Scott Free (24 page)

Scott nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah. Yeah, that's a fine compromise.”

“Now that the weather is finally breaking, I'll head off tomorrow to places unknown. The next day or the day after, I'll drop a dime on you and let people know where you are. That sound simple enough?”

Scott nodded. This wasn't at all where he thought the conversation was going.

“Good.” Isaac slapped his thighs as he rose from the chair. “What do you say I fix us some dinner?”

 

B
ARRY
W
HITESTONE SPENT EVERY
February praying for an early summer. For some reason, summer tourists were just easier to deal with. He guessed that it had something to do with the lower median income of the summer crowds, who were far more likely to be carrying well-worn backpacks than carting thousand-dollar skis on the roofs of their $50,000 SUVs. A man could endure only so many whiny rich New Yorkers.

Plus, during the summer, the president of the United States vacationed elsewhere—places far away, where he could be a thorn in the side of some other town's police chief. Barry glanced at his watch and smiled. If everything went according to plan—and with Special Agent in Charge Sanders at the helm, things
always
went according to plan—in less than twenty-four hours, at 7:00 tomorrow night, Air Force One would be wheels-up and on its way out of his hair.

Twenty-three hours, seventeen minutes and nine seconds, for those who keep score. For today, though, work was finished. Time for Barry to be home with his wife and his kids for a dinner that only had to be heated once. Pushing the lock button in the knob, he stepped out into the squad room and closed the door behind him.

“Good night, people,” he said to the few occupied chairs. In a department the size of Eagle Feather, there was no knife and gun club to keep a strong patrolling presence in the wee hours.

“'Night, Chief,” somebody said.

Janey had said something about ham and canned pineapple for dinner, but he was hoping she'd intercept the brain waves he'd been transmitting for her to cook up tacos instead. She often teased him that his tastes in food hadn't matured since he was in the fourth grade.

He was almost to the exit when the door opened and a breathless James Alexander hurried inside. “Oh, thank God you're still here,” he said.

Barry held up both hands to stop him. “You just think I'm here. Think of me as a 3-D projection.”

“We need to talk, Barry.”

“Is this about Hertzberger?”

Alexander's eyebrows danced. “Sure is.”

“Tell me tomorrow.” Barry tried to scoot past, but James cut him off. “James, your boss wants to go home and see his family. Do I need to review the chain of command with you again?”

“According to the FBI, Giovanni Agostini's last known whereabouts were in the Utah-Idaho-Wyoming area.”

The words froze Barry in his tracks. “He's the squealer, right?”

“Right. The dead father's son.”

“Why is this important?”

“Because it closes the loop. A direct link from the dead plumber to Maurice. And remember the prints that linked Giuseppe's house to the moonshine bottle? Well, we picked up some matching latents in the cab of Hertzberger's truck. Passenger side.”

“The skinny fat guy.”

James's eyebrows danced again. “On a whim, I asked a buddy of mine in Denver to dust around the truck stop where our man picked up his hitchhiker.” He smiled.

“They found the prints there, too?”

“A thumb and a partial forefinger. Not enough for court, but enough to put our hitcher in all the places. It means we have a murderer on the loose in our fair community.”

“Cooper's tox screen?”

James's smile grew larger. “Positive for a drug I can't pronounce. Simulates heart attacks.”

Barry's whole body sagged, as if someone opened an air valve. “Goddammit.”

Pulling his keys from his pocket, he turned on his heel and led the way back toward his office.

T
HE DAMN EYE KEPT EXPLODING
.

The sickening image returned every time Scott closed his eyes, that horrible jet of gore. Lying there in the darkness of his bedroom, he kept rubbing the spots on his face where the brains had hit him.

All that evening, Scott and Isaac had tried to pretend that nothing had changed, that everything was fine; but nothing was. Not a single thing was even close to fine, and while Scott could put on the act in the presence of his host, now that he was all alone in his bed, and the clock inched past midnight, all he could concentrate on was the wrongness of it all.

Murder was murder, no matter how you cut it. He kept thinking about that eye. And the dead man in the yard whom he'd never even seen in life. Movies and television make this business of dying so routine, so uneventful, but the reality was anything but. Those guys were somebody's sons, and maybe even somebody's father. Probably somebody's husbands or boyfriends, and now they were gone. Just like that, their bodies dumped into a pit. It wasn't right.

He kept dissecting Isaac's explanation, trying to make it all add up, but it was just too much—the witness protection, the double cross on the government, the squealing mobsters. All of it made sense at its face, so why couldn't he just relax?

It was the lies. Not just about the phone—though that was a big one—but about his sick father, too. Why would somebody follow him all the way out here when they could have shot him on the spot in the father's house?

Then there was the sheer number of weapons, the night scope, the silencer, the vault. The tunnel. This place out in the middle of nowhere. All of that took money. So, there's the big question: where does an allegedly retired professional killer get that kind of money?

There was no coherence to the thoughts. They flashed as images through Scott's mind: shelves stacked with weapons, the vault door, the weird foam rubber vest. He saw the phone—

The vest was a fat suit. The thought came to him out of nowhere. He'd seen something like it on a television show that took him behind the scenes of a movie shoot, where skinny actors were donning fat suits in the makeup department. The vest was a disguise of some sort!

Okay, so what? That was consistent with his story, wasn't it? A man hunted by the Mob and chased by cops probably would want a disguise, wouldn't he? That'd go with the business of visiting his sick dad. Maybe disguises were as common to men on the run as cell phones were to salesmen.

So, what about the telephone? Why lie about that—twice? Just an excuse, maybe, to keep from calling the police? What was it that Isaac had said? The secret to everything was to look at the situation from the position of the other guy. So, here's this reclusive ex-killer who suddenly finds himself with a houseguest. Is he going to tell the truth? No, of course not. Certainly not under these circumstances.

It all checked out. No matter how many times Scott ran Isaac's explanations through his head, it always checked out. Why, then, was he so convinced that the man had something big and important to hide? Why did Scott continue to feel that he was in jeopardy?

If Isaac wanted to kill him, he'd have done it by now. Nobody knew Scott was even there, so they'd certainly never come looking for him. And if they did, they'd just find his body at the bottom of the dry well with the others. What difference would one more body make?

Thomas Powell is a very dangerous man.

The warning from the FBI agent/hired killer reverberated through Scott's brain. And then he thought of the look in Isaac's eyes when Scott told him that the man hadn't said anything to him in the tunnel. Why had he lied like that? And why had the lie come so instinctively? At the time, it seemed like dangerous information to pass along, but now it seemed more like a stupid thing to hold back.

Don't ever cross me. I play for keeps.

Isaac had said to consider that a warning. A warning from a killer. Suddenly, Scott had the urge to come clean, to correct the record for Isaac. Maybe if he cleared his conscience, he'd be able to relax. If Isaac was telling him the truth about his plans, then all he had to do was hang out for a few days, and it would all end. Isaac would disappear, and sooner or later, Scott would be rescued.

So, why hadn't Isaac left already? It was a gorgeous day today. Yesterday, his excuse had been the storm. So, why was he still here tonight? Scott knew he was close to unraveling the mystery and his stomach tightened. If Isaac truly was a hunted man, why wasn't he off on the run?

Answer: He had something left to do—a solid, affirmative reason to stay. There was no way for Scott to know what that reason might be, but it certainly tickled his imagination. What would a hired gun need to stick around for?

Scott bolted upright in his bed, his heart hammering, his eyes wide in the shadowy darkness. Suddenly, he understood. All the guns, all the paranoia. Isaac DeHaven—or maybe Thomas Powell, a very dangerous man—wasn't retired after all. He was here to do another job.

It was the answer that made sense. Isaac had another person to kill, and for whatever reason, the timing mattered. Maybe he had to meet somebody first, or maybe the victim had to be in a specific place. Who could say?

The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Isaac wasn't in the business of killing just anybody—the fact that Scott still breathed was testament to that. No, his customers hired him to kill specific people, maybe at specific times.

Who might the next poor bastard be? Scott wondered. Whoever it was, he surely didn't know it was coming. Scott thought of the phone in the drawer. He needed to get the hell out of here—to get help, not only for himself, but for that next victim. Maybe some of those Secret Service guys he'd been tripping over all last week could—

Just like that, Scott knew who the next target was. He remembered the posters all over SkyTop announcing the big Founder's Day celebration in Eagle Feather. Holy shit, it was the Super Bowl and World Series of murder all wrapped together: the president of the United States.

 

S
TAYING THERE WAS NO LONGER AN OPTION
. Scott needed to leave, right by-God now. Jesus, this was huge. He didn't understand the game that Isaac was playing by keeping him alive, but suddenly, he knew as certainly as he'd ever known anything that his hours were numbered.

You've got to look at it from the other guy's point of view. Scott knew what Isaac looked like, he knew where he lived, and maybe he even knew his real name. There was no rational reason for Isaac to keep him alive.

Scott dressed quickly and silently, the coldness of the floor reminding him of his first problem: no shoes, no socks. Such a brilliant move when you thought about it. No shoes, no escape: a prison as secure as anything ever built with bars. But there had to be a solution. There had to be. He'd come this far on his wits, beating the odds; he'd be damned if he was going to let it end with a bullet through his own eye.

In all of this house, with its hidden panels and all the toys, there had to be something that could double for shoes.

Moving to his bedroom door, Scott pushed against the door with one hand while he turned the knob with the other, a trick that he'd learned from home experience would keep the latch from making noise as it opened.

Walking on tiptoe, he glided to the mezzanine railing and peered over the side. Light from one lamp in the living room cast a yellow glow over everything, the only glimmer that separated the house from total darkness. Under different circumstances, Scott might have been amused by the fact that a hired killer needed a night light. He stood there for a long moment, watching for signs of movement from below. If Isaac saw him, he was dead for sure.

 

I
SAAC KNEW THAT IT WAS
all out of his hands. As he sat in the darkness of his room, he reassembled his pistol as he considered his options—more accurately, as he considered the lack of them. It was a useful skill, disassembling and reassembling his weapon in the dark. Of no practical use in the real world—if he needed to clean his gun, he'd turn the light on—he nonetheless liked the notion of being at one with his firearm. There was something intimate about the connection between man and machine, nearly as intimate as the act for which the machine was employed.

Sometimes, the mixture of truth and deception that defined Isaac's life was a disturbing, confusing thing. Truly, he was not in the business of killing children. Most of his targets had been old men who likely would have been dead soon anyway. He couldn't remember a single one much under the age of forty. It wasn't in his nature to judge the justice of his victims' deaths. A customer had deemed their deaths to be worthy of his fee, and that was all the rationalization he needed. The rest was just mechanics and logistics. He planned, he acquired his target and he pulled the trigger. A simpler world would be hard to find.

Problem was, his heart actually went out to this kid. He had a lot of balls to set out on his own from a plane crash and wander through the woods to this tiny spot on his map. Isaac wasn't sure that he could have done that himself. Took a lot of courage to pull it off, and if there was one quality in a person—especially a young person—that Isaac admired above all others, it was courage. So, when he hobbled Scott by taking away his shoes, he'd done it with his heart in the right place. At the time, it seemed like a reasonable solution to both of their problems. He only needed one more day. One lousy day. Then it would all be taken care of.

He never would have made the phone call, of course, but at least the kid would have had shelter and enough food to keep him alive for a while. Sooner or later, Scott would have had to make some choices that might have gotten him into trouble, but hey, that truly wasn't Isaac's problem.

He'd convinced himself at the time that it made sense to keep Scott alive, but now that he thought about it, he knew that it could never work. The kid was too smart. And he'd lied to him. Isaac had heard the dickhead in the tunnel ask about Thomas Powell (and just how the hell did he come up with
that?
He hadn't heard that name in years!), and the fact that Scott didn't answer about it truthfully told Isaac something that he frankly didn't want to know. It all came down to the fact that the kid was too goddamn smart for his own good. Certainly too smart for Isaac's good.

His was a business of details. Every job carried its risks, and on every job, something went wrong. Call it Murphy's Law or just plain bad luck, but that's the way it was. One or two things
always
went wrong. Since Isaac was a professional, though, his plans allowed for a certain number of mistakes. That's why he always carried an extra weapon and extra ammunition, an extra driver's license and passport—all of them packaged for easy disposal if it came to that. It was the nature of his business to be extremely careful, and to capitalize on the mistakes of those who were not.

But it was unconscionable to allow so huge a complication as a witness to go uncorrected. It's why he had to kill the truck driver. And it was why the boy had to die.

In the darkness, his fingers found the ammunition clip, and with his thumb, he verified that he'd loaded hollow points. With luck, Scott would be sound asleep when it happened, and he wouldn't know a thing. Isaac would blast him three times in half that many seconds, and the hollow points would do the rest, expanding to twice their size as they shredded the boy's vitals. Guaranteed death, no suffering.

Scott was a nice kid. Isaac owed him that much.

 

N
OTHING MOVED BUT THE WIND OUTSIDE
. With the fire and the wood stoves banked down for the night, the place was downright cold; cold enough to see your breath, Scott thought, even though he in fact could not.

He made it down the stairs to the main level without a sound, and walked quickly to the front door, where he plucked his coat from its peg and put it on. There he paused. He was being foolish. No hat, no gloves, no shoes, he wouldn't make it two miles. More than that, he didn't even know where he was going.

He needed to find something for his feet. That was nonnegotiable. But what? The place was as clean as a model home—not a piece of paper out of place, let alone a pair of shoes. So, what was he going to do? For a second, he thought about cutting up the cotton cloth on the kitchen table and wrapping the strips around his feet like the pictures he'd seen of George Washington's troops at Valley Forge, but he dismissed that as senseless. He needed something to insulate against the wet and the cold.

His eyes moved to the hidden door that led to the secret room and its secret tunnel. No doubt, that's where Isaac put his stuff. Probably in the safe. On the off chance that Isaac had left it unlocked, he pulled on the handle, but of course nothing moved.

Dammit.
The phone was in there, too—his backup plan. If he could somehow get inside the little room, he could duck outside long enough to make a call on the satellite phone and then return to bed to await his rescue. He could be in and out in just a few minutes and Isaac would never be the wiser until a SWAT team swooped down on him.