“Me?” Willis asked, raising an eyebrow dubiously, otherwise holding his poker face intact. “You’re the one who ran me near ragged.”
When they were finished with lunch, Willis drove her back to the cottage so she could get her car. During the ride, she asked the inevitable question about when he was heading back to Akron. In other words, was it only a one-time meaningless hookup or something else? He told her his business was finishing up over the next day. She nodded as her stare fixed straight ahead, a brittleness weakening her mouth.
After he let her out by her car and she was fumbling with her keys, he found himself mentioning that maybe he’d extend his stay and spend an extra week in the area. He wasn’t sure exactly why he said that, but he didn’t see the harm in it. He had no place else he needed to be for several weeks, at least not until he arranged for plastic surgery to have a new face constructed, which he’d have the money for once he collected his stake in the robbery. Both the cottage and the general area were remote enough that he didn’t have to worry about any Factory employees stumbling on him, and the desolate feel of the New England ocean in October appealed to him. He also found himself wanting to see more of Kate, and it wasn’t just that he liked the way she looked without her clothes or how active and imaginative she was in bed. He was surprised at how good he felt around her. It was partly her infectious smile, and partly the freshness and kindness about her that reminded him of how life was, or at least how it could’ve been, before he got entangled with The Factory. His time as a hit man had left him with a heart that was little more than stone. Having Bowser around these past months had opened a thin crack to the stone, and Kate held the promise of something more. Of course, if he looked at it logically it didn’t make sense. He couldn’t settle down with her even if he wanted to. Or at least he couldn’t until he had a new face. But for the time being, he couldn’t see the harm of spending another week or two with her.
Kate brightened up over hearing that he was considering extending his stay. The smile that broke over her face forced a trace of a smile over Willis’s own lips, and he could count on one hand the number of times he had smiled over the past three years. After she gave him her cell phone number, she stepped forward and embraced him passionately, pushing her body hard into his and kissing him almost hard enough to loosen teeth, then she let go and hugged Bowser just as tightly, which brought an embarrassed expression to the bull terrier that was betrayed by how hard his tail whipped back and forth. After she drove off, Willis sat on a weather-beaten Adirondack chair that the cottage provided on its porch, and stared out into the blue-gray of the ocean, blanking all thoughts from his mind. Bowser plopped down by his feet, his expression soon turning as cryptic as Willis’s.
Chapter 3
At two-forty-one in the morning, Bowser lifted his head, his ears straight up and rigid in attention. Even though the bull terrier was lying by the foot of the bed in the near pitch-black room and his movement was silent, it woke Willis. Immediately he sat up, fully alert and listening as intently as Bowser for any noises from outside. From the way Bowser’s head shot toward the front door and then to the back, he must’ve heard the soft scraping sounds of door locks being picked several seconds before Willis. The dog got to his feet and padded quickly toward the back of the cottage. Willis reached into a space between the mattress and the bed’s headboard for a .40-caliber pistol he had wedged in there. He transferred the gun to his left hand, then squeezed his hand into the same space for a folded nightstick he had kept from his time with The Factory. Willis left the bed holding the nightstick in his right hand and the gun in his left. As he made his way toward the front door, he flicked his wrist to unfold the nightstick.
The back door opened first. Willis heard a soft click, a door being swung open, then a man shouting out in surprise, followed by a loud thump and the types of grunts Bowser would make if he were playing a heated game of tug of war. No more than a second after that the front door opened and two men burst into the cottage. Enough moonlight filtered in from outside so that Willis could make out their forms. He had his back flush against the wall and waited until the two men moved further in front of him before he stepped out and hit the closest of the two in the back of the knees with the nightstick. The man let out a dull oomph noise and his legs crumpled, and Willis hit him hard enough in the back of the head with his pistol to knock the man out. His partner began to turn around, trying to get his gun into the action, but Willis chopped down on his gun hand with the nightstick, sending a 9mm Glock clattering to the wood floor and the man grasping his injured hand. Before the man could do much else, Willis transferred the nightstick to his left hand so that his right hand was free, and he grabbed the intruder by his jacket collar, first swinging the man head first into the hallway wall hard enough to put a hole through the plaster, then half-dragging and half-running the man to the other end of the cottage.
Bowser was by the open back door, wrestling furiously with the third intruder. He had knocked the man to the floor and had the man’s right arm gripped in his jaw, while the man desperately reached with his left hand for a gun that had dropped within inches of his fingertips. Willis kicked the gun away and turned on the back lights to see that the intruder Bowser was struggling with was Jared Gannier, not that that surprised him. Nor did it surprise him that the man he had by the collar was Charlie Hendrick. He was pretty sure, from the moment that he had smacked him with a gun, that the guy he knocked out was Bud McCoy. He listened for a moment for the fourth member of their team, Cam Howlitz, and when he didn’t hear anything he had a good idea why these three had come storming into his cottage when they did and what they were after, since it was the only thing that made sense. He hadn’t given them his address, but he knew how they found him. The disposable cell phone that Hendrick had given him must’ve had a tracking chip hidden in it. He swung Hendrick so he went head first into the wall, landing a foot from where Gannier was still trying to fight off Bowser. Willis pointed his pistol at Gannier and told him that if he hurt his dog he’d kill him. Gannier stopped his struggling. Willis commanded sharply for the bull terrier to come over to him, and Bowser let go of Gannier’s arm and did as he was told, which surprised Willis, since he had no idea how Bowser would react.
Gannier, now free of the bull terrier, rubbed his arm while giving Willis a sullen, angry look. “Your damn dog might’ve broken my arm,” he complained bitterly. “And who the fuck brings a dog with him when he’s traveling for a job?”
Willis didn’t bother responding. He grabbed Bowser by the collar and moved him so he was facing toward the front of the cottage, then slapped him on the rear, sending Bowser scampering away. Seconds later, a growl could be heard that came deep from within Bowser’s throat as he stood guard over an unconscious Bud McCoy. Again, Willis was pleasantly surprised since he didn’t know how the dog would respond, but he must’ve been well-trained by his previous owner. By then, Hendrick had gotten off his stomach and was sitting on the floor. He grabbed his head and glared hotly at Willis.
“That was a dumb move breaking in here the way you did,” Willis said. “I thought all of you were smarter than that. You’re lucky I didn’t kill any of you.”
A wildness burned in Hendrick’s eyes. His lips tightened into a vicious smile, and he couldn’t help himself from laughing at what Willis had said. “You’re a liar, Burke,” Hendrick spat out. “You didn’t kill any of us? What about Cam?”
That confirmed that it was the way Willis had been thinking. Cam Howlitz must’ve been killed after he returned home and the money had to be missing. If these three came here only to kill him, they would’ve set fire to the cottage and shot him dead as he fled, but they wanted the five hundred and fifty grand before they killed him, and they believed he had the money in the cottage with him. Willis couldn’t blame them for that, and he might’ve tried the same in their situation, although he would’ve gotten more intelligence before breaking into the cottage and would’ve known better what he was up
against. Still, he wanted to cut the socializing short, so he pointed his pistol at Hendrick’s right knee.
“This is a .40-caliber,” he said. “There won’t be much of your knee left if I shoot you, and I will shoot you if you don’t tell me what you know. And only what you know, not what you think you know.”
Hendrick’s eyes glistened with malice for a moment. He lowered his stare to Willis’s gun. When he looked back at Willis, his smile had faded and his eyes had darkened to the color of coal.
“Cam called me around midnight to tell me he had gotten home. I dropped over around one so we could have a few beers while I helped him split up the money into five piles, and when I got there I found Cam dead and the money gone. So I called Jared and Bud and we came over here to get our money back.”
Willis gave him a hard look while also watching how Gannier reacted. It was possible that some unknown interloper had killed Howlitz and taken the money, but it was also possible it was either Hendrick or one of the two other crew members—that one of them might’ve gotten the idea that they could grab the whole five hundred and fifty grand for themselves while putting the blame on Willis. If either Hendrick or Gannier had done it, Willis couldn’t tell, but it would be a dumb thing for any of them to have tried since a search of his cottage would come up empty. If it was one of them, then the person would’ve had to make sure that Willis ended up dead when they invaded his cottage so the rest of the crew wouldn’t be able to interrogate him, and would have to accept that he had hidden the money someplace where they couldn’t find it.
“And you were convinced I did it,” Willis said.
Hendrick’s eyes glazed and he showed a thin smile, but otherwise didn’t say anything. Willis waved the gun he was holding as a signal he wanted answers for his questions.
“Yeah,” Hendrick said, shifting his eyes away from Willis.
“You hid a tracking chip in the disposable phone you gave me. That’s how you found me?”
“Yeah.”
“How was I supposed to know where your buddy, Howlitz, lived?”
Hendrick shrugged. “Maybe you followed him home after our first meeting. Or you could’ve attached a tracking device to his car. Or slipped one in his pocket. Those are my guesses.”
Willis shook his head.
“Then you had someone in the government track him for you.” Hendrick shifted his gaze back to Willis, his eyes showing some life again. “That device you used to open the security door came from some spook agency. You must’ve worked for the government. Some nasty spook branch of it, and that’s why you had it. So you had one of your old buddies find where Cam lived.”
Willis scratched his jaw as he considered Hendrick. If one of the crew was behind the rip-off, it wasn’t him. He was having too hard a time controlling himself.
“I had no idea where Howlitz lived,” Willis said. “You’re right, I spent time working for a government agency that’s about as nasty as it gets, but I didn’t leave on good terms, and there’s no one there who would help me. If I was going to rip all of you off, I wouldn’t have stayed here tonight. I would’ve put a couple of hundreds of miles between us by now.”
“Maybe,” Hendrick conceded, a flicker of doubt in his eye.
“No maybes. And I would’ve killed all three of you also. I wouldn’t have wasted any time talking to you.”
More doubt showed in Hendrick’s expression as he chewed on his lip and thought over what Willis had said. There was no doubt, though, with Gannier as he accepted that Willis was telling the truth.
“He didn’t do it, Charlie,” Gannier said. “We wouldn’t be alive now if he did.”
“Then who killed Cam? The guy who did it knew he was coming back tonight with the money.”
“I want you to convince me that it’s not one of you three,” Willis said.
Gannier smiled while Hendrick stared at Willis dumbly for a long moment before realizing what he was suggesting. “It wasn’t something like that,” Hendrick said. “All of us grew up together. We’re closer than brothers. It wouldn’t matter how big the score was, we wouldn’t do something like that, at least not to each other. Besides, none of us would’ve had any idea how to kill Cam the way he was killed.” He paused and added, “It was done to make it look like he died of a heart attack or something.”
“Could he have died naturally?”
“No. The money’s gone. Someone killed him. Someone who knows how to make it look like a heart attack or aneurysm or whatever it was that was done to Cam.”
Willis saw another possibility. An accidental drug overdose. Hendrick could’ve met up with Howlitz to snort some lines of coke instead of going over there for a few beers like he said. Maybe they were like brothers as Hendrick said, but if Howlitz expired because of the coke, Hendrick still could’ve come up with the idea of grabbing all the money. Willis wasn’t completely sure anymore about Hendrick, but he decided to wait until he examined the body before bringing the possibility up.
“If I didn’t take the money, and none of you did, then who killed your buddy and ripped us off?” Willis asked.
Hendrick started to shake his head, but grimaced from the pain of doing so. “No one else knew about the job,” he insisted. “Cam wouldn’t have talked to anyone. None of us talked. It doesn’t make sense that anyone would’ve been waiting for him tonight knowing he’d be bringing home that kind of money.”
“Any chance he was an addict? Drugs? Gambling? Anyone he could’ve owed a lot of money to who might’ve been leaning on him?”
“No way, that’s not Cam,” Hendrick said. “That’s not any of us. We keep our noses clean. A little weed, a few beers during the day, but that’s about it for any of us.”
Willis thought about it and didn’t like at all where it was pointing. If Hendrick knew his friend like he thought he did, it either had to be one of those three, or it was a setup by whoever they sold the oxycotin to. One of them could’ve followed Howlitz from Virginia and gotten back the money that they had paid. Willis mentioned the last idea to Hendrick, who shook his head and told him there wasn’t a chance that that had happened.
“First off, Cam was a pro. If someone tried tailing him, he would’ve known. If they tried slipping a tracking device in the money, Cam would’ve found it with a bug detector. If someone planted a bug in the van he drove down there, it wouldn’t have helped. He ditched the van in New Jersey, and drove up a different car. Besides, I’ve done business with these guys before. They wouldn’t have the guts to try something like this, and they’re happy enough making what they do with the oxycotin.”
“If these guys are into pharmaceutical drugs, they must have what it takes to induce a heart attack.”
“I’m telling you it’s not them.”
Willis let it drop. He could revisit it later. “The police know about this yet?” he asked.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I don’t want to walk away from my share of the money,” Willis said. “I’m guessing you guys don’t either.”
Hendrick said, “Understatement of the year.”
Gannier nodded, said, “What he said.”
“Okay, so do we have an agreement? We’ll work together to track the money down, and we’ll stop trying to kill each other?”
Both of them nodded. Willis lowered his gun and signaled for the two of them to get up. A groaning noise came then from where Bud McCoy had been left, followed by a deeper growling from Bowser. The groaning quickly stopped, but the growling continued. Willis helped Hendrick to his feet, then did the same for Gannier. The three of them followed the growling noise to the front hallway where Bowser stood on Bud McCoy, his fangs barred, while McCoy lay on his stomach, his eyes wide open to show he was awake, and perspiration dripping from his face to show he was scared out of his mind. Willis lowered himself so he sat on his heels and could look more directly at McCoy.
“Hendrick and Gannier both understand now that I had nothing to do with what happened with Howlitz
, and that I want the money back as much as all of you do. We have an understanding that we’ll work together to recover it. Are you okay with that?”
His voice raspy and barely above a whisper, McCoy said, “Yeah, just get that dog off me.”
Willis snapped his fingers and ordered Bowser to his side, and once again the dog surprised him by doing exactly what he asked. As Bowser moved over to him, all his ferocity disappeared, replaced by his typical clownish appearance. He sat on the floor, his body bumping against Willis’s leg, all the while panting happily as if the past ten minutes had never happened.
Gannier no longer thought his arm was broken. “Probably just badly bruised. But it’s bleeding, although not as bad as it could be. That beast of yours could’ve ripped it out of the socket if he wanted to, but Burke, you got him well-trained, I’ll give you credit for that. He mostly did what he had to to keep me on the floor. But I still got to take care of this.”
Gannier headed off to the bathroom to fix up his arm. Willis walked out of the room also with his dog following him. Now that Bowser was up, Willis needed to take him for a walk and give him his breakfast. After that, Willis had a dead man to see.
Chapter 4
Willis rode in the backseat of a four-year-old Chevy Malibu, with Hendrick driving, Gannier up front with him, and McCoy occupying the other backseat. Among the items Willis brought with him was a laptop computer that had voice stress analysis software loaded on it, and during the car ride Willis questioned them, asking where they all were that night and whether they told anyone about the warehouse robbery. Hendrick bristled at being questioned further, but he passed the lie detector. Gannier passed also. McCoy seemed mostly amused by the questioning until the software indicated he was lying about whether he talked to anyone about the robbery.
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