Authors: Thomas Perry
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m pretty ordinary in every way. I hope I’m not too dull. I’m not a married guy whose wife won’t do what he wants, or something. I’m just a single man who isn’t in a relationship right now.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll just have to work harder to make your wish come true—you don’t know what it is.”
He called for the check, signed it, pulled out her chair, took her hand, and walked her out to the lobby and into the elevator. By the time they reached his floor he had decided she might be the right girl.
He was gentle, romantic. He made sure Kelly felt unrushed and unpressured and appreciated. He touched her softly and didn’t speak, so she could imagine whatever she liked. But slowly, gradually, he began to use the techniques he had first learned from Mindy when he was fourteen, and had perfected in the fourteen years since then with many other women. He made the experience about Kelly’s feelings, sensations, and desires. He prevented her from reverting to habitual actions that her mind would associate with work, and unrelentingly aroused and stimulated her until, after about two hours, he knew she was his.
They lay still for a long time, and he watched her fall asleep. When she was sleeping deeply he got up and turned on his laptop computer. He bought two admission tickets for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made reservations for an early dinner at Clio, then climbed back into bed and went to sleep.
When he awoke Kelly was dressing. “Have to go?” he asked.
“I’m afraid so. It’s morning.”
“I guess I’d better get you your money.” He got up and went to the dresser, counted out twenty hundreds, and handed them to her, then lay back on the bed.
She folded the bills in half and put the wad into her purse. She smiled. “I should be paying you.”
He shook his head. “Please don’t.”
“What?”
“Say things like that. I know I’m no different from the last guy or the next. I don’t want you to think I’m an egotistical jerk that you have to flatter.”
“I don’t think that at all. You’re a great lover, and you know it.” She jumped onto the bed beside him and tickled his ribs. “Admit it or I’ll tickle you until you pee. Admit it, Mr. Don Juan. Admit it.”
He flipped her over onto her back and held her wrists. “That was the best money I ever spent. You don’t have to lie to make me happy. I’m happy.”
“Good for you. I’m happy too,” she said. “It reminded me of what I like about men. If they were all like you I’d do this for nothing.” She struggled to free her hands, but gave up and lay still. “Give me one kiss.”
He gave her a long, gentle kiss.
“Now let me go before the staff sees I’ve been here all night and figures I must be an escort.”
He sat back, and she got up and picked up her purse. She took a step, then stopped. “How long are you in Boston?”
“I haven’t decided.” He went to the desk and opened his laptop.
“If you want to see me again, I’ll charge you half price. See? You must be Don Juan.”
He said, “I have tickets for this afternoon at the Gardner. Will you go with me and show me around?”
“I don’t know.”
“That can be the half-price date.”
“Done.”
“And I have reservations for an early dinner at Clio afterward.”
“Clio?”
“Massachusetts Avenue and Commonwealth, across the bridge from MIT. Kitchen opens at five-thirty, right when we’ll be starving from walking around and looking at paintings. Okay?”
“You’re spending an awful lot of money at once,” she said. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“No trouble. I can’t always spend thousands of dollars a day, but I don’t often find much that I want. Can I pick you up at one?”
“Make it twelve-thirty. There’s a lot to see.” She stepped to his laptop and typed Google Maps and her address. “There. That’s where I live. I’ll be waiting.”
She left, and he looked at the map on the screen. It wasn’t a bad place—outside the congested areas in a quiet suburb. He wouldn’t mind living there for a while.
Joey Moreland had learned patience. He had no reason to rush Kelly into anything, or even to bring up the idea of living with her. If she thought of it, then she would never suspect his motives in accepting her invitation. He made sure he called her once a day, either to make a date with her or to tell her that he was too busy with his consulting job to see her. He always made sure that he included something in every conversation that made her think of money. He said today that the next time they met, he would drive her to Providence for the evening because there was a lobster restaurant that was highly recommended. Since that first night, whenever he’d seen her he’d brought a present, small but expensive—a silk scarf, a pin, a pair of gloves, lingerie; always the right brand, the best quality.
He had not needed to say that she must never call him, because discretion was standard procedure in her profession.
His profession took up much of his time. The man he was being paid to kill was Luis Salazar Cruz, a Mexican federal prosecutor who had become famous for his success against the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels. The broker had told Moreland that Salazar was fifty-one years old, six feet two inches tall, with wavy coal black hair and a small, neat mustache. He wore very good suits, most of them charcoal gray. It was a reasonable expectation that he would be protected by his own bodyguards, and by people from the Boston police. Because Salazar was a high-risk visitor, the police would probably station a couple of snipers nearby. Killing him and getting away afterward would take thorough planning and calm, efficient execution.
This job was why Moreland had decided to buy the Long Range Sniper Rifle and become expert with it. He could set himself up in a high place two thousand meters from Salazar and shoot him. A police sniper would be armed with a .308 rifle with an effective range of one thousand meters. It would be a deeply uneven match, one that would give Moreland enough margin for error to make the kill and easily get away.
Joey Moreland was a reliable assassin who could be expected to stay in the trade forever. He had been recruited ten years ago by Dick Holcomb. People outside the trade didn’t know that name, but once it had meant something. Dick Holcomb was a former soldier and a former mercenary who had become one of the people to call for unusual and difficult wet jobs.
Moreland graduated from Jamestown High School at the age of seventeen and realized that there was no practical reason to stay in the southern tier of New York. There seemed to be little left to do there that didn’t involve construction, and nothing was being built. He went to Southern California. At first he tried to live by doing odd jobs, but had no success. He stole a few cars and helped chop them for parts, and then delivered a couple of shipments of drugs and money for a crystal meth lab in Tujunga. When the police found the lab, he became a burglar. He had been introduced to a pair of fences, the Hurtz brothers. They would meet him at a bar in Van Nuys called the Eagle, and tell him the sort of thing they were buying at the moment. He would go to a neighborhood where those items were likely to be, and steal some. One night the inevitable happened. A home owner woke up and met Joey Moreland in a dark hallway. Joey killed him with the crowbar he’d brought.
The police never figured out who had killed the man, but the Hurtz brothers were never in doubt. The brothers—Ron and Dale—made most of their money on the simple premise of buying things cheap from people who had not paid for them and then reselling them for more. But on this occasion Dick Holcomb paid the brothers for an introduction to Joey Moreland. When Joey sat at a table across from Holcomb, the first thing he noticed was that Holcomb’s eyes were an odd color. They were almost yellow, like a cat’s.
“What do you want me for?” Moreland asked him.
“I don’t know if I do,” Holcomb said. “I have a job to fill. It pays more than boosting things from houses—any houses—but it’s not for everybody.”
“I guess you want somebody killed.”
Holcomb’s yellow eyes showed nothing. “I’m offering a tryout. I’ll give you some training. It’ll take about three months. I’ll pay you a thousand a week while that’s going on. Any day you wake up and want to quit, you quit. No questions asked. If you last three months I’ll decide whether I want to give you the next course or just shake your hand and give you your last thousand.”
“Why no questions?”
“I said the job’s not for everybody. It’s nothing against you if it’s not for you. I won’t have a problem with you as long as you keep your mouth shut.”
“I’ll try it,” Moreland said.
“Fine. Meet me at the big mall down the street at eight in the morning. Be near the Sears store.”
Joey Moreland showed up at the mall at eight. The mall’s stores didn’t open until ten, so the other people arriving in the lot were a few floor polishers and some trainees in the fast-food places in the food court. There was a big turnover in those jobs, so none of the others, who were about his age, was curious about a newcomer.
At two minutes after eight, a black car with tinted windows drove up about a hundred feet from the others and stopped. After a moment, Joey Moreland walked over and prepared to look in through the windshield, but the passenger window rolled down before he got there. He could see Holcomb in the driver’s seat. “Get in.”
He got into the passenger seat and Holcomb drove off. “It’ll take an hour to get there,” Holcomb said. “When we get there we’ll spend the day. Who’s waiting for you at home?”
“Nobody.”
“No parents?”
“They live in another state.”
“Which one?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“No girlfriends?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Keep it that way for now,” Holcomb said. “I figured since you do night work you probably aren’t tied down. But we may want to do a little traveling, and it’s better if you don’t have to explain anything to anybody.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t seem inclined to argue.”
“Not about that. Anybody can see the sense of it.”
“Good start,” said Holcomb.
They drove out to what Holcomb called The Ranch, which was a vast expanse of land northeast of Santa Clarita that was all steep canyons and spiky peaks, with rocky shelves the size of houses jutting from the ground at a forty-degree angle. There was a tangle of dirt roads, or maybe one road that wound around to various places on the property.
The only excuse that Moreland could see for calling the place a ranch was that there was nothing on it but two buildings. One of them was a cinder block rectangle with a large sloping canvas tarp stretching a couple of feet above it on poles. That kept it in shade and provided a shaded area beside it where Holcomb had placed a picnic table. The second building was long and narrow like the first, it had a steel door at each end and no windows. It was buried in dirt and gravel nearly to its roof.
They began with firearms instruction. Holcomb went to the long, narrow building and selected a pair of .22 rifles, two .22 semiautomatic pistols, earphones, and some paper targets. He put two paper targets up on posts a hundred feet away, handed Moreland a rifle, and said, “We begin at the beginning.”
Holcomb could rapidly place ten rounds in a one-inch bull’s-eye from a standing position. Joey Moreland was less consistent, but not a bad marksman. Holcomb said, “This is the cheapest and simplest way to learn the basics. Do everything right today, and you’ll still do it right in a month when it’s harder. There’s no recoil to speak of, and not much noise. With the rifle, learn to concentrate and control your breathing. What makes you shake is carbon dioxide. Before you fire take a couple of deep breaths, blow the last one out, aim, and fire.”
They fired for a couple of hours. Then they switched to pistols at fifty feet. “Keep your trigger pull steady and sure, so you don’t drag the sights off target. Know at what point it will fire.” After each magazine was emptied, they walked to their targets and examined them.
They stopped every half hour and drank water from a large cooler. Holcomb said, “You’re doing okay. Just make sure that no matter how tired you get, you’re keeping all of your attention on willing that bullet through the bull’s-eye.”
In late afternoon Holcomb taught him how to break the rifle and the pistol down and clean them. He was watchful to be sure Moreland did everything as it should be done, that the weapons were truly clean, and that each had the even gleam of a thin layer of gun oil on it. As with the shooting, he did everything Moreland did.
Next Holcomb took him inside the rectangular building. The inside was like the interior of a house, divided into a few rooms with white plasterboard walls and imitation wood laminate floors and powerful air-conditioning. He turned it on and said, “Now we start getting in shape.”
There was an exercise room at the back of the house, and they went in and began lifting weights and doing pull-ups, push-ups, and various strengthening exercises. As the sun was showing signs of disappearing over the next ridge, Holcomb took him outside. They jogged along a narrow, winding trail that took them up to the top of the ridge. By the time they descended, the sun had set, and the shadows below the hills were chilly.
Holcomb drove Moreland back to the mall where his car was parked. As Moreland got out of the car, Holcomb said, “You can leave the car at home tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at the bus stop around the corner from your apartment at six.”
The daily instruction continued and grew more demanding. After Moreland mastered the .22-caliber guns, Holcomb replaced the pistol with a nine-millimeter Beretta and the rifle with a .308. After they had lifted weights for a week, Holcomb added more weights to the bar. After they had jogged the uphill trail to the ridge for a week, Holcomb turned it into a race. Everything they did the first week got harder the second, and kept growing more demanding after that.
Moreland learned to fire a shotgun effectively and became aware of its limitations. Forty yards was about the top range for a kill; but close in, there was nothing with more power. The spreading of buckshot didn’t do anything to make up for a poor aim at any range. Next Holcomb began the long process of teaching Moreland hand-to-hand combat. They began with techniques for fighting another unarmed opponent, then moved through disarming a man with a knife or a club, then settled on the more common task of using those weapons to kill a man.