The Interloper

by Dave Zeltserman

  “Fifty percent don’t sound too good,” Hanley complained.

  “It’s better than zero percent, which is the odds of getting the money back if I don’t get those addresses.”

  Bowser had been making pig grunts and soft whimpers ever since they arrived at the diner in his anticipation of the food that was waiting for him. At that moment, he let out a louder whimper, and that seemed to annoy the hell out of Hanley.

  “Goddamn it, Willis, you brought that mutt with you on a job? That’s not the way things are done!”

  Hanley knew Willis’s name because he was the one who Willis paid to set up both his cover identities—his criminal one, Burke, and his civilian identity, Connor.

  “He’s not a mutt,” Willis said. “He’s a purebred bull terrier, and I’m going to bring him wherever I damn well want. He might’ve saved my life earlier, so shut up about him and call me back when you have the information I need.”

  Willis disconnected the call and took Bowser into the diner. The blonde waitress working the graveyard shift first stared at Bowser, then gave Willis an annoyed put-upon look before telling him to sit where he wanted. Willis could tell that she wanted to make an issue over him bringing a dog into the diner, but decided in the end not to—that any tip out of him would be better than nothing. He didn’t ask about Kate. She must’ve taken the night off after not sleeping much the night before.

  Willis sat in one of the booths while Bowser lay down by his feet, his paws covering his nose, but his ears straight up as he knew bacon was close by. The waitress reluctantly put down her magazine and came over with a menu. Willis waved it off and told her he knew what he wanted.

  “Maybe your friend would like to see it,” she said with a smirk.

  She was a very different type than Kate. At least fifteen years older than Kate, and she made it obvious that she didn’t want to be working that night. There was a hardness to her flesh and not a drop of warmth in her eyes. Usually women melted on seeing Bowser, but not this one. When her eyes shifted to look at the bull terrier, her smirk only hardened.

  “He doesn’t need to see it either,” Willis said. “Bring both of us a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon. Make his a double order of bacon. Coffee for me, and a bowl of water for him.”

  The waitress gave Willis one last dull put-upon look before walking away. When she returned five minutes later with coffee and a bowl of water, she left both on the table without uttering a word. She maintained her indifferent silence when she returned ten minutes later with two orders of scrambled eggs with bacon, with one order on a paper plate. Bowser was quickly sitting at attention and he gobbled up his food within seconds of Willis putting the plate on the floor, then sat staring intently at Willis while he ate at a more leisurely pace. When Willis finished with his food, he then lingered even more slowly over his coffee. Until Hanley called him back he had no better place to be.

  Chapter 7

  Bud McCoy felt too wired, too anxious, too frustrated, and overall, too pissed off to even consider sleeping. His leg hurt where Willis had hit him with a nightstick and his head still ached. He’d been buddies with Cam since fifth grade, just like he’d also been with Charlie and Jared, and he was pissed that Cam was killed, but even more so that their money was stolen. He was counting badly on that money. He owed people he couldn’t afford to owe. Without that hundred and ten grand he’d been counting on, he was fucked.

  He’d been sitting like a lump on an old beat-up cloth chair that he had in his small and equally beat-up looking living room, and he pushed himself off the chair and limped his way to the kitchen and stood in front of the fridge where he foraged through it, eventually pulling out a packet of bologna, a jar of mayonnaise and a loaf of stale Wonder bread. He stood for a long moment in front of the open fridge simmering in his anger before closing it and moving to the counter so he could make a sandwich. He didn’t believe the bullshit story Burke fed them, and it pissed him off more than anything that Charlie had bought it so completely. That some shadowy government agency put a hit on Cam because he was collecting unemployment? He didn’t know what game Burke was playing on them, or why he didn’t kill them all off when he had the opportunity, but he knew in his gut that Burke had the money—or at least was working with someone who had it. He was going to have to convince Charlie and Jared of that, and then they were going to have to do what was necessary to get the truth out of Burke. Hopefully they’d get a chance to jump him when he didn’t have that damn beast around.

  McCoy shivered involuntarily as he thought about waking up with that dog’s fangs bared as the animal stood on him growling as if he were going to rip McCoy’s throat out. Damn animal was all muscle, jaws, and teeth. He almost crapped his pants back then, and thinking about it again only pissed him off even more.

  He finished making his sandwich, and without even realizing it had wolfed down half of it before looking disgustedly at what was left. He had to quit eating angry the way he did. It was one of the reasons he was carrying an extra sixty pounds.

  McCoy took what was left of the sandwich and a can of beer back to the chair he’d been sitting on earlier, and turned on the TV, keeping the volume low so he wouldn’t wake Heather. She was a cute piece of ass and a true blonde both up and down. Curvy, with nice firm tits and a sweet face. Maybe not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but very cute, and most nights good in bed. He’d been seeing her for two months, and the two of them were interrupted earlier when Charlie called about what he found at Cam’s.

  His face folded into a frown and he took a halfhearted bite of his sandwich since he wasn’t really hungry, and followed that up with an equally halfhearted swig from his beer. While he did that, he stared blankly at the TV and surfed through the cable channels, his mind drifting too much for him to pay much attention to what was on. When he came to a soft porn movie on one of the Cinemax channels, he left it on and thought more about Heather sleeping in his bed. After ten minutes of paying closer attention to the movie, he turned it off and went back to his darkened bedroom where he found Heather curled up on her side, snoring softly under the blanket. McCoy sat on the edge of the bed and took off his dungarees, stained tee shirt, and socks, leaving on only his boxers, then squeezed in next to Heather so that he was spooning her. He worked a hand under the nightshirt she was wearing so he could cup one of her large, firm tits, then pulled down enough of the blanket so he could kiss her back while he slid his other hand under her panties and between her legs.

  She groaned as she woke up. “Honey,” she croaked out in a tired voice, “it’s too late for that. Baby’s got to sleep.”

  McCoy kept up doing what he was doing. He had too much nervous energy and he needed a way to work it out of his system, and she’d do as well as anything he could think of. What he wanted to tell her was to quit her fucking complaining since it wasn’t going to do her any good, and just roll over already, but instead he whispered to her sweetly, “Baby, you make me so hard being near you. Goddamn, you’re a beautiful piece of ass.”

  He let go of her breast so he could guide her hand down and let her feel for herself how hard she had made him, although it was a lie. It was Cinemax’s soft porn flick that did the trick, but it wouldn’t do any good to tell Heather that. She continued to moan and complain, but before too long he could feel a wetness between her legs and soon after that she gave in.

  About fucking time. He twisted over so he could reach into the night table drawer for a condom, and was too preoccupied doing that to notice that someone had slipped into the room, just as he’d been too preoccupied earlier to hear the soft scraping that the person had made when he picked the front door lock. At the very last moment, he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye as the person stuck Heather with a hypodermic needle. He had an impression of the person being a man in his late forties. Thin, hard, and scary, and with a grayness to him. Before he could react, he was swallowed up by a way too loud zapping noise and his whole body seized up as if every musc
le in his body were cramping. Simultaneously, it felt as if he was being smacked repeatedly in the back with a two by four. For that moment, he was completely paralyzed. Then there was another all too loud zapping noise and his world went black.

  *

  Martin Luce had injected the girl with etorphine hydrochloride, which was a powerful animal tranquilizer. It knocked her out instantly, and the dose he gave her would keep her unconscious for several hours. It was doubtful that she saw him, and if she did it would’ve only been a fleeting glance at best with little chance that she’d be able to identify him. He used a Taser on the guy. Twice, which knocked him out cold. After that, Luce left the bedroom and found an old sheet stored in a linen closet, which he used to drape over the cloth chair in the small living room that sat in front of the TV, then he went back to the bedroom, grabbed the unconscious guy underneath his arms, and pulled him off the bed.

  Luce weighed a buck sixty, and while this guy was only about five feet eight, he had to weigh over two hundred and twenty pounds, and Luce was breathing heavily by the time he deposited the guy into the chair that he had ready for him. He rested for a moment to get his breathing more under control, then went back to work again, wrapping duct tape around the guy’s chest, legs, and arms, securing him to the chair. After that, he searched the house more thoroughly. He didn’t find an address book or any papers that could link the guy to the other members involved in the robbery, but he did find the guy’s wallet, his car keys, and two cell phones—one an expensive smart phone, the other a cheap disposable. There were a record of outgoing and incoming phone calls, but there were no contact names or text messages left on either phone. If he could send the phones to The Factory’s technology forensics lab, maybe they’d be able to get him the names of the other crew members, but since that wasn’t possible, the phones weren’t going to help him.

  He stood for a moment, bleary-eyed, looking blankly at the guy he had secured to the chair, a tired sigh easing out of him as he did so. It had been over three days since he had slept more than a few minutes at a time. He just wanted to be done, get a good twelve-hour sleep, and then start planning for his disappearing act with the money he stole.

  Luce headed to the kitchen and had some luck finding a Red Bull in the refrigerator. The caffeine rush from the drink helped. He then went back to the living room, took a pair of pliers from the bag he had brought, and used them to slowly twist the tip of the unconscious man’s nose. After ten seconds, the man sputtered awake, his head jerking up, his eyes blinking wildly.

  “Ow, ow, ow,” McCoy yelled. “Goddamn it, that hurts!”

  Luce released the pliers from McCoy’s nose. “Not another word,” he said.

  McCoy’s eyes were watering badly from the way his nose had been twisted. He turned his head enough so he could look at Luce, and his expression turned grim as he realized his situation. He kept his lips pressed tightly together, though, and obviously swallowed back what he wanted to say. Luce studied him for a long moment, then took McCoy’s driver’s license from his wallet.

  “Donald McCoy,” Luce said, reading the name on the license.

  “My friends call me Bud,” McCoy said.

  Luce’s eyes glazed as he stared at McCoy. Without a word, he grabbed hold of McCoy’s right hand and used the pliers to begin to pull the nail off of his thumb. McCoy started to scream, but the look on Luce’s face made him clamp his mouth shut. He was breathing raggedly as his thumbnail was ripped off, and although he glared at Luce with a burning fury, he kept himself from saying anything further.

  “You make another smartass comment to me and all your nails go,” Luce warned with cold detachment. “After that, if I need to hurt you I’ll do so in ways you would never have imagined could cause so much pain. Do we understand each other?”

  With his voice a little more than a grunt, McCoy forced out that he understood.

  Luce hadn’t found any hidden cameras or listening devices when he had returned back to Howlitz’s address to search the dead man’s home and property. While he had done that, a thought had nagged at him. That maybe he’d been wrong about his targets. That they could’ve been part of a terrorist network after all, and that Howlitz and the others could’ve robbed that pharmaceutical warehouse as a way to fund the insurgency.

  He asked McCoy to tell him about the insurgency, and a rush of adrenaline hit him as he saw the way McCoy reacted to the question. It was more than the way McCoy’s skin paled to a sickly white, but that flicker of understanding that showed in his eyes. It was enough to tell Luce that he’d been wrong all along. That he actually had been killing terrorists. Luce realized then that it didn’t much matter to him, but he was still amazed at how wrong he’d been.

  “I’m not part of any insurgency,” McCoy said, his voice ragged and strained, his eyes shifting from Luce.

  “I warned you what would happen if you made any more smartass cracks.” Luce stepped forward and forced the fingers of McCoy’s right hand apart. Using the pliers, he grabbed hold of the nail of McCoy’s index finger. “Lying to me will be so much worse.”

  “I’m not lying!” McCoy yelled out in a panic. He was trapped where he was with Luce having taped his arm against the chair’s armrest, and Luce now using his weight to push down on his hand. He was so frantic he was close to babbling. “I know why you think I’m a terrorist! One of the guys on our crew used to be one of you! I swear to God. He told us about how one of you guys had to be behind killing Cam and stealing our money!”

  Luce stepped away from his prisoner without yanking out another fingernail. A coolness filled his head. He wasn’t expecting that answer, but he didn’t think the guy was lying. “What do you mean by that,” he demanded.

  McCoy had begun to hyperventilate, and it looked like he was having difficulty getting the words out. After a minute or so his breathing calmed enough for him to talk.

  “He told us he worked for the same government agency, and that they told him he was killing terrorists. I thought he was bullshitting us.”

  The coolness in Luce’s head intensified. He had gotten an announcement months ago about a half million dollar bounty that The Factory had put on some guy’s head. He remembered at the time thinking that the guy must’ve worked for The Factory before performing his own disappearing act, and when he saw the guy’s photo he knew the man had to have worked as an assassin, same as him. He couldn’t remember the man’s name, but he still had the announcement on his laptop.

  “What’s this guy’s name?” Luce asked.

  McCoy’s expression turned glum. His breathing was now almost normal and some color had returned back to his cheeks, although his eyes were still buried deeply within grayish flesh. “Burke,” he said,

  The name wasn’t familiar. Luce couldn’t remember the name in the announcement, but he knew it wasn’t Burke. That didn’t mean anything, though. If he had quit The Factory he would be using an alias. He’d have to be if he wanted to stay alive.

  “If your friend wasn’t killing insurgents, then who’d he think he was killing?”

  McCoy’s expression turned even more glum. Grimacing badly, he said, “He’s no friend of mine. Before this job I’d never seen him before. But he told us that the people he was being ordered to kill were just poor dumb saps who were unemployed. That’s all. That the government is using all of you guys to fix the unemployment problem.”

  Luce couldn’t help smiling. Not because he found anything amusing, but when he thought of the targets that had been assigned to him it made sense. Those sonofabitches. That was all he could think of when he realized that this Burke was right. That those sonofabitches were having him and all the rest of The Factory assassins killing only down-and-out unemployed slobs. He realized that that didn’t matter to him either. He didn’t really care who he killed. He wondered briefly how bad a guy that made him, and realized that he didn’t care. In a month or so he’d be resettling to a remote costal village somewhere in Southeast Asia with enough money to live co
mfortably for the next fifty years if he had that much time left, and his killing days would be over soon enough.

  Luce wished he had brought his laptop with him, but he’d left it in the trunk of his car, which was parked three blocks away. He’d like to get confirmation whether the other crew member, Burke, was the same man his Factory bosses had put a bounty on, especially since his prisoner was too terrified right then to do anything but tell him the truth. But even without confirmation, he was sure it was the same man, which meant there was another half million dollars that he’d be able to get his hands on. The coolness in his head grew worse, almost like ice was being stuffed into his eye sockets, and he soon found himself feeling overly anxious. At first he didn’t understand the reason for it, but after a minute or so he did. His situation had just gotten all that more urgent. If Burke was who Luce believed he was, then Burke knew all about The Factory and could very well stir things up with them to try to get back the money. That was what Luce would do if he was in Burke’s place, and he saw half a dozen different ways that it could lead to The Factory finding out about the money he stole. He had a moment of panic. It was as if he had been swimming blindly in the ocean and suddenly realized he had gone out too far and was now going to drown. The moment passed.

  Luce went back to the kitchen and sat down at the table so he could more calmly think things out, and it kept coming back to the same thing. He had to take care of the rest of the robbery crew as quickly as possible, especially this Burke—an hour ago wouldn’t have been soon enough. He checked the time. It was a few minutes past five. He was going to have a lot to do before he could start hunting down those other men.