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye—a VHS tape.
On the table. All that it said was: PLAY ME.
And that’s just what he did.
Russell took the videotape into the lounge, ejected the tape inside, and slipped the new one in.
The video was a mess. When the tracking kicked in and cleaned it up, he saw Angus. He was in the kitchen. He was frightened, and tears ran down his cheeks and blood down his nose.
Russell’s knees shook, and he stumbled a couple of steps until the coffee table hit the back of his calves, and he sat on it and watched and listened and tried not to cry himself.
A voice came over the VHS: ‘You have been hired to perform a service. You will perform this service. You will not talk about this service you have been hired to perform. If you do not perform this service. Your wife and your son will be murdered.’ Her voice broke. She drew a breath and continued. ‘If you talk to anybody about this service you have been hired to perform, they will be killed. If you refuse to comply in any way, they will be killed.’ A hand entered the side of the frame. In its palm was a revolver. It pushed into Angus’s temple. ‘You have until eight o’clock tomorrow morning.’ The camera panned down to a piece of paper with a number on it. ‘Call this number.’
Russell reached for the portable phone from the table by the couch and dialled.
When the line was picked up, he only had three words to say. ‘Who’s the target?’
There were many ways to kill somebody. A bullet at two thousand metres. A shiv, prison-style in the back. Up close and personal with a .45. Over the past twenty-five years in the killing business, Russell had learnt them all. The one technique that was hands down, absolutely the most preferred mode of closing the eyes of a human being was always, and always would be, making the death look like an accident.
That was how Russell would dispose of Joseph Ferguson. That’s the name he was given. He was the star witness in the trial against Maria Garcia.
The woman who had his family was the head of the Santa Blanca cartel. Now, this cartel wasn’t some group of teenage thugs roaming the streets and getting into shit. The Santa Blanca cartel was made up of international mad, bad bastards who were dangerous to know, with menacing presences in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honduras, Central America, and now Chicago. They had their dirty hands in all kinds of businesses from drug smuggling to human trafficking, gunrunning, extortion, and all other kinds of dastardly activity. The assassination of a federal witness was just another day at the office for them.
Ferguson was a rotten cop. A thirteen-year veteran with the Chicago PD, who many would argue did far more bad than he ever did good on the streets of Chi-Town. He started off as a rookie taking free blow jobs from hookers and free drinks from bar owners without liquor licences and, over the years, expanded into shaking down drug dealers, extortion, blackmail, and finally murder. His path crossed with Maria Garcia when she recruited him to identify and eliminate her competition in the drug trade. Six months later the entire South Side drug trade belonged to the Santa Blanca cartel.
Then Ferguson fucked up. Late on a Tuesday night after an eight ball and half a bottle of Jameson, Ferguson ran over an elderly man walking his dog and drove his car into the wall of a 7-Eleven. He knocked himself out on the wheel, and when he woke, he was handcuffed to a hospital bed. In conjunction to the booze and coke in his system, he had a trunk full of MAC-10s. He was looking at ten years, and anybody who knew Ferguson knew that he couldn’t do ten years.
So he turned rat and told the district attorney everything.
Every. Last. Thing.
For a cokehead, he had an impeccable memory. He remembered names, faces, dates. If he was introduced to a guy in a night club at three am a year ago, Ferguson could remember the name of the guy’s girlfriend, what they drank, what time they left, who they left with, and how they all fit into the larger Chicago criminal scene. He was a fucking treasure trove of information, and Russell could see why Maria Garcia wanted him dead. Any which way he looked at it, Joseph Ferguson was a piece of shit, and Russell had no problem taking care of him.
On the surface, and to any competent detective, the death of Joseph Ferguson would appear as an unfortunate accident. To those who were in the business of disappearing motherfuckers, it would look like something else entirely. Russell has developed what he liked to refer to as the ‘Factory Car Bomb.’ It was a technique which could explode a vehicle by using no detonators, no explosives, no nothing. Only the parts that came with the car the day it rolled off the assembly line. Russell had used the ‘Factory Car Bomb’ so often that two years ago, Audi performed a factory recall on three thousand of its models.
Russell was given the address of Ferguson’s safe house, a hotel on Ninth. No doubt, considering the importance of the case, Ferguson would be in his suite, surrounded by a handful of feds. Most likely two to four in the same suite and at least another two in a room next door
or across the hall. If they had the resources, and Russell saw no reason why they wouldn’t, there would be at least another fed in the lobby just keeping an eye out for anything suspicious. Going in guns blazing would be a suicide mission. Russell was good, but nobody was that good. After twenty-five years, Russell found that the one place that was never under guard was the vehicle. It was always searched for explosives before use but never under guard.
The vehicle was easy for Russell to find in the underground car park of the Sheraton Grand. A Lincoln SUV. Black in paint. Dark tinted windows. Antennas on the roof. From the outside, the vehicle looked like the thousands of other SUVs on the road. But that was from the outside. On the inside it was a whole other beast. It was one of the vehicles that SWAT took into battle and therefore pimped with polycarbonate glass strong enough to stand up against any high-powered rifles. It also had armoured fuel tanks, batteries, and computer modules. The doors, undercarriage, and radiator were all reinforced with ballistic steel for protection against mines and gunfire. It had four high-grade run-flat tires that could keep the monster on the road while driving across fire, nails, or a thousand broken bottles. One of these sons of bitches could drive through hell, extract the Devil, and be home in time for dinner. For 300k a piece, you wouldn’t expect any less.
It took almost the entire night for Russell to bypass all the security on both the vehicles and rewire them to make his ‘Factory Car Bomb.’ The radio doubled as the detonator, which Russell would carry in a third vehicle. The process was simple. All he had to do was activate a signal on the radio, which would send a message to the motherboard, which would send a spark to the fuel tank, and when that happened, he didn’t want to be anywhere near that car.