Never Go Home (23 page)

“Which of you
gentlemen is Glenn?”

The man against
the far wall looked at him with a blank expression and said, “I am.”

One of the
other guys started to get up.

Alessandro
aimed his pistol at the man. “No need to move. I’m only here to see Glenn.”

The guy said,
“Well, that’s my brother.”

“If you want
him to live, you best get back in your seat.”

The guy held
out his hands and lowered himself onto the couch. The three of them breathed
heavily and erratically. Their panic levels were high. If they all tried to
make a move, it would be uncoordinated. It would play into Alessandro’s hand.

The men didn’t
move. This was going to be too easy. He fought to keep a smile at bay.

Then he shot
Glenn in the head.

The suppressor
affixed to the end of his pistol drowned out most of the noise. It sounded like
a pellet hitting a tin can. He spun, fired another shot before either of the
two men reacted. It hit the guy to Alessandro’s right in the head. He slumped
over the arm of the couch.

The third man
moved quickly. It surprised Alessandro. He fired before he aimed. The shot
missed. The big guy lunged for him. Alessandro threaded one arm through the
guy’s arm as he sprawled backward. The man flung his free arm. It connected
with Alessandro’s hand, dislodged the pistol. He heard it hit the floor and
skate across the room. He was unable to get a visual on its position.

The big guy
threw another punch. It connected on Alessandro’s side. One of his ribs
cracked. He fought through the pain, wincing, and delivered an uppercut to the
man’s down turned face. The guy screamed, then gurgled. Without seeing the
damage, Alessandro assumed he’d broken the man’s nose.

So he hit him
there again. And again.

The big guy
dropped to his knees. Alessandro kicked him in the solar plexus. The man wavered,
but didn’t fall. Alessandro kicked him twice more. Once in the gut. Once in the
throat. Finally, the man fell to the side.

Alessandro
crossed the room, picked up his pistol and walked back toward the man. The big
guy struggled to breathe. His face was dark red. Alessandro stepped forward.
The man tried to move his arms, couldn’t.

Alessandro spat
on him, then pulled the trigger four times.

So much for
information gathering.

I opened my
eyes, tilted my head back and glanced at the back door. No light penetrated the
sheer curtain that covered the windows. I considered going back to sleep. I
knew that would be a losing cause. I lifted my cell phone, checked the time.

Five a.m.

I lay there for
a moment, stared at the ceiling, listened. The house was still, quiet. Marcia
slept. Or had left. I could deal with either.

The events of
the previous day flooded my mind. I had plenty to catch up on, so I kicked my
legs over the edge of the sofa. They found the floor. My knees and ankles
popped as I rose. I lifted my arms over my head. My shoulders and elbows had
the same reaction as the lower half of my body. A cool draft ran through the
room. It felt good against my bare arms, legs and chest.

I went into the
kitchen. The tile floor felt twenty degrees cooler than the air surrounding me.
I grabbed a protein drink out of the fridge. I lifted the lid to the garbage
can to throw away the cap. The sheet of paper with my name and the code and the
letters KOS sat atop a used paper plate and two empty bottles of water. I
pulled the document out and carried it into the other room. My pants were
folded on the floor. I grabbed them and stuffed the paper into one of the
pockets.

I tried to
assume that the document had been placed in the trash by accident. But a feeling
gnawed at me. It left me doubting that conclusion. I’d figure out a way to
casually bring it up to Marcia. Her reaction would tell me whether she did it
on purpose.

The only shower
in the house was located in the bedroom. I decided against disturbing Marcia.
She could sleep for another hour or so. I went back into the kitchen. A
twenty-year-old coffee maker sat on the counter top. It worked. The coffee it
brewed was strong in strength, taste, and effect. That was all that mattered.
If Marcia was anything like me, the smell of it would be enough to wake her up
within the next ten minutes.

The coffee
dripped through a filter made from recycled paper. Drop by drop the pot filled,
and I felt sleepier. I let it finish brewing before pouring a cup, though. When
it was finally ready, I bypassed the cream and sugar, and took my tall mug of
black coffee out back.

Through the
trees, I watched the sky turn from blue to red to orange and back to a new
shade of blue. It looked new, crisp, fresh. The sun climbed higher over the
next few minutes. Bright light found its way through clustered leaves. Birds
piped up. The air warmed. The breeze remained cool.

I had my cell
phone in my lap. I glanced down at it as it buzzed against my thigh. The call
came from Florida. I dragged my finger across the screen and answered it.

“Glenn, Matt
and Jed were murdered.” April sounded winded. It was past midnight there.
Presumably, she hadn’t slept much. And the sleep she had managed might have
been beer-induced.

“Are you at the
scene?” I said.

“I’m leaving my
house now.”

I pictured her
brushing the tabby cat to the side and slipping through the front door. I
doubted she put on her uniform. Maybe she had on blue jeans and a tank top, her
sheriff’s shirt draped over her shoulder. There wasn’t time to worry about
being in the proper attire when on the way to a triple-homicide.

“What do you
know?” I said.

“Nothing, yet.
A neighbor called in to nine-one-one after she saw a man fleeing the scene. She
was on her porch, across the street. Said she saw the guy enter the house. She
thinks she saw him in the living room. They had their blinds open, like last
time.”

“OK.”

“The guy
executed them. She heard what she described as bolts dropped into a coffee tin.
That’s all I got right now. I’ll find out more after I secure the scene.”

A triple
homicide was not something an amateur would likely pull off. A pro did this.
And he might still be close.

“Don’t go over
there alone,” I said. “Got it?”

The phone
thumped and clanked. A pause followed. “Sorry,” she said. “Dropped it putting
on my shirt.”

The tattoo
flashed in my mind. I brushed it aside. “April, make sure you have at least
one, preferably two deputies with you.”

“I will.” She
paused a beat. “What do you make of this?”

I made plenty
of it. Three men were executed after one of them revealed that he found a cache
of government secrets. Even though he hadn’t a clue what he looked at, I was
sure that got him killed. April and I weren’t the only ones he told. Now
someone was cleaning up a mess. They started with Jessie. Then April’s deputy
Craig got in the way and paid for it. I was in the middle of it all. Without me
there, who else would they go after?

April?

Sean and his
family?

I said, “It’s
too soon for me to speculate, April. Call me when you get to the house. Make
sure you message me pictures of the crime scene.”

We hung up. I
downed my coffee and went back inside. I had a change of clothes in the
bedroom. The door remained closed. I still had on the pants and undershirt I
borrowed from Sean the day before.

For five
minutes I paced the room. My footsteps grew louder with each pass. The square
trek did little to clear my mind. I had no great insights. Things grew more
muddled.

Marcia still
didn’t wake.

I stepped out
back, called Sasha. I filled her in on the new developments. She told me she’d
dedicate as many resources as she could, when she could.

I went back
inside. Marcia stood in the middle of the living room. She watched me enter.

“Is everything
OK, Jack?”

“No.”

“What
happened?”

“Something
bad.”

“Care to
elaborate?”

I shook my
head, went in the kitchen.

She followed
me. “Jack—”

“Why did you
throw away that paper?”

“What paper?”

“The one I
brought back from Florida.”

“I didn’t throw
it away, Jack.”

“I found it in
the trash this morning.”

She looked at
the garbage can, then back at me. Her eyes were wide. She held her hands out.
“I…I must have done it by accident when I tossed my plate and the empty water
bottles away. Why would I get rid of that? We might need it to figure out what
is going on.”

Her eyes were
unwavering. Her lips didn’t tremble. She stuttered once, but that was it.

I said, “You
told me on the phone that you knew who was targeting me.”

She took a step
back, folded her arms over her chest. She glanced toward the window over the
sink. A tall hedge blocked most of the view.

I said, “If
that were true, you would have said something by now. Right?”

She had no
reply.

“Why’d you tell
me that when you clearly don’t know?”

“All I know is
that something is going on, Jack. I had to get you back here. I knew if I told
you that, you’d reach the conclusion that while you were there, others weren’t
safe, and you’d come back.” She leaned toward me. Pointed at herself. “It was a
gamble, but I was right.”

I reached into
my pocket and grabbed the paper. I realized at that moment I’d left my pistol
in the other room. It wasn’t a good feeling.

“Was this all
fabricated, Marcia? The whole money laundering angle you brought up last
night?”

She shook her
head, reached for the paper. I pulled it back. She said, “That’s the truth,
Jack. I don’t know who the target is, and I’m not even sure if that matters
now. This could be months old. It’s just something that was in her possession
that proves she was still being used. The thing that concerns me is that piece
of paper appears to be the only thing left.”

I debated
whether I should tell her the reason it had survived. Glenn had kept it in a
drawer. Jessie didn’t know about it, neither did her killer. Whichever of them
destroyed the remaining documents had no idea the one in my possession existed.

In the end, I
said nothing to Marcia about it.

“Jack, please
tell me what’s going on.”

“Who says
something is going on?”

“I can see it
in your face, your actions, your reactions. You are overly stressed. I know
enough about you to realize that doesn’t occur very often.”

In truth, it
happened more than it should. Sometimes I wondered how I was still alive.

She said,
“Please, Jack. Level with me.”

“Jessie’s
husband Glenn, his brother Matt, and their friend Jed were murdered last night.”

Alessandro
messaged a confirmation to Vera. The hit had been successful. He fled the
neighborhood, and best he could tell, no one had noticed he’d been there. At
the same time, he assumed someone had seen him. Every job, that was how he
operated. It kept him from doing something stupid afterward. That was how men
in his position got caught, and subsequently killed. They got drunk, bragged to
a bunch of guys at a bar. Or maybe he took home a stripper and let her in on
his dirty secret. Or perhaps, still intoxicated from the kill, he killed again.

He had never
done that.

But this time
he had to.

Now he stood at
the end of a quiet street, positioned behind the Impala. The trunk lid was
open. A single light bulb provided enough light for him to see the contents of
the trunk clearly. He removed the spare tire and pulled out the bag containing
the jack. Vera had told him to look in it. So he did. He lifted an eyebrow at
the contents of it. He closed the bag and brought it with him, placing it cautiously
on the passenger seat. He considered strapping the seat belt over it. That’d be
overkill, he told himself.

He received a
text from her at that moment. It contained a one line address, number and
street. Nothing else. He plugged it into the Impala’s navigation system. A
computerized voice spat directions back at him.

Pretty simple.
Only a couple turns and a few miles to drive.

Alessandro
drove to the end of the dark residential street. He made a right and headed
further away from town. Everything was dark. Houses, businesses, streetlights
even. The town and surrounding areas shut down in the middle of the night. He
couldn’t imagine how people lived like this. He would go crazy.

The navigation
system said he was close. It counted down from a quarter-mile, five hundred
feet, one hundred feet, turn left. He did so, and pulled into the mostly empty
parking lot of a senior care facility. The entrance was in the center of the
long building. Two wings extended out on either side. All of the lights were
off, except for a desk light beyond the front doors. A woman sat behind the
broad counter. She glanced up, her gaze meeting the headlights that shone in on
her.

Alessandro took
a deep breath. He’d killed plenty during his time on the job. At the very least
monthly. Often weekly. Sometimes daily. He liked that the best. Continuity,
he’d learned at a seminar one time, was the key to success.

He leaned over,
grabbed the bag on the seat, reached inside, pulled out the explosive device
and remote.

The woman
stood.

Alessandro cut
his headlights, leaving the parking lights on. He exited the Impala and walked
up to the door. He kept his left hand behind his back, hiding the explosive.
The sliding doors didn’t move for him. He knocked against the glass with the
knuckles of his right hand.

The woman
approached. She looked concerned. She had on pink scrubs and white tennis
shoes. Her black hair was pulled back tight. She looked to be early forties. A
wedding ring adorned her left ring finger. She probably had kids. Worked here
part-time to bring a little extra money home each month while they slept, safe
at home.