A Devil's Bargain

by Jonathan Watkins

  “Whoa,” Dick protested.

  Krane took one oddly large step backward and collided with Carmen, pinning the slight woman between his back and the library’s wall. That was when Luther knew something was very wrong.

  “Dick!” Carmen shouted.

  It was too late.

  In a single confident sweep of his arm, Krane pulled a pistol out of his waistband, leveled it at Dick Sims, and pulled the trigger.

  The interior of Dick’s head gusted out.

  Krane’s arm swept sideways and only stopped when the gun was aimed directly at Luther’s chest.

  Krane’s expression was triumphant, even exultant.

  Three gunshots erupted from behind Krane and his gun dropped to the floor.

  Four more gunshots rang out. Krane spasmed. Gouts of viscera poured out of the holes that appeared in his shirt. The exultant shine in his eyes winked out and he collapsed across the body of Dick Sims.

  Carmen Ras ejected the magazine from her sidearm and slapped a new one in its place. Luther heard her draw in a long, shuddering breath as she stepped away from the wall, took aim, and fired a final shot into the back of John Krane’s head.

  “Holy shit,” Joe yelped and Luther saw that the big man had only barely managed to get up out of his chair. It had all happened that fast. One moment. One moment in time and two men were dead on the floor.

  He followed Joe’s eyes and stared at Carmen.

  Calmly, she holstered her gun and stared back at the two men.

  “Time to leave,” she said.

  * * *

  Darren turned off US 24 and aimed the Lexus east into Bloomfield Hills. Beside him, Issabella glanced at her phone and said, “Three miles, then left.”

  The houses on either side of them were large, immodest affairs. Shiny new cars sat in their driveways and the lawns were immaculately green.

  “You know, I’ve never actually been out here,” she said. “It seems nice.”

  “This is the poor side of town, Izzy.”

  “Okay, then.”

  After three miles, she yelped in time for him to slow down fast and make the left turn.

  “Darren, you need to focus.”

  “I am focused. That’s exactly what I am.”

  The homes grew less frequent, the lawns more expansive. Sculpted privacy hedges obscured the mansions that dotted the road, even if they couldn’t hide the shingled peaks of the behemoths. Shadows were growing longer across the earth, and Darren realized that the day was nearly done. Evening was creeping close. He yawned like a wild beast and kept on.

  “What if we can’t get in?” she said.

  “I’m getting in.”

  “Ok, but what if he isn’t there? What if he’s gone?”

  Darren scowled at the notion. He didn’t want to entertain that thought. James Klodd had been resurrected in his mind, no longer a phantom haunting his sleeping hours. He was real and he was here. And Darren meant to be done with him, to be finally free of him.

  “Darren?”

  “If he’s gone we call the FBI. We give everything to Schultz.”

  “Alright. Good. I think that’s right.”

  “And we focus everything on Theresa.”

  “Yes. Okay, one mile and you make a right. Jesus, we’re almost there. My hands are shaking. Are we...we’re making a mistake. We are, aren’t we?”

  Darren looked at her sidelong and saw the indecision and worry on her face.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean this is really dangerous.”

  “He was never some big bad wolf, Izzy,” he said. “He was a sick little creep who grabbed a kid. There’s nothing to be scared of. On his best day, James Klodd wasn’t somebody I was scared of. He’s just a bug in need of a boot.”

  Issabella stifled a laugh with the back of her hand.

  “Thank you,” she said and laughed again.

  “For what?”

  “For that horrible line. A bug in need of a boot? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh. But it feels good to.”

  Her giggling persisted and before he knew it, Darren was grinning. He shook his head at the absurdity of it, and the absurdity of the entire day.

  “I’m not very practiced at tough guy lines,” he admitted.

  “No. No, you’re not. Make the next right and it should be the third driveway on the left side. Ugh. Here we go. We’re doing this, aren’t we?”

  Darren took the right turn and passed the first gated driveway on their left.

  “It looks like we are. Don’t worry. There’s always plan B.”

  “I know. You’re right.”

  He drove another half mile before passing the second gated drive, and then another. Slowly, he brought the Lexus down to a creeping advance as the third gate came into view. It was not like the first two. Those had been wrought iron and bore the initials of their owner’s. They had been fancy, ornamental things.

  This gate, Reginald’s gate, was a steel barricade of thick vertical bars. It looked sturdy enough to withstand an attempt to ram it with a large vehicle. On either side, a high stone wall ran off into the distance.

  Darren rolled his window down and stopped parallel to the gate. The world outside was silent, the air perfectly still.

  “We’re not getting in,” Issabella said. “Look at that thing. You’d think we were sitting outside a federal gold depository.”

  “There’s an intercom on a pole,” he answered and pointed at the box that sat at a level where a driver pulling up could speak into it.

  “Okay. What are you going to say? ‘Darren Fletcher, here to see the psycho killer-in-residence’?”

  Darren leaned out the window and craned his head to peer at the top of the wall. On either side of the gate, video cameras were aimed at the road. As he watched, one of the cameras pivoted slowly around. When it stopped, it was aimed directly at him.

  “Someone sees us,” he said.

  “Oh, good.”

  “You didn’t have to come, Izzy.”

  “Yeah. I did.”

  Darren smiled and waved at the camera.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “Saying hello.”

  He leaned back out of the window and took one of her hands in his.

  “I know we’ve had this conversation before,” he said. “But you really don’t have to keep on with this. You can take the car and go back to Theresa.”

  “Same answer. It will always be the same answer, Darren. Maybe just have that conversation silently in the future. When you get to the part where I tell you I’m sticking at your side, just fill it in for me. It’ll save us time, I think.”

  “Noted.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We’re not getting in.”

  A low, mechanical hum rose up from somewhere inside the stone wall. The gate rattled and slowly began to retract from across the driveway.

  “Shit,” Issabella said.

  Darren guided the Lexus forward and rolled onto the property. The line of asphalt meandered through a thick copse of evergreen, which in turn gave way to a sweep of lawn that rolled away in all directions. Far off, atop the horizon, a sprawling brick mansion stood, its highest peak just touching the sun in its retreat.

  “So, wow, for one,” Issabella said. “And, for two, wasn’t James Klodd a professor or something?”

  “The newspapers kept trying to make him one,” Darren agreed with a bitter note in his voice. “But, no. He was just an adjunct lecturer for first year English classes. I never found a single faculty member who actually remembered him. When I dug into it, it turned out he’d been the assigned moderator for online courses. He never had any human contact with the undergrads. He was just the guy who grades the quizzes. But to h
ear the reporters tell it, he was a tenured gentleman of the Enlightenment hiding a dark and terrible secret. It sold papers.”

  They rolled past sprawling flower beds and rows of ornamental trees, finally coming to a halt behind a black SUV parked in the circular turnaround in front of the mansion.

  “This is not the home of an adjunct lecturer,” she said.

  “No. No, it is not.”

  “I’m going to write down the plate on that.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It seems sleuthy.”

  Darren waited while Issabella produced a pen and slip of paper from her purse. She wrote down the SUV’s license plate and put the pen and paper away again.

  “Okay,” she said and shot him a nervous smile. “Here we are. We’re here. At the killer’s home. Right here. This is us.”

  “You’re the one who insisted you come.”

  “I know. But it’s nerve-racking. Darren, I’m the person who threw up in a trash can the first time I had to get up in front of a judge and say my name. So, on balance, I think a little frayed nerves before barging into a maniac’s mansion is actually progress. Besides, admitting fear isn’t the same as giving into it.”

  She opened her door and got out, so Darren did the same. He thumbed the remote on his key chain. The trunk yawned open.

  “Don’t make him into something he’s not,” he said as he bent down and opened Gil Sharps’s suitcase. “He isn’t some diabolical boogieman, Izzy. If he’s here and we get our hands on him, you’ll see what I mean.”

  “Okay. Good. I feel better.”

  She was still standing near her door, hidden from view by the open trunk. Darren quickly reached out and grabbed the pistol strapped to the underside of the suitcase’s lid. He slipped it into his pants pocket, shut the suitcase, and shut the trunk.

  They walked together up the steps, onto the marble landing, and stood in front of the wide double doors. To the right, a speaker plate with a button beneath it was set into the brick wall. Darren leaned over and pushed the button. He strained to listen, but heard no chime or bell answer from inside.

  “Maybe nobody’s home,” she said.

  Darren tried the button again. When nothing happened, he tried one of the door handles. The door offered no resistance as he pushed it open. They were staring at a marble floored foyer, a crystal chandelier suspended from the vaulted ceiling.

  “Shit,” Issabella said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Luther’s mind kept drifting away, pulling him back five years to the moment in time he knew was the root of his current calamity.

  He was behind his workstation in his office high above Chicago. The day was long since expired and he was running short of reasons not to go home to the silence and emptiness of his condominium three blocks away. Here, he could find distractions. But home? Home was restless tedium or, worse, a solitude so profound that it fostered the one thing he refused to allow himself: self-doubt. Doubt about his position. His judgment. Doubt that perhaps the criticisms his brother persisted in leveling at him had some truth to them.

  Here, buffeted by the firm’s unflagging need for him to make decisions, such self-examination was easily avoided.

  When his phone rang, it was a relief. Home would wait.

  He read the incoming number and lifted the receiver from its cradle.

  “Senator Chalmers, so very good to hear from you, sir.”

  The Senator’s voice, when it came to him, was a venomous growl.

  “Your brother has entangled himself in my family’s affairs, Luther.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No? I find that particularly unlikely. Don’t think to lie to me. Don’t think yourself capable of it. Why is your brother involved in my son’s troubles? Why do I only learn of it from a newspaper, Luther?”

  Luther stood up and began to pace. His thoughts scattered and refused to gather themselves back together. What was this man saying? What possible series of events could have ever collided that they would bring Darren into the orbit of someone as powerful and treacherous as this man?

  He seized on one tact which had always proven safe in the past.

  “Senator, whatever this is, you have my full cooperation and assistance.”

  A rasping chuckle rose in his ear before he finished getting the words out.

  “Your proclivity for bootlicking is reflexive, isn’t it? Good.”

  “Senator—”

  “I will fillet your kin, Luther. Do I have your attention?”

  He stopped pacing. He closed his eyes and saw Darren’s face floating in the darkness.

  “You do,” he said.

  “If he fails my son, if my family name ever appears in connection to this horror show, I will have your brother divided into sections small enough to bait a fishing hook. And every lake trout, every yellow perch and largemouth bass I haul out of the water with him will be neatly wrapped and mailed directly to you.”

  Luther waited a second to be certain the Senator had finished making himself clear. Then he spoke the words that sealed so many future possibilities into awful certainty.

  “Whatever this is about, I swear I will fix it for you.”

  And he had. He had—

  “Boss?”

  Luther blinked. Joe Link was waving his hand in front of Luther’s eyes.

  “Yeah, see, we can’t have you getting wobbly,” Joe said. “So how about you save the daydreaming for some other time when we ain’t trapped in a fucking box.”

  Luther cleared his throat and nodded in agreement.

  “What were you saying? About the windows?”

  They were both standing beside the library’s single window. From here, he could just see the corner of the little cottage where Krane had been keeping Joe hostage. As he peered out the glass, Joe reached out and rapped the pane with his knuckles. It made a dull thud.

  “Security glass. More than an inch thick and bulletproof. I could take a fire axe to it for an hour and the only thing that would break would be my balls. And I’ll wager when Carmen comes back from her search of the house, she’ll confirm all the glass is like this.”

  Luther didn’t need her confirmation.

  “It is,” he said. “The entire house was specially renovated five years ago.”

  Joe furrowed his brow and said, “Who renovates their home with bulletproof windows and steel lock bolts in all the doors?”

  “It isn’t a home, Joe. Not really. It’s a prison. A prison designed around a single prisoner.”

  “James Klodd,” said a voice that was nearly as familiar to him as his own. He felt his mouth grow dry and his skin flush hot, overcome with sudden disquiet.

  He turned toward the library’s doorway and stared.

  * * *

  Darren stepped into the library and pulled his eyes off of his brother long enough to take Joe Link’s measure. The man looked awful, as if he’d just stepped away from a vicious bar brawl he’d been losing in spectacular fashion.

  “Darren Fletcher,” Joe said.

  “Joe Link.”

  “How the hell did you get in here?”

  “We walked in the front door.”

  “Bullshit,” Joe answered.

  Abruptly, Luther moved. Darren watched his older brother turn and walk on stilt-stiff legs around the other side of a large antique desk at the back of the library. Luther sat in the desk’s chair and Darren saw how a bit of calm seeped into his brother’s face now that he’d put a barrier between them.

  “Why on earth would you ever come here?” Luther said. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”

  “Seriously, though,” Joe pressed. “I wasn’t kidding. How did you two get inside the house?”

  Iss
abella, who had been standing one step behind him, came fully into the room and stood at his side.

  “Those are all excellent, sensible questions,” she said. “But are we going to talk about the two dead guys over there on the floor? It feels like we should. To me, anyway.”

  Darren had seen the dead men, one sprawled atop the other, but had pushed their existence aside the moment he’d spied Luther. Issabella’s reminder that they were there brought him back into the moment, prodded him to think and consider more than the seething outrage he wanted to level at his brother.

  He didn’t recognize either of them. One of was still cradling some sort of a big computer in his arms. A bullet hole was centered in his forehead. The second man was face down atop him. His shirt was a riddled, blood-saturated ruin and the back of his head had erupted into an ugly, gaping wound.

  Neither of them was James Klodd.

  “Who else is in this house?” he said.

  “Also a good question,” Issabella agreed.

  “Just Carmen,” Joe answered and Darren saw the way Luther shot the man an irritated frown.

  “And Carmen is...?” Issabella probed.

  “One of ours,” Joe continued. “She’s checking all the doors and windows.”

  “For what?”

  “To see if any of them open. I guess you two ain’t up to speed. We’re trapped in here.”

  Luther spoke up, “Joe, go check the front door.”

  Joe Link did not move. He grew a resentful scowl and stayed where he was.

  “Joe,” Luther repeated.

  “I heard you. And I’ll check the door. But maybe ease up on that tone of voice, Luther. I think I might just be all done dancing to your tune. I know Dick is.”

  With a pronounced limp, Joe slowly crossed over to the two dead men. He grunted in pain as he crouched down and stuffed one hand between them. After a moment of shoving and pulling, he straightened up with a pistol in his grip.

  “Sorry, Dick,” he whispered, then limped ahead until he was face-to-face with Darren.

  “I never knew anything about James Klodd,” he said. “I figure you’re as pissed and confused as a man can be. Well, I ain’t too far behind you on that front and I think you should know that.”