by Chris Mooney
“Sit,” she said. “Tell me what you like.”
“Right now I’d like for you to slip out of that dress you’re wearing.” His smile was more creepy than confident, although Ellie suspected it had worked on a fair share of women with low self-confidence and major daddy issues. “But I’ll settle for a Scotch whisky on the rocks. The Glenmorangie.”
“I’m seeing, like, five bottles with that name.”
“Go with the 1981 Pride, the Highland single-malt Scotch whisky. And only use two cubes. You don’t want to water it down. That’s primo stuff—and expensive.”
As Ellie poured the drinks, her hands carefully concealed from his view, she slipped into his glass the pair of white tablets Anton had supplied her. She had taken them from her purse, back at the bar, right before they left. The Rohypnol dissolved easily and quickly.
Ellie sat down next to him on a stiff sofa, the kind designed more for looks than for comfort. As they sipped their drinks, he let her in on his latest venture with some company that she had no interest in. Ellie nodded politely, keeping an eye on his glass. She needed him to drink it all for the pills to work, but all he did was keep sipping.
He put his glass down and made his move.
Shit. Ellie playfully stuck out her foot, put her stiletto on his stomach, and, smiling coyly, said, “How about we make a toast first?”
“To what?”
“To a night that’s gonna blow your mind.”
“I’ll drink to that,” he said, and did.
“I need to use the bathroom for a moment.”
The one off the drawing room seemed like the size of her entire apartment, and everything in there was immaculately clean. She removed the phone from her purse and sent a text to the gangly Asian guy who had picked her up this evening and driven her to Viva. She had met him several times; he supplied her with sticks, and she supplied him with the names of carriers. She didn’t know his name. Never would.
Ellie waited five minutes, making a show of flushing the toilet and running the water before she left.
McDouche was still awake, standing at the bar, waiting for her.
“One more drink,” she said.
He grabbed her firmly by the shoulders and pushed her up against the wall and kissed her. The kiss was rough and sloppy, and he mashed his teeth against hers. She tensed—not only from the implied violence in it and the way he was groping at her but also because she couldn’t stop thinking of Cody.
McDouche sensed her hesitation. He relaxed his grip and moved to her neck, kissing it, and when he reached her ear, his breath hot and smelling sweet from the Scotch, he whispered, “Don’t worry—my mom’s not home.”
Ellie almost laughed out loud. “Your mom?”
“Yeah. She’s in Palm Springs for the weekend. We have the whole house to ourselves.”
“You live here with your mom?”
“I work out of here when I’m in town. Have my own office upstairs.”
She was about to ask him another question when he kissed her hard. Not the way Cody did with care and affection but simply out of lust, like she owed him this. She decided to play along for the moment, moaning at the appropriate times, trying to act as though this were the single most exciting sexual encounter of her life.
When he reached around and fumbled at the zipper of her dress, she whispered, “Let’s go upstairs and hit the shower.”
“No shower.” He unzipped her dress.
“Let’s go upstairs, then, to your bedroom.”
The dress slid off her shoulders. Ellie panicked. The kissing and the way he pawed at her—she could justify those things because she was doing a job. But there was no way in hell she was going to sleep with him; no way in hell was she going to allow that to happen.
The dress pooled around her shoes. He stepped back to appraise her, Ellie standing there wearing her heels, panties, and a lace bra.
“Nice,” he said. “Very nice.”
He dropped to his knees in front of her. The drugs were kicking in. Thank you, Jesus.
His eyes grew wide and then he started blinking rapidly as he looked around, confused.
“Everything okay, baby?” Ellie asked, cringing inwardly at the word baby. He struggled to his feet. She helped him.
“I’ve got, like, vertigo or something,” he said.
“Probably drank a little too much. Let me get you some water.”
She helped him out from behind the bar, holding on to his meaty bicep as he staggered and swayed. Then he dropped to his knees. She let go, and he tumbled sideways, against the floor. She rolled him onto his back so he could breathe better.
He was stone-cold out, but his erection was still standing tall, at full mast.
“Mackenzie? Can you hear me?”
He didn’t answer. She hurried to her purse.
Before venturing out tonight, Ellie had collected a package from a secure drop. The package contained a syringe but no needle. She didn’t need to inject him; she needed him to swallow the syringe’s contents.
Quickly, Ellie shot the silvery liquid down into his throat. McDouche coughed a bit, then swallowed the latest advance in tracking: nanotechnology. Microscopic nanobots, normally used to deliver targeted drugs in the bloodstream, gave off a radio signature that allowed doctors to track their locations inside the body. The nanotechnology was currently being developed to turn people—kids and older parents suffering from dementia—into a walking biological GPS so they could be found in short time.
Currently, the range was limited. Less than a hundred feet. That was Roland’s problem now, not hers. She grabbed her phone and made the call to Anton’s man.
“He’s all yours,” she said when the phone on the other end of the line was picked up.
“Heard a lot of moaning in there,” the humorous voice replied. It belonged to her direct report—Nameless Asian, as Roland referred to him. “Papi show you a good time?”
How the hell did he hear the moaning? The answer broke through her pickled brain: her phone. The phone Anton had given her was bugged. Someone was always listening, always tracking her movements.
“Cameras?” Nameless Asian asked.
“One by the gate, another two near the front door. You want me to see if I can find the security system?”
“No, we’ll take care of it. Go unlock the front door—and kill as many lights as you can.”
“What about the gate? He used his phone to unlock it, and I don’t know the password.”
“We’ll take care of it.”
Ellie got dressed and shut off as many inside lights as she could. The outside lights were a different matter. She found the ones for the front door, but the lights on the front yard were solar powered. She couldn’t do anything about those.
Ten minutes later, while she was drinking a glass of water in the cool silence of the kitchen, she heard the front door open. Three men dressed in black, their faces covered in balaclavas, like they were bank robbers, stepped into the foyer and looked around, studying the layout. The tallest of the trio, a man with Asian-shaped eyes, said to her, “Where is he?”
Ellie didn’t recognize his voice. “Passed out in the drawing room,” she said.
“The what?”
“The big room with the bar and pool table.” She pointed to the hall. “Last room on the right—you can’t miss it. He told me he had an office upstairs.”
The other two dropped their bags and rushed down the hall. After removing Mackenzie from the house, they’d go through his phone and his office computer or computers. Right now Anton had another crew at Mackenzie’s Silicon Valley condo, doing the exact same thing, everyone working well into the night getting to know all about Mackenzie’s online life—passwords for his banking and investment accounts, everything. Once Mackenzie had been shipped off to his new life as a donor, Anton would
assume control of all of his accounts, and electronically transfer his money through a series of sophisticated encrypted wire transfers, making it look like Mackenzie had, for reasons unknown, cashed out and disappeared. Anton had developed this side gig, flushing as much money out of rich carriers as he could.
Ellie said, “You want me to stick around and help?”
“Nah, we’re good. Go ahead and take off.”
“You sure? I don’t mind.”
“You did good work tonight,” he said. “Now it’s time for you to go.”
CHAPTER 14
SEBASTIAN PARKED IN a shady spot near a massive rock formation that reminded him of something you’d find on, say, Mars—boulders red and orange and alien looking. For all intents and purposes, this place might as well have been another planet. Human life couldn’t exist for too long here in Death Valley, the hottest and driest place on earth. Rain rarely made an appearance—maybe two inches of water per year, if that—and the temperatures could reach 130 degrees or more during the summer months. Today was a fine December morning, not a cloud in the sky, and according to the digital temperature reading on the Cadillac Escalade’s dash, it was already ninety-seven degrees—and it wasn’t even ten yet.
He killed the engine, and the AC with it, and when he opened the door he stepped into an oven of dead air and dry heat. He was alone. An added bonus of choosing this spot was the fact that park rangers didn’t come here, the area too remote and too dangerous. The access road he’d just traveled hadn’t been used in well over half a century, and during the bumpy drive across the unmaintained dirt road he’d traveled for the better part of an hour, he hadn’t passed a single car or person.
Gravel crunched beneath his loafers and coated them and the cuffs of his jeans in a fine white dust as he made his way to the hatchback. He opened it and unlocked the latch for the hidden compartment used for transporting blood clients back and forth in secrecy from their homes to the transfusion center.
But the man in the compartment wasn’t a client. Lincoln Miller worked for Sebastian’s only supplier for carriers. Link, as everyone called him, was a “runner”; he supervised a group of stickmen and, on a handful of occasions, ran the operations to abduct carriers.
Link’s eyes shut hard against the sudden sunlight. He wore a pair of long, baggy gym shorts, nothing more, and his wrists and ankles were bound with plastic cuffs, which would have made it hard for him to fight—not that the young buck had the strength. Like Paul, Link was obsessive about bodybuilding, but his three months in the dark, subsisting on a glass or two of water and a handful of almonds per day, had wasted away all his gains in the gym. Now he looked shriveled and pathetic, as harmless as a prune.
Sebastian reached inside and hefted the kid out of the compartment. He propped Link up, into a sitting position, on the back bumper. Link couldn’t keep his head up, so he rested it against the side of the hatchback’s frame. His lips were cracked, full of bleeding blisters, and his tongue was swollen—all a result of dehydration. Sebastian had put a stop order on the water a few days ago, and Link hadn’t eaten anything solid in about a week.
Sebastian used his arm to wipe the sweat from his forehead as he went to retrieve the paper bag from Whole Foods. He placed the bag next to Link, then opened a bottle of water, glad that Frank had hosed Link down back in LA before loading him into the car. The kid had smelled ripe beyond belief.
“Drink it slowly,” Sebastian said, placing the bottle in Link’s hands. “If you drink it too fast, you’ll throw it back up.”
Link didn’t gulp the water, but he held the bottle against his mouth like a baby, sucking at it, grateful. When he finished, Sebastian gave him another bottle. By the time he finished that one, almost twenty minutes later, Link looked a bit more alert, his gaze skittering across the landscape of latte-colored mountains, the sunbaked valley floor as white as table salt.
“Beautiful place, isn’t it?” Sebastian said.
Link didn’t answer.
“Ever been to Death Valley?”
Link shook his head. It seemed like a massive effort.
Sebastian reached into the bag, came back with a cellophane-wrapped sandwich. “Chicken salad,” he said. “You want?”
Link eyed it with lust. “No, thank you,” he croaked.
“This isn’t a trap or test or some shit. You need to eat, so eat. There’re a couple of other sandwiches in the bag—a turkey club and some Italian or Mediterranean thing. Didn’t know what you liked, so I grabbed more than one. There’s some more water in there, too. Help yourself.”
“I don’t know anything about Paul.”
Sebastian took a bite of his sandwich. He had invested a significant amount of money into finding Paul, and yet, with all the extra manpower, with all the resources at his disposal, had come up with only two leads—one of them being Link, who hadn’t been working the afternoon Sebastian went for a swim in his pool.
Link, Sebastian was sure, knew something. Paul had worked directly with Link, learning how stickmen worked, the ins and outs of finding and supplying carriers—but through it all, Link had stuck to the same “I don’t know shit” script.
“If I knew anything—anything,” Link said, some strength coming into his voice, “I would’ve told Frank. I told him everything I know, which isn’t much.”
Sebastian nodded, chewing, and eyed the burn marks covering Link’s chest, arms, and legs. Frank was a big fan of some electric torture developed over in Chile, had gotten solid results with it in the past. Sebastian never stuck around to see how it worked. He couldn’t stomach the way a man lost control of his bodily functions, was reduced to a childlike state, begging for the pain to stop. Link, Sebastian saw, was staring at him that way right now.
No one’s looking for you, Sebastian wanted to say. It was true. Link had no steady girlfriend and he didn’t keep in touch with his parents, who lived in upstate Washington. Link had several friends in LA, but not a single one of them knew he’d been MIA for months; Sebastian knew this because he had access to Link’s phone and email accounts.
The City of Angels attracted a lot of guys who had barely any ties to their families—guys who wanted a fresh start from their former lives. They made good employees, especially from an administrative standpoint. In the event that they had to disappear, not too many people came around asking questions. People floated in and out of LA all the time.
Sebastian took out another sandwich and unwrapped it. “You and Paul were tight, right?”
“We weren’t, like, you know, bros or anything.”
“But you hung out a lot together outside of work.” Sebastian placed the turkey club on Link’s lap. “Hit the gym and bars, took in some ball games.”
“But I didn’t know the guy.”
“What did you guys talk about?”
“Just, you know, stuff. General stuff like workouts, broads, and baseball. Fun clubs and bars. Shit like that. I told all this stuff to Frank.”
Frank had put people in and around all the bars and clubs Link had told Frank about, hoping to catch a glimpse of Paul. So far, nothing.
Link said, “Like I said, I didn’t know the guy. Our conversations weren’t deep or anything—he never shared, like, his future plans. Dreams or goals. It was, you know, all surface. You’re his father—”
“I’m not his father.”
The heat in Sebastian’s tone made Link flinch.
Link pieced off a bit of the sandwich. When he placed it in his mouth, he looked like he was going to break down and cry in relief and gratitude. “All I’m saying is that if anyone knows the real Paul, it’s, you know, probably you.”
Not true, Sebastian thought, chewing. What he hadn’t fully realized until the weeks following his attempted assassination was just how little he knew about Paul and his personal life—which, truth be told, came as something of a surprise. Paul had lived
under his roof until he was nineteen, when he joined the Marines, and during those years Paul had had an active social life. So when Paul disappeared after the shooting, Sebastian assumed Paul’s friends and all the contacts on his phone would lead him to wherever Paul was holed up—or, at the very least, provide crumbs of information that would eventually lead to his location.
He was wrong.
Not only had Paul not been in touch with most of his old crew for months, if not years (some, Sebastian had been told, were surprised to find out Paul was back in LA), but the ones Paul did keep in touch with didn’t have much to offer.
As for the people in Paul’s current life, who they were, Sebastian’s investigators had no idea. His people had scoured Paul’s phone records, his computers and email accounts, and hadn’t found anything useful. Sebastian couldn’t help. Paul never talked about his personal life and Sebastian never asked, because, quite frankly, he didn’t care. Up until the point when the son of a bitch tried to have him killed, Paul had been nothing more than an ugly piece of furniture—something Sebastian had to endure for living with Trixie.
Link was saying something to him. Sebastian turned to him and said, “I’m sorry—can you repeat that? I didn’t quite catch it.”
“I said Paul is unknowable. Doesn’t tell you much in the way of what he’s thinking from one moment to the next.”
You got that right. “So you didn’t know anything about Paul taking Simone’s blood or that he might be thinking of setting up his own shop. You’re still maintaining that position.”
“Mr. Kane—”
“Oh, it’s ‘Mr. Kane’ now.”
“—if I knew anything—anything—or if I suspected something? I would’ve brought it immediately to Frank’s attention.”
