The smart thing, the sensible thing would be to sit in the car for five minutes. Wait. Put on something soothing on the stereo. Something gentle. Or calm radio. It was a rental car. They have radios. I put my phone on the cradle.
Then I jammed the car into drive and floored the gas pedal. Cutting right across the traffic, I made a huge u-turn. Dust flew and the tires howled. I took off at speed. Just before the lights changed I took the first right. Then the first right again.
I raced down the block and parked near the end. I may have been conspicuous but the gray rental Toyota was anonymous. The mid-range saloon was as invisible as you could get. As long as I’d got parked without her cop seeing me, I should be safe to wait here. I was sure they were going pass the end of the street. Should be in about a minute and a half.
Great thinking, I told myself, As long as you can keep this up, you can follow them all over town. Right. The cop is never going to notice the same Toyota at every intersection. Especially after the genius bit of discretion where I carved up the street back there. I was acting like a hormonal teenager at the height of a critical outbreak of acne. All I needed to complete the picture was a random stranger to start a fight with.
Are you seriously trying to get arrested? Okay. I let my head cool for a few moments. If they passed this way I would just watch. Why? Just to know. Information gathering, intelligence, is always a basis for action.
There they were. Crossing at the lights. Headed toward me. The phone rang. I’d gotten used to being on my own. The car’s phone system was set to auto answer. Distracted, I didn’t stop it in time. The screen said ‘number withheld,’ but I knew who it would be.
“Can you talk?” Arden didn’t ever say his name.
Resigned, I said, “What?”
“There’s another piece of work. Nearby.” I didn’t say anything. I was looking down. The couple were passing just ten feet in front of the car. I was trying to watch. Without appearing to watch.
Arden said, “Nearby that is if you haven’t left yet.” There was something like a bum note in his voice. When he said it I got the feeling he knew where I was. Maybe he could have gotten a tracker on my phone. I wondered if he could do that.
Could I fix it just by getting another phone, or would I need a new chip? There was a guy I could call.
As the couple passed, I saw the cop was leaning his face toward hers. He’s trying, I thought. Well, I couldn’t blame him. It did make me want to detach his head, though.
Arden said, “Are you listening? Do I have your attention?”
“Of course.”
“It’s no more than sixty miles away. I need an early delivery. I’m messaging you the details now.” I pulled the phone off the cradle. The message screen was a URL. A link to a document on the web. That was how Arden liked to do that stuff. Through a fucking ‘cloud server.’ Whatever the fuck a fucking cloud server was.
The pair were walking away. I watched their backs. As his arm went onto her shoulder, then slipped down to her waist, I drew as slow a breath as I could.
I asked Arden, “Are the two things linked?”
“This and the one yesterday?” He was stalling me. I hadn’t found Arden an easy man to like. He was evasive in all the wrong ways. He put me on my guard always. Rubbed me the wrong way. I waited. He didn’t answer. It made me suspect that they were. Why the fuck wouldn’t he just say?
Eventually, he said, “If you know there’s no point me telling you. And if you don’t it’s best we keep it that way.”
I shook my head. Told him, “I’ll read the material. Get back to you later.”
“Early delivery. I’ll add something to the advance.”
“How much?” Farther down the street I saw the pair climb a few steps up to a diner. He held the door for her. Then he looked around. I didn’t like that too much.
After was a long pause, Arden said, “An extra fifty percent.”
“No,” Arden had shown his hand and he knew it. “Double.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Alright. I’ll get the first part to you straight away. Same bank?”
“No. Make it a different outlet.”
“Early delivery. Forty-eight hours.”
I said, “I’ll have to see what’s involved.”
“Non-negotiable.” He hung up. What if I said ‘No’? Would he have someone else ready? My guess was that he would. I hoped my judgement was working well. To say that my feelings were complicated right then would have been an understatement.
HEN I SAW him leaned against the City Square park railings my blood jumped. I was about ready to run. Then I saw Flip.
Had Flip told me he would be coming by the library today? I had no recollection of it. It couldn’t have been at a worse moment. With the man right across the road. I was sure there was no way for Flip to know it but seeing him practically bounding toward me reminded me, or maybe it made me realize for the first time, that I was a criminal.
Technically… well, no. Not ‘technically.’ Actually. Really. I witnessed a serious crime and I failed to report it. I was an accessory after the fact. An accessory to a murder.
An accessory running into a detective on the steps of the library. When the killer was right there across the street. When, if Flip had got there two steps later, I would have been running to grab him. Sprinting to throw myself at the killer. Throw myself at him literally.
My blood drained from my cheeks as I realized it, but that was the picture in my head. That’s what would have happened.
I would have dashed across the street. Flung myself onto him. Into his arms. My lips on his. Wrapped my arms around his hard body. And clung to him. The thought made my head swim. Flip was saying something. All I could do was nod. He was going to take me for coffee. There was no way I could reasonably refuse.
He would want to know why it was that I closed up the library. I never do that. I never go out without leaving someone in charge. When there isn’t anyone else, like today, I take sandwiches, make tea, and stay until closing time. Right now I dreaded him asking me anything.
If he asked me my name or the time I would crumble. Flip does have that policeman’s way of asking questions, too. If you tease or give him an evasive answer, he’s nice about it, but he’ll come back to it. He can’t leave a question unanswered.
The feelings I had for that assassin frightened me. Deep down. It started with sex, for certain. Even I knew that. But there was something darker as well. In the back of my mind I knew it, but I wasn’t letting that out. Not even to let it run around where only I could see it. It could stay in the dark with all its nasty little friends.
I had to consider carefully, though. Could a thing, an affair, a romance—I didn’t think I’d ever even thought that word before, except where it’s used to mean a kind of fiction. A guilty pleasure genre for so many good people. Too near the mark for me, though. Too close to home. Thrillers, fantasy and sci-fi, crime were all the fiction I dared to be immersed in. Even historical romances were like hot buttons for me.
So, could I have an affair with a man like him and keep it to being one of those brief flings? Even thinking about it made me feel dumb. He wasn’t going to hang around for a romance, much less an ‘affair’, whatever one of those really was. He wouldn’t be in town long enough for so much as a ‘thing’ and I should stop trying to kid myself about it.
What I was imagining was just the kind of lust storm that people are swept away by in hard-boiled detective stories and fast, brittle black and white movies. Come to think of it, those are usually fatal to one or both parties.
My mind swerved away again. Anyway, how could I ever ignore or pass up the way he made me feel? That waterfall chasm that opened inside me when I saw him. Both times I saw him. And never mind the way he made me feel, what about the way he feels. The hard heat of his strong trunk. The insistent ridge of pulse that threatened to impale me.
Up until then, seeing Flip from time to time had always made me feel edgy, like I was skati
ng close to something dangerous. Until last night. Now everything had changed. I was seeing Flip from the other end of a telescope. Now he was a toy soldier. A harmless, eager puppy. A puppy who could put me in jail. I felt nauseous.
He steered me into the diner. It was the place we always went. Now, mounting the steps and walking into the room, the green gingham and pine and the white walls, even the smell of the coffee all seemed somehow unfamiliar. Distant. I felt like I’d come as someone else.
Flip'sF face glowed as he showed me to a table, held a chair out for me. He sat across and leaned over. Like it was the greatest fun, he was telling me about a body they’d found. And how odd it was. The alderman who was just about to be interviewed, ‘Interrogated, really,’ but he made me promise not to tell. The FBI were in town. They’d come to interrogate him.
And all of a sudden he ups and dies. Flip laughed about it. He didn’t know if anything would come of it. He and his division were all waiting for the autopsy. The word gave me a chill, thinking of Beary being opened up like a sports bag. Drained. Having his organs taken out and weighed. The contents of his stomach analyzed.
I asked how much detail they would go into. That made Flip scowl. He looked at me sideways. I said I’d seen Beary. Recently. In the library. I felt like adding, with the lead piping. But I didn’t.
Everything I could think of I tried, any distraction that would keep my thoughts away from the man, the killer in the library. In Beary’s office. His strong hands. His scent.
Flip had started to come into the library a couple of months before. The first time, he was looking for material in the newspaper archives for an investigation. I don’t know if he found what he needed, but after that he became a pretty regular visitor. He liked to read history, mostly military history and he enjoyed crime fiction, too.
I didn’t think that was the real reason for his later visits, though. He’d managed to get all he needed to read before he discovered me behind the desk. He was a good-looking guy. Smart and very presentable. I let him take me for coffee a few times. Enough times that I knew he’d like us to do more. He talked about dancing, the movies. He mentioned dinner once.
So far I hadn’t ever taken the bait. I liked him well enough, but that’s all. And I was in no doubt, what he was looking for was more than just a little companionship. All the way I’ve been clear with him. It brought me a little tingle of excitement to know a detective.
He offered to take me shooting more than once. “I could give you some instruction. If you’d like that.” I didn’t respond. Handling a gun would definitely be sexy. I never felt like getting sexy with Flip.
More than once I wished I did. But you can’t make up feelings. Maybe some people can. Not me.
And, letting something start up with Flip would feel like a kind of settling. Especially now. Anyway, I had gotten this far without settling, so I wasn’t ready to start with him or anyone else.
On occasion he would tell me a little snippet, bit of gossip about the investigations he was working on. I had the impression he saved up little snippets. Probably polished them. Certainly he sanitized them for my delicate sensibilities. That was a shame. If he hadn’t, we might have made more progress in the directions he’d like.
He was a nice guy. I once told him that he was a ‘Johnson.’ He liked the double meaning, although, if you take it that way, I wouldn’t be so sure that it was a compliment.
Sitting by the window, nursing my coffee mug, across the red gingham covered table, all that I could think about was how I should have run. Not thought at all and just dashed to the man waiting for me. I stirred my coffee and did everything I could to listen to what Flip was saying to me. I could hardly catch a word of it. We sat across the little diner table, but there were oceans between us.
The most important moment of my life was fading into the past.
HE DOCUMENTS FROM Arden came into my phone. I tried to get my mind off the girl with the strawberry blonde curls and the heavy wool plaid skirt. I looked through the pages. Big guy. 260 pounds. Could be slow. All that weight might not be flab, though.
There were a dozen or so photographs. All grainy or pixel-buzzed. Definitely a mean looking fucker. Regular hangouts – only two. A dive bar and a truckstop. Oh, fuck. He was a pawnbroker.
It meant that he held, carried, and hoarded cash. And that meant there would be people trying to kill him and rob him constantly. So he would be wary, cautious, and armed to the teeth at all times. Every part of his property and his home was going to be multiple alarmed. They would all be covered by surveillance cameras from every possible angle. All of his vehicles would be, too. Most likely he’d have two cameras and an alarm in the fucking john.
Not even to mention that his store was certain to be packed with guns and lethal fucking knives. You could bet that his coat and his pants and even his fucking socks would be jammed up with weapons.
So I tried to think. Sketch out some options. A direct confrontation in his home or his place of business would be hopelessly risky. Too much chance of me getting on camera and identified. I had a dislike for plans that involve disguises or hairpieces. Anyway, facial recognition is just getting too sharp for a hard-working contract killer to rely on makeup these days.
A car crash was out. They’re always way too unreliable. Not unless your target commutes every day along a cliff top road. I didn’t want the chance, not the slightest possibility of any miraculous recovery. That would be very inconvenient. When I killed someone, I was determined they should stay reliably dead. I liked a high level of confidence on that. I considered it a key feature of the service.
I hated sniper hits. They were a great tactic in combat. Safe, distant. Clean. In the civilian world, investigators get all excited to know about the shot. Where it came from. Who fired it.
Still, your man the pawnbroker was a hard-working sleazebag. A tirelessly dedicated douche. I was hoping he might be exposed by some vulnerable recreational pursuits.
My thoughts kept on drifting back to the librarian. It was no good. I would have to get myself away from there or I would risk turning into a sulky teenager and fall to moping.
Maybe I could deal with the pawnbroker a quick way. I roared out of town and ripped the sixty miles up the highway to Gainboro. On the way I called a guy from a gas stop payphone. My guy was called Jackson. At least he was to me, on the phone. He put me onto a guy. There’s always a guy. Jackson told me to call his guy ‘Flint,’ and he said, “Stay sharp,” when we hung up. That put me ono my guard.
I gave the guy, ‘Flint,’ a list of what I’d need. That I’d let him know later that day for sure. He’d have to come meet me outside of Gainboro.
He groaned. “That doesn’t give me long, man.” I thought about offering him some hints on customer relations in a service industry. Not having too much time to spare I held on to them for now. I thought perhaps I might pass them along if we met up later on.
It was no skin off my nose that he wanted to go through his business pissing people off. Except, people who did that were apt to fuck up and blame other people. That made them doubly apt to get caught, too. Pissing off the wrong people can have that effect.
People who got caught tended to be asked probing questions. Especially about their customers. Captives with a mind to blame others usually rolled over pretty fast. I’d have to give that some consideration.
A few productive minutes with Google street view got me fast results about my douche du jour. The target’s place of business was out of the way. Isolated, on a dark street. I saw a likely location where I could set up. By the road, some bushes, away from the lights. It looked nearly perfect.
In Gainboro, I visited a few bars. Had a couple of useful conversations. That and a few bills got me all I needed to know about my sleazebag. Turns out he was the arms supplier of choice for the local drug gangs. Also a go-to guy for kiddie porn. Kept savage dogs, too. Underfed them. Nice guy.
Killian: The Hitman’s Virgin Page 3
