It was impossible to be logical with someone who was running on emotion.
I rubbed my eyes.
If it wasn’t for the problem I had in Detroit, I’d still have my homes in Seattle, in Stone Mountain, and on the outskirts of Los Angeles. She’d tracked me down, forced me into a state of homelessness.
She was the type of woman that a man couldn’t make deals with. She didn’t have enough sense to understand when she should be terrified. She didn’t know she should be pissing where she stood, that piss running down her legs into her high heels. She was a churchgoing Bible thumper who had killed her own husband, the father of her children, had done that using her husband’s money and my hands.
She was a bloodthirsty psychopath who believed she was righteous.
Nobody stopped her from getting what she wanted.
And she was dying for my death. Dying for revenge.
Ten
under the skin
I slipped out
of the car long enough to spy inside the trunk. Needed to see what they had in the vault of the sedan. There was a suitcase and another purse; the woman had left her designer bag. More guns. Ammo. Duct tape. Knives. And gasoline. Somebody had planned a torture party that would end in the guest of honor becoming a human barbecue. They had everything but the barbecue sauce.
There was a black briefcase. Inside was around sixty thousand dollars.
I took out the briefcase and closed the trunk, wiping away my fingerprints.
Back inside the car, I went through the papers I had taken off them. I.D.s. Lysaght was from Cincinnati, Goetzman from Dayton. The pretty woman had been from the same part of the country. Pictures of a wife and children were in both wallets. Could’ve been real or fake. Never knew in this biz. But I was betting these were real. Death was like a spider’s web, moving in many ways, touching many.
Their money was in a combination of C-notes and Jacksons. Worn bills. Out of sequence.
It smelled like the same money I had returned to my enemy was being used against me.
I should’ve finished her. Should’ve killed her on my last visit to Detroit.
Hindsight, twenty-twenty.
If she’d had her way I’d have been in a wrecked car, my body riddled with bullet holes, cooling to the touch.
Soon after that a dark gray Excursion pulled into the lot. My cellular chimed.
Hawks was there. I had Hawks pull over to the side of the car closest to the store, had Hawks back in so when I jumped out of one vehicle and climbed into another, that and the rain would cover me.
I began wiping down everything I had touched inside the car.
Then I got out of the car, the smoking gun in one hand, briefcase in the other.
Hawks got out dressed in a short black leather jacket, dungarees with a big belt buckle that had an oversized red heart with a knife going through its center, Lucchese crocodile cowboy boots, and a simple black T; burgundy hair with highlights, pulled back into a ponytail that hung down the curve of her butt. Before I had worked with her, some years before, she told me her hair used to touch the floor.
She had grown up in awe of Crystal Gayle’s long mane. But Hawks had grown into her own style.
Hawks was a woman who wore Levi’s as if she were made to fill them out, a woman who wore cowboy boots like they were stilettos, another stunning woman with good bone structure and lovely skin, another woman who didn’t need to gild the lily by wearing makeup.
The assassin known as Hawks. I’d forgotten how beautiful she was.
Chic, hip, and cool, with a romantic mane of hair that swept down below her waistline.
Rain fell on her hair and round cheeks, but she moved like the chilly water didn’t faze her.
She faced me. The rain on her cheeks looked like tears.
Hawks’s eyes were green, haunting, the kind that testified to a life of pain. Intriguing eyes, like that Afghan girl on the cover of
National Geographic
. And her scent was subtle and exotic, like eucalyptus and rosemary mixed with sandalwood and lavender.
She looked me up and down, shaking her head, frowning.
I said, “Hawks.”
“You look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know if I should slap you or kiss you.”
“A kiss would be nice.”
Hawks slapped me. Then she went back to the driver’s side of the Excursion and got back inside.
Hawks’s Sheryl Crow CD played as we rode toward the area known as Music City, USA, because of that industry. And known as the Athens of the South because of all the colleges.
A few good-old-boy trucks passed going in the other direction, F-250s and F-350s and pickups with wheels so large passengers would need an escalator to get to the doors, a parachute to get out.
Hawks shook her head and mumbled, “You have a lot of nerve calling me.”
“I know.”
“Just because I came to help you, don’t think I’m happy to see you.”
“I can tell.”
“You look stupid. Wrapped up in industrial plastic like a mummy. You look as stupid as I feel.”
Hawks was driving, her eyes on the road ahead and checking her rearview. Seventy miles and no conversation whatsoever. Sheryl Crow serenaded us. I kept my eyes on the passenger-side mirror, always looking back. We sped into Nashville. Jefferson Street. Jackson Street. Went by B. B. King’s Blues Club and Schermerhorn Symphony Center.
“Gideon?”
“Yeah?”
“Stop shifting around.”
“I’m not shifting.”
“You are shifting and that plastic keeps making that irritating
crinkle-crinkle
sound over and over and it’s getting on my nerves right about now. So stop shifting around before I start screaming.”
Hawks drove around the river port and railway city formerly known as Fort Nashborough, her lips tight. Her mind worked the same way my mind worked. She made sure there wasn’t a second team on my heels. James Robertson Parkway. War Memorial Plaza. Tennessee Tower. Freedom Center. Had been a long time since I had been to Nashville. West End. Over by Vanderbilt University students were jogging in the rain, some walking with umbrellas, none intimidated by the sixty-degree weather.
Vanderbilt, in an area built by gunrunners and bootleggers. Corruption at its best.
I shifted a little, tapped my leg, and asked Hawks, “How’s Nashville treating you?”
“Nashville is evolving.”
I moved around, plastic crinkling as I sweated. “What does
evolving
mean?”
She took a breath, struggled. “Hispanic and Laotian gangs have moved into the ’Ville.”
“I take it not all evolution is for the best.”
“One of the hazards and joys of being multicultural; the good comes with the bad.”
I struggled to get comfortable, and the cab was filled with the sound of plastic moving against plastic. Hawks had strips of industrial plastic covering my seat, like I had asked, every drop of the mud and sludge being captured.
I said, “Hadn’t heard from you.”
“I think it’s the other way around.”
I nodded. “Thought about you a lot since then.”
“Thinking ain’t dialing.”
“No, thinking ain’t dialing.”
“You mocking me?”
“Not mocking you.”
“You had my number, obviously.”
“Just saying.”
She took a deep breath, swallowed. “Thought you were dead. For a while I did.”
I said, “Thought you were out of the business.”
“Konstantin calls every now and then. When he has something that fits my build.”
“Something easy.”
“Not always easy. I do what I’m paid to do. No matter how ugly. Or sadistic.”
“That we do.”
She paused. “Does it ever bother you?”
I shifted a bit, uneasy with the conversation. “Try not to think about it.”
“You keep count?”
“Nope.”
“I keep count. But then again, I’m a woman. And we keep count of everything.”
Another pause as I checked the mirror, made sure we were riding unaccompanied.
Hawks asked, “You tell anybody what happened? You tell what I did in Killeen?”
“No. That was your job. I was just your wingman.”
She quieted, sucked her bottom lip, and drove, looked like her mind was in the past.
The job we had done together. That played in my mind too.
Eleven
invisible ghosts
Back then,
two years ago, the day I met the hired gun known as Hawks.
We had connected in Texas, a state so wide it would take a man three days to drive across that part of North America, the better part of two weeks to walk across barren plains covered with dust devils. You could sit the U.K., Holland, Paris, and a few other countries in the middle of Texas and the supersized state would swallow up those nations and still have room to have Austria for dessert. Those were my thoughts as we left Dallas, where Hawks had picked me up at DFW, that marker being the start of a three-hour drive east so we could go handle a contract Hawks had picked up. She had called Konstantin and asked if he could arrange for her to have some backup. He recommended me. I needed the money.
I said, “Too bad we couldn’t get our hands on a Cessna.”
“You fly?”
“Small planes. Time to time.”
She said, “Your diction . . . you don’t sound like you’re from the South.”
“I’ve lived all over the world.”
“At first I was going to say you were from Europe.”
“Not from Europe.”
“I can tell. Your teeth are too pretty.”
“Tell me about the job.”
The job was in the city called Killeen. The target was an enlisted man who lived at Stone Hill Apartments. When the target opened the door, I was about to rush in and take him down, my mind in pit bull mode, but what Hawks saw made her have a change of heart. She had grabbed that soldier, her teeth tight, her gun at her side, and forced him to come with us. She did the same with the rest of the people in that apartment, made them come along, no questions asked, everyone trembling.
I sat in a cheap hotel room with a nervous soldier, a jittery and sweaty enlisted man from South Carolina, a man who had been to both Iraq and Afghanistan, a man who had spent almost three years away from his family. He had left his home with what he had on, left his car, and got inside the SUV Hawks was driving, and we sat in a La Quinta.
We
being me, that man, and his family.
Gun in the small of my back, I kept an eye on that twenty-year-old man and his twenty-two-year-old wife. Their kids were there too: one in diapers, one barely walking, one who acted like he had ADHD.
The man’s wife looked like motherhood and debt had aged her ten years. Looked like the soldier had made a baby before he left to go overseas and had made one every time he came back home.
Toys in hand, posted in front of the television, the kids had no idea what was going on. I did what Hawks paid me to do and did it without asking questions. I wasn’t comfortable with what was going on, was taking a big chance on her anger backfiring in more ways than one.
Hawks had left the family with bags of junk food from Wendy’s, food she had paid for, then had gone to visit the man who had hired her, wanted to have a conversation with him. What she was going to do wasn’t wise, but she knew that. She didn’t say what she was planning, but it was in her eyes. I saw that anger and asked her if she wanted it the other way around, for me to go while she babysat, and she said no. She had no problem looking a man in his face and telling him how she felt.
The soldier had marks in his skin, shrapnel from almost being blown up defending the country. Two of his buddies hadn’t been so lucky. Not all Iraqis were thrilled by the American occupation.
He rambled, “I know I messed up. I know I did, just . . . please . . .”
I gave him a look that made him shift and rock.
He stared at his feet, left foot bouncing, rubbing his hands hard enough to start a fire.
He said, “She looks like one of the singers. The woman you’re with. Looks like one of the country singers. The Judds. Wait, not one of the singers. The one that’s the actress, she looks like her. Forgot if that one was named Naomi or Wynonna. Same cheeks and shape of head and—”
“Shut up.”
He stammered, “Yes, sir.”
“Go play with your kids. Make them shut up too. Especially that little one.”
“Yes, sir.”
When Hawks came back she gave that soldier an envelope. Inside that envelope was some money. She put it in the soldier’s hands, told him to get his shit together because next time he might not be so lucky, then we left, told the soldier he would have to get his own way back to the apartment he was living in with his family. The soldier asked her what he was supposed to do with that money. She snapped, told him to get out of debt and take care of his family. Told him if she heard about him gambling or taking out loans from another loan shark she would come back, and next time she would not be so nice. Hawks was angry as hell. Told him if he was wise he’d look into getting a vasectomy because if he went back to Iraq he might not be so lucky and leaving his wife with a house full of kids wouldn’t do anybody any goddamn good, because he knew that when he died they would be on their own, never depend on Uncle Sam. He trembled, asked her what about the loan shark. She told him that he didn’t have to worry about that problem anymore. That loan shark had lived seventeen miles from Fort Hood.
We were riding toward Dallas, Hawks driving with a tense expression, both of us in silence until she popped in a CD, the best of Elvis Presley, his thirty number-one hits, looking at the flatlands as the King began singing about blue moons, suspicious minds, being in the ghetto, and blue suede shoes. We passed R.V. parks, truck stops, Dairy Queens, graveyards, salvage yards, Harleys, and vintage cars.