Tales of Chills and Thrills: The Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Novels) (126 page)

“Smashing,” Sydney said. “You look like you were born to
drive a Jaguar convertible across the English countryside.”

Leon laughed. He kept the cap on and then backed off and
told Marco to secure the iron cage door. The sound of metal on metal echoed down
the tunnel like a cannon shot.

To Marco, Leon said, “You did good not making a move. I’d
hate to have had to shoot you.”

“We’re gonna work together,” Marco said. “Never entered my
mind to mess things up. Far as I’m concerned, we’re partners.”

Leon stared at Marco for a moment. Then he turned to Sydney
and said, “If someone put this scene on the Internet, it’d get a billion damn
hits.”

Leon chuckled. The mask and the English cap gave him a
comedic and completely insane look. He then said, “Well, let’s go get paid for
our hard work. Been one hell of a night. Can’t remember when I’ve had so much
fun.” He held up the Derringer. “I’d of loved to know how many people back in
the day took a bullet from these little babies.”

“There was only one that really counted,” Sydney said.

“I guess you’re right about that,” Leon said. “Too bad I
can’t use this on some future project. Drive the CI guys crazy. But I’d have to
give the gun up, and I have a better use for it.”

Sydney and Marco exchanged looks. This isn’t over, Sydney
thought. This guy is orbiting a planet we’ve never visited.

As they started to leave, Sydney glanced back at the cage.
She had no sympathy for Thorp. He’d gotten what he deserved.

62

When they retraced their steps and returned to the office,
Kora and Rouse were talking about something intense. Kora played with her pistol
on the desk, the big briefcases from the vault in front of her. Rouse sat in the
chair, looking very frightened.

Kora turned as they walked in, a strange, almost ecstatic
look on her face. She said, “We watched on the monitor. That lion…Jesus, that
was the coolest thing ever.”

“You liked that?” Sydney asked, thinking this girl was
really, truly sociopathic material.

“Loved it,” Kora said. “That video is going with me. I want
to have it for whenever I’m depressed. I can watch that bastard meet George over
and over. Me and Dicky, here, had a ringside seat.”

Leon smiled and said, “I got a little present for you, sweet
pea. The twin brother Derringer to the one that killed Lincoln.”

He handed her the gun.

“You lie. No way this is the real thing,” Kora said, looking
the gun over.

“It is. Thorp told us all about it.”

She turned to Rouse. “Is that the truth?” Rouse nodded that
it was.

“How awesomely cool as shit is this?” Kora said, beaming as
she checked the small weapon out. “Damn. Thanks, babe. This is, like, the
coolest present ever. It’s so pretty. It’s like jewelry.”

“And it’s yours,” Leon said, beaming back at her. It was
like he was giving the girl of his dreams an engagement ring to beat all
engagement rings. “Careful, it’s loaded.”

“No way.”

“For sure.”

She pointed it at Rouse and for a moment, Sydney thought she
was going to shoot the lawyer, who looked like he also expected a bullet in the
face.

“We need him,” Sydney cautioned. “He’s going to be the only
one who can close down the party, make the death of Thorp an accident that’ll be
discovered long after you guys are gone.”

She watched as Kora backed off, glad she was smart enough to
know they needed Rouse if all of them didn’t want to end up on the run from
every law enforcement agency in the country.

“What’s the take?” Leon asked.

Kora turned to him. “Rouse says it’s about sixteen mil.
Couple more in the jewelry and gold and bonds. All in nice cases. Like he was
gonna be ready to run to the Caymans if it came to that. Which makes it easy for
us.” She held up some of the jewelry from one of the four matching briefcases
that were out on the big teak desk.

“Of course,” Leon said, waving his weapon at Marco, Sydney,
and Rouse, “I could just kill all three of them and stage it like they killed
each other.”

“No, sweetness,” Kora said. “We have a bargain and we’re
going to keep it. And it’s important that this end is in good hands. Nobody’s
going to believe that if I just up and vanish with the mystery man. Sydney will
cover us. I know what she wants, and that makes us safe. I have no interest in
becoming the most hunted couple since Bonnie and Clyde. Look how that turned
out.”

“You’re right.”

“Besides, don’t you and Marco want to work together sometime
in the future? You make a great team. Oh, and I want to thank Tricky Dick here.
He was nice enough to sign his car over to me.” She waved the pink slip. “He’s
such a sweetheart when you get to know him.”

Sydney said, “Listen to your lady. She’s smart. Rouse will
tell the world when they find Thorp’s body that the fool went in to have a
drunken conversation with George and George didn’t like what he had to say.”

Leon chuckled. “Alright, then, let’s get on out of here. We
have a world waiting for us.”

Kora told him to take the briefcases to the car. When he
came back, it was time to leave. Already, dawn threatened. The party next door
was coming to its final moments. The poker game would soon end.

“Be careful driving with all that money in the trunk,”
Sydney said. “And watch out for scorpions.”

“I will,” Kora assured her, smiling back at her like they
were old chums.

The cute couple, Daisy and the masked man, left on whatever
honeymoon awaited.

Moments later, Sydney, Rouse, and Marco watched on the
monitor as a black Mercedes exited the garage and headed down the feeder road to
Lakeshore Boulevard. Then Marco got a suitcase from Rouse’s bedroom and they
spent an hour filling it with tapes, pictures, hard drives, and notebooks.

Sydney turned to Rouse. She explained to him how it was
going to work.

Marco left with the suitcase.

“He’ll be back in an hour or so, when the suitcase is
secure,” she explained. “Then you’re going to go over and end this party with
apologies. You don’t know where Daisy and Thorp disappeared to. Everyone will
smile knowingly and that will be that. You make a mistake, decide to do
something stupid, everything we have on you will go public very fast. It will
get ugly for you.”

He stared at her.

“When things settle, after Thorp’s tragic accident is
discovered, you’ll cancel the deals you made, have a nice big funeral, and then
you’ll do exactly what George Whittell did: Turn into Lake Tahoe’s greatest
defender. No Taj Mahals, no Vegas North. One day, you’ll win awards.”

Rouse said, “You aren’t going to go to the FBI or any
authority?”

“No. By the way, I hear you make a mean Hangtown fry just
like they used to do in the old days. Really nasty food. Oysters, eggs, bacon. I
think I’d like to try it. You have the ingredients?”

He nodded.

Sydney said, “Good. Go shut the party down. Then, when Marco
comes back, we’ll have a nice brunch, talk some more about the future.”

63

Leon felt strange as they tore down the highway, Kora
driving. He’d taken more pills, but things weren’t right in his head and he
wanted to get back to what he’d been feeling.

He thought about the dead client, the others, the whole deal
that had taken place in Tahoe.

Suddenly, shockingly, he turned against everything that had
happened.
I hate her,
Leon thought, glancing at Kora, at the woman he now
thought had destroyed him.

He tried to fight the feelings. The change came over him
with the force of a tsunami. It washed him away from the emotions he’d been
feeling and brought him back to himself. The self he’d constructed so carefully
over the years.

I have to kill the bitch.

It was a devastating notion. It happened so fast, this
negative reversal of feelings, this conflict in his soul. It began within an
hour of Tahoe, the sun coming up, the heat rising, his head swelling again. He
took off the mask.

He felt confused. He grew angry and couldn’t understand it.
Beautiful woman, millions, freedom. What was wrong?

As the distance away from Tahoe grew, the desert rolled
under them mile after mile, hour after hour, and things began to change in the
deepest regions of Leon’s brain. The change in topography, in circumstance,
seemed to be having a profound effect upon him. For a short time, the strange
high that had driven him over the past days looked like it would return. But
then it began to dissipate. Like a man coming off an excess of partying.

His face resumed aching. His mindset deteriorated. The binge
melted away in the hot sun, leaving behind growing distress.

It became conscious to him—the feeling, the angst—first in
Virginia City. His face began to throb again while he was waiting outside a
store for Kora to buy whatever crap she was shopping for. The feeling of being
out of sorts—disconnected from his real self, his authenticity—continued to
build from there as they ate up the long empty roads across the desolate Nevada
desert toward Vegas. He didn’t want to go anywhere near Vegas, but Kora had
insisted.

He glanced frequently at Kora as she drove. She appeared to
be in a great mood, and that only irritated and bothered him all the more.

Leon realized with a poignant shock that everything that had
happened to him since arriving in Tahoe was crazy. It simply couldn’t go on. He
had lost himself. He was living in violation of all his principles, of his
personal code. As if he’d been led by this whore and thief down a terribly wrong
path.

The party of parties was truly over. What had happened in
Tahoe, the whole insanity of it, now hit him full force.

He took more OxyContin, thinking maybe he’d get his good
feelings back. He didn’t. Having a couple drinks at dinner didn’t either. The
truth was right there, and it was a truth he couldn’t ignore. He had sinned
against himself in a bad way. And now he had to purge himself of this whole
sordid affair, reclaim his truth. And to do that, the first thing was to get rid
of this crazy, wild child of a hooker he’d gotten himself involved with. Love
had ruined him.

Leon lamented his fall with sickening awareness of how he’d
been deceived by evil. He knew he was lost. Between Thorp and this hooker and
those two back there, he’d completely relinquished his sense of self. He’d caved
to pleasure, to consumption, to the rot of civilization. Like that goddamn
wolf-dog of Cillo’s…you’re either one, or you’re the other.

That was Leon’s problem. He felt like a man out of control.
The feeling grew stronger and stronger until he couldn’t stand it. He had to
kill her and go back and fix things. Maybe it all was because of the blows to
his head.

Go back,
he ordered himself.
Go back and kill the
other three.
He didn’t care about the money. Being rich. Living on some damn
beach. He wanted his dignity back. He was a hunter. Predation was his calling.

Get rid of the bitch now,
he thought. Like a
rattlesnake shedding its skin, he had to shed her. No way in hell he could get
his life back with this bitch telling him what to do every damn minute like he
was her fucking lapdog. He couldn’t believe what he’d become in so short a
period of time. From the minute he’d looked at her nude shots, he’d simply lost
his mind.

Finally, as evening approached and they crested the
mountain, in the distance, the lights of Vegas came into view. He asked her to
pull off the road.

“You just took a leak twenty minutes ago,” she said.

“Pull off there. I need to stretch, and I want to remember
this. Vegas out there, what’s behind us, and what we have together. Let’s stand
out there for a minute on the top of this mountain and fix it in our memories.
This is special.”

Leon, feeling at the end of it now, full of dark fury, took
out the CD she’d been playing that Rouse had left in the slot:
From the
Rockies to the Redwoods
. He was sick to death of it. Sick of it and this new
thing, this new connection.

She parked and got out.

This is the place,
Leon thought. No traffic coming
into Vegas from this way on a Sunday night. Throw her body down into the canyon.
Be years before anyone would stumble on the bleached bones. If ever.

When he got out of the car, Kora was already up on the
overhang waiting. She said, “It is a cool view. Like being on some weird planet.
Like we landed in a spaceship and that’s the galactic empire’s capital city or
something. Come here, Leon.”

A man like me cannot have a partner, for there are not
partners adequate, none that understand.

He was a loner for a reason. He was a professional, not some
lapdog for a hooker who had him wait on her while she went on a fucking shopping
spree, buying crappy Indian jewelry. Fuck all that.

Still yapping away, she continued. “Come here, Leon. Stand
with me. Our moment of my liberation.”

It’ll be your liberation, alright. And mine.

She turned, saying, “It’s really spectacular. Come here,
sweet love. What are you doing?”

He made his way toward her, the whore yammering away. The
woman just could not shut the fuck up.

She stood in the brilliant effusive glow of the great neon
metropolis, sin city, the drugged desert flower. A slut like all the rest of
them. Only this one was the greatest threat he’d ever faced. She would destroy
him. He had no defenses against the sexual force that she possessed.

This was just wrong and it was all her fault. From the
moment he’d seen her pictures and hung around to meet her, it went wrong.

Leon the Professional walked up to Kora North, and as he did
so, his hand slipped under his shirt, his fingers wrapped around the butt of his
weapon as he considered where to put the first bullet. He had to blow that
beautiful face away. Wipe it out. Wipe out every corrupting thing about her.