The Widow File

by S. G. Redling

  “Lookie here, Dani,” she said one day as they stood in a huge, shadowed library full of heavy wooden shelves and more books than Dani thought even the public library had. Dani crept over to where her mother stood on a stepladder, feather duster raised. “There’s nothing easier to find than that which someone thinks they’re hiding clever. Tell me what you see.”

  She lifted Dani up to see the broad wooden shelf. Several leather-bound books in a series took up one end of the shelf. A statue of a dancing lady looked so pretty Dani had to stop herself from reaching out for it. There was a ceramic jar like the one they kept flour in at home, only this had all kinds of bright colors and looked like it was carved with real gold. Two girls with big noses frowned from a black-and-white photograph in a silver frame, an ugly little dog panting between them, and behind the frame sat a plain wooden box.

  “See that box, Dani?” Dani nodded. “I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts there’s something wicked in that box.” Dani didn’t know what sort of wicked thing could be in a box that small, but if her mom said it was in there, she didn’t doubt it. “That’s a real good hiding place for it too. You can’t see the box unless you’re up high and even then it just looks like another knickknack. But what did they do wrong, Dani? Can you see?”

  Dani studied the shelf and all the items on it. She glanced at the shelf next to it and the ones below them. They all looked pretty much the same to her. Her mother held her index finger in front of her face, making it inchworm as she whispered, “Here’s a clue.” She ran her fingertip along the edge of the shelf, leaving a clear line in the dust. That’s when Dani saw it.

  “There’s no dust on the box. And there’s no dust where they pulled it out.”

  Her mother had given her a big squeeze and a kiss, praising her for being so smart. Dani hadn’t wanted to let go but her mother finally put her down and got back to dusting but not before tapping her on the head with the feather duster.

  “You remember that, Danielle. If you really got to hide something, it’s always better to be careful than clever. You hear me?”

  And she had. She had never forgotten it. She opened the door to the white microwave that sat amid the crumbs of the toast she’d eaten at a breakfast that felt as if it had happened a decade earlier. Bracing her right hand on the inside roof of the microwave, she tilted the machine back just enough to get her left hand to the envelope taped to the bottom. Working carefully, she peeled off the duct tape, released the last stash of cash she’d hidden in her apartment, and lowered the microwave back into place. She blew softly on the crumbs on the counter, scattering them in a random pattern that left no trace of her handprint, and closed the microwave door.

  She still had a few more things to grab but she wasn’t going to rush it. When it came to hiding, Dani knew it was better to be careful than clever.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Booker hung back by the bar at the Georgetown night spot. The Black Door had enough polish to keep the drunkest of the college students out of its oaken interior but still retained enough hipness to draw an attractive crowd. Most men in the bar were dressed in a more polished version of his own wool pants, white shirt, and modest tie. Booker knew he looked like any other harried young executive in the metro area. Or maybe he didn’t look quite so young anymore. Age in his profession was calculated more along dog years. At forty, he was prime for retirement. He leaned against the bar and scanned the room.

  The client would be in one of the paneled booths toward the back of the room. He saw several pairs of expensive-looking shoes peeking out from beneath tables along the dark row. They could wait. Booker wanted to try to identify any other players in this game. The client was in a free fall of panic, adjusting and readjusting to whims and mishaps with more flailing and more killing. It didn’t really matter to Booker. He got paid by the head and he got paid in advance. If it looked like the job was going to disintegrate into a law-enforcement-drawing melee, he would just absent himself from the shenanigans and disappear. What could they do? Report him?

  A group of red-faced men were getting aggressive and handsy over double martinis and Booker wasn’t sure if they were getting ready to fight or have a gang bang. Or both.

  Farther down the bar, two stunningly beautiful women who seemed incapable of smiling made a point of keeping their backs to the yelling men and thus to Booker. Their thin backs and smooth skin shone under the twinkling bar lights.

  Waiters and waitresses in androgynous black shirts and pants slipped through the growing crowd, dropping off drinks and trendy little plates of elaborate tapas.

  Booker watched the faces.

  The front door opened and closed, more people coming than going, and the volume of the room rose. A well-built man in an Armani suit moved closer to Booker with a look of expectation. Booker took a moment before dropping his eyes and shutting off the come-on with a blink. The two beauties at the end of the bar finally found something to smile about as an equally beautiful man draped himself over their bony shoulders. This room is drunk enough, Booker decided. It was time to get on with the meeting. He shouldered his way through the crowd, lingering just long enough to decide that the martini men were definitely heading in the direction of a gang bang.

  Choo-Choo asked the driver to pass the Black Door and head to the next block before stopping. He watched Tom watch the sidewalk without seeming to do so before slipping into the bar. Choo-Choo had monitored enough surveillance footage to spot a pro. Suddenly this seemed like a terrible idea.

  He walked past the bar, pretending to be on the phone, before making a show of noticing the door. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest and would not have been at all surprised to open the aptly named black door and find a roomful of people with guns all pointed at him. He felt obvious and awkward until he checked himself. This was a bar. He was Sinclair “Choo-Choo” Charbaneaux. He had been getting in and out of better bars than this all over the world since he was fourteen. With a mental adjustment, he pulled open the door and sauntered in.

  He almost stopped when he saw Tom standing in the shadows at the far end of the bar watching the room with experienced eyes. Again, Choo-Choo had seen enough surveillance footage in his lifetime to know the signs. He also knew what sort of behavior triggered suspicion. Furtive wasn’t going to cut it. Choo-Choo had to make an entrance.

  He saw two women frowning at the bar. He didn’t blame them. They were way overdressed for the Black Door and the closest alpha males were a clot of florid-faced ex-jock heart attacks waiting to happen. His entire life Choo-Choo had relied on his charm to smooth over life’s difficult bumps. He prayed it was now up to the challenge, corduroy jacket be damned.

  Pasting an expectant smirk on his face, he strolled up to the two stiff-backed women and draped his arms over their shoulders. The look they threw back at him became only slightly less withering once they took in the details of his face. Choo-Choo tossed his hair and leaned in close between them.

  “Tell me, I beg you, tell me that you two lovely ladies drink champagne. Because I’ve just gotten the most sensational news.” He leaned closer to the one on the left and purred in her ear, “I mean, sensational.” He saw the smiles in their eyes before they reached their well-trained faces. “It would just be tragic to have to celebrate all by myself.”

  He didn’t wait for them to respond. Instead he caught the bartender’s eye and ordered a bottle of Cristal. The bartender brightened at that and asked how many glasses he would like. Choo-Choo raised an eyebrow and one finger. The woman on his left, whose ear he had tickled, broke first, raising one perfectly manicured finger. Her friend on the right didn’t hold out long before she too raised a finger. At his knowing wink, the two beauties threw their heads back in a laugh synchronized to perfection. He leaned in to whisper his appreciation to the woman on the right, all the while keeping his target in peripheral view in the bar mirror. When the man walked past him without so much as a glance, Choo-Choo let out the last of his tension and reached fo
r the champagne.

  The client sat in the booth along with his assistant, a pinched-face young man who Booker decided had paid way too much for his trendy haircut even if he’d gotten it for free. The young man had made a point from the first meeting of keeping his name out of the proceedings, insisting, even though nobody had asked him, that he be referred to only as R. The client had introduced him as “an internal security consultant” but as far as Booker could see, his only job seemed to be handing pieces of paper back and forth and occasionally getting the car door for the client. It was apparent that R fancied himself a player in this drama, probably imagining he had finally reached the point in his career where he was running with the wolves. Booker looked forward to the moment when R learned that guys like him were usually the last mess to be cleaned up at the end of a job like this.

  Booker didn’t care about names or titles. He knew the client’s name but he never used it. He liked to know his target’s names, for clarity and certainty. What Booker cared most about were numbers—the long strings of numbers that accompanied bank transfers. He couldn’t tell you the first names of his last three clients but he could still recite every transfer number and dollar amount, even with the international conversion. After all, he had a retirement to consider.

  At the client’s nod, R slid a manila envelope across the table. He imbued this simple task with such cloak-and-dagger pomposity that Booker felt like pulling out his gun and finishing him right there. Instead he did something he knew would bother the man even more. He ignored him.

  “We’ve found her car.” The client seemed likewise inclined to overlook R. “It’s in a valet parking lot off Dupont Circle. Several hotels and restaurants use the lot. The manager of the lot says he thinks hers was checked in from the Milum Inn, but we haven’t been able to confirm if she is indeed checked in there.”

  Booker slid out the photo of the car—a four-door maroon Honda that had seen plenty of rough use. “She lives in the neighborhood. What makes you think she would check into a hotel? Maybe she had friends she’s staying with.”

  “That’s not what our information suggests. Our sources tell us that Miss Britton is a loner, spends most of her time at work or working at home, and, aside from the occasional fleeting sexual relationship, her primary bonds are with her coworkers.”

  “Who are all dead.”

  “It seems that way, yes.”

  Booker looked up at the uncertainty in the client’s voice. “It seems that way?”

  R spoke up. “Your concern at this juncture should focus entirely on retrieving the missing data which was not at the si—”

  Booker held up his hand to cut the man off. He kept his hand up—keeping R silent and open-mouthed—longer than was absolutely necessary, long enough to be awkward. Finally he asked in a soft tone, “Do you know why they’re called ‘search and destroy’ missions? Because that is the order in which the mission is carried out. First you search, then you destroy. Whoever is calling the shots on this job seems to be getting that backward.”

  R jabbed his finger across the table. “The chain of command in this job is not yours to question. Just know that you are at the bottom of it. Do you understand me?”

  Booker had been told as far back as grade school that there was something wrong with his eyes. The general consensus seemed to be that his gaze lacked a certain vitality or humanity. Or as his second foster mother had told the social workers, “That boy’s dead behind the eyes.” It didn’t bother him then and he’d come to appreciate the quality in his line of work, though never so much as when he got to level his cold stare at some underling overstepping his bounds.

  Personally he always thought he had nice eyes, gentle and blue, but judging from R’s sudden paleness as Booker stared at him, he guessed the man across from him would disagree.

  It saved him time in pointless discussions. Booker turned back to the client, who didn’t do a much better job of hiding his nervousness. “Why don’t you tell me what it is you think she has? If I can take care of her in a private setting, I can get the materials and return them to you with little hassle.”

  “We’re not entirely sure Miss Britton has the ticket.”

  “What is the ticket?”

  “That’s not for you to know.” R had regained some of his starch, or maybe he was just reacting with an adolescent urge to hit back. Booker didn’t acknowledge the outburst with as much as a blink, waiting instead for the client to answer the question.

  “It is research material,” the client said with slow caution.

  “Could you be a little more specific?”

  “No, I cannot.” When Booker sighed, he hurried to continue. “I mean I cannot. We are not entirely sure what form the research is in. We thought we did. Our earlier intel suggested that. We know several components of critical research are not where they should be and we have good reason to believe files have been altered and/or removed from the facility.”

  Booker brought his fingertips together and raised them to his lips like a schoolboy at prayer. He breathed in the smell of Thai food that lingered on his fingertips. “Let me get this straight. You hired Rasmund because you were told there was a leak in your enterprise. Then you brought me in to stop that leak. Now you have brought me back again to stop an even bigger leak within the company you hired in the first place. And now that all those leaks but one are sealed, you still don’t know what’s leaking?”

  The client paled as Booker spoke, his eyes looking everywhere as if expecting a police raid at any moment, as if the innocuous phrasing would somehow damn them all. His boy assistant, R, made the point moot.

  “If you had done what we paid you to do with Marcher, none of this would have happened.”

  Booker leaned forward on his elbows. “Would you like to say that a little louder? The FBI didn’t quite pick all that up.” He looked back to the client. “I did exactly what you paid me to do on the first job. It’s not my concern that you dropped the ball. But I have to ask you what your plan is if this doesn’t work. Are you just going to keep hiring me? Or are you going to get proactive and just blow up the eastern seaboard? Because you know you have to have a finish line, don’t you?”

  “We know perfectly well—” His boss’s hand silenced R mid-sentence. Booker didn’t even bother to enjoy the flushed look of frustration on R’s face. Was it just him or were clients getting more stupid every job? It seemed like more and more of these jobs involved more and more hand-holding and problem solving, like the clients expected him to teach them how to be dangerous men and women.

  Maybe he was already too old for the job because the absurdity of it all had become glaringly obvious. Bullets and dead bodies didn’t fix everything. Bullets and dead bodies often created bigger problems that needed more money and more bullets and more dead bodies. And even then, those increasingly large body piles usually did little to solve the original problem. They just created a whole new set of problems that made the original problem pale in comparison. Booker wished he’d ordered a drink at the bar.

  “What do you suggest we do?” the client asked.

  He had to fight the urge to put his head down on the table.

  Choo-Choo watched what he could from his bad angle. Maura on his left had made herself very comfortable against his hip and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t enjoying the attention her fingers were giving the soft skin on his back below his waistband. He continued with his tale of good fortune, some ridiculous confection of inheritance and invitations to royal functions on private islands. He knew the trigger words to keep women like this engaged. When Maura’s middle finger took an adventurous turn south, Choo-Choo realized he was going to have to make a clean break soon or someone would create a scene and, based on her apparent familiarity with the terrain, he worried that someone might be him.

  “Damn it,” he whispered in Maura’s ear, not trying very hard to hide a sigh of pleasure. “My phone. Hold that thought.”

  Choo-Choo pulled his phone from hi
s back pocket, tensing as he saw Tom look out from the booth and scan the room. He typed, “STILL HERE. CAN’T SEE WHO HE’S MEETING. DON’T KNOW IF I CAN FOLLOW WHEN HE GOES.”

  His phone beeped back in seconds. “OK LEMME KNOW WHEN HE LEAVES. ALMOST DONE. MEET AT MILUM BAR?”

  In his distraction Maura and the other one—Lily? Lilah?—seemed to have worked out a plan. He nearly tossed his phone into his champagne as now two hands worked discreetly and in tandem on one narrow band of his anatomy. He knew from experience there were far worse ways to spend an evening. He also knew this evening would probably not be one of those nights.

  “You’re going to hate me.”

  “We could never hate you, Sinclair.” Lily/Lilah nipped at his lower lip.

  He brushed his lips across her temple, watching as someone climbed from the booth in the back. Not Tom. This man was younger, with an unfortunate haircut and eyes so squinty with emotion Choo-Choo wondered if he’d been crying. Choo-Choo whispered silly words of admiration into the woman’s hair as he watched Tom watch the young man leave. Another set of shoes appeared at the edge of the booth but before he could see a face, the group of martini drinkers beside them finally broke their stalemate of rage. One shoved another, shouts and grunts pounded out from the group, and an ineffective tussle flared up and died out as soon as it started. It took only minutes but by the time the bartender threw out bar towels for the mess, Maura’s hand was gone from his ass and Tom was gone from the booth.

  Dani slipped the box back into place at the top of her closet, careful to return it exactly as she had left it. It irritated her to have to use such caution in her own home but the less Tom knew about her whereabouts, the better.

  She’d tried to imagine her predicament from his perspective. He thought she was alone and terrified and hunted. He thought she would return to the only safe place she knew. He was mostly right, of course. She was terrified and hunted and she had returned to her home, but she wasn’t alone and she wasn’t flying totally blind. She knew what this Tom man looked like. She could see him coming.