by Jack Mars
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Sara awoke as the sun was rising, the sky outside her window a flat gray and threatening the possibility of snow. She heard rustling from beyond her bedroom and sat bolt upright suddenly, listening, before the veil of sleep lifted and she remembered the night before. Camilla, her former roommate from Florida, had shown up unannounced, fleeing an abusive ex-boyfriend.
She tossed the blanket off of her, pulled her hair into a haphazard ponytail, and padded out barefoot to the kitchen where she found Camilla digging a fist into a cereal box.
“Hey! Good morning,” Camilla said brightly. She dug out a handful of fruity cereal and scooped it into her mouth. “Sleep good?”
“Sure. You?” Sara made her way to the coffee machine. None had been made yet, so she grabbed a filter and the can of grounds.
“Yeah. Definitely. Couch was nice.” Sara had slept in Maya’s bed and offered her friend her own, but Camilla had opted for the living room couch instead, claiming that the ambient noise of the TV helped her fall asleep.
Sara turned on the brew cycle and leaned against the counter, struggling to come around. She’d never been much of a morning person; not like Maya, who could wake before the sun and run seven miles before breakfast. But something was off this morning. Her brain was just still too foggy to put it together.
“So what do you do around here?” Camilla asked. “You got like a job or something?”
“No, no job. I’m studying for my GED. And I take some art classes at the community center.”
“Art classes? What, like pottery or something?” Camilla snorted. “Forget all that stuff today. You know I’m flush. Let’s go do something fun!”
Sara looked at her, really looked at Camilla for the first time that morning. Her eyes were bloodshot. She was in the same clothes from the night prior. A quick glance over at the sofa showed a blanket tossed over it, but no divots in the cushions, no signs that the pillow had been used.
“You’re high.”
Camilla blinked at her. “What? Girl, I told you I was clean—”
“Yeah, you said that. But you’re high right now.” Sara felt the anger coming then, rising like heat from her chest into her neck and up to her cheeks. “I checked your bag. Where’d you stash it?”
“I swear, I’m not high!” Camilla protested.
“You didn’t sleep at all!” Sara accused. “You took the couch so that you could do it after I fell asleep!”
Camilla was shaking her head now, over and over, like she was stuck on some kind of loop. “No, I’m not, I’m not…”
“What are you on? Uppers? Coke?” Sara marched over to Camilla’s bag, lying on the living room floor, and snatched it up. “Where are you hiding it?” She tore the bag open and looked again, but found nothing odd—other than the thick roll of cash she’d seen the night before.
“Wait!” Camilla cried.
A-ha. Sara took the rubber band off the roll of dough and let the cash unfurl. It was a clever hiding place, stowing the drugs inside the money roll.
“Sara, don’t! It’s gone!”
She looked up sharply. “What do you mean, gone?”
“I mean… yes. I had some.” Camilla stared at the carpet. “I did everything I had last night. You’re right. I didn’t sleep.” Her red-rimmed eyes grew moist with the threat of tears. “I need help.”
“You need to leave,” Sara said lowly. “I asked you one thing and you couldn’t do it. You couldn’t be honest…”
She trailed off as she glanced down at the stack of money in her hand. “What the hell…?” The edges of the bills were curled in on one another, fanning themselves naturally after being rolled so tightly. The top few bills were fives and tens, but every bill beneath them was a hundred. Dozens of them, maybe even a hundred hundred-dollar bills.
These were not just tips from bartending amounting to a few hundred bucks. This was close to ten grand easily.
“Camilla? What is this?”
“It’s nothing,” she said quickly. “Please, just give it to me? The drugs are gone. Just give me the money, Sara.”
“First maybe you tell me why you’re running away from this abusive ex of yours again.”
“Sara, give me the goddamn money!” Camilla shrieked.
Then she shrieked again, this time out of fear, as a brisk knock sounded at the door.
“Here.” Sara shoved the money into Camilla’s hands. “Take it and leave.” She brushed past the older girl to see who was knocking.
“Wait, wait!” Camilla’s face had gone ashen. “Please, check to see who it is first.”
Sara was about to roll her eyes—she always checked the peephole first—but something about the fear in her friend’s voice gave her pause. She padded to the front door and put her eye to the tiny lens.
On the other side of the door was a young white guy, mid-twenties at best. He wore a white tank top with a heavy leather jacket over it, the loose collar displaying a dark tribal tattoo swirling up his collarbone and reaching his neck. His hair was short, nearly shaved, and his eyes were deep set and ringed in shadow, as if he hadn’t slept in days.
A knot of panic formed in Sara’s stomach. She didn’t have to ask to know who this was.
When she turned away from the door, Camilla had her back against the wall of the small foyer. Sara’s expression must have betrayed her instantly.
“Don’t open it,” she whispered.
“How did he know to come here?!”
“I don’t—”
The man on the other side banged on the door with a fist. “Hello!” he shouted, more of a demand than a question.
Sara rushed into the kitchen and snatched up Camilla’s cell phone, lying on the countertop. She opened the GPS app and checked the settings.
“Son of a bitch,” she hissed. “Your location sharing is turned on!”
“Oh my god.” Camilla looked terrified. “He must have done it when I wasn’t looking… that’s how he always knew where to find me…”
“And you didn’t think that was strange?!” Sara asked furiously.
“I didn’t even know that was a thing!”
“Open up!” The man slapped angrily at the door with a palm. “Whoever you are, I know she’s in there! This doesn’t have to get ugly! I just want my money!”
Oh shit. The money that Camilla had, the thousands in the roll of cash. “You stole from him.”
Camilla didn’t answer, but her gaze darted left and right nervously.
“You have to give it back,” Sara said firmly. “If you do, maybe he’ll leave.”
The older girl shook her head, her unwashed hair swinging in her face. “I-I can’t. I spent… a lot of it.”
“You stole more than ten grand from him?!” And then you came here? Sara wanted to add, but she held her tongue. Instead she rushed back to the door.
“I’m gonna give you to the count of three,” the dealer threatened, “and then I’m kickin’ it in.”
I’d like to see you try. Fortunately her dad had the foresight, after several break-ins, to convince the landlord to allow him to install a heavy-duty security door. Even the frame was reinforced with steel. Aside from the lock on the knob, there were also a sliding chain lock and two deadbolts, one an ordinary twist lock and the other a heavier bar that slid into the door frame.
Sara slid it over now, as quietly as she could. But it settled into place with a heavy chunk.
“Yeah? You think you can lock me out?” the guy shouted from the other side. Sara checked the peephole just in time to see him winding up a kick.
The impact rattled the door in its frame and caused Camilla to let out a small scream. He tried a second time, and then a third before realizing the door wasn’t budging.
Sara tried to think. Christ, I haven’t even had coffee yet. The guy couldn’t get in through the door; of that she was certain. But he’d also clearly driven through the night in pursuit of Camilla, from Florida all the way here to Bethesda, so
he wasn’t likely to just give up and go home. He knew she was here even if they turned the location sharing off.
And the door was not the only possible way into the apartment, if someone was crafty and persistent enough.
Think. What would Maya do?
That wasn’t helpful; her older sister would probably open the door and kick the guy’s ass. Sara was in no position to take on a guy who had at least eight inches of height and fifty pounds on her frame, not to mention the strong possibility that his midnight run north was likely fueled by drugs.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
Camilla stared at her like a deer in headlights. “Huh?”
“His name. What’s his name?”
“Rex. It’s Rex.”
“Rex?” Sara scoffed. “For god’s sake, Camilla… never mind. Just don’t say a word.” She positioned herself just outside the door and carefully glanced through the peephole again. Then she cleared her throat and said loudly, “Rex?”
The guy was gearing up for another kick, but his foot slowly lowered back down. “So she is in there.”
“Yes.” There was no point in trying to hide it. He’d never believe that Camilla’s phone was there while she wasn’t. “But she’s not coming out, and you’re not getting in. If you don’t leave, right now, I’m calling the police.”
“Sara…” Camilla said in a small voice behind her.
Through the peephole, the guy called Rex grinned maliciously. “Sure. Go ahead, call ’em. But maybe ask Camilla first. See if she thinks that’s a good idea.”
Sara frowned at that. “What the hell does he mean?”
Her friend shook her head again. “You can’t call the cops. You can’t. I have a record.”
“What did you do?”
“I helped him move some stuff. A cop stopped me for speeding and he found it on me.”
Sara’s head was starting to ache. “Let me guess. There’s a warrant out for you in the state of Florida. You needed to skip town to avoid jail, so you stole from Rex and took off.”
“That’s…” Camilla gulped. “That’s pretty much how it shook out. And Rex has never been busted. His record is clean. If you call the cops they might get him for trying to break in, but I’ll get sent back, it’ll be worse. I can’t go to jail, Sara.”
“I can’t believe you brought all this on me!” Sara screeched. “What is wrong with you?” She had half a mind to unlock the door and throw her friend to the wolf.
“Please.” Camilla suddenly looked like a lot less like the hotheaded bartender she had known and much more like a frightened child. “Help me.”
Sara’s nostrils flared. Without another word, she stormed to the closet and yanked the door open. In the pocket of her dad’s old tweed coat was the silver revolver.
Camilla’s eyes widened in shock at the sight of it, and then even wider when Sara expertly opened the cylinder to check it was loaded.
“Rex,” she said through the door in a voice that she hoped sounded confident. “Maybe I won’t call the cops. But you can bet your ass I’ll do anything I have to do to keep you away from her and out of here. I’m armed. It’s two against one. Do you like those odds?”
Through the peephole, Rex sneered. “Aw, two frightened little girls shackin’ up together. Thinkin’ you’re tough. But let me ask you something, little girl.” He moved closer to the peephole, so that through the fisheye curvature of the lens Sara saw only a leering mouthful of yellowed teeth.
“You think I came alone?”
He vanished suddenly from the peephole’s view.
Sara sucked in a breath as she rushed through the apartment, to the sliding glass door that led to their small balcony. She checked it carefully but saw no one, so she swiftly closed the blinds. “Close those curtains,” she hissed at Camilla, but her friend was frozen it seemed, her back to the wall and both palms flat against it as if she could become a part of it if she tried hard enough.
“He’s going to kill me,” she said meekly. “He’s done it before, I know he has.”
“No, he’s not going to kill you.” The revolver already felt too heavy in her hand. It had been far too long since she’d even shot a gun. She set it down on the counter and grabbed up her cell phone.
“No! Please, no cops!”
“I’m not calling the cops,” Sara insisted. She was calling for help. There was only one person she knew who could even the odds against someone dangerous like Rex. But that was only if he could get there before the dealer found a way inside.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Stefan Krauss remembered every kill.
He catalogued them in his mind like a bloody library. His memory was not exactly what experts called eidetic, but it was quite excellent, and whenever he wanted he could conjure up the memory of a past engagement as easily as pressing play on a video, rich with detail, precise in actualization.
He did so now, with the odor of diesel fuel stuck in his nostrils, the taste of it acrid in his throat. He still stood on the bow of the small, sleek ship called Glimmer, but the ship was no longer in the water; it was thousands of feet above it.
To distract himself from the rumbling engines, impossibly loud in his ears, and the overpowering scent of fuel, and even the chatter of the Saudis as they shouted in their foreign tongue to be heard, he replayed a memory in his head. His first kill.
His name had not always been Stefan Krauss, but he had not gone by his birth name in many years, would never answer to it again. The real Stefan Krauss was a German footballer who had played for the Dortmund club for only one season. He’d been an instant star, his movements so fluid that it appeared his body made the decisions instinctively for him. But a month after the season ended, the athlete Stefan Krauss was killed in an automobile accident outside Dusseldorf.
He was fourteen when he adopted the name, for the simple reasons that he thought it sounded pleasant to the ear, easy to remember, and the actual Stefan Krauss was no longer using it.
Fourteen. That was his age when he killed for the first time. There had been fights before that, schoolyard scraps that ended with bloody knuckles and busted lips. Wrestling matches in the dirt, ruddy faces and name-calling.
He’d had a sister before he was Stefan Krauss. Two years his junior. Spirited and amusing and curious. He’d had a mother, too young to have a fourteen-year-old, who worked two jobs to feed them. He’d had a stepfather, in lieu of the one who abandoned them years prior.
And at age fourteen, he had learned what his stepfather had been doing to his sister.
There was a word for people like him, or at least one that they would use to describe him. In English, that word was “sociopath.” Amusingly enough, despite the German propensity to have far more interesting versions of English terms, the same word in his native tongue was simply “Soziopath.”
But he did not believe that he was one of them. Not in the true sense. He had a conscience. He had feelings. He knew that because on the day that he learned the unspeakably untoward things that his stepfather was doing to his sister, he came home from school enraged and killed the man.
His stepfather had been between jobs, yet again, drinking a Schöfferhofer while seated in his ratty recliner. The boy had barged into the house, fists balled, and accused him of what he knew his stepfather had done. The older man had stared for a long moment, finishing his beer, standing slowly. Then he lunged with the bottle and smashed it over the boy’s head.
That was a pain he would never forget. His vision had been doubled; blood ran into his eyes. But he’d held his own. It was a spectacularly bloody fight—the bloodiest of his life, before he had learned patience and efficiency. It ended with the boy atop the man, pounding his stepfather with both fists, realizing that he could not do the damage he wished to inflict. He’d grabbed the nearest object—a hand weight. A small dumbbell that his mother used for calisthenics. A mere five pounds.
It took only five pounds, over several blows, to crush a skull.
His sister. The victim. And in that moment, he was the monster. She screamed and ran from the house. Only then did he fully realize what he had done. So he left. He became Stefan Krauss that day.
That was twenty-two years ago. He’d been Stefan Krauss for longer than he’d been that boy. And now he stood upon the bow of a stolen ship carrying a plasma railgun, the ship in turn being carried in the belly of an Antonov An-124, a strategic airlift quadjet capable of loading and unloading cargo without landing. This particular plane was decommissioned twelve years earlier; the last known use was Qatar. Sheikh Salman had purchased it a few years prior in a seemingly clairvoyant move of foresight that he might one day have use for something like it.
Or so the sheikh claimed. In the last two months the plane had been outfitted with specifications that Krauss had been transmitting out of South Korea while posing as security for the railgun’s technical crew. After firing on the Navy ships in Oman, the Antonov had swept out of the sky and low over the water, opening its cargo hatch and slowing its airspeed until Glimmer was able to safely slide into the rotund plane’s belly. Wide rollers facilitated their transfer, and enormous rubber bumpers caught them before they crashed into the cargo hold’s wall.
All in all, it had been relatively smooth.
Over the din of the engine, the PA system crackled and a voice made an announcement in Arabic. Krauss frowned; he did not know the language.
“It is time,” one of the Saudi commandos told him in English. Though the warning was unnecessary; he could feel that they were slowing and dropping in altitude.
“Brace,” he told the Saudi. Then he gestured to the other commandos. “Tell them.” Stefan Krauss lowered himself to his knees and wrapped a bow line several times around his forearm. The landing would be a bumpy one, he knew; the rope was just in case he was flung overboard.
