by Nick Thacker
There was enough moonlight to see just a bit of the tag on it. H. Rayburn.
Hannah.
I’d found her suitcase, stored in what was apparently her room as well.
It meant her brother was probably staying in the next room, and I stepped toward the door connecting the two rooms to confirm it. On my way there I glanced around at Hannah’s room once more. There wasn’t much to see, as it appeared as though she really hadn’t unpacked. She’d changed clothes at least once since I’d met her, but the suitcase sat unopened next to the bed. Probably had a bathroom bag sitting on the counter in the bathroom across the hall. I wondered if she’d taken some of her dresses or formalwear for the funeral and hung them up in the closet.
Aside from the suitcase, everything I could see in the room was not hers but part of the furniture of the place — lamps, dresser, light fixture, rug at the foot of the bed. Then my eyes fell on the small tray sitting in front of the lamp on the left side of the bed.
I walked over. Two sets of earrings, both of them pairs I hadn’t seen her wearing. One was a silvery leaf of some sort that hung down off of a group of three rings, and the other was a tiny, simpler gemstone.
But there was something else in the tray. My eye adhered to it like it had been trying to call my attention toward it since I’d walked into the room. I reached out for it and carefully poked the earrings out of the way.
The token.
A hefty, weighty object. Smaller than a silver dollar, larger than a quarter. Brown, from the tarnished remnants of what was once bronze. It had darkened and grown spotty in places, but there was a distinct impression of a man’s bust on one side. No idea who the man was supposed to be, or what country’s currency it was, if any. It was possible my father had made the token himself, stamping out the bronze in his shop years ago and using a template he’d found online.
Didn’t matter where it came from originally. The point was that this token was absolutely unique. I knew its spots, stains, and tiny imperfections better than I knew anything. It was impossible to mistake for something else, and that was the point.
I flipped the coin around in my hand, feeling its weight. I would have known what it was just by the feel of it. The cold, dead metal feel in my palm represented so much to me. It represented the cold, dead feeling I had when the token was presented to me at the bar, just an unsuspecting schmuck hoping for a quick score, or a big score, or whatever else my father had persuaded them they would find. The cold, dead feeling of victory after they recognized what their score — their final score on this earth — would really be.
And then the cold, dead feeling I knew they felt after they were cold and dead.
I tossed the token in a pocket. I would need it later, to return to my boss. I usually needed it to get paid — I would stash the token in the box out in the woods and then check back the next day. It would be replaced by the money.
A simple system. One that had never failed.
A single token, and a single mark. Always.
Things had gotten complicated, and I didn’t like that. I could handle the complications, and the pressure, but I didn’t like the additional variables they brought into play.
I turned back around and set my sights on the door connecting the two rooms. The moment of truth.
I didn’t hesitate this time. It was too late for hesitation. Too late for surprise. I shouldered the door open and barged through it.
And I nearly slipped on the blood.
30
THERE WAS BLOOD EVERYWHERE. THE floor seemed like a bottomless pit, the darkness and dim shadows combined with the crimson stuff completing the illusion. I gagged, choking on air. I could smell it, the thick coppery tinge of it.
I covered my mouth with my left hand and supported my weight with my right. I stood there, silent, appalled, until I was ready to truly see what was in front of me.
Daniel Rayburn was against the wall on the opposite side of the room, shirtless. He had long pants on, but they appeared to be pajama bottoms or something similar. He was barefoot. The bed in his room had been pushed toward the patio door, blocking the exit and clearing a space in the room. His head was down, but his arms were splayed out to his sides. I could see duct tape, it looked like, wrapped tightly around his wrists and smeared onto the wall. Enough of it to hold his weight on the wall and keep his arms stretched out.
The blood was pouring from his gut, a wide, jagged cut open and leaking onto the floor. A little jostling around and I knew the insides would be on the outside, but at the moment everything appeared intact. There was a horrible mess of blood on the nightstand nearby, and I realized that it had been where they’d placed the tools.
The tools they’d used to torture the poor boy.
He was dead. It had taken some time for him to die, as well. The blood draining from his wound would have come out fast enough to kill him, but slowly enough to give him time to suffer. Had they gone a little deeper they might have punctured an organ and sped the process up, but I had a feeling they had done it this way on purpose. They had intended for him to die, and die slowly. They had done it right after they’d killed Marley, but thankfully the old man had gone much more quickly.
I stepped up closer anyway, to get a better look. I didn’t want to turn the lights on, as that might offer too good a look, and I wasn’t really ready for that. Instead, I needed to see something on him… something I’d noticed.
When I’d walked into the room I hadn’t seen Daniel at first — he was nearly unrecognizable — but something else. Something on his body.
A number.
There, scrawled in his own blood on his chest, was a number. A string of numbers, ten altogether, that had been scratched onto his chest with a knife. Probably while he was still alive.
It was a message, and it was meant for me.
The audacity of it all was almost more appalling than the murder itself. They had actually left a phone number behind, something traceable and trackable, and something that would no doubt take this case from the status of small-town deranged psychopath murder to a state- or national-level alarm. Multiple precincts, multiple jurisdictions, possibly even Fed-level involvement.
They would have known that, and they would have continued along anyway. Without caring about the larger ramifications. It meant they were either too stupid to know, or they were too bold to care. I had a feeling their stupidity was not going to be an issue for them.
I needed to get out of here, before the cops arrived and the thing blew wide open.
I felt the rage building in my own chest as I committed the number to memory. I didn’t dare take my phone out and call it from there, but I fingered the end of the antenna in my pocket as I stared daggers at the number.
They had Hannah, and now they want me.
They had used her brother as a tool. And they meant to use me, as well.
They knew I would want Hannah back — that I was invested enough in all of it to want her — and they probably thought I’d want revenge, too.
The thought of revenge didn’t upset me.
There was nothing else of value in the room, and I’d almost incriminated myself by stepping in the pool of blood that had nearly reached the door, but I sidestepped it once again and walked out. I took the same path I’d entered, glancing at Hannah’s suitcase on the floor. I thought about it a moment, then grabbed it.
It was heavy, an old-fashioned sort that had thick leather all around the single zipper and didn’t roll. I hefted it with my right hand, feeling that it suited Hannah perfectly — a modern-day woman keeping up the impression of a classy, timeless dame.
The suitcase and I left the room, turned left, and reached the stairs on the opposite side of the hallway, the stairs on this side of the house that would take us down and out through the front door without having to see old man Marley and as little of the rest of the crime-scene house as possible.
The descent down the stairs was illuminated by the light spilling in through th
e still-open front door, the combination of moonlight and streetlight mixing into a wash of faint white-orange. I came to the bottom of the stairs, felt the urge to speed up, and walked over the threshold.
I was wondering if anyone had heard the gunshot, as that would have warranted a call to the police. Marley’s was on a large lot, probably one that was the size of four of the surrounding ones, an old grandfather clause in the zoning. Still, a shot that had blown the brains out of an old man would have been plenty loud enough.
I looked left and right, both to check for flashing police lights and to see what sorts of establishments were closest to Marley’s place. I already knew there was a corner store on the northern side of the lot, and I saw a small office building, like a dental practice or something similar on the southern side. Both would be closed at this hour, and it was likely no one would have been in the building.
For now, I was clear. If no one had called in the gunshot by now, no one would. And if the Rayburns really had been the only tenants in the bed and breakfast, it meant it would be days until anyone thought to check in with Marley.
Days for the trail to grow cold.
Then the cops would swoop in, shut the block down, and start the slow but menacing wheels turning in the direction of justice. They would follow protocol, allowing the guys who’d done it plenty of time to adapt, dodge, and stay one step ahead.
But I wasn’t the cops, and I wasn’t planning to follow any protocol but my own.
I had the number, and I planned on calling it as soon as I could.
31
I DROVE NORTH ON 174 once again, heading away from the coast, Edisto Beach, and everything I owned in this life. But I wasn’t leaving this life behind — far from it. I needed to think, and I thought best out in the middle of nothing else but my own thoughts.
The road was harder to find at night, but not impossible if you knew what you were looking for. I’d made the trip plenty of times already, both at night and during daylight hours, so it was no trouble to pull off and drive along the shoulder, keeping a steady, slow speed until I found it.
There were some scuff marks in front of me from the battle I’d had against the other cars, and it helped give me a little idea of where I was. Some black tread marks, tracks in the sandy shoulder, and small pieces of car littered over the asphalt. Just past that mess I saw the turnoff for my sanctuary, and I took Joey’s car down it a hundred feet or so.
I didn’t want to get stuck, as even a five-minute drive back into town would become a twenty-five minute walk, and I didn’t know if Joey’s car could handle the terrain of the old beat-up path. I parked, shut the car off, and walked the rest of the way in the dark. A small moon offered more than enough light to bleed through the trees and illuminate the path in front of me just enough to get to the rock outcropping. I wasn’t worried about wildlife, as there really wasn’t anything out on the coast that I was concerned about, and I figured I’d scare off anything smaller than me well before I could hear it nearby.
The rocks were suddenly in front of me, looming, deep shadows of nothingness against a lighter blackness behind them. I dodged the two in my path and came around the last one, just as I had done earlier.
I didn’t need to dig as far to find the box, which told me a couple things: one, whoever had put it back in the ground had been a bit lazy, and two, that my father had been out here.
My father, my employer, was the only human on the planet besides me who knew about this location. It had been my idea, and because of that he’d always tried to make me feel like crap about it. ‘What’s wrong with a bank account?’ he’d ask, like he thought tainted money from his sources would be safe to store with banks. Or ‘why not a simple safe deposit box?’ or something of that nature.
Truth was, I did it for two simple reasons. Probably weighted fifty-fifty. The first reason was that I didn’t trust anyone but myself, and to a slightly lesser extent, Joey. He’d proven himself enough of a loyalist that I had started to no longer question him anymore. I didn’t trust banks, or drop boxes, or any other ‘regulated’ sort of security exchange, including gym lockers (and there were no fancy gyms anywhere nearby). And I sure as hell didn’t trust my boss.
The second reason was that I kind of liked the effect it had on him. He was constantly pissed at me for one thing or another, and more often than not it was simply because I wasn’t exactly like him in that particular way. He hated that I had my opinion on things, and he really hated that I had training that had proven — time and time again — that my opinion, shaped and honed over years of experience, was often better than his. He hated that I felt a moderately-deep hole in the woods was by far a better place to hide money and other accoutrements than a bank or an old-school safe-deposit box somewhere.
We’d even gone over it more than once, since it took more than once for him to get the message. Worst case, the land it was on would be sold and developed, in which case I’d have to pay enough attention to get there before the inspectors, surveyor, and initial construction crew arrived. But that was a multi-month process, and if I wasn’t out here more than once every few months to pick up my money, we had bigger problems.
Other cases that he’d argued, as implausible as they sounded, were things like if a hiker happened to stumble across the location and start digging in that exact one-foot square location for some odd reason, during the time between when he left the money for me and I came to get it. I explained that it was far more likely that a bank executive would receive a government-stamped mandate to open my box and snoop around. Or, in actuality, it would be far more likely that I just got struck by lightning on the way to the bank.
He dropped it after about three such scenarios, after I’d explained to him that I was contracted, not salaried. That meant a few things, but most importantly it meant that I could receive my money however I decided to receive it, and we promptly drew up and signed a contract stating that as soon as the money had hit the hole, as we called it, it was mine — if it got robbed before I got to it, that was on me.
That contract was the only document we’d signed, and we’d promptly thrown it into the bowl of our shared ashtray and lit it on fire. It was enough for both of us that we’d agreed to something, signed it, and then ceremoniously celebrated its brief existence over an illegal Cohibo. If my old man was anything, it was honest. He had never, to my knowledge, lied about anything. We weren’t in a line of work that typically mandated pure honesty, but it was the sole source of pride I had in him that I could confidently say he was a man of his word.
That fact made our work even more impressive to me. He never told the marks what he had in store for them, but he somehow never lied, either. He would finally get in contact with the schmucks, hand them the token, and whisper something in their ear like, ‘you need to see my pal down in Edisto when you pass through. He can get you what you deserve,’ or ‘take this. It’s good for a two-for-one, if you know what I mean.’
Now, if you’re a straight-laced, upstanding taxpaying citizen like the vast majority of us, we’d hear that as exactly what he said. But if you’re anything else, including a scum-of-the-earth pornographer or a shitbag pedophile, you hear what you want to hear. You hear something entirely different than ‘free drink’ or ‘deep discount for a hard-working grunt.’ You hear something that sounds an awful lot like ‘next score,’ and ‘this is what you’ve been waiting for.’
For those assholes, there’s no better music to their ears. They’re hearing it because they want to, and that’s the genius of the company. That’s the brilliance of the business model, because we don’t have to lie, cheat, or steal.
We just have to kill.
But killing, to me, is an extension of living. And when we forfeit our right to life, we forfeit our right to choose how and when we die.
And call it religion, belief construct, or simple blind ignorance, but one of the only things I’ve ever been one-hundred-percent sure about is the fact that if you decide to take someone e
lse’s right to life, or someone else’s God-given right to work toward life, you abandon your own.
So I felt no remorse for the work I did.
Most of the time, really, I enjoyed it.
These folks come in with their swagger, confidence, and nonchalance, and I come in to remind them that their choices have a consequence. If I got to pour them a perfectly manicured drink beforehand, all the better. I call it foreshadowing.
I thought about all of this as I pulled the box out. There wouldn’t be any reason for my boss to come by and dig it all up, then rebury it lazily unless he was going to pay me, and I knew by the weight of it that he had.
Thirty thousand dollars.
Not enough to carry me through the year, but not nothing, either.
I counted it out, in the darkness, feeling the Benjamins as much as seeing them. They felt dirty, but only in the physical, tired way. As I thought about the man I’d killed, and the reason I’d done it, they felt like the cleanest bills I’d ever put my hands on. I collected the edges and corners and placed them into their neat little stacks. Then I took the stacks and filled up my hands with them — one-hundred fifty bills in each hand, as it were — and set them aside for the moment. I placed the box back in the hole and filled it in, then picked up the stacks once again.
Thirty thousand dollars.
I usually got about a mark a quarter, once every few months. Sometimes more. It took time for my old man to track them down, place them on a grid — a proprietary system he’d created that plotted their likelihood of being tracked by government agents against their probable net worth — and study their movements.
So thirty thousand was enough to carry me through the next six months, easily, including both property’s rent and mortgage, Joey’s salary, my overhead, and a few extra payments I intended to use to get the bar under my own name, and then some. It was enough that I knew I’d won with my boss — he wanted to make sure I had enough capital to get the job done, clean and done. No loose ends, no unknown variables, no questions. He wanted it as much as I did, and he knew there wasn’t anyone else he could call.
