by Nick Thacker
I waited, hoping he might just give me what I wanted. I had sized him up immediately as someone who had some training, so I knew he wasn’t an idiot, but I didn’t know if he intended to draw this out or not. He knew what I would need — where are they taking her, what are they going to do, who are you working for. He knew that’s what I wanted from him, and he knew the answers.
The question now was whether or not he’d give them to me.
I cocked my head sideways a bit, opened an eye a little wider. You gonna tell me?
He just sneered.
I shrugged, then lashed out with a hand and grabbed onto a chunk of his short hair. There wasn’t much to play with, but it was enough. I yanked my hand forward a bit, taking his head with it, then slammed it as hard as I could against the wall.
It was a standard southern-style estate, and the outside paneling was wood. Old, soft, and painted with a thick layer of light-blue. The blow wouldn’t kill him — far from it — but it would rattle him up some, at least until he knocked out.
It worked the first time, and I saw his eyes close and his weight sink into the edge of the wall, like he was trying to melt into the space between the planks and disappear down under the porch. He was out cold.
I quickly grabbed his arm and slung him over my shoulder into a fireman’s carry. He was heavier than he looked, but not unmanageable. I walked him over the porch and down the steps, toward Joey’s car.
“Dixon?” I heard a voice say from behind me. “Hello?”
Marley. The old man himself had come out to see what the commotion had been, and he’d caught me in the act of hauling away the remnants. It was dark, and I knew he wouldn’t be able to see me clearly, but it would be abundantly clear that I was struggling with some sort of human-sized weight on my shoulder.
“H — hey, Marley,” I said. “How are you tonight?”
He paused, and I could just barely see his face in the shadows, twisted up in confusion as he tried to figure out what was going on.
“Well, I heard a noise,” he said. “Big bump outside the living room. Everything okay out here?”
Marley was a sharp guy, considering his age. Nice man, ran a tight business. I respected him. I also didn’t want him getting involved.
“Marley,” I said. “Listen. “I — I need to take care of something, and I hope you can understand that I can’t really explain it fully right now. But I give you my word, I’ll swing by tomorrow and sort things out, okay?”
He frowned, but nodded. He either didn’t want to become another human-sized weight on my shoulder or he actually trusted me. Didn’t care one way or another — I just needed to get the hell out of there.
I turned and started walking again before he could respond. “I’ll give you a visit when I can, Marley.”
As I got to the car, I shouted a thanks over my shoulder, balanced the man’s weight with one hand, and fumbled with the trunk release with the other. It popped open and I kicked it up fully with a foot, then tossed the man inside. There wasn’t an emergency release inside Joey’s trunk, so I wasn’t worried he would get out.
Instead, I was worried about Hannah. I didn’t have a lot of time to make my move, and I had the feeling I was already in over my head.
I slammed the trunk shut — might have clipped him a bit, but whatever — and got into the driver’s seat and started driving away. Marley was still on the porch, watching me head out into the shadows.
21
I WAS SEETHING. RAGE DIDN’T begin to describe what I was feeling. Rather than a mixture of emotions — anger, defeat, confusion, betrayal, fear — they were all wrapped up into a singular, individual force. A single feeling that consisted of everything I’d felt that night.
I wasn’t a revenge-driven person. Instead, I vouched for justice, longed for a world without the perverse style of hatred I fought so hard against. I wasn’t retaliatory, nor was I the kind of person to get caught up in pettiness.
But this. This was different. This wasn’t revenge. This wasn’t retaliation.
This was removing a piece from the chessboard. This was taking out a threat, once and for all. It was getting information, and then figuring out how to use that information to my advantage to get Hannah back. And then destroying the thing that gave me the information.
The man in the back of the trunk had woken up. Either his head was harder than I’d thought or I hadn’t clocked him well enough, but he wasn’t going anywhere. Joey’s trunk could be broken out of, but I doubted the man had anything on him he could use to the pick the lock. Plus, it would be nearly pitch-dark in there, the dim lights from the old streetlights outside wouldn’t be enough to allow him to see anything useful.
On top of that, we were only a few minutes away from the bar, and I knew Joey and I could handle him well enough once we were in the alley. I spent those few minutes thinking through the plan.
Hannah had been taken, but she had been taken by a group that was trying to exploit her father’s death. They wanted what they thought she had — control of the company. That meant her brother would also be in danger. Hell, he was probably up in the room when they’d snatched his sister.
I still didn’t have a token, but it was clear to me that the mark had been Hannah all along. She was the one I was supposed to off, since her father had been the one at the head of the company. It was simple — Mr. Rayburn was dead, so the only thing left to do was remove the other owners of the company from the picture. My mark was his daughter, and I could bet that if I’d accomplished my mission correctly the first time, my second mark for the weekend was her brother.
But there was still… something. Something I couldn’t place. I drove on in silence, the radio killed long ago, and churned through the options. I tried to place the motives on the other group, the ones who had gotten to —
I stopped. Literally pulled the car up short. The brakes grabbed and stuck, hard and fast, and I heard the man tumble forward in the trunk and slam up against the indentations toward the back of the trunk. I heard a muffled groan, but I didn’t stop to revel in the slight satisfaction that sound provided.
This group didn’t take out her father.
I knew it, even as the words fell through my mind. I knew it, without a doubt. This group, the men who had taken Hannah and tried to kill me earlier that day, was not the group that had offed her father. They weren’t the ones who had forced the man into a noose, told him to stand on a chair or a desk, and held a gun to his head until he walked off the side of it. They weren’t the ones who had done that, because their motive told a different story.
They would have told the man what they wanted, and they would have threatened him or tortured him until he complied. They would have beat him until he bent and gave them what they wanted: control of his company. Specifically a very profitable portion of his company. The portion of the company my friend in high places had been looking into.
The schmuck would have given them what they wanted, and they probably still would have killed him, but then they would have had no need to come after Hannah.
But they had come after Hannah, and I was pretty sure it was a convoluted argument to assume they’d done so just to get back at me for offing their frat-boy from last night. They’d come after Hannah, but not killed her, because they still needed the company.
They still needed her to comply. She controlled some of the company. Enough of it, apparently, that they were interested in what they could gain if they took it from her. So they took her, and they would, I knew, do whatever it took to wrench it from her hands and then toss her away like a discarded piece of trash.
So that left me with the nagging thing I’d noticed from earlier, but couldn’t quite place. The nagging had been there since I’d thrown the asshole in Joey’s trunk, but I hadn’t — until this moment — realized what it was nagging me about. This was it.
The timeline didn’t make sense, and the motive didn’t either. They had come for Hannah after her father had died. They had
tracked her movements, watching her from afar for a few days, a week maybe, and they’d just followed her down here to Edisto, where they had a beach house and a yacht, where they would bury their old man.
They followed her down after her dad had been killed, but they hadn’t been the ones to kill him. They had only shown up on the scene after the playing field had been leveled a bit — after the key piece was removed from the board. It made their job easier, having the old man gone, but they hadn’t been the ones to do it.
No, it hadn’t been them. Instead, it had been me. Not me, specifically, but my employer. He’d had the old man killed.
It was the only thing that made sense. Old man dies, my mark shows up at my bar looking for Hannah to kill her off, too. The playing field was being leveled.
I was responsible for his death. I was the reason he had been killed. He had been a mark, I was sure of it. The token always had a way of traveling through a set of people who were related by a single, unifying element of their lives. It traveled through until there were no more people in that group we had identified as being bad people. Then, and only then, was the token retired temporarily, until it was needed again.
These travelings happened in spurts, from one person to the next, each one a mark for me to kill, to take out and deal with, with or without Joey’s help, until I’d made it through all of the people the token had deemed worthy of its attention.
But there was a huge, glaring problem. While I was completely sure the old man had been a mark, I had never even heard of him before I’d met Hannah.
I had never met him, nor had I been the one to kill him. He had been given the token just like they all had, I was sure of it, but it hadn’t been me to pull the trigger.
My employer always sent them to me. Always. And this time I hadn’t been the one to do it.
Which meant I now had a coworker.
22
I WAS STILL STOPPED ON the side of the road, so I fumbled around until I found my flip phone. I yanked it out and turned left to head back down to the alley behind my bar. I didn’t want anyone to hear the conversation I was about to have, but I didn’t want the man in the trunk to hear it either.
I jogged over to the fence and walked along it, away from the bar, until I found a narrow gate that had been installed far too long ago. It was just barely hanging on, a few pieces of warped rails all that gave it the support it needed. It had sunk into the ground a few inches as well, so I had to finagle it and shake it around until it pushed the leaves and junk on the forest side of it away enough for me to squeeze through. I walked into the woods about twenty paces, knowing I was pretty much as middle-of-nowhere as I’d get, and started dialing.
This time the phone connected on the first ring.
“You’ve had a busy day,” the deep, gravelly voice said.
“We need to talk,” I snapped.
“I imagine you do think that.”
“We need to talk in person.”
The voice paused, then chuckled. “That is never an acceptable —“
“I don’t care about protocol,” I shouted, with the shoutiest whisper I dared. “I don’t give a shit about your rules anymore. You know I want out, and we need to talk about that.”
“We need to talk about what you’ve screwed up,” the man said.
I hesitated. Too long. Any hesitation was too long, and he knew that I knew it. He reveled in it. Took pride in it. He’d won. “I can fix it,” I said. “I can make it right. The mark —“
“The mark is gone!” he yelled. “You missed the mark. You hit the wrong one!”
“I know that — I obviously know that. There was no money, and —“
“Stop.” The voice — my boss’ voice — had returned to its all-too-controlled level, its calmness and coolness. A ruse, meant to get the listener to comply, no matter what. And most of the time, it worked.
I waited. He didn’t speak. He was thinking about it. Considering.
“Come see me,” I said. “You know where to find me. Hell, you’re less than an hour away.”
I heard breathing on the other end. A cough. Finally, a simple word. “Fine.”
23
I TRIED TO SPEND THE hour napping on a thin mattress I’d long ago tossed in the back of the office, catching up for lost sleep and storing whatever energy my body would give me, but it was pointless. I had closed the bar early, which really meant I just had to give a free drink card to two oldies I hadn’t seen before on account of ‘feeling under the weather.’ It wasn’t something I’d never done before, either. A few nights out of the month, typically, I had ‘other work’ to take care of, so I’d had printed up a few thousand of those little ‘free drink’ coupon cards. Business card sized, nice and shiny, the works. Cost me about forty bucks, and it bought me the ability to run the hours I wanted to run.
Edisto is too small a town to really care, after all. The competitors’ places all felt like kids’ lemonade stands compared to the regularity in the hours I kept, so most of the oldies and regular attendees had no beef with my needing to change things up on them last minute. They were in here, night after night, and they got it. A man’s got other responsibilities, I heard one of them say.
It was the out-of-towners that I had truly made the cards for. I needed the money of my side gig, but I wanted more than anything to make the bar my life. So I couldn’t afford for any of the city folks to go back to their big cities and write a nasty review on one of the weirdo online review sites they were always yapping about. I had plans — big plans — and I didn’t need my reputation to suffer before I’d even started implementing them.
So a few free drink cards were well worth the additional hours I could buy at a moment’s notice, so Joey and I tended to keep stacks of them on hand on both sides of the backbar area.
The oldies took off, making sure to finish off their beers, and left a tip before exiting and heading home. I dispatched Joey to deal with ‘the issue’ in the trunk, telling him to do nothing but make sure the guy didn’t escape. He took to the task enthusiastically, as watching a closed trunk with a loaded handgun in hand was a far easier job than cleaning the kitchen after an evening of flipping catfish and mixing drinks.
I’m not sure I slept even a minute. I was thinking about it all, trying to make it make sense. The whole time I was concerned for Hannah. How long would they give her before they… started in? What would they threaten her with? I even thought about her brother. He was probably fast asleep back at Marley’s, but in a matter of hours he would realize something was wrong. I made a mental note to check on the guy later. From what I’d seen of him yesterday, I had a feeling he’d be scared shitless when he found out Hannah wouldn’t be coming back.
I lay there, thinking, trying to force the thoughts out of my mind and get some sleep, but it was hopeless. Finally I heard the tiny bell above the front door. It opened, the ringing sound hanging there in the air for a second, then it rang again as it closed. The sound petered out slowly, menacingly. Even after it was completely silent again I could still hear it, pinging around throughout the inside of my head.
I didn’t hear the footsteps on the warped hardwood floor, which meant he was here. I checked my watch — nearly an hour after we’d hung up.
I stood up and sniffed a few times. I coughed, twice, then walked over to the industrial sink on the back wall across from the office, then checked myself out in the mirror. It wasn’t a pretty sight — I’d been run through the ringer from the car accident, and the exertion from earlier that night hadn’t helped. My eyes were bleak, reddened from a lack of decent sleep, and they looked hungover from knowing they weren’t going to get any more anytime soon.
My neck and face was a topographical map of scars and pockmarks from old wounds, my nose hinged left just a little off-kilter, and my lips were fixed in the permanent sneer that for some reason had made Hannah feel like kissing me wasn’t the worst idea she’d ever had.
My left shoulder sagged down a bit, and I coul
d feel my chest rising and falling deeply, breathing heavily as I tried to compensate for the anger and exhaustion.
I shrugged, then walked out of the kitchen.
He was at the bar, waiting for me. He’d already helped himself to a glass of Jefferson’s Ocean, carrying the lowball and the bottle of booze back around to the guests’ side. He had poured it — an ocean-aged, lighter bourbon I actually enjoyed quite a bit — nearly halfway, with no ice.
As I turned left as I passed over the threshold, he winced and held up the glass.
“You look like shit,” he said.
It was funny, really. He said it, all the while looking at me through those same eyes, that same sneer, that same mess of a face I called my own.
In a way, it was my own.
I poured my own glass of the same stuff, reaching across the counter for the half-empty bottle. I stared down to the bottom of the rocks glass, not ready to look up.
“Hey Dad,” I muttered.
24
“GET YOU A DRINK?” I asked.
“Besides the bourbon?”
“Besides the entire bottle of something I’d normally be able to sell at a four-hundred-percent markup.” I said.
“Well, if you think about it, I bought it. So…”
“Well, if you really think about,” I shot back, “your benefactors bought it.”
He sneered at me. “I could use a glass of water. What’s the markup on that?”
I spritzed some water into a glass and slid it across the bar. “Free. Ice is ten bucks.”
He raised his eyebrows. I didn’t have to imagine what he was trying to say. Want to play, boy?
“Seems like you’d be asking a whole lot more than ten bucks for the water, considering.”
I clenched my jaw. “Yeah? Considering what, asshole?”
He stuck his tongue down into his bottom lip and stared at me with those beady little eyes I used to fear but had come to despise. He turned his head a bit, just slightly, letting me know he was in. He wanted to play.
