Final Target

by John Gilstrap

Dom smiled. “Fair enough. Before I go into any details, I need to be certain that if you say no to my offer, you won’t repeat the details of our discussion to anyone else.”

  “Okay.”

  Dom waved a finger. “No. Don’t be glib with your answer. If you speak out of turn, people can get hurt, not the least among them you.”

  Jesse took longer to answer this time. “Okay.”

  Dom didn’t know what he thought about this kid. About his attitude. If it were his decision . . . Well, that wasn’t in play, was it?

  “I am going to offer you a way to be free of your parole restrictions. To be a free man.”

  Jesse’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t have to suck anything I don’t want to suck, do I?”

  “Oh, please,” Dom said.

  “Or do anything else I don’t want to do?”

  Dom stumbled on that one.

  Jesse coughed out a laugh. “Okay, here we go. I knew nothing came for free.”

  “Isn’t that why you’re on probation in the first place? Trying to get stuff for free?”

  Jesse rolled his eyes. “Okay, Father. Good one. Bless me, for I have sinned. It’s been a long, long time since my last confession. I was a thief. And if you must know, I was a good one. A master at my craft.”

  “Until your mentor, Vikram Kusar, took a plea deal and threw you to the wolves.”

  “You’ve done your research,” Jesse said. “Has he died of ass worms yet? I’ve been hoping for that news.”

  Dom laughed at the image. “No, he has not. And shame on you for even thinking such a thing.” He augmented the scolding with a smile, which he hoped would make Jesse feel more comfortable. “According to your uncle, you’ve always had a knack for achieving the impossible.”

  Jesse scowled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Your high school grades, for example.”

  A dismissive puff of air. “The easiest hack ever.”

  “Or the nineteen sixty-eight Plymouth Barracuda,” Dom prompted.

  Jesse laughed. “Okay, now, that one was pretty impressive, I have to say. That was a pool game.”

  “You conned him,” Dom said.

  “That’s what the loser claimed.”

  “Are you going to tell me you didn’t snooker him? Remember, you’re talking to a priest.”

  “He had already taken my father’s car,” Jesse said through a smirk.

  “Which you didn’t own.”

  “Details. I had to bet something. How ’bout some bad thoughts for the other guy? I was only seventeen, and he was, like, old. Forty or more. He didn’t mind taking advantage of me one bit.”

  Dom knew the whole story, but he wanted to get a feel for the kid. “What did your dad think when he found out?”

  “From the way you’re asking the questions, I think you already know.”

  Dom looked over the center console and winked. “Think of it as an audition,” he said. “I’d like to hear you tell it.”

  “Okay, fine. I’d been losing to this guy all afternoon. I think his name was Billy.”

  “Bobby,” Dom corrected.

  “Bobby, then. I’d just lost Davey’s car—”

  “Who’s Davey?”

  “Huh? Oh, that’s my father. I had the choice of calling him Davey or Chief. So, anyway, Davey tore into the pool hall, and he was mad. He saw me and came in like a torpedo. He smacked me across the head and started yelling at everybody.” Jesse shifted his tone to a whispered shout. “ ‘He’s only seventeen! He doesn’t even belong here! I’m going to sue every one of you moe foes!’ Then he turned on Bobby. Now, my old man’s a big guy, but so was Bobby, and I thought they were gonna start pounding on each other. Bobby said he won the car fair and square, and it went on and on.

  “So, Davey says, ‘Give him a chance to win it back.’ Now, remember that his car was a piece of shit Ford Focus. So, Davey pulls, like, five grand in cash out of his pocket and puts it on the table. Also, remember there’s, like, two dozen people watching this go down. He tells Bobby that he just got paid and that this is the last cash he’s got, but he wants to still have a marriage when he gets home and he can’t go back to the house without a car. Then he says, ‘Think of the kid. She’ll kill him.’ The guy bitched, but with all those people looking, he was shamed into saying yes.”

  “So let me guess,” Dom said. “You swept the table.”

  “Well, mostly,” Jesse said with a humble shrug. “He insisted on having the break, and under the circumstances, we had to say yes. Otherwise, at the end, it would look too much like a hustle.”

  “But it was a hustle?” Dom was driving just for the sake of movement, random turns to kill time.

  “Of course it was a hustle. There wasn’t any marriage to go home to. In fact, Davey was only passing through between deployments. Bobby wasn’t nearly as good as he thought he was when we first started playing, but after a few beers, it actually got hard to make him look good. Anyway, he sunk a couple on the break, then whiffed a side-pocket shot. And then I ran the table.

  “So, then Bobby wanted a rubber game to save face. I told him hell no. Then he, like, threatens Davey, saying he was a pussy. Which was funny, because my old man could’ve turned Hulk Hogan inside out through his nostrils if he was pissed enough. But Davey played it cool and said yeah, I’d play him again, but for the Barracuda. That time, I got the break and Bobby never got a shot. It was beautiful.”

  Dom laughed in spite of himself. Hey, you had to admire talent, whatever the package it came in. “I’m guessing you never went back to that pool hall.”

  “Oh, hell no. We’d targeted the Barracuda from the beginning, because Davey had a friend in Texas who really wanted it. That puppy was in a trailer and on the road within five hours of us winning it.”

  Dom was impressed. Not just because Jesse’s story matched the one Paul Boersky had told him—at least in the major details—but because the kid had had guts even when he was seventeen. “Tell me about how you got sideways with Vikram Kusar.”

  Jesse shifted in his seat. “You know what? I don’t think I will. Tit for tat. I’ve given you some story. Now it’s your turn.”

  Dom pulled to the curb and stopped. They were in front of a 7-Eleven knockoff whose parking lot was filled with men who looked like laborers waiting for a pickup job. “Get out, if you want,” Dom said.

  Jesse recoiled. “Wait. What?”

  “I said get out. Enjoy your life as a parolee.” Dom didn’t get a chance to play hardball very often, but when the occasion arose, he was very good at it.

  “That’s it? One story and I’m done? What’s going on?”

  Dom threw the transmission into PARK and turned in his seat to face the young man. “You need to understand that this is not a game,” he said. “The stakes are very high for me, and if you don’t want to cooperate, then I don’t have the time to mess with you. I’ll tell you what this is about when I feel it’s appropriate. Now, either you can live with those rules or you can get out. Choose.”

  Jesse looked startled, just as he was supposed to. “Hey, I’m just looking for a little fairness here.”

  “Definitions may vary, I suppose,” Dom replied, “but from where I sit, you’re on the brink of an offer that is beyond fair. It’s yours to screw up.” A beat. “So, are you talking or walking?”

  Defeated, Jesse pointed ahead through the windshield. “Drive,” he said. “I’m talking.”

  Dom held his position for another ten seconds, just to let the kid know he was serious. Too much was at stake to let smart-assery win the day. “This isn’t a game, Jesse. In fact, this is as serious as it gets.” Then he pulled away from the curb and into traffic.

  “Vikram and I had a sweet little business,” Jesse explained when they were moving again. “We were getters of things. Scroungers. People who wanted things came to us, and we got them what they wanted.”

  “For a fee.”

  “For a damn good fee,” Jesse corrected. “We’re
talking artwork, jewelry, cars. We even obtained a helicopter once.”

  “So, you were thieves,” Dom said, cutting to the chase.

  “Now you’re sounding like the judge,” Jesse said with a flash of humor. “Since we never kept the stuff for ourselves, I liked to think of us as businessmen. That’s for sure how we were seen by the people who hired us. The real money was in corporate spying.”

  “As in . . . what?”

  “You know, trade secrets, intellectual property, financials.”

  “You mean you’d break into offices? That sort of thing?”

  “Sometimes, but not as often as you might think. Vikram was a master on a computer keyboard. You can do a lot of that stuff from off-site. But if we needed to gain entry, that was usually on me—unless we needed to get access to a computer.”

  Dom felt a little embarrassed by how much he admired the amount of guts it would take to do such things. “So, how did you get caught?”

  “We didn’t get caught. We got ratted out by Vikram’s horse-faced sister. I guess he told her about the business, and when he refused to lend her some ridiculous amount of money, she called the feds. They started an investigation, and there you go. But here’s the pisser. They didn’t know about me. When they pressured Vikram, he got a plea deal on the condition that he turn in any accomplices. By then, I’d already decided to move on to honest work, but the genie was out of the bottle. He rolled, they got me, and, well, ta-da!” He did jazz hands.

  Dom laughed in spite of himself. Digger would either like this kid or hate him—it was hard to tell. But Boxers was going to loathe him. He wished he could be there when they finally met.

  Dom glanced across the center console, then looked back at the road. “Okay, Jesse Montgomery, you’ve got the job, if you want it.”

  Jesse’s shoulders sagged, and his jazz hands became frustration fists. “What job? I’ve told you everything you’ve asked. Now it’s your turn to come clean.”

  “You’re right,” Dom said. “But it’s a complicated story. You hungry?”

  CHAPTER 14

  Alejandro Azul had long ago lost any sense of queasiness over the physical detritus caused by the murderous acts of others, just as he’d lost any sense of remorse that came with the hurtful things that his line of work required. He likened a man’s tolerance for violence to a man’s tolerance for alcohol. As a man grew older, he learned his own limits, and he worked to stay within them. Still, despite all that experience and practice, there remained those occasions when he overdid it and paid a price.

  It was that way this morning with blood and suffering. In the end, Alejandro came to believe that Ernesto Gabay and his family knew nothing of what had transpired during the slaughter at the House of Saint Agnes. A man who maintained his ignorance through the moment when his wife was shot before his eyes could conceivably be a fine actor who was bound to an unhappy marriage. But when he continued to profess ignorance as his daughter’s legs were broken, Alejandro accepted that the man and his family had nothing to share. He made sure that they all died quickly, with as little additional suffering as possible.

  With that work completed, he returned to the rubble of Saint Agnes to oversee the proper handling of the dead. As the sun rose higher, and the shadows shortened, the details of the carnage began to clarify, and he felt his limit being reached. Thus far, he had not seen a single intact corpse at the explosion site. During the night, his men had bagged the identifiable pieces of anatomy and had shipped them away. Now he was supervising the collection of bits and pieces. Some were still identifiable as a bit of bone or a finger, but for the most part, he was looking at globs of bloody tissue, and after a while of that, the effect on his stomach could not be denied.

  He was relieved, then, when his phone rang and his caller ID showed the name of his cousin Orlando. For him to call at all, something important needed to be happening. And whatever that was had to be a relief from what he was doing now.

  “Hello, Orlando,” he said.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, Alejandro, but—”

  “That’s all right, cousin.” Orlando was a jumpy sort, competent enough at the tasks with which he was entrusted, but easily frightened. So Alejandro made a point of putting a smile in his tone. “What do you need?”

  “Well, Alejandro, a situation has arisen that I believe needs your attention.”

  “What sort of situation?”

  “C-can you return to the Gabays’ house?” Orlando stuttered.

  “What is wrong?”

  “We, um, have new guests,” Orlando said.

  “Please don’t speak in riddles to me,” Alejandro snapped. His efforts to be cordial were overrun by his annoyance with his cousin’s efforts to be coy.

  “Children,” Orlando said.

  “What children? What about them? What are you trying to tell me?”

  “They’re from the House of Saint Agnes,” Orlando said. “They just wandered up. One of them has a pistol.”

  Something stirred in Alejandro’s chest. A pulse of excitement, maybe? “What are they doing there?”

  “They say they were looking for a place to hide,” Orlando said.

  “Do you believe them?”

  “That’s why I would like you to come back here. It’s difficult to say. Their story does not add up completely.”

  Alejandro fell silent as he considered the possible options. Why would the children from Saint Agnes be at a place where the occupants clearly had not been expecting them? It remained inconceivable to Alejandro that Ernesto would protect a secret at the expense of his family’s agony.

  “You say one of them has a pistol?” Alejandro asked.

  “Yes,” Orlando said. “The oldest one. His name is Hugo. It is loaded, and he had it in his pocket. We searched the others. His is the only gun.” A beat. “Can you please come back here?”

  Alejandro opened his mouth to say yes, but then he changed his mind. “Tell you what, Orlando. I have a better idea.” He scanned the bloody wreckage that surrounded him, and he smiled. “Bring them back to me at the school. Better to be in familiar surroundings, I think.”

  As he clicked off and slid his phone back into his pocket, Alejandro smiled. In just a few minutes, he imagined that he would have all the answers he wanted to hear.

  * * *

  Gail Bonneville’s office could not have been farther separated from The Cave. Her job at Security Solutions was to run the overt side of the business—the legitimate side, which involved managing dozens of ongoing investigations as they were conducted by a team of eleven professional investigators. Most were ex-cops—more former military investigators than former civilian investigators—and when a rare job opening occurred, Jonathan’s standing order was to weigh evaluations heavily in favor of those who were disabled in the line of duty. Mobility was important, and there wasn’t much room for cognitive impairment, but Gail had never witnessed anyplace that took reasonable accommodation to the extent that Security Solutions had achieved.

  Like all things Jonathan Grave, anonymity was important, especially when it came to philanthropic matters. As a consequence, he’d won no community awards, they’d never won an 8A contract from the government, and he was fine with that, and it was hard to stay angry with him.

  Digger Grave was an asshole. A handsome, charming, generous, and funny asshole, but an asshole nonetheless. They’d been lovers once. She’d actually loved him—on one level, maybe she still did—and those feelings had driven her to do unspeakable things that crossed virtually every moral boundary line. Gail was a lawyer, for heaven’s sake—an officer of the court—and a former sheriff and FBI agent. Laws mattered. They existed for all the right reasons, and they provided equal protection for every citizen.

  But they worked slowly, methodically. They occasionally punished good guys for the way they handled bad guys, but only when said good guys broke the rules. When she’d worked on the dark side of Jonathan’s business, she broke those rules every day. In the p
rocess she’d saved lives that otherwise would have been lost, and she’d also taken the lives of undisputedly terrible people, but in so doing, she’d denied them the due process that civilized nations guaranteed.

  The dichotomy was so stark that she had learned to question everything they did, every happy outcome they celebrated.

  And then she’d got herself shot.

  The fact that she still walked the planet beat the projections of all but the most foolish oddsmakers, and that fact alone had led her to decide that God had granted her a reset, a chance to do well by doing good and, in the process, maybe rebalance her soul.

  Yet here she was, being drawn back into the work she’d pledged to abandon, because there literally was no one else available to do it. She continued to love Digger enough not to sit idly while his life was threatened.

  In theory, Gail’s involvement had ended after she’d closed the loop with Wolverine and passed along the contact she’d been given, but in her heart, she doubted it.

  So when her phone rang, she wasn’t the least bit surprised to see Venice’s name in the intercom ID. “Hey,” Gail said after she lifted the receiver.

  “I need to speak with you,” Venice said. Just from the tone of her voice, Gail knew that she’d been tapped to reenter yet again the life she’d tried so hard to abandon.

  “On my way,” she said. She stood as she placed the receiver back on the cradle, and she cast a glance at the mountain of investigative reports that would remain unre-viewed. The only question was for how long. She reached for her cane, then decided to leave it.

  Thanks to an unfortunate bit of mischief that had occurred in the Security Solutions offices a few years ago, armed guards stood 24/7 outside the main doorway to the office, and then another stood at the door leading to The Cave. Of the employees who worked on this side of the office, only Gail had unfettered access past The Cave’s door. Everyone else had to request permission. As she walked the distance to that door, she could feel the eyes of the others on her; no doubt wondering what the nature of the work performed in such a secure area was.

  Gail kept her eyes on the guard, Charlie Keeling, as she approached, and he pulled the door open for her as she arrived.