by Chris Holm
A twenty-something meathead—popped collar and backward ball cap, tequila breath and cheap cologne— shouldered Hendricks hard as he staggered by.
“Watch it, dipshit!” he said.
Hendricks sized him up. Eyes glazed from drink. Veins bulging. Fists the size of country hams. He was clearly spoiling for a fight. Hendricks wasn’t keen to give him one, so he kept walking.
“Hey!” He wrapped a hand around Hendricks’s upper arm and yanked. “I was talking to you, asshole.”
As Hendricks turned, his right hand lashed out and grabbed Meathead’s trachea in a pinch grip. The guy let out a pained cry, which dwindled to a gurgle as Hendricks applied pressure. Hendricks knew he could crush the asshole’s windpipe easily. Leave him to choke to death in the street, where he’d be mistaken for another weekend drunk until it was too late. And for a moment, he was tempted.
But Lester was in trouble, so Hendricks couldn’t afford any complications. By force of will, he released the man, who backed—bug-eyed and gasping—into the throng.
When Hendricks finally reached the Bait Shop, it was shuttered and dark, and its sign read Closed—unheard-of on a Saturday night. Ten agonizing minutes spent surveilling the place indicated no discernible activity inside. Once he’d satisfied himself that no one lay in wait for him, he ducked into the alley that ran alongside the bar and used his key to slip in via the service entrance.
The first thing he noticed was the scent. Sweat and pennies, and beneath them, something even less pleasant, like garbage left too long. Though the gloom of the bar was impenetrable, Hendricks knew precisely what that olfactory cocktail signified. He’d smelled it more times than he wished to recall: sometimes on the field of battle, though more often in cold, gray, stone-walled basements—long shadows cast across the floor and walls by naked bulbs and naked zealots, strapped to chairs and taken apart piece by piece until they gave up either their secrets or their ghost. It was the scent of death drawn out—of a body letting go of blood and bile and bladder and bowels long before it’s granted the reprieve of death.
As Hendricks’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, the lifeless form of his only friend swam slowly into focus. He was in the center of the restaurant’s small dining room, slumped forward in his wheelchair. A bar rag dangled from between his swollen, bloodied lips. The only thing that held him upright were the zip ties that bound his forearms to the wheelchair’s armrests, looped through the spokes of his wheels to keep him from rolling off, and cinched so tight his pained struggles had stripped skin from sinew like insulation from a wire. Hendricks felt sick as he took in the grisly scene: a blasphemous Rodin’s Thinker, an ode to suffering rendered in bound and bloodied flesh.
Hendricks ran to his friend’s side, tears welling as proximity revealed fresh horrors. Lester’s shirt lay in tatters on the floor around him, cut from his body by his assailant so that he could better access his living canvas. Lester’s chest was marked with plier-bites as if snacked on at leisure by some kind of carrion feeder, plucking flesh from bone here and there at random. A series of inch-long slices—fine, as if made by razor blade or surgical scalpel—etched his muscled shoulder like a woodcut. What should have been blood-caked was instead glazed and sticky, with a residue whose scent suggested whiskey—poured onto these cuts to inflict maximum pain. One ear dangled loose. Three fingers on his left hand were missing; a length of rubber hose was tied tight around his left elbow to prevent him from bleeding out as they’d been taken one by one. The floor before him was littered with teeth, pinkish-white amid the puddling scarlet. His skin was gray. His chest was still. His eyes, mercifully, were closed.
Hendricks crouched before Lester and touched his forehead to the dead man’s. “I’m sorry, Les,” he said, tears falling as he clenched shut his eyes—a vain attempt to keep his grief at bay. “I’m so sorry.”
So this is what this life he’d chosen had come to. What his bullshit quest for atonement—for absolution—had wrought. He’d once believed that God and country were worth killing for. After, when that moral certainty abandoned him, he thought that balancing the scales might make things right again. But now—too late, perhaps—he knew, as he wept over his departed friend, that his new crusade was as delusive as his last. There was only one thing in this world worth killing for—worth dying for. The lives of those you love.
He wished that he were dead instead. That the man who did this to Lester had bested him at Pendleton’s— or that he’d died alongside the rest of his unit in the high desert of Afghanistan. Then the horrors of the past three days would have never happened.
Could he die? he wondered. Or was he too good at this? Too tough? Too stubborn?
Apparently, Lester was.
Because at that moment, the broken man opened his eyes, spit the filthy, blood-caked rag out of his mouth, and began to scream.
It was a noise unlike any Hendricks had ever heard. Every one of Lester’s muscles clenched as he expelled breath from his lungs, and he thrashed violently against his restraints, loosing fresh gouts of blood from his many wounds and rocking his wheelchair so hard it nearly toppled.
Hendricks had no idea how Lester had survived this long. Had no idea how anybody could have. But by the look of him, and the severity of his wounds, his vise-grip on life wouldn’t hold for much longer.
“Jesus, Lester—I thought you were a goner!” Hendricks exclaimed. “Just hang on, buddy,” he said, plucking his phone from his pocket. “We’re gonna get you to a hospital.”
But Lester grabbed his wrist and held him fast. Through gritted teeth—what few he had left, at least—he barked “NO!” his voice hoarse and weak, his neck bulging from the exertion required to speak. Blood trickled from the corners of his swollen, ruined mouth.
Hendricks mistook Lester’s gesture as protective of Hendricks. “Don’t worry about me. All I care about is getting you—”
“NO,” Lester once more insisted. He closed his eyes and focused. Then, calmer than he’d sounded prior, though thick and wrong from the trauma to his mouth, his face, he added, “Evie.”
Hendricks froze. Fear crawled up his spine like living ice.
“I’m sorry,” said Lester, tears streaking his blood-caked cheeks. “I tried to wait. I didn’t want to tell him...”
Hendricks touched his friend’s shoulder—gingerly, for he was loath to cause him further pain, and there was little undamaged flesh left on him—and said, “It’s all right. I understand.” And he meant it. He didn’t blame Lester for having told his assailant of Evie—he couldn’t. After all, it was Lester himself who insisted on safeguarding against knowing anything that, if disclosed, could compromise Hendricks’s safety. No one could hold out forever while tortured. All they could hope for was to bide their time until shock, unconsciousness, or death took over. It would seem Hendricks’s adversary was clever enough to stave off all three. And one look at Lester told Hendricks he’d resisted, valiantly, regardless.
“Tell me what happened,” said Hendricks.
Lester nodded, wincing at the effort. Both he and Hendricks knew that whenever help came, it would be too late. Lester was too far gone to save. Five minutes wouldn’t make any difference. The only thing that had kept him here this long was sheer force of will—he was determined to redeem himself for having given up Evie.
Lester told Hendricks everything he could—beginning with the fact that Engelmann had left no more than an hour prior, armed not only with the knowledge of Evie’s existence, but with her address as well. He spoke haltingly, struggling for every breath, growling his words out as fast as he could force them. Hendricks held his hand and listened, rapt, until finally one of Lester’s pauses stretched on forever, and Hendricks looked up to find two dull eyes staring back at him.
Lester was gone. But in holding on—in delivering his message—he’d bested his tormentor, who’d left him to die rather than killing him quickly in a cruel attempt to prolong his suffering. In holding on, he’d given Hendricks what he needed mos
t in that moment: the chance to end this. To save someone who mattered.
39
As Hendricks raised a hand to close his dead friend’s eyes, there was a banging on the door. He rose from his crouch beside Lester’s wheelchair and headed for the window. Parting the blinds slightly, he saw a pair of unmarked black sedans parked just outside—one blocking the alley through which he’d entered. Two men in dark suits were at the door. Two more hung back a little—weapons drawn, eyes darting all around. FBI, he guessed.
He ran into the bathroom and shut the door. It was dark but for the streetlight through the window. The window frame was painted shut, so he wrapped his sweatshirt around his hand and knocked out the lower pane. He climbed out as the men out front kicked in the door and stormed the place. Then he strolled as nonchalantly as he could around the corner—his mind reeling, his stomach in knots—and plucked his cell phone from his pocket, punching in a number from memory.
“Hello?” The word was high and thin and tinged with fear.
“Hello, Edgar.”
“You,” Edgar Morales spat. “Do you have any idea what my involvement with you has put me through? Some psychotic motherfucker damn near killed me in my own bed because of you! I’ve barely slept since, and when I do, it’s with a gun under my pillow. I’m goddamn terrified he might come back.”
You wouldn’t have been alive long enough for Engelmann to visit you if it weren’t for me, Hendricks thought but didn’t say. Instead, he said, “Actually, Edgar, that man’s precisely why I’m calling. See, I’ve got a bead on where he’s headed, and I aim to deal with him—permanently. But he’s got a head start on me, which means I’m gonna need a favor.”
“Yeah?” asked Morales. “The fuck is that?”
“You own a fleet of charter jets, don’t you?”
There was a pause on Morales’s end, as if he were weighing a decision. Then he sighed and said, “I’ve got planes on ready at every airport in the country. Just tell me where you need to go.”
It took eleven minutes from the moment Thompson put out the order to get eyes on all their Lester Meyerses for the Portland, Maine, office to call her back. Turns out, Portland’s Lester Meyers was the Lester Meyers they were looking for. Emphasis on was.
Seems he ran a bar in some touristy section by the water. The first agents on the scene found the place empty, save for Lester Meyers’s mangled corpse. They would have assumed him dead for hours but for the fact that he was still warm. Only a coroner could say for sure, but it seemed they’d missed saving him by minutes at most—assuming he could have been saved at all. Given the pictures of his injuries they’d forwarded to Thompson’s cell, that was one hell of an assumption.
How he’d managed to survive the trauma he’d endured for as long as he had, Thompson hadn’t a clue. But one thing she did know was Meyers wasn’t L’Engle’s big play. If he’d meant to use Meyers as bait to draw Hendricks out, he wouldn’t have tortured him and left him for dead—he would have taken Meyers and left behind a grisly message like the one on the ambulance for Hendricks to follow. No, the evidence suggested the killer had extracted information from Meyers, which meant he had bigger bait in mind—and that Meyers himself was the message.
Thompson had no idea whether Hendricks had received that message, but still, she thrilled at the prospect of catching the two of them at once. First, though, there was the matter of discovering what it was L’Engle was onto.
Whatever it was, it must be somewhere in Hendricks’s file, hidden beneath the black redaction bars.
Thompson scrolled through her cell-phone contacts, dialed up an old friend in the DOD.
“Charlie Thompson. I never would have guessed I’d hear from you today. How are you?”
“I’m fine,” Thompson said. “Did I wake you?”
“Nah, I was up,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
“Actually, Diane, I need a favor. Got a file on one of your guys by the name of Michael Hendricks. Real cool customer, from what little I’m allowed to see. File says he’s dead, only it turns out, not so much.”
“What do you need, Charlie?”
“Someone’s hunting this guy. Someone bad. I think he’s got a bead on some major bait to draw him out. Guy’s an orphan—no siblings, either—so I’m thinking it’s a partner. He wasn’t married, so this partner could be male or female.”
“And you need my help in finding said partner?”
“Yeah. Anything you can give me. His death benefits. Where his checks were sent. Whatever you can think of.”
“Files like these are sealed for a reason, Charlie. I do this, I could lose my job.”
“You don’t do this, that partner of his might just lose their life.”
Diane sighed. “Hell,” she said. “I never could say no to you. Keep your phone handy. I’ll call you back in twenty minutes. And Charlie?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s good to hear from you. We should grab a drink sometime. Catch up.”
“Yeah,” Charlie agreed. But she knew they never would.
40
Two a.m., and Dulles’s long-term parking was deserted. Hendricks’s footsteps echoed through the concrete parking structure while he eyed license plates.
The flight from Portland to Dulles had taken less than two hours. The next commercial flight wasn’t for another six. Hendricks assumed Engelmann would be on it. He hoped to God Engelmann didn’t have a Morales of his own.
On the fourth floor, he found a car that met his needs: an early-nineties Porsche convertible with doctor’s plates. The ragtop made breaking in a breeze. The engine was fast enough to get him to Evie’s quickly. And the car was old enough to be susceptible to hot-wiring.
Hendricks had raided the charter plane’s tool kit on the way down. Took a utility knife, a hammer, a couple screwdrivers, some electrical tape. He used the knife to cut a slit in the car’s roof, right behind the driver’s-side window.
Then he reached inside and unlocked the door. It took some wrestling to pop the cover off the steering column, and in the dark of the garage, the multicolored wires were hard to tell apart, but eventually, he teased out the ones he wanted. He connected the ignition on-off wire to the battery, and the dashboard came to life. Then, taking care because it was live, he stripped the starter wire and touched it to the join between the other two.
Two hundred forty-seven horses’ worth of power roared.
Hendricks left the parking lot and kept the needle pinned at eighty-five all the way to Evie’s. Even with the doctor’s plates, there was a chance they’d try to pull him over. He didn’t care. They could chase his ass the whole damn drive, he thought—all that mattered now was Evie. All that mattered was keeping her safe. Leading a parade of cops to her front door seemed as good a way as any to do it.
But no one tried to pull him over. On those dark back-country roads, beneath the low ceiling of clouds that blotted out the stars and threatened rain, no one noticed him at all. And so Hendricks wound up standing on Evie’s front porch, alone.
He knew at once Engelmann hadn’t beaten him here. If he had, he would have made a show of it—trashing the place, causing a scene, maybe leaving a grisly souvenir to lather Hendricks up into an ill-advised rage. But all looked normal, and quiet, and dark.
Still, Engelmann would be here soon enough. And Hendricks aimed to be ready for him when he showed.
He wished he’d had time to procure weapons. But his whole way here, all Hendricks could think was that the hours he spent tracking down the gear he needed might make the difference between beating Engelmann to Evie or allowing the only woman he’d ever loved to fall into a madman’s hands. And besides, he had no idea how compromised he was. There was a good chance every law enforcement agency in the country had eyes out for him. And with Lester dead, he had no backup, no tech, no way to reach his usual suppliers in time, and no access to the money he’d need to pay them if he did. That meant he’d have to either reach out to untested contacts or stea
l what he needed, either of which might well alert the authorities to his location. He couldn’t run the risk of getting caught before removing Engelmann from play—the cost of doing so was far too steep.
Hendricks’s pulse raced. He was horrified at the prospect of confronting Evie—of confessing everything to her. Of allowing her to see the monster he’d become.
And still, he pounded on that door.
“Evie!” he shouted, his voice oddly tinny and distant to his own ears. “Goddamn it, Evie—open up!”
It was almost three a.m.—plenty late for most decent folks to be asleep.
If I were Evie, Hendricks thought, and some nutjob was banging on my door shouting my name, I might be reluctant to answer, too. Which is to say, he should’ve figured on what happened next.
The inside light came on, spilling yellow through the decorative glass panel in the door. Then the door flew open. As Hendricks squinted against the sudden light, a hand grabbed a fistful of his shirt. Next thing he knew, he was up against the doorjamb, the business end of a baseball bat in his face.
Fucking Stuart.
It was all Hendricks could do not to end his ass right then and there.
Instead, Hendricks tried to talk to Stuart—to calm him down. It didn’t take.
Stuart was riled up—anger masking fear. A king defending his castle. Lots of “Who the fuck are you?” and “The fuck you think you’re doing, pounding on our goddamn door in the dead of fucking night?” The whole time, Hendricks was a little bummed Stuart didn’t recognize him. Guess Evie doesn’t keep too many pictures of me around, he thought.
Then again, even if she did, you couldn’t blame the guy for not putting two and two together. No one expects his wife’s dead fiancé to come knocking in the middle of the night. But Stuart kept getting angrier and angrier—spit flying, veins pulsing, nose almost touching Hendricks’s—and the whole time, all Hendricks could think was This is the guy who gets to lie down next to Evie.
