Landry now had the assassin’s contact info and had received the communication key. Now he could communicate with Zach Smith. He could tell Zach where to pick up his instructions. Whom to kill, and when and how to do it.
All Landry needed to do now was come up with the right place.
CHAPTER 27
For this mission—and Landry saw it as a mission—he needed a remote meeting place. He had made a habit of running through many canyons in the Angeles National Forest near his home base in Arcadia, so it was easy to narrow it down to the one most favorable for this op. After weighing the pros and cons, Landry decided on the Devil’s Canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was good.
There were a few things that recommended the area. One, it was a harder hike than many others, so few people. The farther down you hiked, the more remote it became. And the trail was difficult in places and would require some concentration on the part of the mark.
The biggest worry was that Zach Smith would pause often to look behind him on the trail. Smith would automatically worry that a large part of the trail was downhill. He would know that if anyone was stalking him, the shot would come from above high ground—and he’d never see it coming.
Landry had planned for this contingency. He had set the drop point down on the canyon floor, an area entangled by vines, shrubs, and undergrowth, hidden from view by a canopy of trees. There would be running water and hidden rocks to add to the distraction. The idea that the drop was on level ground would bolster Smith’s confidence in the mission. As for the effort to get there—these guys came to believe nothing in life was easy.
Landry would set up behind him in the creek, on the same level ground. He had already found the place, and made sure he could be completely hidden there.
He made a dry run and timed it. The drive there, how long it would take to jog to the place where he would set up, the places on the trail where Smith would be in his line of sight. He knew exactly where he would bury the packet: in the dirt against a massive boulder where an oak tree encroached on one side, and a berm on the other. The mark would have to present his back to Landry as he crouched down to dig up the packet. This was of the utmost importance, because Landry had planned his shot for the back of the head.
It had to be the back of the head.
On that point, there was no ambiguity.
Landry called the hitter. It was a very short phone call—just long enough to introduce himself as the man tapped by the person ordering the hit to give him the GPS position where the packet would be buried.
The next morning Landry watched through binocs as Smith drove to the trailhead and parked. It was just dawn. There were no other cars. Smith wore a T-shirt, shorts, hiking boots, and a large pack on his back—probably containing a high-powered weapon of some sort. There was a firearm on his hip as well.
As the TV ad said: “Don’t leave home without it.”
Landry didn’t move from where he was. He watched as the man disappeared from view, reappearing here and there along the trail.
After letting him get a good head start, Landry trotted down, stopping every once in a while to glass the trail ahead.
The kid was making good time. Landry made sure to stay in cover as much as he could. The farther down they went, the more cover: chaparral, woody trees Landry didn’t recognize, oak, plenty of rock formations, snarls of grass and wildflowers, and a few puddles of brackish water here and there.
Landry didn’t have to get close. He had already picked out the best place and waited for the mark to reach the spot.
Rarely did it work out so perfectly.
The kid (he couldn’t help thinking of him as one, even though Zachary Smith was twenty-eight and an adult) worked his way to the water. There, he pulled out a GPS, correlated the coordinates for the package’s placement, and followed the trail to the foot of the boulder.
Smith looked around first, using his binocs and scanning the hills above him. That was where the threat would come from—above. Finally, he crouched down and took a knee. He swept the dirt and oak leaves away from the base of the boulder and pulled out an earth-brown envelope. Abruptly, he froze. His body was taut, on alert. He scanned the mountain range above, looking for possible threats. Looking, Landry knew, for an odd glint of light on a rifle barrel. Anything out of the ordinary.
Smith decided the area was clear. Still on one knee, he tucked the envelope inside his jacket.
Landry pulled the trigger.
The kid’s head recoiled—Landry imagined he could hear the thwack as the bullet hit, followed by the faint spit of the silencer screwed onto Landry’s rifle.
The kid fell forward and lay facedown in an awkward slump, legs crumpled partially underneath his body, partially behind him. Head down, pressed into the base of the boulder.
Landry kept him in his sights. He did not move for ten minutes. Down here in the canyon, there was no wind. It was quiet, except for the birds. The kid in the scope did not move. Landry listened for car engines in the distance, but heard none.
He was alone.
Waited another ten minutes, watching the trail in and out of the canyon, listened for car doors, glassed the hills and rocks and high ramparts, just to make sure no one was coming. Then he made his way down to the canyon.
He jumped down from the berm and rolled the body to one side to snap the photo with his new burner phone—making sure the kid’s face was still planted in the dirt. Even if he had displayed the face, there wasn’t much left—the shot had been placed so that the bullet obliterated Smith’s features when it blew out the other side, making him virtually unidentifiable. Landry paused, and looked down at him, said, “Dumb kid.” The kid was a killer, but it was still a shame—they should have hired someone who knew what he was doing. Landry spared the kid a moment of regret. Then he roped Smith’s feet and dragged him downstream to a grave he’d dug the day before, a hole tucked under an overhang of rock in an area filled with brush. Using the folding camp shovel he’d left there the day before, Landry covered Zach Smith with dirt and pulled more rocks and brambles down on top. The grave was high enough and far enough that water would not reach, even during a flash flood. The operator who had come for Landry was now dead at Landry’s hands.
At the post office, he forwarded the photo of the corpse along with his own fingerprints and saliva sample to the Toolshed, using the envelope they had kindly provided Zach Smith for that purpose. The saliva sample would be used to confirm the corpse’s DNA, and the fingerprints would be corroborative: proof positive that the operator they’d hired—Zach Smith—had completed his mission.
Cyril Landry was dead.
Again.
CHAPTER 28
Back at the hotel by midmorning, Landry showered and changed. He kept the TV on, listening for his name, but didn’t hear it. He checked his iPad—all the Internet news sites—but Landry’s photo had been replaced many times over. In fact, there was nothing on the school shooting, which was old news.
He called his brother and got his voice mail. “Call me,” he said, and disconnected.
He called Tom, his old friend in Kentucky. One of the few people in life he could depend on.
First thing out of Tom’s mouth was “So what they said on TV is true. You’re still here.”
“So far,” Landry said.
“I heard someone put out a paper on you.”
“They did. Someone killed me.”
A pause. “Well, that’s good news. So what now?”
“This worked for a while, but it’s possible whoever put the paper out on me will want to make sure.”
“You mean, take a victory lap?”
“See for himself. But that’s not my real problem. The real problem is I don’t know where Cindi and Kristal are.”
“Gary won’t say, huh?”
�
�No.”
A pause. Then, “Damn.”
“You don’t know, do you? Any idea?”
“Nope. Just got the call from Gary saying they wouldn’t be coming out here. They made ‘other plans.’”
“He didn’t say anything about her fiancé?”
“Nope.” Tom Davis was a man of few words. He worked for a pinhooker outside Lexington, training young horses to run. He had seen a lot of action, mostly in Vietnam, and had his own place, thirty acres covered in junk. Landry pictured Tom in his trademark overalls, his long white hair and beard—he looked like Santa Claus, not one of the best pinhooking trainers in the business. Tom was what Landry called a “scattered genius.” He’d once built an airplane from scratch in his barn—not from any specs; he’d just built it and built it right—before realizing there was one last part of the puzzle he couldn’t fix: he couldn’t get it out the door. Tom had come up with an unusual solution—he’d told Landry about it but he still didn’t get it—and the plane made one maiden flight before Tom just gave up on it and it became another pasture ornament. Whether it was training racehorses or building something in his shop, he was all about the project. Once he was done with something, he was done.
Tom was also former Special Forces, and the most trustworthy man Landry knew. He was the only man in the world Landry would trust with his wife’s and daughter’s safety except for himself.
And now Tom was out of the loop.
“Could you call Gary again? Find out why there was a change in plans?”
“I could. You think it will help?”
Landry thought about how Gary had dug in. “Probably not. But I need to know where they are. Have you met Todd?”
“The boyfriend? No. Haven’t even talked to him on the phone. Only talked with Gary.”
“You have no idea where they went, then?”
“Well, I assume they went to Big Bear Lake.”
Landry felt the spark, like someone had connected a jumper cable to his chest. “Big Bear Lake? Why?”
“Heard Gary mention the boyfriend has a cabin there.”
“Where?”
“That, I don’t know. He mentioned it once, is all.”
“But you think that’s where they’d go?”
“You said for them to get out of town, right? So that would be my guess.”
Landry called Gary and got his voice mail. He left a message, asking Gary to call him.
“Don’t mention I called,” he added. “Somebody put a hit out on me. It’s okay now, but no one knows I’m alive.”
He disconnected, feeling as if he’d been cut loose from the world. Heard his own words. Somebody put a hit out on me. No one knows I’m alive.
What kind of crap was that? Was that supposed to sway Gary into telling him where Cindi and Kristal were?
Gary had the power. Gary and, to a lesser extent, Cindi. What would Cindi think about what he’d just said? Just another day at the office. Somebody put a hit out on me, and it’s all worked out, but for all intents and purposes I’m dead.
He couldn’t think about it right now. He needed to know where they were, needed to protect them. Needed to get them someplace safe. They couldn’t depend on Todd.
He glanced at the TV. The caption option was on.
Landry didn’t watch a lot of TV, but he liked to read newspapers. He followed the news. And this news concerned him.
It had taken some time for some of the bodies from the massacre at Gordon C. Tuttle High School to be released. The first to be buried was Devin Patel. The Juggalo kid. His funeral was at the end of the week.
A reporter on the news channel was interviewing a man who planned to protest the funeral.
Landry recognized him. He was one of those preachers in the news all the time. The kind who capitalized on anger, fear, and misery.
When you got to that level where you were on television all the time, it was all for show. To be more specific, for show and money.
Pope Francis was the only exception to the rule Landry could see. But then he wasn’t really what you’d call a preacher.
Most of the preachers Landry had seen on TV were charlatans at the very least, and soul-stealers at their worst. They made their money scaring people. As far as Landry was concerned, a lot of these high-profile preachers with their massive cathedrals and expensive limos were con men, and they made their money on pain. They sucked money and pain into themselves and grew bloated on it, and spewed out more grievances, insults to God that their flocks had never heard of until they brought them up.
Like Devin Patel—the Juggalo.
According to the man on television, he wasn’t just a Juggalo. He was a gay Juggalo.
Landry didn’t know if Devin was gay. He didn’t care if Devin was gay. What did it matter to him?
What mattered was, Devin had looked after his sister. What mattered was, he had friends who cared about him, friends who looked after their side of the pact they’d made, and watched after his sister now that he was unable to.
What Landry felt as he stared at the TV screen was animus—very unusual for him. Landry prided himself on being even-keeled. Even-keeled and efficient.
He had seen the face before—you couldn’t miss it if you watched TV, or read a newspaper, or used the Internet. It was a mean face, scored with cruel lines running down from hard-apple cheeks to a hinged jaw that made Landry think of Howdy Doody. A clown face gone awry. Piggy little eyes stared out at the world from behind round wire-rimmed eyeglasses, the kind bankers and politicians and big businessmen wore during the Great Depression.
He seemed to have come to the present from long ago. Not the Great Depression, though: the Gilded Age. Large girth, three-piece suit.
Well fed and pompous.
He was standing outside a university called Mount Loyal Independent Christian College—a religious institution Landry had never heard of—located in Pasadena. The sun shining on his glasses, his mouth opening and closing like the lips of a large-mouth bass. Quoting Bible scriptures and thundering death and destruction to those who did not obey God’s law.
Melvin Fortun. President of Mount Loyal Independent Christian College. Mel to his friends? Landry wondered. Landry remembered seeing him once before. He had a memory for strange-looking people. Fortun had gone hunting with one of the US House members—Landry remembered a gray day, the man dressed to the nines in hunting gear that looked like it had come directly from Rifleman Warehouse. So new it crunched. Hunting rifle tucked under his arm. High up in the National Rifle Association. Landry himself had had a membership in the NRA, but had to let it lapse, due to the fact that he was dead.
Fortun thundered about homosexuals and keeping and bearing arms, and the two issues were so consistently linked together, for a moment Landry wondered if he was in favor of homosexuals bearing arms. He railed about the Juggalo lifestyle. Satan worshippers, fiends, evil incarnate. He slipped and called Devin “Devil” Patel. When the reporter corrected him, he said, “Devil isn’t far from the truth. He should not be buried on hallowed ground.”
The reporter asked about the shooting. Melvin Fortun was a little more circumspect there. “It was a sad occasion, but no one should read anything into it more than a madman with a gun.”
He cited the brave security guard who had shot the bad guy.
Landry was never one for pride of ownership. His mouth turned up a little, thinking how easily the press had been snowed. That anyone could believe a security guard with a pistol could have made that shot . . .
It had become common knowledge, though. The security guard had been made a hero. And meanwhile, people like that FBI special agent Landry had talked to on the phone—they knew that it had taken an expert sniper to kill someone like that. Which was why they were looking for someone like him.
Fortun was actually stupid enough to say the words “collateral d
amage.”
Landry turned the TV set off.
He thought about Devin Patel, and Luke Conaboy—“Eezil”—and Brian Swinney, and Willow. Willow, wandering around like Lucia di Lammermoor.
One person he avoided thinking about was Luke Brodsky. It was still too close. It was the one place he could not go.
Mount Loyal Independent Christian College was a sprawling, lively campus full of kids who looked like college kids everywhere. The grounds were particularly inviting. Plenty of grass, shaved close to the ground like felt on a billiard table. Big shade trees. California sunshine. A few palms. Redbrick buildings that looked a century old but up close were clearly built to newer standards. There was Sermon Hall, square in the middle of campus, complete with a white cupola with a bronze angel on top. Gabriel, blowing his horn.
Landry walked the campus and got a feel for it. He had dressed in a business suit and held a briefcase. He sat down on a stone bench in the dark shade of a tree opposite the administrative offices, opened his iPad on top of his briefcase, and looked absorbed. At twelve noon on the dot the doors to the admin building opened and people started coming out, ostensibly heading for the student union for lunch, or at least a cigarette break.
Landry recognized Melvin. He looked like a fat shark in a suit. Light bounced off his gold rims. He walked close to the woman with him—someone in the administration, but from here it looked like he was too close, as if he were trying to feel her up. The woman ignored him and kept to a businesslike pace.
Landry had seen enough. He already had the man’s address, and now he’d seen him in the flesh. After watching six video clips of him—three TV interviews of short duration, microphones basically thrust into his face, a sit-down address on his cable show, Praising God (ChristWorks TV), and two short clips of his sermons—Landry had confirmed that while Melvin Fortun threw his weight around, he had a strong sense of personal space. It was clear he didn’t like to be touched.
Hard Return Page 21
