Cindy returned and was shocked when the door swung open, as she barely touched it with her key card.
She entered, calling Billy’s name, and was surprised to hear the shower water still running.
“I’m back, Billy!”
There was no answer. When she looked over at the door, she saw a red handprint above the knob.
“Billy?”
Cindy dropped the bag of food and rushed toward the bathroom, but she halted as a figure emerged from the closet, a figure holding a bloody kitchen knife.
Cindy staggered backwards and stared. “Daddy?”
Joe Preston smiled at his daughter. He looked terrible. Preston had barely eaten or slept in over a week and gray stubble littered his pale face.
He was still wearing the same clothes he’d worn on the evening he’d left Rossetti’s property, and the sleeves of his shirt were wet, while the front of it was torn and speckled with blood.
His eyes held a glint of madness and his nose was bloodied and sat crooked, having been broken during a recent struggle; a struggle he had won, thanks to the blade he carried.
“I remembered. You always talked about taking that helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon someday. I remembered, kept watch, and I followed you back here. Did you like it, baby? Was it as much fun as you hoped it would be?”
Cindy gazed at the bathroom door and then at the bloody knife, before sinking to her knees.
“What have you done, Daddy? What have you done?”
“Shh, it’ll be okay now, baby. Hank O’Grady, he, he, he fired me… he fired me on the phone, but, but now, now he’ll have to take me back, because I’ve found you and I’m bringing you home.”
Cindy cried out Billy’s name in an anguished tone that was more scream than word.
“Biiiilllllly!”
Again, there was no answer, and the room filled with the sound of weeping, as Cindy sank into despair.
48
Down Time
WEEKS LATER
In a private bungalow in the Florida Keys, Tanner watched the young woman he was with rise naked from the bed and pad toward the shower.
She called back over her shoulder, her long, auburn curls framing her face and accentuating her green eyes.
“I’m hungry, baby. Can we eat soon?”
“Yeah, I’ll throw some fish on the grill.”
“Thank you, lover, and I’ll make a salad.”
Tanner returned her smile. Her name was Maggie. She was a dental assistant from New Jersey and he’d been shacking up with her for two days after meeting her at a bar in Miami.
Before Maggie, there was Pamela, and Jessica, Lila, and several others.
Tanner was resting, revitalizing himself after his time in prison, while preparing for battle with the Conglomerate, which he knew would come.
He had gone against their wishes and killed Rossetti. They would consider it impertinence and seek to punish him and make an example of him as well.
Tanner had regained the weight he’d lost in prison and was fit and ready for battle. He was an independent contractor and planned to always remain so, but he knew the Conglomerate liked owning things, such as people.
He had always known that someday he and the Conglomerate would clash, and he had prepared for it. In fact, he welcomed it, for in the long run it would prove highly profitable.
Or, they would kill him.
Tanner never feared death. He was death, and he had delivered it to more targets than anyone else in his profession.
Tanner joined Maggie in the shower, and afterwards, they emerged cleaned, sated, and with an appetite for food and wine.
Maggie poured the drinks. As she started on the salad, Tanner took out the yellowfin tuna he’d bought from a local fisherman the day before, and removed the cutlets from the old newspaper they were wrapped in.
When Maggie joined him on the patio minutes later, she saw him sitting by the grill, the flame ready, but the fish forgotten and just sitting unwrapped atop the table.
Maggie sat on his lap and ran a hand through his hair as she studied his face.
“Thomas, what’s wrong?”
Maggie knew him as Thomas Willis. He’d been using the alias since leaving Vegas.
Tanner looked at her. She was a beautiful woman, and the feel of her, the weight of woman, it felt comforting to him. Although he was a loner, at that moment, he was glad he wasn’t alone.
“Nothing’s wrong, why?”
“I don’t know. You just had this strange look on your face.”
“Is the salad ready?”
“Yes, and hey, tomorrow is my last day of vacation. Why don’t we go to Miami?”
“Why not?” Tanner said. A few moments later, he rose to grill the fish.
49
So Close
Sara moved with furtiveness toward Tanner’s bungalow.
It was 2:28 in the morning and she was hoping to catch him asleep and unaware.
It had taken her weeks to track down this alias of Tanner’s, weeks of endless searching, detective work, and false leads.
The lock on the patio door proved to be no obstacle, and Sara slid the door open with great care, lest it emit a squeak and warn her prey.
When there was enough room to ease though she did so, and moved with stealth past the living room, down a short hallway, and saw that the door to the bedroom was open.
She stood to the right of the doorway with her back pressed against the wall and listened, while filtering out the lapping of the waves from the beach outside.
The sound of breathing reached her ears, although it was ever so faint, but she could tell it was the soft steady rhythm that accompanied sleep.
She could also tell that it came from two people.
Sara entered the room low, then headed toward the bed in a sideways gait. If Tanner was faking sleep or awakened suddenly, she wanted to give him a narrow target to hit.
Two forms lay atop the bed naked, amid tangled sheets. The woman, Maggie, lay on her back, exposing her breasts. The man was facedown, his right hand hidden beneath the pillow. Sara imagined that it gripped a gun even in sleep.
As she aimed her weapon at the man’s torso, she turned on the bedside lamp.
“Wake up and die, Tanner.”
Maggie startled awake and gawked at the gun in Sara’s hand. “What’s going on?” she said, as the man beside her stirred.
Sara jammed the gun into the man’s ribs and he jerked awake, turned over, and scrambled back against the wicker headboard while pointing at the gun.
“Shit! What’s happening?”
Sara lowered the gun to her side. The man wasn’t Tanner.
“Where’s Tanner?”
The man looked blank and Maggie shrugged.
“I don’t know anyone named Tanner,” Maggie said.
Sara sighed in frustration. “Thomas Willis, he’s calling himself Thomas Willis.”
Maggie swallowed hard. “Oh my God, are you Thomas’s wife? I didn’t know he was married.”
“I’m not his wife. Now, where is he?”
“He left. It was after lunch. He just said he had something to do and left.”
“Is he coming back soon?”
“He didn’t say, but he did say I could stay here until tomorrow. I didn’t break in or anything.”
“Who’s this?” Sara said, as she looked at the man. He was holding a pillow over his crotch and seemed more frightened than the woman was.
“This is Brad. We met at the bar in the hotel. Thomas was gone, I was alone, and I figured… Thomas said I should make myself at home.”
“Do you have any idea where he went or when he’ll come back?”
“No, I don’t, but he packed up everything and this place is only rented for another two days.”
Sara left them without another word and returned outside, where she walked down to the shoreline and gazed up at the stars.
“Goddamn it, Tanner. Where are you?”
50
COLORADO, EIGHTEEN HOURS LATER
Tanner had come across the story when he unwrapped the fish from the old newspaper. The article gave few details, but it was the headline that caught his attention.
MISSING COLORADO TEEN KILLS FATHER, SELF, IN MURDER-SUICIDE, AFTER FATHER SLAYED BOYFRIEND
He figured that Cindy must have used the gun he’d given her, the one he told her she might need someday.
Tanner checked the straps on his backpack, tightened them, and began the hike. The trek took over an hour, and while he walked it, he remembered Cindy and recalled her innocence.
He had shed no tears over Cindy’s death.
It was not his way.
His way was different.
His way was final.
When Tanner reached his position, he dropped his gear and removed the small spray can he would need to send a message.
He has to know. I want him to know why.
Tanner walked on to complete his first task, and when he returned, he readied his rifle.
It was an Accuracy International L115A3 sniper rifle. In the hands of an expert, the rifle had an effective range of just over a mile, a limit that Tanner had tested in the past… with success.
He lay flat atop a hill, calculated the elevation in relation to the target, and factored in the wind, which fortunately was quite still, a rarity given that he was firing across an empty field.
Normally, he would take several shots to ensure that he was in range, but he knew he wouldn’t miss. No, he wouldn’t miss the shot, and it would only take one.
Hank O’Grady slapped his son on the back as he escorted Ricky and his date outside.
It seemed Ricky had recovered from the shock of Cindy’s death and moved on to a woman named Amanda.
Hank O’Grady liked Amanda, and it didn’t hurt that her father was nearly as rich as he was.
The three of them had dinner together, but the couple had plans, and O’Grady walked them to Ricky’s car, a new Mercedes convertible, which Ricky would garage during winter, before switching to his new Chevy Tahoe.
O’Grady saw the couple off with a wave and headed inside.
When he entered his office, he paused in the doorway and puzzled over the writing marring the picture window behind his desk. Large block letters were written there in what looked like red spray paint.
O’Grady moved closer to stand before the desk, where he read the words aloud.
“This is for Cindy,” he said, then took note that the dot above the i in the word Cindy resembled a bull’s-eye.
He got it. Too late to do anything about it, to duck or even twitch, but O’Grady got it and Tanner saw the knowledge in the man’s eyes through his scope.
The bullet passed through the window, entered O’Grady’s head and obliterated his features. When it exited his skull, it left little more than a bloody stump behind, and O’Grady’s headless corpse tumbled to the floor.
Tanner stood away from the rifle, stepped out of a pair of black coveralls and removed latex gloves.
He would carry these items into the surrounding woods and bury them. It was all evidence now and he would make better time down the mountain without the rifle’s weight.
Tanner shrugged into his pack, headed for the trail, and thought of the future, for in the past, in the past lived the dead.
BOOK 2
KILL IN PLAIN SIGHT – A TANNER NOVEL – BOOK 2
Tanner returns and the Conglomerate wants him dead.
With their resources and vast troops of lethal thugs, the Conglomerate assumed that killing one man would be easy. They were wrong!
While Tanner is just one man, he is the last man you want to go to war with, and when he teams up with another target of the Conglomerate, he doubles his chances of surviving.
But this is war and the Conglomerate plays to win. Enter Lars Gruber, possibly the greatest assassin in the world. Now Gruber has set his sights on Tanner.
It’s hit man versus hit man and only one can survive.
51
Tanner To The Rescue
Tanner jammed the tip of his blade into the base of the first man’s skull, causing the second man to swear in surprise. After ripping the blade free, Tanner pivoted and sliced open the second man’s throat.
That move kept the man from shouting, while also causing him to abandon all thoughts about the gun he was reaching for. His hands flew to his throat in a feeble attempt to stem the rich gush of blood.
Tanner then stepped over the body of the first thug, even as the second thug slid down along the side of the car he and the other man had arrived in, an old Cadillac with New York plates.
Once he was past the men, Tanner stood in the open and waved both arms in a beckoning gesture toward a camera, which was set high above a door marked, RECEIVING.
He was in the town of Washington, New Jersey, and it was just after midnight on a Sunday.
Tanner was in the town’s warehouse district, which consisted of over a dozen new monolithic buildings that were roughly double the size of a football field.
The building he stood before housed an electrical supply chain’s main warehouse and there was a man hiding inside named Tim Jackson.
Jackson was a computer hacker with a price on his head. However, Tanner wasn’t there to kill him, but to save him, and to do that he would have to eliminate the hit squad that was after Jackson, a team of killers sent by the Conglomerate.
Tanner lowered his arms and quit waving. Either Jackson had seen him take out the two men and clear a path for escape or he hadn’t. If he wasn’t watching, there were three more men to deal with, one each for the three remaining sides of the building.
The two men he had just killed had been tasked with keeping an eye on the rear of the huge building, which had over sixty bay doors, two exit doors and a wide metal door that went up on rollers. Had Tim Jackson exited by any of those doors, he would have been cut down and killed.
The other three sides of the building had only one door each to exit by. The door on the left end of the building led to a side parking lot and a short stretch of grass dividing the property from its neighbor, which was another massive warehouse.
The door on the right led to a field of grass that was bordered by a fifteen-foot-high sound wall, beyond which was the New Jersey Turnpike, and in the front of the building were glass doors leading to a lobby and the office area beyond.
Cameras gave a view of all sides and Tanner assumed that Jackson had seen the hit squad approach and surround him. That meant Jackson was either glued to the monitors in the security office or was hiding in the warehouse.
Hiding wouldn’t have done Jackson any good, the five men would have entered the building, blocked all exits and hunted him down. But now the men had become the hunted, and it was Tanner who hunted them.
Tanner stripped off the black hoodie he’d been wearing. The second man, the man with the gashed throat, had spewed blood all over it, and Tanner needed to change.
The first man wore a New York Yankees cap along with a matching jacket. Tanner stripped them off the dead man and put them on, pulling the cap low.
The man had also been wielding a sawed-off shotgun. Tanner picked it up, checked the load, and carried it with the barrel pointed toward the ground, as he headed to the right side of the building.
Tanner walked with his head lowered slightly to obscure his face. He hoped that the jacket and cap would cause the man stationed on the right side of the building to assume he was the man he’d taken them from.
It worked, and Tanner made it within twenty feet of the man before he heard him speak in a hushed tone.
“Shit, you ain’t Mikey.”
“Mikey’s dead,” Tanner whispered, as he dropped the shotgun and brought out a silenced pistol.
The first shot caught the man just in front of the left ear, while the second round entered his open mouth and exited in a spray of blood. The body made even less sound than the silenced shots
as it tumbled to the grass.
Tanner scooped up the shotgun and headed toward the front, where he hoped to deceive yet again.
It was not to be.
The man guarding the front doors was sharp and likely the crew leader. He was a man in his forties with a graying goatee. He pegged Tanner as a phony within moments of spotting him.
Tanner was watching the man from under the bill of the cap. When he saw the man’s gun arm come up, he fired off a blast from the shotgun.
The steel pellets went wide of the man, but they did make him dive behind an air-conditioning unit. Tanner pumped the shotgun and sent a second blast toward the front doors, to shatter the glass, before making his way inside the dark building.
As he went behind the reception desk, he heard the man outside calling for his troops, and then the bitter curses that followed when he discovered that only one of his men remained.
Tanner pushed through the door behind the reception area, moved past rows of desks, then listened at a window that faced the parking lot.
When he heard a new voice speaking in a whisper, he chanced a look out between the slats of the window blind and could see the lower leg of one man jutting out from beyond the air-conditioning unit, as both men hid behind it on their knees.
Tanner took out the silenced gun, pressed its muzzle against the glass, and took aim.
When he pulled the trigger, the scream told him that he had hit the man, and although the wound would be far from fatal, it would still slow the man down and cause him to bleed, and those that bled were often more fearful than dangerous.
The men returned fire, shattering what was left of the window, but Tanner was already rushing back toward the entrance, while pumping the shotgun as he ran.
The Tanner Series - Books 1-11: Tanner - The hit man with a heart Page 15
