Dead or Alive: A heart-pounding assassination thriller with a shocking twist (Eliot Locke Thrillers Book 1)

by Dean Carson

  She looked at me, her eyes boring straight through. She let the silence stretch, an old interrogation technique.

  I broke first. “And some documents.”

  She nodded. “Now we come to it. You are in deep shit. And I knew that before you came into the bar, so don’t try to bullshit me. You carried out a hit on a warlord, and the warlord that ordered the hit doesn’t want you going home to spend his money. You see, I am well informed. I also know that word has gone around that no one is to help you.”

  This was news to me. My situation was worse than I thought. “We have history,” I reminded her. Both good and bad history I thought, but hoped she would only remember the good.

  “For old times’ sake I would like to help you, but I won’t,” she said. “There are two reasons I won’t help you. The first is that my employers have asked me, as a courtesy, not to get involved. And the second is that I am very busy at the moment.”

  I looked at her and she smiled.

  “Oh yes, I am very busy tonight. Even as we speak I am fucking a man. Sorry, that is a bit crude, but what I am doing to that man you could not call making love. And coitus sounds so clinical.”

  This time I let the silence grow, not in an effort to get her to reveal more, but because I was completely lost. Perhaps she had drunk more than I thought.

  “I see that you do not believe me,” she said, standing. “Come, I will show you.”

  NINE

  I followed her up the stairs at the back of the bar, to an upper floor where a few dingy rooms were rented. Knowing the type of area, I bet you could have got one by the night or by the hour. The first two rooms had doors ajar so were still available. The final room on the corridor was closed. This was the door she approached. She took a key from her pocket and inserted it in the lock.

  “You will love this,” she said. I had my doubts.

  She opened the door and my doubts were confirmed. It was a small room with a dusty brown carpet that hadn’t seen shampoo in my lifetime. The bed was halfway between single and queen size, with an off-white throw over it that had also seen better days and better decades. The walls were painted orange, and a horrid photo of a harbour scene swung crookedly over the head of the bed. A single lightbulb, no shade, hung in the middle of the room, and the window was closed, giving it an unnatural feeling of stuffiness and heat.

  However bad the room was, it paled into insignificance beside what was on the bed. Stretched on the dirty white throw was a thin young man with dark hair, completely naked except for his nylon striped necktie. He was spread-eagled, his wrists handcuffed to the head of the bed and his ankles tied with rope to the end of the bed. He looked terrified and his head spun towards us as the door opened.

  “Please…” he pleaded.

  “This is my lover for tonight,” said La Donna, walking forward and stroking his cheek gently. “Aren’t you, my dear? Such a sweet young man. I feel it will be an exceptionally pleasurable encounter.”

  He flinched from her touch, but she didn’t seem to notice. She had a strange light in her eyes that chilled me like a shadow passing over my soul. It wasn’t madness. She was in too much control for that. And it wasn’t evil. But it wasn’t far off either.

  She ran her finger down his cheek and along his neck, passing gently to his chest. Slowly, smiling into his frightened face, she ran her finger down his thin hairless chest, down past his navel, slowing when she reached his waist. As she reached his pubic hair, her smile broadened.

  I was very uncomfortable. This was an intimate moment, and I had no business watching it. I wanted to be anywhere outside of that room. But I needed her help. I forced my face not to register the disgust I felt.

  She leaned forward, her breasts crushing against his chest, and clasped him by the cheeks, bringing her lips down hard against his. The savage kiss lasted as long as the kiss she greeted me with, then she was standing and grinning at me.

  “We will have so much fun tonight,” she said. “So you can see, I am too busy to help you, even if my employers would let me. But I do have time to let you buy me another drink before I come back to my lover boy.”

  She smiled at him, then took the tie from around his neck and swiftly tied it around his mouth, gagging him. He was able to breathe and able to grunt. But he wouldn’t be able to cry for help. I followed her out to the corridor and she closed and locked the door behind her.

  We went back down to the bar and had another glass of the bubbly. My face betrayed nothing. Actually, I managed to grin like a schoolboy in on a prank.

  “I didn’t know you were into games,” I said.

  “All sex is a game,” she replied. “Normally the men make the rules, but today I have turned that around. In this game I am the dungeon master, he is the slave.”

  “Does he get to enjoy the game?”

  “Of course. All men are animals, and at the end I will give him his moment of release. That is all a man wants. For a woman, it is all foreplay.”

  “And what you were doing upstairs was foreplay?”

  “But of course. And he loved it.”

  “He didn’t seem to be loving it.”

  “You can’t read the signs. His mind was still full of thoughts. Those thoughts and worries will go, and he will lose himself in the experience.”

  I shrugged. I don’t get S&M play. My tastes are very vanilla. The lifestyle I have chosen is not conducive to lasting relationships, but I don’t live like a monk. I take my chances when I can get them, and I do get them. Maybe not as often as I like, but enough to stay in the dance. But I steer clear of the kinky stuff. Life is complicated enough without that. I generally find that the more kinky a woman is the more kookie she is, and my life is full enough of kooky people as it is. Like this woman I needed to stay on the right side of if I was to get out of here alive. I knew she had said no, but I also knew that was just an opening ploy. She would help me in some way. I hoped.

  So we talked about other things. Small talk is difficult in our profession. How are the kids? Don’t know — if I go home there is a warrant out for my arrest. How’s work? Can’t say, it’s classified. But we managed. We told war stories about old campaigns. I enjoyed chewing the fat, but I have to say my stories were funnier than La Donna’s. And hers featured a level of sadism that I try to avoid. If someone has to die, I believe I should show them the respect of doing it quickly.

  An hour passed and the second bottle, which had appeared mysteriously as the first emptied, was down to half. La Donna pushed her chair back.

  “I think it is time to check in on lover boy.”

  “What’s the deal there?” I asked. “Do you just tease him like that all night?”

  “Until the main show.”

  I raised an eyebrow, and she went on.

  “Did you notice the webcam on the bedside locker?”

  I hadn’t.

  “That’s connected to his home computer. He’s on a night-long Skype call to his wife. She’s out at work now, but when her shift ends she’ll notice the open computer and she’ll begin to watch. And that is when the main show begins.”

  It took me a moment to process that, then the penny dropped. She was going to rape him live on webcam with his wife watching. No wonder the guy looked so uncomfortable. I had thought his reluctance was part of their game. Now I understood. I had underestimated how twisted she was.

  She smiled, like a little schoolgirl presenting her daddy with a Father’s Day posy.

  “His wife is not in on the game?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “She’s a player. She just doesn’t know it yet. When I start I will hook up my laptop so that I can look into her eyes as I do it. The feeling is so much more intense.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “Not often. It’s a holiday treat for myself. Who has the time the rest of the year?”

  I leaned back in my chair. “How did you pick him?”

  “He picked himself. I was at the bar and he tried to
pick me up. I let him. When I knew he was married, I knew we had to play the game. Don’t worry, he was as into it as I was. He held his hands out for the cuffs. Don’t look so disapproving. We’re consenting adults.”

  “And he consented to the webcam?”

  “Chérie, you are very innocent. I put the webcam in after I had him secured. I suspect that might have been a deal breaker for him.”

  I suspected she was right. The poor sucker must have been in an absolute panic. Sure, he was a bit of a prick messing around behind his wife’s back. But this was almost certainly going to cost him his marriage. What if they had kids? I have a conscience. But I am also human. I didn’t like the guy. His wife deserved better. Perhaps this was karma and the universe was just clearing out the garbage. None of my business.

  So I let her go up the stairs to her chained sacrifice and I got in a quick coffee to counteract the effects of the glasses of champagne. I strongly suspected that La Donna could drink me under the table, and I wanted to end this night upright. I also took a moment to open the wallet I had lifted from the big guy earlier. I know I was going to ask La Donna for money at the end of the evening, but I wanted to be able to cover the bar tab before that. Call it male pride. If the wallet was short, I reckoned I had a few minutes to slip out and roll a drunk. I wouldn’t feel good about that, but a drunk was now the only ATM open to me. Luckily, the wallet was full. Even better, his bank card had the PIN scrawled across it with a sharpie. Some people take no security precautions. If I was a less honest man…

  But I couldn’t use his card, because once I used it the bank’s security systems would ping my location. However, his driver’s licence might be useful. I slipped the money and licence into my pocket and went to the toilet, discreetly disposing of the wallet in a trash can once I was out of sight.

  I was back at the table, the coffee mug gone and a half-filled glass in front of me, when she reappeared. As she entered the bar she was adjusting her lipstick, and I didn’t want to think what had smeared it. She pecked me on the cheek and sat down opposite me.

  “Short show.”

  “She’s not home yet. It will be another hour. Time enough for you to get me drunk.” She raised her glass and we clinked in a silent toast.

  “You never told me what you are doing in Dubrovnik,” I said.

  “Purely pleasure. I am on holiday for a week.”

  “And why Dubrovnik?” I had only been here since the afternoon, and already I was more than anxious to get out of here.

  She smiled. “The cops here are useless. When I pick a location for my games, that is an important consideration. One of the most important. You want to pick a place where the game can proceed without a referee intervening. If there are complaints, nothing will be done.”

  She had that right. I know from my work that once you cross the old Iron Curtain, all rules are flexible. A couple of notes of foreign currency could open a lot of doors. Minor indiscretions could be overlooked. I suppose the kidnap and rape of a man who was half consenting could count as a minor indiscretion. Back in Italy, it would not be overlooked. And her bosses might not relish the attention on one of their chief enforcers. Dubrovnik made sense.

  “Sex tourism,” I said.

  “Of a kind,” she replied.

  “Do you do it often?”

  “Maybe once a year, when the urge hits.”

  “And do the guys ever complain afterwards?”

  She looked at me oddly. For a while she said nothing, and I became painfully aware of the sounds in the bar around me. It was now just past eleven, and the joint was as packed as it could be. A couple of elderly men with moustaches were playing cards on one table. A group of young men were talking too loudly and not handling their beer at another table, occasionally bursting into snatches of last year’s British pop hits. A couple were having a low but insistent argument two tables away. The bar itself was thronged, with the two servers constantly on the move. I am trained to notice such things, but I wasn’t focused. I was looking at La Donna, and a slow realisation was dawning.

  Then she confirmed it.

  “Darling, do you understand the concept of a game? There are winners and there are losers. I win, he loses.”

  “But I thought…”

  “Oh yes, he gets his moment of release. That is his consolation prize. Then I claim my prize.”

  She sat back with a distant smile on her face. Taking her time, she reached into the pack and drew out a cigarette. She lit it then blew smoke at the ceiling with a sigh.

  “After he has come, I sit on his face,” she said. “I look his woman straight in the eye through the computer and I grip his head tightly between my thighs. I time it so that he has a full breath in his lungs. Then I squeeze. If I time it right — and I will — he will squirm for two minutes, maybe three. His head will jerk convulsively between my legs as he struggles to draw a breath, and I will have the most delicious orgasm.” She blew a ring of smoke across the table. “In two hours’ time, that fucker upstairs will be dead. And he will die with a smile on my face.”

  TEN

  That was a conversation killer. It dropped right on the table in between us, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Not a single thing.

  “Shocked?” she asked.

  Yes — and no. As I said, I have a history with La Donna.

  “Well, I guess that gets rid of the problem of witnesses,” I said eventually.

  “Don’t be a hypocrite. You kill people for a living.”

  That’s a blunt job description. I prefer to think of myself as meting out justice to those beyond the reach of the more legitimate agencies, a sort of caped crusader without the cape. But I am willing to accept that I am delusional in that.

  “I don’t kill for fun,” I pointed out.

  “If you haven’t tried it, how do you know you won’t enjoy it?”

  Sometimes you come up with an unanswerable argument. So I changed the topic.

  “My sister is making a porno.”

  But, because she wasn’t, that topic didn’t last too long. It was difficult to go back to war stories knowing what was upstairs waiting for her and knowing what she was going to do. I had accepted in my head that the guy was an asshole who deserved the bad karma that was going to shit down on him with a vengeance, but I had assumed the bad karma would involve an encounter with a furious wife, sometimes sleeping alone on the couch and perhaps a frying pan being slapped over his head if she was volatile, as many around the Mediterranean are. Did he really deserve death for infidelity?

  But then I thought, if he is unfaithful to his wife, he probably fiddles his taxes and cons his customers and alters his expenses sheet. It all adds up. And it wasn’t my business. My business was getting out of Mostar. And I hadn’t got very far so far.

  La Donna solved the problem of conversation. She licked her lower lip in a way that might have been seductive a few hours earlier and smiled at me.

  “We could go upstairs and do it on the bed beside him while we are waiting for his wife. Give him a sort of floor show to get him excited before the main event.” She saw the look on my face and added: “Don’t worry — you will be out of there before his wife comes home and tunes in. The main event is a private performance and she won’t see your face. It doesn’t matter what he sees, because he won’t be telling anyone.”

  Why not? La Donna exudes kinky sexuality. I hadn’t seen any action in quite a while. And I was betraying no one. I am not in a relationship, so there was no one at home to be let down. I had never done it in front of an audience before, but I am a confident guy. I didn’t anticipate any performance anxiety.

  I sipped the champagne and considered my choices. The guy upstairs seemed to have limited options. He could die with a smile on his face or a scream. She had her mind made up, and I knew I couldn’t talk her out of it. And I didn’t know him and didn’t really care. People die all the time. It is the grand jackpot we all play for and eventually win. He was going to cash out tonight.


  That accepted, I could sit here and drink by myself. I could go out for a long walk and come back when it was over. Coming back was a certainty. I needed her help. Or I could trot upstairs for what I knew would be a very memorable encounter. I was beginning to feel a little randy. How enjoyable could it be with him staring at me? Hey, I have done some pretty horrible things in my life. I would get through.

  Thus reasoned my rational mind. But behind that a little voice niggled. If I let events run their natural course, would the guy upstairs qualify as collateral damage? Not really, since it was nothing to do with me either way. And yet… Could I just walk away?

  “I need to hit the head and freshen up,” I said. “Give me ten minutes.”

  “You could have put that more tastefully,” she said.

  “Sorry. I need to freshen up, brush my teeth, make myself beautiful for you.”

  She smiled.

  I did need to hit the head. Too many coffees and too much alcohol in a day will do that to you. I am not a handsome guy, so vanity has never been one of my vices. She could take me as she found me in terms of hair and oral hygiene. But she could wait for me; there was work to be done.

  I waited in the toilet until a big man was leaving and I came out the door behind him, slipping discretely to the side as I did so. There was no need for the precaution. She wasn’t looking in my direction. She was too busy flirting with a guy at the bar. I hoped he wasn’t married and into kinky games.

  From the bar I made my way to the door leading to the bedrooms. Once I was out of the public area, I could drop any pretence at precaution. Speed was what mattered. The empty rooms hadn’t been rented, which helped. There was no need for silence. But La Donna’s door was still locked, and that would slow me down.

  There are three ways to open a locked door. The first is familiar to everyone from cop shows. You stand back and kick, or run at it with your shoulder. Here’s a newsflash: it only works on the cop shows. And it hurts. No thanks.