by Max Austin
An only child born long after her parents had given up on ever having a baby, Penny had been raised in the family business, trotting back and forth across busy Sixth Street her whole life.
At one time, her father had owned three square blocks here on the north side of downtown Albuquerque. He’d sold off parcels over the years, but kept the 1920s bungalow directly across the street from his office. The other houses on the block had been converted to offices, mostly competing bail bond companies feeding off the courthouses that towered over Lomas Boulevard to the south. But the Randall house remained a home, its shady front porch Penny’s playground. Even when she was in college and wanted some independence from her overprotective dad, she lived in a garage apartment behind the bungalow rather than someplace closer to the University of New Mexico.
The one-bedroom apartment belonged to Vic Walters now. His name wasn’t on a lease, but he’d lived there nearly twenty years, and she couldn’t imagine any other tenant. A lot of creeps pass through bail bond offices, and some carry grudges. Penny felt safer whenever Vic was home.
In a way, she had inherited Vic along with the family business. Growing up, she’d thought he was just another bounty hunter, tracking down skips. A courtly man, but steely at the core. Only after her father’s death did she learn about the two men’s profitable sideline.
She checked the clock. Vic should be getting back from Phoenix anytime now. He’d left her a message the night before, letting her know the hit had been accomplished. As always, the message said simply: “Collect the money.”
This morning, she found an account of the death on the website of The Arizona Republic. Just a paragraph, saying Harry Marino was found dead at home, an apparent drowning victim. Penny thought that was a nice touch. The client liked it, too, so much that he offered a bonus when she talked to him on the phone.
She wondered what Vic did with all the money he earned. He had no expensive habits, as far as she knew, his one indulgence being eating out, usually in cheap diners where Penny would be afraid to order a glass of water.
While her inherited home was modest, Penny lived large in other ways. Restaurants, designer clothes, massages, fine wines, casinos. Twice a year, she treated herself to weeklong ocean cruises.
She did what she could to hide her income from the contract kills, including stashing some in Caribbean banks. If their sideline ever did get exposed, Penny could flee to the islands. She wondered what Vic would do, where he’d go. She felt sure he had a contingency plan.
Before she could get too tangled up thinking about Vic, the man himself arrived outside her window, unfolding from a Yellow Cab, lanky and loose-jointed, his silvery hair combed straight back. He bent to the taxi’s window to settle his fare and said something that made the fat cabbie laugh.
Vic was smiling as he turned away from the cab. He wore dark glasses and his standard uniform: charcoal-gray suit and a black golf shirt buttoned to the neck. She’d never seen him wear a necktie, and he almost never wore jeans and T-shirts like a normal person.
“Man found his style and stuck with it,” she said aloud. “Something to be said for consistency.”
Two of Penny’s bounty hunters, Shep Akers and Marty Gomez, were leaving the office and paused on the sunny sidewalk to greet Vic. Shep was a hulking man with a pale shaved head and his partner was a squat toad in baggy pants and a shiny blue jacket. Next to them, Vic was Fred Astaire.
After the men shook hands all around, Vic went inside. A few seconds later, he came into Penny’s inner office and shut the door behind him.
“Nice flight?”
“Not bad.” He sat across from her and removed his shades. “Did you know there are people who make their living selling mud?”
“You mean, like, gossip?”
“Actual mud. They squirt it down into oil wells.”
“Fascinating.”
“The guy next to me on the plane wouldn’t shut up about it.”
“The perils of public transportation.”
“I get tired of traveling to Phoenix. Why are so many of our transactions over there?”
She smiled. “People in Arizona are dying to kill each other. Must be all that heat.”
“I’m glad to be home. I could use a shower and some fresh clothes.”
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Penny said. “I’ve got another job for you right away.”
“It’s too soon. I can’t face another flight.”
“That’s the beauty of this one. It’s right up the road in Santa Fe. You might not even have to spend the night.”
“My own bed would be nice.”
“I’ve seen your bed. It’s lumpy and old.”
“So am I. The lumps fit my body. That’s important at my age.”
Penny laughed. “You always talk like you’re ancient. You’re in your fifties. The prime of life.”
“It’s not gonna get any better than this? How disappointing.”
“You got it better than Harry Marino.”
“He had a nice life while it lasted. Lots of money, big house, swimming pool.”
“I was going to ask about that. Drowning? That’s a new twist.”
Vic shrugged. “He was in the pool when I got there.”
“I talked to the client this morning. He’s very happy.”
“Good. A happy client is a client I don’t have to shoot in the head later.”
She laughed as she unlocked her center desk drawer. She removed a manila envelope and slid it across the desk to Vic.
“The Santa Fe job,” she said. “Target’s a music producer named Marc Troy.”
“That his real name?”
“What do you think?”
Vic snorted.
He flipped through the photos and printed pages inside the folder while she summed it up: “Mr. Troy stiffed some investors back east, to the tune of millions. They want him to disappear. Immediately.”
“All right,” he said. “I might as well get it over with.”
“You need a gun? Anything?”
“I’ve got a rig at my place. I can use it on this job, then lose it in the desert on the way back.”
“Sounds good. Tonight?”
Vic sighed. “Let me drive up there and look around. I’ll let you know.”
“You’re a workhorse,” she said as he wearily got to his feet.
“You know what they do with old workhorses, don’t you?” he said. “They turn ’em into glue.”
Chapter 4
Vic slumped behind the steering wheel as his Cadillac ate up the miles. He was beat, and the smooth ride of the big black car was a little too comfortable. He struggled to stay awake as the dusty landscape rolled past.
Like a lot of Albuquerqueans, Vic rarely went to Santa Fe. The City Different catered to tourists and shoppers, and he was neither. He got all the sightseeing he wanted traveling for work, and he hardly ever went shopping. He bought his clothes from the same tailor, year after year. Once in a while, a new Cadillac.
The vista got more dramatic as Interstate 25 climbed La Bajada, the eroded brim of a red-rock mesa. The Cadillac hummed past trucks struggling with the steep grade. Once he topped the rise, Vic could see the capital city kneeling at the feet of the snow-shouldered Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
It still surprised him that so many houses had sprung up along the highway. He remembered when the Downs at Santa Fe racetrack stood off by itself, miles outside of town. Now it was surrounded by subdivisions.
All the houses were adobe or stucco in the trademark Santa Fe style—flat-roofed mud huts with enclosed patios and jutting vigas. People from other parts of the country found this pueblo look exotic, but Vic had grown up in New Mexico. To him, they were just houses.
The first home he could remember looked exactly like these. Adobe walls, tile floors, arched doorways. Nice place. Lived there until he was seven. After his parents split up, he and his mom lived in apartments, each more run-down than the one before. A steady slide, matched
by his mother’s health, as she calmly drank her way into an early grave.
Barely old enough to legally live on his own, Vic struggled through a variety of dead-end jobs before he found his way to the bail bond business. He took to the work right away, becoming an excellent manhunter.
He wondered how many hours he’d logged in cars and airplanes since. So much travel, so much time sitting in cars, watching. The actual hit always amped Vic’s pulse rate, but the rest of the time his job could be boring.
He exited the freeway at Cerrillos Road, though it was the slowest way into town. Vic liked Cerrillos, with its blue-collar businesses aimed at locals, not tourists—muffler shops and tire stores and cheap diners. It felt real to him. Felt like Albuquerque.
When he reached the big intersection where Cerrillos and St. Francis Drive and the railroad tracks come together, he turned onto St. Francis, headed north. Supermarkets, gas stations and fast-food joints lined the busy boulevard. Traffic was thick and slow.
He finally broke free of the pack as he left the city limits. The rolling hills north of town were crowned by million-dollar homes. Squat evergreens polka-dotted the tan slopes.
The famous Santa Fe Opera stood just ahead on the left, its soaring shade structures giving it the look of a sailing ship. Vic had never been to the opera, but he’d heard plenty about it over the years. The newspapers were regularly full of photos of opera-goers in their tuxedos and cowboy boots, having elaborate dinner parties in the parking lot.
Vic liked the idea of the tailgate parties, but he wasn’t interested in fat people singing in foreign languages. He got enough of that from the Mexican radio stations in Albuquerque. Vic understood enough Spanish to pick out every sixth word in those bouncy songs, just enough to give him a headache trying to sort out the lyrics.
Following Penny’s directions, he turned onto a dirt road called Calle de Luz and followed it up into the hills, gravel popping in the wheel wells.
“House worth ten million bucks,” he muttered, “but you don’t pave the fucking road. I’m gonna have to wash my car.”
He went about a mile before he spotted the turnoff for Marc Troy’s mansion. He slowed, double-checking the address. The sand-colored house was shaped like a horseshoe, embracing a central courtyard. The paved driveway was bracketed by matching stucco posts, but the black iron gates stood open. Vic wondered if Troy closed them at night.
He drove past, climbing another hill. When he reached the crest, he wheeled the Cadillac around so he was facing the other way. From this vantage point, he had a good view of the entire property.
Vic got a pair of compact binoculars from the glove compartment and took a more thorough look. Wire fence around the perimeter of the yard, which was sparsely landscaped with yuccas and junipers and bunches of winter-dry chamisa. Security bars over the windows. Probably lights and motion sensors around the house. Hmm. He might have to find a way to get Marc Troy to come outside.
Vic flipped through the folder, looking for the photograph of the record producer. Standard publicity shot, three inches by five, with Troy showing off lots of expensive teeth. He was about fifty, with lush blond hair that swept back from a tanned forehead. Sunbursts of wrinkles around his eyes. An outdoorsman. Probably played a lot of golf.
No sign of him or anyone else on the property now. Vic put the Cadillac in gear and let it creep down the hill. Once Troy’s place was behind him, he sped up, headed back toward town. He turned onto St. Francis, looking for a coffee shop where he could kill time until nightfall.
Chapter 5
Once the sun goes down, the temperature in the high desert drops quickly. Vic shivered as he approached Marc Troy’s hacienda, using the light of the waning moon to navigate between the shadowy blobs of juniper trees.
Quiet out here, except for a faraway yipping. A coyote? Somebody’s dog? Vic tightened his grip on the silenced .22. He was a dog lover, always hated to put one down on a job. The yipping didn’t come any closer, so he continued through the low trees.
The chain-link fence was only five feet tall, and he managed to climb over it without snagging his pants. The yard was a mosaic of sculpted gravel and chunks of sandstone and a few scattered yuccas. Not much cover, so he walked straight toward the house, which was decorated with fake luminarias along its flat parapet. A luminaria is traditionally a brown paper lunch bag, weighted with sand and lit with a votive candle, displayed on Christmas Eve. The electric lights in these plastic imitations didn’t cast much of a glow.
Motion sensors triggered security lights as he crossed the yard, however. He trotted into the shadows next to the house.
From inside came the one sound he didn’t want to hear: a dog barking. Not a yipper, either. This dog sang bass.
Shit.
Vic hurried toward the front of the house. An open gate there led into the central courtyard, where doors would lead into different wings of the house. One of them would be easy enough to—
He froze. The barking suddenly was much louder, as if the dog had come outside.
Four-foot-tall walls, their adobe blocks naked to the elements, framed the courtyard entrance. The phrase “ugly as a mud fence” danced through Vic’s mind. Each wall had a square hole cut into it, a viewport braced open by weathered chunks of wood. He duckwalked to the nearest one and peeked through, wincing at what he found.
Marc Troy stood under a porch light that illuminated the landscaped courtyard. He was dressed in silky white pajamas and black slippers. His most noticeable accessory strained at the end of a leather leash: a sleek brown boxer, ninety pounds of muscle and mean, barking and slobbering.
“Who’s out there?” Troy shouted over the dog. “I’ve got a gun!”
Vic saw no gun, but the dog was looking right at him. He ducked away from the window, crouching beside the low wall. He readied the .22, holding it about the height of the boxer’s head. As soon as those snapping jaws came through the gate, he’d put a bullet in the dog’s brain. Then he’d stand, reach over the low wall and put a few into Troy.
His finger tightened on the trigger as the dog lunged into view. The boxer whirled toward him, drool flinging from its bared teeth.
A gunshot cracked in the night and red mist puffed from the dog’s head. The beast collapsed.
Stunned, Vic looked at his pistol. He hadn’t pulled the trigger and the suppressor was in place. The gunshot had come from out in the dark. Sounded like a rifle.
Feeling vulnerable, Vic shot out the nearest security light. Then he stepped into the gateway and found Marc Troy bent over the dead dog, his mouth hanging open in disbelief.
Vic fired, two bullets puffing out the end of the suppressor. They slapped into Troy’s tanned face. He went over backward, dead before he hit the ground.
Vic shifted his aim and shot out another floodlight. Keeping low, he covered twenty feet of open ground before he reached a man-sized yucca. He crouched behind it, peeking around the swordlike leaves.
The rifle didn’t fire again. Was the shooter waiting for Vic to move? Why had he taken out the dog rather than either of the men? Who the hell was out there?
Vic waited three full minutes before he scurried to the next yucca.
Nothing.
Two minutes this time. He ran to a dark corner of the yard.
Still nothing. Either the sniper had fled, or he was letting Vic go. What the hell could that mean? Somebody gives him a hand, shooting the dog, then lets him pop the target and take off? Vic suddenly has a helper?
He thought of Harry Marino, drowned in that swimming pool, just before Vic arrived. He’d tried to convince himself it was a coincidence, but tonight proved that was bullshit. Somebody was following Vic’s movements, showing up at his kills.
The night chill gave him a shiver.
Chapter 6
Penny Randall had been asleep less than an hour when her doorbell rang.
“This better be good,” she muttered as she got out of bed and threaded her arms through the sleeves o
f a fluffy blue bathrobe.
She stalked to the front door, veering into the kitchen long enough to pluck a ten-inch knife from the wooden block on the counter. She turned on the porch light and peered through the peephole.
Vic Walters stood on her porch, looking around, his breath puffing like smoke in the cold air. Penny threw open the door.
“What’s the matter? What’s happened?”
“Everything’s fine,” he said. “But I need to talk to you.”
“Sure. Come in.”
“No, I need you to come out here. Can you put on some shoes?”
“What time is it?”
“It’s after midnight. Just come outside. Please. It’s important.”
She cocked an eyebrow, but Vic looked dead serious.
“Let me get my coat.”
“Turn out the porch light first.”
“Okay.”
The porch went dark. As she turned from the door, Vic said, “Penny?”
“Yeah?”
“You won’t need that butcher knife.”
Her cheeks warmed. She returned the knife to the kitchen, then went to the bedroom for her slippers. A raincoat from the hall closet nearly covered the fluffy robe. On the way to the front door, she rounded up her keys and her phone and put them in her pockets.
Vic waited for her on the porch, facing the street.
“Somebody out there?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, “but someone’s been following me.”
“What?”
“Don’t say anything more. Come on.”
He grasped her elbow and led her down the bungalow’s wide front steps. They went to the curb and walked along the sidewalk for half a block, Vic still clutching her arm. He pulled her to a stop in front of a house decorated in Christmas lights shaped like red chile peppers.
