Perfect Killer

by Lewis Perdue

  "Okay, let's look as normal as possible," Kilgore said. "There's a lot of traffic and other RVs so nobody's likely to notice us. Everybody stay in the van but Anita and me. Well get Talmadge in and settled."

  As Lewis got Talmadge out of the van, Anita and Rex embraced and exchanged a kiss and a whisper. Then Anita was gone.

  Kilgore filled the silence. "Jasmine, you and Tyrone take the pickup." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. "This is to the truck. The backseat and the camper shell are full of the stuff Bill got for you." Kilgore looked at Tyrone. "The laptop, WiFi cards, are still in their box."

  "So I have a little configuration to handle."

  "Yeah," Kilgore said. "But I have faith in you. Anyway, you two follow the map and the directions. There's a powerful walkie-talkie in the glove compartment with extra batteries and a connection to the cigarette lighter. It's all digital; encrypted and set to the same frequency as the rest of us. Turn it on as soon as you get in the truck and listen very carefully."

  Jasmine and Tyrone nodded.

  "Any questions?"

  They shook their heads.

  "Okay, get moving."

  Jasmine gave me a hug and a kiss.

  "I love you," she told me.

  Her words made me inarticulate. "Me you too," I stuttered. When she gave me one of her deep, inscrutable smiles, I tried to etch it in my memory in case I never saw her again. A memory worth making.

  Then she and Tyrone drove away.

  * * * * * "Hey, these things are just stacked up here," Dan Gabriel called down to Harper from his perch atop a stack of barrels. "They're not fastened down or anything. All the barrels sit one on top of the other with a dinky little removable metal rack between each layer."

  The stack shook ominously as Gabriel wrestled with one of the barrels on top. "Yes," Harper said. "They come down all the time in earthquakes. But wine people are pretty clueless. They seem to have a fairly loose grip on reality"

  "If we can make enough noise to get the guards to open the door, I can drop one of these on him."

  CHAPTER 91

  Rex and I sandwiched ourselves behind the concrete support pillars of the Highway 29 underpass at Green Island Road and listened intently to the earbud connected to the walkie-talkies, which had set Bill Lewis's American Express card back more than $600 each.

  We wore navy-blue Dickies coveralls, Red Wing boots, and khaki baseball caps with the Napa Valley Vintners Association on them. We had big cans of bear repellent, duct tape, cable ties, nylon cord, box cutters, and a handy piece of three-quarter-inch rebar about eighteen inches long. I had handcuffs; Rex had a funky red ball with holes in it and a strap Lewis had bought at a porno store.

  The HK41 I had taken from the blond in Mississippi rested in a ballistic shoulder holster inside the coveralls. Rex wore his own 9mm the same way.

  A constant vehicular surf rolled off the four-lane highway and washed around us, punctuated by the deep notes of tractor-trailers and pickups with glass packs. Every two or three minutes, a vehicle passed by our position, coming from or heading to the Green Island Road warehouse complex west of us. Kilgore preferred this spot, but had two other contingency locations.

  "On his way." My radio earpiece filled with Kilgore's voice. I pressed the tiny button on the foblike microphone.

  "Ready"

  Rex looked at me. "This is freaking nuts."

  "That's why you and I are here."

  Rex smiled as we moved down the concrete slope. He squatted behind the steel guardrails; I sprinted to the other side of the road and took cover. Moments later, Kilgore's green minivan came around the sharp corner. Kilgore passed us, then hit the brakes and turned the minivan sideways, blocking the underpass road. Not two seconds later, a big delivery van came around the corner. The driver locked up the double rear tires when he saw the minivan.

  Rex and I launched ourselves at the truck from both sides. The doors were unlocked so we discarded the rebar and jerked the doors open. I wrestled the startled driver to the middle of the cab as Rex slid behind the wheel. The driver's foot left the clutch, bringing the truck to a lurching halt. Rex had the truck restarted and moving in seconds.

  The driver was a slight Hispanic man who kept shouting, "No hurt me! Por favor! No hurt! I have childrens!" He prayed in Spanish. Terrifying this innocent man made me more ashamed than I had ever been.

  "I won't hurt you," I told him as we followed Kilgore north onto Highway 29 and back toward Napa. I believe he recognized truth in my eyes and calmed down. He let me put the handcuffs on him and place the gag in his mouth. He was momentarily frightened when I brought out the hypodermic Anita had prepared, but quickly settled down as the sedative took hold.

  We followed Kilgore through Napa, across Big Ranch Road, and north on the Silverado Trail. We pulled off the road south of Rutherford and stopped alongside three cars with empty bike racks, their owners obviously some of the brilliantly colored riders packing this beautiful and popular wine-country route. The heat and lingering smoke from the distant brush fire had thinned the packs of Lance Armstrong wannabes, but had not chased them away all together.

  "Any problems?" Kilgore asked when I opened my door. I shook my head. "How long's he out for?"

  "Three, maybe four hours," I said.

  "Good," Kilgore said. "By the time he wakes up, we'll be dead, in jail, or big heroes."

  "Just so long as it's not all of the above, kemo sabe," Rex said.

  Kilgore opened his mouth to say something, but Rex beat him to the punch. "Rex. That's Rex with an x."

  "You're okay." Kilgore smiled and punched Rex on the shoulder. "So let's get moving. Mr. X."

  With the truck as cover from passing motorists, we transferred our gear and the minivan's plywood to the back of the truck and gently laid the sedated driver in the back of the minivan. Kilgore parked the minivan at the far end of the parking area in a shaded, narrow area parallel to the road to keep people from parking alongside.

  We laid the driver on his side so he wouldn't choke. Then, with a web of nylon rope and cable ties, we made sure that if he recovered prematurely, he couldn't move or hit the sides or roof of the van with his arms, legs, or head. We left the engine idling and the air-conditioning on low.

  Finally, Kilgore attached a dark smoky-gray plastic pod smaller than a computer mouse to the back door of the van.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "Auxiliary handset," Kilgore said. "Connects to my cell. This one has a motion sensor and camera built in. If the van or our man starts to move, it takes a picture like a camera phone, then e-mails it to me."

  "Cool," I said.

  "It's a cheap, stripped-down handset. No keypad or display. You program it with the main cell phone. They come with accessories to detect sound, moisture, heat … a bunch of other stuff."

  I opened my mouth to ask him more.

  "No time to jawbone about toys. We gotta show up on time for check-in."

  We all climbed inside the truck and used the wine cases and the plywood to create hollowed-out hiding spaces in the back of the truck for Kilgore, me, and our gear. I hunched down and focused on remaining calm in the stifling, confined space as Rex stacked the boxes over me. Then the cargo door rattled down and the truck engine rumbled.

  As the truck lurched its way back onto the road and Rex ran through the gears, I prayed: for the Hispanic man with children; for Jasmine and for myself; for Rex and Anita and Tyrone; for Kilgore; for Camilla, Vanessa, and my mother; and for the wisdom and protection to accomplish this mission.

  Lying there in almost perfect darkness, I experienced the most perfect vision of Camilla, Nate, and Lindsey since the night they'd all died. The memory appeared in nearholographic faithfulness. The vision was important so I let it play.

  * * * * * At Jasmine's direction, Tyrone turned the blue pickup left off the Silverado Trail south of Rutherford.

  "Big-shot General ain' gonna like this. No-suh!" Tyrone joked.

 
"Big-shot General can just stuff all those stars," Jasmine said. "I need a couple of minutes practice before the main event."

  "You and me both." Tyrone nodded toward the brand-new laptop.

  They drove past a flat, dirt-covered field, bare except for a gigantic pile of grapevines that had been cleared to make way for new ones.

  "Turn here"—she pointed—"to the right."

  Tyrone steered them along a hard-packed dirt lane like others crisscrossing the vineyards, providing access for trucks and other machinery involved primarily in the annual harvest.

  "Okay, stop," Jasmine said.

  She got out, opened the camper shell, and pulled out a radio-controlled airplane. The wings, nearly four feet from tip to tip, needed to be attached to the fuselage.

  "Piece of mass-manufactured crap," she said. "Give me a couple of hours and I'd do something with this junk."

  "Ain't got two hours," Tyrone said. "You or me."

  Jasmine did not reply as she filled the small plane with fuel from one of the metal cans in the bag, then inserted batteries in the airplane and the control console.

  "Can you get me the plastic bag from behind my seat, please?" she asked. When Tyrone returned, he handed her the Albertson's bag and watched as she took out a half stick of dynamite with an electric detonator inserted and taped into the end. She strapped this to the fuselage of the R/C aircraft but did not connect the detonator wires to the plane's remote accessory circuit.

  Jasmine placed the airplane on the hard-packed road, ran up the engine, and guided it skyward.

  "Awright," Tyrone said. "I got to get me to work on that crappy old Windows laptop."

  * * * * * Gabriel crouched on the top of the barrel racks farthest from the door. "Over by the door." Harper smiled as he followed the directions.

  The barrel stack wobbled drunkenly as Gabriel pushed it away from the wall, rocking it back and forth, unbalancing it more with each shove until it tipped. Gabriel clambered to the next stack as the first barrels of extravagantly expensive cabernet sauvignon detonated like bombs against the floor. Wine and barrel staves flew like shrapnel.

  The next layer of barrels burst too, but not as violently. A few, instead of breaking open, rolled against the far wall. Neither of the men thought it odd at the time that the barrels made distinctly different sounds when they struck the wall. The head of one of the barrels cracked when it hit the wall and sent more wine cascading over the floor.

  "Okay, that's more like it," Gabriel said as he rocked the next stack of barrels.

  CHAPTER 92

  The stale air had begun to choke me by the time the truck stopped. I struggled not to cough as the cargo door rumbled open.

  "Okay, the undercarriage and engine compartment are clear" I heard a voice, not Rex's.

  "This looks like more wine than the order specifies," said a second unidentified voice.

  "I've got another delivery after this one," Rex said without missing a beat.

  The footsteps grew close, then stopped. The box above my head shifted; daylight filtered through a growing crack. I grabbed for the HK.

  * * * * * Parked under one of the few trees in the middle of a large vineyard slightly northwest of Castello Da Vinci, Jasmine sat in the pickup and listened anxiously for some word on the walkie-talkie. But nothing came through.

  In her mind she checked off her action list: All four of the radio-controlled aircraft sat in the pickup's bed, under the camper shell, fueled, loaded with their half sticks of dynamite. She needed only to connect the detonator wires to be ready to fly at a moment's notice. The vineyard access road they had parked on was actually a little better than the one she had tested all four planes on.

  In the distance, she caught glimpses of a steady procession of limousines and the occasional motorcade as they headed for Braxton's event. Behind her, sprawled across the truck's backseat, Tyrone clacked at the keyboard of the new laptop.

  "Yes!" Tyrone startled her.

  "What?" She was irritated at having her thoughts interrupted. "I'm in!" "In where?'

  "Braxton's network"

  Into the WiFi?"

  Tyrone shook his head. "All the way in."

  "You're kidding!"

  "Nope."

  "How?"

  "Cool new update of some crackware called airpwn," Tyrone said. "Uses raw

  frame injection. One of my network cards listens on one channel, and the other card injects custom frames with perfect replies. If you tickle the size of the replies just right, it works so perfectly that the connection functions so well nobody on the other end can detect the intrusion unless they're watching a packet sniffer real-time."

  "I don't understand a thing you're saying."

  "That's okay," Tyrone said. "The important thing is that they can't block me without blocking legitimate traffic. So I get in through the wireless and look for a machine

  that's connected to both the wireless and the hardwired network. Happens all the time. Anyway, I have some custom modifications to the Ethereal packet sniffer along with a MAC spoofer and a custom password cracker I wrote a while back that let me grab all the data I needed to get into the primary system."

  "You told Kilgore you were rusty at this."

  "I lied. He knew that. Like I said, its a new technology and really hard for even a talented user to close off all the holes. This one also didn't even bother to change the default password on the router."

  "And what does that get us?"

  "Eyes and ears."

  "Say what?"

  "Look at the screen here."

  "Oh my God!"

  * * * * * Despite his age, his Parkinson's, and his having had little rest and nothing to eat or drink in more than twenty-four hours, Frank Harper startled Dan Gabriel with a whoop of joy when the next to last stack of barrels came thundering down. A fortune in cabernet sauvignon pooled ankle deep in the cave and made a visible current as it drained under the door.

  "That should get somebody's attention," said Harper who had moved to the back of the cave as Gabriel worked toward the door.

  "Not too many somebodies, I hope," Gabriel said.

  CHAPTER 93

  I THUMBED OFF THE HK4'S SAFETY."Not now, Benny." The wine box over my head stopped moving. "We got a line backing up out there." The case of wine came back down and sealed me off again.

  "Awright," the voice said.

  Then the previous voice: "Unload at the usual place. Wait for somebody to come check the inventory before you leave."

  "My pleasure," Rex said.

  The cargo door rumbled again and the truck began to move. Only then did I reset the safety. I heard the safety on Kilgore's pistol click about the same time.

  Moments later, the truck slowed, reversed, stopped. A minute later, cool air flooded in over me.

  "Wake up, asshole," Rex said.

  Beyond him, the yellow and black stripes of a loading dock showed beyond the mostly closed cargo door. An electric forklift whirred in the distance. I got out and helped excavate Kilgore, who climbed out quickly and paused to suck in the fresh air.

  "Okay, let's stage the scenery as best we can," Kilgore said as he started moving wine cases toward the back of the van. "Stack the plywood flat in the corner so it's not noticeable. The more innocent things look, the more time we'll have before they tumble onto us."

  Rex and I followed his lead, and minutes later Kilgore keyed the microphone. "We're in."

  Then we rolled up the cargo door, grabbed a case of wine apiece, and followed Kilgore through the chaos on the loading dock. Caterers, vendors, and platoons of people in white uniforms with toques cursed in a dozen languages, demanding forklifts, assistance, and insisting to be escorted upstairs immediately or the canapes, ice sculptures, gelato, and everything else would be ruined. Ruined!

  Braxton's security, dressed in blue blazers, khaki pants, white shirts, and rep ties, sidled through the unruly mob, trying to establish order. The looks on their faces said they'd prefer to shoot most of th
ese people if only it wouldn't deprive the General and his guests of pâté or pastry.

  "I like this very much," Kilgore said as we pushed our way through the melee and across the loading dock. To our right, an arbor heavy with summer foliage blossomed and extended the length of the lot now jammed with trucks.

  "The formal entrance is on the other side of this," Kilgore said."Braxton wouldn't want his very snotty guests insulted by the sight of common people working."

  We followed him into the coolness of the main service entrance.

  "Right up there." Kilgore pointed at shadows in the far right corner. We stood stock-still for a moment, blending into the dimly lit area. One of the security officers looked over at us, then turned to a tall, thin young man who was haranguing him about how his was the most important course and the General would be displeased if the delivery was not made immediately

  Kilgore led us around an oblique corner to a shadow-filled corridor and set his wine case down.

  "This should be it."

  Rex and I stacked our wine on top of his. A long, dimly lit cave stretched before us, lined on both sides with phalanxes of identical oak-plank doors bound with black iron straps.

  "From here, I count maybe twenty doors."

  "Damn… ," Kilgore mumbled. "Let's get going." He turned and slid the heavy bolt of the nearest door. The tunnel resonated with the screech of metal in desperate need of lubrication.

  "Jeez!" Rex said. "Better hope the noise back there continues."

  "We have a choice," I said as I took the first door on the other side of the tunnel. It screeched slightly less than Kilgore's.

  "I'll work ahead," Rex said as be walked half a dozen doors down the tunnel. I cringed as he slid back the next bolt and filled the corridor with a deafening metallic thunder.

  "Listen!"

  * * * * * Gabriel stopped by the door and stood up. The last pieces of broken barrel staves and a hoop hung loosely at his side. Above the sounds of priceless cabernet dripping into the expensive red flood came the rusty complaints of the cave doors and muffled voices of men.