Authors: Max Austin
Duke City Hit
Duke City Hit
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Alibi eBook Original
Copyright © 2014 by Steve Brewer
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
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eBook ISBNâ97805
53390315
Cover art and design: Scott Biel
v4.0
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Vic Walters watched out for cactus as he crossed the moonlit desert. In his gray suit and black loafers, he wasn't dressed for hiking, but he didn't have far to go. A hundred feet away, the target's house sat behind three towering saguaros, their arms draped in twinkly Christmas lights.
Vic had never understood Arizonans' fascination with spiny plants. Water was just as precious in Albuquerque, where he lived, but New Mexicans managed to keep their shade trees alive. Some shrubs. Something to give a man some cover when he's prowling through the night.
At least it was cold enough he didn't have to worry about rattlesnakes. Early December in Phoenix: short sleeves during the day, freeze your ass at night. The chill made the bursitis in his shoulders ache.
Security flood lamps were mounted on each end of the rambling house, pointed at the surrounding desert. Vic veered to the right, keeping just outside the illuminated area. To the south, the lights of the metroplex stretched toward Tucson. But here on the outskirts, where the rich folks lived, each house was an island in the dark.
He'd been told to expect a guard, but he circled the property without finding one. The house was constructed of weathered timbers and way more glass than seemed safe. It was past midnight, and most of the rooms were dark. Nobody moving around inside.
Behind the house, a light in the swimming pool cast a blue glow. The covered patio next to the pool was filled with shadows. Vic stared into the shadows a long time. He could make out a white towel thrown over the back of one lounge chair, but he couldn't see anything shaped like a person. No splashing from the pool. Just the hiss of distant traffic and the whistle of the desert wind.
He eased the .22-caliber target pistol from the deep pocket inside his suit. The four-inch suppressor was already attached, making for a long, unwieldy handgun, but Vic was accustomed to that. He'd used this same streamlined Ruger model several times, and never had a problem with any of them.
He kept the gun close to his body as he hurried into a slice of shadow next to the house. He stopped there, watching and listening.
Nothing.
The pool seemed like the best bet, so he went along the wall, ducking past dark windows. When he reached the patio, he peeked around the corner. Still no sentry, but a corpse floated facedown in the kidney-shaped pool.
Vic crept closer. The floater was a swarthy guy in a black Speedo. Lots of black hair on his legs and back, not much on his head. Likely the home owner, Harry Marino, the man Vic had been sent to kill.
He gave the silent house another once-over, then slipped the gun back into his pocket. Hanging on the wall nearby was an eight-foot-long aluminum pole with a net on one end. Designed for skimming bugs off the water, but it would do for his purposes. He lifted the skimmer off its brackets and carried it over to the pool.
After a couple of tries, he snagged the net over the dead man's head and dragged him within reach. Vic knelt and grabbed the man's thinning hair. He lifted the head out of the warm water and studied the dripping face. Harry Marino, for sure, and he hadn't been dead long. Looked just like the photo supplied by Vic's client. Only wetter.
Vic stood and shook water from his hand. Still no sign of anyone else around the house. Was it the help's night off? Had they fled after discovering the body? That thought gave him an itchy feeling. Maybe the cops were on their way here right now. No longer bothering with stealth, he jogged across the rolling desert to where he'd left his rental car.
Puffing for breath, he climbed behind the wheel, cranked the engine and eased away. The movements were automatic. His brain was busy with Harry Marino.
Awfully odd coincidence, Harry drowning in his pool on the very night a hit man shows up to bump him off. Vic didn't like coincidences, but he didn't see much he could do about this one.
He decided to consider it a lucky break. Easiest money he'd ever made. But he watched his mirrors all the way back to his motel.
Vic felt edgy, showing himself again at Sky Harbor International Airport so soon after he'd pulled a job there.
That hit had been a coup, so brazen it made the national TV news a week ago. The target, a dirty stockbroker named Milton Wright, was scheduled to change planes in Phoenix, and to be on the ground for only an hour. He had no reason to leave the secure area of the airport, which meant Vic couldn't get to him with a gun or a knife. Still, Vic left him dead in a men's room not sixty feet from where he currently sat.
According to news reports, authorities had no suspects in the killing, but Vic worried about security cameras, which were everywhere in a big airport like this one. He kept his sunglasses on, sitting with his back to a window so the morning sun warmed his aching shoulders. Trying to be patient. The piped-in Christmas carols didn't help.
He carried no bags. He'd brought only the clothes he was wearing and some disposable bathroom stuff he'd left at the motel. Every credit card and ID in his wallet identified him as Richard Whitfield. Stashed at home were four more wallets, each devoted to a different alias.
He'd put the disassembled .22 into the mail, shipping the parts to Lucky Penny Bail Bonds in Albuquerque. Since he hadn't fired the gun, he could use it on the next job. Vic's manager, Penny Randall, had a guy who provided unregistered guns and silencers. They cost Vic nothing, but no sense in being wasteful.
He shifted on the plastic chair, trying to get comfortable. His weight hadn't changed much over the years, but things shifted as he moved through his fifties. He'd lost padding on his backside, and he missed it. Airport chairs aren't made for bony butts.
A policeman sauntered past, but didn't give Vic a second look. Still, as soon as the cop was out of sight, Vic moved to a different hard seat beside a different sunny window thirty feet away.
He considered buying a newspaper to hide behind, but opted instead to watch the other passengers from behind his dark glasses. It was a Tuesday morning, so many were business travelers, loaded with briefcases and carry-ons and laptops. All of them busy with their phones. Some even had gizmos screwed right into their ears so they could conduct their loud business hands-free. Always doing three things at once.
Vic owned a basic cell phone. It didn't play music or track stocks or tell you the weather in Kalamazoo. It made phone calls and took messages. When he remembered to turn on the ringer, it received calls. That's it. He wouldn't carry a phone at all, but Penny insisted. Sometimes she needed to reach him in a hurry.
He took the phone out of his pocket and looked at it. No messages. Vic didn't have many close friends, and most of them didn't trust phones. It always puzzled him when he saw crowds of people yakking on phones. What do they say all day? Probably the same shit over and over: “Just checking in. I'm at the airport. Now I'm standing in line. Now I'm on the plane.” Endless blow-by-blow descriptions of the banal.
He looked around the waiting area at the business travelers. Not the blue-collar guys or the boy-men in their hoodies and sneakers. Men in suits, the kind of men who keep a shine on their shoes. Experienced men like Vic.
He could see a dozen from where he sat, and they all looked harried and tired. Talking on the phone. Staring grimly into glowing screens. Hustling to pay the mortgage and put the kids through college and keep their ex-wives off their backs. Vic figured half of them would drop dead before they reached the gold watch at the end. Lots more would kick the bucket the first year of retirement, their bodies falling apart once they finally relaxed. They work hard their whole lives and what do they have at the end? Same thing as everybody else.
Fuck that. Vic believed in enjoying life every day, not waiting until some mythical golden years. You never know how long you have on this Earth, particularly in his line of work.
The secret to happiness? Low overhead and few demands. He lived rent-free in a little bachelor pad behind Penny's house. He had no debts, no entanglements, no expensive relationships. He worked only a few days a month, but his bank accounts kept growing. He had enough stashed away that he could retire anytime, but Vic enjoyed the challenge of his work, and he couldn't see himself fishing or playing golf for the next twenty years. Standing around a golf course with the other senior citizens, betting on who's the next to go.
Most contract killers either died young or spent their golden years in prison. Mistakes were too easy to make. Vic had enjoyed one hell of a run these past three decades, and he wondered every day whether he was pressing his luck.
The seats around his gate filled up as boarding time approached. A plump, fortyish woman settled into the chair to his left. She had a carry-on and a purse and a purple canvas sack full of what looked to be yarn. She arranged the bags around her feet as if she were about to tell them a story.
Vic took her in without turning his head. The sunglasses helped.
Her blue blouse and long skirt were ratty and loose, and she wore flat sandals. Her wavy black hair was pulled back from her face with a sweatband. She looked like a gypsy.
The modern traveler, he mused. Proof that people just don't give a shit anymore.
He went back to watching the passing parade, but he could feel the woman glancing at him, getting up her nerve to speak.
“I can help you,” she said finally. “If you need help finding your gate or anything.”
Vic looked over to make sure she was speaking to him. She was looking right at him, chewing her lower lip.
“I know I'm nearly sixty years old,” he said, “but do I seem feeble to you?”
“What?”
“Too senile to find my plane?”
“No, no. Wait. I'm sorry. I've made a mistake. I thought you were blind.”
Now it was Vic's turn to say, “What?”
“The dark glasses,” she said. “The way you stare straight ahead. I thought you were a blind person.”
Vic took off the sunglasses so she could see his icy blue eyes. “Nothing wrong with my vision. But I might be feeble.”
“No, reallyâ”
“If I were losing it, how would I know? I live alone. Nobody there to tell me I'm slipping. I'd need to come to the airport to get a diagnosis.”
Her cheeks flushed, but she didn't look away.
“I work with blind people sometimes,” she said. “I guess I'm sensitive to it.”
“Sure you are.”
He smiled at her. He had a killer smile. It had gotten him out of a lot of tight spots over the years.
“What's your name?”
“Megan.”
“That's nice, Megan, that you work with the blind. What do you do with them?”
“I teach them how to knit.”
She reached into the purple bag at her feet and came up with a ball of yellow yarn pierced by a couple of foot-long knitting needles. She held them up for him to see, as if they were proof.
“They let you carry those things on the plane?”
“They banned knitting needles for a while, but knitters made such a fuss the feds backed down.”
“Don't mess with the knitters,” he said.
“That's right. It's the perfect way to while away the time on a plane.”
“This is very interesting to me, Megan, that you can bring those aboard. They're metal, right? They look like deadly weapons.”
“Oh, you could give somebody a nasty poke with one,” she said, “but I don't think they'd really be âdeadly.'â”
“In the right hands, most anything can be a deadly weapon.”
The smile slipped from her face.
“But I'm sure the security people know what they're doing,” he said. “No safer place than an airport.”
He forced another smile and put on his dark glasses. “I'm just people-watching, Megan. Sunglasses let me get away with staring.”
“I thought it was bad manners to stare.”
“Not if they can't see me do it. I wear dark glasses, I can stare all I want.”
“So it's only bad manners if you're caught.”
“Ain't that always the way?”
She gave a little shrug and started the needles moving in her hands. Nice way to opt out of a conversation. Vic wondered whether she and her husband sat in silence every evening, the only sound the
tick-tock
of the knitting needles.
He managed to avoid other conversation until the plane was in the air. He got an aisle seat, which gave him a little room to spread out his long legs, but the square-jawed guy next to him was broad-shouldered and thick-armed, and the armrests belonged to him. He wore a Western-cut suit and pointy boots. Vic felt sure a cowboy hat was stowed in the overhead bin.
A sleeping teen occupied the window seat, so Vic was the only available ear. The cowboy wrestled around in the narrow seat to offer a handshake.
“Tyler Pounds,” he said. “I'm in mud.”
“I beg your pardon?”
The cowboy's face cracked into a grin. “Oil-field mud. If you're drillin', we're fillin'.”
“I have no idea what you're talking about.”
Pounds handed Vic a business card, which sure enough identified him as a salesman of specialty muds used in drilling.
“It is sort of exotic,” Pounds said. “Not every day you meet a mud salesman. Only a handful of us around the country.”
“Is that right?”
Vic still wore his dark glasses. He wished now that he'd pretended to be asleep. Because he knew what was coming next.
“What do you do?”
“Bail bonds.” Vic reluctantly handed over a business card of his own.
“ââLucky Penny,' huh? Are you, like, a bounty hunter?”
Vic gave him the smile. “I leave that sort of thing to the younger men. I'm just an old paper-pusher.”
“Still, must be fascinating work.”
“Not really. People screw up. They get caught. They give us money to get them out of jail. It's a simple business transaction.”
“You been doing it a long time?”
“Thirty-five years.”
“Wow. That's quite a career.”
“It's not mud, but it's a living.”