Work Done for Hire

  He picked up a snub-nosed .38 Special, not very accurate or powerful, but small. He also got a 9-mm Beretta like the one he had carried in the army, but that size cannon is hard to conceal in light summer clothes. He’d never fired either one except at an indoor range in the local gun shop. The first of every month, he’d go there and run a couple of dozen rounds through each one.

  After about a year, he proposed to Arlene and was overjoyed when she accepted. His mother sent a $250,000 “nest egg” check and his boss promoted him to full partner.

  A couple of weeks later the boss sent him to the university law library in Gainesville to do a few days’ research in tax law, and when he came back, the firm’s office had a FOR LEASE sign on the door. He went home and found annulment papers on the kitchen table. His new wife had taken his new car and cleaned out their joint bank account. All their credit cards maxed for cash. The $2,000 rent was due, and he had less than a hundred bucks in his pocket.

  The two disasters were not unrelated. She’d gone to Mexico with the boss and all the firm’s liquid assets.

  His parents’ unlisted number was no longer in service. In the waiting mail, there was a note from his mother saying that Dad was furious about the unauthorized $250,000 gift, but he would get over it. Maybe not, Mom, under the circumstances.

  The man who came to repossess the furniture, a fellow Steve had worked with a few times, was sympathetic and bought his old pickup truck. He also sold the expensive Beretta and his Lance Armstrong road bike, keeping the .38 Special and the rusty beach bike he kept for riding on the sand. With some reluctance, he sold his state-of-the art iLap, after downloading its files into a winkdrive. That gave him enough money to renew his PI license and rent a one-room office with a foldout couch. He had some cards printed up, whimsically calling himself “Spenser for Hire,” and took out an ad in the weekly advertiser.

  He’d been bicycling an hour or so a day, before work, both as therapy for his legs and to cut down on his smoking. He didn’t desire tobacco while he was on the bike, so with no money for cigarettes and plenty of time on his hands, he started bicycling constantly. If he could give up a dangerous habit, one good thing would come out of this debacle.

  Two good things, actually. For better or for worse, he was finally free of his father.

  He got into a routine. He’d get out of bed at first light and take off on the bike for a long loop south of Daytona Beach and back, using his cell to check for calls back at the office every hour or so. There were never any really interesting calls, maybe one repo deal a week, but it did keep him from smoking. When he got home after sixty or seventy miles he would collapse into bed, where he also didn’t smoke. He got to where he didn’t even fold it back into a couch.

  Some of the areas he biked through were not particularly safe, so he usually carried the .38—not in the shoulder holster, which would be a little conspicuous in a T-shirt, but in an innocuous zippered bag in his front basket. He had two big rear baskets for groceries, and he took to filling them up with aluminum cans, tossed from cars, worth about two cents apiece. It amused him to be beautifying the environment in exchange for lunch money.

  After about a month of this, he was pedaling along with a few days’ beard, old shabby clothes, on a squeaky rusty bike loaded down with trash, and a young cop stopped him and asked whether he could produce evidence that he shouldn’t be arrested for vagrancy. In fact, he had left his wallet at home, so he didn’t have any ID or money, but he did unfortunately have a gun, and the young fellow didn’t want to listen to a lecture about unlawful search and seizure, least of all from a vagrant who claimed to be a lawyer.

  Back at the police station, fingerprints and a retinal scan quickly verified he was Stephen Spenser, a lawyer with a PI ticket and a gun license. Why was he biking around looking like a penniless bum? A police reporter who was loitering around the station overheard some of that, and asked whether he would trade an interview for a steak dinner. Good human interest story, and it might drum up some business for Spenser for Hire.

  The steak, at the local Denny’s, wasn’t too bad, but the story made him wince. It was in the Sunday edition of the Daytona Beach paper, leading off the People section. There was a big picture of him above the fold, scarfing up that cheap steak like a starving hobo. The story was sympathetic but condescending. He almost went out for a pack of Winstons.

  But the story had his phone number, and that would change his life.

  He read through the rest of the paper and was about to get on his bike when the phone rang. It was a man named Bayer Steinhart, who said he might have a job for a private investigator with a gun and a bicycle. Could they meet this morning? He gave an Ormond Beach address on A1A—Millionaire’s Row—and Steve said he could be there at ten thirty.

  He put on some decent clothes and pedaled south, going down the A1A sidewalk. He stopped and stared at the ocean just long enough to be five minutes late. It wouldn’t do to appear too pathetically eager.

  It was a mansion with architecture so idiosyncratic that Steve had stopped to look at it before. It was in the style of the twentieth-century Spanish architect Gaudí, the corners flowing as if melted. Fantastic gargoyle ornamentation. The lawn featured topiaries of unicorns and dragons, and there was a fountain where three beautiful nudes, life-sized and meticulously accurate, embraced laughing. The three Graces, having a better time than usual.

  So the man had a surplus of money and a shortage of taste. Steve could live with both.

  An attractive black maid a little older than Steve answered the door and escorted him through the house to a terrace that overlooked the ocean. Not too many people on the beach yet. Mr. Steinhart was scanning the horizon with a compact Questar telescope. Steve recognized it; his father owned one. They were built like a Swiss watch but cost considerably more.

  He was wearing faded jeans and a light flannel shirt. Forty or fifty years old. As tall and muscular as Steve, he shook hands gently.

  Without preamble: “One thing the article didn’t say. When you were betrayed and lost everything, why didn’t you just find a position with another firm? Law degree from Princeton?”

  “I don’t like lawyers. I’ve been around them all my life, and really wanted to do something else.”

  “What if I’m a lawyer?”

  Steve paused. “I’ll take your money.”

  He smiled. “Rest easy. I’m a mathematician, sort of. Self-taught. This all came from computer games.”

  “Of course. I thought the name sounded familiar.”

  The maid brought out a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses. She set it on a glass-covered wrought iron table.

  “Thank you, Selma.” To Steve: “If you biked here, you must be thirsty.” They sat down and he poured two glasses.

  “You’ve heard of Hunter.”

  “The assistant governor?” Slimeball.

  “No. The serial killer.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  He rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes. “Five years ago . . . almost six now . . . my only son was his first victim.”

  “My god. I’m sorry.”

  “They found, the Georgia police”—his voice cracked—“they found his, his skin and insides. He’d been dressed out like a rabbit or a deer.”

  “I’ve read about that. I had no idea it had happened to you.”

  “We paid a lot to keep our identity secret. We thought it might have been a kidnapping, for ransom, that went awry. I had two younger daughters to protect.”

  “They’re not here?” The place had a bachelor feel.

  “No, they live with their mother up north. The marriage sort of fell apart. Understandable.”

  “The police weren’t able to . . .”

  “No, nothing. Of course it’s federal now. Homeland Security and the FBI. They have no leads at all. And I just found out there was a new one, the twel
fth, last week. A jogger in Alabama.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Nobody does. The man had no family, so they kept it under wraps. If the murderer is after publicity, they think maybe not getting it might make him do something stupid.”

  “I read that he’s pretty . . . not stupid.”

  “He’s never left prints or DNA. He’s left tire tracks, but no two are the same.

  “I’ll give you the FBI dossier, everything they gave me. I don’t want to look at it anymore. Pictures.”

  “So . . . what do you want me to do? Find him when the FBI can’t?”

  “Basically, well, I want you to be a lure.”

  “Lure him to you?”

  “To yourself. And then capture or kill him.”

  “Why would he want to come after me?”

  “Everyone he’s killed was alone, on a country road or path. All athletes, either jogging or running or, like my son, biking. All in Florida or Georgia or Alabama.”

  “I bike sixty miles a day in Florida. He hasn’t come after me yet.”

  “My son and three others seem to have been on the same trail. It can’t be a coincidence.”

  “What trail?”

  “It’s the Southern Tier Trail, three thousand miles of back roads and bike paths from St. Augustine to San Diego. Thousands of people bike it every year.”

  “You’d think the authorities would have it staked out. Parts of it.”

  “You’d think. But they call it ‘weak circumstantial evidence.’ None of them died near the trail, but they all were on or near it the day they died. My son’s bike was found right off the trail outside Tallahassee, but he was taken to a remote part of Georgia to be killed.”

  “Well, I’m not a criminal lawyer. But I’d call it circumstantial evidence myself.”

  “Whatever, I’ll pay you two thousand dollars a week to ride that trail by yourself, alone and apparently vulnerable, but armed. A hundred thousand if you capture the bastard. Two hundred if he’s killed. It beats picking up cans off the road.”

  It was a crazy idea, but hell, the man could afford an expensive hobby. A quest. “Well, I’m not camping. I had enough of that in the army.”

  “I’ll give you a credit card. Sleep in motels, eat in restaurants, best you can find out there in the sticks.”

  Steve rubbed his chin. “That piece of crap I’m riding wouldn’t make it to Tallahassee. Need a new bike—and a new gun, more effective than the little peashooter I’m carrying now.”

  He reached into a beach bag and pulled out a fat wallet. “New bike.” He counted out fifteen hundred-dollar bills. “New gun.” Ten more. Then he put the wallet back and pulled out a thick manila folder that had “Dup. Hunter Case File” scrawled on it.

  “Thank you, Mr. Steinhart.” He stacked the bills together and folded them and put them in his pocket. “You’ve got a deal. Do you have a contract?”

  He smiled. “I don’t like lawyers, either. But if you draw something up, I’ll sign it tomorrow.” He stood up. “And then you’ll be on the road.”

  Steve stood and shook his hand. “You’ve bought yourself the most expensive piece of bait in the state of Florida.”

  4.

  Kit read the last page and set it on the small stack on the kitchen table in front of her. “Well, I like it so far, Jack. But the movie’s script doesn’t have all that stuff about the marriage and betrayal and all.” She’d taken a copy of the script with her and read it on the plane.

  “He wanted me to give the guy some depth, some history,” I said. “In the movie, he’s just a private dick with a bike.”

  She got up and tousled my hair on the way to the fridge. “Missed your private dick.” She pulled some sandwich stuff out and put it on the counter. “Ham sandwich okay?”

  “Sounds good.” I watched her being methodical, four pieces of bread lined up along the edge of the cutting board. Mustard on one and three, mayo on two and four; ham slices folded over to precisely fit the bread. My head felt good where she’d rubbed it.

  “Decide about the pseudonym?” The contract allowed me to make one up, or not.

  “I don’t think I’ll do it. I’m not ashamed of having to work for a living.”

  “Are you sure?” She sliced the sandwiches in neat diagonals. “‘Jack, I mean Christian Daley . . . wasn’t he the guy who wrote that awful monster book?’ Not that it won’t be a good book.”

  “You know, that’s part of it? People will expect a piece of shit, and get a decent book. Besides, the movie might be a big hit. Sell millions of copies of the book.”

  She put the stuff back in the fridge. “So then what? You get lots of novelization offers?”

  “Maybe a real book or two.” Though in fact I wouldn’t turn down another deal like this. A thousand bucks a day plus a quarter for every copy sold?

  She set the sandwiches on plates and brought them over. “I’ve never been to Daytona Beach. Is there really a house like that?”

  “No, I wouldn’t risk using a real one. But there are plenty equally tasteful. Good sandwich.”

  “We ought to fly down when the snow gets deep. Call it research.”

  “Well, not much more of the story takes place there. I had an idea, though, actual research.”

  “You’re gonna go kill a deer and cut it up.”

  “Hey, I didn’t think of that! Seriously, I want to take a longish bike trip, get a feel for it.”

  “How long? You have snow tires for that thing?”

  “Just a couple of weeks. Maybe over to Davenport and down the river a bit. Go through state parks as much as possible, no traffic. Maybe you could join me for a couple of days?”

  She gave me an intense look. “Sure, pedal along through the deserted woods. Miles from nowhere. Why does that creep me out?” But she laughed.

  “Just a thought. I mean, I could do it myself during the week.”

  “Actually, I could use the exercise.” She stood up. “Glass of wine?”

  “Half one. I’m going back to work.”

  “Like that’s stopping me.” She poured the glasses and brought them back. “I’ll tell the boss that I had to have a drink because I just found out I’m in the middle of a Hitchcock movie where my boyfriend the writer is going to lure me out into the woods and dismember me.”

  “I’ll be gentle and clean up afterwards. But that’s a Stephen King movie, not Hitchcock.”

  “It’s Stephen King if the script possesses him and makes him act it out. It’s Hitchcock if he’s just fucking crazy.” We clinked glasses.

  “Early Saturday, then? You could spend Friday night here.”

  “Oh, goodie. I’ve never slept with an axe murderer.” She faked a three-syllable orgasm. “I’ll put my bike in the car and bring it over after work. Movie and dinner?”

  “Good. I’ll see where the Trail comes closest. Maybe Ames. We can use my van.”

  “How do we handle that? I mean, it won’t come when you whistle.”

  “Just pedal a half day or so and stop at a motel. Take the same route in reverse on Sunday, drive home.”

  “Okay. If it’s the Bates Motel, though, I’m not going in.”

  “See? You do know horror movies.”

  “Just Hitchcock.” She shuddered, or pretended to. “Could we talk about the weather, like normal people?”

  “How ’bout them Hawkeyes?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  There was no actual road or driveway to Hunter’s lair. He had planted scrub pines across the original dirt road years before, and there was no trace of it anymore. You had to weave through trees to get there, and he meticulously alternated among a dozen different entrance points, so there was nothing like a path leading over the rise to the double-wide trailer that squatted hidden among a stand of ancient live oaks.

  He maneuv
ered the van carefully through a mile of forest, mindful not to leave any broken saplings or flattened bushes. He parked the van under a lean-to of camouflage netting adjacent to the trailer, which was covered with the same stuff, made of immortal plastic.

  He got out finishing the last of six Big Macs that came from the place in Macon where he usually bought lunch when he ate out. He carried three pizzas up the groaning stairs, for later. He always bought them at the same Pizza Hut, down the block from the McDonald’s. He was known as a local character at fast-food joints more than fifty miles from where he actually lived and worked.

  The double-wide had only two rooms, one of which was a large meat locker. The other room had a kitchen with a large professional range and oversized reinforced bed, chairs, shower, and toilet, with a long stainless steel worktable. A rolltop desk painted black sat at one end of the room, under a framed Star Trek poster and diagrams of male and female anatomy. All the other walls were solid with cheap metal bookcases crammed with science fiction paperbacks. All the books’ spines were lined up exactly. All the metal surfaces glistened and the bed was made up with hospital precision. The tile floor was spotless and gleamed with wax.

  He set the pizzas on the stove and emptied a tray of ice cubes into a large ceramic mug. He filled it partway with Coke from a plastic gallon container. Then he snapped the top off a half-gallon bottle of Old Crow bourbon and topped off the mug. He turned on a small TV mounted over the range and stirred the drink methodically.

  Five minutes till six. He wouldn’t be on the news yet, but he always checked. He sipped at the bourbon and Coke and ate half of one of the pizzas while he watched the inconsequential goings-on that consumed normal people’s time—weather and war and human interest. He did have a special interest in humans.