The Specter (17 page)

He couldn’t move, couldn’t risk any noise that would give away his position. He may already know as Aaron wasn’t sure how much noise he had made getting up or how close the gunman was.

He lifted his head and scanned the backyard.

Julie was nowhere in sight.

He hoped she got out of the yard. He needed her running down the other street, away from the danger.

Aaron knew this plan was dangerous, but he couldn’t allow thugs to keep showing up with guns. Eventually they would achieve their goal. He had to send the message that whoever they sent would end up in the hospital being questioned by the police.

He laid his head back, closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. He needed to calm down. He needed to be in control to have any chance of success.

A loud crash came from inside the house. His heart rate increased again, and he had to take deep breaths through his mouth. Beads of sweat rose on his forehead and face as the afternoon sun beat down on him. He rubbed his hands on his pants to keep them dry and waited.

The back door opened hard and slammed shut. Aaron had to assume the intruder was standing on the deck directly below him. He waited for a count of three and then slowly peered over the side.

The deck was empty.

Fuck
.

He waited, listening. A minute passed. The only sound was the traffic in front of the house. No dogs barked, no kids played, no adults argued in any of the houses nearby. It was like this one city block detected the danger and remained quiet, waiting for it to dispel.

Something moved below him. He chanced a look and caught sight of the man’s arm. He stood near the barbecue.

He’s good. If there was a trap, he waited for it to be sprung like a professional.

Aaron had moved the barbecue so he could jump to the roof. The man might be putting it together. He had to decide: move away from the edge, jump down onto the guy or just see what he was doing now?

He needed to look first and then decide what to do. There was something about lying out on Julie’s roof that suddenly didn’t feel safe.

When he edged around to look down at the deck, the man was gone. He leaned over farther and took in the whole deck.

Nothing.

If he climbed down, ran next door, hopped the fence, he could call for Julie and make a run for his car. They could drive directly to Folley and have the police attend to the unwanted visitor.

Or was Aaron being played? Did the man figure Aaron was on the roof and now he’s sitting back, waiting for Aaron to climb down so he could shoot him? How smart and professional was the shooter?

Knowing he couldn’t spend the afternoon on the roof, Aaron got in position to climb down. He removed his shirt and leaned over far enough to wave the shirt in front of the kitchen window. Getting a bullet in the shirt was a lot better than getting a bullet in the leg as he climbed down.

He waved it twice and got no response.

Does he think we ran away, so he’s gone?

He put his shirt back on, took a deep breath and lowered his legs over the edge. The black shingles smelled of tar. He hurriedly kicked below searching for the railing to stand on. His right foot made contact. He applied pressure and put his full weight down on the railing.

Cold steel pressed against his right temple. Normally a foreign object coming this close to his face, this fast, and Aaron would block it, but both his hands were under his chest, supporting his upper body as he had waited to step onto the railing. Now, though, any sudden movement would startle the gunman, who had climbed onto the roof and walked up behind Aaron.

“Where’s the girl?”

“What girl?”

The intruder pulled a cell phone from his pocket, flipped it open and aimed it at Aaron’s face.

“Smile.”

The cell phone clicked as the man took Aaron’s picture.

“What’s that for?” Aaron asked. “Your perverted picture collection?”

“I always take a photo of my victims a few seconds before I kill them to show proof of life. Then I take a photo of the corpse. That way I get paid without delay and there’s no confusion that I did my job. Now, where’s the girl?”

He dropped his cell phone back in pocket.

“What girl? You want more pics for your masturbation session later?”

The intruder pulled the weapon back to pistol-whip Aaron with it, but the second the gun lifted away from his temple, Aaron shot out an open-palmed right hand, into the man’s shin, right below the knee, searching for impact with the same nerves a doctor would tap with a hammer.

It worked. Before the gun could smack Aaron in the face, the intruder’s leg jerked under him. He slipped to the edge of the roof with a curse, about to fall. He let go of the gun, grabbed Aaron’s shoulder and held on.

Aaron turned to knock the hand loose but the man’s grip held. Both men lost their balance in unison with the intruder going down first. Aaron tried to gain his balance on the thin railing, but fell to the grass five feet below. He landed hard, half on top of the gunman who scrambled toward his fallen gun.

Aaron smacked the man in the throat hard enough to stop him, but not hard enough to collapse his trachea. He sat on the gunman’s stomach and twisted the man’s arms under his knees where they remained pinned.

Gasping with the fear, the fall and the exertion, Aaron waited a few seconds before asking his first questions. The intruder tried to raise his legs high enough to pull Aaron off, but Aaron expected that move and elbowed both the man’s knees, then drove two very hard fists into the intruder’s stomach to remove the fight still inside him.

To encourage the intruder to answer his questions and stop squirming under him, Aaron grabbed the man’s hair with his left hand, pulled hard enough to keep his head still and then placed his right thumb over the man’s eye and applied a soft pressure at first.

“Who are you?”

The eye not under Aaron’s thumb bulged, but his mouth didn’t move. He squirmed under Aaron, trying hard to move his head away from the prying thumb, but Aaron held firm and pushed harder. The free eye opened more and the intruder growned.

“Who are you?” Aaron asked again.

The man tried to swing his head back and forth to dislodge Aaron’s thumb, but Aaron’s grip was too tight. Aaron had never actually popped anyone’s eyeball out before, but he’d been trained how to. He wondered how that would look to the judge when he stood before him in court on the attempted murder charge. Then he wondered if he would even be in court if he didn’t find out who these people were. Eventually one of them would get lucky, and then Aaron would join his sister. The thought of his sister made him push harder.

The man screamed and flailed under him. Aaron saw his thumbnail had dipped deep enough to be inside the man’s orbital socket. Mucus mixed with clear liquid and blood seeped out around his thumb.

“Tell me who you are and why you’re here or lose your sight completely. Might be hard to do your job blind”

The man squirmed violently and whimpered, more blood trickling past Aaron’s thumb.

He lifted his thumb out and placed it over the man’s other eye. As it touched down and started to press in, the man screamed.

“Okay, okay, wait!”

Aaron eased off. A dog barked in the yard behind them. Aaron took a quick scan of the backyard but couldn’t see Julie.

“The man who hired me … is Clive Baron.”

Aaron kept his thumb hovered over the man’s one good eye. He looked like he was about to pass out. The bad eye wasn’t as circular as it used to be. Aaron’s stomach churned at what he’d done to the man’s eye, but he could live with it.

“Who is Clive Baron and why is he after Julie?”

“He’s a billionaire … imports vodka into Russia … called and gave me a list of people to deal with …”

Vodka? There’s that connection again.

“Where’s the list?”

“Memorized it …”

Bullshit.

“How many more of you are there?”

“No … idea.”

The man was fading fast. The blood seeping from his open eye wound was slowing, but Aaron knew the pain in the man’s head would be intense.

“Why does he want people killed?” Aaron asked. “Why not just leave us alone?”

The man’s only good eye rolled up and the lid closed, his head tilted slightly to the side.

Aaron lifted his knees off the man’s arms and moved down his body, feeling for a wallet or some kind of ID. Aaron pulled a piece of paper from the man’s pants pocket, a list of seven names and addresses in pencil.

Memorized it, my ass …

Aaron shoved the list in his pocket and double checked the rest of the man’s pockets. Finding nothing else, he grabbed the gun off the grass and ran back through the house to the front door. After making sure the front was clear, Aaron opened the door and walked along the sidewalk to the side street where he parked his car.

Julie stood from behind a bush ten meters to the right of his car and joined him at the passenger side door.

“What happened?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

Aaron nodded. “Yeah, close one though. Come on, get in.”

He opened the door for her and walked around to get in his side, hoping she wouldn’t notice the gun he’d hidden in his waistband. When he sat in the car, he slipped it down beside the seat controls by the door. If men continued to show up with guns, maybe he needed one, too.

“Where are we going?” Julie asked.

“To the police station.”

“Why?”

“To report what just happened and to tell them about a man named Clive Baron.”

“That’s the name the cops were talking about at the station earlier,” Julie said. “But I don’t really know who he is.”

“I don’t know yet either, but I’m going to find out. I swear, I’m going to find out.”

Aaron pulled his cell phone out and called 911 to report to the unconscious man in Julie’s backyard.

Chapter 20

Aaron pulled into a parking spot at the police station. He hoped Folley would still be there. He didn’t want to talk to anybody else.

They had talked on the way back to the station, mostly so Julie could calm down and make sense of what had just happened at her home. Aaron showed her the list and Julie confirmed every name was either a waitress or a bouncer at the House of Lancaster except for the last two names. There was no address for the last two, just their names: Jackson and Hugh.

They both guessed that the two men Aaron and his friends stopped at the club were probably the two names on the list. Addresses weren’t needed as both men were being held in jail so the intruder, now referred to by Aaron and Julie as the assassin, knew where to find them.

“Let’s go inside, tell Folley everything and maybe he can assign cops to watch the people on the list until this thing is over.”

Julie nodded. The lines in her face were taut from stress, fear in her eyes after finding out she was on the list. Aaron wanted to take all that fear and uncertainty away.

“You okay?” she asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

As they started up the front steps of the station, Folley walked out.

“I’ve been waiting to talk to you,” Folley said.

“I’ve been waiting to talk to you, too. Had something to clear up first.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“Had to stop another murder.”

Folley stepped back, eyebrows raised. “What?”

“A man with a gun stopped by Julie’s house because she’s on the list.”

“A gun? What man? What list?”

“Clive Baron has prepared an execution list, and the names on it are all the employees of the strip club where my sister worked. Also on that list are two names that might be the men who tried to blow the club up last night.”

Folley’s squinted in disbelief. “Are you serious? How do you know about this list? How do you know about Clive? We just spent a lot of man hours identifying him from sketches and Google Images. I think maybe you’ve got some explaining to do. How the hell do you know so much?”

“I have the list right here,” Aaron said as he pulled it out.

“Where did you get it?” Folley asked.

“Off the man who came to kill Julie.” Then Aaron leaned back and slapped his hands together. “Shit!”

“What?” Julie asked.

“I forgot to grab the guy’s cell phone.”

“Why is that so important?” she asked.

“He took a picture of me.”

“He took your picture?” Folley asked, crossing his arms. “Why would he take your picture?”