Perfect Killer

by Robb T White

  Jade felt guilty of one thing only in her friendship with Maria: she never divulged she spoke Spanish. Because of her demure appearance and language skills, she was valued for field work in large urban settings. Overhearing what people were saying when they thought they weren’t being understood was a priceless gift in surveillance.

  Jade was on her way to court, hoping Maria’s diner wasn’t too packed yet, when she saw Maria looking at her through the picture window and summoned her inside. She brought over some salsa macha, a favorite recipe from Maria’s native Veracruz. Jade wasn’t surprised that, it being Monday, Maria had another one of her frequent staff turnovers; she saw a pretty, dark-haired, mocha-eyed waitress, whom Maria brought over to Jade’s table and introduced as Mely and while Jade was finishing a chocolate tapioca dessert, she grabbed the new dishwasher and table busser, a slender man in his mid-thirties with an emo look, a long flap of hair offsetting a shaved other half, one gold loop earring, and both arms sleeved with a helter-skelter of tattoos, glyphs, and writing in the elaborate cursive fonts favored by artists and their customers. She caught a Proverbs on one bicep and an Acts on the other. Fortunately, she thought, for Maria, none were the spider webs, weeping clowns, and cartoon figures of hard-time convicts.

  Brian seemed polite, nodded pleasantly to her despite a missing upper left incisor, and rubbed his hands on his apron to dry them before shaking hands. His handshake was soft like a young girl’s and his wet palm made her want to recoil. She’d shaken a thousand hands as an agent and Brian’s was definitely one of the least pleasant.

  ‘I felt sorry for him,’ Maria said to her.

  Jade laughed. ‘You feel sorry for everyone, Mama,’ using her nickname.

  She smiled at her. Jade had learned that Maria’s own daughter Ida was lost to the drug and prostitute life in Albuquerque’s notorious War Zone.

  ‘I don’t need to read my Bible,’ Maria said. ‘I just ask Brian to come over and I read him. Ven acá, Brian! Show Miss Jade,’ she said.

  He obliged her with a slow pirouette, arms outstretched, to reveal the elaborately inked quotes decorating him front and back; after a laugh, he skipped off to his round of tables to be cleared.

  Maria rolled her eyes and made a gesture to suggest he was effeminate without using the slang term maricón, a word Jade had heard often on the streets of Calle Ocho when she was assigned to Miami out of Quantico.

  ‘You coming by for dinner?’ Maria asked.

  ‘I can’t, Mama,’ she said. ‘Busy day. I’ll be stuck inside the office late. I thought I was all through with paperwork but it seems to follow me everywhere I go.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Maria said. ‘I’ll have a meal sent over with Mely. My special burritos with the chipotle sauce you like. Don’t say no.’

  Maria did this for a couple of businesses at the mall like hers that stayed open late. Maria’s diner was open until ten most nights, although it depended on the help that showed up to work that night. She did prefer Maria’s cooking to the frozen dinners she was too tempted to make instead of a decent meal for herself after a long day.

  Tonight was all paperwork. She smiled, thinking that she had escaped one profession where writing was systemic for another, a rougher one, where writing and filling out forms was equally daunting at times. Not to mention the arcane tax codes that she had yet to learn. Those regulations drew most of George’s ire, she recalled.

  ‘It ain’t the goddamn criminals you got to worry about in this business,’ he told her, ‘it’s the damned tax man.’

  Jade was going to force herself to get as much of that homework accomplished tonight as possible. Once the week started up, a certain desultory rhythm established itself and she found her time allocated piecemeal to tasks. Between the weekend’s regurgitation of arrestees from jail from Friday to Sunday, a lag time occurred before the new week’s load of arrestees commenced, and she found a restful block of free time available on Monday evenings.

  George was old school and maintained a personal system of organizing and collecting information on his clients and their bookings, debt payment schedules, and added his own notes on stick-it tabs to the files. With his accounts spreadsheets, he was even less consistent. It took her hours to get everything sorted and arranged. She would defer synchronizing the information from hard copy into digitized files for another day.

  Around 8.30, she began to feel hungry and decided to walk down to Maria’s. She was surprised to see a closed sign in the window, but Mama’s hours were a match for George’s haphazard business practices.

  At 8.45, she heard a light tapping on her window and saw Brian with the diner’s mobile cart for serving some of her best mall patrons or, when she could get a willing driver, those long-time customers unable to make it to the diner.

  She pushed some file folders aside from the desk she took when she first bought into the business and greeted Brian at the door.

  ‘I thought you were closed for the day,’ she said.

  Brian said, ‘Mama’s giving the place a top-to-bottom cleaning. We’re all in the kitchen helping out. Then she remembered she’d promised you a meal so here I am. Mely was supposed to bring it but she’s got cleanser all over her hands right now.’

  ‘That was kind of her,’ Jade said. ‘Please come in.’

  He pushed the cart inside, which looked like some kind of antique tea cart with folding leaves and rubber wheels. ‘Where would you like me to put it?’ he asked her.

  ‘That desk, if you would.’

  Brian removed the white napkins covering the plates and began setting the dinner plates and silverware on the table.

  She noted the prolific tattooing as she had in the diner earlier that day and marveled at the number he sported, going every which way on his exposed flesh. She didn’t disdain tattoos in the young as her strait-laced colleagues in the FBI traditionally did. Gang Intelligence Units loved them because they earmarked criminals and gangbangers in the databases. She had read in an FBI profile report once that tattoos running into each other were classic signs of a psychopath.

  She mused about this while going to fetch her purse from beneath her desk to fish out a tip for his trouble and kindness. She had no bills smaller than a ten, but c’est la vie, this might restore faith in women tippers. Especially the professional women, she liked to say, ‘real cheapskates.’

  Approaching from behind, she glanced at the Bible quotes, the upper half of the letters scrolled across his neck disappeared into his black sleeveless t-shirt. Her stomach recoiled at the very instant her neocortex processed what the tattoo said. She had read those words before.

  Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

  Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent.

  The Tractatus’s final proposition. Wittgenstein. Charles Wöissell.

  Brian.

  Right here—

  As if he had read her mind, he turned around to face her with a slow, gaptoothed smile that widened as the recognition between them spread.

  ‘Agent Hui.’

  The bill fluttered free. The gun came out of her purse, fingers tightening around the butt and her front leg assuming the position. Chest shot, hit him in the torso—her old training on the firing range coming back in a split-second.

  But a split-second too slow.

  Wöissell was in motion the moment he saw her plunge into her purse. He kicked the gun out of her grip before she squeezed off the first round.

  She froze.

  Don’t panic. Don’t panic, panic, panic—her limbic brain screamed.

  He relished the pure horror in her eyes.

  She tried to block a punch he threw lazily but it was a feint. He hit her on the jaw and her head snapped back. She tottered into the corner of the desk and slipped to the floor. She felt numbness in her hands and legs.

  ‘Don’t fight it,’ Wöissell said. ‘You know I’m going to kill you, don’t you?’

  She tried to get up but her legs were rubber.
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br />   He has no mercy.

  Wöissell’s arrogant calm belied his innate skill. He acted as if he had all the time in the world. She watched from the floor as he hit the light switches with his hand.

  The office went dark.

  ‘Maybe just one for mood lighting,’ he said. He hit another switch.

  Cars drove past and could detect people inside, but would anyone know or care what happened inside her office?

  ‘Let me help you up.’

  He grabbed her triceps and hauled her to her feet and shoved her backward onto the desk, pinning her legs and keeping her hands locked. He was close enough for her to smell his breath.

  ‘Tell me what you’re feeling right now, Special Agent Jade Hui.’

  ‘Fear,’ she said.

  ‘Good, that’s good. I was afraid you’d recognize me from my handshake. An ice pack and a little Crisco grease. I saw her on Central when she found Mely. Then I saw you.’

  ‘Is—Maria alive?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. I know you’re smart. I learned everything I could about you.’

  He balled his fist and brought it down on her nose, blinding her with pain. A jet of bright blood shot from both nostrils. Her eyes watered; she could not see.

  ‘I don’t want you doing anything while I’m preparing you,’ he said.

  He had moved off to her left side.

  She snorted out more blood and used her hands behind her for leverage.

  Wöissell said, ‘You, Agent Hui, are all I have been thinking about.’

  ‘You … flatter me, Charles,’ she gurgled out, coughing blood.

  The kick came from her right side; she never saw him move. She doubled over, gagging, spitting out more blood and a ropy string of yellow bile. She couldn’t breathe. She had to remain conscious or she would never survive.

  That was the exact moment she knew she could fight. He stepped over to her and touched her chin with his foot.

  ‘Get up, bitch. Take what’s coming to you.’

  She snapped her hands out, caught his foot and twisted it hard while rising to her knees in one movement.

  He jumped backward, easily freeing himself, and laughing as he came down in a fighting stance.

  ‘You’re going to have to do much better than that. Time for more pain.’

  His speed was dazzling in the half-light and she instinctively clenched before he struck. She felt two hard, rapid blows to her chest and side, and a third straight to her liver that dropped her to the floor again. He wasn’t fighting to kill her. He was dishing out punishment.

  She kept looking toward the place where the gun had flown out of her hands. She caught his eyes watching hers.

  She stood up—rather he let her stand up—and took a fighting stance and waited for the next attack. He used a leg sweep to send her down to the floor hard. The noise, however, was worse than the pain. She had enough strength for one effort, no more. But he had to help her or it was over. He could stomp her throat, crush her windpipe at any second when he tired of playing with her.

  Wöissell grabbed her in his powerful hands and threw her over his hip as if she were a ragdoll. She landed on the desk and cracked the glass top into shards that flew everywhere, but she knew how to roll and when she landed, it wasn’t in a heap as she faked her sprawl.

  Her purse lay underneath her.

  She groaned, feigning worse injury than she felt while her hand dug inside it.

  He realized his mistake. Wöissell flew over the desk in one leap with his lead foot extended. She rolled as it came down and missed.

  He came at her, a low growl in his throat, his hands like claws when she hit him full in the eyes with a burst of mace.

  He roared and flew backward, clawing at his eyes.

  Jade struggled to her feet, fell in a heap, got up, stumbled, headed for the door more from memory than sight. Then she spotted it through blurred vision: the gun.

  Lying in the corner—

  Time, no time—run!

  But she didn’t.

  Wöissell roared, a mad bull, too incapacitated to kill her, went full speed in a blind rush to the door. She executed a perfect wheel kick before he passed.

  His turn to go the floor hard. Still sightless, moaning in a frenzy of pain, he crab-walked toward the door. She kicked him in the head. He lashed out, flailing with arms, too blinded to catch hold.

  She hit the light switch, knowing he could see his path to escape. He stood up as she moved away. The two faced each other. His face was a scarlet mask of pain. Hers was covered in blood.

  Wiping blood out of her eyes, she looked for the gun. Wöissell staggered to her, making guttural noises, determined through his swollen eyes to get to her. She remembered how he’d used his legs to choke Misrach and De Hofnar. She’d never be able to fight off his power.

  Wöissell reached her just as her hand touched the gun.

  He jammed an arm bar under her neck, lifting her to his chest and, with a twisting motion, swung his body around hers in a somersault inside a tuck. It was like being thrown headfirst into a high-powered washing machine.

  She felt the vise grip of his thighs instantly and knew he was planning to break her neck.

  She placed the barrel against his spine and pulled the trigger.

  Her head hit the floor hard as the taut muscles of his legs collapsed.

  Before she blacked out, she heard one word from his dying mouth, a word she knew—

  She was falling down a black hole, letting go from the pain, fear choking her.

  But, her stubborn brain told her, there is nowhere else to go—

  Cee Shaughnessy flew down on weekends and stayed by her bedside until she stopped screaming for pain meds.

  ‘Give your body to science when you’re done,’ she said. ‘You take too much punishment.’

  During her hospital stay, she read Wittgenstein again to see what she missed the first time.

  ‘Dasein,’ she said to Cee one afternoon.

  ‘Da-what?’

  ‘It’s a philosophical concept. It means Being there.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘He said it. I heard him—just before he came at me that last time, when the mace was burning his eyes.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Stop clucking, Cee. It’s Heidegger’s concept, not Wittgenstein’s, so what do you think—’

  She looked at the expression on Cee Shaughnessy’s face and burst into laughter at the mixed expression of confusion, disapproval, and (she hoped) true, heartfelt concern for her friend’s sanity.

  Being there, being there, being there …

  Let him keep his secret in the grave.

  It hurt to laugh but she did just that. Then Cee started to laugh. For a couple of long, delicious minutes, they laughed together—at what, she didn’t know and didn’t care. It was healing to the soul and that’s what mattered. Then a nurse came into the room and told them to keep it down. ‘This is a hospital, for God’s sake, not a comedy club.’

  That sent them both into hysterics. Their peals of laughter reverberated around the ceiling and echoed all the way down the corridor to the ICU unit.

  EPILOGUE

  THEY’D JUST RETURNED FROM Maria’s Diner, although it was newly reopened and run by a nephew with six children named Lopez. He moved from Tehachapi in the San Joachin Valley after Maria’s funeral. Hundreds of people attended to celebrate a simple, good-hearted woman’s life at the Queen of Angels Cemetery. It was a blistering hot day and dozens of people, her customers, openly wept.

  Charles Tyrone Wöissell was buried in Potter’s Field in a public cemetery on the West Mesa outside Albuquerque. His family in New England did not claim the body. KOAT News reported that, so far, the bones and remains of eight young Hispanic girls and women, all street prostitutes with drug addictions, were discovered in shallow graves. A woman was out walking her dog at sunset in the desert where new developments were digging foundations for new housing.
The dog returned with a long bone. She snapped it with her iPhone and sent it to police who identified it as a femur.

  ‘It matters to be good,’ Jade told herself. ‘Somehow it matters.’

  ‘It’s crooked, damn it,’ Celeste complained.

  They were stopped in front of their plate glass window where Celeste was screwing up her face in a look of dismay.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ the painter said, turning around to face her. ‘You’re looking at the cactus. That’s what’s throwing you off.’

  ‘Bullshit. It’s crooked as hell. Jade, come over here,’ she said in her command voice, a pitch below bellow and a couple of octaves above baritone.

  Jade got up from her desk and walked over to stare at the lettering.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said.

  The painter smirked and went back to his work.

  HUI & SHAUGHNESSY PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS AND BAIL BONDS

  Jade suggested they cancel out the twenty-four hours bit as it was proving to be working too well as far as drawing calls to the office at three in the morning, that hour the early church fathers declared as the Dark Night of the Soul. In Albuquerque, as anywhere, it was the hour cops bagged their quotas of DUIs, trespassers were rounded up, drunk or high spousal abusers were being cuffed by police and all sorts of city mayhem happened.

  ‘But that,’ she told Shaughnessy as honestly as she could a month ago, ‘is the business we’re in.’

  We’re. It sounded good.

  The timing couldn’t have been better, either: Cee’s girlfriend had recently dumped her and she was going through a bad case of the blues, drunk every time she called up Jade, which was getting to be every night instead of once a week.

  ‘Why don’t you relocate here?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Seriously, I’ve got more work than I can handle,’ Jade said.

  It was true. It was also true she was looking forward to expanding to work that would help clients in more ways than getting them out of the slammer. It was more satisfying work she craved after her release from the hospital, thank God, with no permanent damage beyond a few more scars.