by Chris Holm
Hendricks had waited until he heard both cars in the driveway leave before he climbed out of his hiding place and retrieved his phone. Then he walked barefoot toward Peoria proper, his too-small stolen loafers in one hand.
In a Goodwill parking lot, Hendricks had jimmied open a donation box and started dumping bags at random. After a little digging, he’d grabbed a plain black T-shirt, a pair of Levi’s, a hooded sweatshirt, and a pair of paint-spattered black Chuck Taylors. He felt a little guilty stealing from a charity, but as bedraggled as he looked, walking into a store would’ve drawn too much unwanted attention—and anyway, he was a little short on cash. The way Hendricks saw it, a fugitive from justice twelve hundred miles from home with less than seven hundred dollars to his name was entitled to a little charity.
He’d cleaned up in a nearby Hardee’s restroom and put on his new clothes, burying his old ones beneath a layer of paper towels in the trash bin.
Not far from the Hardee’s was a Best Western. Hendricks strode into the lobby like he belonged there. The bored young woman playing a game on her cell phone behind the front desk didn’t even look his way. He helped himself to their continental breakfast, and then he pulled up Craigslist on the computer in their business center.
Three hours and a bunch of phone calls later, he was the proud owner of a ’93 Civic. The tires were bald, the backseat was all chewed up, and the cabin smelled like dog, but at three hundred bucks, the price was right— and deals for two other cars had fallen through already, so he couldn’t afford to be too picky. Hendricks offered the owner another hundred to bring the car to his hotel. Once he dropped the guy back at his house, Hendricks was on his way.
Stolen wheels are fine for short-term transportation, but when you’ve got twenty hours of driving ahead of you, it’s nice to know the cops aren’t looking for your ride.
Now, the lights of Cleveland beckoned to him in the distance. Hendricks figured he could find some food there, some Advil, and maybe even a shower and a proper bed— provided he could find a motel shady enough to accept cash no-questions-asked. He knew Cleveland well enough to assume that wouldn’t be a problem.
Hendricks turned on the radio, scanned the dial until he found a classic rock station playing the Stones. Cranked the volume and drummed along on the steering wheel.
For the first time since Purkhiser double-crossed him, things were looking up.
When Thompson’s phone played Garfield’s ringtone, she nearly jumped out of her chair trying to answer it. “Garfield, where the hell have you been? Are you okay?”
Thompson heard shuffling on his end of the line. She wondered for a moment if he’d dropped the phone. “Huh?” he said. “I mean, uh, yeah...I’m fine.”
“You sure?” she asked. “You sound distracted.”
Garfield barked with laughter. It sounded more desperate than amused. “Distracted? Nah. Rough night, is all.”
“Listen, your lead panned out—we got a hit on those prints. Some badass Special Forces type by the name of Michael Hendricks. And get this: he’s been presumed dead for years. We’re tracking down a known associate of his now—a soldier from his old unit.”
“That’s great,” Garfield replied flatly. “E-mail me the file, and I’ll take a look at it on the way in.”
“Sure,” she said. “It’s on its way. You picked a hell of a time to disappear, you know. The director is furious. I tried to cover for you—I told him you were sick—but he’s not an idiot. He knows damn well I was lying.”
“Thanks, Charlie. You didn’t have to do that. Not after...the way I’ve been to you.”
Thompson was taken aback. “Hey,” she said, “what are partners for?”
“Still,” Garfield said, his voice tinged with regret, “for what it’s worth, Charlie, I’m sorry.”
36
The bell above the Bait Shop’s door jingled as the sandy-haired man let himself inside, sunlight streaming in around him on all sides. It was a little after four p.m. on Saturday. The bar had been open for all of five minutes, and save for Lester, it was unoccupied.
When Lester heard the bell, he peeked over the bar toward the door. He could just make out his would-be patron’s head and shoulders from where his wheelchair sat. Black sport coat. Black turtleneck. Black kid gloves, evidenced when he raised a hand in hello. And the palest of blue eyes. The man limped slightly, and his face was bruised, but his expression conveyed no discomfort—the slightest of smiles graced his lips, as if he’d just remembered the punch line of a joke long since forgotten.
“Afternoon,” Lester called to him. “Kitchen’s closed, so if you’re hungry, keep walking—but if a drink is what you’re after, I’m happy to oblige. What’s your poison?”
“What, indeed?” asked the man—his smile coming out in full now. His English was flawless, but its edges were sharpened by an accent that clearly marked him foreign. Austrian, Lester thought, or maybe Swiss.
The man looked around the bar’s small dining room. Empty booths, empty barstools, empty chairs. There was something sinister about him, Lester realized. Something predatory. Fear uncoiling in the pit of his stomach, he said, “Yeah, it’s been a little quiet around these parts today. But no worries: this place’ll be hopping in no time.” He hoped it sounded less a bluff to this man than it did to his own ears.
“Yes, Lester,” said the man, sliding the bolt on the door behind him and flipping the sign on its inset pane to Closed. “I suspect it will be.”
The threat was hard to miss. Lester didn’t hesitate. He tripped the panic button hidden beneath the lip of the bar—signaling Hendricks—and went for the Beretta M9 Velcroed to the underside of his chair. Maybe if he’d gone for the gun straightaway, he might have had a fighting chance. The man, mongoose-quick, grabbed a wooden chair from the nearest table and hurled it at him. Gun hand and chair legs connected. Lester’s Beretta slipped from his grasp and shattered the mirror behind the bar. In seconds, the man was on him—vaulting over the bar, his knee connecting hard with Lester’s groin. The pain was excruciating. Lester’s world went a little wobbly around the edges.
“That was hardly the most hospitable of welcomes, Mr. Meyers,” the sandy-haired man hissed as he backhanded Lester across the face. Lester’s head rocked sideways at the force of the blow.
Black-gloved hands zip-tied Lester’s arms to his wheelchair’s armrests with practiced grace. A whole lemon from the garnish station was stuffed as far as it would go into his mouth. Juice bled from it where Lester’s teeth pierced its skin, invading the cuts those same teeth had left in his own lips—twin bee-stings, top and bottom.
As quickly as the man was on him, he was gone. A terrifying, animal grace. He strode calmly but with purpose around the perimeter of the bar—closing blinds, checking the restroom for occupants. Briefly, he disappeared into the kitchen—checking the storeroom and service entrance, Lester supposed.
Whatever’s about to happen, Lester thought, it ain’t gonna be pretty.
Once Special Agent Garfield had supplied Engelmann with Hendricks’s file, finding Meyers was a simple matter of placing a phone call. His Council contact let it ring so long, though, it was clear that he—and by extension, his organization—wished to register his displeasure at Engelmann’s lack of progress.
“What?” his contact answered, eight rings in.
“I need a favor.”
“So far, you’ve needed plenty of favors, and we haven’t seen much in return. What makes you think you deserve another?”
“I’m close,” said Engelmann. “Closer than anybody else has come.”
“You’d best be. What, exactly, do you need?”
“I assume you have sources within the military, yes?”
His contact hesitated. “Maybe.”
“I need to find a certain Lester Meyers. All I know for sure is that he’s a military veteran. Late twenties, I’m guessing—maybe early thirties.”
A long, calculating pause. “He our guy?”
“No,” said Engelmann, “he’s not. But I believe him to have information I require.”
“This Meyers...is he underground?”
“I have no reason to assume so, but his military record is under lock and key.”
“Seems to me the bucks we’re paying you, you oughta be able to do your own goddamn legwork.”
“I understand—but time is of the essence,” said Engelmann.
“Law’s onto this guy, too?”
“Yes. And if they locate him before I do...”
“I get the picture,” his contact said. “Gimme five minutes to do my thing, then call me back. And Alexander?” He said Engelmann’s first name with exaggerated care, as if mocking his hired killer’s mannered grace.
“Yes?”
“That call better be the last I get from you until your target’s dead.”
The sandy-haired man returned from the bar’s back room and fetched from his inside coat pocket a black leather kit the approximate size and shape of a woman’s clutch, zippered on three sides. It looked to Lester like a particularly extensive lock-pick kit.
And after a fashion, it was.
The man unzipped the kit and set it on the bar. He made a show of unfolding it—three panels, all told. Its contents, held in place by a series of leather loops, snapped at one end, were the stuff of nightmares.
A set of scalpels. Awls and chisels in assorted shapes and sizes. Something that looked like a cross between a ball-peen hammer and a hatchet. A small bow saw. A hand drill with an assortment of bits. And sundry forceps, clamps, and scissors.
They were old, no doubt—antiques, perhaps, dull-looking and rust-flecked—but there was no mistaking their purpose. They were surgical instruments. But in this man’s hands, they were meant to undo rather than repair.
Lester’s chair rocked from side to side as he struggled against his restraints. The sandy-haired man cooed over him as though he were a crying child, but made no move to stop him. Lester struggled until his limbs and chest burned from exertion, and sweat plastered his hair and clothes to his body. The zip ties dug into his flesh, drawing blood. It dripped onto the hardwood in quiet, rhythmic taps. Eventually, Lester’s struggles ceased, and he eyed the man before him in unadulterated fear.
“Are you quite finished?” asked the man. Lester was silent. “Good. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Alexander Engelmann. Now,” he said, one hand hovering over the open surgical kit a moment before selecting from it a small, wooden-handled awl, “you’re going to tell me everything there is to know about one Michael Evan Hendricks.”
37
Saturday afternoon, and the New York Thruway was slow going. It seemed to Hendricks as though the entire stretch from Syracuse to Albany was being paved. The roadway was reduced to one grooved lane for miles on end. Hendricks rolled along at twenty miles an hour, cursing the traffic. At this rate, it would be midnight before he got home.
He planned to spend the night at his cabin and head to Portland in the morning. He figured hunting this guy could wait a day, at least—and the way his last forty-eight hours had gone, Hendricks thought he’d earned a little peace and quiet.
Traffic moved at a crawl. Hendricks played chicken with the Civic’s gas gauge, watching the needle tip toward E and hoping he’d make it to a gas station. The thruway was bumper-to-bumper as far as he could see in both directions.
He coasted into the Guilderland Plaza five minutes after the indicator light came on. The electronic road sign in the median told him he had five more miles of construction to look forward to.
Hendricks was gassing up the Civic when his burner phone vibrated in his pocket—one short burst, signaling a text. He fished it out of his pocket with his free hand.
The phone’s screen read 911.
It was the message triggered by the panic button behind Lester’s bar.
A helpless dread gripped Hendricks. Lester was in trouble, and here he was five fucking hours away.
He climbed back into the Civic and eyed the backup on the thruway. Saw cars trying to leave the plaza’s parking lot idling as they waited for the chance to merge. Knew he’d go out of his mind sitting in traffic like that for the next five miles.
At the far end of the parking lot, there was a metal gate separating the plaza’s lot from the one its employees used, there to keep people on the toll road from leaving without paying. It was a risk. He could be seen. Reported. Chased. Arrested. And if that happened, Lester would be on his own.
With gritted teeth, he jerked the wheel toward the gate and hit the gas.
The gate slammed open, and he drove through—leaving the traffic jam behind and disappearing down the narrow access road.
Engelmann worked on Lester quietly and without urgency. His expression was one of both care and ecstasy—a master composer conducting his opus before a rapt audience of one. He’d told Lester at the outset that Lester was going to tell Engelmann everything there was to know about Hendricks. It wasn’t a question, Lester noted at the time, but in the agonizing hours that followed, it was as close as Engelmann ever came to asking one.
Lester, unlike Engelmann, was far from quiet. He screamed. He cried. He begged. He pleaded. Most were muffled by his makeshift gag—the lemon, at first, though he bit through it within the hour, at which point Engelmann replaced it with his own belt.
Not that Lester’s protestations mattered much. The Bait Shop was a sturdy old brick building, made to withstand Maine’s hard winters. The bar next door played host to a reggae band most Saturdays, today included. And once the dinner hour hit, the Old Port came alive, its streets full of tourists, buskers, and barhoppers. Anyone who heard Lester’s cries over the din failed to take notice.
Lester told himself all he had to do was stay strong. That Engelmann didn’t know about the panic button, or hadn’t realized Lester’d triggered it. If he could hold out long enough, Michael would come for him—even though Lester always told him if he ever got that message, he should run.
Mikey was still a soldier at heart—he’d never leave a man behind.
That thought carried him through the first excruciating hour. Taunted him for half the second. But eventually, Lester realized Michael would not come soon enough, so he began to root for Engelmann to get carried away and kill him inadvertently.
For a time, that grim strand of hope sustained him. But Engelmann was talented. Exacting. Creative. And Lester, for all his resolve, was no match for him. There was no shame in it. No betrayal. There’s not a man alive who wouldn’t sell out his own mother after two hours of Engelmann’s ministrations. Most wouldn’t last five minutes.
As the sun glinted orange off the western faces of the low-slung Portland skyline, Lester Meyers began to talk.
38
“My god,” said Thompson. “What happened here?” Thompson stood on the threshold of Henry Garfield’s bedroom, her hands sweating inside her disposable nitrile gloves, a pair of paper booties on her feet. Crime scene techs were everywhere, gowned and masked and solemn as they laid down numbered evidence markers and dusted surfaces for prints. The room flashed white as the crime scene photographer took photo after photo of the bodies.
The woman was unfamiliar to her. She lay on the bed, her throat slit, her naked flesh mottled. It looked like she’d been rolled over—there was relatively little blood beneath her, but the left side of the bed was soaked with it, and the floor beside as well.
Garfield was naked, too, and slumped at the foot of the bed, a gunshot to the center of his forehead. It looked like he’d been kneeling when he was shot.
Her question was more involuntary response than legitimate inquiry, but the DC homicide detective who’d greeted her at the door answered anyway. “We’re still piecing that together,” he said. “We just got here ourselves. No one seems to’ve heard the shot. Downstairs neighbor called it in when her ceiling started bleeding. When we found out he was one of yours, we figured we oughta loop you in.”
The detective had introdu
ced himself when Thompson arrived, but she’d been in a fog. Now she struggled to remember his name. Newman? Newsome? Neubauer.
“Time of death?” she asked.
“Hard to say. Lividity’s fixed. Rigor mortis has set in. The bodies are room temp. I’m guessing it’s been twenty-four hours at least. The ME will probably be able to get us closer.”
Thompson’s heart sank. Twenty-four hours ago, Garfield had called her and asked for Hendricks’s file. She’d e-mailed it without a second thought. “That’s close enough,” she said.
“If it’s any consolation, your buddy didn’t suffer,” Neubauer said. “There’s no other trauma to the body. No defensive wounds to indicate a struggle. Just the gunshot. Stippling indicates it was close-range. He would’ve died immediately.”
Thompson shook her head. Garfield didn’t even put up a fight—he just gave the bastard what he wanted.
“Could be this was drug related,” Neubauer mused aloud. “We found some coke and paraphernalia on the nightstand.”
Thompson shook her head. “This wasn’t drug related.”
Neubauer scowled. “Look, I called you out of courtesy. If you know something you’re not telling me—”
But Thompson wasn’t listening. She was ringing up HQ. Three transfers later, she got someone on the line worth talking to. “We’ve got a problem,” she said. “Henry Garfield is dead. Our ghost’s ID has been burned.” A pause. “I’m guessing it was the perp who flipped the ambulance.” Another pause. “Yeah. It’s bad. We’ve gotta get eyes on every Lester Meyers on our list ASAP.”
Michael Hendricks fought through the crush of drunken revelers that crowded the lamp-lit streets of Portland’s Old Port, his impatience tipping toward panic. Every glance his way felt hostile. Every idle bump was a potential threat. The live music blasting from open bar doors set his teeth on edge. The bass thump from the dance clubs knocked the breath from his chest.
