by Derek Haas
“You gonna ask me whose skull it is?”
“I’m gonna ask you something else.”
“Yeah?”
“What would’ve happened if I would’ve dialed 24-34-24 into the safe like you told me?”
He swallows. His face blanches as white as the skull bones.
“I . . .”
“You told me 24-34-24. But when you popped open the safe just now, the combination you used was 10-20-10.”
He smiles weakly. “You caught that?”
“Yeah. I have good eyes. Could’ve been a fighter pilot.”
He shrugs. “It . . . uh . . . it would’ve blown up in your face.”
“I figured.”
“Does that mean . . .”
I fire into his back twice, through his skin and into his heart. He flops forward, dead before he can finish the sentence.
I wasn’t lying when I told Flagler I wouldn’t kill him. But attempting to trick me into tripping a bomb puts a foot on the throat of my mercy.
CHAPTER FOUR
I walk into the warehouse, and for the first time, I realize I’m soaking wet. The cool air hits me as I step through the door, and I shudder as though a ghost walked on my grave. Like I said, though I haven’t been on an assignment, not really, it feels like an assignment. The tiger is a tiger, and though some may forget, may think of the animal as domesticated, as tame, the beast remembers what it is, and watches, and waits. Instincts, though dulled, are resurrected like Lazarus. Smiles turn to screams. Familiarity turns to non-recognition. And love? Love inevitably turns to grief.
I played the game against a worthy opponent for the first time in over a year, and I came out on top. A feeling is growing inside me I’m not sure I can contain. I’m not sure I want to contain it.
The tiger is a goddamned tiger.
Risina has her back to me when I enter, and maybe she feels a change in the air, a charge, like an electric current ripping through the walls, because she bolts upright, nearly overturning her chair as she spins.
“You scared me,” she says breathlessly. Her eyes find what’s in my hands. “Is that . . . ?”
I nod at the skull, holding it up like the gravedigger in Hamlet.
“You know whose it is?”
I shake my head, and she laughs. The sound is like a hypnotist’s snap, a bell ringing, because whatever foreboding premonition I brought into the room disappears in that sound. That laugh, that look on her face, that simple prism in her eyes sustained me through so much it almost seems surreal, absurd, that I questioned going on without her.
And maybe that’s it, what I haven’t been able to get my head around until now: maybe the key isn’t absence but proximity. Maybe the key isn’t sending her away, but pulling her closer. Maybe Risina is my battery, my power source.
“So we make the exchange with Bacino? That skull for whatever information he has on why your name is involved.”
“That’s it.” And she’s touched on the biggest problem in all this: if Bacino just wanted his skull back, and kidnapped Archie to get me to do the dirty work for him, why would he cite me specifically? It doesn’t add up, it’s not simple, there’s a piece missing. That’s the way of the killing game: it’s a messy business.
“I’m looking forward to meeting him,” Risina says. Then, a second later . . . “Archie, not Bacino.”
Smoke strolls into the room, his eyes downcast, his hands fidgety. I liked Smoke when I first met him, and I chalked his nervous disposition up to being a fish out of water, but now I’m suspicious. There’s no doubt the time I spent out of the game dulled my skills; maybe it dulled my senses as well. I feel like a diver coming to the surface after a long time in the deep.
“Something wrong, Smoke?”
He meets my eyes, then quickly looks away, his head bobbing like a chicken looking for seed. “Nah, just anxious is all.” I think that’s all he’s going to say, but he adds, “I swear I feel like I’m being watched or followed or some shit.”
“You mark anyone? Same car in two different places, same eyes in a crowd, even if the face is different?”
Smoke shakes his head. “Nah. I don’t think so. Like I said, I’m anxious. Wanna get this over and done with. Get Archie back. It was just a feeling, was all. Maybe I been drinkin’ too many sodas or some shit.”
I watch him twitch some more, like he doesn’t know where to put his hands, so they stay in perpetual motion.
“In this world, you gotta trust your instincts, Smoke.”
His eyes shoot up and search mine to see if there’s any malice behind my words. Am I talking to him or about him? Am I challenging him? I don’t give him anything, my face as unreadable as a cipher.
There’s something he’s keeping from us, something that has him as skittish as a deer, and I’m sure Risina spots it too.
“So now we wait for the meet, I s’pose,” says Smoke.
“No.”
His eyes shoot up again. “No?”
“Uh-uh. Playing defense is how you get backed into a corner, how you end up broken or dead.”
Risina offers, “We take the fight to him?”
“That’s right. Word of what happened to Flagler won’t hit the streets until tomorrow at the earliest . . .”
“What happened to Flagler?”
I look at Risina carefully, and the question dies in the air.
“Oh,” is all she manages and her cheeks color. I have to remind myself how new she is to this life. It’s another crack in the wall of my plans to keep her close, but that laugh. I have to concentrate on that laugh.
“So we hit him tonight before he has a chance to plan for our arrival. We meet him on our terms. If Archie’s alive and Bacino has him, we’ll get him back.”
Smoke nods, seeing it. He raises his eyebrows, and it looks like he’s genuinely relieved. “I s’pose you want to see the original file on Bacino again.”
“Yeah, we should all go over it and figure out the best place to hit him.”
I like to confront a man in his bed. It’s the second most vulnerable place to hit a target, short of his shower or bath. It is where a mark’s defenses are at his lowest—even if he’s stashed a weapon under a pillow or beneath the mattress, the added effect of being groggy cancels any advantage. The romanticized notion of a hunted man sleeping with one eye open is bullshit. Once a mark is down for the night, it is exponentially easier to put him down permanently.
I don’t need to kill Bacino; I just need him to know how easy it is for me to get to him. I need to embarrass him. I need to make him regret summoning a hit man named Columbus.
According to the file made up for Flagler, Bacino lives in a mansion in Highland Park. He’s alone, except for a half-dozen bodyguards, the occasional woman, a pair of dogs, and his older brother, Ben, who collects a salary but does little to earn it. Ben is supposed to be some sort of chef, cooking for his brother, but the file mentions his real job is a gofer, an errand boy. Groceries need rounding up? Ben does it. Coffee needs brewing? Ben does it. Car needs a wash? Ben does it, but not much more than that. Whether or not he knows Rich collects skulls is not mentioned in the file. They live on opposite sides of the house, and Ben is a foot shorter and a hundred pounds heavier, so I’m not worried about confusing the two.
The bodyguards live at the house and rotate out, two-two-and-two in eight-hour shifts to cover the clock. The guys are ex-cops or ex-military, and they indicate Bacino isn’t trifling with his detail, isn’t just trying to create an exaggerated sense of security the way some people put security company signs in their yards even though they never turn on their alarms.
Archie’s file is a good one, and if he makes it out of this alive, it’ll be at least partly due to his meticulous work. Bacino sleeps in a second-story corner bedroom that faces away from the street. He usually stays up late, hitting the pillow around midnight and then sleeping through the morning.
“I’m going to get to him at two a.m., wake him up from sugarplum dreams b
y tapping my Glock to his forehead. And Risina?”
She raises her head, expectantly.
“You’re coming with me.”
Outside, the moon is down and the sky is starless, as black as tar. We parked ten blocks away and hoofed the distance, both wearing dark shirts and pants. We stand in the expansive back yard of Bacino’s neighbor, a Persian oil billionaire who is only in this country two months of the year. He pays a man to check on his property twice a day, but the caretaker cut that down to twice a week when he realized no one reported to the Persian about his performance. Risina and I have the yard to ourselves.
“Are you sure?” she whispers at about ten minutes to two.
I make certain she can see my eyes, even in the darkness. “You were in it with me, even before you knew you were in it. And if something should happen to me, you’re still in it. You understand?”
“I understand. You told me it was your choice to have me here, but it is my choice as well. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“The more prepared you are, the better I’ll feel.”
“Then let’s go wake up Bacino.”
We scale the brick wall separating the two yards as easily as steeplechase horses and stick to the shadows as we approach the back of the house. Archie’s file is accurate: the night-shift bodyguards have joined up on the front patio to have a twenty-minute smoke. I imagine they’ve spent the last four years smoking together like this without incident, swapping stories about their lives away from this house, catching each other up on their wives or children or what the Cubs did the day before. I have a feeling they won’t have these jobs much longer.
The alarm is a standard 10-zone system from a generic manufacturer, and since Bacino has a pair of golden retrievers who have free rein of the house, I’m confident he doesn’t turn on the motion detectors. The sensor makers always say pets under forty pounds won’t set ’em off, but they’re full of shit. I’ll know in a moment if I’m right.
We enter through a small rectangular pane of glass embedded in a set of French doors that lead from a den out to the pool. I don’t break the pane—some alarms trigger just from the sound of glass shattering—so instead I use needlenose pliers to scrape away the wood putty and take out the glazier’s points, starting at the center of the frame and working towards the edges. I only have a few minutes and have to move quickly. Once I pull the bottom of the wood apart, I gently slide the glass panel out and place it against the house. After we shimmy through the opening, I replace the wooden frame so to the casual eye, it looks like nothing is missing, though the pane is no longer there. The air is still, so I’m not worried about a breeze giving away our entry-point.
We sneak through an entertainment room, then a foyer, where we can just make out the soft voices of the two guards jawing away, and then we take a set of stairs to the top of the house before heading for the corner bedroom.
I feel Risina freeze even before I understand why, and then I hear the panting of a dog’s breath, or two dogs’ breaths, as I now make out their silhouettes in the doorframe of the nearby guest bedroom. They move forward, toward us, cautiously, their tails down, their ears pricked. If Bacino thought he owned guard dogs, thought they might bark a warning against intruders, he should have raised a different breed. Risina turns her hand palm upward and I do the same, holding it out toward the timid retrievers. Grateful for the acknowledgement, they mosey over and start licking our hands. A few quick pats to the head and they trot back to the guest room, mollified. Risina’s grin is unmistakable, even in the dim light of the corridor.
As promised, I tap the barrel of my Glock on to Bacino’s forehead. “Tap” is probably the wrong word; I pop him hard. He bolts up like a snake bit his face and the first thing he sees is Risina at the foot of his bed. I wanted to disorient him and she does a hell of a job at that. He blinks a few times like he’s still trying to swim to the surface, and then I slap him between the eyebrows again so he jumps, clamps his hand over his head and barks a sharp, “No!” Not “stop” or “don’t,” but “no.” Under the circumstances, I think it’s a decent reaction.
I rack the Glock so he knows there is a bullet in the chamber and a second “no” dies in his throat. He starts to open his mouth, but I interrupt. “We have what you want . . . you need to give us back what we want.”
“Who are you?”
“Columbus. Now where is Archie Grant?”
His eyes do that unmistakable thing where they squint as he searches his memory.
“I don’t . . .”
I smack the hard polymer of the gun down on his nose. “Ow, goddammit . . .” he manages as his hands flock to the spot.
“A bit harder and your nose breaks. And I’ll pop it right through your fingers if you don’t start talking.”
“Let me finish my goddamn sentence then,” he croaks, his voice muffled by his hands. I don’t look over at Risina to see if she’s startled by my aggression. She hangs in my periphery, immobile.
I nod and Bacino continues, his eyes watering. I gotta give him credit for keeping the tough-guy act going under the circumstances. Hell, maybe he is a tough guy. “Mrs. Hauser. Kindergarten teacher. Craig Captain. Father’s friend from college. Met him one time, when I was seven. John Mayfield. First man to ever cut my hair.”
He dabs his hands near his nostrils to check for blood, but his fingers are clean, and then he scrunches his nose a few times. His voice remains pinched. “I have a thing for names. I remember names from before I could read or write. Guys I met only once. Guys my father brought around for a beer after work. Some people never forget a face . . . I never forget a name. Now you said this name, Archie Grant, like I should know it but I don’t. You can pound on my nose until there’s nothing left, but I don’t know that name.”
He’s telling the truth; it’s unmistakable. How does he not know the name of the guy he kidnapped? There is only one answer. Bacino’s a lot of things, but he’s not the guy I’m looking for.
An idea starts to form in my mind. Maybe I got the end of this story right, but misread the beginning.
“You missing a skull?”
His eyes flash. “Missing?”
“No one’s stolen one of your skulls?”
“I . . .”
“You made a deal with a contract killer named Flagler.” It’s not a question.
He looks back and forth from Risina to me. “I . . .”
“He came to kill you, and you bought him off with a skull from your collection.”
Now he doesn’t protest or stammer, just lets me continue my train of thought.
“He doesn’t put a bullet in you, and you promise to give him one of your most expensive, rarest items. That’s how it went down, right?”
Bacino folds his arms across his chest and pouts. “I knew it wouldn’t end there.”
I reach into my pack and pull out the skull, the one I thought was swiped by Flagler but was actually traded to him by Bacino. A skull for a life. Bacino looks at it with the eye of a practiced collector.
“Do you know how much that’s worth?”
I shake my head.
“More than the contract on my life, I can assure you. You got it, you keep it. I know I’m not in a position to bargain, but I’ll make the same deal with you I made with the other guy. Don’t kill me and that skull’s yours. You can make a fortune off of it. It’s the head of—”
And right then, his brother opens the door holding a leather collar and wearing only a bathrobe. “What talent you got up in here, bro?”
He’s wearing a dopey grin and it takes a moment for his eyes to move from Risina to me. I can see the slow calculations take place in his head. He moves from lustfulness to confusion to understanding in the span of five seconds.
Good fences can get into a lot of places, discover a wealth of personal information, chronicle a life to a surprising degree. A pay-off to a talkative employee, a search through police records, a disguised visit to relatives or friends can prove indi
spensable in fleshing out a mark’s file. And in areas that are off-limits, behind closed doors, an experienced fence will make educated assumptions.
Nothing in Bacino’s file suggested he shared his late-night trysts with his sad-sack older brother. I thought we’d have another ten minutes before the bodyguards finished their smoke break, but now I understand why the guards take that break in the first place: to give these bastards some breathing room while they screw whores together. Who would want to listen to a pair of assholes slipping it to some one-night stand each night?
“Get help!” Bacino screams. It takes Ben a few seconds of blinking for the words to process. Then his lids pop open and his eyes widen as the pieces come together.
In a fistfight, the guy you’re trading blows with will often try to land a haymaker to the jaw. The punch starts from somewhere near his belt and is as easy to spot coming as the headlight on the front of a train. An experienced dirty fighter will duck his chin and crouch so that the punch connects with the top of his head, almost always shattering the bones of the punching hand. It is the hardest part of the human body, the top of the skull.
Before Ben can flee, I hurl the stolen skull at his face with everything I have. The top of the cranium connects with his forehead, making a sound like a baseball bat thumping into a wooden support beam. Immediately, he drops to the floor as his legs turn to jelly.
Spying an opening, Bacino launches out of the bed and heads for Risina, roaring like a lion. I’m not going to be able to close the distance before he gets to her, but I’m going to make him sorry if he harms her in any way. He leaps for her throat, but she swings the gun around like she’s unleashing a pair of brass knuckles, not taking the time to aim and pull the trigger, but nailing him in the side of the face with everything she has, the steel and polymer of the gun’s barrel leading the way.
The blow connects with an audible crunch, a pistol-whip, and though it doesn’t knock him out, it stuns him and shatters a few teeth in the process. Enraged, he blinks away tears and tries again, but I finish what Risina started, swinging for the back of his head with the butt of my gun, once, twice, until he falls face-down on the wooden floor.
