A Fire in the Night

by Christopher Swann

  “Where’s Jonas?” Cole said.

  “Got delayed in Hilton Head,” Zhang said. He stifled a yawn. “Tropical storm going up the coast grounded air travel. He’ll let us know when they can fly out.”

  “How long do we wait here?” Dawes asked.

  Cole leaned back in the front passenger seat. “Twenty minutes,” he said. “Keep the engine on. Hot as balls out there.”

  Buying weapons always required care. In America, if you needed a rifle or a shotgun or a semiautomatic pistol, you could practically pick one up off the sidewalk. Anything beyond that and you entered thickets of legalese and local, state, and federal laws. Licensed gun dealers kept records, which meant a paper trail. Of course, some were willing to deal under the table, but that could be hit or miss in terms of the reliability of the dealer, the quality of the product, and the amount available. Cole preferred that when they took a job, the client provided all their weapons up front. And if they needed to buy their own, Cole knew dealers throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East, even Europe. But Cole didn’t operate in the States often, so whenever they had a job here he had relied on Winslow, who had been their quartermaster, to purchase their weapons. And Winslow’s primary dealer in the Southeast sold out of a barn down this dirt road in Georgia. The fact that the dealer was conveniently located on their way to the last known signal from the girl’s phone wasn’t lost on Cole. Karma, perhaps—another sign of order in the universe.

  Cole reached into a pocket of his tactical pants and pulled out a slim paperback of The Art of War. Time for a little reading. He hadn’t finished the book yet.

  Aside from the air conditioning and the idling engine, the only thing Cole could hear was Zhang softly snoring behind him. Cole was sure Zhang was wearing those big-ass noise-canceling headphones that even Waco gave him shit about—he’d put them on anytime he could take a nap. Well, the man had been up all night hacking into Annalise Bashir’s cell phone carrier. And after he had damn near broken Zhang’s arm that morning, Cole wasn’t going to deny him some shut-eye. He went back to Sun Tzu: To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.

  Dawes shifted in the driver’s seat, then unbuckled his seat belt. Cole, concentrating on his book, waited for Dawes to step out of the Suburban, figuring he needed to take a leak. Several moments passed, the silence stretching. Cole looked up from the page to see Dawes sitting behind the wheel, staring off into the distance.

  “What?” Cole said.

  Dawes jerked his head, startled. “Shit,” he said. He reached out to grasp the steering wheel, then withdrew his hands. “Sorry, Cole.”

  Cole glanced out the windshield. “You see something?”

  “Nope,” Dawes said. He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  Cole narrowed his eyes. Aside from Jonas, Dawes was usually the most rock solid of his men, and now he was acting like a teenager caught sneaking home after curfew. “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

  Dawes opened his mouth, closed it, looked in the rearview mirror at Zhang passed out in the back seat. Cole waited patiently. Then Dawes sighed like a man facing a fuckup. “You ever been married?” he asked.

  Cole laughed. “Jesus,” he said. “No. I haven’t.”

  “Right,” Dawes said. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to pry.”

  Cole grunted. “Idea never interested me,” he said. He laid his open book down on his lap. “And this line of work isn’t exactly conducive to the bonds of matrimony.”

  “No,” Dawes said. “I mean, that’s true.” He made to reach for the wheel again, and again he withdrew his hands as if he didn’t know what to do with them.

  “Dawes, what the fuck,” Cole said.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re acting like a kid on his first date. What is it?”

  Dawes turned a miserable face to Cole, who was utterly baffled. And then it clicked into place and Cole stared at Dawes, gobsmacked. “Jesus,” he said. “Are you thinking about getting married?”

  Dawes shrugged. “Maybe,” he said, his voice low. “Yeah.”

  Cole had nothing to say, or rather, he had plenty to say about the subject—how being married could make you vulnerable, how it could distract you from the job at hand, which, in their business, could mean getting a bullet in the head. How being a mercenary for hire often meant dropping everything to fly halfway around the world with less than forty-eight hours’ notice. It wasn’t a lack of things to say that made Cole hesitate; it was that he wasn’t sure which objection to voice first.

  In that moment while Cole paused, Dawes started talking, words pouring out of him like water from a burst dam. “I met her when I was in the Army—she was a waitress at a bar. How cliché is that? My whole table flirted with her, but she only flirted back with me, and we’ve been together since. I told Mandy—that’s her name, Mandy—I told her I’m a security consultant, she’s cool with me being gone when I’m on a job, but I’m worried she’s gonna think I’m not serious. I’ve got a plan and everything. When we’re done with this job, I’m gonna fly back to LA and surprise her. I’ve got a ring all picked out; this jeweler in Century City is holding on to it for me. So I’ll fly in to LA and pick up the ring and take Mandy to this beach near Malibu, and that’s when I’m gonna ask her.” Dawes abruptly stopped talking and looked at Cole with a kind of sick hopefulness. “Am I being stupid?” he asked.

  Cole looked down at the open book in his lap. Not that Sun Tzu had anything to say about marriage, at least not in the parts of the book Cole had managed to read. He picked up his book and closed it, then tossed it onto the dashboard. “My old man used to smack my mother around,” Cole said. “Not every day, or every week, but he did it. Kicked my ass if I tried to stop him. I was ten years old, and I tackled him once when he was shoving her into a wall. It was like running into a tree. He just turned and backhanded me across the room, swatted me away like a puppy, then started laying into my mother again. Day I turned seventeen, I kicked his ass for once. Broke his nose and laid him out on the kitchen floor.” Cole turned to Dawes with an ugly smile. “And my mother called the cops on me. I took off and never turned back.”

  Dawes blinked, as if trying to process what Cole had said, maybe trying to process the fact that Cole had shared any of this. “Jesus,” he said.

  Cole shrugged. “I’m just saying I’m probably not the best person to ask for advice about marriage. It’s not like I had any great role model in the first place.”

  They sat in silence after that, looking out the windshield as if the answer to Dawes’s question lay out in the kudzu. Cole let his thoughts drift to the idea of a home, a place to return to after a mission, a woman waiting for him. He couldn’t picture it. He lived out of a duffel bag. He knew Jonas had a place in Chicago and a woman he’d had an on-again, off-again relationship with for years. And Winslow would crash with his sister. Used to crash. He shook his head at the thought of Winslow, at all of it, the whole domestic-bliss bullshit. He liked his freedom to move where and when he wanted, and as for women, he had no problems on that score and preferred to keep his relationships casual. Any home he had was with his men, but that wasn’t the kind of thing you could share aloud. He’d shared enough. He looked at his phone. It had been nineteen minutes. “Let’s roll,” he said, loud enough that Zhang woke with a start in the back seat. Dawes put the Suburban in gear and continued down the road without another word.

  Another half mile down the road and they saw a mailbox peppered by more than one blast of buckshot. Dawes turned left down a gravel drive past the mailbox and up a short rise. They crested the rise and drove down into a wide, shallow bowl like a moon crater. At the bottom of the bowl was a white ranch house with a covered porch across the entire front. To the right of the house sat a graying hulk of a barn. Cole made out two men on the porch of the ranch house, one sitting on a chair, the other standing at the top of the porch steps.

  “Ten and three o’clock,�
�� Dawes said. Cole squinted—damn, he needed glasses. He’d seen movement by the barn to his right, and sure enough, there was a big old boy with a beard the size of a shovel blade standing in the open doorway of the barn, an AR15 in his hands. But he’d missed the smaller man who had stepped around the far left corner of the house, cradling a shotgun.

  “Welcoming committee,” Cole said.

  Dawes stopped the Suburban about ten meters away from the front steps of the ranch and turned off the engine, leaving the keys in the ignition. “They look itchy,” he said.

  “Let’s play nice,” Cole said. He opened his door and stepped out of the Suburban, as did Zhang and Dawes. Cole had a blue duffel bag in one hand, his faded Hawaiian shirt untucked to cover the Glock in his waistband. He took a few steps toward the porch, Zhang on his right flank. “Mr. Toomey!” he called out, raising his free hand.

  The man at the top of the porch steps didn’t move, but the seated man stood up from his rocker. His face was leathered and lined and said his age was anywhere from forty to sixty. “You Cole?” he said.

  “Yessir,” Cole said, smiling. He made sure to hold his hands slightly out from his body, nonthreatening and friendly. In his periphery he saw Dawes doing the same, moving to stand by the left front tire of the Suburban.

  Toomey walked across the porch, a board popping beneath his feet, and came down the steps, trailed by the other man, who put on a straw cowboy hat as he stepped into the sunlight. At the bottom of the steps Toomey stopped and put his hands on his hips. “Usually deal with Winslow,” he said.

  Cole nodded. “He couldn’t make it today. You got my message, though.”

  Toomey said nothing, just continued to look at Cole, who looked back. A crow called out somewhere behind the house.

  “ ’Kay,” Toomey said finally. “You got the cash?”

  Cole held up the duffel bag. “You want to check it, of course.”

  Toomey grunted and moved toward Cole, the man in the cowboy hat following. The bearded man with the AR took a step or two closer, as did the fourth man at the corner of the house. When Toomey stopped just out of arm’s reach, Cole raised the duffel bag and slowly unzipped it, then held the bag open so Toomey could see the stacks of bills.

  Toomey leaned forward a little and peered at the contents of the bag, then frowned. “That ain’t right,” he said, sounding puzzled.

  Cole glanced down at the bag even as he automatically took a half step back. The half step ruined Toomey’s punch so it glanced off Cole’s forehead instead of breaking his nose. Still, the blow was powerful enough to nearly send Cole to one knee. In less than a second he had regained his balance and dropped the bag to free both his hands, but now Toomey pointed a revolver in Cole’s face. The man in the cowboy hat had a pistol trained on Zhang. On the other side of the Suburban, Dawes was holding his hands up, covered by the man with the shotgun.

  “You treat all your customers this way?” Cole said.

  Toomey’s face was a closed door. “Where’s Winslow?” he asked.

  “Like I said, he couldn’t make it.”

  Toomey took a step closer, the barrel of his revolver inches from Cole’s forehead. “On your knees,” he said.

  Behind him, Zhang shifted his feet. “Don’t move, motherfucker,” the man in the cowboy hat said.

  “It’s okay,” Cole said to Zhang, his eyes on Toomey. Slowly, he knelt in the yard, the grass here worn to dirt. “Mr. Toomey,” he said, keeping his voice calm and measured, “I’m just here to make a deal.”

  “Did you kill him?” Toomey said.

  Cole looked around the barrel directly into Toomey’s eyes. “No. He’s on another job.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Why do you think that’s bullshit?” Cole said.

  Toomey didn’t waver. Neither did the revolver. “Because he’s my cousin, you asshole. And he never sends anyone to me without coming himself. So unless you want me to start lighting parts of you on fire, you tell me where he is.”

  Cole saw the grief and rage in Toomey’s face, knew the man meant what he said. He sighed. “Zamboni,” he said.

  Toomey frowned, a question on his lips, when the other man’s cowboy hat flew off his head, followed by the crack of a rifle shot. The man toppled to the ground, dust pluming around his body. Toomey jerked his head up, looking for the source of the shot. Cole drew his knife from his boot and stood, sweeping one arm to brush Toomey’s gun hand to the side. With the other hand he stabbed upward into Toomey’s gut, the blade just below the sternum, seeking for the heart. Toomey grunted, his mouth dropping open, and he sagged against Cole, who let go of the knife and shoved Toomey away. Zhang was shouting, and then a shotgun blast from the far side of the Suburban was punctuated by three pistol shots—Dawes. The bearded man by the barn let loose with his AR, stitching the dirt up to and past Cole, missing him by a foot. Cole pulled his Glock from beneath his Hawaiian shirt, crouched, and let off two rounds in the man’s direction. Behind him Zhang was also shooting. More jackhammering from the AR, then the bearded man spun and collided with the side of the barn as another rifle shot cracked across the sky. The bearded man tried to lift the AR, but Cole put three rounds into his chest and dropped him.

  “Dawes?” he called out. “Zhang?”

  “All clear,” Dawes called back.

  “Clear,” Zhang said.

  Cole rose, still holding the Glock in both hands. He kicked the revolver away from Toomey’s outstretched hand. Toomey was still breathing in shallow gasps, bright-red blood threading from his mouth. Cole bent to look Toomey in the face. The man’s eyes were wide and rolling, but they came to focus on Cole.

  “Fuck,” Toomey breathed. “You.”

  “Yeah,” Cole said. He stood and aimed the Glock and shot Toomey in the head.

  He, Dawes, and Zhang started searching all four bodies. Dawes knelt next to the man with the straw cowboy hat and checked his pockets while Cole crouched by Toomey. Zhang was at the far corner of the house, checking out the guy with the shotgun. Absently, Cole scratched at his ear. “Hey,” he said quietly, and Dawes looked up.

  “That girl,” Cole said. “Mandy. She make you happy? Beyond just getting laid?”

  Dawes stared at him for a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, she does.”

  Cole nodded. “Then you oughta marry her,” he said, and went back to searching Toomey’s corpse.

  Cole had just retrieved a ring of keys from Toomey’s belt when Poncho jogged double-time out from behind a nearby stand of trees. He had slung his sniper rifle across his back so the barrel rose over his shoulder like an empty flagpole. A few moments later he reached them, slightly winded after his run from the far rim of the bowl. “The fuck happened?” he asked.

  Dawes glanced at Cole, who was looking through the ring of keys. “Guy in charge wanted to know where Winslow was.”

  “I heard that part,” Poncho said. “At least I heard Cole over his mic. Dude think you all were cops or something?”

  Dawes glanced again at Cole, who continued examining the keys, and said nothing. Then Zhang, who had finished with his body and was now examining the Suburban for any bullet damage, spoke up. “He said he was Winslow’s cousin.”

  Poncho’s eyes widened. “Shit.”

  Cole, still looking at the keys, said, “Good thing the throat mics work. How far was that, Poncho? Half mile?”

  Poncho nodded. “More or less. Heard you clear as a bell. Is Zamboni even a real word?”

  “It’s one of those ice rink machines,” Dawes said. “Goes around and smooths out the ice.” He picked up the straw cowboy hat from where it lay in the dirt. “About my size.”

  Poncho grinned. “Got a hole in it.”

  Dawes looked into the crown of the hat. “Kinda messy now too.”

  Cole found the kind of key he had been looking for. “Barn,” he said, and the four of them headed for the barn, Dawes dropping the hat next to its former owner, the top of the man’s head a shattered wreck. They s
tepped over the body of the bearded man where it lay across the barn entrance. Inside the barn, the air slightly cool and smelling of ancient horseshit, they found a stack of hard cases in a stall, covered by a tarp. They were padlocked, and Cole used the key from Toomey’s ring to unlock the cases. Each held either an MP5 submachine gun or loaded magazines—what they had arranged to buy.

  “My guess is there’s a lot more guns around here somewhere,” Zhang said.

  “Just take what we need,” Cole said. “Somebody heard that shooting.”

  “I saw another road out through the back fields,” Poncho said. “Loops back around to that two-lane.”

  They put the cases into the back of the Suburban, threw the tarp over them, and drove around the side of the ranch and through the back fields on the route Poncho had found, leaving the bodies to the flies already swirling above them.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Lapidus Investigations was located at one end of an office park. The two-story buildings were nondescript brick boxes with doors leading to various offices. The building that housed Lapidus Investigations also held a dental practice, an accounting firm, and a real estate office. The PI firm was at the far-right end of the building, next to the real estate office.

  Nick parked the car in a far corner of the mostly empty parking lot. From their spot, Annalise could see the front door and the side of the building. The windows were all closed, the blinds drawn.

  “What do we do now?” Annalise asked.

  “You stay here,” Nick said. He reached underneath his seat. “Keep an eye out for anyone.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Nick retrieved his day pack from beneath the driver’s seat. “Honk the horn if you need me.”

  “And call attention to the teenage girl all alone in a car? No thanks.” Annalise unclipped her seat belt and opened the car door. “I’m coming with you.”