They exited the resort and turned left onto A1A. Looking down the highway a bit, Monica said, “Let’s avoid the van. It shouldn’t be there.”
Callie agreed.
They were about to head the opposite way when Callie said, “Oh my God! That’s my in-laws!” She sighed. “Oh well, so much for my run!”
Monica slowed. “Let’s try again tomorrow.”
“Come with me!” Callie suddenly blurted out, her eyes twinkling. “I want to introduce you. It’ll just take a sec, and you’ll be speeding down the road again in no time!”
As we planned, Callie ran ahead without giving Monica time to reply. Monica barely knew this girl and certainly wouldn’t want to stop her run to meet the in-laws. But she also wouldn’t want to appear rude, so we counted on her to follow Callie to the van.
And she did.
As the girls approached, I slid the side door of the van open and stepped out, smiling broadly. I’d dressed in what I considered to be coastal casual, a white, spread-collar dress shirt and tan linen slacks with matching Italian loafers. When I picked Callie up that morning, she had pointed at me and laughed a full minute. Even now, I saw her smirking at my choice of attire.
While waiting to be introduced, Monica ran her fingers through her fashionably short black hair. Though I knew her to be fortyone, she looked years younger. She was in excellent shape, with deep, expressive eyes and a willowy frame that boasted a set of Park Avenue’s fi nest implants. I wouldn’t classify her as stunning, but she was certainly pretty, possibly even striking for her age. She would probably hate to hear a man add the words “for her age” when describing her looks, but things were what they were.
Callie made the introductions, saying, “Donovan’s handsome, isn’t he! Check out that engaging smile and those penetrating, jade green eyes.”
“Oh please,” I said, rolling my penetrating, jade green eyes.
Monica smiled politely. As far as I was concerned, Callie could step back and let me take it from there, but she was on a roll. “And that outfit,” Callie said, winking at me, “very stylish.” Then she said, “Monica, what would you call that look?”
Monica smiled. “Umm … continental?”
“Coastal casual,” I said.
Monica was itching to get back to her run, but she returned my smile. “Hello, Donovan,” she said, extending her hand.
I took her hand in mine and made a slow, exaggerated bow as if intending to kiss it. Callie started to giggle, and Monica glanced at her and blushed. Monica seemed to want to say something, but I increased the pressure on her hand and suddenly everything in her world turned crazy. Monica gasped and tried to pull away, but I shifted my weight and clamped my other hand on her upper arm. Before her mind could process what was happening, I hurled her into the van with such force her body crashed into the far wall and rebounded to the floor.
Wide-eyed, terror-struck, Monica scrambled for the door. But I was already in the van, blocking her escape. Stunned mute by the sudden explosion of violence, Monica tried to scream. My hand was already at her throat, and the pressure was so intense she couldn’t achieve more than a squeak.
Monica’s eyes frantically searched for Callie. What was going on here, she must have wondered. Why wasn’t Callie helping her?
I pushed Monica’s head against the exposed metal floorboard with my left hand and slid the van door shut with my right. She tried to wriggle out of my grasp, so I applied more pressure to hold her in place. I heard something crunch and guessed it was the cartilage in her ear. Cartilage or not, it seemed to take the fight out of her. Monica’s chest heaved, and her breath came in quick bursts, like a child gasping after a hard cry. She let out a low moan like a terrified animal caught in a trap: too frightened to scream, too disoriented to react.
She must have heard the engine turn over, must have felt the van jerk into gear. Somewhere in the part of her brain that was still functioning, a puzzle piece fell into place. I know because I saw it register on Monica’s face: Callie was driving the van, and there would be no escape.
Something worked its way up her throat and triggered her gag reflex. A mixture of drool, nose fluid, and blood collected at her chin and hung like a thick strand of rope. Victor would be proud to see how far Monica had fallen in such a short period of time. As if on cue, her tears began fl owing freely. She whimpered in a little girl’s voice, “Please, please stop! You’re hurting me! You’re hurting me! Please! Let me go!”
Callie scanned the highway and checked the rearview mirror before slowing the van. She made a sharp left onto the meager trail we’d cased earlier. As she worked the van into the thicket, scrubby pine boughs and overgrown bushes and vines parted before us and instantly closed behind us, effectively swallowing us up. Callie pushed us in about a hundred yards, then, with great effort, turned the van around, pointed it back toward the highway, and put it in park.
“We’re good,” Callie said. She kept the engine running so the heater could work. Then she turned halfway around in the seat to watch.
“Monica,” I said, “I’m going to let you sit up now if you promise not to scream.”
She nodded as best she could, and I helped her get to a sitting position. She glared at Callie. Callie shrugged and mouthed, “Sorry,” then handed me some tissue to pass to her former friend. We watched Monica dab at her face until she’d got it as presentable as it was going to get under the circumstances. She tentatively touched some tissue to her ear. She winced and lowered her hand to inspect the blood. There wasn’t much on the tissue, but it was enough to cause some more tears to well up in her eyes. When she blinked, most of them got caught up in her eyelashes and only a few wound up tracing down her cheek. I’d been watching her all this time, waiting for her to catch her breath, maybe relax a bit. It seemed to be working. I think she was finding some hope to cling to. After all, why would we bother with tissue if we intended to kill her, right?
I called Victor. “She’s ready to talk,” I said. I handed the phone to Monica, and Callie and I climbed out of the van and closed the doors behind us.
“Did you see the look on her face when you handed her the phone?” Callie said.
I nodded. It was a look I couldn’t easily describe: a mixture of shock, confusion, hope, fear. This whole experience had been a first for me.
“You think she’ll try to lock us out?” Callie said.
“I doubt it. She knows she can’t get to the front seat faster than we can open the door.”
Callie nodded. We watched the poor soul holding the phone to her good ear, straining to understand the clipped, metallic voice at the other end of the line. I knew the feeling.
“How are you coming with the body double?”
“The one for you?” I asked. “I’m still working on it.”
Callie laughed. “I’ll bet you are.”
“Not easy finding a nice, sweet librarian looks like you.”
“Librarian, huh?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Your last ‘librarian’ was Fifi the French whore. Had a tattoo on her pussy that said, ‘Read My Lips!’”
I smiled at the thought. “Fifi ’s right, but I don’t remember her calling herself ‘the French whore.’”
Callie frowned. “It’s a librarian expression. But she wasn’t the first hooker librarian with a crotch tat. Do you even remember the name of that other one?”
I did. Constance would have been a perfect body double for Callie … except for the crotch tat that said, “Is it hot in here or is it just me?”
“I think I deserve more credit,” I said. “It’s not easy finding a body double for you. Not to mention the detailed inspections I have to make, you being so fussy about tattoos and such.”
“Yeah, well I agree that when it comes to hookers, you put everything you have into your work.”
Inside the van, tucked against the far corner, Monica had pulled her knees up to her chest. Tears streaked her cheeks, and her mouth formed words I couldn
’t hear. She seemed to listen for a while and then she started crying softly.
“What do you think he’s saying to her?” Callie said.
I had no idea and hated myself for caring.
“This next body double,” Callie said. “Does she have a tattoo?”
“Jenine? I don’t know yet.”
“But you’re itching to find out.”
“My devotion to detail is legendary,” I said. “Timeless.”
“So is the clap,” Callie said.
Monica looked up at me through the window and nodded, and I opened the door. I heard her thank Victor and wondered what that meant. She handed the phone back to me. I put it to my ear.
“Creed,” I said.
“You know … what … to do,” Victor said.
CHAPTER 7
I did know what to do, but I was curious about a couple of things. I asked Monica if she knew Victor.
“I know of him,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“Through my husband.”
I nodded. So Victor was killing her to punish the husband. At least that made some sense. I didn’t want to ask too many questions, though. Questions lead to answers, and answers lead to doubt, and doubt will ruin a good contract killer. I looked at Callie. She was about to explode, she wanted to know so badly.
“Tell me about Victor,” I said.
“I can’t. If I tell you, you’ll kill me.”
Callie and I exchanged a look. Callie couldn’t hold it back any longer; she had to speak. “This Victor guy, you’re saying he told you we’d let you go if you kept quiet about your conversation with him?”
Monica looked confused. “Is this a trick question?”
Callie looked at me in disbelief. “What a twisted fuck.”
“Hey, watch it,” I said. “You’re talking about our employer.”
We all sat there looking at each other for a minute. I could have forced it out of her, but I didn’t want to torture her. I could have threatened her into telling me, but that would require giving her false hope, and that didn’t feel right to me somehow. I decided to let the motive slide.
“Okay, Monica,” I said. “You didn’t tell us anything about your conversation with Victor or about your connection to him, so you did well. I won’t ask you again. But tell me this: why is his voice so weird?”
“He’s a quadriplegic.”
I nodded. “Still,” I said, “it’s eerier than that. There’s more to it.”
Monica was loosening up now, convinced she was about to be released. She had stopped crying, and her voice was steadier. She seemed encouraged. “It’s probably because he’s so young,” she said, “and a midget.”
Callie and I looked at each other. I said, “Midget?”
Monica gasped. “Little person,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”
Callie asked, “Young? How young?”
Monica looked at me before speaking. “I don’t know,” she said. “Early twenties?”
“Your husband must have done something terrible to make Victor this angry,” I said.
She nodded. “He saved Victor’s life,” she said.
CHAPTER 8
I gently lowered Monica’s head back to the floor and held it there. I stroked her hair a couple of times to help calm her. And she was calm … until she caught sight of the syringe in my free hand. At that point, her eyes grew wide with terror. She started thrashing around in the van. Then she lost control of her bladder. Too frightened to care, she peed explosively. I heard it strain against her clothing, burbling hot against her crotch, down her thigh. Because of our close proximity, she managed to drench my pants leg in the process. I looked over at Callie, exasperated.
“Believe me, Donovan,” she said, “that can only improve your ‘coastal casual’ look.”
I frowned and loosened my grip ever so slightly—but just enough—and this time Monica’s scream was loud and piercing. Of course, it had no effect out there in the middle of nowhere. I got her back under control, parted her hair, and pricked the side of her scalp with the tip of the syringe. A few minutes later, I slid open the side door and pushed Monica out. Her body tumbled into a thicket and skidded to a stop. She staggered to her feet and managed to walk a few shaky steps before falling down to stay.
Callie put the van in gear and steered it carefully through the underbrush and back onto the highway. She kept to the speed limit, drove south, and put the crime scene behind us.
“A real fighter, that one,” I said, making my way to the front passenger seat. “She impressed me just now, the way she got to her feet.”
Callie nodded.
The van’s tires thrummed rhythmically over the patchy road tar. We passed a golf course on the right and an ambitious condo development on the left, which appeared to be unfinished and abandoned. The few residential community entrances we passed were camouflaged by foliage so dense and overgrown, even in February, I had to wonder what sort of people would pay these astronomical prices to live a half mile from the beach, among the spiders and mosquitoes, without benefit of an ocean view.
“She had gorgeous hair,” I said.
“Very stylish,” Callie agreed. “And classy.” She paused a minute before asking, “How long you think before someone finds her?”
“This close to the plantation? Probably two days.”
“You think they’ll notice the needle mark on the scalp?”
“What are we, CSI? I doubt the ME will notice it.”
“Because?”
“I put it in one of her head wounds.”
Callie thought about that and said, “She must have hit the wall head first when you threw her in the van.”
“That’d be my guess,” I said.
We rode in silence awhile, content to watch the scenery unfold. We were on A1A, south of Amelia Island, where the two-lane road cuts a straight swath through the undeveloped scrub and marsh for fifteen miles. There was a primal element to this stretch of land that seemed to discourage the rampant commercialization running almost nonstop from Jacksonville to South Beach. A couple miles in, we passed three crosses and a crude, homemade sign that proclaimed “Jesus Died For Your Sins!”
“Monica seemed nice,” Callie said. “A little snooty, but that could be the money. Or the age difference. Still, I liked her. She had great manners.”
I laughed. “Manners?”
“She had a premonition about the van,” Callie said. “But she didn’t want to offend me, so she came anyway.”
I tried the sound of it in my mouth. “She was killed because of her good manners.”
“I liked her,” Callie repeated.
“I liked her, too,” I said, “until she peed on me!”
I placed two bundles of cash in Callie’s lap. She picked one up, felt the weight in her hand.
“I like this even better,” she said.
We dropped the van off behind an abandoned barn a couple miles beyond the ferry boat landing. We removed the explosives from the wheel well in Callie’s rental car and positioned them throughout the van.
“How much you have to pay for this thing?” Callie asked.
“Four grand,” I said. “Not me, though. Victor.” Right on cue, my phone rang.
“Is it … fin … ished?” Victor asked.
“Just a sec,” I said. I climbed in the passenger seat, and Callie drove us a quarter mile before putting the rental car in park.
“Are we far enough away?” I asked.
“If we go too far,” she said, “we’ll miss the fun part.”
She got out of the car and dialed a number on her phone and the van exploded in the distance. Callie remained out of the car until she felt the wind from the explosion wash lightly over her face.
“You’re insane,” I said to Callie.
“It’s done,” I said to Victor.
Victor said, “Good. I … have … two more … jobs … for you.”
“Already?” I retriev
ed a small notebook and pen from my duffel and wrote down the information. The names, ages, occupations, and addresses were so different, it seemed as though they’d been plucked out of thin air. I asked Victor, “Do you even know these people?”
“All … part … of a … master … plan,” he said. I covered the mouthpiece and said to Callie, “I take back what I said before, about you being insane.” Then I said to Victor, “Are there many more?”
“Many,” Victor said in his weird, metallic voice. “Real … ly … Mr.