by Matt Hilton
'Don't worry, Joe, Harvey's being the perfect gentleman.' Her voice sounded musical, like some of the worry had been expunged from her soul. I only hoped my next question wouldn't send her two steps backwards.
'What has hit the news about last night, Harve?'
Harvey grunted. 'World War Three, the way the networks are handling things.'
'Anything specific?'
'If you're asking if the shooter has turned up, the answer's no. But some old guy was found floating nearby the crash scene. Unless he was unlucky and the Lincoln landed on him, I think Dantalion did the poor sap in.'
'What was he doing out there?'
'At a guess? Fishing. And before you ask, the water's too deep for wading; he had to have had a boat with him. Looks like Dantalion survived. Worse than that, he got clean away.'
We should have made sure. It's a pity Rink didn't get to put a couple rounds in his ugly face for good measure before pushing him into the sea.
But, the news didn't exactly surprise me.
'So he's still out there,' I said. 'But if we were right about Gabe Wellborn being his handler, then I'm guessing he's been cut free. He has no support network to back him up.'
'Has to be resilient enough,' Harvey said, 'surviving the crash and getting away. I don't think he's about to crawl away and hide under a rock someplace. He's probably got himself holed up somewhere and is planning his next move.'
'OK,' I said. 'This is what we're going to do. You go ahead with getting Marianne to the safe house; I'm going to try to get hold of Bradley. I don't trust that asshole Seagram to protect him. Only way that piece of shit would stop a bullet would be if he tripped over his own feet and fell into the line of fire.'
'Can help you there,' Harvey said. 'We spoke to Bradley a few minutes ago. Marianne guessed where he'd be. A motel they used to use when they were first seeing one another.'
In the background I heard Marianne saying something about their rendezvous all being innocent, that they'd only meet there then go on to some movie or bar.
'Where is he?' I asked.
'On his way back to Neptune by now. We caught him on his way out. Tried to convince him to keep well away but he wasn't having any of it.'
'Idiot,' I said.
'He has to be concerned,' Marianne said in his defence. 'Don't forget that we're talking about his home. His family.'
Yeah, I thought. The same family who were trying their damnedest to kill Bradley and her off. I went on, 'The place will be swarming with cops. It's not going to be easy getting in touch with him.'
Then Marianne chipped in, 'I can always give you his phone number.'
'He's carrying a cell?'
'No, I don't think so. We spoke to him on the motel phone. But if he's home I can give you a direct line through to his private office.'
'Sounds good.'
Marianne reeled off the number and I memorised it to put into my phone's address book later.
'OK, guys, I'll let you get on with your bit. I'll ring you when I know what's happening. Watch your backs. If this crazy is still out there we've no idea where he'll pop up next.'
'Don't worry,' Harvey said. 'Next time there'll be no mistakes.'
'Yeah,' I said. My own sentiment exactly.
'Take it easy, Hunter.'
'Yeah, look after Marianne.'
Marianne had her say. 'Please be careful, Joe. And bring Bradley safely back to me.'
'I will,' I promised and pressed the button to end the call.
Then I stabbed in the number that Marianne had narrated.
The ringtone came back at me. And kept on coming.
Deciding I was a little premature in ringing Bradley, I got out of the car and stretched my limbs. From where I was standing I could see the beginning of the Jorgenson estate. The wall that encompassed the landward side of the grounds was a smudge on the horizon. Beyond it I could just make out a hint of the first of the family homes beyond it. A steepled roof with turrets at each corner. But the heat haze was building, so the turrets could simply have been a play of the shifting light.
Quite a large number of tourists were about now. Some had brought blankets. Some had fishing poles and were wandering across the sand dunes that swayed with saw-tooth grass, heading towards the inlet. Others came armed with binoculars, and I thought that there was an inordinate number of ornithologists unless some pretty special birds lived hereabouts. A noisy group of college-aged guys played volleyball on a stretch of open sand. Some of them had bottles of beer in their hands and were posturing for the young women who watched them from their beach towels. I had no beer; I'd brought mineral water with me and I slaked my thirst directly from the bottle.
I should have thought to ask Marianne how far away Bradley's motel was. It would have given me a clearer idea of how long he would be on the road. I didn't even know which direction he'd be coming from. When they'd taken off last night, Seagram had driven north. But the motel could have been in any direction. My plan was to cut him off before he arrived back at the estate and take him back to Marianne. Then the problem posed by Dantalion's apparent survival could be dealt with without the encumbrance of someone I had to protect along for the ride. With that in mind, my obvious recourse would be to park up next to the main entrance gate, but that would likely bring the police down on me in seconds. They'd have been there all night, and there would be more coming and going throughout all of this day, and perhaps many more to come. A strange vehicle with a gun-toting driver would raise the eyebrow of any cop worth his salt.
I decided to wait where I was.
I had a good view of the road, and would recognise the silver sedan Bradley and Seagram had taken off in the night before. If by chance I didn't see them, I'd ring the number for his office on each quarter-hour. I hoped to have made contact by mid-morning at the latest.
While I waited I watched the traffic heading south. I didn't bother with those coming towards me, as none of them would have Bradley on board. Streams of vehicles drove by, some stopped at the layover, but none was a silver Lincoln. I tried Bradley's number. No answer. A quarter-hour and about two hundred vehicles later, and I tried it again. Still no answer.
I wondered if Seagram was clever enough to ditch the sedan and bring Bradley home in a less conspicuous vehicle. Something like an older model station wagon or the black truck with tinted windows I watched sail past. But then I recalled his panic from last night and decided he wasn't fully suited to his chosen career. He would drive the sedan back, because that was what bodyguards drove when they had an important passenger.
Trying the number again, someone picked up. A female voice. Officious. Cop, I thought, and hung up quickly.
It didn't surprise me that the police were in Bradley's office. They'd be trying to make sense of the mayhem that had gone down at two of Bradley Jorgenson's homes, plus that of his cousin Petre, and would quickly tie the family business dealings to the attempts made on their lives. Police officers would be going through the records in Bradley's office in an attempt at identifying who had attacked the houses.
I regretted standing outside the gate when we first arrived, challenging security by shouting angrily at the CCTV camera. The cops would likely be reviewing those recordings right now. Two angry guys demanding entrance, obviously armed and pissed off, would be immediate suspects. Rink's image and mine would be flashing across country to the FBI VICAP HQ at Quantico to try to identify us from their store of mugshots. Not that they'd find us there, but someone with a bit of savvy might think to interrogate military records, and that would finally give us up.
Hindsight's a wonderful thing.
33
The wooden chest in the dead man's living room disgorged its secrets.
It would have been nice to have discovered a cache of weapons but what he found instead were the makings of a disguise that could get him close to Bradley Jorgenson. Each item he lifted out was folded neatly, preserved within layers of tissue paper the way some couples preserved their
wedding suits and dresses. Not that the man he'd killed in his bed ever appeared to have been married. Not to a woman at any rate. But he had been married to his career. The love and care with which he'd saved his uniform indicated that. As did the proliferation of photographs that showed him standing alone, or with groups of colleagues, proudly grinning towards the camera.
Dantalion wondered where things had gone wrong for the dead man. Perhaps he'd been injured, or had become sick, or merely grown jaded with the day-to-day, but he seemed to have taken early retirement from his career. He guessed that the man must have left on good terms, otherwise he might have destroyed his uniform in protest.
The uniform was complete. Even down to belts and equipment.
The only things missing were the tools of his office, but Dantalion believed a more thorough search would turn them up.
The trousers might present a problem, the man being shorter in the leg than Dantalion, but he saw a way round that. The shirts might be a little large, but he only had to fool Jorgenson long enough to take him out and then he wouldn't be concerned by how many people saw through the disguise.
First, though, he had to get out of his wet clothes. Take a shower. He had no hydrocortisone cream with him to salve his itching skin, but he hoped the dead man would have moisturising lotions of some kind in his bathroom. And he didn't know of a farm that didn't possess a rudimentary first-aid kit. Or weapons, he reminded himself. There were always guns on a farm.
He had a tepid shower. Not hot, his skin was too raw. Then he dried off with the softest towel he could find. He dabbed body lotion over the exposed areas of skin on his face and hands, but decided that the rest of his body would be fine as long as he kept covered up and away from direct sunlight. He found antiseptic cream in the same bathroom cupboard and cleaned his bullet wounds. The wounds on his arm and cheek were inconsequential. However, the one on his leg was particularly angry-looking, the flesh at the edges red and swollen like collagen-plump lips. He wondered briefly about the effects the infection could be having on his system. But he discarded the notion. Mind over matter.
Then he set to his hair with a pair of scissors, trimming the long strands into a crew cut. His hair was sparse and tufted in places, and he'd never survive a thorough inspection, but with the hat in place the haircut would suffice.
With the same scissors, he unpicked the hems on the trouser legs, letting them down a full inch. Not too bad, he thought, but tucked them into the tops of his boots all the same. With the shirt on, he folded the back over twice and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers, cinched it in place with a thin leather belt. On went a clip-on tie. The collar sagged a little, and he looked like someone who'd been on a drastic diet and hadn't gotten round to replacing his wardrobe yet, but over all he didn't look too bad. He pulled on the jacket and adjusted the wide-brimmed hat to a jaunty angle, admiring himself in a mirror on the bathroom wall. The mark on his jaw was only a graze, not that noticeable if he kept his chin tucked down.
He found a utility closet. Cleaning fluids and brushes and rags were stacked in boxes. On a shelf at head height he found a strong box. Next to it a key. When he popped the lock he found what he'd been looking for.
The gun was a Taurus 85, a five-shot revolver. One of the.38 calibre specials worn by some law enforcement officers as a back-up weapon. There were two rapid loaders filled with standard.38 bullets. This time he wouldn't be conducting a full-on assault on the Jorgenson estate, so ten rounds would be sufficient.
He couldn't find a holster, so assumed the dead man had kept this gun purely for home defence. Not that it had proved much use, locked in a metal container two rooms away from where he'd died. Dantalion loaded the revolver, then slipped it into his jacket pocket alongside the spare rapid loader.
Then he saw to the most pressing task of all.
His book.
When he opened it, he found that the sea water miraculously hadn't invaded the interior beyond a broad margin. Most of his lists of numbers were still legible. The ink had spread a little, causing an auric light effect around the figures, but that made the numbers seem ethereal and magical and somewhat to his liking. Only the final numbers troubled him. They told a lie. The three he'd written down pertaining to Bradley, Marianne, and Hunter held no power. He could offset that by entering the numbers of those he'd killed since: Petre Jorgenson, Gabe Wellborn and upward of half-a-dozen bodyguards, but that could throw off the value of the figures. The numerology system he used demanded that he be exact at all times. The three he'd already written down must die before he could tally the others' numbers.
In the pantheon of the Fallen, Dantalion is the seventy-first spirit. He is a great and mighty duke, who governs thirty-six legions of spirits. A legion is a subjective figure, whichever way you look at it. In ancient Rome, a legion was a division of soldiers numbering between three and six thousand. That would give Dantalion dominion over the spirits of between 108,000 and 216,000 people. However you approached those figures, it was an unattainable sum for any single killer without the power of an army behind him, or his finger on the button of a nuclear arsenal.
But numerology is flexible. Dantalion had found that by adding up each victim's personally calculated three-digit number, he was quickly approaching those kinds of figures. Once his targets were dead, and he added those from earlier, he'd only need another few victims to be truly treading in the original Dantalion's shoes.
He used a hairdryer from the bathroom to dry the book off. Inevitably the paper had warped along the edges, but again it added to the esoteric look of the book. He swathed it in cling film — just in case. The silver chain was tarnished, but that was OK. The antique look was all the rage. He clipped the free end of the chain to a belt loop and fed the book into his opposite jacket pocket.
Then he lay down on the bed next to the dead man and fell asleep. When he awoke, he ate food from the refrigerator. Not that he was hungry, but he had to keep up his strength. He chose some fast and some slow release carbohydrates and munched them without tasting them. Afterwards he couldn't recall what he'd eaten, but he had a full stomach and was ready to go.
He checked himself out in the mirror again. His clothes were rumpled from the nap, but that made them look like authentic work clothes, and not some he'd taken fully pressed from a storage chest.
He left the lug wrench and screwdriver, but the knife could still prove handy, so he wrapped it in a cloth and took it with him when he left the house. He went out the same way he entered, and was surprised to find that it was dawn, and mist was rising from the surrounding fields and swamps as the early-morning sunshine set to burning off the dew.
He crossed the yard past the outbuildings and approached the truck where he'd abandoned it in the lane. Checking inside, he found that some of his supplies were still there — not everything had been dumped during his assault on Neptune Island — and saw that his plan for taking Bradley Jorgenson was even more viable than before.
The truck started first try. Rather than trying to reverse it the length of the rutted trail, he drove into the rear courtyard of the farm, turned round, then headed out the way he'd come, making his way back through Aurora Village and seeking the highway.
As far as Bradley Jorgenson knew, yesterday's attacker was now sleeping with the fishes and no further threat. Under those circumstances, the man would want to return home to survey the damage caused and to murmur condolences to the families and friends of those killed. He'd also have to face the questions of the police investigators on the scene. Dantalion would be waiting for him.
He picked up the Dixie Highway, then the coast road and approached the island from the north. The roadblocks he anticipated weren't there. In all likelihood, they were busy looking for him at the crash scene. Cautious though, he watched for anyone following behind, anyone in front of him. He also looked for a silver sedan, skimming his eyes over vehicles parked on layovers along the way, watching for unmarked police cars. He didn't see anything. A black
Audi A8 parked on a wide layover caught his eye, but it looked too immaculate to be a government-financed vehicle. Probably belonged to a businessman on the commute to Miami who'd stopped to enjoy a few minutes of peace and quiet before joining the Babel of the big city.
He continued south, driving adjacent to the wall that enclosed the estate. Parked opposite the main entrance was a group of assorted vehicles. They reminded him of newsreel footage he'd seen of hippy caravans that traversed the country in the late 1960s. Vans back then were decorated with flowers and 'peace' symbols and antiwar slogans. These vehicles were equally emblazoned, but the signs on these vans and cars declared affiliation to a greater movement than flower power. These were agents of the new media-hungry age, and the writing showed the names of their respective TV or radio stations.
Turning off the road, he wound his way through the assembled vehicles, parking up furthest away from the highway. Stepping out of the truck he settled his hat on his head, shadowing his face with a tilt of the brim. No one took much notice of him, and no one questioned why he hadn't arrived in an official vehicle.
A TV crew were passing the time of day in sarcastic banter while awaiting entry to the estate and he touched the brim of his hat in greeting. Eyes skimmed over him, but no one approached him for a comment. Leaving the throng behind, he approached the highway and started directing other arriving vehicles on to the layover, looking fully part of the scene in his Florida National Parks Warden's uniform. The cops guarding entry to the Jorgenson estate didn't give him as much as a sour look.
Within fifteen minutes he was just background, and went unnoticed as he walked away along the road, seeking a way into the grounds. When he'd checked out the area yesterday morning, he'd been concerned about CCTV cameras and motion detectors and pressure pads, but with the exception of the cameras all would now have been isolated. There were too many interlopers present for the security devices to be viable. Also, no one would be expecting him to wander inside among dozens of police officers, so the cameras wouldn't be scrutinised as thoroughly as before. In fact, anyone watching the cameras would be concentrating on recordings from the previous evening.
