Dark Men (6 page)

“My aunt Elaine. Elaine McCoy. I used to call her the Real McCoy because she always kept it real with me, you know? You didn’t end her, did you?”

This guy. I shake my head once. “Hogtied on aisle six.”

“The rope aisle.”

“Yep.”

He nods, “Thanks for that. She knows what I do, and she knows she’s in it, but still, it would’ve been a shame.”

“Where’s the skull?”

“You gonna shoot me after I tell you? I don’t care much, I’d just like to know if it’s coming so I can get my mind right.”

I shake my head again. If he’s relieved, he doesn’t show it. If he doesn’t believe me, he doesn’t show it either.

“There’s a floor safe under the lamp there. Combo’s 24-34-24.”

I look over in the direction he indicated. “You open the safe, fish out the skull and give it to me. Afterward, you can call whatever doctor you use and get ’im over here. I wasn’t hired to kill you, so I’m not going to do any pro bono work. I just need the skull.”

He walks stiffly over to a straight black floor lamp near a television. Using his good hand, he rolls it along its base and exposes a recessed safe before he stoops over the lock. His face is white from the bullet wound; sweat has broken through and drips off his forehead. He forces himself to concentrate as he twists the dial on the safe’s face, and then exhales when the door pops open.

I put the barrel of my pistol up against the middle of his back as he reaches inside with both hands. In movies, guns at close range are always pointed at victim’s heads, but the head is the easiest part of the body to jerk suddenly, like I did when I heard the shotgun cock downstairs. But the middle of the back? The middle of the back is damn near impossible to spin out of the way in the time it takes for a skilled gunman to squeeze a trigger.

He doesn’t flinch as he withdraws a bone-white human cranium from the safe and hands it to me.

“You gonna ask me whose skull it is?”

“I’m gonna ask you something else.”

“Yeah?”

“What would’ve happened if I would’ve dialed 24-34-24 into the safe like you told me?”

He swallows. His face blanches as white as the skull bones.

“I . . .”

“You told me 24-34-24. But when you popped open the safe just now, the combination you used was 10-20-10.”

He smiles weakly. “You caught that?”

“Yeah. I have good eyes. Could’ve been a fighter pilot.”

He shrugs. “It . . . uh . . . it would’ve blown up in your face.”

“I figured.”

“Does that mean . . .”

I fire into his back twice, through his skin and into his heart. He flops forward, dead before he can finish the sentence.

I wasn’t lying when I told Flagler I wouldn’t kill him. But attempting to trick me into tripping a bomb puts a foot on the throat of my mercy.

CHAPTER FOUR

I
walk into the warehouse, and for the first time, I realize I’m soaking wet. The cool air hits me as I step through the door, and I shudder as though a ghost walked on my grave. Like I said, though I haven’t been on an assignment, not really, it
feels
like an assignment. The tiger is a tiger, and though some may forget, may think of the animal as domesticated, as tame, the beast remembers what it is, and watches, and waits. Instincts, though dulled, are resurrected like Lazarus. Smiles turn to screams. Familiarity turns to non-recognition. And love? Love inevitably turns to grief.

I played the game against a worthy opponent for the first time in over a year, and I came out on top. A feeling is growing inside me I’m not sure I can contain. I’m not sure I
want
to contain it.

The tiger is a goddamned tiger.

Risina has her back to me when I enter, and maybe she feels a change in the air, a charge, like an electric current ripping through the walls, because she bolts upright, nearly overturning her chair as she spins.

“You scared me,” she says breathlessly. Her eyes find what’s in my hands. “Is that . . . ?”

I nod at the skull, holding it up like the gravedigger in Hamlet.

“You know whose it is?”

I shake my head, and she laughs. The sound is like a hypnotist’s snap, a bell ringing, because whatever foreboding premonition I brought into the room disappears in that sound. That laugh, that look on her face, that simple prism in her eyes sustained me through so much it almost seems surreal, absurd, that I questioned going on without her.

And maybe that’s it, what I haven’t been able to get my head around until now: maybe the key isn’t absence but proximity. Maybe the key isn’t sending her away, but pulling her closer. Maybe Risina is my battery, my power source.

“So we make the exchange with Bacino? That skull for whatever information he has on why your name is involved.”

“That’s it.” And she’s touched on the biggest problem in all this: if Bacino just wanted his skull back, and kidnapped Archie to get me to do the dirty work for him, why would he cite me specifically? It doesn’t add up, it’s not simple, there’s a piece missing. That’s the way of the killing game: it’s a messy business.

“I’m looking forward to meeting him,” Risina says. Then, a second later . . . “Archie, not Bacino.”

Smoke strolls into the room, his eyes downcast, his hands fidgety. I liked Smoke when I first met him, and I chalked his nervous disposition up to being a fish out of water, but now I’m suspicious. There’s no doubt the time I spent out of the game dulled my skills; maybe it dulled my senses as well. I feel like a diver coming to the surface after a long time in the deep.

“Something wrong, Smoke?”

He meets my eyes, then quickly looks away, his head bobbing like a chicken looking for seed. “Nah, just anxious is all.” I think that’s all he’s going to say, but he adds, “I swear I feel like I’m being watched or followed or some shit.”

“You mark anyone? Same car in two different places, same eyes in a crowd, even if the face is different?”

Smoke shakes his head. “Nah. I don’t think so. Like I said, I’m anxious. Wanna get this over and done with. Get Archie back. It was just a feeling, was all. Maybe I been drinkin’ too many sodas or some shit.”

I watch him twitch some more, like he doesn’t know where to put his hands, so they stay in perpetual motion.

“In this world, you gotta trust your instincts, Smoke.”

His eyes shoot up and search mine to see if there’s any malice behind my words. Am I talking
to
him or
about
him? Am I challenging him? I don’t give him anything, my face as unreadable as a cipher.

There’s something he’s keeping from us, something that has him as skittish as a deer, and I’m sure Risina spots it too.

“So now we wait for the meet, I s’pose,” says Smoke.

“No.”

His eyes shoot up again. “No?”

“Uh-uh. Playing defense is how you get backed into a corner, how you end up broken or dead.”

Risina offers, “We take the fight to him?”

“That’s right. Word of what happened to Flagler won’t hit the streets until tomorrow at the earliest . . .”

“What happened to Flagler?”

I look at Risina carefully, and the question dies in the air.

“Oh,” is all she manages and her cheeks color. I have to remind myself how new she is to this life. It’s another crack in the wall of my plans to keep her close, but that laugh. I have to concentrate on that laugh.

“So we hit him tonight before he has a chance to plan for our arrival. We meet him on our terms. If Archie’s alive and Bacino has him, we’ll get him back.”

Smoke nods, seeing it. He raises his eyebrows, and it looks like he’s genuinely relieved. “I s’pose you want to see the original file on Bacino again.”

“Yeah, we should all go over it and figure out the best place to hit him.”

I like to confront a man in his bed. It’s the second most vulnerable place to hit a target, short of his shower or bath. It is where a mark’s defenses are at his lowest—even if he’s stashed a weapon under a pillow or beneath the mattress, the added effect of being groggy cancels any advantage. The romanticized notion of a hunted man sleeping with one eye open is bullshit. Once a mark is down for the night, it is exponentially easier to put him down permanently.

I don’t need to kill Bacino; I just need him to know how easy it is for me to get to him. I need to embarrass him. I need to make him regret summoning a hit man named Columbus.

According to the file made up for Flagler, Bacino lives in a mansion in Highland Park. He’s alone, except for a half-dozen bodyguards, the occasional woman, a pair of dogs, and his older brother, Ben, who collects a salary but does little to earn it. Ben is supposed to be some sort of chef, cooking for his brother, but the file mentions his real job is a gofer, an errand boy. Groceries need rounding up? Ben does it. Coffee needs brewing? Ben does it. Car needs a wash? Ben does it, but not much more than that. Whether or not he knows Rich collects skulls is not mentioned in the file. They live on opposite sides of the house, and Ben is a foot shorter and a hundred pounds heavier, so I’m not worried about confusing the two.

The bodyguards live at the house and rotate out, two-two-and-two in eight-hour shifts to cover the clock. The guys are ex-cops or ex-military, and they indicate Bacino isn’t trifling with his detail, isn’t just trying to create an exaggerated sense of security the way some people put security company signs in their yards even though they never turn on their alarms.

Archie’s file is a good one, and if he makes it out of this alive, it’ll be at least partly due to his meticulous work. Bacino sleeps in a second-story corner bedroom that faces away from the street. He usually stays up late, hitting the pillow around midnight and then sleeping through the morning.

“I’m going to get to him at two a.m., wake him up from sugarplum dreams by tapping my Glock to his forehead. And Risina?”

She raises her head, expectantly.

“You’re coming with me.”

Outside, the moon is down and the sky is starless, as black as tar. We parked ten blocks away and hoofed the distance, both wearing dark shirts and pants. We stand in the expansive back yard of Bacino’s neighbor, a Persian oil billionaire who is only in this country two months of the year. He pays a man to check on his property twice a day, but the caretaker cut that down to twice a week when he realized no one reported to the Persian about his performance. Risina and I have the yard to ourselves.

“Are you sure?” she whispers at about ten minutes to two.

I make certain she can see my eyes, even in the darkness. “You were in it with me, even before you knew you were in it. And if something should happen to me, you’re still in it. You understand?”

“I understand. You told me it was your choice to have me here, but it is my choice as well. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“The more prepared you are, the better I’ll feel.”

“Then let’s go wake up Bacino.”

We scale the brick wall separating the two yards as easily as steeplechase horses and stick to the shadows as we approach the back of the house. Archie’s file is accurate: the night-shift bodyguards have joined up on the front patio to have a twenty-minute smoke. I imagine they’ve spent the last four years smoking together like this without incident, swapping stories about their lives away from this house, catching each other up on their wives or children or what the Cubs did the day before. I have a feeling they won’t have these jobs much longer.

The alarm is a standard 10-zone system from a generic manufacturer, and since Bacino has a pair of golden retrievers who have free rein of the house, I’m confident he doesn’t turn on the motion detectors. The sensor makers always say pets under forty pounds won’t set ’em off, but they’re full of shit. I’ll know in a moment if I’m right.

We enter through a small rectangular pane of glass embedded in a set of French doors that lead from a den out to the pool. I don’t break the pane—some alarms trigger just from the sound of glass shattering—so instead I use needlenose pliers to scrape away the wood putty and take out the glazier’s points, starting at the center of the frame and working towards the edges. I only have a few minutes and have to move quickly. Once I pull the bottom of the wood apart, I gently slide the glass panel out and place it against the house. After we shimmy through the opening, I replace the wooden frame so to the casual eye, it looks like nothing is missing, though the pane is no longer there. The air is still, so I’m not worried about a breeze giving away our entry-point.

We sneak through an entertainment room, then a foyer, where we can just make out the soft voices of the two guards jawing away, and then we take a set of stairs to the top of the house before heading for the corner bedroom.

I feel Risina freeze even before I understand why, and then I hear the panting of a dog’s breath, or two dogs’ breaths, as I now make out their silhouettes in the doorframe of the nearby guest bedroom. They move forward, toward us, cautiously, their tails down, their ears pricked. If Bacino thought he owned guard dogs, thought they might bark a warning against intruders, he should have raised a different breed. Risina turns her hand palm upward and I do the same, holding it out toward the timid retrievers. Grateful for the acknowledgement, they mosey over and start licking our hands. A few quick pats to the head and they trot back to the guest room, mollified. Risina’s grin is unmistakable, even in the dim light of the corridor.

As promised, I tap the barrel of my Glock on to Bacino’s forehead. “Tap” is probably the wrong word; I pop him hard. He bolts up like a snake bit his face and the first thing he sees is Risina at the foot of his bed. I wanted to disorient him and she does a hell of a job at that. He blinks a few times like he’s still trying to swim to the surface, and then I slap him between the eyebrows again so he jumps, clamps his hand over his head and barks a sharp, “No!” Not “stop” or “don’t,” but “no.” Under the circumstances, I think it’s a decent reaction.

I rack the Glock so he knows there is a bullet in the chamber and a second “no” dies in his throat. He starts to open his mouth, but I interrupt. “We have what you want . . . you need to give us back what we want.”