Silencer (6 page)

She'd explain how that flush of terror dissolved and everything downshifted to slow-mo. She couldn't account for it. It was a knack she'd had since childhood, and it served her well as a college athlete.

Claire went cold and quiet. Saw every detail frame by frame. A sharp focus, eye on the goddamn ball.

She sprinted back to the barn, ducked into the tiny office, pulled down the twelve-gauge, loaded it, and trotted back to the house. See the dead guy, go fetch the shotgun. A handful of seconds to race back to the lodge. Less than a minute. No thoughts buzzing through her mind. Not a trace of the earlier panic.

There'd been no drills for such a moment, though given the steady stream of politicians, sports stars, diplomats, literary lions, painters, musicians, and movers and shakers of every stripe, and all those grimfaced bodyguards, more than once Claire had considered a worst-case scenario. Still, nothing like what was unfolding. Nothing that put her dead center.

In a light-footed crouch, she crossed the bridge, went up the steps. Pressed her ear to the door. She made out one low voice. It was Browning's, but she couldn't distinguish the words. His tone was stern, like the voice he used on ranch hands who'd screwed up, a stiff restraint that barely masked his disdain.

She thumbed the latch, shouldered the door open an inch, set her feet, then barged into the foyer. Two minutes max since she bumped Saperstein's shoe.

With the shotgun at her shoulder, she stepped forward into the den.

Twenty feet away Gustavo Pinto held a pistol in his right hand. A silencer was attached to the barrel and the handgun was aimed down at the floor. Gustavo's cheeks glistened and his eyes were red. Ten feet in front of him, Browning and Earl stood stiffly at opposite ends of the big burgundy couch.

A long oak coffee table separated the two of them from Gustavo. Rolled out on the table was a survey map dotted with red circles. Governor Sanchez stood paralyzed behind the couch, Antwan Shelton at his shoulder.

“Gustavo. Listen to me,” Claire said. “I don't care what's going on
here, but you need to set that pistol on the floor and you need to do it right now. Do it now, Gustavo. No debate, no mistakes.”

Claire stepped closer, the cherry stock of the Remington cool against her cheek.

“Shoot him,” Browning said. “Shoot the fucking bastard.”

Browning glared at the small man. Tears sparkled on Gustavo's cheeks.

“For your family!” Browning yelled. “Shoot him!”

Less than three minutes since she'd discovered Saperstein in the oleander. Three minutes. Everything frame by frame. Her finger tightened against the trigger.

“I'm sorry,” Gustavo said. “Mr. Earl, I'm sorry. God forgive me.”

“Shoot him, goddammit!” Browning roared.

If Claire hesitated for a few seconds, it was because Gustavo's right arm was slack, his handgun aimed harmlessly at the floor. And because she knew him to be a gentle soul, with a wife and several grown children. Like his father before him, he worked his ass off alongside the pickers and ranch hands. Once in her early days on the ranch, Gustavo rescued Claire when she'd become hopelessly lost while driving around the ranch, trying to familiarize herself with her new home. Night falling, she was on the brink of despair. Gustavo appeared in his pickup and guided her back to the lodge, never mentioning the incident again. Unfailingly polite, Gustavo was the one employee on Coquina Ranch she considered a dear friend.

Seconds passed. Claire waited for her order to register with Gustavo, waited for him to drop the pistol, waited as any reasonable person would. That was all. With Browning yelling, commanding her to open fire on the gentle soul.

Gustavo's pistol rose, Claire saying no, no, as that long cylinder wobbled upward toward the men across the room.

There was no choice. No time for pleading. God help them all. She tensed her finger and set off a blast that seemed to rattle the foundation of that house.

Though she'd fired that shotgun hundreds of times and knew its kick, she was staggered and spun awkwardly to her right. When she swung back she saw the spray of pellets had blown out the twenty-foot window and a cascade of bright needles was raining down on Gustavo's body.

She dropped the shotgun on the stone floor and turned to the couch. It was then she realized that in those seconds of delay she'd lost more than a friend.

Earl Hammond, who'd been born on Coquina Ranch and spent decades nurturing the land and the people under his care, strictly maintaining the customs of his ancestors, Earl Hammond Jr. was sitting oddly erect on the leather sofa. His head was turned to the side as if he were watching the scenery pass outside the window of a car. The expression on Earl's face was too serene for this world.

Browning bent over him, felt for a pulse at his throat. He kept his hand there for half a minute, staring up at the ceiling. The governor and Antwan Shelton emerged from behind the couch.

“Holy Jesus,” Sanchez said.

Browning removed his hand from his grandfather's throat. He straightened and looked at the governor and Antwan.

“Aw, shit,” said Sanchez. “Mary mother of God.”

Antwan was holding himself erect, eyeing Claire with a grim fascination, like one gladiator marveling at another's deadly skills.

Browning walked over to Gustavo's body, glared down at it for a moment, then drew back his boot and kicked the small man in the ribs. Gustavo's limp body rose from the floor and flopped back down, his arms slinging loose. The front of his blue cowboy shirt was ripped open, exposing a meaty mess.

Browning stood above the body and raised his hands to his head and slicked his fingers through his brown hair, once, twice, a third time. Eyes closed, blue veins rising at his temple. A moment later, he turned his eyes to the ceiling and howled till his lungs were empty.

When he'd gathered himself, he wiped his lips on his sleeve. Looking
at Claire, his face was pale and shrunken, but his eyes had the fierce glimmer from his football days when he trotted through the stadium tunnel onto the field, readying himself for the clash of bodies, the bruising hits.

Claire came to him and he opened his arms mechanically. Pressing into his warmth, she felt his massive body tremble with such force it seemed the house was quaking around them.

In that moment, in her husband's shuddering embrace, Claire felt an ache of dread and desolation as the enormity of the moment settled. Because she had been the instrument of Earl Hammond's death, however justified her slowness to act might have been, it was very likely she had committed the one unpardonable act that would forever alter her marriage and her life at the ranch.

“Sweetheart, I'm sorry,” she said. “Forgive me please. Oh, God.”

Gradually his trembling subsided, and with a long sigh, he released her from his arms. She reached up and smeared the tears from his cheek. With dawning recognition, he stared at her as if she were just now emerging from a heavy mist.

“Call Frisco,” he said. Nothing in his voice she could read.

“What?”

“Call my brother. He should hear it from family.”

“Frisco?”

“We'll need him out here. A cop talking to cops, it'll go better.”

Claire swallowed but found no words.

“He can run interference. Do his cop thing. Give us advice.”

“What kind of interference?” she said.

Browning didn't reply. His eyes had come unmoored from the moment.

“Where's Saperstein?” the governor said.

“Outside,” Claire said. “He's dead.”

The governor winced and flipped open his phone and began to punch, calling in the rest of the FDLE eight-man security detail stationed
at the eastern perimeter of the ranch in compliance with Earl's one-bodyguard rule.

“Call Frisco, Claire.”

He flexed his jaw. Those brown eyes she'd fallen in love with, so boyishly adoring, so simple and kind, had narrowed to slits, as though a vengeful resolve had taken possession of him, his mouth assuming a scowl so fearsome, so devoid of mercy it seemed the very act of gazing upon the world had become all but unbearable.

“All right,” she said. “All right. I'll call him.”

She glanced past Browning at the bodies of the two dead men. One, a trusted friend, the other, her surrogate father, a man of such quiet dignity he'd been Claire's inspiration and her lifeline these last six years.

More glass tinkled against the stone floor. Claire looked up at the high sill where the last shards were breaking loose and dropping like sleet from an unearthly sky.

 

 

“
THORN? WHAT KIND OF GODDAMN
name is that?”

“It's his name. His last name. What difference does it make what his name is? The other one's named Rusty. That bother you, too? They cohabitate.”

“She's a girl?”

“A woman, forty-five. Middle-aged.”

“Rusty's a boy's name,” Jonah said. “A girl with a boy's name—I hate that kind of freaky shit. It's aberrant. Rusty and Thorn. I don't like these two already. They piss me off, names like that.”

Three in the morning, Jonah and Moses Faust were in the Prius rolling onto the last exit ramp as the turnpike petered out and dumped them in tiny, redneck Florida City, a good hour's drive from their base at Coquina Ranch.

Moses drove. Jonah had his hand out the window, doing wing-dips with his Glock as they passed through the franchise strip. McDonald's, Burger King, all closed up, the gas stations dark and shuttered. He'd been plugging away at speed signs, mile markers, and billboards whenever one flashed into view. Hitting about as many as he missed, which was damn fine shooting at seventy-five miles per hour.

His iPod was connected to the sound system, pumping out a Navajo death chant, the kind of transcendental eerie shit he listened to after a kill.

“That's inviting trouble,” Moses said. “State trooper sees the muzzle flash, we're busted.”

“Like I'm afraid of some hick cop? Bring him on. Let's see what he's made of.”

Jonah let off two more rounds at a Budweiser billboard. Drilled the top of the twenty-foot bottle. Two other bullet holes already marked the sign from some rival sharpshooter.

Moses snapped up the phone, the silver one with international coverage. Pressing it to his ear with his left shoulder, using both hands to scribble on the pad that was clipped to the dash, steering with his knee.

“Too low,” Moses said. “The Danny Rollin is already at three hundred.” He waited while the client weighed the new price. Then Moses said, “Okay, you're down for three seventy-five. Bidding's over at noon tomorrow. Check in around ten.”

Six phones in all. Five items being auctioned at any given time. Most of the bidding happened on their website, new offers streaming in all day and night from keyboards around the world. But there were some clients too paranoid to trust the Internet. Nut jobs who favored the phone. So Moses accommodated them. As it turned out, a lot of the phone freaks were their biggest buyers.

The MoJo brothers made their living purveying murder memorabilia. Specializing in Oldie Goldie shit, like the Danny Rollin item, a crime-scene photo smuggled out of the police files up in Gainesville. Color shot of one of the decapitated coeds, her head posed in front of three mirrors, syrupy goo dripping down the front of the dressing table. A twisted smile on her dead lips.

In all, Rollin, the sick fuck, confessed to killing and mutilating eight victims. Probably there were more, hacked-up scraps of them buried in the Florida woods.

The Faust boys paid two-fifty for the photo from a crime-scene technician who was funding his meth habit by stealing photos from case files. They had a dozen sources like that spread around the United States and Canada. The rest of their product arrived word-of-mouth, people calling at all hours. “Hey, dude, you want to buy an unedited video of the cops at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue, prying up the floorboards and digging in the crawl space beneath the house of John Wayne Gacy?” Moses and Jonah sold that video last month, $284 to some waitress in Omaha. She was a phone-in. Kept yacking away like she thought Moses and Jonah shared her twisted addiction for serial-killer paraphernalia.

Just because they sold gruesome shit didn't mean they were whackjobs. It was a business, like collecting garbage, hosing out Port-o-Johns. Didn't mean you wallowed in the product. Yeah, okay, now and then Jonah glanced at the photos and shit that passed through his hands, purely professional curiosity, trying to see what the clients got all hot about. And yeah, it happened once or twice, his fantasies kicking in, he found himself looking at a photo, wondering how it felt, cutting off a cute blonde's head, placing it neatly in front of those mirrors.

Jonah didn't see how it automatically made you a twisted fuck if you wondered a little, let your imagination play.

Business kills, like the one Jonah did earlier in the evening, that was different. Nothing psycho about it. Bang, it's over, collect your pay. Quick and slick. None of that creepy weirdo shit, playing with the bodies, having sex with corpses. Jonah was a straight-ahead bad boy, certified outlaw, nothing twisted about it.

Moses ended the silver phone call, dropped it in the cup holder, got the blue phone to his ear, scribbled on the pad some more, taking down the new bid.

Twenty-eight years old, two older than Jonah, Moses Faust was a fine-looking man in the classic
GQ
mode. He went six-one, one-ninety. On that score, Jonah got shorted by a few inches and fifty pounds. Moses was ripped from pumping iron in their home gym. He had the
abs, the biceps, the quads. Not Jonah. No matter how many protein shakes he guzzled, how much iron he cranked, he stayed slinky as a coyote.

Cool Moses got his thick black hair styled. While Jonah went with the shaved, Dalai Lama, end-of-days look. A minute with the razor, he was done, ready to roll. No shampoo, no comb. Bing-bing-bing.