Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5)

by Craig Schaefer

  “Oscar Espina,” Kevin said. “Spent four years in Cross City for sexual assault. Other than that, he looks like a Tampa native, given how many times he’s been in and out of Hillsborough. Mostly petty stuff: burglaries, trying to move stolen goods, a couple of assaults that look like bar fights. He’s kept his nose clean for the last eight months, or at least he hasn’t gotten caught again.”

  “Parole?” Harmony asked.

  “For another four months. Says he hasn’t missed a single check-in.” Kevin glanced to the screen. “Well. I mean, if this is the guy, he’s about to. His registered address was a men’s shelter in Beymont; now he’s at a transient motel.”

  “Looking for employment is a requirement of probation,” Harmony said. “What’s he claiming?”

  “TampaFast Courier Services. Says he’s a driver.”

  Before Harmony could say another word, April swiveled back to her keyboard.

  “Already on it,” she said. “Let’s see what the IRS has to say about Mr. Espina’s employer.”

  22.

  The IRS had a lot to say about TampaFast Courier Services. No one was the slightest bit surprised to see Judah Cranston’s name as the registrant, or his home address listed as the principal place of business.

  “It’s a real company on paper, registered as a DBA,” April said. “Albeit a nearly dormant one, and it has no actual presence beyond that. No website, no clients, no evidence that they do anything at all. There’s nothing suspicious about that from an outsider’s perspective; thousands of new startups pop up and fail every single year. Some people register sole proprietorships for businesses they might run and never get around to doing anything beyond the initial paperwork. In all the venues where the government pays attention—annual filings, for instance—Cranston is meticulous.”

  Spreadsheets and notarized applications replaced the mug shots up on the video wall. Harmony studied them, eyes narrow, following the money trail.

  “DBA means the company is entangled with Cranston’s personal finances,” Harmony murmured. “No separation from a tax standpoint, and he’s keeping TampaFast afloat with the money he makes from Nautilus Research. How about W-2 forms? Who’s on the company payroll?”

  Two names: Oscar Espina and Randy Hern. Both were on file as professional couriers, each pulling down fifty thousand dollars a year.

  “Not bad, for a courier service that doesn’t make deliveries,” Jessie said. “Fifty K, though? That’s not living extra large, but it’s not transient motel money either. Why was Espina living in a shithole like that?”

  “Drugs?” Kevin guessed.

  He was already on the move, anticipating Harmony’s next request. Two minutes later he had Randy Hern’s rap sheet and latest mug shot up on the main screen.

  “And here’s Oscar’s fish-stick eating buddy,” Kevin said. “They did time together last year, a three-month stretch at Hillsborough. Looks like Oscar got hired first, then Randy joined the crew a couple of weeks later.”

  The curly-haired ginger leering at the camera had freckles and a bad sunburn. He wore a muscle shirt cut to show off his full tattoo sleeves, an ocean of cheap prison ink that looked like a bored teenager had spent a year doodling on his arms.

  “A Latino and a white guy with full sleeves,” Jessie said. “Perfect match for the bartender’s description.”

  Harmony stared at the mug shot, burning his face into her memory.

  “Give us an address.”

  * * *

  Randy Hern’s address on record was a trailer park, not far from the Tampa fairgrounds. Palmetto bugs, fat roaches the size of Harmony’s thumb, skittered lazily through the weeds in a “recreation area” one step removed from a vacant lot. Most of the trailers looked like they hadn’t moved since the mid-seventies and had come out in a losing fight with a storm or two along the way.

  Randy’s screened windows were open. Harmony stood on her tiptoes, taking a look. There wasn’t much to see inside but scattered clothes, an overflowing ashtray, and a portable TV. She caught the faint odor of cheap cannabis. It didn’t look like anyone was here, but Jessie knocked anyway. They waited, listening to the hot wind rustle through the palm trees.

  “Let ourselves in?” Jessie asked.

  “Doubt we’ll find a signed confession in there. We need to talk to Randy two-on-one. Don’t want to spook him; let’s find a spot to watch and wait, and we’ll corner him when he comes home.”

  They were turning away when one of his neighbors, a plump woman in a Tweety Bird T-shirt and sweatpants, looked up from the plastic-box garden she was watering.

  “You lookin’ for Randy?” she called over.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Harmony said.

  “What is it, ’round noon? Most days about this time, if he’s not smoking up in there, he’s grabbing lunch over at Babes. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

  * * *

  “Oh,” Harmony said, staring up at the dirty marquee at the edge of the near-empty parking lot. A woman’s silhouette, with a bust size not found in nature, reclined atop the name of the club.

  Jessie turned to look at her. “What kind of place did you think it was?”

  “I wasn’t sure. I thought she meant ‘Babe’s’ with an apostrophe s, as in ‘a place that belongs to a person named Babe.’ But instead it’s Babes in the plural. Multiple babes.”

  Jessie unbuckled her seatbelt.

  “Your mind,” she said, “both awes and frightens me.”

  Harmony wondered what kind of person went to a strip club for lunch. She got her answer on the other side of a windowless door and a black curtain. A few locals had shown up for the $5.99 steak and fries special, sawing at gristle-and-shoe-leather fillets while a DJ spoke in a bored monotone.

  “Wasn’t that great? Yay. And now, put those hands together for Tanqueray. Foxy, foxy, Tanqueray.”

  A Rihanna song thumped on the speakers while a woman in a schoolgirl outfit wandered out on stage, took hold of the pole, and strolled in a languid, aimless circle. An old man looked up from his plastic plate and held out a dollar bill like it was an obligation.

  “This job takes us to the classiest places,” Jessie said.

  They spotted Randy by his mop of ginger hair. He sat at a small round table near the back of the club, more focused on his food than the show. He didn’t look up until Harmony’s and Jessie’s shadows fell over his plate.

  “Not looking for a lap dance,” he said.

  Harmony showed him her badge. His eyes flicked in dangerous directions. First to her, then to the knife in his hand, then to the door of the club.

  “That idea you’re having,” Jessie said, “is a bad one.”

  He set the knife down.

  “I didn’t do nothin’,” he mumbled with his mouth full.

  “Careful,” Jessie said, “my partner’s a grammarian.”

  He swallowed his steak. “Don’t know what that is.”

  “Do you know what kidnapping is? How about conspiracy to commit murder?” Harmony asked.

  “It’s not fish sticks at Hillsborough,” Jessie said. “More like you go to Coleman for twenty to life. The food’s even worse there. If you’re a bad boy, they serve you Nutraloaf. You ever eat the loaf, Randy?”

  He squirmed in his seat like he’d been pinned with a needle.

  “The good news is,” Harmony said, “there might be a way out. One that doesn’t end up with you dead like your buddy Oscar.”

  Randy’s dull eyes stopped roaming the club. He squinted at her.

  “What are you talking about? Oscar’s not dead.”

  Harmony thought this situation looked wrong from the start. “Honor among thieves” was usually nothing but an opportunistic lie, but Randy and Oscar had done time together, worked together—finding Randy enjoying his lunch without a care in the world seemed out of character for a man whose partner had just been fed to the sharks.

  He wasn’t putting up a front. He had no idea. Harmony and Jessie shared a glance
and a wordless understanding.

  “Let’s save some time,” Jessie said. “I’m going to tell you what we already know. Judah Cranston, your boss, told you and Oscar to go to the Rusty Nail and abduct a woman named Natalie Cooper. Cooper was expecting a handoff. You probably told her the briefcase wasn’t with you, that you had to drive her to where you’d stashed it.”

  “But out back,” Harmony added, “she smelled a rat. She shot Oscar.”

  “Yeah, but—” Randy froze. Two little blurted words, a confession he couldn’t take back.

  Jessie leaned in, looming over his table.

  “‘Yeah, but’ it was a piddly little .22. A gutshot. But hospitals report gunshot wounds. So, once you were done with Cooper, you threw your buddy Oscar to the sharks right alongside her.”

  Harmony saw where she was headed. They’d caught Randy off-balance and they needed to keep him there, holding his feet to the fire. He hadn’t been the one who murdered Oscar, but the more trouble they could pile on his shoulders, the more desperate he’d be to make a deal.

  “Your own jail buddy,” Harmony said, feigning disgust. “And you killed him, to keep him from snitching on you.”

  “No. That didn’t—” He pressed his palms to the table. “You got it all wrong. That’s not what went down. Oscar isn’t dead. Yeah, the bitch shot him with his own piece. But like you said, it wasn’t a big deal. Hell, I got him bandaged up. He was barely even bleeding when I dropped him off.”

  “Dropped him off?” Harmony asked.

  He took a deep breath, struggling to hold on to the last of his cards.

  “You’re going down for this,” Jessie told him, “unless you give us somebody to go down in your place. You know what they’re going to do to you behind bars when they find out you offed your own partner? Hey, Harmony, you think we could pull some strings, get our boy here a cell at Cross City? I bet Oscar’s old buddies in the Familia 14 would love a little quality time with the man who fed him to the sharks.”

  “I think we can arrange that,” Harmony said.

  Randy was neck-deep in denial. “You’re wrong. You’re both so wrong, you don’t even know. Oscar was gonna be fine. The doc said he was gonna bring in a patch-up guy—you know, a medical doctor, not a fish doctor—and take care of him.”

  “And you didn’t stick around, why?” Jessie asked.

  “Doc was worried somebody might have seen the snatch go down. He told me to get my ass someplace public that was nowhere near the Rusty Nail. Get receipts, try to build an alibi in case I got picked up for questioning. He said he was going to handle everything.”

  “Oh, he handled it, all right.” Jessie gave Harmony a sidelong glance. “Show him.”

  Harmony pulled up one of the morgue shots on her phone. He flinched when she turned the screen around. Randy didn’t have much of a poker face; they watched him race through every argument he could think of, each one crumbling before it hit his lips.

  “Cranston doesn’t know any patch-up men,” Harmony told him. “That or he weighed the cost of a house call against the value of your buddy’s life and decided on the cheaper option.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Randy breathed.

  “If I were in your shoes,” Jessie said, “I’d be wondering how long it’ll be before I’m next on the menu. I mean, he let you believe Oscar was going to be just peachy, and obviously that’s not a sustainable lie.”

  “Sounds to me like he’s cutting loose ends,” Harmony added.

  “Swear to God,” Randy said, still reeling. “I just…I just dropped them off, Oscar and the chick we were supposed to grab. That’s all I did.”

  “At Nautilus Research,” Harmony said.

  “No. No, it was at the doc’s mansion.” He stared at her, looking for some kind of a lifeline in her eyes. “He’s got a second lab, down in his basement, behind a secret door. I’ve never been allowed inside, but me and Oscar bring…brought deliveries there all the time. Anyway, he’s…”

  Randy stopped talking. He bit his bottom lip and tried to disappear into his chair.

  “Bad time for the silent treatment,” Jessie told him. “You’re fighting for your life right now, you feel me? Speak now, give us something good, or forever hold your peace. Once the cuffs go on, all deals are off the table.”

  “He didn’t use the sharks at the research center, okay? He doesn’t do it there. He’s got his own, in a tank in his lab. Like I said, never seen them, but I know he has ’em.”

  “You know,” Harmony said, “because this isn’t the first time you’ve done this.”

  “Like I said. We made deliveries. Usually science-geek stuff, machines, barrels of chemicals. Sometimes people. People nobody would miss. Oscar handled that. He used a shelter as long as he could get away with it. Then he moved into a transient motel. Lots of interstate drifters, and nobody bats an eyelash when one goes missing. That’s what drifters do.”

  “He had you kidnapping bums,” Jessie said, “to feed to his pet sharks.”

  “I figured it was like dogfighting, you know? Most dogs don’t want to fight. You got to condition them, give ’em a taste for blood.”

  He sank lower in his chair.

  “They got a taste.”

  “Don’t you move a goddamn muscle,” Jessie told him.

  She tugged the sleeve of Harmony’s jacket, pulling her back a couple of feet. Her voice was a hard-edged growl.

  “We got an obligation to Cooper. Promises to keep. I’m going to take this scumbag around back and find a dumpster to leave his body in. I know you don’t like killing cold, so if you want to go bring the car around while I finish the job, that’s fine by me.”

  Some parts of this job went down bitter. Harmony had started out in the Bureau. The FBI had rules to follow. Laws to uphold. Vigilant Lock had been born into a world where those rules didn’t always apply. Laws went out the window when the killer was possessed by a body-hopping demon, and prisons couldn’t hold a sorcerer capable of turning into a living shadow. More often than not, Vigilant operatives went for the terminal solution.

  Randy Hern was nothing but a low-rent thug. He could fill a prison cell just fine, and the justice system wouldn’t have any problem handling him. The part of Harmony that still wore a badge recoiled at the idea of a summary execution.

  There were bigger issues in play, though. Even beyond the promise—that if and when a Vigilant operative went down fighting, they could trust they’d be avenged—was the need for the reborn organization to put its foot down. The occult underground was watching, waiting to see if they had a bite to match their bark.

  She was about to swallow her reluctance and give Jessie the go-ahead. Then something else gave her pause. No connection to her ethical qualms.

  “Stay of execution,” she said. “There’s something we can use him for first.”

  They stepped back to the table. Randy’s hands were frozen, his gristly steak and undercooked fries going cold in front of him. It was a sorry excuse for a final meal.

  “There’s a way out of this for you,” Harmony said.

  It was a lie, but the look on his face said he’d do anything she told him.

  “Cranston’s laboratory,” she said. “Not the public one, the one under his house. Can you get us inside? More importantly, can you get us in without him finding out about it?”

  “Yeah, totally!” He nodded like a bobblehead doll. “Easy, we can do it right now if you want. I’ve never been in there, but I’ve seen him punch the key code in a dozen times.”

  “We’ll need an excuse to get Cranston out of the house,” Jessie said to Harmony.

  “Nah, you’re all good,” Randy said. “The doc’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “At least that’s what he told me. He called me this morning, said…well, he said Oscar was doing fine and I’d hear from him soon. Also said he was going to visit his family for a couple of days, so I should just take it easy and lie low.”

  “What about his maid?” Har
mony asked, thinking back to the dinner. “Any other staff on the grounds?”

  “Just her and the lawn guys who come in once a week, but they always work Thursdays. She’s probably gone; she usually travels with the doc whenever he leaves town. I never asked, but I kinda think they’re cousins or something. Got that same frog-face look, know what I mean?”

  Jessie drummed her fingers on her hip pocket, making her decision.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  23.

  “Hey, Neptune. It’s Harmony. Can you talk?”

  The gust of breath on the other end of the phone raced ahead of her voice. Harmony was standing on the sidewalk halfway down the block from Cranston’s place, while Jessie kept an eye on their prisoner in the car. She’d been watching the windows, checking for any glimmer of movement beyond the ruffled curtains before they made their move. The kidney-shaped driveway out front was empty.

  “Are you okay?” Neptune asked. No preamble.

  “I’m fine. Just needed to ask you something: did Cranston tell you he was leaving town?”

  “What? No. I mean, he doesn’t come into the lab every single day, so if he took a short trip I wouldn’t necessarily know about it. Did he?”

  Harmony stared at the front windows.

  “I’m trying to find out if he’s home. Can you do me a favor? Text him. Say you’ve got some promising test results and ask if he wants you to run them over to his house. Don’t actually go, just let me know what he says.”

  “Sure, give me two minutes.”

  It only took her one and a half. She called Harmony right back.

  “He just said ‘out on business, be back soon.’ Want me to ask where he went?”

  “Would you normally press him for details?” Harmony asked.

  “No, I’d just wait for him to get back.”

  “Then don’t. Just do what you normally would.”

  “Do you want me to come over there?” Neptune said. “I’ve been to his house plenty of times. I can help—”

  “No.” Harmony caught herself. Too brusque. She could do better than that. “I mean, no, but thank you. It could be dangerous. I appreciate the offer.”