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A Fire in the Night

Page 3

by Christopher Swann


  He paused, then turned to her and nodded. “Some cash,” he said. “And a smartphone. They’re under the hoodie there.”

  Relief washed over her like a warm bath. Her phone wasn’t lost. And hopefully neither was what her father had told her to give her uncle. But she had to make sure this was Uncle Nick, and that she could trust him. “Thank you,” she said. “Could … I have my phone, please?”

  He retrieved the phone from under the hoodie and handed it to her. “Looks like it’s dead,” he said.

  “Didn’t have a charger,” she said. It was stupid, but she felt better once she had her phone in her hand. She couldn’t look at it, or at the sleeve on the back of the phone, while he was watching her. First she had to make sure. “So you’re my uncle,” she said.

  “Looks like it,” he said.

  “Can you prove it?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You want to see my ID?”

  She shook her head. Her dad had told her what to ask him, but she was so tired, and the thought of her father about did her in. But she had promised him. “How old were you when my father fell off the roof?” she asked.

  He stared, those amber eyes locked on her. “He didn’t fall off the roof,” he said. “I did. I was ten.”

  She closed her eyes. Her father had told her only her uncle would know that. This was her Uncle Nick. Mission accomplished, Dad, she thought, and while she wanted to weep, she felt herself smiling. She had made it, all the way to her uncle.

  She felt the mattress sag as he sat on the end of the bed, like last time, not too close. “Why did you come up here?” he asked.

  She so wanted to keep her eyes closed, to drift off to sleep, to not think about any of this. Instead she opened her eyes to see him looking at her, his forehead quirked with concern. God, she hoped he could help her.

  “Because,” she said, “someone killed my parents.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cole wiped off his knife on the boy’s sleeve—he would clean it more thoroughly later—and then slid it back into the sheath in his boot. A place for every thing and every thing in its place, he thought. He liked the saying, the mirrored structure of the sentence, how it underscored an irrefutable fact: there was order in the universe. Man just tended to fuck it up. Exhibit A lay in a heap at his feet.

  “What do you want me to do with this?” Hicks said, toeing the heap.

  Cole longed for a cigarette, a hand-rolled one, preferably filled with hash, but he refrained. He didn’t want to ruin his night vision—old habits died hard. And there was still Winslow to deal with. “Leave it for now,” he said. “And get Winslow out here.”

  Hicks nodded, shifting his jaw. Cole could smell the pungent wintergreen scent of the man’s dip, a generous pinch already between Hicks’s lower lip and gums. Hicks rarely dipped during a job but always dipped after one, and so Cole associated the scent with downtime. But this wasn’t downtime. The scent seemed a violation. A flare of anger spurted in Cole, and just as quickly he quenched it. It wasn’t Hicks he was mad at.

  Hicks crossed the yard to the house and went in through the sliding glass door. Cole whistled tunelessly and looked up at the stars which shone like wet diamonds in the night sky. Cole’s right ear itched, but he refrained from scratching the gnarled scar tissue there. He caught a whiff of the bayou that led to the sound and the Intracoastal Waterway, and he tilted his head back and breathed in through his nose. The air was rank and salty. Like life.

  The sliding glass door opened and Hicks returned with Winslow, followed by both Dawes and Zhang. Winslow was thickset with a perpetual scowl, and he walked ahead of the other three with the rapid steps of an angry man. Before he reached Cole, he pointed at him and said, “This is bullshit. The fuck you mean sitting me in the house like I’m in time-out?”

  “I needed a minute to clear my head,” Cole said. “Figure out what to do here.”

  Winslow looked at the heap lying at Cole’s feet. “Take it out to the bayou and dump it,” he said. “If the gators don’t take care of it, the sharks will.”

  Cole gave him a hint of a smile. “My thoughts exactly. But that’s not the problem.”

  Like watching the moon rise, Cole saw realization slowly dawn on Winslow’s face, and then Winslow glanced around to confirm that he and Cole were now flanked by the other three men, who had formed a loose arc at the perimeter of the yard. Winslow hesitated, then forged ahead, as Cole had known he would. “He tell you where the girl went?”

  Cole considered his own boots, then raised his gaze to Winslow’s. His smile was gone. “And why would I need to find that out from him?”

  Winslow didn’t flinch but met Cole’s gaze. Cole gave him credit—the man had balls. “Because I fucked up, I know,” Winslow said. “Did he—”

  “Sun Tzu said, ‘He wins his battles by making no mistakes.’ ” Cole continued to look straight at Winslow. “ ‘Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.’ Pretty good, right?”

  Winslow clenched his fists, then relaxed them. “Look, Cole, I’m sorry, okay? I am. I shouldn’t have let the girl get away. But I didn’t know she’d sneak out the back window. I couldn’t watch the front and back of the house at the same time. Maybe if I’d had Hicks with me, I—”

  Cole waved a hand in a cutoff gesture. “You had one job. I trusted you to handle it. And you fucked up.”

  Winslow stabbed a finger at the heap on the ground. “That’s why I got the kid! I figured she must’ve gone to see her boyfriend. It was an easy snatch, no one saw a thing—”

  “Like you didn’t see the girl sneak out of the house?” Cole said.

  One of the men standing at the edge of the yard started to chuckle, then turned it into a throat clearing when Winslow glared. After a beat Winslow returned his attention to Cole. “I know I fucked up, and that’s why I got him. We needed a lead.”

  Cole considered this. “So you kidnapped a kid and brought him back here,” he said. “Without calling me first.”

  Winslow’s face flushed with anger. “I didn’t have time! The kid was alone in his backyard, staring at his phone. There wasn’t time to call you. I grabbed him and threw him in the truck. No one was home, no one was around to see. And I left his phone there so no one could trace him.”

  Cole sighed. Maybe smoking some hash beforehand would have been a better idea. “Did you look at the phone first?” he said. “See if he was texting someone? Maybe the girl? Maybe that would have been easier? Told us something about where she is?” He pointed at his damaged ear. “See this? Happened on my last job working for somebody else. The team I was on got hired by the cousins for a security gig.” Winslow made a sour face; the cousins—slang for the CIA—liked their paramilitaries, but the sentiment was not always reciprocated by those who fought dirty, secret wars for the analysts back at Langley. “We were meeting somebody at the Syrian border,” Cole continued. “In and out, they said. We walked into a fucking ambush. Lost three men plus one of the cousins. Had to drag the bodies out. And my ear got chewed up by shrapnel. An inch to the left and I’d be dead. When we got out of there, I made a vow I’d set up my own team and run it right.” He fixed Winslow with a hard look. “I could get the ear fixed. But I keep it to remind me that this isn’t a game, that if you’re on a job and you fuck up or get distracted—” Cole snapped his fingers. “Lights out. And you fucked up, Winslow. And that’s not acceptable.”

  Winslow threw his hands up in frustration. “I saw an opportunity and I took it. How many times have I done that right? Remember Mexico? Uganda? Yemen?” Winslow took a breath, visibly controlling himself, then spoke in the low tones of a man pledging an oath. “I promise you, Cole, I’ll get her.”

  Cole locked eyes with Winslow. He sensed the three men around them shift almost imperceptibly, but he kept staring at Winslow. Winslow maintained eye contact for several long seconds. Then he lowered his head a fraction, a sign of submission.

/>   Cole nodded. “Okay,” he said.

  Winslow visibly relaxed. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you. I won’t let you down.”

  Cole slapped Winslow’s shoulder. “I know you won’t,” he said. He stepped back and smiled. “I know I bore you all quoting Sun Tzu, but the man said some wise shit. You know what he said about being a leader?”

  Winslow assumed the air of a student patiently awaiting a lecture. “I don’t.”

  “He said if you regard your soldiers like your own sons, they will stand by you, even unto death.” Cole kept his eyes trained on Winslow. “And you know how I feel about my men.”

  Winslow shifted his feet. “Cole,” he said. “You know I would … that we would do anything—”

  Cole raised a hand, silencing him. “But,” he continued, “if you are indulgent, and cannot make your authority felt, then your soldiers are like spoiled children, and useless for any practical purpose.”

  Winslow frowned and opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, Cole drew his pistol and shot him in the forehead, a flat crack that rolled over the night marsh. Winslow fell backward, still frowning. None of the men around Cole jumped. Cole stepped forward and shot Winslow in the head one more time. He stood there for a moment, gazing down at the body, then holstered his pistol. To Hicks he said, “Take them both out into the sound.”

  Hicks waited a beat, then spit a short stream of dip juice and nodded at Dawes. Zhang produced a pair of tarps, and the other two men started wrapping the heap in one of them. They paused as Cole unfolded the other tarp and laid it on the ground next to Winslow, then rolled Winslow onto it. Cole stopped and looked back at his men. “My mess, my responsibility,” he said. He continued wrapping the tarp around Winslow, and the other two went back to their work. When both bodies were secure, Hicks and Dawes carried them one at a time off into the dark.

  Cole turned to Zhang, the one remaining man in the yard. “You find anything?”

  “Emergency contact number in the girl’s school file,” Zhang said. “Grandparents. It’s an 843 area code, South Carolina. I’ll narrow it down.”

  “Do it,” Cole said. “Check in with Poncho, see if he’s seen anything. And tell him what happened with Winslow.” Poncho was on lookout near the bridge, watching the one road leading on and off the island. Cole wasn’t worried about the gunshots—the rednecks around here shot off bottle rockets and rifles like every weekend was the Fourth of July—but he didn’t want Poncho getting nervous.

  Zhang nodded and stepped away, pulling out a cell phone. From the darkness, an outboard motor kicked up, a sound that faded as the boat with the two bodies headed out into the shallow bayou. Cole took in a deep breath, then exhaled. His men had reacted as he had thought they would—hoped they would. Winslow had fucked up; everyone knew it. An example had to be made. It wasn’t the first time he’d lost a man, but it was the first time he’d had to shoot one of his own. Still, Cole was glad it had gone smoothly. Now he had an hour, maybe two, before the boy Winslow had taken would be truly missed. The boy hadn’t known much except that the girl was scared and on the run, with a backpack of her daddy’s. And the boy had dropped her off at the Tampa airport. For that information, the boy had traded his life—no way they could let him go once he’d seen their faces. A fucking waste. Cole’s ear itched savagely. He ignored it.

  Cole walked back to the house and went in through the sliding glass door. Inside, Jonas was scrubbing plates at the kitchen sink while Waco played Call of Duty on the flat-screen in the living room. “What up, boss?” Waco called, his eyes on the screen. “Come on, come on, motherfucker, don’t you—yes, that’s what I’m talking ’bout, you bitch!”

  In his bass rumble, Jonas said, “That’s all he’s been doing since we got here.” He squeezed a sponge out. “Playing games like a little boy.”

  A month shy of being able to drink legally, Waco was the youngest of Cole’s men, and it was easy enough to think of him as a kid. But in his three missions so far, Waco had already made four kills, and he followed orders eagerly, so Cole was willing to cut him some slack.

  “You doing a little housecleaning?” Cole said to Jonas, a grin drifting across his face. “All you need’s a hoop earring and you’d be the black Mr. Clean.”

  Jonas rinsed off a dish and put it in a drying rack next to the sink. “Just taking care of business, is all,” he said. He glanced out the window, then at Cole. “Winslow?”

  Waco’s video game was loud, maybe loud enough to cover the pistol shots earlier, but Jonas had a clear view of the backyard through the window over the sink. Of all the men, Jonas was the one whose reaction Cole was most curious about in regard to Winslow’s death. “We had a parting of the ways,” Cole said.

  Jonas said nothing at first, just dried his hands on a towel, then hung it on the stove door. “How you want to handle his next of kin?” He meant Winslow’s. He had a sister and nephew in Kansas City.

  “Full payment,” Cole said. Whatever Winslow would have earned on this job, his sister and her kid would get, plus five K for bereavement.

  Jonas raised his eyebrows.

  “He fucked up, but he was one of us,” Cole said. “And I take care of us.”

  Jonas nodded. “I’ll handle it,” he said. “We heading out?”

  Cole reached down and pulled his knife from his boot and laid it on the counter. “Soon as the others get back,” he said. “Got to go find that girl.” He picked up the sponge Jonas had been using, squirted a bit of liquid dish soap on it, ran it under the faucet, and started cleaning his knife. The action calmed him. He hadn’t realized he needed calming. He would need to watch that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Nick looked at his niece lying in the bed, pale and still feverish but clearly not ranting. She knew what she had said, about someone killing her parents. And she was remarkably calm.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “They killed them,” Annalise said. “They went into my house and burned it to the ground with my parents …” She closed her eyes and her breath hitched—she was holding back a sob. Then she took a deep breath and opened her eyes again. They were wet but clear. “I was at my boyfriend’s house and saw the fire. I saw the men who did it. I saw them leave. My house was burning, I tried to go inside to see if my parents … but it was so hot. I couldn’t—” She took another breath. “I ran away, but I read the news reports after on my phone, before it died. My parents were still inside.”

  Nick had spoken with many people who were lying. There were generally signs, what a professional poker player would call tells, physiological reactions to a spike in anxiety. Annalise wasn’t unconsciously touching her face, or becoming very still, or adjusting the bedsheet or her T-shirt or her hair. But Nick hadn’t watched her long enough to establish a baseline, and she was recounting a traumatic experience. That made reading her reactions trickier. In his gut, though, Nick felt a kind of certainty stirring. She wasn’t lying.

  “Okay,” he said. “Where did this happen? In Tampa?”

  She nodded.

  “When?” Nick asked.

  “Two days ago,” Annalise said. She frowned. “Or three? What day is it?”

  “Thursday.”

  “It was Tuesday night. Or really early Wednesday morning. I guess that’s two days. I’m sorry, but … could I have some water?”

  Nick made himself smile gently and nod. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll make some soup later too.”

  Annalise’s expression didn’t relax, but her voice did. She sounded smaller. “Mom always made me chicken-and-rice soup when I was sick,” she said.

  Now Nick gave her a genuine smile. “My mom did the same,” he said. “And my father would always give me ginger tea. I can make that, too, if you want to try it.” She shrugged. Nick got a clean plastic cup from the bathroom and filled it with water from the sink, then brought it to Annalise. “I’ll go get you that tea,” he said.

  He left the bedroom, closing the door. Immediately he felt a
weight descend on him, his heart a heavy stone in the cage of his chest. Why was he suddenly responsible for this girl? He had constructed his life in a way that minimized disruption, kept the outside world at bay, and then this sick, lost teenager had blown it wide open. Of course he wasn’t going to kick her out of his house—even if she weren’t his niece, he wouldn’t do that. What he ought to do was call the sheriff, get Deputy Sams back up here, turn this over to the authorities. If he still had a landline, he would probably do just that, call him right now. But he could drive into town and call from any of half a dozen stores. Later. First, he’d find out as much as he could from his niece.

  He could almost hear Ellie. She’s not lying.

  I don’t think she is either, he said. But that doesn’t mean she’s telling the whole truth.

  He poured water into a saucepan and put it on the stove, then sliced up some ginger and dropped it into the pan. He added a cinnamon stick and cloves and turmeric and a dash of cayenne pepper, then squeezed half a lemon into the pan as the mixture heated.

  The mingled scents opened a door in his mind, a door that had long been closed and locked.

  NICK’S MOTHER WAS having one of her bad spells again, and his father told him to watch his little brother. Dad had his hands full taking care of their mother, who was alternating between anger and listlessness. The anniversary of his parents’ departure from Afghanistan was approaching, which always brought out the worst in his mother. She had not wanted to leave her parents, Nick and Jay’s grandparents, who were buried in the Kart-e-Sakhi cemetery in Kabul. But their father, an American who had worked for USAID in Afghanistan, had said they had no choice once the Communists supported a coup against King Zahir Shah. Dad had always respected Mâmân’s heritage, had been married to her by an imam even though he was agnostic. He knew that asking Mâmân to leave Afghanistan was like asking her to learn how to breathe water. But with the Soviet Union backing the new regime in Kabul, Afghanistan was a tinderbox waiting for a lit match, especially for an American. Nick’s father knew they had no future there, and they had left when Mâmân was pregnant with Nick, a move that might have saved their lives and for which his mother had never forgiven his father. So when his father told him to watch his brother, Nick went to find Jay without complaint.

 

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