Alpha Kill - 03 (2 page)

Lester checked his watch. Seven fourteen.

He peered through the blackness, to which his eyes still hadn’t properly adjusted.

Where was Drake?

As if his thoughts had been read, a voice close to his left ear said, “Hello, Lester.”

Lester recoiled from the nearness of the voice. He tried to twist his head round but Drake said: “Uh-uh. Face forward.”

Drake had already gotten there, Lester realized. He’d beaten Lester to the doors, and was waiting for him in the shadows.

Drake whispered, his voice a sandpaper rasp: “The card.”

Lester fumbled in his shirt pocket and produced the override card. He felt it tugged from his proffered fingers.

From his left, Drake said, “Good.”

Lester braced himself.

The plan was that he’d hand over the card, Drake’s final obstacle to getting out of the building, and then Drake would beat him up. Not too seriously, not enough to cause life-threatening damage. But enough to cement the cover story: that Drake had taken Lester hostage until he got to the doors, and then decided to leave him there, incapacitated, while he made his escape.

Lester had a good health insurance plan. Whatever damage Drake did to him, he’d be covered. With luck he’d be out of hospital within a couple of weeks. Then he’d make his way to the rendezvous point in Wisconsin, and pick up the cash, and whisk Rhonda away to Florida. The explanations - and Lester had rehearsed them until they were pitch-perfect - would have to wait.

He felt the shock of cold, an ice that was greater than pain, in his middle back.

In his ear, Drake hissed: “Don’t struggle.”

Lester opened his mouth, because although he was afraid of Drake, he suddenly wondered if the guy understood the deal correctly, and he thought it might help to remind him of the details.

Because the all-encompassing cold in Lester’s back felt...
wrong
, somehow. Like a misjudged Little League baseball pitch.

He opened his mouth, but no sound came.

Distantly, Lester was aware that he’d pissed his pants. And that seemed wrong, too.

Then the pain hit.

It was a wrenching ball of burning agony, exploding like a phosphorus bomb deep within his guts and spreading through his pelvis and his chest and roaring up through his throat to detonate in his head.

He couldn’t feel his legs.

Lester’s back seemed to be leaking, he noted abstractly. Gushing warmly, in a way that felt unnatural for a person’s
back
.

Whether he heard Drake’s words, or whether in his dying moments he hallucinated them, Lester would never know. But the voice in his ear appeared to say, “It’s your aorta, Lester. In case you were wondering. I’ve always wondered if I could access it from behind, and I know now I can. So... thanks.”

The darkness before Lester’s eyes seemed to flicker brightly.

“You
know
it has to play out like this, Lester,” the voice, or hallucination, went on. “Of
course
you have to die.”

Then:  “If it’s any consolation, your alibi is now set in concrete.”

At some point, an eon later, Lester K. Fairbanks’ consciousness winked out for the last time.

*

T
en minutes later, Gene Drake dropped into the backseat of the Toyota SUV halfway down the hill beyond the perimeter wall.

One of the guards in the tower had actually let loose after Drake had gotten over the wall, spraying the blind night with automatic fire. A few of the shots had smashed into the ground around Drake’s feet, worrying him for a moment. But he’d seen the shape of the SUV, silhouetted against the dim horizon, and had hightailed it until he’d slammed against the side and dived inside.

It took off at a slow, measured pace, not screeching away in a way that would attract attention.

From the passenger seat, Skeet Hoxton craned round, his yellow eyes glinting in the gloom.

“
Fuck
, man. You
did
it,” was all he said at first. His tone was awed.

The driver was Walusz, the silent Pole. Drake had glimpsed his eyes in the rearview mirror.

Ten minutes later, when the SUV joined a highway and merged with the evening flow, Skeet let out a long whoop.

“You did it, man,” he yelled again. “You’re
out
.”

He reached back and raised his hand for a high-five. Drake returned it.

Skeet said, “Clothes are in the suitcase.”

Drake looked at the case on the seat beside him.

He said, “Blood on me. I’ll need to take a shower first.”

He saw Skeet’s sharp profile against the windshield. “Where we’re going,” said Skeet, “you’ll be gettin’ laid before you get anywhere near the showers. Blood and all. Sex first. Maybe a bottle of Cristal too.
Then
a shower.”

“No,” said Drake.

Skeet twisted round again to stare at him. “What?”

“No time,” said Drake.

Skeet ground his teeth, the way speed freaks did. The way Drake remembered him. Some things didn’t change.

“Jesus, dude,” Skeet muttered. “It’s all set up. Across the border. Kentucky. The twins are there. Rosenbloom too. We got shit
arranged
for you. A homecoming party like you wouldn’t believe. Champagne. Bourbon. A whole bunch of girls who’ll leave you
raw
.”

“Guns?” said Drake.

Skeet paused. “Guns. Hell, yeah. Just like I promised. But we’re talking about the
party
here.”

Drake said, “No party.”

“What?”

Drake leaned forward, until his face was inches from Skeet’s profile.

“No party. We’re going straight to New York.”

––––––––

J
oe Venn hauled on the line and squinted hopefully at the glistening shape that burst thrashing above the surface.

Nope. Another striper, and not a particularly large one at that.

Venn reeled it in and dropped it into the pail alongside the others of its kind he’d accumulated, and the bluefish. He’d been hoping for a porgy or two – he was partial to the flavor – but for some reason, this evening they weren’t biting.

The setting sun slanted its golden rays across the surface of the water. Venn gazed at the rippling vista around him for a minute or two, savoring the mellow light, the crisp bite of the early fall air.

He supposed it was time to head home.

Venn had discovered this spot on Long Island Sound three weeks earlier, and since then he’d made a habit every Sunday, when he wasn’t working a case, to load up his Jeep Grand Cherokee and head out of town. The fishing was good, the people were few and far between, and the air was clean and free of the industrial tang of Manhattan.

He guided the boat to the shore, in no particular hurry, and moored it. At the moment he rented it on a pay-as-you-go basis, but maybe he’d consider buying one at some point, if these Sundays on the water became a regular thing.

After all, it wasn’t like he was saving his money for anything special.

Venn stacked his rods and his haul in its buckets into the rear of the Cherokee. He’d gotten it nearly new from a dealer in Yonkers almost three months ago, to replace his beloved Mustang GT which had been destroyed in a shootout in Harlem one afternoon. He liked the way the Jeep handled, and although he was used to sitting lower to the floor in the vehicles he drove - he was a cop, after all, accustomed to easing around town like a panther prowling through the undergrowth, and at first the Jeep had made him feel awkwardly exposed above the metaphorical grassline - he’d gradually adapted to it.

He fired the engine and began the hour-long journey back to New York City.

As he eased into the traffic, weekend trippers making their own weary way back to the bustle of city life, he pushed a CD into the dashboard player. A chirpy woman’s voice began speaking in Spanish. Venn listened for thirty seconds, before realizing he hadn’t been paying attention closely enough to the last CD, and had no idea what the woman was talking about. With a sigh, he punched the FM button instead.

He’d decided to try to learn Spanish, something he had a basic working knowledge of but which, as America’s second language, he felt he really ought to master. He’d gotten back into fishing, a pastime he’d last pursued as a beat cop almost fifteen years earlier. He’d started reading more, mainly non-fiction: biographies, histories of war and political events, memoirs by former military and law enforcement heroes of his.

All of this activity, he recognized in his more honest moments, was intended to try and blot out the three words that had taken a hold of his mind three months ago, and had branded themselves there like the mark of Cain.

She said no.

Jesus. Just thinking about it now sent a lance of pain through his gut.

He flicked through the channels, past the inane chatter of DJs, trying to find something he could focus his attention on. A news channel, maybe. Something that would pull his thoughts away from that day back in July, in the waiting room of the hospital in San Antonio.

He’d asked Beth to marry him.

And she’d said no.

She hadn’t stated it as baldly as that. Not immediately, anyhow. But when he’d popped the question, her silence afterwards gave him his answer.

Instead of saying anything, she’d turned her face to his, and gazed sadly into his eyes.

“Let’s talk about it later, okay?” she murmured.

Dumbly, Venn had nodded. He’d been so certain her answer would be yes, he hadn’t prepared himself for the other possibility. And he didn’t know what to say, what to do. How to handle the churning bewilderment inside him.

Venn found a news station on the car radio and tried to concentrate on the anchor’s grave tones.

He and Beth had made the journey back to New York together, and on the way they’d talked about other stuff. About how she’d been taken hostage in the home they shared in Midtown, and transported to the airfield in South Texas where she’d been used as a bargaining chip by a drug baron named Salazar. How Venn had contrived her release, and taken Salazar down, with the help of a young British petty criminal named Danny Clune. How Clune had shown some guts right at the end.

But they avoided the elephant in the room, a phrase Venn cordially detested but which seemed entirely apt in this situation. They avoided his question to her, and her reply.

It all came out gradually over the next couple of weeks. Together, Venn and Beth put their ransacked house back together. They both returned to work, Venn dealing with the fallout from the Salazar operation, Beth taking up her duties as an attending physician at the downtown hospital where she had privileges. She’d dismissed her employer’s offer of a leave of absence after her ordeal, insisting she’d be better off plunging back into work to take her mind off things.

One night, after Venn couldn’t stand the pretense any longer, the invisible barrier between them, he’d confronted Beth. Asked her to tell him what was wrong.

Asked her if there was somebody else.

Her reply had been immediate and sincere. No, there was nobody else. She loved him.

But she couldn’t... be with him any longer.

They talked through the night, Venn trying hard not to slip into police interrogator mode, but desperate to find out what was wrong. And piece by piece, it emerged.

How, two years ago, after they’d met under traumatic circumstances, and survived a few days of extreme danger and violence, she’d thought it was all over.

How the ambush at their home in July had brought all those memories flooding back.

And Venn understood. Beth didn’t feel safe with him.

He’d failed to protect her. Because of him, because of his stupidity, his sloppiness, Salazar and his men had kidnapped Beth. She might have been killed.

Venn’s head told him it made sense for her to leave him, to get as far away from him as possible. She lived with a detective lieutenant who carried out politically sensitive investigations. He was always going to be a potential target. And she could be used to get to him. She didn’t deserve to live like that, always in a state of unease, constantly in danger of being used as a bargaining chip.

Venn’s heart, on the other hand, told him to wrap her close and never let her go.

He worked at it. Offered to quit his job, to apply for an alternative position in a more mainstream section of the New York Police department, where he’d be just another detective. To give up police work, even – he’d done it once before, after all – and find another way of making a living.

But he sensed it was a lost cause. Beth insisted that the problem wasn’t him, or what he did. That it was her inability to get over what had happened to them that was the stumbling block. Venn knew she wasn’t telling the truth, or else didn’t realize what the truth was.

He understood that Beth couldn’t be around him without being constantly reminded of all she’d gone through. And there was only one way to begin to remedy that.

He moved out of the house they shared in late August, as the summer was rallying itself for a last, ferocious assault. Beth made a half-hearted attempt to persuade him to stay, saying that she was the one who should go. She suggested that she rent another place on a trial basis, while she worked through the stuff she was having trouble dealing with. But Venn knew she was delaying the inevitable, and put his foot down.

She’d left the house, too, and it was now on the market. Selling it was awkward, because it was in both their names, and that meant they had to meet up from time to time with real estate agents and potential buyers, together, as if they were any couple looking to sell a home together and move on to a new one. The price they were asking, the agent told them, was too high, and so they were dropping it incrementally, both hoping they’d get a bite soon.

To cope, Venn threw himself into his job. He worked late at the office, sending his colleagues home when they tried to match his long hours. He took up distractions like his fishing and his Spanish and his reading. He started to drink more. Not excessively, but just a little bit, aware that he was easing his toes over the edge of that particular slippery slope.