Hybrid (29 page)

“I didn't realize it would be raining this hard,” the man apologized as he handed her the warm mug.

“I've been through worse,” she added as she studied her face in a compact mirror. “Shit, I look terrible.”

“Do you know if he completed the job?” the man asked intently.

“He did. He always uses me after a successful contract. It's the same routine every time.” She casually combed her long wet hair. She took a long swig of the warm beverage, allowing herself to heat her hands on the mug. “Mmm, this is really good, thank you.”

“Excellent, and you're most welcome, enjoy,” the man answered as he tapped the tinted Plexiglas partition that separated the passenger compartment from the driver's area.

“How did you know about our relationship, anyway?” she asked, suddenly curious.

“It's my job to know everything about all our subcontractors. It was a small matter to trace the cellular electronics our friend uses and track their specific signals back to its source. Then,” he continued after another sip of his drink, “a simple matter to place a tap on his lines, pull phone records, research numbers, bribe phone company employees, match calls to your employer, and cross reference them with work he has done for us in the past. This is the electronic age. There are no secrets, and no one can hide who uses computers or gadgetry. Information is power; the ability to utilize information is the ability to wield that power. Anyone who thinks they can hide in this age is a fool.” The man poured himself another scotch on the rocks. “Did you place the device like we discussed?”

“Yeah, I kept him too preoccupied to notice what I was doing.” She took another long drink from her cup.

He nodded and handed her an envelope. She quickly opened it and counted out the ten hundred dollar bills. Her eyes were shining with delight as she folded the bills and tucked them inside her shirt.

“It's getting crowded in there.” She giggled as she adjusted herself to accommodate the extra cash. Suddenly, her face began to look flush. She began to gasp for air, struggling for each breath. She felt a sharp pang in her stomach, like she swallowed acid.

“I ... I don't feel so good,” she whispered as she curled up in pain.

“Really?” The man took another swig of his scotch.

“What's happening to me?” she asked as she began choking and convulsing.

The man reached toward her and took the cup from her shaking hands. “Haven't you guessed, my dear? You've just been poisoned; you're dying,” Conrad whispered as he placed the cup on the nearby tray.

The blonde gathered the last of her strength and swung at him as hard as she could. She felt satisfaction as her knuckles connected with the front of his face with a loud resounding crack. “You bastard.” She winced as the poison finally shut down her central nervous system and involuntary synapses. Her final word was: “Why?” She stopped breathing, her heart stopped beating, and she silently fell over, dead, into his lap.

The man carefully unbuttoned her blouse, reached inside her bra, and removed the money she had carefully placed there. “Sorry about this, Miss,” he whispered as he carefully buttoned her blouse back up and used his gloved hands to push her against the other side of the passenger compartment.

He stared at her dead body. Suddenly, the full weight of what he had done came crashing down upon him. He had just personally committed a homicide. He murdered someone. He was used to discussing the termination of people, numbers or names on a sheet of paper, but this was the first time he had ever actually sullied his hands.

Her dead eyes kept staring back at him, looking through the coarse exterior of the man into his vulnerable side, the small remaining piece of his soul that hadn't been totally tarnished by the greed and corruption of his occupation.

“I'm sorry, Miss, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, an unwitting pawn in a grander game of chess. Please don't hold it against me. It's just that I'm in too deep now, we all are. It wasn't supposed to play out like this. We were supposed to make easy millions on this operation,” he whispered as her dead eyes continued to bore through him. He tapped twice against the tinted glass, and it slid down into the wall partition separating the passenger and driver compartments. “Dispose of that, quickly.” He pointed to the body.

The driver pulled the car over into the abandoned area he was informed of earlier. The single tap on the glass was his cue to begin moving the car toward its destination. The driver got out of the car and opened the rear passenger door, and let the corpse fall out into a deep, large puddle of rainwater.

“Move her to that dry corner of the alley, please,” he instructed the driver. He would not give her the indignity of being found in a mud puddle. He felt he at least owed her that much.

The man walked over to inspect the body. He adjusted her arms, gently folding them across her chest with his gloved hands. He pulled a small black booklet from his coat pocket and mumbled something. The driver looked at him oddly as he made a sign of the cross over their victim. The driver escorted the man back into the car and they proceeded back toward Mr. Smith's townhouse.

The large car parked a block away, while the man studied the control now nestled inside his palm. He flipped a switch and a red button activated and began blinking. He looked out the window and stared at the distant townhouse.

“No loose ends.” He pressed the glowing button and the explosive that had been placed under the assassin's mattress went off with a satisfying pyrotechnic display.

Mr. Conrad smirked at the irony of the whole situation that just unfolded. The explosive and detonator were prepared earlier that day by the two men that the assassin had murdered earlier. Conrad had personally paid them a cash bonus for the extra work once they had completed modifying their army helicopter.

Pendelton Corporation had an understanding with the organization that controlled the blue light district in Worcester. This organization provided ‘companionship’ for visiting executives and important clients that did business with the large corporation. Once it was discovered that their hitman had a fondness for a particular female inside that organization, it was easy to utilize that business relationship to tie up that loose end. The organization was paid a hefty price for the loss of their call girl. All tidy, with no loose ends, everybody was happy.

Conrad poured himself another scotch on the rocks as the limousine headed back toward Boston. Deep down, he had to admit, he wasn't really happy. “More blood on my hands,” he whispered.

The game was getting too severe, the stakes too deep. He wasn't sure that he had the stomach for it any longer. He had just committed two murders. His company had illegally tunneled in a wildlife preserve area and unleashed some unspeakable horrors upon innocent people. He had literally participated in dozens of other unethical, bordering on illegal, business actions earlier in his career with little to no effect on his conscience. But what he had done in the past two weeks had been more than he ever bargained for.

He thought about Erik Knight momentarily, how seven years ago he had participated in the literal destruction and character assassination of what he judged to be a fairly likeable fellow. Fortunately, Erik Knight was resilient. Despite all odds, the detective had bounced back from the edge of oblivion. Conrad remembered the dozens of other poor souls who weren't so lucky. And lately, they numbered in the many—too many for his tastes.

He knew that if he tried to walk, he too would become a loose end and most likely share in the fates of the two people he just had a hand in eliminating. He took a long drink from his glass and settled into the heated leather seat. He could only escape this in sleep, and right now, he was extremely tired.

* * * *

Friday morning 8:00 a.m.

Erik was sitting at his booth staring down at his breakfast. Normally he enjoyed a hearty meal first thing in the morning, but today all he could stomach was a blueberry muffin and some coffee. This was not the most nutritional way to meet the new day, but there was still a big knot in his stomach from the events of the past few days.

Erik did admit to himself, after much soul searching, that he could not have prevented his friend's death. Nelson's words had gotten through. It didn't lessen the loss, but it alleviated the guilt, some of it anyway. There would always be that small piece of self-doubt, the never-ending ‘what if’ that always plagued men of good conscience and character.

Erik was deep in thought when the sound of a newspaper landing on his table snapped him from his stupor.

“I figured you would want to see this,” Jeff remarked as he sat across from him.

Erik picked up the paper and studied the headline: “Monsters on Murderous Rampage in Sleepy Suburb.”

“Oh, just marvelous,” he whispered as he scanned the story quickly.

Erik noted that his name appeared in several paragraphs, as did the officers who died out in the mountain. The story of the Reynolds saga, his involvement, the involvement of Halls and the police were all described in remarkable detail. Erik assumed somebody on the Hopedale police force couldn't keep his or her mouth shut. What particularly caught his interest was the reporting that another team of heavily armed men and equipment was being organized to hunt down and kill these creatures.

Erik looked up at his friend. “It seems our little township will become very busy over the next week or two.” He folded up the paper and placed it on the corner of the table.

“The Town Fathers wanted to be on the ‘Map,'” Jeff remarked ironically. “But I assume that this isn't what they had in mind.”

“I'm sure it's not.” Erik nodded in agreement as he took a sip of his coffee.

“They're going to come looking for you, you know that,” Jeff said suddenly. “'The only man to successfully defeat the creatures in two consecutive conflicts is a private investigator named Erik Knight, who runs a small informal operation out of a local dining establishment,'” Jeff recited, quoting the
Globe
verbatim. “You think they could have at least mentioned the name of the place,” he added lightly.

“Do you really want to play host for a bunch of reporters, photo hounds, and political officials, half of them who will try to pawn you for a free meal?” Erik asked.

“No, not really,” Jeff answered. “But a little publicity never hurts.”

“There's no such thing as a little publicity,” Erik responded.

“No,” Jeff said softly. “I suppose you're right about that. What will you do if they come looking for you? Are you going to go up there this time?” Jeff asked, pushing the issue.

Erik looked at his friend, his eyes becoming unreadable, blazing with some unknown fiery determination. “I won't go back there with another group of men, but I do have a score to settle, somehow. I don't know how or why I know this, Jeff, but these things won't just go away Armed soldiers are not the answer. If these creatures feel like they're in danger, they'll just disappear like they've done before and reappear somewhere else at a different location. We have to learn more about them before we can decide on the best way of coping with them. They can appear and disappear like a genie in a lamp, like some type of ghost or something.”

Erik paused as he thought about all the encounters with the creatures up to now. “All we'll gain from another assault on that mountain will be more dead bodies. I'm going to have to get involved sooner or later. I don't know why, it's just a feeling I've had ever since that day at the park. The way that thing looked at me, I could tell there was something more there, an anger—a hunger and a hate like I've never experienced. It knows something that we don't, those creatures seem as though they have a score to settle with us. But, for the life of me, I can't figure out with who or with what or why.” He added moodily as he finished his coffee.

“Just be careful,” Jeff cautioned. “Don't let yourself be ‘guilted’ into anything,” Jeff added as he stood.

“I won't,” Erik assured his friend.

He watched Jeff leave and turned back toward the newspaper, skimming through the last few paragraphs of the article. He thought more about the strange creatures; they seemed to be utilizing more than the trees, they actually seemed to have the ability to seemingly pop in and out of areas like people would use a doorway to go through one room to another. He wondered if the intense darkness that usually accompanied their appearance was related to their ability to jump in and out of spaces. He knew there had to be some reason for their ability to simply drop into areas undetected and then simply vanish into thin air. He also pondered the extreme drops in temperature that marked their arrivals.

Erik thought about it for several more minutes before dismissing any wild theories; he was no longer involved in the investigation. With any luck, the military would catch up with these things and scatter their bodies across the hillside with some heavy artillery. That instinct in the back of his mind, the one that usually warned him of danger, whispered that the next military expedition would fare no better against these horrors than he had when he encountered them. Erik casually leafed through the paper, getting himself caught up on current events.

Alissa quietly strolled over and refilled his coffee cup, and then cleared away the half-eaten muffin and unused butter. “You seem to be healing quickly,” she commented, studying the scars on the side of his face.

Erik looked up, and then rubbed his right hand across the side of his cheek. “Yeah, I sometimes forget that they're there, until I look at myself in the mirror, that is.” He let out a slight chuckle.

Alissa smiled briefly and walked back toward the kitchen, while Erik continued thumbing through the newspaper.

Erik's thoughts quickly turned back toward work. He had made enough money on the events of the past to carry him through the next few months. He decided that he would place a call to Martin Denton the first thing Monday morning and see if there was any freelance work that his firm needed to be done. Erik knew that Denton was always willing to utilize his capabilities, and he admitted to himself that at this point in time he had no other options.