Remote (6 page)

Jack: Let’s work on trust, first.  I think we should meet.

As Jack had expected, the next reply took a while to arrive.

Remote: I see.  I don’t think that would be wise.

Jack: Why?  Don’t you trust me?  Or is it your own deductive skills you’re questioning—perhaps I’m not who you think I am after all?

Remote: No, I’m quite sure you are exactly who you claim.  But I’m afraid I’m not quite as mobile as you are, and having you visit my base of operations presents difficulties I can’t go into detail about.  But I’d like to suggest an alternative, if I may.

Jack: Go ahead.

Remote: A swap.  From what I know of your methods, at the end of your process you simply dispose of your subject; when I’m done with one of mine, I let him or her go.  But perhaps we would both benefit by exchanging our respective subjects once we’re finished with them?

Jack frowned.  It wasn’t what he’d expected, and he didn’t like it.  It smelled too much like what a police officer would suggest; it removed a potential hostage from the situation while exposing Jack to possible capture. 

Jack: I don’t currently have a subject on hand.

Remote: I’m willing to wait until you acquire one.  And interrogate him, of course. 

That was more promising.  A cop would never suggest Jack continue with his modus operandi—stalking, kidnapping and torturing a suspected serial killer until Jack’s subject provided details of every one of his kills. 

Jack: I can understand why you’d want one of mine.  But why would I want one of yours?  Your subjects are guilty only by association—they have no crimes to confess.  Certainly nothing that would require my particular talents. 

Remote: In most cases that would be true.  But—much like the queen of a hive—I sometimes need soldiers as well as drones.  To this end, I’ve recently acquired a subject you might well be interested in.

His name is Gordon Mason, but he’s known to both friend and foe as Goliath.  He stands six foot seven, and masses somewhere between two hundred and sixty to two hundred and eighty pounds.  Goliath is a member of a motorcycle club called the Diamond Demons, based out of New Mexico, and has been for the last twelve years. 

His arrest record is long and colorful.  Convictions range from assault to possession of an unregistered firearm, though he’s managed to avoid any lengthy jail time.  He’s been accused of rape twice--though the charges were dropped both times, once when the victim mysteriously vanished—and is the prime suspect in two arson cases, both involving rival clubs.  In one, a clubhouse was burned to the ground and three bikers died; in the other, a bar owned by a rival gang was torched.  An adjoining house also caught fire, killing a young couple and their three children. 

He was surprisingly easy to trap.  A man of his bulk and reputation tends to think he’s invulnerable, and that simply isn’t true.  He’s in my possession now—but I think you could make better use of him than me, don’t you?

Bait
.  Jack could smell it.  Tailor-made for the Closer, exactly the kind of remorseless killer he’d made a career of ending.  But what did Remote stand to gain in return?  A half-dead psycho?

No.  A killer whose will had already been broken.  One that Remote could use in whatever fashion he wanted, a weapon sharpened by experience but no longer capable of resisting.  A murderer willing—even eager—for the chance to kill again. 

It made sense.  Remote could be telling the truth.  But Jack would have to be very, very careful . . .

Jack: In fact, I do have a target lined up.  If it works out, I’ll get back to you.  Maybe we can set something up.

Remote: Outstanding.  I’m looking forward to it.

***

 “So, we’re really going to do this?”  Nikki asked. She and Jack were in the basement, but the training mats had been rolled up and the weight equipment pushed against the walls.  What was in the center of the room now was a single wooden chair, bolted to the floor at all four legs, a small metal table on wheels beside it, and a pole lamp with a halogen bulb that could be angled in any direction.

“I think we have to,” Jack said.  He set a black leather briefcase on the chair and opened it.  Light gleamed on steel.

“Sure you’re up to it?”  She stared at him coolly, evaluating.  Jack was in his mid-thirties, his body hard and muscular, his brown hair thinning.  He had a lot more scars now than when they’d started.

“He views this like it’s a chess game, Nikki.  Innocent people are just pawns to be sacrificed so he can take out a bigger piece.  He sees the death of anyone from a child to a senior citizen as acceptable collateral damage, and he likes to play with bombs.  We have to stop him.”

“I didn’t think the mission was about stopping people, Jack.  I thought it was about closure.  Filling holes, remember?”

Jack took out a black velvet cloth, unfolded it and lay it on the table.  Filling holes.  That was what serial killers left—huge, gaping holes in people’s lives, holes that used to be a sibling or a partner, a child or a parent.  He couldn’t fill those holes, but he could make them smaller; he could provide the grieving with some answers.  He could tell them where a body was buried, or what their loved one’s last words had been.  And he could provide them with one hard, cold assurance that no one else could—that the person who’d stolen the life of someone precious was now dead as well.

And that their dying had not been easy.

“It’s still about closure,” said Jack.  “Don’t the families of the people Remote is blackmailing deserve to know the truth?  That their son or daughter isn’t really a killer, that they had no choice?”

“Really, Jack?  Funny, you never seemed to care much about the friends or family of the people
we
take down.”

Jack took a gleaming scalpel from the case, laid it out at the edge of the black cloth.  He added a pair of pruning shears beside it.

“I care about all of them, Nikki.  I care about the mother that has to confront the fact that she raised a sociopath.  I care about the wife that never understood just what it was she married.  I care about all the colleagues a killer fooled for years.  I care about people knowing the truth.”

 “Which we leave for the cops, once we have it. Maybe that’s what we should do here, Jack; let the cops make the call on this guy.”

Jack picked up a hacksaw, ran a thumb lightly along the blade to test the edge.  “No.   We know nothing about who he is or where he operates from—we’ve got nothing concrete to pass along.  All talking to the police at this point can do is expose us to an investigation.  We’re the only ones in a position to get close.”

“And then what?  We expose the people he extorted, maybe screw their lives up even further?  Jesus, Jack, there’s no clean win here no matter what we do.”

Jack put down the hacksaw and met Nikki’s eyes.  “There’s nothing clean about anything we do, Nikki.  We do what we have to, that’s all.  And we have to do this.”

She studied him for a moment before replying.  Jack was the most focused man Nikki had ever met, utterly committed to his cause.  She knew he believed in what he did to the depths of his soul, that he had stared squarely at the consequences and accepted them without blinking.  She had more respect for him than any other person alive, but she wouldn’t hesitate to contradict him if she thought he needed it.  Jack was as lethal as a bullet, but even the most accurate gun sometimes needed to have its sights adjusted. 

“Okay,” she said.  “But this starts to go south, we bolt.  Got it?”

“Got it.”

C
HAPTER
S
IX

Malcolm Tanner locked both deadbolts behind him when he got home.  He lived in a high-security Portland high-rise, but he always felt better once those steel shafts slid into place with a solid double-
thunk
. 

He hung his jacket up in the closet, undid the laces on the hiking boots and pulled them off.  He padded into the living room on thick wool socks, flipping on lights as he went. 

The apartment was a luxury suite on the uppermost level, with five bedrooms, a Jacuzzi in the master, and a kitchen built mostly from black marble, stainless steel, and smoked glass.  He never used it, but it was impressive nonetheless. 

The view was impressive, too, but he rarely bothered looking; the heavy drapes were closed now, as they usually were.  He sank down in the long, modular couch and grabbed the remote for the oversize flatscreen mounted on the wall, above the fireplace.  He turned it on, flipped to the correct channel, then leaned over and tapped a few keys on the open laptop on the coffee table. 

The flatscreen gave him a security-cam’s view of the cell in the cabin.  Gordon “Goliath” Mason had collapsed to his knees, but the chains were arranged in such a way that he couldn’t hang himself, or bash his head against the floor or walls.  It was as close as he could currently come to resting, though sleep was out of his reach; both the methamphetamine coming in through the IV drip in his thigh and the constant barrage of music through the headphones made unconsciousness impossible.  Tanner had refilled the saline supply while he was there, so Mason was safe from dehydration for at least the next few days.

What state Goliath’s mind would be in by then he really didn’t know.  But then, he didn’t really care, either.

He switched to picture-in-picture, making Goliath a tiny figure in a little box in the corner of the screen.  That was satisfying, but it was even more satisfying to put on a Japanese game show at the same time—it diminished Goliath even further, turned his captivity into a joke. 

Tanner had been fascinated by the genre known as
batsu gemu
—“penalty games”—for some time.  It wasn’t just the cruelty involved—though there was plenty of that—it was the element of degradation he really enjoyed.  The part he found the most fascinating was that the people willing to undergo ritual humiliation as well as pain weren’t even doing so out of a motivation for profit; the games were structured as the punishment for losing a bet.  And what did the winner receive?

He got to see his rival suffer. 

Social sadomasochism,
Tanner thought. 
Nothing gained but the thrill of gloating as your enemy is mocked and tormented in front of the whole country.  They should introduce this to Wall Street—half the guys I know would sign up in a flash, and half of those would probably hope they’d lose.

He watched a row of men in kimonos as each in turn tried to recite a Japanese tongue twister.  When one failed, a weighted bar between his legs swung up and smacked him in the groin.  Tanner grinned, watching a groaning victim collapse to the ground.  It’d be better if there was some blood, but you couldn’t have everything.

 Not on television, anyway. 

He got up, went to the bar and poured himself some Scotch.  It was a forty-year old single malt called Bruichladdich, one of only five hundred bottles in the world, and had cost him twenty-five hundred dollars at auction.   He mixed it with a little water and added a few ice cubes, chuckling at the memory of winning the bid; he’d made a point of sending the loser a recording of him mixing a shot of it with Dr. Pepper and drinking it with a big grin on his face. 

Winning wasn’t enough.  Making someone else your bitch—that was where the true pleasure lay. . .

***

Nikki was a pro.

Hooker, escort, lady of the evening, working girl, whore—she’d used every term at one point or another.  “Sex trade worker” was the one she preferred, for two reasons: one, it defined what she did as a job—not a kink, not a crime, not a disease.  She performed a service and got paid for it, same as anyone else.  Two, the term had the word “trade” right in the middle of it, and she liked that.  The extension of trade was tradition, and that suggested a long and honorable history that belonged right up there with carpenters, weavers, farmers. . .

And hunters.  Especially hunters.

Every job in the world demanded you trade time and effort for the tools of survival: food, clothes, a roof over your head.  A little perspiration in return for a little security, that was how the world worked.  If you happened to enjoy your job that was a bonus for you, and if what you did made the world a little better place to live in that was a bonus for everyone else. 

Nikki didn’t particularly enjoy what she did to pay the rent, and she wasn’t sure whether or not it made the world a better place—it made the world a little less horny, anyway—but, like many people with a job as opposed to a career, she found satisfaction outside her workplace.  Well, technically it was an extension of her work, but she rarely got paid for it.  No, she did it because—

Nikki stared at her reflection in the mirrored wall of the nightclub, painted in flashes of lurid color by the dance floor lights somewhere behind her. 
Why the hell
do
I do this?

I’m a human bullseye, a fish on a hook.  I put myself out there to draw in homicidal crazies, so my partner can stage his own personal re-enactment of the Spanish Inquisition for them.  Sooner or later we’re going to get caught by the cops or go up against the wrong guy and wind up in an unmarked grave.  After, of course, we’ve been raped to death by farm implements. 

She shook her head and tossed back her drink, signaled the waitress for another.  She always got fast service, mainly because she gave her server half their tip up front; they’d work a little harder when they knew what was coming.