I opened my eyes to see the outline of his face, one strip--from eye to chin--illuminated by the moonlight streaming through the crack between the curtains.
"Can't sleep, either?" I said.
"Nah. Too...busy."
He went quiet again, just standing there, so still that even that strip of moonlight over his face didn't budge. After a moment, he said, "You wanna go out?"
"You need a cigarette?"
He shook his head. "Just...out. Somewhere."
I rose on my elbows and yawned. "Probably not a bad plan. As for where, at this hour, that could be a problem."
"Got an idea."
He left it at that. When I nodded, he grabbed his bag and headed for the washroom, telling me to call when I was dressed.
We drove in silence, the lights of the city soon fading behind us. I recognized the route as the one we'd taken into Chicago, but knew we couldn't be leaving, not with our bags still at the motel.
Jack turned down a road where, earlier that day, we'd stopped for gas. He drove slowly down the dark back route, as if looking for something, but there was nothing to see. We were in a wooded area, with the occasional sign warning us this was conservation land.
After a couple of miles, he made a three-point turn and headed back, then turned off on some kind of service road, little more than two ruts leading into the forest. The entrance was so faint, I'd missed it the first time, but Jack turned in with the confidence that said he'd already seen it.
The car rocked down the ruts, brush scraping the sides and undercarriage. He drove past the forest edge, then stopped and killed the engine.
Jack got out of the car. I followed. I didn't ask why we were here. I was enjoying the anticipation of not knowing. I was in the mood to turn off my brain, stop trying to figure it out and just let myself be surprised.
Awaiting instructions, I stood alongside the car, listening to crickets and the distant, unmistakable yowl of coyotes. The hairs on my neck rose at the sound, eerie and mournful. I closed my eyes and drank it in with the rich smell of wet earth and dying foliage.
An ache grew in the pit of my stomach, casting me back twenty-five years to my first "away" summer camp, lying on my cot, smelling marshmallows on my fingers, thinking of hot chocolate and home. I stood there, taking in the smells and the sounds of the forest--the smells and sounds of my lodge, of home--and with that longing, the weight of the evening lifted, fluttered away on the breeze.
A sharp click of the opening trunk.
I walked back to find Jack uncovering a rifle case.
"Target practice?" I said.
"Yeah."
I looked out, into the forest, black a mere five steps beyond the moonlit clearing. "Kind of dark, don't you think?"
"That's the point." He hefted the case out. "Do much night shooting?"
"Not enough."
A grunt, as if this should answer my question, which I suppose it did.
He handed me the flashlight. "Got your gun?"
I peeled back my jacket to show him.
"Good."
He took out the twenty-six-ounce bottle of whiskey from the motel and passed it to me.
"I'll carry, but I'm not partaking," I said. "Guns and alcohol don't mix."
"That's the point."
He shut the trunk. As that light disappeared, I turned on the flashlight and cast it over the dark woods. He waved me toward them, then set out on a narrow path. A few steps, and we were in the forest. We passed a campfire pit near the edge, ringed with beer cans.
The forest closed around us, the sounds of the crickets vanishing under the crunch of dead leaves underfoot. A few more steps, and Jack continued the discussion as if he'd never left off.
"Drink on a job? Big no-no. But sometimes? Don't have a choice. Can't always have a cola, nurse a beer. Job might mean you gotta drink."
I stepped back to let him lead as the path narrowed, but he waved me on again.
I said, "So you need to know how it will affect your reflexes and your judgment. How to counter the liability. Like shooting at night."
The path forked. Jack's fingers pressed against the back of my jacket, prodding me to the left. Ahead I could see a moonlit clearing.
"Might never need it," he said. "But gotta know how. Perfect chance comes? Nighttime? Or had a beer? A coffee? Know how to compensate? Won't lose the opportunity."
He stopped in the clearing, put the rifle case on a stump and opened it. Inside was a takedown rifle and nightscope. He handed me the scope.
"Holy shit," I said, turning it over in my hands. "I've got scopes at home, but this is high-tech. James Bond territory. Yours?"
"Nah. Gadgets and me? Don't mix. That's Felix's area. And his scope."
He held out the rifle for me to attach the scope, but I was still examining it, a slow smile creeping onto my face.
"Thought you'd like that," he said. "This is done? We'll talk to Felix. Get you some stuff."
I could feel my grin stretching, thoughts of the opera house fading, almost gone now--belonging somewhere back there, in the city. Here was the forest, with its reassuring sense of home, of calm and order. And here was something for me to learn, to focus on, to enjoy. A diversion. Which was, of course, the point.
I finished setting up the rifle and played with it for a while under Jack's tutelage. Once I had the hang of it, he tried a few rounds, then we put it away. Onto the handguns. That was the real practice. I'd used nightscopes--if nothing so fancy--but I had little experience shooting a handgun in the dark. Night-vision goggles would help but, as Jack had said, this was more about preparing for found opportunities, those times when you see the chance to hit a mark, but something is less than perfect, like the lighting or your blood alcohol level.
"Need a target," Jack said. "Something we can see..."
"Hold on."
I ran back to the campfire pit and gathered all the silver-label cans, took them to the clearing and let them clatter into a pile by the stump.
"Now, to do this in proper hillbilly style, we're supposed to drink the beer, then shoot the cans, but we'll have to settle for empties and whiskey."
"Works for me." He squinted into the darkness. "Set 'em up over--"
"Uh-uh. This is supposed to be a challenge, remember?" I drew back my arm, ready to pitch the can. "Whenever you're ready..."
"Fuck no."
I turned a grin on him. "You think this is too challenging? Wait for the whiskey shots."
He laughed, a low rumble that was an actual laugh, maybe the first I'd ever heard from him. Then he took out his gun. "Five bucks."
"Oh, getting serious now, are we?"
His eyes sparkled in the moonlight. "Nah. You want serious? Wait for the whiskey shots."
I laughed and threw the can, closing my eyes as I did, hearing the crack of the gun, then the sharp ping of the can. When I looked, he was walking to the beer can pile, moving with his usual slow, deliberate gait, never in a hurry. He bent...then whirled fast, whipping the can without warning.
"Cheat!" I yelled as I fired.
The bullet zinged through the can. Jack shook his head. "Fuck."
"If you want an advantage over me, you're going to need to do better than that."
I passed him the bottle. He uncapped it and took a slug, then paused, letting the alcohol settle into his stomach before handing it back.
"Ten bucks," he said.
"You got it."
He got the can, too.
Our shooting, predictably, grew less impressive the more whiskey we consumed. Jack gave me pointers on overcoming the imbalances, but it was less a serious practice than "Let's get a feel for this"...with a generous heaping of horseplay.
I pulled into the lead quickly, but lost ground the more I drank, with Jack seeming to hit his "low point" early, then staying there. Earlier Jack had said I didn't seem to be much of a drinker. I suspected the same went for him. It took less than half a bottle to get us both pretty wasted--well beyond the point whe
re we'd ever attempt a hit.
As for Jack, I must admit I was curious to see him drunk. He was one of those guys you can't imagine stumbling and slurring. And he didn't, his feet and tongue steady even as I could see the alcohol taking its toll.
I'll admit, too, that I was curious about how the alcohol might affect his tongue in other ways, but the only thing it did was make his brogue more pronounced. He didn't start waxing eloquent...or even use more pronouns. Nor did he delve into tales of his sordid youth, as much as I would have loved to hear them.
What did happen was not what I expected. As he drank, that edge I'd seen earlier, when he put on the tux, that hard, dangerous "something" that I glimpsed every now and then, slid to the fore. Not an angry drunk. If anything, he was quicker with a laugh or a joke. Just that edge peeking out, that look in his eyes, in that set of his jaw that said he wasn't someone you wanted to cross.
Maybe, seeing that, I should have been worried. At least wary. If anything, it was almost comforting. I saw it, and I recognized it, and it didn't bother me. With a man like Jack, a career killer of his caliber, you know there has to be something hard, something dangerous under that calm, impassive exterior. Seeing it and seeing no anger there, feeling no sense of danger directed at me was oddly reassuring.
The last thing I remembered that night was Jack's voice, his thick brogue making even his clipped sentences almost musical as he told the story of a job gone by. I'd been up a hundred dollars in the betting, but almost falling over drunk, and he'd suggested I sit, close my eyes, rest for a minute. While I did, he told his story and I hung there, fighting sleep, clinging to his words, wanting to hear the end and then...thankfully dreamless sleep.
The next morning I awoke on the forest floor, Jack's coat draped over me. He was propped against a tree--more dozing than sleeping--and roused when he saw me up. We gathered our things, including the beer cans, then headed off in search of breakfast and news.
The morning papers mentioned the killing. Just mentioned it. Few details had been released, and certainly nothing about the killer's "challenge." I suspected the Feds were scrambling to come up with a way to break the news themselves, with their own slant.
As for us, we'd go back to doing what we'd been doing all along, pursuing our leads in hopes that we'd roust the killer from the rear, through his identity and contacts in the underworld. Far from a foolproof plan, but it was a damned sight better than sitting on our hands waiting for more people to die.
* * *
HSK
He watched the typed messages scroll up the screen and, with each, his hands gripped the chair arms tighter. He'd logged in for a quick check before he dropped off his next letter at the courier's. In it, he forewarned the Feds of his next night-time strike--an overnight train to California. He'd even provided the train number. That should be fun, and hopefully more challenging than the opera house. On the way he'd make his daytime hit. He hadn't worked out the location or the specifics yet, but he knew what he wanted: a young working-class male. And it was probably time for another visible minority.
But now he was reading something that had sent all thoughts of his plan from his head. The big news on the boards? Little Joe Nikolaev was dead. He wanted to believe the timing was coincidental, but a smart man assumes connections exist until he can prove otherwise.
Rumor had it that Little Joe opened his mouth once too often. One of tonight's posters claimed to know a middleman who'd been approached by Little Joe about a job just a few days earlier. Sounded like wannabe bullshit...until he read the next lines.
REDRUM: LJ wanted him to whack two broads. First thing I thought was: whores. LJ buys himself some company, blabs too much pillow talk, wants them offed. No big deal. Only one of them was old enough to be my grandma. The other was younger but, still, doesn't sound like whores to me.
He stared at those lines, watched them jiggle up the screen, pushed by the flurry of responses that came after them.
Evelyn.
His fingers dug into the chair arms. Now the pieces clattered into place. Rumors of hitmen on his trail. Jack showing up at the opera house, with a young female partner on his arm--Jack, who never took partners. A young woman and an old lady show up at Little Joe's, asking questions that put a price on their heads.
Evelyn, the goddess of destruction, always looking for disciples to sacrifice on the altar of her ego. Evelyn and her schemes, endless schemes, sucking you in, then tossing you aside when something new and shiny caught her eye.
A snap of her wrist and she'd yanked her favorite hound back to her side, foisted her new acolyte on him, then set the pair on his trail.
He could be wrong. There were plenty of assumptions in that argument. But a careful man took action before action was required. If Jack was on his trail, and if Evelyn knew about the Nikolaev connection, then he had a tap to shut off...before it leaked.
He looked at the letter. Could he still do it? Not that particular train, but he'd find another. He wasn't about to let Evelyn spoil his plans.
* * *
THIRTY-SIX
"Gallagher," Evelyn said before her door even closed behind us. "Maurice Gallagher called the hit on Sasha Fomin, the one Kozlov witnessed."
And with that, she swung us back on the trail without a word about what had happened in Chicago. The opera house murder had yielded no clues, so she'd plowed past it. An inconsequential distraction from the hunt.
"Gallagher in Vegas?" Jack asked.
Evelyn snorted. "Where else? That spider hasn't left the Fortuna in thirty years. As long as he's alive, that's where you'll find him. Hell, even when he isn't alive, that's where you'll find him." She looked at me. "He's built himself a mausoleum inside the casino. You meet some strange ones in this business. More than our share of psychiatric case studies."
"Go figure," Jack murmured. "Guess we're off to Vegas, then."
"Should be a quick trip. You've built up enough credit with Gallagher, all the work you've done for him."
"Been awhile."
Her head shot up. "He hasn't been calling you?"
"He calls. I don't answer."
"What? You get a client like Maurice Gallagher on the line, you thank God for a steady income, Jacko. You don't go telling him you're too busy."
"Don't tell him that."
"Good."
"I tell him I'm not interested."
"You what? For fuck's sake, Jack!" She turned to me. "About those psychiatric case studies? Case in point."
"Is this going to cause a problem, Jack?" I asked. "If he's pissed off at you--"
"Not pissed off. Just not happy. We'll work around it."
Evelyn opened her mouth, but Jack cut her off by grabbing my suitcase.
"Better repack," he said.
"Do I need the push-up bra?"
"It's Vegas."
"Damn."
I'd really hoped to avoid my makeover for a few hours, but Jack insisted that we arrive and leave in character. Made sense, but he didn't need jeans so tight they gave him a wedgie with every step.
Jack wore a golf shirt, chinos and loafers. Quite preppy...until you slicked back the dark hair, undid all three buttons on the shirt and added a half-pound of gold--chain, watch, rings, earring, even a tooth. Toss on mirrored sunglasses, and you took the persona from banker to loan shark. A five-minute trip to the bathroom and you'd be back to banker.
My outfit wasn't nearly so versatile. I got a blowzy blond wig, painted-on jeans and cowboy boots. No five-minute change was making that more respectable...or more comfortable.
When we got to the airport, there was a guy soliciting donations outside the terminal doors, tucked behind a pillar, out of sight of security. When I saw the red pot beside him, stuffed with dollar bills, I thought Huh, a bit early for the Salvation Army Christmas drive, isn't it? Then I saw the sign beside the pot: Your Dollar Accepted Here.
I slowed, and steered Jack closer to read the smaller print.
Protect yourself today, it said
. Pay your dollar, and sign the list.
"Fuck," Jack muttered. "What's he gonna do? FedEx the cash?"
"And the list, don't forget, because I'm sure the killer is checking ID first."
"Con artists. Fucking bottom-feeders."
I looked around. "I should notify security."
"No time. People are stupid enough to pay..."
He didn't finish, just shrugging as if to say that you couldn't rescue people from stupidity, and he wasn't about to waste his time trying. So I waited until he was in line to check in, then zipped off to the bathroom, with a side trip past the security office. Sure, you can't save people from stupidity, but at least you can stop others from getting rich off it.
"You want the window seat?" I asked as we boarded the plane.
An odd look crossed his face. He mumbled a gruff "You take it," grabbed my overnight bag and hoisted it into the compartment. By the time he lowered himself into the seat beside me, I was almost done straightening and rearranging the in-flight magazines. I pulled an overlooked empty peanut bag from under the seat in front of me, then glanced around for a place to put it.
The light came on for us to fasten our seat belts. As I reached for mine, I noticed Jack's hands as he fastened his, fingers trembling slightly. I looked at him, but his gaze was down, intent on securing the belt.
We listened through the obligatory safety spiel, then the plane began takeoff. As I shifted, getting comfortable, I happened to glance Jack's way. He'd gone dead white...almost as white as his knuckles, gripping the chair arms like they might fall off if he let go.
"You're afraid of flying," I murmured, lowering my voice. "Why didn't you say--?"
"No choice. Too far to drive."
"Can I get you any--?"
"Talk to me."
That was one thing I could manage, so I did.
Once in Vegas, we had to make a few stops. First to a safe drop where Jack kept disguises and equipment, including guns. Then to a hardware store, where I could find the material I needed to carry out our plan.
The Fortuna was the kind of casino frequented by three types of gamblers: old pros who hate the glitzy big operations, problem gamblers kicked out of the big operations, and lost tourists. It was off the Strip. Dated from when the mob ruled Vegas, it looked as if it hadn't been renovated since, and wore its age like a badge of pride. If you wanted flashing lights and fruity drinks and gorgeous girls you went elsewhere. The Fortuna was for gambling.