Everybody Dies - A Thriller (Phineas Troutt Mysteries Book 3)

by J. A. Konrath

  They call him The Man With Seven Tears.

  He has a teardrop tattoo on his cheek for every man he’s murdered for his twisted cause. He’s the head of the most ruthless hate group in the USA, and he’s about to commit the biggest act of domestic terrorism in history.

  There’s only one person alive who knows him well enough to stop him. Someone strong enough. Determined enough. Smart enough.

  Someone willing to lose everything.

  His younger brother; a problem solver named Phineas Troutt.

  EVERYBODY DIES by J.A. Konrath

  EVERYBODY DIES

  Copyright © 2018 by Joe Konrath

  Cover and art copyright © 2018 by Carl Graves

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the authors.

  CONTENTS

  Epigraphs

  Begin reading EVERYBODY DIES

  Author Afterword

  Other recommended titles

  Joe Konrath’s Complete Bibliography

  Sign up for the J.A. Konrath newsletter

  Sometimes life is far from fair,

  That comes as no surprise,

  But in the end all get their share,

  For everybody dies.

  “The threat of domestic terrorism has increased sharply in the past year. Unless we take decisive steps now to respond to this threat, it’s only a matter of time before the country endures another nightmare like the Oklahoma City tragedy.”

  —Morris Dees, a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, April 11, 1996

  PROLOGUE/EPILOGUE

  MAY 2008

  PHIN

  My girlfriend, Pasha, had stopped breathing.

  I wasn’t far behind.

  Another punch, which hit with the force of a freight train, spinning me around, knocking me to my knees.

  I heard my brother laugh, muffled through his gas mask.

  Then I heard, ever so faintly, thousands of people cheer.

  My hands were shaking with agonizing tremors, drool running down my chin. My eyes were so wet that everything was a blur.

  My stomach twisted, and I threw up.

  My body was failing. Shutting down.

  I was dying. Fast.

  I’d been dealing with that reality for years. But I thought I’d die from the cancer running rampant through my body. It was a death I’d grown comfortable with. One I’d endure alone.

  I never thought I’d die from poison gas. Alongside the woman I loved.

  And more than six thousand people would die soon after me.

  Six thousand deaths, that would lead to millions more.

  It was incomprehensible.

  The United States of America was going to be utterly destroyed.

  Torn apart, by my asshole older brother.

  Hugo.

  And the only hope for me, for Pasha, and for my country, was another asshole.

  An asshole named Harry McGlade.

  CHICAGO

  ONE WEEK EARLIER

  HUGO

  The Man With Seven Tears unwrapped the bloody tape from his knuckles and tossed it into the trash can in the corner of the interrogation room. His breathing was heavy, his heart a machinegun. Sweat ran down his naked upper body in rivulets, making his dozens of black prison tattoos glisten like they were needle-fresh.

  He picked up a folded towel from the nearby table and rubbed it across his fifty-seven inch chest, wiping away sweat and a few specks of blood from when the prisoner’s nose popped. Then he extended the motion into rubbing his face and shaved head, back across his neck, down his enormous trapezius muscles, and under both arms.

  It had been a good workout, but a disappointingly quiet one. His punching bag, hanging from the ceiling from the wrists, had become unconscious after the first few minutes of body work, and hadn’t made a peep while Hugo worked over his face.

  What was the fun in that? Might as well be hitting an actual bag.

  Hugo wasn’t even sure the man was still alive. He didn’t look it; barely recognizable as human, just a swollen, dripping sack of flesh and bone.

  But then he heard a small groan.

  The Man With Seven Tears walked back to the prisoner. “Now you want to make noise?”

  The man’s swollen lips trembled, drooling blood. “Why…?” he wheezed.

  That was the age old question. Why me? Why were some born sheep, and others born wolves? Why did life produce a few exceptional people, destined to make history, but so many more who only existed to be instantly forgotten?

  Hugo had several answers.

  “Because I’m strong and you’re weak. Because I’m white and you’re the wrong color. Because I wanted to. Because life isn’t fair. Because I could. Pick one.”

  “Mon… ster…”

  Hugo felt a spark of irritation. Exercise usually quelled that itch, but lately the anger spikes had been coming more frequently. Maybe it was the new juice.

  “Would you like to see a monster?” he asked. “Let me introduce you to a friend. This is Göth.”

  The Man With Seven Tears pronounced the name as goet, and then removed the straight razor from the cuff of his newly-polished combat boots. With a practiced flick the blade snapped open.

  “Göth has an unusual talent. He can make people beg for death. Do you want to see?”

  The man didn’t want to see.

  But Göth made him see.

  It only took forty seconds for the man to plead for his life to end.

  Hugo silenced the screaming with a deep cut across the throat, biting deep enough to hit the vertebrae. Göth was so sharp, so thin, that it was easy as finger-drawing a line in the sand.

  The Man With Seven Tears left the interrogation room and went to the showers to wash off the blood. When he was sure Göth was squeaky clean, he made a horizontal cut along his shin bone, a few millimeters below the forty-three other such scars running from his knee to almost his ankle.

  Schlammensch didn’t warrant a blue tear tattoo. Tears were only for specially chosen targets.

  Hugo had seven tears.

  He wanted his eighth. He wanted it like a dog in the desert wanted water.

  But there were rules.

  There had always been rules.

  After toweling off, Hugo poured a packet of Celox on his leg to stop the bleeding. Then he dressed in the filthy locker room, alone. The rally had ended the day before, and the former football stadium, which the CN had unofficially dubbed The Bunker, had gone from two hundred race warriors to only a handful. It was pathetic. The majority of their army was locked away in prisons, and those that remained were white nationalists only one weekend per month. The rest of the time they hid in their pathetic nine-to-five jobs, pretending that diversity was a good thing so HR didn’t threaten to fire them.

  So they marched around their little stadium to Wagner music, burned a few crosses, drank a lot of beer, listened to speeches about White Power, and then went back home actually believing they were making a difference.

  One of the recruits came in, a skinhead no more than seventeen years old, more acne on his face than Hugo had on his back. The kid immediately lowered his head in respect.

  “Truppenführer, the General sent me to find you. He’s waiting in his office.”

  Truppenfüh
rer. Troop leader. A meaningless title, supposedly bestowed by the SC. Hugo had never met the man, never even spoke to him. The made-up rank was meant to appease him while he awaited his next mission, but all it did was remind Hugo that eleven years had passed, and he still hadn’t been given what was originally promised.

  If things didn’t change, and fast, Hugo was going to kill every single one of them.

  “There’s a mess in the interrogation room,” Hugo told the boy. “Clean it up.”

  The recruit scuttled away, and Hugo dressed and went to meet Packer. His office was down the hall; an old equipment room with a secondhand pressboard desk. The drywall that hadn’t been kicked out was slathered with graffiti, and the only light was an overhead florescent bulb that buzzed like a pissed-off horsefly.

  There was no seat for visitors, because Packer preferred they stand at attention. Hugo walked up to the desk, towering over the older man, dwarfing him.

  “Good rally,” Packer said.

  If by good he meant that the cops hadn’t shown up, and no one had beaten anyone else up, then it was indeed one of their better efforts.

  “The prisoner is dead,” Hugo said.

  “That’s why we brought him here. For you to exact vengeance.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Does it matter? Do you care?”

  He didn’t care. But it was the principle of the thing. Hugo was good enough to kill for them, but not good enough to know why.

  Hugo leaned forward, putting his knuckles on the desk. It began to bow inward. “How many men have you killed, General?”

  Packer had three tears, and never discussed his past.

  “I’ve done my share for the cause. You know that. I follow orders just like you do. Now kindly get off my desk before you break the damn thing.”

  Hugo removed his hands. “I want my eighth tear. I’ve been waiting a long time.”

  “I know you do. That’s why I called you here.”

  Hugo tensed his whole body. “You found him?”

  “We have a job coming. A big one. Remember the business a while back, with the Chemist?”

  Hugo nodded. “We paid him a lot of money.”

  “Well, after years of planning, we’re finally ready. We have a date, and it’s approaching fast. If this all comes together, you’ll earn your eighth tear, and the Great Race War will finally begin.”

  “How many people do I get to kill?” Hugo asked.

  “Six thousand. Maybe more.”

  The Man with Seven Tears smiled.

  Six thousand. Maybe more. That was a number worthy of him.

  But there was only one murder that he truly cared about.

  “Tell me where my brother is,” Hugo said. “Tell me where I can find Phin.”

  PASHA

  The day had been molasses slow. Only five scheduled patients and three walk-ins. Dr. Bipasha Kapoor let her assistant go home early and began making her way through the never-ending pile of paperwork that always seemed to be on her desk. Dealing with inventory. Dealing with billing. Dealing with insurance companies. Pasha did well enough to hire others to do this kind of thing, but a combination of stubbornness and a need to maintain complete control over every aspect of her business meant she would just wind up double-checking their work. It was the strength, and the curse, of having a Type A personality.

  Pasha absentmindedly picked at a hangnail, and when it began to bleed she found a pair of cuticle scissors and snipped it away. After an hour, she’d made enough of a dent to justify treating herself to dinner. Pasha checked her cell phone, to see if she’d somehow missed a message from her boyfriend, but Phin hadn’t called. He was involved in something serious, and when she’d pressed him on it, Phin did what he always did; pushed her away.

  Such a hot-and-cold relationship. Incredible, dramatic, emotional highs, and then parts that were heart-wrenching, difficult, and seemingly impossible.

  Pasha had been wondering, more and more, if the plusses were worth the minuses.

  So tonight would be dinner for one. Maybe Thai food. Flutesburg had a good carryout place. Then maybe curl up and watch some TV. She’d been recording a show called Breaking Bad, centered around a guy who turned to a life of crime after being diagnosed with cancer. It sounded a lot like Phin. Her boyfriend had cancer, and his condition seemed directly related to how often he broke the law. The worse he got, the worse he got.

  Bad boys break your heart in so many ways. But it’s quite the ride.

  Pasha was taking her keys from her purse to lock up for the evening when a woman surprised her at the clinic’s front door.

  She appeared… off. It wasn’t an unusual look for patients. Pasha dealt with troubled women on a daily basis. Women with cancer. With addiction problems. With abusive partners. With STDs. Women who were worried they were pregnant, or could never get pregnant. Virgins with questions about sex and birth control, and sex workers with PTSD.

  “We’re closed,” Pasha told her. “I’m sorry.”

  The woman was rail thin, eyes sunken, in need of a shower. “I… uh… think I might be pregnant.”

  “Can you come back tomorrow?” When the words left Pasha’s lips, she knew it wouldn’t fly. No woman would put off waiting for a day.

  “I… I really need to know.”

  “Did you take a home pregnancy test? They’re almost as reliable as blood tests.”

  “I took two. One negative, one positive.”

  Pasha hesitated for another few seconds then said, “Come on in.”

  She led her into the waiting room and picked up a new patient form clipboard behind the receptionist’s desk.

  “Please have a seat and fill this out.”

  The woman made no move to take the clipboard. After an awkward moment she asked, “Where is everybody?”

  “Slow day in the burbs. I need you to fill all of this out before we can do a pregnancy test.”

  “So you’re all alone?”

  An odd question. Was this woman nervous, because she was possibly pregnant?

  Or was it something else?

  Pasha had been robbed once, a junkie who came in demanding drugs. Pasha had no Schedule IV samples, but she offered to write the agitated man a prescription, and he actually gave her his name. The police picked him up twenty minutes later at a local pharmacy. The robbery hadn’t been a pleasant experience, and for several months afterward Pasha had been justifiably paranoid it would happen again. But like all bad memories it faded with time.

  The paranoia came rushing back while staring into this woman’s sunken eyes.

  “My assistant is in his office,” Pasha said.

  “I thought you were closing.”

  “We are closing. But he and I are going over the books. Going to be a late night.”

  “It’s your assistant? Or your boyfriend?”

  Pasha considered her next move. Her threat-meter had gone from three to six, and she’d learned to trust it.

  “My assistant. My boyfriend is coming by in a few minutes.”

  “Really?”

  “He’s bringing dinner.”

  Pasha took a step back as the woman quickly dug a hand into her purse—

  —and pulled out a cell phone.

  Not a weapon, but Pasha was done with this weirdo. She stood straighter and kept her tone even and firm. “I really do have to get a lot of work done. We’re closed. You can come back tomorrow.”

  No wiggle room there. It was an order.

  “She said he’s coming,” the woman told the cell.

  Pasha’s threat meter jumped from six to ten. She was no longer worried this was a robbery. Instead, she feared it was something worse. Perhaps related to the incident she’d hired Phin to take care of. A few months ago, a powerful man had tried to close her clinic, and Phin had helped Pasha make the problem go away. Maybe the man’s friends had come for some kind of revenge.

  This woman was slight; Pasha had two inches and thirty pounds on her. She could push past, ge
t outside, run up the street to the coffee shop, just three doors down. If she was overreacting, she could laugh about it later. But both her gut instinct and her logical mind told her to get out of there.

  Don’t think, just do it.

  Pasha walked past the woman, reaching for the front door just as it opened and two men came in. One was a boy, a teenager, with a shaved head and army pants. The other—

  The other was a monster. Several inches above six feet, his shoulders so broad he had to come in sideways. He locked the door behind him and then stared at Pasha like she was a mosquito he was ready to swat.

  “Tell me where he is,” the giant said, his voice so low it rumbled.

  Pasha considered the back exit, and she turned around and almost ran into the gun that the woman was pointing. A second later, two enormous hands grabbed her arms and actually lifted her up, her feet dangling off the ground.

  “Phineas,” he said. “Where is my brother, Phin?”

  After that dramatic entrance, Pasha had been thrown into her leather office chair, tossed as easily as a child might mistreat a doll, her hands bound behind her with duct tape.

  Hugo hadn’t hurt her. Yet. He’d only asked two questions. Where was Phin? When was she seeing him again?

  Pasha answered honestly. She had no idea where he was, or when he’d be back.

  Then Hugo did something strange. After he put Pasha in the chair, he sat across the desk from her. Not talking. Not even moving. Just staring.

  Ten minutes passed.

  Twenty.

  Sitting and staring, a robot being recharged.

  After half an hour, he made a call on Pasha’s cell phone, and hung up without saying anything.

  It was creepy as hell.

  Hugo bore little resemblance to his younger sibling. Phin was lean, wiry, angular. Hugo was a gigantic lump of bulging flesh, sculpted into some grotesque parody of a body builder. Phin’s head looked good without hair, Hugo had a giant brow ridge, with fat rolls on the back of his neck thick as hot dogs, and except for the thin mohawk on top, his scalp was unnaturally shiny and shrouded with hate tattoos, just like the rest of his body. Phin’s eyes, deep-set and intense, showed intelligence, kindness, even humor. Hugo’s eyes were like staring at oiled marbles.