by Matt Hilton
He stopped the vehicle a hundred yards short of the buildings, turned off the engine and slipped out the door. He didn't close the door fully, only pushed it gently to. Then he moved towards the buildings at a steady lope. The bullet wound in his leg was knitting, but with each step it felt like his skin cracked open. Ordinarily such a minor wound wouldn't be a distraction, but now it made him chew his lips against the pain. The limp became more pronounced the nearer he got to the buildings.
In his black clothing, his face stark and smudged with blood, hair hanging in colourless ribbons, he felt like a B-movie vampire skulking through the night. Not a bad image — it would strike fear in the hearts of those he might come across. Fear would be his greatest weapon.
He scanned the buildings. Two were little more than lean-tos, while one was an enclosed barn. There were a couple of adobe-style outhouses and then a small, single-storey house. The house was adobe as well, more like those he'd seen in Santa Fe than those indigenous to this part of Florida. He was approaching from the back of the house, but he got the impression of large windows in all the rooms. Because of its remote location, with no discernible neighbours, the drapes hadn't been drawn when the occupants had retired for the evening. The only light he could see was from a dull bulb in a porch at the rear door.
It was hot here through the day, so he could guarantee that the house was temperature-controlled by A/C units. For them to work to their best ability, windows and doors would be kept shut during the sultry hours of the night. Shut but not necessarily locked.
The obvious door to try would be the back door. People who lived and worked in the area of the outbuildings would use that door on a regular basis. The front door would hardly ever be unlocked. Still, he bypassed the rear of the property to fully reconnoitre the building. When he got to the front of the house, it was in darkness. His peek through the large picture window showed a simple living space with sturdy wooden furniture and an old-fashioned stereo built into a cabinet. Trinkets adorned shelves on the wall. Framed photographs lined one wall, but in the darkness he couldn't make them out. Portraits for sure; sons and daughters and grandkids, more than likely.
Continuing round the far edge of the building, he found a car port. It housed only one vehicle, a Dodge pick-up, dusty and scraped from hard toil in the fields. He found the door unlocked and opened it. No alarm. He wasn't expecting one: an alarm or central locking would have armed itself by now and made the doors secure. He searched the interior for a weapon, but there was nothing. He did note something, though. The driver's seat was misshapen and tattered, but the passenger seat was as smooth as the day it came off the assembly line. Only one person ever rode this vehicle. No Mrs Farmer to contend with inside the house. Whoever lived here did so alone.
He poked around on the back of the flat-bed, and came away with a large lug wrench from a box of tools. Heavy and blunt, it was a formidable weapon. He also took a screwdriver that he pushed into his waistband. It wasn't dagger quality but it could still be rammed through flesh if the need arose.
As he made his way past the front of the house the scene hadn't changed. The lights were still off, the living room devoid of life. He kept going, gained the back of the house once more. Gnats swarmed on the screen of the porch, seeking the light bulb within. Dantalion opened the screen very slowly so that it didn't squeak, then stepped inside, accompanied by many of the darting insects. Some of them batted off his features and clung to his hair and he shivered involuntarily. He wiped them away. He turned the door handle. Felt resistance. The person inside was security conscious after all. But that was a good thing, could mean he also had what Dantalion had come seeking.
He took the screwdriver out of his waistband, inserted it alongside the lock and levered against the frame, gradually forcing open the door. The lock was as much use as nothing when the door frame was made of weathered wood. He was happy that the noise of his breaking and entering was minimal, that it wouldn't have woken even the lightest of sleepers. He stepped inside. A utility area with a stack of laundry waiting for the iron greeted him. Chequered shirts and jeans, a pair of tan nylon trousers, socks and underwear of a conservative type. His assumption of a single occupant was taking on more validity. An older man, judging by the style of clothes. He picked up the nylon trousers — a fashion faux pas to anyone under the age of fifty — and checked the size. Not that he was planning on wearing them himself; he wanted to get a picture of the man he would have to kill. They were narrow around the waist, short in the leg. Small, skinny bastard, then? He selected one of the shirts and found that it was surprisingly bulky. Who was this guy, Dantalion wondered, a goddamn ape?
There was only one way to find out. He went through into a kitchen. It had only the most basic of utilities. Cooker and hob. Sink with a couple of neatly stacked dishes on the draining board. One cup ringed with coffee stains waiting to be washed under the faucet. A drawer in a cupboard disclosed silverware. Dantalion took out a heavy-bladed bread knife. It was better for stabbing than the screwdriver, and he kept it fisted in his right hand.
Moving towards the living area, he passed an upright vacuum cleaner standing in the hall. Ambient light came in through the front door so he avoided tripping over the pipe that lay at his feet like the coils of a boa constrictor. On his right now was the living room. He gave it only cursory attention, then turned to the door on his left.
He listened, an ear to the door.
From within came the tell-tale sounds of snoring. Just a light buzz, but it did appear to be from only one person. He tried the handle and the door swung silently inwards. He stepped inside and squared his feet on the carpet. The figure lying on his back beneath a sheet didn't even stir. Dantalion was a child of the night; his condition had ensured that, so he had no problems with the darkness. He could make out the man's sleep-relaxed features where they poked from beneath the sheet. Younger than he'd thought. The man had a shaved head and a thin moustache that hooked round the corners of his mouth. One shoulder looked muscular where the sheet had dropped away. Strong, farm strong, but maybe something to do with gymnasiums and heavy weights, too. Could be a handful in a hand-to-hand tussle.
A quick stab to the carotid artery would do it.
No. The man would wake, thrash about, his blood jetting around the room, growing less with each failing heartbeat.
Maybe not the best way to kill him.
Club him senseless with the lug wrench, then cut his throat? Less thrashing but still copious amounts of blood.
A single stab to the heart would be best. Very little blood if the heart died instantly. The only problem with that was he couldn't be sure of an immediate hit. The man had a sheet over his upper torso and it appeared one of his arms was draped across his chest. It would mean lifting the sheet to get a clear view. If the man woke up there would surely be a fight.
Choices, choices, Dantalion thought, always choices.
And with each choice a myriad tangents to choose from.
The man muttered in his sleep. Maybe some primal instinct was warning him about the presence of danger hovering so close by.
Maybe I should let him choose how to die, Dantalion thought.
But no. This killing wasn't for pleasure.
Dantalion lifted the lug wrench with his left hand. Brought it down in a sweeping arch. It struck the man's head on the left temple, making a deep depression in the skull above his ear. That could prove a killing blow in itself. The man's eyes shot open, but his pupils didn't contract, they stayed wide and bewildered. He didn't even see the knife that Dantalion drove through his chest. And that wound definitely did kill him.
Dantalion leaned over and flicked on the bedside lamp. Pearlescent light shone. He pulled back the sheet until it snagged against the shaft of steel protruding from the man's chest. Just left of dead centre. Dantalion smiled at his precise stab. But he still needed a gun. He was going up against men who had guns and he had to at least even his chances of a fair fight.
He checke
d the bedside table. No gun.
He checked the closet but found only more of those plaid shirts and jeans. Another pair of cream nylon trousers, too. These were sheathed in plastic, as though kept for best. He took them out and saw that the leg length was much longer than the worn pair in the utility area. These hadn't seen a trip to a seamstress yet. He held them alongside his own legs and found that they stopped a full inch above his ankles, but though he'd probably look like Pee-Wee Herman they would do at a push. He set them on the bed at the foot of the mattress. He selected the less gaudy of the shirts, pale blue with a white plaid. There was also a battered stetson on a shelf at the top of the cupboard. That joined his growing pile of clothes. He found socks too. He'd be going commando, however; no way was he going to wear the man's underwear.
He drew the knife from the man's chest, wiped it clean on the sheet, and then threw the remainder of the sheet over the man's ceiling-staring face. Taking the pile of clothes he went in search of the shower.
On his way he dipped his head into the living room. Glancing around, he noticed a wooden chest pressed up against the wall below the photographs. Switching on the overhead light, he placed his supplies on a worn couch and approached the chest. It was held closed by a flimsy hasp and cheap padlock. One smack of the lug wrench was all it took to break off the lock. He threw back the lid.
He bared his teeth in a grin of pleasure as his eyes took in the contents.
32
As dawn broke over the Atlantic, Harvey headed north-west towards Tampa. He took the Ford and he also took Marianne. Harvey was one of only two people on the planet that I felt easy handing the girl over to. The other, Rink, was already in San Francisco. He called to tell me he'd be on his way back as soon as his parents stopped hugging him. I asked him to hug his mum for me. For my part, I had another job to do. Several, actually, but all involving locating Bradley Jorgenson and delivering him to the safe house where Marianne would be waiting.
While I waited for my rental car to be delivered, I took a run through the state park. A tourist pamphlet in the motel room said that there were more than four and a half miles of trails through the swamps and hummocks of brush. By the time I was finished I'd have covered twice that distance. I needed the exercise. In my line of work you have to remain at a peak level of fitness. All being equal in other areas, it was always the man with the greatest endurance and conditioning who would win a fight. I pushed myself hard. My lungs laboured for the first mile, but then I settled into a rhythm and my breathing evened out so that I was running at a steady gait and my breathing came easy.
Finding myself on a stretch of sand overlooking the ocean, I stopped for a while. I watched the sun come up while performing a yoga 'sun salutation', stretching my muscles and limbering up. I dropped and pushed off two hundred press-ups and the same number of crunches. Then I spent ten minutes going through a series of prearranged patterns of movement that involved punching, kicking, and elbow and knee strikes. Nothing fancy; not karate or t'ai chi or anything so flamboyant. The moves I did were short and brutal and designed along the lines of a simple equation: minimum effort? maximum impact = devastating effect.
Sweating like a pig in a sauna, I ran back through the swamp, detoured so I completed the course again, then headed back to the motel room. My rental was waiting for me, and I signed an assumed name and showed the delivery guy a fake driver's licence courtesy of Harvey Lucas.
Taking the keys for the imported Audi A8 from him, I went inside and immediately checked that my SIG Sauer was where I'd left it inside a tissue box stuffed behind the TV.
Dripping from my workout, I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Then I stripped out of my damp clothes and stepped gratefully under the hot water. My muscles were pumped with blood from the exercise, and I relaxed under the steaming flow, working the kinks out of my body with a soaped-up sponge. When I stepped out of the shower my mind was back on the job.
I slipped into fresh boxer shorts and pulled on a pair of crisp denims that clung to my damp body. Shirtless, I retrieved my SIG from its hiding place and sat on the bed to clean it. I had rags and oil and I stripped down the gun so that I had all the working parts laid out on the bed. When I was done, I inserted a full clip, racked the slide so that I was good to go. Police forces the world over teach a method of safe gun handling. They absolutely will not condone carrying a gun with a bullet in the firing chamber. In case of lawsuits, that was. Or to avoid a fumbling cop shooting off his toes. I come from a different school of thought and practise a method called 'point shooting'. A bit like the quick-draw heroes from Western movies, I could draw, point and fire in an instant. The thinking behind the system was that there should be no natural wastage of time. And it would be a waste of a precious second if I had to rack a bullet into place before I fired. In that time I could already be dead.
The SIG I used was specially modified so that there were no safety switch or sights on the barrel to snag on my clothing. It was a steel-bodied blowback model that barely recoiled in the fist. Handy when the 9 mm soft-nosed Parabellums it fired were a powerful enough load to stop most men in their tracks. I didn't want a gun that I had to constantly fight to control and to retarget after every shot.
Harvey had brought plenty of spare ammunition. He'd also supplied me with a military issue Ka-bar knife coated in black epoxy. Finally, there was a new pay-and-go mobile phone for use during the operation ahead.
I caught sight of myself in a mirror at the back of the room. Most people would see a taller than average man on his way to forty years old, but with the hard body of someone ten years younger. They'd see the short brown hair with only a hint of grey at the temples and the eyes that flashed between blue and green depending on my mood. They'd notice the tattoo on my right shoulder and wonder what it represented. Only if they looked close enough would they notice the story of my life etched into my skin in the form of a tapestry of scars that I'd picked up during fourteen years as a counterterrorism officer and the four years since. On my right pectoral muscle is a tiny white indentation where I was shot when on patrol in Northern Ireland. The scar where the bullet exited formed a puckered mass of scar tissue an inch or so from the tattoo.
I touched a more recent scar, running my fingers over the pink ridge in my chest just to the left of my heart. That was courtesy of a fight with an ex-Secret Service agent named Martin Maxwell who had taken to killing people and stripping bones from their corpses. The bones he took to Jubal's Hollow, his secret repository in the Mojave Desert. Maxwell, dubbed the Harvestman by the FBI, made a mistake when he took my brother, John. I hunted the bastard down and rammed one of those bones into his throat. He got me good, though, and it was pure chance that he missed my heart and found only the meat of my pectoral muscle.
Thinking of the Harvestman, I couldn't help but draw parallels between him and this latest maniac I was up against. Why was it that they had to take assumed names? And often from the Bible? Martin Maxwell had believed himself Tubal Cain reincarnated, and now I had some lunatic who thought he had fallen from Heaven with Lucifer and his crew. Well, he'd certainly taken a fall, rammed off the bridge at Neptune Island and sent to a watery hell in the sea below.
Ever the pessimist, though, I had to admit that I hadn't seen him die. He could still be out there someplace. With that in mind I pushed the SIG into my waistband at the back and felt around for fresh socks. I pulled on my boots — still dusty from my run — then slipped the Ka-bar alongside my right ankle. A plain black V-neck T, with a loose canvas jacket over the top of that. It was too warm for outerwear but I needed something to cover the bulge that my SIG made at the small of my back. I had a licence to carry, but not in my real name. Fundamentally the cops were on the same side as I was, but it wouldn't stop them running me in if they realised the licence was as bogus as the name on it.
A man of many resources, Harvey had already paid the bill for the room. But I still had to hand back the keys before leaving. Pulling all my belongin
gs into a pile, I shoved them into a plastic bin liner and knotted the top. I slung them on the back seat on passing the Audi then went and deposited the key to the room through a flap provided. Then I got in the car, and headed back towards the Dixie Highway. I watched the totem pole grow small in the rear-view mirror as I pulled away.
The Dixie Highway went through Hobe Sound. It was still early, not yet eight o'clock, and the road wasn't so busy. There were only a few people out on the palm-lined streets. Out of Hobe Sound the road hugged the coast. A short distance later, I found the turnpike that allowed me on to the road that traversed first Jupiter then Neptune Islands.
As I drove I watched the boats sailing up and down the Inter-Coastal Waterway. The sea was turquoise against pale sand. In places I could see all the way to the bottom. The sky was equally clear with only a haze on the southern horizon that wasn't cloud but pollution from the cities of Miami and Miami Beach. A mile overhead a passenger plane headed out over the ocean, and I imagined holidaymakers with glum faces as they took their last look down on paradise. They wouldn't think it was paradise if they knew what had gone on down here the evening before.
Arriving at Neptune, I slowed the Audi and pulled into a layover next to a picnic area. There were already families in attendance, but they were too busy enjoying the scenery and glorious weather to pay attention to a lone man making a telephone call. Harvey was driving so it was Marianne Dean who answered. She put the call on speakerphone so that the two of them could listen.
'I hope Harvey's treating you well, Mari?' I said, to keep things light between us. Purposely I used the name she wished to go by; a way of reassuring her that I was fully on her side.
