The Killing Kind (24 page)

Hendricks had hoped to sever Leonwood’s spine. Hoped, but didn’t count on it. That shot would have been one in a million—slipping between or driving through his vertebrae—and Hendricks wasn’t quite that lucky. Spewing blood as he fell backward from the force of the blow, Leonwood raised both the MP5K and the .25 at Hendricks and squeezed off a few rounds. Hendricks didn’t even flinch. He knew Leonwood’s shots would go wide.

Thompson didn’t know what to think. She hit the deck, face to floor. As she fell she saw the stranger mount the stage with ease and close the gap between him and Leon-wood in three quick strides.

When Leonwood slammed into the stage, he dropped his weapons and grasped weakly at the knife jutting from his throat, blood surging between his fingers. Hendricks crouched over him and watched the light in his eyes die.

“Happy travels, Leon. Maybe we’ll meet again in hell.”

The whole encounter had taken maybe twenty seconds. Thompson listened, still as death, where she lay. She feared if she moved, she might make herself a target. But when she heard Leonwood’s assailant rise and turn to flee, she scrambled over to her gun, which lay to her left. She snatched it off the floor and rolled, meaning to draw down on the new man—the new threat.

But by the time she did, the man was gone.

28

The service hall was long and bright, with off-white painted cinder-block walls glaring beneath the cheap fluorescent lighting and emergency lights strobing all around. Nice of Leonwood to have the Feds unlock the door for me, Hendricks thought.

There were no cameras that he could see, but all the doors had card-swipes like the door he’d used to escape into the hallway, the lights on their card-readers red. No doubt the female agent’s doing, Hendricks thought. Trapping him backstage was a pretty lousy thank-you for saving her life.

Finding the stairwell door among his twenty-odd choices was a breeze: it was the only one marked with an exit sign. Its swipe pad indicated it was locked like all the others. Hendricks dug his fingernails into the seam between the unit’s wall-mounted base and the plastic cover protecting its guts, and pried the cover off. Inside was a tangled mess of leads and wires. Lester probably could’ve hacked the thing in seconds. Hendricks, however, could work at it for an hour with the best tools money can buy, and all he’d likely get for his trouble was electrocuted.

Lucky for Hendricks, there was more than one way through a door.

The door and frame were painted steel. Busting through was not an option. The door handle was a heavy-duty lever-style, not unlike the one he’d just come through. Hendricks examined the brushed nickel plate into which the lever was set, hoping to separate it from the door and expose the mechanism within, but it was flush and well-affixed.

That meant the lever was the weakest link.

Hendricks looked around for something to break it with—a fire ax or an extinguisher. But the hall was bare, the only fire-suppression tools in sight the sprinklers in the ceiling. He considered trotting the length of the hall to see if there was anything of use around the corner, but then they cut the lights, and he knew there wasn’t time. He had seconds, not minutes, to make his move.

As he was plunged into darkness, the hall’s only illumination the faint, hellish glow of the LEDs reflecting off the glossy walls, Hendricks’s hand went instinctively toward the only weapon left in his possession—his penlight zip gun. Some help this’ll be, he thought. Not that he had any intention of putting any members of the SWAT team in the ground, but the fact was, if he had a gun, he’d have more plays to make. The threat of violence is often more powerful a persuasion than violence itself—and anyway, a well-placed shot square in the center of a flak jacket might provide him just the opening he needed, while leaving its recipient with nothing more than a couple cracked ribs. But just try to threaten violence with a fucking penlight. The very thing that seemed so clever when Lester built it—the fact that no one would ever suspect it was a weapon—was suddenly threatening to get Hendricks killed.

And then it hit him.

The zip gun might make for a lousy deterrent in the face of imminent violence, but it—and the hollow-point round inside whose raison d’être was to maximize internal damage—might make for a half-decent key.

Hendricks pressed the penlight to the door lever and fired. The shot was deafening in the empty hallway. The handle fell from either side of the door with a metallic
thunk.

Hendricks was in the stairwell.

It was a narrow old affair, designed for evacuations in the case of fire and the like—poured concrete steps rimmed at the edges with rusted metal, the metal handrail rusted red as well. The air inside the stairwell was kiln-hot and smelled of oxidation.

One landing down, there was an air vent, its cover held fast by two rusted screws—top left and bottom right. The other two holes sat empty, the screws either long gone or never installed in the first place. Hendricks yanked the cover off the vent and tossed it onto the center of the landing. He disturbed the dust and rat shit just inside the vent with both hands and tossed his cowboy hat as far into the ductwork as he could. Then he turned around and headed up the stairs—ignoring the down-arrowed exit signs and their false promise of daylight, of liberation.

Hendricks knew the Feds’ playbook in situations such as these. They’d expect him to panic—to flee. To get as far from the scene as he could before they locked the county down. And they’d respond accordingly. So let them give chase, he thought—as long as it wasn’t actually him they were chasing.

Sometimes you survived by the bullet, or by the blade. Sometimes you survived by tradecraft, spotting tails and squashing bugs. But sometimes, survival came down to nothing more than swagger—bluffing big and playing it to the hilt. Problem is, you go all-in on a bluff and someone calls it, you go bust. Which ain’t so comforting when it’s your life that’s on the line.

Hendricks knew he was in deep shit. What he didn’t know yet was how deep. He’d been set up—of that much he was sure. The timing of his assailant’s attack suggested he hadn’t ID’d Hendricks until today—otherwise, why try to take him out in so public a venue? And it seemed clear that Leonwood wasn’t in on the scam. A good sign. It suggested that whoever was behind this was operating alone, rather than marshaling the full resources of the Council, who—given that this gig fell into his lap after intercepting their communiqués—were no doubt the ones behind the hit. The fact that his assailant was keeping his cards close to his vest pointed to a freelancer; he was hoarding intel to preserve his value to the organization and ensure they couldn’t take care of Hendricks themselves and then kill him, too.

Problem was, Hendricks had no idea who the hell this guy was, or how to find him. And until he did, he remained exposed. Every job would offer his guy another opportunity to bag him. Every communication, every contact point, would place whomever Hendricks was talking to—friends and clients both—at risk.

And that was just the half of it. It wouldn’t be long before the Feds found out who Purkhiser really was—if they didn’t know already—and looked into his supposed Seychelles account. Hendricks never intended to leave Purkhiser’s money in that account. Lester had set it up to automatically transfer to several of Hendricks’s other accounts within seconds of deposit, after which he’d close the one that Purkhiser had access to—a fail-safe against Purkhiser double-crossing him. Hendricks had no idea how fast the Feds might chase down that first account, or whether they could trace it to the others. Which meant he’d have to sever ties with
all
his Seychelles accounts—and forfeit any funds within. So not only was there no fucking way he’d see a dime of today’s payday, this shit-show of a job actually
cost
him dough.

Wait—today’s payday. The result of a surprise reversal on Purkhiser’s part, and too big a number for Hendricks to’ve resisted.

That weasely bastard, Hendricks thought. Purkhiser
knew
that son of a bitch was gunning for me. Purkhiser helped the fucker set me up.

It took the edge off failing to prevent his death, at least.

Now all that was left was getting out of Pendleton’s alive.

The hotel’s upstairs hallway looked like a high school twenty minutes past the final summer bell: doors left swinging open, detritus scattered about—clothing, bits of trash, a half a turkey club. An ice bucket lay overturned beside one room, ice water bleeding into the carpet, a stack of food-caked plates beside it. Hendricks watched through the wire-crossed safety glass of the fire door for a hundredcount—his cowboy boots in his hands, the concrete warm beneath his stocking feet—before he eased the door open just enough to slip out. He counted another hundred before he actually did so, easing the door closed so it wouldn’t echo down the stairwell. He knew SWAT would typically take their time breaching the hallway in which they assumed he was trapped—letting him sweat awhile in the dark to keep him off-balance—but he couldn’t discount the possibility that by discharging his zip gun, he’d accelerated their time line. If that had happened, there was a chance they were peering into his decoy ductwork at this very moment and reconnoitering the landings up and down from there as well. He didn’t want to give them any reason to turn their cursory search up the stairwell into anything more aggressive. Subterfuge was his only ally in getting out of here.

Hendricks was on the seventh floor. The hotel portion of the Pendleton’s casino complex stretched twelve stories high. Hendricks chose the seventh floor for two reasons. One, he knew any systematic search of the building would begin at top and bottom, meeting somewhere between four and nine depending on occupancy, so the middle floors afforded him the most leeway with regard to time. And two, Pendleton’s had dome cameras mounted at the end of every hall—not a problem to his left, because the hallway jagged around a corner four rooms down, but a huge problem to his right, where the camera at the end of each hall had a clear shot of the fire door. Everywhere but the seventh floor, that is. On the seventh floor, some member of the cleaning staff had left the utility room door open in his or her haste to flee—even though the shooting downstairs had lasted only minutes, word spread quickly through the Pendleton’s complex, sending patrons and employees alike into hysteria—and the door, prevented from closing by an abandoned cleaning cart, now blocked the camera’s sight line to the fire door.

Hendricks had half a mind to leave a tip.

He padded silently through the abandoned hallway— neither slinking nor hurrying, and affecting a look of fright and worry in case anyone was watching his progress through the peepholes in their doors. A good quarter of the doors were open—some wide, some kept ajar by the brass-plated ovals of the interior door latches, protruding from the door frames like bookmarks—but many were still closed, and Hendricks had no way of knowing how many of those rooms were actually occupied.

Hendricks snatched the ice bucket up from the hall, scooping as much of its spilled contents back in as he could manage. He popped his head into every open door he passed, examining at a glance the open closet space inside like some hard-boiled Goldilocks. Too big. Too small. Too showy. In one case, the dimensions were about right, but he thought the odds of him walking out unspotted in this enormous woman’s pink chiffon dress unlikely.

Then, finally, he hit pay dirt.

Once he’d found what he was looking for, he closed the door behind him and threw the bolt. He removed the wad of cash Lester’d sent him—rolled tight and rubberbanded—from his pocket and set it on the nightstand. Then he stripped naked, folding his clothes as flat as he could and placing them between the mattress and box spring.

The room belonged to Norm and Patty Gunderson of Parker, South Dakota. Hendricks knew this because of the tags on their luggage and the printed Google driving directions on the nightstand. They must have skedaddled in a hurry, because the TV was still tuned to KMBC’s coverage of the shooting. As Hendricks riffled through their belongings, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for them. The suitcase was filled with patterned polos, iron-creased denims, and wrinkle-free blouses in a cascade of Easter pastels. The closet held two pairs of khakis and two dresses as appropriate for Sunday service as dinner out. Below them on the floor was a pair of boat shoes—a little small for Hendricks, but they’d have to do—and a pair of sensible, low-heeled pumps. There were no ties, sport coats, or any other indications of business-wear to be seen.

The Gundersons were on vacation.

Hendricks wondered if they’d ever take another one.

Hendricks padded naked to the bathroom and eyed himself in the mirror. Nothing I can’t work with, he thought. Sure, his shoulder hurt like hell, and his body was a road map of bruises, but apart from the cuts drying sticky-red on his left hand, a half-inch-long knife wound across his Adam’s apple—bleeding, but superficial—and some slight swelling on his right cheek, his injuries weren’t the sort most folks would notice.