Dark Men

by Derek Haas

  There’s not going to be an exchange, a negotiation. Not because I’ve already killed Decker, but because I don’t really care if Grant dies too. Sure, I’d rather he came out of this alive, but that would be a bonus, rather than the point.

  I’m going to kill Spilatro as soon as I spot him. No talking, no give-and-take, just pull up my gun and shoot him in the head.

  I tell this to Risina as we drive down a Virginia road, strip malls and shopping centers breaking up the horizon. Her hands are on her knees, knitted together.

  “You said you wanted to know the plan. That’s the plan.”

  “You don’t care about Archie? This has never been about Archie?”

  “I like him. He’s a good fence. A great one, even. And I liked his sister very much, too. But if he dies in the middle of this, or if he’s already dead? I won’t mourn him. I won’t think about him. And he wouldn’t mourn me either. You wanted to see me, Risina, to see the real me? This is who I am.”

  She nods. “You just shut off your feelings?”

  “About everyone and everything except you. And I let my rage build for the man I have to kill. But don’t let rage and rashness blend. My rage allows me to take a man’s life and walk away from it cleanly, but I am never rash in executing the hit. Cold-blooded and cold-hearted, you have to be both.”

  “And powerful, yes?”

  “Power is the drug that hooks you to this job. Ending someone’s life against his will—it’s something you can’t fathom until you do it. It takes an even greater hold of you when you know you do it well, when you plan it and execute it and get away with it. My first fence told me it was a power reserved for God, and there is an attraction in that power that is difficult to resist.”

  “And Archie? How did he deal with this power?”

  “If he does his job right, he sets up his hitters’ successes. He compiles the information and hints at the best strategies. He lays out the evil in the target for his killers so they can stoke that rage. A hit man has to connect with the evil so he can sever the connection, and a good fence knows this, knows the importance of this. He does the plotting without the bloodshed. It’s a different power the fence holds, but I’m sure the good ones share in it.”

  “When we finish this, I want to be your fence.”

  She says it in such a matter-of-fact way that I can tell she’s been thinking about it for a while. “Even if we get Archie out alive?”

  “Even then.”

  “But we could run again. Hide out. Find a new spot, somewhere even more remote.”

  “No. You know we would just wait for the next man to come. There will always be a next man who comes.”

  “I wanted to believe in a future without this.”

  “You can’t have it, any more than a tiger can lie in a cage and forget his instincts.”

  She’s right. She has a way of getting inside my head and saying things I won’t let myself think.

  “But why would you want to do this with me?”

  “Because we are good together. Because I think I was born to do this work. Because I would like to know that you have every piece of information at your disposal to be successful. Because I can provide that, make the file come to life. Live, breathe. It’s research, it’s writing, but it has to have heart. For you to be the person you are, it has to have heart. I read all those files in Archie’s office and it was like discovering a new library that no one knew existed. It was life and death and love and pain and beauty and horror in one place, in those pages, and it was riveting. Biblical. I can do that. I can put it all together for you. Only for you. And better than Archie. I need time to learn, but yes, better than Archie.”

  “You sound certain.”

  “I am.”

  “Where would we live?”

  “The place you and I both know best. Boston.”

  “And how would you establish us there?”

  “You still know a few people. Word will spread quickly that Columbus is back in the business.”

  “And how will you protect yourself?”

  “We’ll protect each other. A pair of tigers, burning bright.”

  She grins, pleased with her idea. Maybe it can work, if we survive the day.

  I tell Spilatro an address near the Potomac just outside the District in an industrial area. Canneries rise out of the landscape, monstrous, noisy and bleak. It’s as though men couldn’t stand to look at the beauty of a river cutting through a fertile countryside and so did all in their power to poison the land.

  I demanded the exchange take place at seven-thirty, when the sun hangs low and the commercial district will be primarily unpopulated. We might have to deal with security guards and cameras pointed at the street, but I don’t care. I’m finishing it now.

  I want to drop Risina off at a coffee shop and pick her up when it’s over, but she refuses. I tell her that fences don’t participate in kills, and she tells me she isn’t my fence until this is over. The thought of not knowing what is happening while she sips on a decaf latté is more than she can bear. She’s been in this one since the beginning and she’ll be in it until the end, and if she sees the dark side of me again standing over Spilatro’s dead body, then she welcomes it.

  I told Spilatro the address and he tried to keep me on the line, but I didn’t give him the opportunity. He’s learned all he’s going to learn about me, and now the preparation is over and the two killers have to take the field until one is dead.

  A black Toyota Tercel with tinted windows slowly rolls to a nearby intersection, the address I gave him, and then turns right and speeds away. I expect to see the same car again soon . . . he came fifteen minutes early to get the lay of the land, do some reconnaissance. I haven’t given him time to set up a mousetrap. He’s in my world, the world of improvisation, a world he can’t control, a world where he has to take advantage of the opportunities as they develop or die face-down in the street.

  “This is it. I’m moving out. When you see the muzzle flash, race in and pick me up. Don’t hesitate.”

  She nods and I kiss her and I think she says “be careful,” but it’s lost in the wind as I duck low out of the passenger side and move to a row of shrubs. I didn’t anticipate how quickly the wind could pick up this close to the river and there’s an industrial smell to the air, that combination of gas and oil and chemicals that seems to linger around factories like a trip wire: “Don’t cross here or you’ll cough up blood.”

  The shrubs line a concrete barrier demarking the property of a sardine cannery, and I slip between the greenery and the wall to make my way down to the intersection.

  The sky turns that deep sea green as the sun hides in the horizon, and the traffic on the street is minimal, a few trucks rolling out of factories and lumbering up the streets. I find a spot where the intersection is visible through a break in the branches, and here comes that Tercel. I’m going to show myself just long enough for him to step out of the car and ask about the exchange so I can pop him in the head.

  Two hundred yards away and it’s impossible to see if he has Archie in the car with him, and if he does, I’ll do my best to save my old fence, but only once the job is done and Spilatro is down and I can get away clean. Only then.

  One hundred yards now and my Glock is out and in my hand. The wind howls, whistling a dirge as it crests the concrete barrier and zips through the shrubbery. Fifty yards.

  Out of nowhere, a taxi smashes into the side of the Tercel and drives it across the width of the street, up on to the opposite sidewalk. The section of the Tercel from the driver’s side tire to the door is bent concave from the force of the taxi’s bumper and the engine has caught fire and whatever play this is . . . I have no idea what he’s up to, but it has to be a play.

  I can feel the advantage shifting between us, or is that adrenaline in my system? I have to decide how to make a move and what move to make, goddam him.

  The taxi driver gets out of the car, a middle-easterner with a tight turban and a full
beard, and he’s yelling at the driver of the Tercel, and what the hell play can this be in the small amount of time I’ve given him? What am I walking into?

  The door to the Tercel somehow swings open and a man climbs out but he isn’t Spilatro, at least he doesn’t look like Spilatro, not exactly, he looks too young from this angle, but can I be sure? He’s dangling a gun at his side, and as the taxi driver registers this and starts to wave his hands and turn around saying “no, no, no, no, no,” the driver shoots him in the back, BAM, dropping him in the road, just another piece of debris from the accident. Through the open door of the Tercel, I can see a figure slumped in the backseat, a dark figure, maybe it’s Archie, fuck, this is not what I was expecting. The fire from the hood starts to vomit clouds of black smoke, whipped into a frenzy by the wind and someone nearby, some security guard or late-leaving lunch-bucket union douchebag must’ve heard the collision or is going to spot the smoke and dial 9-1-1 and then everything I’ve put into this moment is going to spoil like weeks-old bread. I’m going to have to bite, now.

  When I kill, I don’t like dropping anyone collaterally, anyone besides my target, because things get messy, but this isn’t a target, not really, they targeted me, and if he enlisted some of these dark men, some other hitters the way he did Deckman with his wife’s gambit, then they’re going to join him lying on the pavement. What’s real and what’s not is what has had me on my heels this whole time but I have to move in and shift the advantage back to my favor.

  I walk quickly from the shrubs and make my way toward the accident, toward the shooter who might be Spilatro but doesn’t look like the man I saw two times, and he spots me coming.

  “Where’s Decker?” he says in a voice I don’t recognize—he’s not Spilatro—this only takes a moment to register, but he raises his weapon like a Western gunslinger and I already have mine up and fire from thirty yards away, catch him in the forehead and spin him like a top.

  I step past the dead cab driver and the dead Tercel driver and head to the sedan, and the guy in the backseat, the one I thought was Archie blows a hole out the window. A bullet whizzes close enough to my ear to make my lobe flap like laundry drying in the wind, and I duck behind the car, lucky the bullet didn’t rip my head off.

  The man squirms in his seat as he tries to find me and when he turns to the back windshield, I’m already there, in his blind spot. I fire and the back windshield shatters along with half the man’s face. He didn’t adjust for the fraction of an inch the glass between us would make on his shot. I didn’t make the same mistake.

  “We have her!” says a voice to my right, and when I wheel, the cab driver is up off the pavement, up and alive and glaring at me, a pistol aimed my way. And now I see it. The beard is fake and the turban is covering a bald head and the bullet he took in the back was staged and the voice is that same prissy “I’m smarter than you” whine I’ve heard before except there’s a desperation anchoring it down to the pavement like an albatross around his neck.

  I didn’t give him time to prepare and the best he could come up with on the fly was a faux wreck attached to a shell game and his hitters were dealt the dummy hand and are dead before they even knew what game they were playing. I imagine Bando is one of them, the clown who broke Archie’s nose for having the audacity to put up a fight in his own bedroom and now he’s either the one dead on the pavement or the one dead in the backseat of the Tercel. Spilatro thought I’d walk up and talk and he could plug me from behind but he didn’t count on my Glock speaking for me.

  His words stop me though. His plan had a wild card, a joker. “We have her” and I look up the street and sure enough, Risina is out of the driver’s side with a gun to her head.

  Holding the pistol is Carla.

  Carla, who I listened to for hours as she poured her heart out regarding her husband’s betrayal, whom I believed whole-heartedly, whose story I swallowed like a spoonful of fucking ice cream and maybe that’s the part I misjudged the most about my rust, my diminished abilities. I thought my killing skills had dropped, the physical skills, but it’s the mental part that has to be exercised to stay finely tuned . . . the ability to read faces, gestures, voices, lies. I thought I was in shape, but I’m faced with my failure now; I was played like a fool and my sand castle crashed down, stomped on by the ugly woman with the hound-dog face and the black heart.

  She’s too far away to attempt a shot and Spilatro sneers as he aims his gun in my direction.

  “What say we all get in the car and take a trip?”

  He gestures toward the taxi.

  “I thought you didn’t like confrontation up close and personal.”

  “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear from hostile witnesses.”

  I nod, the Glock heavy in my hand.

  Spilatro smiles, his voice hitting that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard pitch. “I told you I was smarter than—“

  I shoot him in the head, the bullet slamming into his right eye.

  His gun goes off, a finger spasm, but I don’t hear it, don’t even wait to see Spilatro drop. My mental game may be lagging but my ability to hit a man at fifteen feet will never flag, and I sprint directly at Carla, my focus on only her, as everything else fades away. I don’t feel the pavement under my feet, don’t feel the wind in my face, don’t feel the wetness searing the edges of my eyes. She’s far away, too far away, why did I park so fucking far? Why did I bring Risina? Why didn’t I—

  Carla blanches, then shoves Risina into the car and is behind the wheel and I see her cold-cock Risina with the butt of her gun, one, two, three times, wham, wham, wham, a blur, a whipsaw, and Risina’s face is bloody and out and she’s slumped and the engine cranks and I shoot into the windshield which spiders but the car launches into a left turn, tires screaming, engine thundering.

  Only then do I realize I’m bleeding, shot in the chest by Spilatro’s involuntary finger jerk.

  I don’t know how to . . . won’t know how to find her if she escapes with Risina.

  Wheeling on a dime, I sprint back to the taxi with the damaged front end, the old Crown Vic that Spilatro drove into the Tercel, and I’m in the driver’s seat and behind the wheel and the engine is still running. My breath is a bit shallow like I’m trying to suck air in through a straw but I’ll be damned if I’m going to drop. I will not drop. Not now. Not when someone put a plug in me with a lucky shot after he was already dead.

  I catch a flash of beige streaking through a gap in warehouses a block away and hear the bass blast of a big rig’s horn followed by a screech of brakes and tires locking up as they cling to asphalt. Whatever happened slowed Carla’s escape and may be my only hope because I don’t have a plan anymore, certainly don’t have one for Carla, and as soon as she shakes me she’ll kill Risina, I know it, and I won’t let that happen, can’t let that happen. She might’ve thought better of holding a hostage and already finished the job, but fuck if I’m going to think about that . . .

  I throw the taxi into a hard right to chase the sound of the semi’s horn and as I whip behind the industrial plant, I just have time to see my rental car untangle itself from the left bumper of a cannery big rig.

  I don’t know what parts of Carla’s story were bunk but I’m guessing she hasn’t spent a lot of time as hunted rather than hunter, because she’s panicking at the exact moment when she should have calmly made her getaway, disappeared around a corner and then I would have been lost.

  The taxi has a fractured bumper and the alignment is pulling to the right but the engine is still functioning and the wheel responds to my jerks. I’ve spent the last few years with gunsights on me and despite the pain in my chest, despite the way my right arm is shutting down, hanging uselessly, the bullet wound worse than I thought, goddamn, I’m glad to be pursuing, chasing, closing, hunting. At least I have that. If I’m going to die, I’m going to die on offense.

  I saw her knock Risina unconscious, and that image—that visual of this haggard woman repeatedly pounding Risina
in the head with the butt of her gun—will sustain me until I catch Carla and kill her, bullet in my chest be damned.

  The rental sedan blows through a red light and I don’t hesitate, don’t brake, just keep the accelerator pinned like I’m trying to stomp the pedal into the street. The taxi sways all over the road like a bird with a clipped wing and I hug the middle of the asphalt steadily, closing the distance with every swerve Carla makes.

  She brakes into a hard right at the next intersection, swinging wide, and I’m able to cut the corner and narrow the gap between us to the length of a car. A UPS truck pulls out into our path and Carla swerves around it while I shoot the gap on the other side and when we bullet past the truck, I emerge right on her bumper.

  Risina’s head rises in the Taurus’s passenger seat as she regains her senses.

  No. No no no no no no no. Stay down, play dead, pretend to be out, don’t call attention to yourself. Don’t dangle bait in front of a desperate animal.

  I wish these thoughts straight into Risina’s brain, but she doesn’t get the message. I see her head wobble and then her face turns towards Carla in the driver’s seat. Even at eighty miles per hour, I can see this taking place through the back windshield as clearly as if I were in the front row of a stage play. Risina slowly comprehending her position. Carla quickly deciding she has a better chance of losing me if she doesn’t have to deal with a living, breathing passenger. You can’t keep a wild dog near by if you don’t want to get bit. She raises her pistol to shoot Risina in the face at close range.

  I upshift and tag her bumper just as she pulls the trigger. The gun jerks and fires, blowing out the rear passenger window. Startled into sobriety, Risina launches for Carla’s face, going for her eyes with her fingernails leading the way.

  I plow into the sedan’s bumper again and this time our cars lock up and spin and twist and crumple and the world turns weightless before a blackness drops over me as suddenly as if a bag were thrown over my head.