A Welcome Grave lp-3

by Michael Koryta

  Then it was gone. The alarm had stopped even before the gunfire, taken out by one of the bullets, apparently. I lowered my arms and held the Glock with both hands, a shooter’s grip, preparing to turn around. It took me a few seconds to convince myself to do it.

  When I spun around the pillar, all I could see was the empty street in front of me. The room was covered with stone and glass and other debris, but with the window gone, there was nothing out there but the street. No cars, no gunmen.

  The phone on the wall rang again. The waves of sound trapped in my ears from the shooting and the alarm almost kept me from hearing it, but as soon as I did I moved across the room, not caring that the last time the phone had rung it had been a prelude to the gunfire.

  I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear but didn’t say anything. When the man on the other end of the line spoke, I could hardly hear him, but that was probably due more to the echoing ringing in my ears than to a soft voice. Even so, I knew the speaker. He’d just left the same impression on my gym that he had on my face.

  “Still alive,” he said. “Good. I shot high and wide, but with all those bullets, you never know.”

  “When I find you—”

  “Shut up, Lincoln. You’re not going to find me, and if you try, you die. I’ve got a nasty feeling that’s what will happen here, eventually, but you have no one but yourself to blame for that. You were given an opportunity to step back. An opportunity you should have taken but did not. Next time you won’t even have time to regret that.”

  “You’ll be the one talking about regrets, you piece of shit. You shouldn’t have shot high and wide.”

  “Damn, but you get your confidence back quickly.” His tone was light, carefree. “Jefferson’s son was due a nice chunk of cash before his unfortunate passing. Something in the neighborhood of five million dollars, probably. Could have been more, could have been less, but we’re going to be fair, in the interest of time, and ask for a mere three million. Tell the wife to get it ready to move, and we’ll be in touch to tell her where to move it and when to move it. Do that, and maybe nobody else dies.”

  He continued before I had a chance to respond to that.

  “Go ahead and call the cops, Lincoln. You disappointed me today, running to them so quickly. My opinion of you was clearly set too high. Go ahead and call them now. It’s not going to stop a thing.”

  Then all I could hear was the hum of the dead line after he hung up, and the sirens of police on their way, and Amy screaming my name from outside.

  19

  I called Targent myself. The CPD cops that showed up were clueless to the situation, and the more detail I got into with them, the more complicated it was all going to become. I wanted to call Karen, too, but the cops were in my face, asking questions, and I didn’t have a chance. Targent arrived maybe forty-five minutes after the first squad car got there. If my shot-up gym cast any doubt on my guilt for him, he didn’t show it. He just stalked around the place, growling and grunting and saying little while I gave him the scenario. His eyes took in Amy, who was standing in the corner of the gym answering questions from another officer, but he didn’t ask anything about her, not even to see if she could corroborate my version of the night.

  “I’ve got video cameras that record everything in the weight room,” I said. “Have to have them, for insurance, since there’s no staff here during off-hours. If you need to verify my story, make sure I didn’t stand on the sidewalk and cut loose into my own building, go ahead.”

  I went back to the office and got the current tape out of the videocassette machine that the cameras fed into and gave it to him. He took the tape without a word, spoke in hushed tones to the sergeant who was in control of the scene, and then told me he’d be talking to Karen to verify my story.

  “The good news is, I wasn’t hurt,” I said.

  “You know what’s curious?”

  “What?”

  “That this guy wants to go through you. I mean, I’ve worked some extortion cases before. You want to squeeze money from somebody, you usually just go right to squeezing them. But this guy, he calls Karen Jefferson to tell her he’s going to be calling you? Then he gives you the price tag he’s after?”

  I stared at him and then turned back to my gym and swept an arm around it. “You see this place, Targent? You really think anyone would open up on his own business with a semiauto just to preserve a lie?”

  “Depends on the individual,” he said, “and the magnitude of the lie. You get the right mix, and, yes, I can believe it.”

  I shook my head. “Watch the damn surveillance tape. Watch it, and then you’ll either believe me or give me an Oscar.”

  My request for Targent had only increased the curiosity of the city cops, but I told them any elaboration on the situation would have to come from him. They milled around for a while longer, taking pictures and trying to dig bullets out of the walls. Two of the uniformed guys helped me clean up, sweeping the glass and stone fragments up and dumping them into a large trashcan. The free weights had survived with just a few nicks, but a couple of the stationary bikes had taken direct hits, and their computers were destroyed. The damage would be in the thousands.

  The cops finally finished with Amy, and she stood in the corner, arms wrapped around herself, shivering in her thin sweatshirt. All the cold air was pushing into the gym, no window in place to keep it out. I went over and rubbed my hands over her upper arms, trying to warm her. She attempted to smile at me, but it didn’t work. She looked scared.

  “Go home, Amy,” I said. “You’re going to get sick, standing around like this. Go home and get warm. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t need to be sorry, Lincoln. I’m just . . .” She shook her head. “I went to sleep and you were there, right? And I woke up and you were gone and talking on the phone, and then two minutes later I’m all alone and someone is shooting at the building . . .”

  “I know. I’m sorry. It all happened pretty fast. I didn’t know what to expect.”

  Her eyes were on the cops across from us. “This is all about Karen?”

  “It’s about her husband.”

  She took a deep breath and nodded.

  “Night to remember, huh?” I said.

  She managed a weak smile. “In a lot of ways, right? In a lot of ways.”

  “Go home and get warm.”

  She nodded again and reached up and hugged me hard. I kissed her once, and then she stepped away and walked to the door, pausing to say something to the sergeant, probably to ask him if it was okay if she left. She turned at the door and looked back at me.

  “Hey, Lincoln.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The fireworks that are supposed to happen when you’re with someone for the first time? They work a lot better as a metaphor.”

  I laughed, and it was as if something inside of me had just been loosened, knowing that she could still manage a joke about all of it.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, and then she left.

  By the time they were all gone, it was past five. I found a large sheet of plastic and a roll of duct tape and set to work covering the hole in the wall where the front window had been. As I worked, I thought about Amy, and my anger toward whoever had done this grew. It should have been a wonderful night. Had been, for a few hours. But they wouldn’t even allow me that. Amy had gone home cold and tired and scared. I wondered if these bastards knew that, if they’d watched Amy’s lonely ride home and laughed.

  Once the window was covered and as much of the debris as possible cleaned up, I sat in the gym office with my feet on the desk, drinking coffee and staring at the damage. I’d hung a CLOSED DUE TO VANDALISM sign on the door. When seven o’clock came, I called Grace and told her what had happened and that she wouldn’t need to come in for the day. After dealing with her worried questions and attempts at mothering, I managed to hang up and call Joe. He listened to the story in total silence, and when I was done he asked just one question.

/>   “You say Amy was there?”

  I sighed. “Yes, Amy was there.”

  “Slumber party?”

  “Joseph—”

  “No, no, don’t worry, I won’t pry. I just have trouble believing it. Seems to me she’d have good taste, and your taste has certainly never been so impressive before.”

  “I’ll see you at the office.” I hung up on him, but I was smiling when I did it.

  The next call went to my insurance agent. It was still too early for him to be in, but that was good—I wanted to break the news on his answering machine. Explaining that I had a claim due to an assault on my building would be tedious.

  At ten to eight, I finished my coffee and walked into the weight room again, taking one last look before I went down to the office. The sleep I’d lost wasn’t tiring me yet, not in the face of the anger I felt as I surveyed the bullet-riddled equipment.

  I’d left the lights off to help make it clear that the gym was closed. The plastic sheet I’d spread over the broken front window let some sunlight in, but it came through filtered and gray, the plastic not being completely transparent. Now, as I stood in the middle of the weight room and stared at it, a figure developed in front of the plastic sheet. The milky cast kept any facial features from being distinguishable, but I could see the figure was a man, and he seemed to be peering through the plastic, searching the interior of the gym. For a reason I could not begin to articulate, I felt a wave of dread, a quick sense that the man on the other side of the plastic was a dangerous one.

  Taking two steps toward the wall, I bent and picked up one of the curl bars. It was fifteen pounds of solid metal, and if I swung it accurately, it would make a hell of a weapon. Even as I twisted the bar in my hands, shifting it so I gripped the end like a baseball bat, the man on the opposite side of the plastic pushed hard against the edge of the sheet, and the duct tape that held it in place began to peel back from the wall. A second later that entire side ripped free, and the man stepped right through the window and into the gym.

  His name was Thor. The brief, seemingly unfounded sense of danger I’d had when his silhouette appeared was not so absurd, after all. Thor—I still knew no last name—was probably the deadliest man in the city. I might have denied knowing him the previous day, but the recognition as he stepped through that window affected me in a way few things could. Although I’d met him rather unwillingly, it had been an important acquaintance for me. The kind of acquaintance I would not forget, no matter how long I might live. The kind of acquaintance that sometimes made sleep a hard thing to find.

  “Lincoln Perry,” he said, his voice soft and controlled and without menace, the way it always would be, no matter what the moment, no matter what the stakes.

  “Thor.”

  His ghostly eyes took in the bar in my hands with a disinterested glance and then returned to my face. He wore black slacks and a long-sleeved black shirt, and everything about him was unremarkable other than those eyes.

  “It would seem,” he said, looking around the gym quickly but without missing a single disturbed item, “that you have had some trouble.”

  I looked around the gym again, too. “I’ve made some enemies.”

  “That is something you appear to do regularly.” There was no smile in his voice or on his face, but I had the sense the statement amused him.

  “We’ve all got talents,” I said.

  He ran an index finger down one of the weight benches, admiring the deep split that a bullet had left in its cover.

  “Your troubles and my troubles appear to run together often.”

  I didn’t say anything to that.

  “The police have been asking me questions,” he said. “In all truth, the police often ask me questions. I rarely provide answers. But yesterday, the questions concerned you.”

  He looked up at me, held me with those blue eyes.

  “What did you tell them?” I asked.

  “As I said, I rarely provide answers.”

  I nodded. “They’ve been asking me questions, too, Thor. Your name was brought up for the first time yesterday. You were in the car of a dead man, they said. A dead man they suspect I may have killed.”

  His face didn’t change at all. “Did you kill him?”

  “No.”

  “But you are in love with his wife?”

  “No. I was once. I’m not now.”

  “We know some things about one another,” he said, the words slow and careful, as if he had taken great care selecting them. “Things that would probably be best left between us.”

  “I’m not going to talk.”

  His head bobbed once. “There was another man . . .”

  “He’s gone, and he was so scared of you that he’ll never talk, no matter the incentives.”

  This, he certainly believed.

  “I suppose that is all, then.” He gazed around the room once more. “At least for me. You? You seem to have some issues that need to be addressed. I wish you luck with that. I trust you will not need it.”

  He turned on his heel and moved back for the window, reaching out for the free edge of the plastic sheet.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “Yes?” half-facing me, but still leaning toward the window.

  “Why were you in his car?”

  When those ice-blue eyes met mine, my spine felt as cold as the metal bar in my hands.

  “I do not discuss the affairs of others.”

  He would end the lives of others, had done so frequently, but he would not discuss their affairs. Honor.

  “They’re coming for me, Thor. Whoever did kill Jefferson, and the cops. They’re all coming for me.”

  Thor cocked his head, frowning. He did not like to talk. He was a man of deeds, not discussion. He stood there and stared at me, though, and I thought that maybe he was remembering the way we’d locked eyes after he’d plunged his knife into another man’s body, remembering that he’d not seen me in court after that, testifying against him. Those things that he wanted to remain between us already had, for some time.

  “An offer was made,” he said. “It was made out of confusion. I declined the offer, and I went on my way. That was the only time I ever saw the man.”

  “What offer?”

  He looked at me for a long time, and just when I thought he was going to decline to answer and make his exit, he told me.

  “Alex Jefferson wanted to employ me to kill a man. I do not know who the man was, because I stopped him long before he got to the details of the situation. I told Mr. Jefferson that whatever he had been told about me, it was wrong. I told him that I do not engage in activities of murder for money.”

  No, only murder over money, I thought. Didn’t seem like the kind of point Thor would appreciate, though, so I didn’t offer it.

  “How did he find you?”

  “Through an acquaintance who has represented some of my associates in legal matters.”

  “A criminal defense lawyer, then,” I said, and he seemed amused again.

  “That is of no concern to you. I have told you all I can. I would hate to think that I have already said too much?”

  The question held the menacing edge of a machete blade.

  “You haven’t said too much.”

  He didn’t respond to that, just nodded once, politely, and lifted the free edge of plastic and stepped over the low window frame and out onto the sidewalk.

  For a long time after he was gone, I kept the curl bar in my hands.

  20

  So it wasn’t too much of a coincidence, after all,” Joe said. “I said earlier that the city wasn’t small enough for both you and Thor to figure into this. When it comes to hired killings, though? City becomes an awful lot smaller. Tight little community.”

  I winced. “You’re including me in that community?”

  He shrugged. “Look, I’m not getting visitors like Thor.”

  I pushed out of my chair and walked to the window, looked down on the street for the third
time since I’d gotten to the office. I was looking down on the street a lot lately. It’s a habit you pick up when you always think someone dangerous is nearby. Just a little healthy paranoia.

  “I should have pushed him harder.”

  “Are you insane? Men like Thor do not respond well to pushing, LP.”

  “Men like Thor also share only the bare minimum of information,” I said, turning back to him. “He knows more than he gave me.”

  “If I were you, I’d just be glad he walked back out that window.” Joe shook his head. “Walking through the damn window. For all his stillness and calm, that guy has a flair for the dramatic.”

  “If Jefferson was willing to hire Thor to do his killing, he’d have been willing to hire someone else. If whatever he was afraid of had become that serious, pushed him to that extent, then he wouldn’t stop because one man declined his offer. He’d keep looking.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Thor basically admitted that Jefferson had found out about him from a criminal defense lawyer who has defended Belov’s crew. If we can find that guy, maybe we can find out who else he might be connected to.”

  Joe looked at me as if I’d offered him a glass of milk that had been left in the sun for a week.

  “Surely, LP, you’re not suggesting we refocus on interviewing every contract killer we can find.”

  “One of them will know something.”

  “Right. And when we find that one, he’ll kill us and consider the problem solved. I’d suggest approaching this a little more obliquely.”

  I ran a palm over my face, feeling the haze of a sleepless night already working on my brain.