PRAISE FOR DANIEL JUDSON
“Daniel Judson is so much more than a crime-fiction novelist. He’s a tattooed poet, a mad philosopher of the Apocalypse fascinated with exploring the darkest places in people’s souls.”
—Chicago Tribune on The Water’s Edge
“Shamus winner Judson once again successfully mines Long Island’s South Fork for glittering noir nuggets.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Violet Hour
“A suspense masterpiece.”
—Bookreporter.com on The Violet Hour
“Judson hits you with a 25,000-volt stun gun in chapter one and doesn’t let up until the satisfying end.”
—Alafair Burke, author of 212, on Voyeur
“Judson is a thoroughly accomplished writer.”
—Kirkus Reviews on Voyeur
“A searing, brooding look at the bleak side of the Hamptons . . . an intense novel.”
—South Florida Sun-Sentinel on The Darkest Place
“Action packed. Loss and redemption rule in Shamus Award–winning Daniel Judson’s third novel, set in Southampton nights so cold that they could cool off a reader sizzling in this summer’s heat. It’s noir on ice.”
—USA Today on The Darkest Place
“This taut thriller is far from predictable, and its dark and mysterious plot suits Judson’s understated writing style.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Poisoned Rose
OTHER TITLES BY DANIEL JUDSON
The Agent Series
The Temporary Agent
The Gin Palace Trilogy
The Poisoned Rose
The Bone Orchard
The Gin Palace
The Southampton Trilogy
The Darkest Place
The Water’s Edge
Voyeur
Stand-Alone Titles
The Betrayer
Avenged
The Violet Hour
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Daniel Judson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503940772
ISBN-10: 1503940772
Cover design by Rex Bonomelli
for my family, those born to and those acquired
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
PART TWO
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
PART THREE
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
PART FOUR
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
PART FIVE
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
PART SIX
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
About the Author
Prologue
Tom awakens to the sound of barking in the distance.
It takes all he has to keep from immediately sitting up, as any abrupt movement will disturb the sleeping woman beside him.
Not just asleep but deeply asleep, judging by the length and rhythm of her breathing.
Stella’s state is the first thing Tom determines. The second thing he does is tune in to the far-off noise so he can assess its nature.
Is it the frantic, endless barking of a dog whose territory has been crossed by another animal? Or is it a more aggressive snapping, an indication of an intruder somewhere nearby? Maybe even more than one, possibly a team of men currently heading in their direction?
Men coming to kill them.
But Tom doesn’t hear any of that.
The commotion coming from the farm two miles to the south is the lazy yelping of a hound bothered by the full moon.
The barking isn’t anything to worry about.
And anyway, that isn’t what had actually awakened him.
Tom checks the clock on his bedside table and sees that it is a few minutes past one a.m.
He has slept for three hours and will need to get up in less than three more.
That is, if he can fall back to sleep right away, which isn’t always the case postdream.
Out of habit, he confirms that his .45-caliber pistol is where he left it, to the right of the clock, and that the old Marlin Camp carbine they had found upon moving in is still leaning in the corner.
Chambered in .45 as well, the Marlin has a sixteen-inch barrel that, while offering some accuracy at a range that the handgun can’t, makes it particularly well suited for close-quarter combat.
For Tom, the real plus is that the carbine not only uses the same ammo as his pistol—a well-used 70-series Colt 1911—but also accepts the same magazine.
A significant convenience in the numerous scenarios for which he and Stella have prepared.
On the nightstand next to the pistol lie a half dozen fully loaded McCormick Power Mags, which Tom can easily gather together in an emergency. Next to them is a 600-lumen pocket flashlight.
He has long since come to terms with the fact that the need for such weaponry has extended into his civilian life. A peaceful wanderer once, he has now in Stella something he can never lose.
After a moment, Tom carefully rises from their bed and heads toward the bathroom to wash his face.
The nightmare always leaves him in a cold sweat.
Their apartment is above the small breakfast-and-lunch place that he and Stella run together—she waits on the eight booths and ten-seat counter; he buses tables, washes dishes, and handles repairs and whatever else the business needs.
Open six days a week, serving from five a.m. to two p.m.
The staff is Stella, himself, and a gifted short-order cook named Krista, who came looking for work right when they feared they’d never find anyone. The timing of her appearance has always struck Tom as too good to be true, but such things do occur. And anyway, more than just qualified, she is, in Stella’s words, capable, and that is what mattered, that is what they needed.
Stella would never have purchased the building had Tom not possessed the variety of skills necessary to bring the place up to code.
As a onetime US Navy Seabee, Tom could easily do whatever needed to be done, and yet a month’s work—day and night, seven days a week—was what it had taken to get the d
ilapidated structure ready for both business and personal occupancy.
During that time Tom had also made a number of specific modifications to their bare-minimum living quarters, among them a makeshift safe room, which he’d rendered bulletproof by securing old phone books and encyclopedias to its door and walls, after which he’d covered the protective layer with ceramic tiles.
It had taken a week after completing that work for Tom and Stella to get the restaurant stocked and ready to open.
Their living area remains a work in progress, but these days they are more concerned with security—financial as well as tactical—than comfort. Stella had only a small amount of savings left over after closing on the property, and much of that was used up during the renovations.
The little she has left is all they will have to run on, should that time come.
In the bathroom, Tom opens the tap, knowing he’ll need to wait a good half minute before the water begins its transition from frigid cold to hot. Looking into the cracked mirror over the sink, he is reminded of the nightmare by the sorrow evident in his eyes.
A nightmare he has been having with increasing frequency over the past year.
He had learned in the months following the murder of his mother and sister that four men had entered his childhood home that long-ago night.
And that is always how his dream opens—four men exiting their vehicle and walking toward the darkened and unguarded house, weapons concealed by long coats.
And then the men quietly enter the house.
Tom had been fifteen at the time, away at the military school his father had insisted he attend. And his father, an engineer, had been off on one of his many business trips.
This one had been a last-minute business trip. So, the two women who back then were Tom’s world had been left alone, at the mercy of men who had none.
A home invasion gone wrong, according to the police.
Tom’s dream, however, doesn’t end with the men approaching and then breaching his childhood home.
He sees them enter and move as a pack through darkened rooms until they have found their prey.
And he sees his mother and kid sister—a woman and a teenage girl, identical in nearly every way—cornered by the men. The look on his mother’s face is a mixture of anger and resolve.
His beloved kid sister is overtaken by fear.
Each time he wakes, Tom does everything he can to ensure the quick evaporation of the details his unconscious mind forces him to endure.
Details of events that are nothing shy of a horror show.
Based on what witnesses reported at the time, it is believed that the murders occurred soon after the men entered. But soon is relative, and Tom knows full well how terror can turn minutes into hours.
Often what’s left in his mind is not just a memory of the unbearable but also the feeling that he had in fact been there and was a living witness to the sights and sounds and the raw emotions they stirred, helpless to do anything to stop what was unfolding before him.
Tonight’s dream was no exception, and despite the film of cold sweat on his face, Tom decides not to wait for warmer water. Cupping his hands under the faucet, he lets his palms fill, then splashes his face, his head, the back of his neck with the icy flow. He does this several times before finally standing up straight and reaching for the towel hanging on its hook.
Only then does he realize that Stella is standing in the doorway.
She asks whether he’s okay, and he nods, though unconvincingly.
Of course, she knows the reason he is up, but before she can say anything, he starts to tell her that it’s okay, it’s just a dream.
She quickly cuts him off. “We should have kept on moving, Tom. We should have looked for another property, something farther away.” She pauses, then says, “We’re too close here.”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
Tom has no answer.
He can tell by Stella’s reaction that his inability to come up with a quick lie is comforting to her. A year and a half ago, when they began their wandering together, Stella said that what she wanted most was to know everything about Tom, which included a visit to the small town in Vermont where he’d grown up.
A town Tom hadn’t seen since leaving it seventeen years before, when he was all of eighteen, one year of college behind him and no money to continue, nowhere to go but into the military.
They had eventually made it to his small town, and it was as they’d been driving away with every intention of resuming their wandering that they had spotted the building for sale.
Mere miles from where Tom had grown up and where his life had been forever altered, first by the murders of his mother and sister, and then by the death of his father two years later.
Tom’s adult life, therefore, is a journey that began in violence.
A journey that carried him into and through yet more violence, both during and after his eight years of military service.
But it is also a journey that ultimately led him to Stella.
Step by step, decision by decision. Minute by minute, year by year.
What life isn’t the bounding from bad to good, though, all seemingly senseless until the day it suddenly isn’t?
He knows this much.
Tom has long since come to terms with what his life has brought, and with what he has had to do to stay alive.
What he and Stella have both done just to survive.
He’d do that and more again, should he need to.
In this regard, he considers himself a lucky man because his life has now but one purpose.
The recurring dream is a problem, yes. And though he knows that Stella would disagree, he considers it his problem.
Looking at her, Tom says, finally, “Here is where we’re supposed to be, Stella. I believe that.”
“You say that, I know. But you can’t go on like this. The dreams used to be now and then. Then they were once a month. Now it’s at least once a week that you wake up like this. You never had these dreams before we moved in here.”
“I can deal with it.”
“I know, you say that, too.”
“It’ll burn itself out eventually. The same thing happened when I came back from Afghanistan.”
He had dreamed again and again of the grenade that had landed feet from him, of the force of the blast that had, seconds later, sent hot fragments tearing through his flesh, as well as the flesh of the man who at the last moment had lain down between the grenade and Tom.
The man who had almost died saving him.
It had taken five years of living as a drifter for Tom to stop dreaming of that night, and he is certain that in time he will stop dreaming of this, too.
“And if it doesn’t burn itself out?” Stella says.
“We’ll figure out what to do then. Okay?”
She says nothing. Tom can tell she is stopping herself from saying what is on her mind. He appreciates her restraint.
Finally, she touches his shoulder. “Jesus, your shirt is soaked. Get out of that and dry off, I’ll get you a clean one.”
Stella leaves. Tom pulls off the T-shirt and lays it over the edge of the tub.
The cold he feels as he heads back to the bedroom is something he has gotten used to. Insulating the upper floor is a project he plans on getting to before the summer heat.
If they are lucky and business continues to be as good as it is, they may actually be pulling out a profit by then.
Stella has retrieved a clean T-shirt from his makeshift dresser—a cardboard box. She turns and watches Tom as he walks to her. Her eyes immediately go to his scarred torso.
She tells him that his workouts are paying off, that he is looking even stronger than he was when they first met.
Tom understands that while her comment is intended as an earnest compliment, it is also an attempt to assure him that she no longer sees his scars when she looks at him—those made by the grenade fragments and tho
se left by his many surgeons.
It is his evident fitness alone that draws her eyes.
He knows that this isn’t the entire truth, but it is as close as they come to lying to each other, and for that he is grateful.
Stella, too, is stronger looking. In the past year alone, she has packed on close to ten pounds of muscle—an achievement made even more impressive by the fact that, at the age of forty-six, she is, in her words, no kid.
Hers is the kind of physique earned by working with one’s own body weight—push-ups, pull-ups, burpees, dive bombers—and always after a daily five-mile run.
Physical conditioning is simply another of their many rituals performed in the name of security.
Should one day their enemies—or what worries Tom most, enemies posing as friends—find them, they may need to run.
And if they can’t run, then stand and fight.
Either way, they long ago resolved that they would prepare themselves for whatever may come.
Heart and body and soul.
And not hesitate for a moment to leave behind everything for which they have worked so hard.
Back in bed, Tom holds Stella close until her breathing tells him that sleep has again found her.
It will be a while, he knows, before it reclaims him as well. So he lies there in the moonlit room, hoping not only for a dreamless sleep, but also for another day without any sign of those he has no desire to see again.
It has been a year and a half since he last heard from them.
From James Carrington and Sam Raveis and the man Tom knows only as “the Colonel.”
It has been a year and a half since he killed for them—had been given no choice but to kill, and to do so more than once.
In the deepest part of himself, Tom hopes that he will never hear from them, and that every day that passes without contact means it is that much more likely they never will come looking for him.
That in their time of desperate need, they will wisely seek out others for help.
An odd thing, Tom muses, for a man to hope that he has been forgotten by all who have ever known him.
But this is precisely the thing for which he prays as he patiently waits for just a few more hours of precious rest.
PART ONE
The Rogue Agent (The Agent Series) Page 1
