Mortal Lock (21 page)

“The cops see a guy driving around this hour of the night, wearing a ski mask in the middle of June, they make up some excuse—busted taillight, smeared license plate, doesn’t matter—and they pull us over.”

“They got to have probable cause—”

“Where’d you hear that, from one of the big-time gangsters last time you were in the county tank? The cops tell the judge how they found us both wearing latex gloves, with a couple of unregistered pieces under the seat, and the judge, he’s going to, what? Toss out the case?”

“That’s why the boss has lawyers, man. He said no matter what happened, he could always—”

“You know what we’re supposed to do tonight, right?”

“Yeah. We’re going take out that—”

“That’s the
job
, understand? That’s what we have to get done. That’s what a job is, something you have to get done. You think we could go ahead and get it done
after
we got stopped by the law? Gun-felony bust, this town, even if some bought-and-paid-for judge eventually kicked us loose, they’d hold us for twenty-four hours, minimum, just waiting on arraignment. You think the boss is gonna like paying out a bunch of bribes instead of paying
us
?”

“I—”

“You
never
get impatient. That’s a rule you can’t break. We put the masks on
just
before we go in, understand? That way, anybody spots us back of the joint, they make us for a couple of drunks, or maybe we’re trying to wait on one of the girls when they come out.”

“I don’t see why we got to do it right where he—”

“You want to learn, the first thing you learn is, pay attention. This is a
job
, all right? It’s
work
. And part of every job is doing it the way the client wants it done.
Where
he wants it done,
when
he wants it done, and
how
he wants it done, understand?”

“The boss—”

“The boss
is
the client.”

“Yeah, yeah. I got it. But why does he want it done like this?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“Hey, I’m just trying to learn, okay? You’re supposed to be the big pro, right? The boss said I got to do this one with you, so I’m doing it, ain’t I? I mean, I could do it myself, but—”

“Only you never have.”

“Everybody’s a virgin once. Even you. When was your first one, about a hundred years ago?”

“More questions?”

“I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“Yeah.”

“Look, after tonight, you ain’t going to have to put up with me, okay? The boss said, I do this one with you, I pass the test, I’m blooded in. After that, I can work on my own. Just like you.”

“That’s between you and the boss.”

The gray car rolled past a free-standing one-story building set in the middle of an unlit parking lot. The building had no windows; its slab-sided monotony was broken only by the glowing red outline of an impossibly proportioned woman and various other promises, wrapped around three sides of the building in streams of neon:

XXX TOTALLY NUDE XXX GIRL-GIRL SHOWS XXX PRIVATE ROOMS XXX

The gray man checked his watch, said, “Four-fifteen is the time we move. We’ve got a seven, eight minute margin. We’ll pull into the back, sit there for a minute, make sure it’s clear.”

“What’s the big deal, a few minutes either way?”

The gray man made a sound of disgust, but didn’t speak. He slowly wheeled the gray sedan around the back of the strip joint, positioning it carefully at an angle so he could watch both the back door of the building and the streets that ran along either side of the parking lot.

“Yeah, well, I guess you ain’t perfect, pal,” the younger man said. “I heard you did a real long stretch a while back.”

“Is that right? What else did you ‘hear’ about that?”

“I heard you did almost twenty years. For a contract hit.”

“It was seventeen and change. And it was for a homicide—nobody ever proved it was paid for. In fact, I’m still on parole; I pulled a Life for that one. But it looks like you didn’t ‘hear’ anything you could use.”

“What’re you talking about, man? I’m not planning on doing no seventeen years.”

“Nobody
plans
on doing time. It’s
how
you do it, that’s the test.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I went down by myself. Just me, nobody else. You following me?”

“Sure. You didn’t rat nobody out.”

“Which is why I’m still working for the same people, see? Like I said, that was a test. And I passed it.”

“You did all that time, and you’re still doing … this?”

“If I was a plumber, and I did seventeen years inside, what would I do when I got out, be an architect?”

“The boss should’ve taken care of you. I mean, seventeen
years
 …”

“
I
was the one who got caught, not the boss. So I was the one who had to do the time. That’s the way it works.”

“But he
did
take care of you while you were—?”

“Everyone makes their own arrangement. I made mine, and I stuck to it.”

“Big deal. I—”

“Put that away! No smoking on the job.”

“Why not? We ain’t playing with gasoline, here.”

“We’re not
playing
at all. They can get DNA from saliva.”

“Fine! Jesus, look, how come it’s gotta be exactly four-fifteen.”

“Because that’s when he’ll be in the back office.”

“The bouncers—”

“They’ll all be out front. He likes to bring a couple of the girls back there with him when the last shift’s almost over, and he doesn’t like to be interrupted.”

“The back door might be—”

“It’ll be open.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Sometimes a man’s on more than one payroll.”

“You mean one of the bouncers—?”

“It’s time,” the gray man said.

He opened the door. The sedan’s interior light did not come on. The gray man stepped out into the night, slipped the ski mask over his head, and motioned for the younger man to do the same.

The gray man reached under the front seat and extracted a blued steel semi-auto. By the time the younger man joined him, holding a similar weapon, the gray man was screwing a long tube onto the front of his pistol. Again, the younger man copied each move.

They walked casually to the back door of the club. No lights
shone on the back side of the building. The gray man held his weapon straight down, dangling by his side, and used his free hand to turn the doorknob. Slowly. It yielded.

He stepped inside, the younger man close behind.

To their left, a sign said
DRESSING ROOMS
. The gray man turned right, walked a short length of hall, then turned right again, heading for the farthest corner of the building. He motioned for the younger man to stay back a few steps. The only sound was the music coming from the front of the strip club.

The gray man stepped through the door of the dimly lit office. A pudgy man with a red face was sprawled in an office chair. He was fully dressed, but the pants of his suit were puddled around his ankles. A skinny brunette with improbable breasts knelt in front of him; a heftier blonde with a more believable chest stood slightly to one side, as if waiting her turn.

“Anybody screams, everybody dies,” the gray man said.

All three pairs of eyes magneted to the silenced pistol he was holding.

“You,” he said, pointing to the kneeling brunette with the pistol, “get up. Go over and stand with the other one.”

The brunette got up without a word. The gray man nodded. The younger man walked over to the two women, stuck his pistol awkwardly in his waistband, and handcuffed the women together, using two cuffs on each wrist and crossing the chains.

“Turn around and face the wall,” the gray man told them.

They did it, moving in sync as if accustomed to being yoked together.

“Where’s the rest of it?” the gray man asked the man in the office chair, indicating a half dozen lines of cocaine on a hand mirror resting on top of the desk.

“In the safe,” the man in the office chair said, his voice tired and resigned, just on the edge of boredom.

“Get it.”

“Sure,” the red-faced man said, scrambling to pull up his pants as he rose. “Whatever you—”

“Open the safe,” the gray man said.

As soon as the red-faced man started to turn the safe’s dial, the gray man stepped close to him and fired a single shot into the back of his head. The red-faced man dropped. The gray man knelt next to him and put a bullet into each eye. Then another into his right ear. Each shot made a
splaat!
sound, inaudible outside the office.

The gray man stood up, unscrewed the silencer, and pocketed each half of the disassembled weapon in a separate pocket of his coat. Empty-handed, he motioned for the younger man to move away from the women.

“Hey, wait a minute,” the younger man said. “You know what the boss said.”

“Shut up.”

“The boss said ‘no witnesses,’ man!” the younger man whispered harshly, nodding his head urgently in the direction of the handcuffed women, who were still facing the wall. “We got plenty of time. No reason I can’t have a little taste of that stuff, first.”

“No.”

“No? The test is whether I can follow orders, right? Well, the order was ‘no witnesses.’ You were right there when the boss said it. He didn’t say nothing about not—”

“When the boss said ‘no witnesses,’ he wasn’t talking to you; he was talking to me.”

“So? What difference does that—?”

“All right,” the gray man said. “But hurry it up. And give me that piece—you’re gonna need both hands free.”

The younger man handed his pistol to the gray man, and turned toward the women. The gray man briefly examined the weapon in his hand, shook his head, flicked off the safety, said “Hey!” very softly. The younger man turned. The gray man shot him between the eyebrows. The gray man knelt next to the body and added
three more bullets, exactly as he had done to the man in the office chair.

The gray man took the pistol he had used to kill the club owner from his pocket and reattached the silencer. He put the weapon on the desk, his movements sure and unhurried. Then he stripped off the surgeon’s gloves he had been wearing, being careful to turn them inside out, revealing still another pair of gloves underneath. He removed the single-layer gloves from the body of the younger man, pocketed them, then regloved the body with the outer gloves he had removed from his own hands.

Satisfied, he wrapped the younger man’s hand around the pistol used to kill the club owner. He broke down the younger man’s weapon and stowed the separate pieces.

The gray man got to his feet. “You know the story you have to tell,” he said to the handcuffed women. “And what happens if you don’t.”

They didn’t answer him. He hadn’t expected them to.

The gray man walked out of the office, down the hall, and out into the night, pulling the ski mask off his head as he moved. The gray sedan was gone. A black sedan was parked in its place, engine idling quietly.

The gray man got into the backseat. The black sedan pulled away.

for Mike MacNamara

1

“This one is mine,” the girl said, as her fingers danced over an ergonomic keyboard with an attached wrist cushion. Her posture was boarding-school perfect: back straight, wrists resting on the keyboard’s cushion, forearms parallel to the floor.

The girl was almost thirteen. To her wealthy father, an ongoing source of bafflement. To the three men in the room with her, a job.

The man standing close to the girl’s right side was utterly unremarkable, a human generic. “He looks like every guy you ever saw walking down the street,” a cop named McNamara had once described him. “Probably could get a job being the extra at lineups.” The man was wearing a dark business suit over a white Kevlar shirt and a plain black tie.

Several feet to that man’s left was a creature so mammoth as to cause gasps at first sight, his huge, formless body encased in a putty-gray jumpsuit. He stood motionless, right hand gripping his left wrist. The tip to the forefinger of that hand was missing—the remaining digit as smoothly polished as an aluminum cigar tube. And roughly the same size.

Directly behind the girl, peering over her shoulder excitedly, was a man who would have been described as “huge” if not for the contrast of the monster in the same room. This glowing specimen was dressed in a chartreuse tank top over a pair of sunburst-yellow parachute pants, his impossibly overdeveloped arms and chest bulging even at rest. Every visible inch of his body was ripped with corded muscle, as chiseled as a quarry-stone statue. His head was shaved, and polished to cue-ball smoothness. But the overdone
body and outrageous costume were seemingly mocked by a mud-thick application of makeup. His eyes were surrounded with enough mascara to print a page. A heavy blush of rouge adorned his cheeks. And his Eau de Walmart cologne was slathered on heavily enough to displace smog.

The computer’s screen popped into life.

“That’s a profile,” the girl explained. “So anyone who wants to check you out can see what’s up with you, understand?”

“You make it up yourself?” the unremarkable man asked quietly.

“Sure. I never put photos on my page, though. That would make it … well, make it too real.”

“But you
could
put anything.…”

“Of
course
. I mean, that’s part of the fun too, see? It’s all just … fun. Don’t you get tired of just using e-mail?”

“I don’t use it.”

“You
what
? I mean, how do you, like, send messages and stuff?”