The Way I Die

by Derek Haas

  I am Copeland. I am Columbus.

  Should I choose one name over the other?

  Do I have to?

  Loeb meets me in his office this time, his inner sanctum. His giant bodyguard stands watch in the room. He keeps his gun out and in one of his ham hock hands, but not pointed directly at me. Polite menace.

  “You don’t waste time,” Ezra Loeb says, happy.

  “No.”

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Copeland.”

  “How come I don’t know you, Copeland?”

  “I don’t like to be known.”

  “How is Archibald Grant?”

  “Why?”

  “You pleased with him?”

  “He gets the job done.”

  Loeb leans back in his chair and his chin doubles. He looks at me like he’s studying an experiment, waiting for the mouse to pick its way through the maze.

  “Here’s my offer. You move to the West Coast and you work with me. I’m the best fence in the United States, and I don’t say that to brag. I say it because it’s true. I’ll take care of everything. Your housing, your weapons, your ammunition, your banking, your transportation. I will not miss a single detail. I have a feeling you’re high-end, so I will give you high-end jobs. I handle all the research personally, and if you want to see one of my target files, I’ll oblige. I’m not here to besmirch Archie Grant, but I’m telling you, you can do better. It’s as simple as that. That’s my pitch.”

  I nod, but only to let him know I mean no disrespect. “I appreciate the offer, Ezra, and I promise to carefully consider it.”

  “Good.”

  “But for now, I’m just going to ask for the name of the hit man and the client on the Matthew Boone job.”

  “Okay, yes. We had a deal and I will hold up my end of it, but I also want to explain why I made this offer. It is not my business to turn out my killers nor my clients, but these are special circumstances. First, they’re both terrifying. I don’t really have a second.

  “The client is a Polish citizen named Piotr Malek. This is an evil man, the worst I’ve ever seen, and I surround myself with devils. It is up to you to decide how evil, and I will hand you his file so you may know what I know and you can see the kind of research I do. I took his money because I had no choice. I then assigned the kill to this man . . .” He hands me a second file. “Keith Watts. Watts has been in my stable for less than two years, and I made a big mistake taking him on. He’s not a contract killer; he’s psychotic. He kills the target and dozens of other people along the way. He once took out fourteen men and women on an office floor on the way to his mark. It was a massacre. I would’ve dismissed Watts, but I’m afraid of him, to be honest. I’ve been doing this job for thirty-five years and I have never been in this situation. When you walked in like manna from heaven, I thought, I can kill three birds with one stone here. Take out my rival and get rid of these two demons, all in one fell swoop.”

  “Three birds, huh?”

  “I’m scared of them. Bey, do I get scared?”

  The big guy behind me grunts, “No, boss.”

  “See, I don’t get scared. But this murderous bastard of a client and this homicidal maniac of a hit man have me jumping out of my skin. I feel for Matthew Boone, I really do, which may be why I didn’t put together the greatest file for Keith Watts. I might’ve bought Boone some time.”

  “When did the assignment go out?”

  “Six weeks ago.”

  “So he’s in the strike window?”

  “Yes. Eight weeks is usually it, but . . . yes.”

  “Okay,” I stand, holding the files. “You’ve been fair. And I will consider your offer.”

  “Seventy-thirty. If we work together.”

  “Again, I’ll think about it.”

  He stands, and we shake hands. Bey opens the door and shows me out. The files feel heavy and thick.

  I am Copeland. I am Columbus.

  Soon, I will have to choose which is stronger.

  7

  I take a private jet out of Van Nuys so I don’t have to switch out guns and ammo when I get back to Portland. I’m alone, except for the pilots and a flight attendant who brings me a plate of Chinese food from what she assures is the best restaurant in Beverly Hills. I ask for privacy and she disappears to the flight deck without being offended. I open Ezra Loeb’s first file and bend over a well-written, strong piece of research.

  The man who ordered the hit on Matthew Boone, Piotr Malek, is fifty-six. He grew up outside of Warsaw in a town called Wolomin. His parents, like everyone else in Poland after World War II, were poor and stayed poor. Malek’s youth is a mystery until he shows up at Moscow University in 1978. He earned a degree in chemical engineering followed by another in computer science. What he did in his primary education to garner enough notice to attend university in the Russian capital must’ve been remarkable. He graduated with distinction, then disappeared into the labyrinth of the Soviet government until 1989, when the wall fell, and he moved back to Poland.

  He appears in various records after that—building permits and bank accounts and travel visas provide a timeline—but his longest employment stint was at Belchatow Power Station, which is unremarkable on its surface. A chemical engineer who ends up in the energy sector of his homeland seems a natural progression, though I don’t profess to know the ins and outs of Polish politics. That he held his position throughout his country’s volatile identity shifts speaks to either expertise or tenacity. That the power plant remains one of the most climate-damaging installations in the world is not Malek’s fault and certainly can’t be the source of Ezra Loeb’s horror and spite. I don’t take this fence for a radical environmentalist.

  A few pages more and I get to the crux of it: Twenty-four plant workers died in an accident in 2004 at Belchatow. There was an inquiry. Malek held the title of Chief Engineer and some kind of fire spread on his watch and two dozen men perished. Malek was exonerated and the newspaper in Warsaw proclaimed the tragedy an “unfortunate accident.” Official reports on the hearing went missing or were destroyed. Soon thereafter, Malek’s bank account grew by millions. He left his position at the Belchatow plant and moved back to his nation’s capital where he consulted with the Minister of National Defense. His position in the government remains unknown.

  So what to make of all this? How do twenty-four deaths at a lignite-burning power plant result in a bribe and a defense post? How does that tie into a hit on Matthew Boone? And why was Loeb scared enough of his client to give him up to me? I feel like I’ve been given the answers to a crossword puzzle but the boxes don’t fit the words.

  I flip to the file on Watts, the hit man. It has more detail than I imagined it would be, mainly because shooters in my line of work tend to bury information about their history. Our pasts can be used against us, as I found out when a fence named Aiza sold my biography to a killer named Castillo. Many people died, including my wife, Risina, and the name Columbus.

  “Keith Watts” appears to be his birth name. He was in and out of institutions since the age of twelve, including a two-year stint in juvie for torturing his neighbor, an eight-year-old girl. He hung her in her basement by throwing a rope over a chin-up bar, then released her to her feet long enough to catch her breath before he hoisted her up again. He was nearly beaten to death by the girl’s father when the latter fortuitously discovered them. The girl survived and recovered. When the details emerged, prosecutors dropped charges on the father.

  Watts did his time and then started killing for money, according to Loeb’s file. He worked for a succession of fences in the South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama—before he was busted for murder in Texas and did an eight-year piece at Huntsville. His release was either a clerical error or someone paid off the parole board; regardless, Watts lit out for the West Coast immediately. Loeb recruited him on the recommendation of a fence from New Orleans, but he thinks he was tricked into it. The New Orleans fence wanted Keith W
atts off his hands and off his books and was only too happy to push him onto a colleague like a magician forcing a card. Since then, Watts performed half a dozen jobs for Ezra Loeb, all involving additional casualties to civilians, most involving criminal torture of the mark before he or she died.

  Loeb is right. This man is a psychopath. I’m going to have to stop him before he makes his move, find him and eliminate him first, because his attack will most likely take out Peyton—and the boys.

  His affinity for torture has me looking forward to it.

  The safe house outside Portland is quiet.

  No smoke rises from the chimney when I approach and I go on high alert, like a dog that hears a stick crack outside a window. I park quickly and leap from my car, but the front door is locked and inside the house, silence. The curtains are drawn, so I can’t see through the windows, and unease sets inside me. I realize I don’t have a key. I never asked for a key. Peyton had the key when I left, and Peyton’s car is here but there’s no sign of her or the Boone family.

  I move around the house soundlessly, my ears up, my Glock out, and the wind picks up, the cold, remorseless Oregonian wind, and the hairs on my neck feel it, all of them erect and standing at attention. I thought I had time, but hit men never respect your clock, your schedule. They make their own time and exploit your sense of yours.

  The windows on the side of the house are covered too, mocking, and the forest seems to have gown closer to the house, a trick of the shadows, the sun fading, falling. If I’m too late, if inside is mutilation and devastation, then the next job I perform will be free of charge.

  A football thumps in the grass thirty feet in front of me, bounces, tumbles awkwardly, comes to rest. Josh leaps on top of it, then Liam on top of him, and they tumble, laughing, rolling over each other.

  They stop when they see me with my gun up and freeze, their easy laughs dying in their throats. Peyton jumps around the corner, her pistol in her hand, but she catches sight of me and stops before she pulls the trigger.

  “Oh,” she says. “It’s you.”

  I sit at the kitchen table with Boone and Peyton, empty soup bowls in front of us, tension in the air.

  “So your recommendation is to stay here and do nothing?” Boone is restless. It’s not his fault. It reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre’s story “The Wall.” Mix terror, worry, and waiting, and the combination will drive any man to the brink.

  “I’m going to find the hit man who took the contract and put him down. Then I’m going to find the man who hired him and make sure he hires no one else.”

  Peyton shifts her eyes from me to Boone to see how he’s going to accept this strategy. He keeps his voice low to avoid the ears of eavesdropping children. “I have a business to run. A life to lead. They have school. How long do you think—” then he stops himself and squints his eyes tightly like all of this is too absurd. “I can’t believe we’re talking about this.”

  “Well, we have to talk about it because it’s happening. If you want to live through the next month, then this is the way it has to be.”

  “You’ll kill them?”

  “Yes.”

  “This name you have.”

  “Piotr Malek.”

  “I don’t know how I got on his radar. Or why. But can’t we make him an offer . . . buy him out?”

  “You’ll be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life, even if he agrees to terms now. You want to be sure?”

  Boone nods.

  “Then you unleash me.”

  Peyton might as well be at Wimbledon. Her eyes follow back and forth as we speak, enraptured.

  “What did I do to him?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it is, he thinks he’s better off with you out of the way.”

  “Poland? He’s Polish, you say. I’ve never done business with Poland. Or anywhere near there.”

  “Maybe Malek wants your company’s software, and he thinks it’ll be easier to acquire without you in charge.”

  “This goddamn technology. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to help people, help governments, help law enforcement. What they want is a perversion.”

  He looks for approval from me, agreement, but the way things start out and what they become are rarely in the hands of the creator.

  “How long?” he asks again, like a child accepting his punishment but haggling over the terms.

  “I don’t know. When I get to Watts, that’ll buy us some time. You can check in with your office then. Do whatever you need to do business-wise.”

  “I should shut the company down. I don’t need it. I’ve done enough.”

  “That’s neither here nor there. It could make everything better or everything worse. I don’t know why Piotr Malek wants you dead, but the whys don’t change what is. Understand?”

  He nods.

  Peyton speaks up, her voice strong and confident. “What about me?”

  “We’ll talk later.”

  Boone rubs his hands up and down on the back of his neck, trying to relieve tension that won’t go away. “You’re asking me to tell you if it’s okay to kill two men I don’t know . . .”

  “No, Mr. Boone, I’m not asking. That is what is going to happen. You have no culpability, morally or legally. It just is. What I am asking you to do is to continue to hide here, continue to have no contact with the outside world, especially your business, until I do my job.”

  “But I thought when I reached out to Curtis, I thought I was hiring a better bodyguard.” His voice rises. “Someone to guard my body. Not someone who . . .” He stops, controls his volume. “Not someone who . . . who kills the . . .”

  “You did. You did, and that’s what I’m doing. There’s a threat that isn’t going away until I eliminate that threat. It’s no different than if you had cancer and you hired surgeons to cut it out before it spreads.”

  He stares at me a long time, trying to wrap his mind around this new reality, seeing if my logic is acceptable.

  Finally, he nods. “A cancer.”

  “That’s it.”

  “I . . . uh . . . I should go check on Liam and Josh.”

  “Okay.”

  He stumbles away, sleepwalking.

  Peyton takes a bite of an apple.

  “Cancer?” she says, and a little juice dribbles onto her chin. “That was a good one.”

  The house has an outdoor fire pit on the side with a view of the driveway, so we turn on the gas and set if aflame, and Peyton and I sit while the logs crackle and throw out just enough heat to keep us comfortable. A light is on upstairs in the boys’ room, and we can hear Boone reading to his sons, even though they’re too old for bedtime stories.

  I had plans to read to my son—I wasn’t going to do it like all the parents before me. I wasn’t going to read the Magic Treehouse and the Hardy Boys and the Elmo books. I was going to read him Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men and The Old Man and the Sea, because those authors wrote about the way real people acted, real boys talked, real life was lived. That was my plan until real life was lived and he’s not my son anymore. I wonder what Jake is reading to him now.

  The way I die is curiosity.

  Peyton puts her hands near the fire to warm them.

  “What about you, Mr. Copeland? I told you my deep, dark secrets . . . you got one for me?”

  I shrug, lost in my past. “There’s nothing to tell. I just do my job.”

  “Horseshit,” she says. “You’re no more bodyguard than Kermit the Frog. And you’re not, nor have you ever been, law enforcement. I can spot a cop a mile away, and you’ve never carried a badge.”

  “What am I then?”

  “I’m guessing some kind of special forces. Some kind of army intelligence we never hear about that does shit in countries we’re not supposed to be in. How close am I?”

  “All over it,” I give her.

  She accepts it reluctantly.

  “While you’re gone, I want you to know, I will not let them out of
my sight. I don’t need much sleep. When I catch a few winks, it’ll be inside their room, next to the locked door. I will stick to the Boone family like Velcro.”

  “Keep doing what I need to do until it is done.”

  “Glad to. These boys—these boys, they’re something special. The dad I don’t know about. I want to like him because it’s my job to keep him alive and I want him to be worthy of it, you know, but he’s sort of closed off, which I can’t really blame him for, knowing what’s going on, there being a price on his head and all.

  “But the boys, Josh and Liam, they’re great. They get along more like friends than brothers, and they’re so sweet, asking me how I’m doing. Maybe I shouldn’t care. I don’t know. But it makes me happy to stay here.”

  She bites her lower lip, like she’s been talking too much and she’s gonna stop now.

  “I had an old boss once who explained to me that when I did a job, an assignment, I had to make a connection with my mark so I could sever the connection.”

  “Mark? What do you—” then she stops herself. “Oh.” It comes clear to her. “Ohhhh. Okay. Go on.” She settles back in her chair, her cheeks flush.

  “He said it was a mental game you play so you can continue to do the job effectively. Find something terrible in the person you have to put down, latch on to that, breathe that, so when it comes time to dispose of it, it’s like cutting out the rotten part of an apple.”

  “Does that work?”

  “I think so. I don’t know. I’ve never had a hard time sleeping at night, I know that. But maybe, maybe on this side of the coin, maybe the protection game is similar. Maybe you have to find something to love about your client, breathe that, so you’ll do anything to save him. Or them.”

  Peyton snorts.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry. But you sure aren’t doing anything like that with Matthew Boone and his kids. You barely look at them.”