Kill Fee

by Owen Laukkanen

  COMM LIVED IN a handsome Spanish Colonial home in Coral Way, half a mile from the ocean. Ojeda was waiting in his Crown Vic when Stevens and Windermere pulled up out front. He had another agent with him, a hard-edged young woman in a tactical vest. “Stevens,” he said, “this is Foster.”

  Foster gave him a nod. Gave Windermere the same treatment. Windermere nodded back, tight-lipped. Then she turned to look up at the house. The whole place was dark. The driveway was empty. Windermere looked at Ojeda. “Go around back,” she told him. “We’ll try the front.”

  Ojeda disappeared into the backyard with Foster. Windermere looked at Stevens in the streetlight. “Got your sidearm?”

  Stevens nodded. Ojeda had kitted them both out with FBI standard-issue Glock 22s. Stevens drew his from his holster and felt his heart rate automatically increase. He looked around the dark neighborhood. Then he met Windermere’s eyes. “Let’s do this.”

  Windermere drew her own sidearm. They crept up the path to the front door, low and fast. Reached the stoop and Windermere knocked. The door swung open. There was nobody behind it. Windermere glanced at Stevens. “Left in a hurry.”

  “Or someone broke in.”

  They crept into the house. Windermere called out Comm’s name. There was no answer. The place was dark. Nothing moved. It was empty.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER and they knew it for certain. Comm was gone. There was nobody home.

  He’d disappeared quickly. Thrown a pile of shirts on his bed and hadn’t bothered to rehang them. His dresser drawers hung half open, bikini briefs and undershirts dangling. The light was still on in the master bathroom.

  Stevens wandered down the second-floor hallway. Poked his head into doorways. He could hear Windermere looking around the bedroom, Ojeda and Foster downstairs. The adrenaline still pumped in his veins; he bounced on the balls of his feet, wondering if Comm had made it out on his own. If the killer had found him in time to tie up loose ends.

  Stevens looked into another room. Comm’s office. A laptop computer on a cherrywood desk. A model ship, a freighter. A stack of papers. Stevens leafed through them. Shipping invoices. Contracts. Paperwork.

  Stevens surveyed the room. Books. Hardcover, blue. Ancient. The room was impeccably neat. Stevens looked under the desk, found the wastebasket and shook it a little, studying the contents. Then he smiled. Bingo.

  Comm had tried to burn through the evidence. He had failed. He’d left ashes, a scrap of paper unburned. It was a bank account statement, a transfer confirmation. One hundred thousand dollars to a numbered account.

  “Windermere!”

  Stevens fumbled in his pocket. He’d made note of Cody’s payment information earlier. Now he took out his notebook and compared Cody’s Killswitch account numbers with those in Comm’s wastebasket. Comm’s paper was torn, and burned. The first four numbers were missing. The rest of the account, however, matched up perfectly.

  Bingo.

  Windermere came into the room, Ojeda and Foster behind. “What’s up?”

  Stevens showed them the trash. “The numbers match Cody’s Killswitch transfer,” he told them. “Comm’s our guy.”

  “So where is he?” said Windermere.

  “Guy’s got a place in Houston,” said Ojeda. He glanced at the model ship on Comm’s desk. “Or . . .”

  Windermere arched an eyebrow. “Or?”

  “He has a ship, left Miami for Port-au-Prince tonight. Kind of a sudden departure, apparently.”

  Windermere looked at the model ship on Comm’s desk. “Call somebody in Houston,” she said. “Have them check out Comm’s place.” Then she grinned at Stevens. “How about a boat ride, partner?”

  71

  Parkerson drove Wendell Gray to the lake house.

  He’d fallen in love with the lake as a kid, when the shorefront was still farmland and forest. It had been a peaceful place, an escape from the city and its noise and oppressive heat. Even his parents seemed to calm when they came out here; for blissful weekends, Parkerson could almost imagine that his mom and dad loved each other, that they could see past the relentless onslaught of bills and invoices and too-skimpy paychecks. His dad had sold his plot by the lake one desperate winter, and Parkerson could still remember the long, torturous summer that followed, endless days spent sweating in his room, wishing for the cool relief of the lake, longing for silence instead of his parents’ unceasing crescendo of harsh words and slammed doors.

  The lake was developed now, dangerous. Cottages and big summer homes crammed almost every inch of waterfront, and come summer the whole region would be crawling with families in monstrous sport-utility vehicles and powerful ski boats. For now, though, in early April, the lake was quiet.

  They arrived at the lake just before dawn. Turned down the shore road and followed it to a stubby end. There was a dirt trail leading into the trees beyond. Parkerson slowed the Cadillac and turned down the trail. Crept over the bumps until he reached the house, a run-down little cabin in a clearing in the woods, the lake a few hundred feet distant. He’d purchased the place, secretly, shortly after he’d dreamt up Killswitch. Registered it to a dummy corporation and told no one he owned it, his own private bastion of calm. His Killswitch sanctuary.

  Gray was still passed out in the passenger seat. He’d stirred a couple times on the drive. Parkerson had hushed him. Soothed him back to sleep. Now he circled around to the passenger door, hefted the kid up, and dragged him into the yard. Gray muttered a protest but didn’t resist.

  The house was musty. There was a layer of dust over everything. A steady drip from the tap in the kitchen. Parkerson frowned. The damn thing would have been dripping since midwinter.

  He half dragged, half coaxed Wendell Gray through the door. Helped him across the scuffed kitchen linoleum and down a narrow set of stairs to the basement. The basement was damp and earthy. The ceiling was low. Parkerson had to duck as he dragged Gray along. Gray groaned. Struggled a little. “Hush,” Parkerson told him. “Almost there.”

  This was the unfortunate part of the process. Training a new asset was a dirty occupation. There were no absolutes. There was only Parkerson and Wendell Gray, a scared, traumatized man, and the grim process of molding him into a workable asset.

  Parkerson had built a room in the basement, walled in and soundproof, after he’d purchased the cabin. He’d done some research on posttraumatic stress and advanced torture techniques. Gradually he’d honed the training process into an efficient regimen of reeducation and discipline. Broken men went into the room. Assets came out.

  Parkerson unlocked the padlocked door and helped Gray inside. Sat him down on the thin iron bed and stood above him. Gray wavered, unsteady as a punch-drunk boxer. Parkerson lifted the kid’s legs and helped him lie down. Made sure he was comfortable and then turned to check the projector.

  Satisfied, he walked out. Closed the door behind him and relocked the padlock. Crossed the basement to a recliner, tilted all the way back, and picked up a remote.

  The remote controlled the DVD player that would feed images to the projector inside the new asset’s room. Parkerson pressed play, and then sat back to listen. The room was pretty well soundproofed, but sometimes, if he listened closely, he could still hear the screams.

  72

  The Coast Guard MH-65 Dolphin rocked and shook as the wind tossed it about. Stevens gripped Windermere’s hand, tight, and stared down into the night. Far below them, the cutter Vigilant was a tiny cluster of lights on an otherwise coal-black sea.

  Windermere peered across Stevens at the vessel beneath them. Then she grinned at him. “You get seasick, too?”

  Stevens grimaced as the helicopter descended. The Vigilant looked impossibly small down there. “Guess we’ll find out,” he said.

  The helicopter dropped down to a hover just above the cutter’s stern. A crew member slid open the side door, and immediately the win
d roared into the cabin, buffeting Stevens and pushing him back from the void. He stared out the yawning door and fought to keep his stomach under control.

  The crew member yelled something. Gestured at Windermere. She listened, nodding. Then she turned to Stevens. “They’re going to drop us on the stern,” she said. “Don’t think about it, just do it, okay?”

  Stevens nodded. “Okay.”

  Windermere grinned at him again, her face close, her eyes bright. “This is FBI living, Stevens,” she said. “Welcome to the big show.”

  The helicopter descended until it was just a few feet above the Vigilant’s roiling deck. The boat looked bigger up close—it was probably a couple hundred feet long—but the black night seemed to dwarf it, and it rolled with the ocean’s swell. Windermere glanced back at Stevens in the doorway. Flashed him a thumbs-up, then dropped out of sight.

  The crew member turned to Stevens. “Your turn, sir.”

  Stevens closed his eyes and edged toward the open door. He could see Windermere on the deck below, hustling away from the helicopter’s spinning rotors. A seaman stood on deck, arms outstretched, waiting for him. Stevens closed his eyes, thought of Nancy, and dropped.

  A split second of gut-wrenching free fall. Then he hit the deck. The seaman grabbed him and hurried him away from the helicopter. The chopper’s engine roared as it lifted off again. Within seconds, it was hundreds of feet above.

  The ship was strangely quiet without the helicopter’s screaming engine. Stevens let the seaman usher him to where Windermere waited at an open doorway. He looked around the vessel, his legs unsteady as the ship rocked beneath him. Then he looked up into the sky, found the helicopter’s tiny lights as it raced back to shore. He leaned against the bulkhead and tried to calm his racing heart. “Holy shit,” he said. “God damn the FBI.”

  73

  Lind sat on his couch and stared at the television. The TV was playing infomercials. Lind wasn’t watching. He was thinking about the girl, Caity Sherman.

  She’d cooked him spaghetti for dinner. Meatballs and everything. “Totally simple,” she said, “but it’s comfort food. You don’t quite look ready for quinoa.”

  Lind had watched her make it. He’d pretended to pay attention. Mostly, though, he was still thinking about what a mistake he was making. He was trying to keep the panic from overwhelming him again.

  Mistake or no, the dinner was good. It was the first meal in a long time he’d enjoyed, maybe the first meal ever. He told Caity and she laughed. “Of course it is, silly,” she said. “You only eat TV dinners. That stuff tastes like cardboard.”

  That wasn’t the reason, Lind knew. Whatever he ate, no matter what it was, it all seemed to taste the same. It had been that way for as long as he could remember. Since he’d come back, anyway. Since he’d met the man.

  The man.

  The man would be angered by this development. Lind had tried to mitigate the damage. He’d eaten his dinner, and then when the dinner was over and they were sitting at the table and she was staring at him, he hadn’t looked at her and he hadn’t said anything. He’d wanted to look at her, but he didn’t. He knew the man would be displeased if he did.

  No connections. No friends.

  They sat at the table in silence for a while. Lind stared down at his plate. The girl looked at him. Met his eyes, and looked away quickly. She stood and began to clear the table. Lind stood up, too. Tried to help. She smiled shyly at him—“Thanks”—and he felt a lurching sickness in his stomach.

  The man wouldn’t approve.

  The girl talked as she washed the dishes. Handed him a dish towel and told him to dry. He dried, and she talked. Mostly about herself. She seemed to know that he wouldn’t fill the silence.

  Her name was Caity Sherman. She was twenty-five years old. She’d come to Philadelphia to study piano at UArts. Then she’d dropped out. “No money,” she said. “I wasn’t good enough anyway.”

  She’d worked a few jobs before landing at Delta. “I like it,” she said. “In the short term, anyway.” She paused, then laughed a little. “Just don’t ask about the long term, because I have no idea.”

  She’d paused, waiting for a response. Glanced at him and he looked away. “What about piano?” he said finally.

  She looked at him. “As a job? I don’t think so.” She paused. “I mean, I love it, but it’s hard. It’s really damn hard.”

  He dried a plate. “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “Yeah.”

  AFTER THE PLATES WERE DRIED and the kitchen was cleaned, she’d looked around and looked at him and kind of shifted her weight, smiling shyly. “I should go.”

  Lind nodded. “Okay.”

  “Okay.” She took a pen from her purse and bent over the kitchen counter. Scribbled something on a scrap of paper and pressed it into his hand. “You won’t call,” she said, smiling, “but if you get lonely or whatever.”

  He took the paper from her and watched as she walked to the door. She waved good-bye and then disappeared into the hall, and he heard the elevator doors ding open just before his own door slammed closed. He stood in the kitchen for a long time, thinking about his mistake.

  He would have to kill her, he knew. She knew too much about him. The man would be angry. The man would demand that she die. And Lind needed the man happy. He needed the man to make the visions disappear.

  He didn’t want to kill the girl, though. He wished he didn’t have to.

  74

  The Vigilant’s skipper pointed through the wheelhouse windows at a line of lights on the horizon. “That’s her,” he told Stevens and Windermere. “The Island Joy.”

  “Comm’s ship,” said Stevens.

  “Roger. We’ve just hailed her, and she’s slowing, thank God.” He turned to a seaman lingering close by. “Petty Officer Briggs will get you ready to board.”

  They followed Briggs aft through the cutter to the stern of the ship, where a team in black tactical gear was readying a rigid-hulled Zodiac intercept boat for launch. Stevens studied the men. They didn’t say much. They wore grim expressions and carried compact machine guns.

  You’re a long way from Saint Paul, Stevens thought, feeling the cutter roll across another wave. No way in hell Nancy ever finds out about this.

  Briggs came back with an armload of bright orange neoprene survival gear. “In case you fall overboard,” she told Stevens. “Kind of rocky out there.”

  Stevens took the suit from her and pulled it on. Windermere dressed beside him, her eyes on the Island Joy on the horizon. Her jaw was set, her eyes narrowed. She looked like she was ready to kick somebody’s ass.

  The Vigilant slowed and the assault team launched the Zodiac, struggling to keep it close to the larger vessel in the swell. Windermere grinned at Stevens, and then climbed down the hull of the cutter to the little boat. Stevens hesitated a moment. Then he followed.

  THE LITTLE ZODIAC skipped like a pebble over the waves, lurching and jiving as it sped toward the freighter. Stevens crawled up to the bow, where Windermere crouched, gazing forward, taking spray in her face with every new swell.

  “Comm had better be on that ship,” she yelled across at Stevens. “This is a hell of an adventure to have to explain if he isn’t.”

  “Harbormaster said the ship left in a hurry,” said Stevens. “Wasn’t scheduled to depart for a week. This is suspicious, whatever it is.”

  “You got that right,” said Windermere. “Maybe we get unlucky and it’s just a mountain of drugs.”

  The Zodiac sped up alongside the freighter. The ship looked vast from up close, a featureless black hull topped with yellow sodium light. There was movement on board, faces at the rail. The Zodiac slowed, and the crew dropped a pilot ladder forty feet to the swell. Stevens watched as the team around him climbed up, one by one. Then Windermere shoved him forward. “Go for it.”

 
Stevens felt his heart racing. Whatever his fears, this was kind of cool. He crawled back along the Zodiac to the swinging ladder. Watched as the pilot brought the small boat alongside. The hull stretched high above him, almost to the sky. The boat rocked in the swell. A chasm of roiling water appeared. Then the pilot gunned the engine and the ladder was there. Windermere slapped his back. “Jump.”

  Stevens jumped. His arms found the ladder and he pulled himself upward, feet kicking off against the slick hull. Then he was climbing, the ladder rocking against the side of the freighter. Stevens climbed and didn’t look down.

  The climb took forever. His arms ached at the top. He clambered over the hull and stood beside the assault team, his limbs screaming, his lungs begging for air. A minute or so later, Windermere appeared. She stretched. Shook her head. “Holy shit,” she said. “That was cool.”

  She surveyed the deck of the freighter. The assault team had their machine guns drawn on the crew. The crew waited, eyes wide, their hands in the air. Windermere turned to Stevens. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s find Comm.”

  75

  It took less than ten minutes for the new asset to start screaming. Parkerson left him alone for an hour.

  The kid was curled up on his thin mattress when Parkerson finally walked in with breakfast. He’d puked on the floor. “Poor guy.” Parkerson sat on the bed beside the kid. Rubbed his shoulder. “You just had a bad dream, is all.”

  The kid hugged his knees to his chest. Looked at Parkerson with wide eyes. “What the hell is this?”

  “You’re having nightmares,” Parkerson told him. “Those visions you get. You’re safe now. I’m with you.”

  The kid stared at him, shivering. Parkerson held up a plate. “I brought breakfast.”

  Gray closed his eyes tight. Rubbed his head and groaned. “Where am I?”

  “You’re safe,” said Parkerson. “You just had a vision. Eat your breakfast.”