When They Come for You

by James W. Hall

  PRAISE FOR JAMES W. HALL

  “A masterful writer.”

  ―James Patterson

  “No writer working today . . . more clearly evokes the shadows and loss that hide within the human heart.”

  ―Robert Crais

  “The king of the Florida-gothic noir.”

  ―Dennis Lehane

  “Delivers taut and muscular stories about a place where evil always lurks beneath the surface.”

  ―Michael Connelly

  “I believe no one has written more lyrically of the Gulf Stream since Ernest Hemingway.”

  ―James Lee Burke

  “Hall keeps the tension mounting as motives and alliances shift with the foul-scented wind. Even as violence looms, Hall’s talent for description adds a balancing, poetical note.”

  ―Publishers Weekly on The Big Finish

  “As ever, Hall is in colorful command of his South Florida setting . . . Compared to other mystery writers, he plays things refreshingly low key, but he’s always in control, thriving on the setup as much as the payoff . . . with its nicely observed characters and lively dialogue—and terrific sex scenes—it keeps readers turning the pages.”

  —Kirkus Reviews on Going Dark

  “A damn good mystery.”

  —Booklist on Dead Last

  “Hall is one of those rare thriller writers who can build character as he ratchets tension, who can do no-holds-barred action scenes with panache and, in the midst of bedlam, never lose sight of nuance. All those skills are on display here, as Hall assembles a full-bodied supporting cast whose stories hold our interest as much as Thorn’s attempt to save his son without helping to bring about a South Florida version of Chernobyl. A fine thriller on every level.”

  —Booklist on Going Dark

  “Hall’s latest novel, titled Going Dark, proves he’s one of the best genre writers working today.”

  —Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered

  OTHER TITLES BY JAMES W. HALL

  The Thorn Series

  Under Cover of Daylight

  Tropical Freeze

  Mean High Tide

  Gone Wild

  Buzz Cut

  Red Sky at Night

  Blackwater Sound

  Off the Chart

  Magic City

  Hell’s Bay

  Silencer

  Dead Last

  Going Dark

  The Big Finish

  Stand-Alone Novels

  Bones of Coral

  Hard Aground

  Body Language

  Rough Draft

  Forests of the Night

  Short Story Collections

  Paper Products

  Over Exposure

  Nonfiction

  Hit Lit

  Hot Damn!

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by James W. Hall

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or by photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477848678

  ISBN-10: 1477848673

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  For Evelyn

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  PART TWO

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  ONE

  February, Coconut Grove, Florida

  Spider Combs was parked five blocks east of the white wood cottage on Margaret Street in Coconut Grove where his target lived.

  Behind the tinted windows of the stolen pickup, he spied on the residents of the cottage via the iPad in his lap. Last week, after a midday recon of the neighborhood, he’d slipped behind the house, jimmied a door, spent a half hour inspecting the layout, noting the proximity of neighbors, angles of sight, then searched for security alarms, hidden firearms, or other weapons.

  It checked out fine. Neighbors shielded by thick walls of foliage. No guns in bedside tables, no baseball bats tucked behind doors, no security system. Sweet young pacifists. Easy pickings.

  In the pantry, he spotted an oversize can of charcoal lighter. Which saved Spider the trouble of lugging his own.

  When he finished his inspection, Spider installed four microcams, piggybacking on the young couple’s wireless network, then planted a range extender behind the curtains near a front window. The extender projected the cameras’ signals for several blocks, so Spider could park a safe distance away and access the live feed on his tablet.

  For the past few days, he’d monitored their helter-skelter schedules, looking for patterns, getting to know them. Husband Ross, a newspaper guy, left and returned at odd intervals through the day, heading out before dawn some mornings, other days staying indoors in his sweatpants and T-shirt, typing on his laptop, making phone calls, then putting on jeans, polo shirt, baseball cap, and departing.

  Wife Harper spent her days with the infant. When she wasn’t breast-feeding the kid or singing to it or reading to it, the kid was sleeping in a crib and she was shut inside the spare bathroom that was rigged as a darkroom. Harper was a photographer. Black-and-white shots of famous people. Some so famous even Spider knew their names. Most nights she stayed at home, made dinner for hubby, read a book or watched TV, breast-fed the kid. Tonight was different. She was headed out, going somewhere fancy.

  Spider would have to hurry to make it before she left.

  She wasn’t exactly his type. He preferred them short and plumpish, a little flab for handholds. But, hell, he’d make an exception for Harper McDaniel. Truth was, he had a goddamn crush.

  Spider watched her dry off after her shower, then slip into her black bra and panties. Hubby appeared in sweatpants and a ratty T-shirt, and they had a quick back-and-forth that ended with Harper giving hubby’s crotch a feel through the sweats. Watching that, Spider felt his hormones fire.

  Hubby scooped the baby out of his crib and tucked the little guy into a body sling, then went back into the bathroom. Harper, still in her underwear, picked out a black cocktail dress from her closet, held it up against herself, looking in the full-length mirror. Something about her putting on her clothes layer by layer, leg by leg slipping into her panties, snapping t
hat bra, shifting her breasts so they were comfortable, then sliding into the black dress—it was sexier than when she stripped them off.

  Something else for his shrink to play with.

  That black outfit was one of the few dressy items in her closet. Harper was a blue-jeans girl. Tomboy. Tee tops, shorts, workout clothes, sandals. She was tallish with shoulder-length raven-black hair, very thick with a good shine. She was long limbed and lean like some kind of athlete, marathon runner, high jumper. He couldn’t say. The husband, Ross, was a couple of inches taller, curly black hair, hawk nose. The wife was clearly a nine, tilting toward a ten, while the guy was barely a six. A weird combo. From what Spider had seen, the guy survived on black coffee, Cheerios, milk, the occasional apple. No physical threat to Spider.

  They weren’t rich but doing okay, these two white-bread yuppies. Husband pulled down high five figures at the Miami News, and Harper brought in slightly more than half that as a photographer.

  Thirteen thousand in a savings account, a piddling 401(k). A quarter of their monthly paychecks went to mortgage, taxes, and insurance. Didn’t eat out much, a movie now and then. Ordinary financial situation, nothing that concerned Spider. He wasn’t after their money. It was just part of his research, the usual protocol. He liked to know as much as possible about his targets to protect himself against hidden trip wires. Rich fucks could pose problems. The less income, the less likely anyone would come looking for their killer.

  Though he knew he shouldn’t do it, he saved the day’s video feed to a file, then attached that to an e-mail and sent it to himself. Later he’d load that file onto his storage site out in the cloud, wherever the hell that was.

  He never took that kind of risk. He always let everything he recorded go flying off into the wireless void. But he wanted to watch this one some more. Later on, when this job was finished, bring her back, feast on her face, her long, lean body, that hair. That goddamn hair.

  This had never happened before, falling for a target. Spider was a pro. Clinical, detached. But this girl was graceful. He liked how she moved, how she held the baby, the kind of wife she was. The way Ross brushed her hair some nights, slow strokes through that long black mane. Brush, brush, and brush. Hypnotic to watch. Fuck if he could explain it. But there it was. He was going to miss watching the live feed, Harper McDaniel doing her daily rituals, the way she leaned close to the mirror and dabbed at the skin around her eyes like she was searching for wrinkles, the sexy way she fit the kid’s lips to her nipples. The way she and hubby spooned after sex, holding each other like that until they fell asleep. Another thing to dump on his shrink. Someday, when he actually got around to seeing a shrink.

  He sat back, tapping his foot, in a hurry now, eager to arrive before Harper left, have a few words with her, see her up close, a last look. He felt like he knew her, like they were old friends.

  But he couldn’t move until dark. He watched the last of the twilight drain from the sky. Watched people walking their dogs. Big dogs squatting to leave turd piles on lawns. People picking up the piles in plastic bags. Everyone all goody-goody.

  He rolled down his window for some fresh air. Coconut Grove had good air, flavored with jasmine or something. Spider didn’t know from plants. There were a lot of things he didn’t know the names of: stars, insects, trees, shit like that. Not one of his skills. But he had other talents. The things he did to make his money. Cagey, industrious. How he survived. Where he got his name. Stringing his intricate web, snagging his prey.

  When it was full-on dark, he rearranged the fit of his shoulder holster beneath the baggy Cuban shirt. He left the keys in the ignition so the truck could find its way back to its rightful owner. Spider was a hired gun, yeah, but he was no low-life car thief.

  He got out of the truck and walked west on Margaret Street. He hadn’t gone a block when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He stopped, took it out, read the text: Okay, go. He didn’t bother answering. The fucker didn’t need an answer. He shoved the phone back in his pocket and went on.

  Two blocks from the McDaniel house, he checked to be sure nobody was around, then he smashed the iPad against a fire hydrant. Beat it until the screen shattered and the guts came loose. He dropped the remains down a sewer drain. With the pay from tonight’s job, hell, he could buy a hundred iPads.

  He walked on, staying on the shadowy side of the street, fitting on his leather gloves, a sticky silk thread spinning out behind him.

  TWO

  February, Coconut Grove, Florida

  They said their good-byes, and Harper did a final check of her lipstick in the dresser mirror and was headed to the door when she caught a glimpse of Ross and Leo in the bathroom. An irresistible photo op.

  She went back to her closet, took down her Leica from a high shelf, and returned to the half-open bathroom door. This was going to make her late, but screw it, the shot was too good to pass up.

  Standing at the bathroom mirror, Ross angled the blade against his throat. Only a straight razor would do for Ross McDaniel. He’d inherited the blade, along with the leather strop and the badger bristle brush, from his father and generations of McDaniel men before him.

  He worked the blade around his Adam’s apple, then moved down row by row, scraping away his coarse beard. With the towel tight around his narrow waist, the sinews and muscles of his upper body swelled and flowed with each adjustment of the blade.

  Leo was cradled in a sling on Ross’s naked chest. Facing forward, Leo stared into the mirror as if trying to puzzle out the meaning of this odd ritual. There was a dab of shaving cream on Leo’s cheek. A father’s mischief.

  Just beyond Ross’s peripheral vision, Harper steadied her aim.

  A side view of Ross’s craggy profile, bent nose, the hard cheekbones, long lashes. A challenging angle. Beyond the window the moon was rising, its frail light filtering through palm fronds.

  An edgy contrast between the moonlight and the ominous blade sliding across the throat only inches from the delicate skin of the child. The father’s eyes, loving yet coolly workmanlike. The clash of serenity and risk, the mundane and peculiar. A photo Deena might have taken.

  Harper slanted to the left, caught the perfect zing of light on that flat silver instrument, the upward tilt of the sharp steel. And depressed the shutter. Her mother’s spy camera, the Leica’s mechanism silenced for such stealthy shots as this.

  She snapped a second.

  Ross didn’t notice.

  Three tries were all her mother had allowed herself—her only aesthetic rule. If three attempts couldn’t nail it, it probably wasn’t there.

  Harper focused on the blade scraping his throat, Ross working deliberately as if each stroke were a discrete lesson for their son. Leo’s first drill in the art of patience and restraint.

  On Harper’s third snap, Ross sensed her presence, and his eyes ticked to the mirror and met hers, and his razor flinched. A dot of blood, then a dark trickle cut through the foam.

  Baby Leo saw it in the mirror and reached out, swiping a hand toward his father’s reflected face, fascinated by the red stream tracking down Ross’s throat.

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.” Harper pushed open the door, came into the bathroom, and set the Leica on the edge of the tub. “I ambushed you.”

  “A nick,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

  “It was such an image,” she said. “Leo learning the manly arts.”

  Harper tore off a piece of toilet paper and handed it to him. He applied it to the cut and smiled at her in the mirror.

  “I thought you were gone.”

  “I’m just stalling,” she said.

  He nodded. Understandable. “Why don’t you call them, tell them you’re sick.”

  “I’m not sick, damn it. I’m fine.”

  Ross toweled off the last of the shaving cream, then Leo’s puff of foam. The boy was grinning at Harper, delighted by the fuss, the three of them gathered in the small room. Something new.

  “Don’t rush it. It�
�s still fresh. If you don’t want to go, you’re entitled to stay home. Relax.”

  Goddamn it, Harper felt her eyes muddying again. Another surge of grief for a mother who didn’t deserve it. A woman who’d never shown her daughter even mild affection. Since Harper was old enough to speak, Deena had treated her with the cool practicality of a business partner, not the nurturing presence any daughter yearned for.

  “Or, if you want, Leo and I can come along. We’ll hang out in a back room, entertain ourselves until you’re done. Send supportive vibes.”

  “I thought you had work to do.”

  “There’s always work. The news cycle never sleeps.”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I need to suck it up and stop whining. You and Leo have your boys’ night. You’d just make me self-conscious.”

  Harper picked up the Leica, enjoying the heft of the old R8, its reliable sturdiness. That camera was the one tangible item her mother specified in her will; the Leica should go to Harper. There was money too, a mountain of it, but the camera was Deena’s prize possession and became for Harper a shred of evidence, however wishful, of her mother’s affection.

  Deena was a suicide. Caught in the steep downdraft of her latest depression, she’d managed to acquire a pistol in Paris and shot herself through the heart. Then lay dying in her hotel room with a NE PAS DÉRANGER sign on the door. The maids stayed away. No one heard the gunshot. How was that possible? The Parisian médecin légiste believed she hadn’t died quickly. Might have been saved. Maybe lasted hours, bleeding out. Harper picturing it again and again. The ornate Hôtel de Crillon, her mother’s favorite, on the Place de la Concorde next to the American embassy. High ceilings, thick walls, a former palace. Where she and Deena had stayed dozens of times, mother and daughter in Paris, working side by side on Deena’s latest project.

  Hours bleeding out. If Harper had gone along as usual, she would’ve heard the gunshot through their connecting door, gotten help in time, saved her.

  But she hadn’t made the trip. With Leo only seven months old, the fresh challenges of motherhood consuming her, she had a good excuse. But more than that, she’d needed time away from Deena’s gravitational pull, time to consider her own direction. Did she truly want to follow in Deena’s deep footsteps? Spend her life peering through the lens at the faces of the rich and infamous?