Shadows in the Water

by Kory M. Shrum

  “Jesus Christ. Was that necessary?”

  “Yes,” Lou said. The growl had not left her voice entirely. “I hate motion-sensors.”

  King took one look at her, the angry snarl marring her features, and let it drop. He wanted to argue that of all the rooms in the DEA headquarters, perhaps light would be useful in here at least. He’d like to see where he was looking. But as his eyes readjusted to the darkness, he realized perhaps that wasn’t true.

  Generous light the color of daylilies spilled across Chaz’s desk from the parking lot outside. He relied on it as he bent down and reached a hand underneath. A momentary fear seized him as he stuck his hand into the darkness. He thought a hand would reach out and grab him, yanking him off to some godforsaken place.

  But no cold hand of death grabbed his. His arm disappeared as if painlessly amputated by the darkness. He reached up and felt the underpart of the desk, his fingers running over the gritty pressed board until his nails snagged on the corner of a piece of paper. He gingerly felt around the corners, memorizing the edges before using his thumbnail to separate the tape from the desk’s underbelly. Thank god, he thought. He was lucky Brasso was a creature of habit.

  He sat back in his old partner’s desk chair and read the baby blue post-it aloud.

  “b00BiEs4Me,” he said and snorted.

  Lou arched an eyebrow.

  King felt the heat rise in his face. He turned the post-it toward her so she could read it for herself.

  “A mature guy,” she said, nervously thumbing the safety of her gun on and off as she peered through the crack in the door down the lighted hallway. The lights flickered off to conserve energy now that no motion was detected. He could see something in her relax visibly as darkness overtook the building once more.

  King removed the laptop from the backpack and powered it on. As soon as he was prompted, he entered the password from the sticky note.

  “How did you know he would have his password taped under his desk?” Lou asked. Even her voice was softer now in the darkness. The strident irritation clipping her words had dissolved.

  “We were partners for a long time,” King said. He felt his throat tighten as if a beignet had gotten stuck halfway down and was threatening to either suffocate him or come back up. He swallowed again. And he saved my life. Something about that really makes you pay attention to a person afterward.

  “How long?” Her voice dropped, soft.

  “Fifteen years,” he said. “He was my first.”

  “How romantic,” Lou said.

  He looked up and met her eyes, expecting derision or the bland sarcasm he’d been privy to before. But her face wasn’t flat and unreadable. Her lips were turned up on one side. Sympathy.

  “You were betrayed,” she said, her face a perfect mask of seriousness.

  He wanted to ask her what the hell she knew about betrayal. She was too young and didn’t appear to have anyone in her life. She only trusted Lucy, and Lucy wouldn’t squash a bug, on principle alone.

  But then he thought of Gus Johnson. The way he’d acted in the days following Jack Thorne’s death. Or hell, the way he’d acted in the days after Jack died.

  “Louie,” he asked softly. Darkness was intimate. You didn’t shout in the dark. You whispered. You held holy deference as if you were in an inner sanctum. In the presence of some ancient primal force. A god, maybe. In this case a goddess. A goddess of the dark. “Did you kill Gus Johnson?”

  “He betrayed my dad,” Lou said, without hesitation. “He gave Martinelli our address.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said and ran a hand over his head. “You just confessed to murder.”

  “Did I? I don’t believe I did.” Lou asked with a hint of amusement in her voice. “I’m just stating facts.”

  He realized it was true. She had not filled in the gaps for him. She’s said the exact thing she needed to say to let him know of course she’d killed him.

  “All they ever found at his house was blood,” King said. He remembered going to Johnson’s house himself. He wasn’t in homicide and had no business being there. But Kennedy was the lead on the case, and Kennedy had looked up to King since the academy. He knew Johnson was one of his old students and gave the older man his due.

  He also knew the Johnson case was cold. Long dead in its grave. So dead, daisies were sprouting through the dirt annually. Unless King stumbled upon a bloody weapon or Lou confessed on tape, he had nothing that would reopen it.

  And he found he didn’t want to turn the girl in.

  How the hell had she worked him over so thoroughly in such a short time?

  “You wouldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen when Gus...disappeared,” he said, typing the password into the blinking white box. Then he waited for the main screen to load.

  “Is that so?” She wasn’t shutting him down exactly. The same humor was there, beneath the surface. He had nothing, and she knew it. She knew his best grab was nothing more than smoke and shadows.

  “Was he your first kill?” King asked.

  The smile on her lips flattened. She didn’t answer. And in its way, it was an answer unto itself.

  Yes, the voice said in the back of his mind. It had been her first kill. And if that was true then Lucy had truly tried to deal with this on her own, tried to rehabilitate the girl and keep her from going nuclear. She’d tried for a long time before caving and asking King for help. He did the math in his head because Gus had been dead for eight years.

  But it also meant Lou had been out for eight years, hunting and destroying the Martinellis, and that was a lot of ammo to go through. A lot of bullets fired. King was under no delusions a person could be rehabilitated after that much killing.

  She’s too wild. King imagined himself breaking the news to Lucy. I’m sorry.

  “What does the computer say?” Lou asked. She didn’t look at him. Her gaze remained fixed on the hallway beyond the crack they’d left in the door.

  King blinked, pulling himself back to the task at hand. The screen had several documents still up as if Chaz had been in the middle of something when he’d powered it down and walked away. Or he’d stepped away from the computer, and the screen had locked itself after minutes of inactivity.

  It was information for two flights.

  King opened the satchel and started searching for the scrap of paper he’d lifted from Brasso’s pocket. He found the folded piece of stationary and read the numbers again: FLR-CDG 815-1005. CDG-IAH 1040-205.

  He looked at the screen. Flight numbers.

  “It looks like he was expecting someone,” King said.

  Lou came around the desk and peered over his shoulder at the laptop screen. “Who was on both flights?”

  After minimizing two tabs, voila. Lists for each flight sat framed in the screen. “I’m the detective here.”

  “You’re not a detective,” she said. “You said so yourself.”

  “I’m the one with experience.” He regretted saying it immediately. After all, if they were going to compare credentials, he knew how he’d size up in the body count. King only killed one man in his life, and it hadn’t been intentional.

  He stopped scribbling names. “There’s only four passengers who were on both flights.”

  He showed her the list:

  Sasha Drivemore

  William Glass

  Paolo Konstantine

  Dominic Luliani

  Her shoulders stiffened.

  “See something?” He asked, his eyes running down the list again. None of the names meant anything to him.

  “Yes.”

  After a full minute, he made an out-with-it gesture with his hand, waving it encouragingly in the air. “Secrets never made friends.”

  “Konstantine.” Her face scrunched up as if she’d gotten a whiff of rotten meat. “He’s Martinelli’s son.”

  “Martinelli’s son? I thought you killed all of Martinelli’s sons?”

  “There’s one left.”

  �
��What the hell does Ryanson want with him?” King asked, more to himself than to anyone else.

  A car door shut and they both froze.

  King scrambled to his feet, closing the laptop and adjusting the leather satchel on his shoulder. He pivoted in the desk chair and peered out the window. A red Sedan sat parked beneath one of the orange halos.

  A man in a brown suit with a green tie sauntered toward the building with a travel mug in his hand. King didn’t recognize him. But at four in the morning, it was probably some young buck, recently hired, putting in the hours to get ahead.

  King turned and stopped. He blinked twice, but the scene didn’t change.

  Lou was gone.

  He was alone in the room, and down the hall, the motion-sensors began to click on.

  29

  Konstantine stepped off the sidewalk in front of his expensive hotel room and toward a black sedan pulling up to the curb. The car stopped, and he lifted the handle, but it didn’t open. A man from the driver’s seat exited the car and came around to open the door for him.

  The door opened. How strange American men are, Konstantine thought. The richer they become, the more they like to appear helpless. Unable to open their own doors or drive themselves. Cook for themselves. They evolved into entirely cerebral creatures who would do well to be plugged into giant computers, pumping their thoughts and decisions into a main-frame. Their bodies would remain motionless and out of the way while they exerted their real authority on the lives of others.

  Konstantine forced a smile despite his desire to open and close his own door. When in Rome. “Thank you.”

  The driver dipped his head in acknowledgment.

  Konstantine slid into the car. The temperature shift was shocking. One moment, he stood under the blanket of Texas heat. The next, he was in the car’s refrigerated interior. The enclosure gave the impression of a grave. A large box deep in the earth and surrounded by crawling things on all sides.

  Senator Ryanson smiled at him from across the seat. He wore a gray suit with a red tie. The suit gave the impression of small rabbits Konstantine had seen as a boy. Vulnerable things which could easily be squashed beneath the tire of a car in the city center, if it had dared to dart across the cobblestone at the wrong moment.

  “Mr. Konstantine,” Ryanson said with a wry smile. It did not reach his eyes. “A pleasure.”

  The man reached across the seats and offered his hand. Konstantine knew the American custom and accepted it. The hand was frigid. A corpse’s hand, fitting for the corpse box they sat in.

  The car pulled away from the curb without instruction.

  “I can give you twenty minutes of uninterrupted access to the HIA database,” Ryanson said. Straight to business. “Will this be enough time to gather the intel we need?”

  “Yes,” Konstantine said. He did not care to elaborate. More than enough to get what I want on you.

  “Once you link up,” Ryanson said, the same false joviality puppeteering his features. “How long do we have before they know something is up?”

  “It depends on the nature of their security,” Konstantine said, his shoulders tensing against the leather seats. “The more security, the less time.”

  “As long as I’m on my party boat and celebrating by 6:00.” Ryanson smiled again. This time, the smile was genuine. His eyes crinkled at the corners, and he shared a wide toothy grin with Konstantine before raising a rocks glass to his lips and drinking. Ice clinked against the rim, and Konstantine found himself staring at the water ring on the knee of his pants where he’d balanced the beverage.

  “This is why I brought you here,” Ryanson said with a grin. “Sponsored your visa, got you through customs. It was a small price to pay for such brilliance. You know we brought Einstein here too. Another political refugee.”

  And what about my brothers? What had you brought them here for?

  He couldn’t ask, of course. It was too soon to give up the game.

  And the American was babbling again. Konstantine wanted to look out the window, watch the streets and buildings go by. He marveled at American architecture. It all seemed so new. So infantile. Malformed like a child’s building blocks. In his country, they built with stone and rock. They prepared for war, having a long history and the basic comprehension it would come.

  Even the newest buildings in his country had perhaps a century or more on these chapels made of glass and electricity. Where would the Americans hide when the war reached their shores? Not in these glass giants so easily brought down by their own vulnerability and gravity.

  It was moments like this when Konstantine thought of his mother. She had done nothing wrong. She’d caved to Martinelli’s affections because to rebuke him would mean her death. But what had it gotten her? A heartless end. Another man who’d wanted to hurt Martinelli but couldn’t reach him, hurt her instead. Like a lion grabbing the weaker gazelle in the herd.

  As of now, he knew of at least one other woman who’d lost her life this way.

  Louie’s mother.

  “Not a very talkative man,” the senator said, and he did not bother to hide his sneer. “You know, in America, we would call that rude.”

  “I prefer not to speak unless I can improve upon the silence,” Konstantine said and offered his best disarming smile. And you are talking enough for the both of us.

  The senator’s sneer softened. “You’ll enter the HIA with me under the pretense of my personal bodyguard. When I begin to speak to Fenner, I will leave you by the door. It’s customary, a sign that I trust him as we do our cloak and dagger negotiations. It’s all about the Mexico trade agreement. As much as you might want to be privy to that conversation, I think we both know you have something better to do.”

  Konstantine acknowledged him with a nod of his head. He thought, I wonder how she will do it? Will she put a bullet between your eyes? Or will she use a blade? Slowly? Enjoy it?

  “The door to his inner office is to the right, and the door to the hallway is to the left. Take the office door instead of exiting and you can work your magic.” Ryan fiddled with his cuff link again. “I’ll spill my drink when it’s time to go.”

  “It’s like a spy movie.” Konstantine smiled.

  The congressman tilted his head and smiled back. “I thought it was a clever idea.”

  You’re an imbecile. Elected by imbeciles who do not know how you work against them. She will see right through you. She’ll know you for exactly what you are.

  The congressman went on smiling. “Regardless, this computer is on the HIA server. You’ll be able to do what you need to do from there.”

  “And after?” Konstantine asked with a grin to mirror the senator’s.

  The congressman’s smile turned wolfish. “Then I will take you out on my boat to celebrate. Have you ever seen the Houston harbor at night?”

  “No,” Konstantine said.

  “It’s beautiful. Absolutely to die for.”

  30

  Lou leaned against the cool tree trunk, clutching the bark as if it were a great log in a wide river. Her compass spun inside her. One part of her wanted to go back to King. She saw him in the upstairs window, in the fat bastard’s office, a sliver of light across his face as he searched the hallway.

  Another part of her wanted to go to Lucy. Aunt Lucy needed her. Was it Venetti? Or was some greater, more venomous danger on the move? She couldn’t be sure. A third part of her pulled again toward Konstantine. At last she’d put the name to the face. And once she’d seen him, her compass forever marked his direction. When she listened through the darkness of her mind, she could smell him, the thick musk of his cologne and the pulse of his heart in the back of her head.

  Stay, she commanded her shaking legs. Don’t be the victim, Lou-blue, her father said. His voice echoed in her bones as if he was beside her, cooing encouragement into her ear. As if he’d never left her. Master this.

  “I’m in charge," she said. All her life she’d been a slave to this greater current.<
br />
  No more.

  I say where we go. Get King. Then my apartment.

  Lou let go of the trunk and plunged through reality’s fabric. She reached out and grabbed the back of King’s coat. He still had his face pressed to the crack of the door, searching the hallway for his chance to escape.

  He sucked in a breath when she yanked him away from the door, but whatever he was about to say was swallowed up by the black ocean stretching between two fixed points in time and space. When they stepped out, they were in her closet. King’s enormous body squished hers. The closet was too small. Grunting, she squeezed through the door. Fresh air hit her full in the face.

  Lights from the buildings along the river danced across her apartment floor. While cabs raced down wide boulevards outside, she crossed the room and removed a painting that hung on the brick wall. A replica of Picasso’s “Girl with a Mandolin.” She’d always loved this picture since the first time she saw it with Aunt Lucy in the MOMA. It was a perfect representation of her being.

  A girl, all broken up, but recognizable.

  That’s what happens to me when I slip through the darkness, she thought. She split into pieces, fed through the cracks and reassembled on the other side.

  She propped the painting against her shin and pressed three bricks on the wall. A click rang out. The façade popped out. She peeled back the edge of the brick, revealing a gray steel safe set into the wall. Lou entered her six-number combination until the safe also clicked open. She shoved aside the extra guns and stacks of cash and grabbed a handful of glow sticks. She also grabbed one of the guns and extra ammo—the kind that exploded when it hit its target, leaving more shrapnel in the body than could be dug out.

  She’d slipped it off a table at a gun show. The dealer, a man missing one of his front teeth, the other half-dissolved in blackened decay, hadn’t even seen her do it. She was in and out of the shadows before he could ask her to show ID.

  “I thought you lived in a hovel,” King said. He was enormous. A wall of a man in her studio apartment, craning his neck to absorb the details. “I sort of pictured an abandoned warehouse, maybe a mattress in one corner and enough guns and explosives hanging around to take over New York.”