Storm Surge (11 page)

“You didn’t
even give him a chance,” Sharon said. “You didn’t give him a chance to give
up.”

“He didn’t
deserve one,” Mercer said. “He needed killing.”

“He’s right,
Mom,” Glory said. She looked down at the body on the floor, her eyes narrowed.
“That bastard tried to kill me before you got here.”

“We haven’t
got time to debate this,” Mercer said. “We need to get to the ferry.”

“They must
have left by now,” Sharon said.

“They wouldn’t
leave without us,” Mercer said.

“I wouldn’t be
so sure,” Sharon said. “It was pretty much a madhouse.”

“Only one way
to find out,” Mercer said. “Come on.” He walked back into the shadows, came out
with a shotgun in one hand. He held it out to Sharon. “If you have to use
this,” he said, “Aim at the face. The only loads the guy who owned it had were
for shooting skeet, so it won’t do much good otherwise.”

Sharon looked
at the gun. “I’ve never even shot a gun before.” She looked up at Mercer. “No.”

“Well, give it
to me, then,” Glory said. She reached for the shotgun.

“No!” Sharon
snapped. She took the gun awkwardly.

“Come on,”
Mercer said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“So,”
Bohler
said, “what’s the story on this Mercer?”

“Contract
gunman,”
McMurphy
said, “Did some work for the
Russian mob in Chicago. Not associated with any particular organization.
Pretty much a freelancer.”

“All I know is
what I’ve read,”
Bohler
said, “But isn’t that pretty
unusual?”

“It is,”
Bohler
nodded. “But apparently the guy was good enough he
could write his own ticket.”
McMurphy’s
mouth
tightened. “Unfortunately, the last hit he did was on a confidential informant
we’d been cultivating for two years. A guy named Boris
Vercansky
aka Barry V.”

“Bad luck,”
Bohler
observed. “You think this guy’s around here?”

“Mercer
dropped off the radar two years ago. We thought someone had taken him out in
retaliation for
Vercansky
. But then Chicago
PD
pulled in a guy on a forgery rap who told them he’d been
in the business of creating fake ID documents. As you might imagine, that got
Homeland Security interested, and that got us into the mix. He gave us a list
of the fake identities he’d created for the Russians.”

“So this guy
Mercer…”

“Had a full
set of documents—driver’s license, Social Security Card, passport, the whole
works—in the name of Max Chase. We ran the fake social, and we found that a Max
Chase is employed by Pass Island Management Corporation.”

“What the…why
would
Pass
Island need a hit man?”

“We think he’s
trying to retire,”
McMurphy
said. He smiled without
humor. “Unfortunately for him, it just doesn’t work like that.”

Bohler
peered through the window of the
patrol car. “Okay,” he said, “Well, if he works for Pass Island, he’s probably
getting off that boat that just landed. Come with me.” The rain pounded down on
them as they exited the vehicle, and
Bohler
had to
grab his hat to keep it from taking flight. A gust of wind got up under
McMurphy’s
umbrella as he attempted to raise it, turning it
inside out.
McMurphy
swore and struggled with the
ruined umbrella for a moment, then cast the twisted thing away in frustration.
They jogged towards the ferry landing, their black dress shoes squelching in
the mud.

A
pair of deputies in their bright yellow rain slickers were
trying to control the stampede off of
the barge. Some of the people were staggering, and
Bohler
saw one of them grab onto a light pole and get violently sick onto the ground.

“He could be
anywhere in this madhouse,”
McMurphy
called over the
wind.
Bohler
just nodded grimly. People were running
for their cars. “HOLD UP!”
Bohler
tried to shout, but
the soaked and nauseated workers of Pass Island were having none of that. They
were hell-bent on finding anyplace dry.

“Sir?” a voice
said.
“Officer?”

Bohler
saw a tall skinny kid with a shock of
sun-bleached blonde hair standing with his arm around a young, pretty Latina.
The girl was shaking, her light brown skin
underlaid
with a ghastly pallor. “Sir?” the kid said again.

“Yeah, son,
how can I help you?”
Bohler
said.

The kid
gestured back towards the barge. “I think they may have left a friend of ours
behind.”

“What do you
mean, left behind?”

“On
the island.”

Bohler
stared at him. “Son,” he said, “If
this is your idea of a joke…”

“It’s not a
joke,” the woman said. “Our friend
Sharon,
and her
daughter. They were on the boat with us. We didn’t see her on the boat on the
way back.”

“Did you tell
the captain?”

“We tried,”
the young man said. “He wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t turn around.”

“God DAMN it!”
Bohler
exploded. One of the deputies turned around, a
look of shock on his face. “Henderson!”
Bohler
snapped. “See of you can get the Coast Guard on the radio. We may have someone
left on the island.”

“Oh, shit,”
Henderson said.

“Oh shit is
right. Don’t just stand there, Deputy, move your ass. See if they can get a
chopper over there.”

“
Yessir
.”
Henderson jogged off towards his car.

“Torres.”
Bohler
said to the other deputy. “Find me the jackass who
just drove that damn boat away from the island without checking to see if he
had all his people.”

Torres looked
around at the rapidly disappearing crowd. “What do I do when I find him?”

“Shoot him,”
Bohler
snarled.

“Sir?”

Bohler
sighed. “Okay, don’t shoot him. But
bring his ass here.” He looked over at
McMurphy
, who
was showing his picture to the blonde kid. The kid was nodding. “Oh yeah,” he
said. “That’s that guy. Max. He works at the marina.”

“Was he on the
boat?”
McMurphy
said.

The blonde kid
screwed up his face in concentration. “I’m not sure…”

The Latina
spoke up. “I saw him at the office,” she said. “He was getting his check.”

McMurphy
looked around. “You see him get off
the boat, either?” They looked at each other and shook their heads.

“Maybe he got
lost in the crowd,”
Bohler
said.

“Maybe,”
McMurphy
answered grimly. “Or maybe two innocent people are
trapped on that island with a cold-blooded killer.”

“Who?”
the blonde kid asked.
“Max? What are you, nuts? Max is an okay dude.”

McMurphy’s
mouth set in a tight line. “How well
do you know him?”

The blonde kid
shrugged. “I know him to talk to. You know, ‘how’s it
hangin
’
Max?’ ‘Okay, Sonny, how’ve the waves been?’
Y’know
,
stuff like that.”

“So you think
if you ask an actual contract killer ‘how’s it
hangin
’,
Max?’ he’d answer, ‘not bad, Sonny, you know, one time I shot four men in a bar
then set the bar on fire so the two guys who were only wounded, and who might
have made it, burned to death?”

Sonny just
stared at him.

McMurphy
grimaced. “If there’s one thing I’ve
learned in twenty-two years of law enforcement, kid, it’s that nobody knows
anybody.”  

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Sharon ran
through the rain as hard as she could, her breath like fire in her lungs. She
could hear Glory’s Nikes splashing on the muddy path behind her and felt a
brief flash of envy when she realized the girl wasn’t even breathing hard. She
looked up the path ahead to where Max was pounding along ahead of them. He
didn’t seem particularly winded either.
If
I get out of this alive
, she thought,
I
am definitely quitting smoking.
She thought of what he’d said to her after
he’d killed the man who was about to…her mind sheared away from completing the
thought. But she kept coming back to Max’s words, the matter-of-fact tone in
his voice.

He needed
killing
.

It was a flat,
unemotional judgment, pitiless as the Old Testament.
You have been weighed
in the balance and found wanting.
There was nothing in the voice or in the
face of the man who said those words that even remotely resembled slow-talking,
amiable Max. The man who could say those words so calmly or who could bury a
cleaver in a man’s head was someone she’d never met, possessing the body of
someone she thought she at least knew a little about.

But he
wasn’t wrong
, a voice
said in her mind.
That man deserved to die. You would have killed him
yourself to save your daughter.
And yourself.
Sharon’s train of thought was interrupted as her foot slipped out from under
her. She stumbled, grabbed frantically at nothing. The gun in her hands went
flying. Then Sharon was lying face down in the light-brown muck of the pathway
that the pounding rain was turning from soggy to soupy. She got a mouthful of
water,
spit it out, gagging and gasping for breath. She
looked up. Max had slung the machine gun on his shoulder. He was standing over
her, looking down with no expression on his face. He had his hand out to help
her up. She got to her knees, brushing uselessly at the mud caked on the front
of her jeans and blouse. She didn’t take his hand. Lightning cracked above her,
freezing everything for a second in its harsh glare. The thunder that followed
close behind was so loud it seemed as if it would flatten her back down into
the earth. In that instant, Max looked like an apparition from Hell.

“Go away,” she
whispered at him. “Just go away.” His expression never changed. He stood there,
hand out, as the thunder rolled and boomed around them. Then Glory was bending
at her side, pulling her up. “Come ON, Mom!” she pleaded. Max withdrew his
hand, his face still blank. He picked up the shotgun and looked down. It too
was caked with mud, a plug of the stuff sticking out of the barrel. He handed
the weapon to Glory. “Come on,” was all he said. He turned and stared running
again.

“What’s the
matter with you?” Glory said frantically.

Sharon turned
and looked at her daughter. “He’s not a good guy, baby,” she said.

Glory looked
after him. He was far ahead and pulling away. “Maybe not,” she said, “But he
may be the bad guy we need right now.”

They ran.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

It had been a
struggle humping the heavy bags up the ancient rickety wooden stairway that
spiraled up the interior wall of the old lighthouse. The stairway was narrow
and cramped and the bags caught and dragged on the ragged wood.

More than
once, Phillips cursed the luck that had put them so short-handed.
If we do
meet serious resistance
, Worth had said,
this won’t be nearly enough
.
And now, even the inconvenience of a civilian and her teenaged daughter was
proving an impediment.

Phillips was
not a superstitious man, but he couldn’t help but wonder if some angry deity
hadn’t placed him on some sort of cosmic blacklist. His last assignment had
ended badly, with the entire team dead and the mission objective turning out to
have been worthless.

Unfortunately,
Phillips had only discovered that after attempting to procure the object for
himself. It had taken some fast talking to persuade his employer that there had
merely been a misunderstanding, and he’d been let know that he was under
serious scrutiny. This mission had been assigned as penance. The others didn’t
know, but he was doing this one on the cuff.

Finally, he
was at the top, where the stairs came up through a trapdoor into the watch
room, a wide circular space that once held fuel and supplies for the big oil
lamp that provided the light. At one time, the empty space in the center of the
watch room had held the machinery to turn the giant, exquisitely engineered
lenses that focused the lamp’s glow into a mighty beam which could cut through
rain and fog to warn passing mariners off the rocks and shoals near the island.
That lens was long gone since the Coast Guard had deactivated the old light. It
sat, Phillips supposed, in a museum somewhere. Only an empty hole in the
ceiling of the watch room remained. There was a ladder halfway around the
circle from the stairs, leading straight up through a trapdoor to the former
lantern room. Phillips had to take two trips to haul his burden up there. When
he was done, he looked around and gave a low whistle.