Silently, I turned the bedroom door handle and pushed the door in at the same time. I took a step forward and only had a second to duck my head as a golf club swung my way. I managed to avoid a direct hit from the club head as she only grazed my skull with the graphite shaft. Still, I had to fight off the surprise of being discovered in the act, and I wasn’t ready for the intensity of this woman.
She whipped the club back and prepared to strike a second time. She was only half dressed, and something about her bare legs caused me a moment’s hesitation, which she took advantage of, swinging the club low and connecting with my left shin. I felt the bone crack and a flash of stars blurred my vision, but instincts took over and reminded me that whatever this woman was, she wasn’t an experienced killer.
She tried to pass me, to get out of the bedroom to the more advantageous battlefield of the living room, and she almost made it, but I lunged for her and caught her arm, twisted her wrist back and jerked her body to the floor.
From there, it was a scrum. I had a hundred pound advantage, and although she had the desperation of a cornered rat, I used the pain in my shin to focus my intensity. I clawed at those bare legs until I was able to get on top of her. She tried to scratch me, to bite me, her jaws snapping like a turtle’s, her eyes wild, rolling in their sockets. She pounded the heel of her foot into my shin, but I was focused, feeding on the pain, and I managed to pin her arms down, straddling her torso while I hooked my fingers around her throat.
I was getting ready to finish the job when I heard Monique’s front door open behind me.
Fuck. I had to make a decision, had to time it right. While Monique struggled under my grip, I concentrated my hearing, listening for the telltale sound of footsteps approaching the door to the bedroom. Even with my bum leg, I could hoist myself backward off of her and use surprise and a solid forearm to get the new visitor down on the ground. From there, I would have to hope I had sapped the fight out of this woman so she wouldn’t be able to help.
“Columbus!”
The last thing I was expecting was Pooley’s voice coming from the living room.
“Columbus!”
Even as I processed this, I could feel my fingers loosening on Monique’s throat. She coughed and made her body go as limp as a possum’s.
Pooley appeared in the light of the living room, drawn by the coughing. He was sweating and breathing hard, and he peered in at me in the bedroom as I slid off the woman.
“She . . . uh . . .” He was trying to catch his breath. “She’s not the target.”
“What?”
As soon as I lifted my body off Monique’s torso, she scrambled backward to the corner of the bedroom, leaning her back against the wall, hugging her knees and sobbing between coughing spasms.
“I fucked up. I . . . uh . . . the double fee . . . the two names . . . I thought it was . . .”
“This isn’t . . .”
“She’s pregnant. The hit is on the baby inside her.”
“Fuck.”
I stood up and Monique screamed, flinching back, her hands on her stomach.
I put my palms up in a calming motion, but I was staring hotly at Pooley. “Fuck,” I repeated. “How do you make that mistake?”
“I didn’t catch it . . . I should have but I didn’t. That’s why I got here as soon as I could.”
I turned my eyes on Monique and she flinched.
“I’m leaving,” I said to her. “I’m not going to kill you or your baby. But someone put a professional hit on that child and didn’t care enough to explain it wasn’t on you.”
She nodded, but her mouth was still pulled back in a snarl, like she was ready to fight again if I made a move in her direction.
I limped out of her apartment and Pooley helped me down the stairs all the way to his car.
WHAT
kind of person would put a hit on the child when hitting the mother would have served the same purpose? And what kind of psychological game was the person playing to sign off on the kill that way . . . name the unborn daughter but present it like it was the mother? Was it so the man or woman could rest easier knowing the assassination was little more than a forced abortion? So the person could blame the mother’s death on the shooter, since it wasn’t in the contract? The sin of omission easier to stomach than the sin of execution? Maybe I didn’t want to know the answer. But I didn’t finish the job that day, didn’t go through with the assassination, because I didn’t like being manipulated.
IN
Portland, the sky is cloudless for the first time in weeks and it feels as though someone has lifted a blanket. The horizon is clear, endless.
Abe Mann is heading to Sacramento, his last stop before heading to a convention in Los Angeles he will never reach. I am watching a news clip about Sacramento and Mann’s impending arrival on the
Today Show
as I brush my teeth in the hotel mirror and a name starts to tickle the back of my mind like it is trying to get my attention.
Skyline Hall.
Skyline Hall in Sacramento.
When on a job, assassins sometimes pepper their conversations with nuggets from their real lives, their real backgrounds, to add sincerity, a touch of authenticity to whatever cover they’re using to get in close to a target. This tactic has its strengths, usually gaining a mark’s confidence to be exploited. But this tactic also has its shortcomings, like when it is employed on someone who isn’t a target at the time, someone who remembers, someone who might become an enemy.
Skyline Hall in Sacramento.
Hap Blowenfeld told me a story the first time I met him as we loaded beer crates into the back of his truck, a story so I would bond with him, a story about how he had killed a kid with his bare hands over the theft of his father’s wallet and had been sent to Skyline Hall in Sacramento, California, a Juvey Center like Waxham.
If this story is true, if Hap had been at that Juvey center, then there might be some record of what his real name is, of where his father lives, of a living relative, of a way to get to him.
CHAPTER 15
THERE
are two ways to get information you aren’t supposed to have. One is to sneak in and steal it. The other is to force someone to give it to you.
Skyline Hall for Boys is on the outskirts of Sacramento, on a deserted stretch of highway, away from any major roads. It looks like a high school with razor wire, a place built a long time ago with zero funding for repairs.
I case it for a day and mark the shift changes. Like with Richard Levine’s security force, I know the best time to strike will be when the front desk is at its most chaotic, when tired government employees are handing the keys to the asylum over to bored government employees just getting started on another shitty day in juvenile hell.
I head up to the front doors and make my way to a chubby receptionist who is literally watching the clock.
“May I help you?” she asks without shifting her eyes to me.
“Yes. Hi. I’m with State Senator Vespucci’s office. Can you point me to the records room?”
Now her eyes move from the clock to examine my face. She is pissed. I have arrived looking like work at the end of a long shift. Her face tightens until her mouth disappears into a thin line.
“What’s this regarding?”
“It’s pertaining to research for funding grants.”
“No one told me.”
“Well, there was a fax sent a few days ago.”
She casts her eyes to an empty back office where an old fax machine sits on a shelf, then back at me, trying to decide if she wants to heave her considerable bulk out of her desk chair with only ten minutes left in her shift.
Finally, she sighs and gets up.
She moves inside the office and heads to the fax machine, looks around for some stray papers, but doesn’t find any.
“Well, listen here. I don’t know anything about no . . .” She stops in the middle of her sentence, because I have come up behind her silently and now stand with a gun pressed against her rib cage. Outside that office, there is a little commotion as the new shift of workers enters, but inside, where we are, it is quiet.
Under her breath, she manages, “Oh, lordy . . .”
“What’s your name?”
She whispers, “Roberta.”
“Roberta, you have a decision to make. We live in a world where we have choices and for good or bad, there are consequences to those choices. Now you’re going to have to make one.”
“Don’t, mister . . .”
“Choice one is you do exactly what I tell you to do and no one in this building dies. Not Lawrence the janitor, not Bill the counseling rep, not you, Roberta. And not those cute little grandkids whose pictures I saw taped to your desk.”
“Oh, lordy . . .”
“Choice two is you raise your voice, you cause a stink, you draw attention to me or yourself, and I go on a killing spree the likes of which Sacramento has never seen. Nod your head if you understand.”
She nods her head, her eyes never leaving mine, her face red, stinging, like someone slapped her across the cheeks.
“Good. Then no one is going to get shot today.”
I lower the gun so she’ll know she’s given the right answer, made progress.
“Okay, Roberta, now you’re going to lead me to the records room. When we’re in there, you’re going to point me to the files covering the five-year period from 1984 to 1989. Can you do that for me, Roberta?”
She nods again, and then mechanically, robotically, she leads me out of the office and down a side corridor. No one looks at us, no one greets us, no one asks us what we’re doing. It’s just another Tuesday in a place where no one cares.
WE
spend just over an hour in the records room, undisturbed. Roberta has dropped her guard and is helping me dig through the materials, showing me booking photos of each child. Thankfully, they’ve been catalogued by offenses, so I narrow the field to the most serious felonies, and I can skip over all the faces except the white ones, which makes the task even quicker. Still, there was an abundance of teenagers committing felonies back in the heyday of West Coast gang violence, so the job is arduous.
Just when my patience is wearing thin and I think maybe Hap got the details right but changed the geography, I find the right picture staring back at me.
Younger, with more hair and less confidence, a teenage Hap Blowenfeld glares out from a black and white photograph with an expression of faux defiance. The name on the file is Evan Feldman. It has an address for his father in Arcadia. It seems the only detail Hap changed was his name, and even that isn’t too far of a stretch.
“That’s it, then?” asks Roberta.
“That’s it.”
“You gonna let me go, now?”
“How old are your grandkids, Roberta?”
Her eyes flash a little, like she has gotten comfortable with me and now regrets it. Softly, she whispers, “The boy is five. The girl, three.”
“Well, if you want the boy to see six and the girl to see four, you forget you ever saw me and you don’t mention this to anyone.”
“No, sir, I wouldn’t.”
“If you do, some men might try to arrest me, but they won’t. Some others might try to kill me, but they won’t. And I’ll know it was you who told someone about today, Roberta. And then I’ll come back to Sacramento. And let me tell you something as sure as I’m standing before you, I don’t want to come back to Sacramento.”
“You won’t have no reason to.” A tear spills down her cheek but her voice doesn’t crack.
“I know I won’t. I’m gonna take this.”
I pick up Hap’s juvenile file and head out the door. I’m sure it will be a long time before Roberta gathers the strength to leave the room.
ARCADIA
is a town of urban sprawl gone wrong. It’s buildings, buildings, buildings and concrete and asphalt and sewers and shit as far as the eye can see, all surrounding a horse track improperly named after a Saint, all within a stone’s throw of the bad side of Los Angeles.
The address I have is on a residential street lined with squat one-story houses packed as close together as the city planners will allow. None of the houses seem too eager to do battle with an earthquake, should a fresh one arrive.
The address I have for Hap’s father, Tom Feldman, is 416 N. Armstrong Rd., and as I scope out the unassuming house from down the street, I find myself praying there’s an older white man still living in it. Just don’t be a dead end. Not when I feel like I’m so fucking close.
There are times in life when fate smiles on you, when you ask for a piece of luck and that piece arrives in a box with a bow on it. I asked for luck when I killed that prostitute back in Pennsylvania, what the fuck was her name, I can’t even remember it now, just the smell of that grape bubblegum in the passenger seat of my rental car, and I was asking for luck here, luck I had done my homework, I had guessed right, Hap’s old man hadn’t died or moved or been kicked out for not making his mortgage payments. And here’s the thing: luck has a way of shining on preparation, of rewarding those who put themselves in a position to take advantage of it when that gift box with the pretty bow plops into their laps.
Hap’s father parks his car in his driveway, gets out and heads to his mailbox. His face unmistakably belongs to the sire of the man who killed my partner; father and son share the same features, the same small nose, the same eyes. I can feel anger and excitement building up inside me.
I slam my door shut and hurry down the street.
“Sir . . . ?”
He looks up innocently. “Yes?”
“Are you Tom Feldman?”
“Yes . . .”
“Thank God . . . How you doing?”
“Fine . . . ?” It is more of a question than a statement.
“I’m so glad I found you. I’m friends with Evan . . .”