Smith's Monthly #4

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  I WOKE UP IN 2014 next to Patty in her apartment. She rolled over against me and sighed, still mostly asleep. She smelled wonderful, like soft roses and faint earth.

  Around the edges of the sun-blocking drapes, the Las Vegas day looked bright and dry, not at all like the rain in Oregon.

  That had been one very strange dream.

  I lay there on my back, holding the love of my life, staring at the ceiling, thinking back over the dream of going back to 1999 and playing Doc Hill.

  It had felt so real.

  It had to have been real. But yet I remember clearly coming home late last night from the Bellagio tournament and crawling in with Patty.

  After a moment, Patty stirred, and opened one eye. When she saw I was awake, she laughed softly. “Stewing about Doc beating you?”

  So it hadn’t been a dream.

  Then I remembered Laverne had said it had been a loop in the normal timeline, so of course we had returned to the moment the loop started to end it.

  “Not stewing,” I said, hugging her. “I gave him a good fight.”

  “It was a lot of fun to watch,” she said, snuggling against me and closing her eyes. “You did better than Doc expected. You even won the first of the four matches, remember?”

  “Before he got a read on me,” I said. “Thank heavens there was no life on the line.”

  “Or world destruction,” Patty said.

  “Yeah, that too,” I said.

  “Just a wonderful trip into the Idaho Wilderness.”

  I tried not to shudder. The Oregon Mountains where my doublewide trailer was were wild enough for me.

  She leaned up on one elbow and looked me right in the eyes. “Is he that good or did you let him win?”

  I laughed. “He’s that good. And no real poker player ever lets another win for any reason.”

  She smiled and kissed me. “You’re still my superhero.”

  I kissed her back and pressed against her. After a moment we came up for air and she looked at me again, her wonderful brown eyes twinkling. “We might have to change your superhero name, though.”

  “To what?” I asked, holding her fantastic body tight against me.

  “Well, it sure can’t be “River Man,” she said.

  I laughed.

  “I’m thinking right now,” she said, “about something like “Man of Steel.”

  She kissed me and I kissed her back, doing my best to live up to my new superhero name.

  STARTING FRESH AND BLOODIED

  I love January 1st

  like a father loves a newborn child.

  I hold the day like a bundle of promises

  and stare into the future like I can time travel.

  I start fresh every January 1st

  like a baby just emerging into the world,

  the past nothing more than food and nutrients

  dripped down a short cord.

  I stare into the truth on January 1st,

  a newborn in a new year,

  slapped around by somebody I don’t know,

  covered in the blood of someone who loves me.

  I dread January 1st,

  for I am no longer in the comfort of the known

  as I slip forward into the arms of a strange day,

  crying my eyes out.

  USA Today bestselling writer, Dean Wesley Smith, returns to the world of his human garbage collector. A man without a real name who prides himself in his ability to take out the garbage of society.

  After going freelance, his former employer wants to take him to the curb as well. Not only must the garbage collector finish what he started, but play the killers coming after him as well.

  A twisted mystery in this second installment in the “I Killed…” series.

  I KILLED JESSIE TOOK

  ONE

  I TAKE OUT HUMAN GARBAGE. It’s what I do.

  Since my former employer decided that I needed to be taken out as garbage as well, I have gone freelance. It was never difficult for me to go freelance, since I had saved almost every penny of all the millions I had earned from all my garbage runs for them. My former employer never really ever knew who I was or where I was or where I was based.

  I had always made sure of that.

  My real name is long lost in the past. As are my real looks.

  I only had contact with my former employer from a distance when getting an assignment and when reporting in that the garbage was removed. I was always paid through accounts that only existed for each job and then vanished and could not be traced back to me or any business associated with me.

  My former employer didn’t even know what I looked like exactly. I had made sure of that with changing looks for every assignment.

  I could do little about my six-foot height, but I changed hair color, facial features, walk, and other features with simple disguises and a vast amount of training.

  I am also an expert in the modern computer age. I can make an identity appear and disappear at will. I can change identities easily, and study my targets carefully.

  Before being a freelance human garbage collector, I never felt any need to record my job. It was just a job, after all.

  But now, as a freelancer, I have decided to record these events in a case-by-case nature.

  And since my first official case on my own had actually been my last for my former employer, I have recorded it under the case title “I Killed Adam Chaser.”

  Granted, my former employer did transfer my standard four-point-one million to my accounts after the initial job was finished, but I considered that a freelance fee in killing the agent they sent to kill me. Seemed only a fair trade.

  I unofficially call my little business “I Killed…” I could think of no name that suited “Garbage Man for Human Waste” that I liked. So simply “I Killed…” But no one would ever be able to track it under that name or any other name.

  I am that good.

  This, my first job after becoming a freelance human garbage man, taking out the human waste of society, I will call “I Killed Jessie Took.”

  The reason for that, I decided, was to track easily what each case is about. The target’s original name is Jessie Took, but he went by Joe Harley in Portland, Oregon.

  And I know for a fact that this case will also involve my former employer. It must.

  It is the nature of my former employee, to leave nothing unfinished. I am a very unfinished business they cannot leave open.

  I must be killed. I must be taken to the curb.

  I welcome their involvement.

  And they have presented me this Jessie Took, my first freelance case, like it’s tied up in a bow, a bow they know I will not resist.

  They believe that sometimes garbage men must be taken to the curb as well.

  I’ve killed other garbage men in the past; I can do it again if they force my hand.

  Which, of course, they will do.

  TWO

  UNLIKE WHEN I WORKED for my former employer, I am fed no information on which garbage needs to be taken out. So over the last year, since the Adam Chaser case, I developed a method of searching for unsolved crimes, of criminals going free for various reasons, of simple “talk” about a person.

  One series of unsolved teenage girl disappearances came to light, seeming to string across the country from Michigan to Oregon. They did not seem to be related and each remained active cases in their local areas.

  But since I was looking at patterns as my former employer knew I would, the cases came together for me fairly clearly. Each girl was sixteen, each brunette, each had slight problems in school, often with minor drugs and boys.

  And each had brown eyes.

  Seven missing teenage girls in seven years. A trail leading to Portland, Oregon, like a neon arrow as far as I was concerned.

  Right back to the same town of my first freelance case, my last working assignment that became “I Killed Adam Chaser.”

  That seemed to tell me that more than likely my forme
r employer had set this up, made it clear, to attract me like a bee to a flower.

  It would not matter. They could keep sending agents and I would keep helping them remove that agent from their workforce.

  But before I could have that looked-forward-to meeting with another garbage man or woman, I needed to find who was taking the girls and why. I was sure my former employer already knew.

  So for each girl’s disappearance, I searched for the one common denominator that held that trail together. That took me almost four months of searching from my Las Vegas home near the University of Nevada.

  Of course, my research could not be traced in any fashion.

  I spotted a few attempts to backtrack on my traces, but they were blocked easily.

  What became the clear connection in all the disappearances was a yard maintenance man who went under a different name in every town. He seemed about twenty-five, had short brown hair, a slight moustache, and dark eyes that seemed to see everything. And they looked hungry.

  I could find no picture of him in any fashion where he was smiling. Even in security camera footage, stoplight security cameras, and so on.

  He never smiled.

  He worked for different yard maintenance firms in every city, always under different names, and always quit early in the fall to move on. Always a month before a girl disappeared.

  He had been born and raised under the name Jessie Ben Took in Lansing, Michigan. Right out of high school he had started working yard maintenance and he had left two months before a popular girl from his former high school had gone missing. The reports of her disappearance never mentioned his name in any way since he was already out of town and living outside of Madison, Wisconsin.

  Every fall he moved on. A month or so later a girl went missing from his former town.

  It was a trail I could not miss.

  And my former employers would know that if I remained freelance, I would not miss it.

  So I went back to Portland, Oregon, changing identities as I traveled and setting up escape routes.

  The day I finally settled into Portland was a warm early-summer day, the leaves green, and the air smelling of open restaurants baking bread. The apartment I found was in the Northwest section of Portland with a slight view down the street of the river and one of the many bridges.

  The apartment had large windows and too much light. It was on the second floor of an old Victorian that had been divided into four apartments, plus a manager’s apartment on the main floor.

  I went in under the name Nick Benson, an engineer from Idaho brought in to work on a new building down on the riverfront. I told the woman with large sixties’ gray hair who was the landlord that I would be in and out of town a great deal and not to worry. I paid her four months in advance, which she liked.

  The apartment was directly across the tree-shaded street from Jessie’s apartment in a small ten-apartment complex that had been built in the mid 1960s out of cinder blocks and concrete stairs.

  I bugged his small two-bedroom apartment one afternoon when he was at work, filled his walls with tiny cameras that looked like fly specks so there was no place in the apartment I couldn’t see.

  Then I put a few cameras in my apartment as well and rented another house a quick train-ride and identity change away. The second apartment was in a complex similar to Jessie’s and the apartment had a very clear method of entry that required me to climb a flight of stairs.

  The cameras in Jessie’s walls any agent from my former employer would recognize. They would know I was here.

  The ones in my apartment in the old Victorian were far better hidden and the signals could not be traced in any fashion. I wanted to know when my former employer’s agent came snooping around my apartment.

  But I knew they were already here. This had been a set-up, of that there was no doubt. They were well-trained in situational death, otherwise one of them would have attempted to kill me the first moment they realized who I was.

  But as I said, they would work to cover their tracks. It was the nature of the business they worked for.

  I doubted my employer had yet to realize I no longer needed to follow those same rules.

  In my second apartment, as one more level of protection, I rented under a corporation name the empty apartment under my second apartment. That had a number of varied exits through a back door and a couple windows. I cut a hidden escape hatch through the closet floor of my second apartment to the third apartment’s closet.

  Then, protected with a number of back-up plans, I went about the business of making sure that Jessie Ben Took, maintenance man from Lansing, Michigan, really was responsible for all of the disappearances of the girls.

  It became clear in very short order that he was human garbage that really, really needed to be taken out. He had a notebook hidden in his apartment of pictures of all the girls. All of them were nude and he was posing with all of them.

  Typical of sick humans like him, he kept trophies.

  All of them were the old Kodak-style prints. And I found an old camera in his apartment as well.

  I captured each of the images, then spent the next day checking that none of them had been faked, that the locations and times were accurate. I did not put it past my former employer to set up an innocent man.

  But with very little research, it became clear that Jessie was far from innocent. He spent a night a week poring over that notebook and reliving sexual acts he must have performed on each girl.

  So I was the major target in this game and he was just a bonus.

  So I spent the next few days tracing back through his employment in a new town, searching for where the girl’s body would be buried. It made sense that since he worked yard maintenance and landscape work, he would bury the girl when he was finished with her in one of his projects.

  He clearly had no young girl in his apartment across from my Victorian apartment, so I started tracing him. His last victim had been a girl from Boise. I doubted she would still be alive since it had been six months since she had been taken, but there might be a chance.

  I found in a quick search, under his mother’s maiden name, a storage locker that had been rented outside of Portland off of I-84.

  I watched the rental for a few days to make sure it was not a trap by my former employers. They were not there and he did not visit the unit at all.

  So after two days I moved in so that no security camera could see me and I opened the storage unit.

  She was there.

  In a large wooden crate inside the unit, with high levels of soundproofing covering the inside. She wasn’t dead, but she might as well have been. She would be in another day at most. He had left her tied up and gagged to starve to death.

  Now I was very, very angry at my former employee. They were willing to let this young girl die just to get me.

  This had to end, and end now.

  THREE

  I LEFT, locked everything back up, and made sure I was not seen when leaving.

  Then, from a secure phone, I called the police and told them where they would find the poor young girl from Boise and who she was. She would survive.

  That left me only a few hours at most. Jessie wasn’t good at covering his tracks and clearly would be identified and quickly arrested. So I needed to move fast and take care of my former employer’s agents.

  I went back to my Victorian apartment and made sure no one had been in. I knew no one would be, but better to be safe. My former employer had sat this trap up a long time in advance.

  I had to admit, it was a well-done trap. And if I hadn’t been expecting it, I would have walked right into it.

  I set the signal to self-destruct all my cameras in Jessie’s apartment and the Victorian apartment.

  On the way out, carrying a suitcase with everything I would need to make my escape clean, I knocked on my landlord’s door and told her that I would be gone for a few weeks on a trip to Boise.

  To any other agent, that would be the sign
al that I was leaving and she had to act and act fast.

  “I’ve got a package that came for you today,” she said, turning away from me.

  She should have been ready for me. Sloppy work.

  I put a bullet in the back of her head.

  Actually, she should have shot me the first moment she saw me. But my former employer had taught all its agents, including me, to play out the scene and cover tracks. She had lived, and now died, by that rule.

  I glanced around. No one had seen.

  My sound-suppresser was good and the shot had not been heard.

  I quickly pushed her body back inside and closed the door. Her computer had cameras all over the building next door. And as I had suspected, the young guy in the apartment next to Jessie’s apartment was the second agent on this job.

  He was asleep in his apartment.

  I sent a coded message from her computer to my former employer that said simply, “The garbage has been taken out.”

  That was a signal that she should be paid.

  That I was dead.

  I gave them an account number as was standard.

  I made sure that the ten million and change she was paid was moved out of that account quickly and shuttled around so that it couldn’t be traced. It would eventually land in accounts I controlled, but could not be traced back to me in Las Vegas.

  She would have instantly moved the money as well if she had been a good agent.

  She had been far higher paid than I had ever been. That meant she was in charge of this entire hunt for me. And that meant that more than likely there was more than just a second agent. Otherwise her pay would not have been so high.

  I hadn’t expected to make any money on this job, but a few extra million would make up for the extra mess I was being forced to cause.

  Then I triggered her computer to self-destruct and destroy all her cameras in both buildings.

  As I turned to leave, I could see that the mask over her face had been blown partially off her face by my shot. She had been far more beautiful than her disguise had played.