The Killing Kind

by Chris Holm

  “A six mil payout goes a long way toward putting you back in the upper class,” Hendricks said. “Picture in the paper aside, that was quite a stroke of luck.”

  “Luck? You think that shit was luck? Took me eight months to write a program that could get through the casino’s firewall and hack those slots. I earned every fucking dime of that money.”

  “And now that you have it, you’ll have no trouble paying me.”

  “Yeah, only that’s just it—I don’t have it yet. Maybe Vegas does it different, but a two-bit slot joint in KC don’t exactly hand over that kind of coin right on the spot. I gotta go back Thursday to pick it up.”

  A puzzle-piece clicked into place, and suddenly, Hendricks saw the whole picture. The instructions in Lester’s decoded communiqué said to make the hit as public and messy as possible. “Let me guess,” he said, “big crowd, oversized novelty check—that sort of deal?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Not ideal for a guy on the lam, I know—but I figure nobody’s got better security than a casino, and once I get my money I can disappear for good.”

  “Be careful what you wish for. I’m pretty sure that’s where they’re going to hit you.”

  Purkhiser made a little whining noise in the back of his throat. “Why? What makes you so sure?”

  “Their instructions were to make a show of it. Their goal is to make sure no one ever tries to burn them like you did again. What better way to make their point than to take you down in front of God and everyone during your supposed moment of triumph?”

  Even in the dim light of the Skylark, Hendricks saw Purkhiser go pale. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.” Then he brightened. “But you said that you could stop ’em, right?”

  “I said if you paid me, I could stop them.”

  “Right, but if you stop ’em, I can get my money, and then I’ll have more than enough to pay you.”

  Hendricks shook his head. “I don’t work that way. I get my money up front or no deal.”

  “I dunno, dude—that sounds pretty fucking hinky to me. If you’re as good as you’re puttin’ on, why’s it matter if I pay you after?”

  “Well, for one, there’s no guarantee you ever would, in which case I’d have to kill you—and that makes two jobs I don’t get paid for. And for two, an attempt on your life is going to attract all kinds of attention from the authorities, which will help keep you safe from subsequent attacks if you hire me to do my thing, but it also makes any subsequent transfer of funds a whole lot riskier than it would have been beforehand. But all of that pales in comparison to the fact that I don’t kill without good reason. No money, no reason. So take it or leave it, but my offer’s nonnego

  tiable.”

  “Everything’s negotiable, dude.”

  “Not this.”

  “So, what, then?” Purkhiser said. “You’re just gonna let me die?”

  “That’s up to you,” Hendricks said. “You’ve got a choice to make. Today’s Monday, which means if I’m right about the timing of the hit, you’ve got three days. You can choose to run—to leave this place tonight—and if you do, who knows? Maybe you’ll manage to disappear again. Maybe they’ll hunt you down and kill you. Or you can choose to spend the next three days getting my fee together. There’s a slip of paper in your glove compartment. On it is a phone number. Once you’re ready to pay my fee, call me at that number, and you have my word no harm will come to you.”

  Hendricks released his grip on Purkhiser’s seat belt and climbed out of the car. Purkhiser leaned heavily against the wheel.

  With one hand resting on the open door, Hendricks said, “You’ll find your spark plugs in your glove compartment, too. They’ll come in handy getting home.”

  Then he shut the door and walked away, leaving Purkhiser with his thoughts.

  16

  Leon Leonwood was a burly, rough-hewn man of fifty in a plaid flannel shirt tucked into off-brand jeans, a pair of steel-toed work boots on his feet. His considerable heft— he was six foot four if he was an inch, and tipped the scales north of two-sixty—gave him the appearance of an athlete gone to seed. His clothes, bushy mustache, and ruddy features suggested a man who worked with his hands: a contractor, or a plumber perhaps. But, bar brawls aside, Leon had never been one for athletics—and though he did, indeed, work with his hands, it was not drywall in which he specialized.

  Leon lumbered down the airplane’s narrow aisle and wedged himself into his seat. If the scant crowd at the gate was any indication, his flight from Logan to St. Louis International wouldn’t be too crowded, and for that, Leon was grateful. A guy his size didn’t fit so well in coach.

  Leon had built up a decent stake in his time as a contract killer, but he still couldn’t bring himself to pay for an upgrade to business class or better. While on assignment, Leon had imagined his own death a thousand times, picturing all the ways a job could go bad in a heartbeat— but he’d spent too much of his life barely scraping by to let a bunch of fat-cat airline execs nickel-and-dime him to death.

  The oldest of seven siblings, Leon grew up in squats and tenements all over Boston’s Southie neighborhood, catching as catch can to put food on the table and clothes on his brothers’ and sisters’ backs. He learned early on that if you wanted something, you had to go after it—to take it, if need be. His pop—a petty thief and an even pettier man, who spent his time bouncing back and forth between the bars of Southie and those of the Suffolk County lockup— taught him that. In Leon’s estimation, instilling that fundamental truth in Leon was the one good thing that piece of shit ever did. The only other thing his father ever taught him was how to take a punch.

  Well, that, and the basic dos and don’ts of a body dump. One fateful day in ’82, Leon bashed the fucker’s head in with an ashtray when he made a move on Leon’s eldest sister, Margaret. The old man had been drunk and said Margaret looked just like her mother “before the bitch let herself go.” It was Leon’s first kill—just shy of his eighteenth birthday. Later that night, Leon tossed his old man’s body into Boston Harbor with a pair of ten-pound barbells tied to his feet. He was sure the body would never be found. But two weeks later, his pop’s ankle joints separated and his bloated corpse washed ashore on Deer Island a few feet from the sewage treatment plant.

  Leon figured it was a fitting resting place for him, at least.

  Boston PD had liked Leon for the crime but couldn’t prove a thing. Only Leon and Margaret knew for certain what had happened, and Leon’s father had enough shady associates to create reasonable doubt a thousand times over. Leon was pretty sure his mother—a sad, dead-eyed woman who’d spent her life turning a blind eye to her husband’s many transgressions—suspected the truth.

  His next kill had been an accident. A drunken bar fight gone awry. Leon couldn’t for the life of him remember what set it off. It hardly mattered—desperate men and drink are ingredients enough for any tussle. Leon’s opponent—a grizzled ex-con who, upon reflection, reminded Leon of his father—pulled a knife.

  Leon took it.

  Used it.

  Seventeen times, if the police reports were to be believed. Leon would have guessed he hadn’t stabbed the guy more than twice—his memory of the night’s events was hazy to this day. Blood like warm silk spraying his hands and face and clothes. The looks of shock and horror on the faces of the bar’s other patrons—hard men all, or so Leon had thought. Cops arriving as if from nowhere, seconds it seemed after the fracas ended, though Leon later learned nearly ten minutes had elapsed.

  That night marked the only time to date Leon took a fall. He served three years (of a ten-year sentence—God bless overcrowding) for manslaughter in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord, during which he racked up kills three through seven—most for money, and all without getting fingered. By the time he left, he’d amassed a mental Rolodex of people who needed people killed, and had a résumé to match.

  Leon specialized in high-risk, high-pay jobs, or
those his fellow hitters found distasteful—women and children and the like. Leon told himself he gravitated toward those kinds of jobs because he was still that scrappy kid from Southie, willing to do whatever it took to get ahead, but that was only partly true. If he were still that scrappy kid from Southie, he’d be more likely to stand up for women and children than to lay them out on metal slabs. But then, he’d had to watch as Margaret grew up into the same brand of glazed, hollow woman as their mother. Margaret’s poison was Oxy, not booze, but the trajectory of her life had been the same.

  Killing women didn’t bother Leon none. And he thought killing kids might be a mercy. This world’s no place for innocents.

  His current job looked to be a cakewalk compared to most of his gigs. Wouldn’t even be the sort of job the Outfit usually tapped him for, if it weren’t for the fact they wanted it to be messy. The target was some Federal snitch who’d stuck his head out of his hidey-hole when he shoulda stayed buried. Purkhiser, his name had been, though now he went by Palomera. Seemed he hit it big at some Kansas City casino—so big it made the papers. Those same papers said Palomera’d be given his award at a ceremony this coming Thursday, which is where Leon intended to pop him. Leon swore the next time Purkhiser was buried, it’d be for good.

  As the plane filled, a baby toward the back began to wail. Leon cast a scowling glance over his shoulder that softened slightly as he saw the child’s mother—wan and sunken-eyed in a stained T-shirt and sweatpants, her unwashed hair in a hasty bun—trying to calm him to no avail. He turned around, and a nearby flight attendant—Felicia, according to her name tag—caught his eye. Felicia was a dark-skinned, curvy black woman in her midthirties who shared his pained expression at the racket. Leon thought she wasn’t bad-looking—though he coulda done without the ghetto braids or the tiny stud in her nose. He flashed her a smile and said, “Any way I could convince you to get that kid a muzzle? He’s giving me one hell of a headache.”

  She returned his smile. “Believe me, darlin’,” she said, low and conspiratorial, “I wish I could.”

  “Well, then, I guess I’ll have to settle for a drink.”

  “Sad to say I can’t help you there, either—at least, not until we’re in the air. Airline policy.”

  “Thing is,” he said, his smile vanishing, “I wasn’t asking.”

  Felicia’s smile faltered as well as she tried to determine whether he was joking. Her hand rested on the seat back in front of Leon. He put his own hand atop it. His fingers wrapped around her wrist and squeezed. Not enough to hurt her—to a casual viewer, the contact might have seemed no more than an escalation of their flirtation—but enough to suggest he easily could.

  Felicia’s eyes went wide. She tried to withdraw her hand, but Leon held her fast. And when she glanced around the cabin for backup, she realized no one was paying them any mind. The plane was too empty. The crew otherwise occupied.

  Leon’s grip tightened as if to chastise her for seeking help. Her gaze met his once more. His expression was dark amusement now, like a schoolyard bully’s. He felt her pulse quicken in her wrist and noted with satisfaction the sheen of sweat that had broken out across her brow.

  “I want you to go get me two bottles of Jack Daniel’s and two cups—one with ice, one without. Not one bottle, and not one cup. And don’t go pouring for me—I wanna get the ratio of booze to ice just right. Can you do that for me, Felicia?”

  Felicia nodded. Leon’s expression darkened, and the pressure of his grip increased once more. It hurt. He knew it. “I want to hear you say it.”

  “Y-yes,” Felicia said. “I can do that.”

  “Atta girl,” Leon said, releasing her, a smile upon his face once more. “That wasn’t so hard now, was it?”

  Felicia shook her head and took off trembling down the aisle to fetch his drink.

  “Oh, and Felicia?” he called, cheery as could be.

  Felicia turned.

  “Fetch me one a them neck pillows while you’re at it.”

  17

  “Yo, Chazz,” said Hank Garfield from the open doorway of Charlie Thompson’s file-strewn, overstuffed office, nestled deep inside the concrete monstrosity of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in DC. “You got a sec? I got something you oughta see.”

  Thompson wasn’t wild about her partner’s new nickname for her—or the fact that he’d waited until she was on the phone to interrupt her—and she was pretty sure he knew it. But she didn’t get as far as she had in the Bureau by letting pricks like Garfield push her buttons, so instead of giving him the satisfaction of correcting him, she told Jess she’d call her back and then asked Garfield, “Is this about my ghost?”

  “Sorry to disappoint,” he scoffed, “but not all roads lead back to your little pet obsession. As you may or may not know, there are one or two other bad guys in the country the FBI’s been tasked with nabbing.”

  Shit. It’d been nearly a week since the trail in Miami ran cold, but Thompson had been holding out hope some of the feelers they’d put out among their community of confidential informants would pay off. She felt sure someone had to be helping this guy—funding him, arming him, issuing his marching orders. And any organization brazen enough to order the hits they had—not to mention powerful enough to pull them off—had to leave a footprint of some kind. But there wasn’t one. It was so damned maddening she was starting to half-believe Garfield’s gibes that she was hunting Batman.

  She extended a hand toward the manila folder Garfield was holding and curled her fingers twice in a gimme sign. “What’ve you got?”

  He handed her the file. It contained a photocopy of a commercial airline’s passenger manifest and a series of grainy, black-and-white security-cam photos of a burly, mustachioed man walking through an airport concourse with the sort of hunched, furtive demeanor that suggested he knew damn well he was on camera—and that he didn’t like it one bit.

  “Fella you’re looking at is a hitter by the name of Leon Leonwood,” Garfield said. “TSA forwarded along the passenger list when one of his aliases popped.”

  “I know the name,” said Thompson. “This guy’s got one hell of a nasty reputation. How come he’s not no-fly?”

  “Rep aside, we’ve got nothing on him. He’s suspected in no fewer than a dozen hits in the past five years alone, but as bloody as he leaves his vics, he never leaves us much to go on by way of evidence. But if he’s on the move, maybe we can catch him in the act.”

  “Where were these pictures taken?”

  “Saint Louis International. He landed an hour ago.”

  “Any idea who the target is?”

  “Nothing yet. I figure he’s got a job lined up in town. I’ve got Atwood and Prescott looking into it.”

  Thompson shook her head. “The hit won’t be in St. Louis. Leonwood’s a pro—he’d never fly into the city the job’s in. My guess is, the hit’s someplace close, but not too close. Have Atwood and Prescott comb through the chatter out of Kansas City, Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, Chicago—anywhere we’ve got ears out within a day’s drive. And have our agents on the ground circulate these pics at every rental car company in town, with special attention to the ones near—but not in—the airport. He’ll be looking to break up his trail, and my bet is, he won’t want to run the risk of a cabbie remembering him, which means he’ll leave the airport on foot. Get them a complete list of Leonwood’s aliases, too—he’s gonna switch up now that he’s on the ground.”

  “Anything else, boss?” Garfield asked, both annoyed by his partner’s marching orders and embarrassed he hadn’t gotten there on his own.

  Thompson thought a moment, her gaze passing over the stacks of unread files and unfinished reports on her desk—all awaiting her attention, and a good three-quarters of them unworthy of it. “Yeah,” she said, finally. “Two things, actually. Thing one: book us on the next flight to St. Louis. You and me are gonna track Leonwood from the ground.”

  “Okay—what’s thing two?”

  “Thing two, H
enry, is if you call me anything other than Charlie, Charlotte, or Special Agent Thompson again, me and my trusty sidearm are gonna make sure the only thing the boys around here ever call you is One Ball, comprende?”

  Garfield gulped. “You got it, b— Special Agent Thompson.”

  “Good,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Now get moving. We’ve got a bad guy to catch.”

  18

  Eric Purkhiser’s stomach churned as he frantically stuffed clothes into a duffel bag. He was dizzy and light-headed. Acid scratched at the back of his throat.

  He should have known the whiskey was a bad idea.

  He’d taken a swig straight from the bottle as soon as he got home from Westlake Plaza. He thought that it would calm his nerves. Instead, it came back up immediately, along with what was left of his lunch.

  He tried to tell himself the dude who braced him at the mall this afternoon was running some kind of con—that he was a petty lowlife who’d stumbled across the story on Purkhiser’s big win and figured he could shake him down for some quick cash. But he didn’t really believe that. The guy’d been too skilled, too steady—too clearly practiced in this sort of meeting for it to’ve been a one-off. Planting his wallet in Purkhiser’s pocket without him noticing?

  Knocking out the security feeds? Talking his way out of an armed standoff with mall security? That shit screamed pro. And the fact that the dude didn’t bite when Purkhiser offered to pay his fee out of the casino winnings further suggested this was no shakedown.

  Which meant the dude was telling the truth.

  Which meant the Atlanta Outfit had found him.

  Problem was, Purkhiser was skint. Strapped. Flat-ass broke, to own the truth. There was no way he was gonna come up with a quarter mil in just three days. He was no holdup artist; he was a computer geek. It took him the better part of a year to plan and run his little casino scam—and anyway, it was that selfsame scam that put him on the Outfit’s radar in the first place.