When the Devil Comes to Call (A Lars and Shaine Novel Book 2)

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Shaine set down the surfboard and picked up the gun. She brought the rifle to her shoulder, tossed her head to get the wet hair from in front of her eyes, and sighted through the scope. Two hundred yards down the beach her target rested in the coarse sand. She tried to control her breathing. She drew deep breaths in through her nose, let them out through her mouth.

The image in the scope wavered, her target looking fuzzy. Each minute the movement of her hand, her shoulder, her head, sent the image bouncing like she was trying to hit a target from a moving roller coaster.

Shaine brought the rifle down from her eye, took three deep breaths to steady herself, then shook off more water from her arms. The wetsuit made it hard to draw full, deep breaths and the wetness still oozing from her shoulder-length hair ran salt water into her eyes and across her already chapped lips. She tried to match her breathing to the slow, steady rhythm of the Pacific ocean waves breaking on the beach.

She lifted the gun again, sighted down her target between the eyes and fired.

The familiar kickback of the sniper rifle didn’t hurt her shoulder anymore, not like it did the first time. She examined her aim through the sight. A miss.

“Well, it’s not like you’ll ever have to really do this.” Lars had resisted saying anything while Shaine seemed to be having trouble getting her sight down. He knew the only way she’d learn was to do it herself. “But it’s still a good exercise in breathing control.”

“You can see that from here?” Shaine asked, trying to look down the beach without her scope, but finding it a bit blurry.

“I can see you didn’t hit the coconut,” Lars said. “I may be slowing down in a lot of areas, but my eyesight is still pretty damn good.”

A wave gently whooshed onto the sand, the sound dissipating into the warm Hawaiian breeze. Lars took the long range rifle from Shaine. She ran both hands over her hair, slicking it back on her head and licking the salt water off her lips.

“You had a nice ride, though,” Lars said.

“You should really come out with me some time.”

“Nah. This dog is too old to learn some tricks.”

“You’re not even fifty.”

“A few months away.”

“There are guys even older than you out surfing all the time.”

“Yeah, but they started early. Besides, I’d look goofy in one of those suits.”

Shaine turned her eyes down to look at her own wetsuit. “You saying I look goofy?”

“Not you. Me.” Lars didn’t want to embarrass Shaine by telling her how she had blossomed in the two years they’d known each other.

Lars saw boys lurking lately. The warm days when Shaine would surf in her bikini, the days when she would blow past them in the pipeline and then paddle out farther, ride bigger and wipeout harder. He saw the way they looked, and suspected she did too. But her old shyness remained, and her unwillingness to let anyone close for fear of being found out.

On the run. Fugitives. An ex-hitman and an orphan girl. Well, might as well be an orphan. Her mother was dead to her.

But here, in their private inlet, with the rough, black-flecked sand not soft enough for tourists, she could be herself. And she could study to be someone else entirely. She could learn from Lars.

Lars agreed to teach her things. Skills she could use in life, but not in the life. He wanted no part in training an assassin. He’d walked away from the job. He wanted better for Shaine. Lars risked everything to save her, to give her a better life. He would teach her to defend herself in case they ever came for her. But shooting coconuts would be where the training ended.

“You want lunch?” he asked.

“I guess so.”

They walked to the small break in the thick greenery and onto the pathway leading to the two-bedroom shack on the beach. Wood slat walls, a wide porch, a tiny kitchen and a satellite dish on the thatch roof. Two hammocks swung between palm trees. The place was rustic by most standards, perfect for two people looking to live small and not be noticed. The tiny cove, where the shack sat nestled in thick growth trying to take the house back to the jungle, got no traffic. High volcanic cliffs on either side meant nobody could even accidentally walk over from one of the beaches in front of the hotels. They were nestled. Safe. Or as safe as they could feel.

In the two years since they escaped the mainland with their lives and little else, save for well over a million dollars in the bank— courtesy of Lars’s former employer, Nikki Senior—Shaine and Lars had carved out a nicely spartan existence. Surfing, firearm training, home schooling from an online course so Shaine had completed her high school equivalency exam. And Lars creeping ever closer to a half century on earth.

Two years without pulling a trigger on another human being. Like an alcoholic with his ninety day chip, Lars felt like he would really never have to go back to that life again.

The trouble before—the killings, the lost money, the attempts on their life—Lars hardly ever thought about them anymore. Hardly ever thought about that prick Trent, hardly ever thought about how he couldn’t save Shaine’s dad Mitch, hardly ever thought about Nikki Senior at all.

Nikki Senior coughed until he felt a thick slug in the back of his throat. He leaned over, lifted his wastebasket a few inches closer to him, and spit the phlegm wad out. He was ready to talk.

“Show him in,” he said to the hulking man standing in the doorway.

In his home office—his fortress—Nikki had overseen a thirty-plus year run as leader of his organization. A time of growth, profit and eventual decline. His own son had been a source of much of the trouble, but Nikki knew the ship began sinking long before that particular iceberg.

Now a prisoner of his own bad lungs and the many grievances he’d earned over the years— which put a target on his back, over both his eyes, circling his heart and his balls—Nikki rarely left the house. People came to him. Some out of respect, some out of obligation. Today’s guest, however, came with a different agenda. Nikki had been expecting him, or someone like him. He always figured they would show up with guns blazing, sirens flashing, not make an appointment and enter his office as an invited guest.

Times change, though.

The door opened and FBI Special Agent Drew Qualls stepped in. A pale, thin man with a concave chest and a high forehead, everything about Qualls said desk jockey, not field agent. His look may have been how he got inside the inner sanctum of Nikki’s crime empire.

“Come in, Mr. Qualls,” Nikki said. He hated the idea of an FBI agent in his home. He preferred the phone calls, the times when Qualls would wait to hear from him, not show up in person to put the pressure on.

“Thanks for seeing me.”

“Did I have a choice?”

Qualls smiled. So it was going to be that kind of meeting. “I’m here, obviously, to see if we’re any closer to a deal.”

“Closer, yes. But there are still some things I need to sort out first.”

“Mr. Pagani,” Qualls said. “I can’t guarantee how long the offer will be on the table.”

“Son,” Nikki said, his voice a rumble of too many cigars and too many years behind him. “Don’t bullshit me. You want what I’ve got to sell you. This is my whole business. A business you say is immoral.”

“I say it’s illegal.”

“Potato, po-tah-to. My business is giving people what they want. And you want information. I have it. Don’t kid me that you’re gonna walk away from a deal like that.”

“If you wait too long, we’ll have all that information on our own and you’ll be spending the rest of your days not in witness protection, but behind bars.”

“If you had anything more than your own dick in your hands, you’d have arrested me already.”

Qualls leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and pressed his fingertips together. “And if you didn’t think we would have everything soon, you wouldn’t have come to me for a deal.”

Nikki rolled his tongue around his mouth behind clenched jaws. The little punk was half right. Nikki never thought he’d be a candidate for witness protection, especially after that shit with Mitch the Snitch went down and nearly got Nikki killed. In a small way, he was glad his son wasn’t alive to see the day Nikki called in to the FBI to offer up a deal. Names, dates, incidents those pencil pushers didn’t even know about.

The fucking FBI. In his office. What had the world come to?

“I’ll call you soon,” Nikki said.

“I hope you do.” Qualls took the hint and rose to his feet. “You know my number.” He said it with enough of a lilt in his voice Nikki would surely get the tiny dig. The reminder of the day big, bad crime boss Nikki Pagani came running to the FBI for help.

Nikki let him leave without another word. When the door shut, Nikki hocked up another thick ball of slime from his lungs and spit it sharply into the wastebasket.

If this is what it’s going to be like in protection, he might change his mind. Shitty little suit-and-tie guys taking swipes at him? Not worth it. He’d be better off in jail among his own types. With everyone he knew, Nikki could set up a pretty sweet existence on the inside if he needed to. But even surrounded by lackeys and sycophants jumping at the chance to smuggle him a few Cuban cigars or mix up a batch of toilet wine, the sun in Boca Raton sounded nicer.

Ah, those loose ends,
Nikki thought. He’d been arming himself, stashing away the ammunition to take down all his enemies as he fled. He’d hand the FBI information on people he always wanted gone, and hold back what he wanted to for the people who deserved to stay off Rikers Island.

But there was one. One stone-cold bastard who Nikki could never pin anything substantial on. He thought he must know how the FBI felt when they tried to pin anything to himself. Nothing led directly back to the man. No, Nikki needed another plan. A plan he’d been avoiding to head off starting a turf war. But now, who cared? After his shoes were off in Boca, let ‘em murder each other in the streets.

For this, he needed help. He needed a pro, a man of integrity and discretion. A man who knew his work and excelled at it.

He needed Lars.

Lars slept lightly. Even for all his years in the desert, he was never too far from traffic noise. After growing up in Queens, his first few months in the Southwest were an adjustment, but now, in his quiet corner of Hawaii, the total lack of mechanical noises threw him for a long time.

Two years later, he could get to sleep without much problem, but he slept shallow, no deeper than his feet sank in the sand outside the door. So when Lars heard a noise in the kitchen, his eyes sprang open.

He lay still, ears tuned to the night sounds he knew, and listening for anything unfamiliar. The steady sound of the surf, the breeze through the acacia trees, the night bird calls all were there. Then another sound. Shuffling. Feet moving, but quietly. Lars knew when Shaine walked through the house she showed no such stealth. Her bare feet pounded the floors with great fleshy slaps, worse when she wore her flip-flops.

There was an intruder in the house.

The shack sat so far off the road, so hidden in the overgrowth and so sheltered by the cove, that Lars had never seen another person casually stroll by. If anyone came this far to the end of the lane, they wanted to. The isolation of the shack gave them privacy, but also meant they were vulnerable. And Lars was the only security system.

He stood, sliding the gun from underneath his pillow as he moved. Old habit, sleeping with a gun. His version of a wife, the thing you bed down with every night and most nights never touched. But when you wanted her, you were grateful she was only an arm’s reach away. He moved his lithe, yoga-toned body through the darkened room. He didn’t even hear his own footsteps.

Lars wasn’t the kind of gun owner who needed to rack a shell into the chamber, the metal mechanics of the action reverberating through the house. No, Lars stood up knowing a round would be waiting for him in front of the firing pin.

He listened at the door. The sounds again, trying to be quiet. Lars eased his door open, the hinges kept well oiled. Another of his habits. He stepped into the hall, a few feet from the living room. He saw nothing unusual, tilted his head to hear the sounds again.

Then a shadow, moving in front of the kitchen bay window.

Lars made it across the living room quickly, gun down by his leg. He heard the sounds more distinctly, the rooting through the fridge sounds. The beer bottles clanking sounds.

He had to talk himself into it, but he would not shoot first. He’d catch the guy, then decide when or if to shoot.

Lars spun away from the wall, squared his shoulders with the kitchen counter and raised his gun to eye level.

“Freeze!” But the voice was not his.

A flashlight beam burned the face of the intruder, a teenage boy with a half-eaten energy bar in his mouth, a bottle of beer in each pocket of his jacket, and a terrified expression on his face. Behind the beam and the voice was Shaine. She stood on the other side of the counter with her own gun aiming at the teenager.

Lars hadn’t heard her, hadn’t seen her in the shadows as he crossed the room. A smile crept over his mouth and he nodded his head in approval.

The teen swallowed the energy bar. “Shit, I didn’t think anyone was home. All I needed was something to eat. I swear I wasn’t gonna steal nothing.”

“That food is not nothing,” Lars said.

“Yeah, but, I mean like a stereo or something.”

With two guns pointed at him, two barrels staring him down like dead, black eyes, the kid seemed on the verge of tears.

“Keep him there,” Lars said to Shaine.

“Got him.”

Lars lowered his gun and went to the light switch. He lit the kitchen and saw the beach bum of a kid in his board shorts and hooded anorak. He did look thin.

“How did you get here?” Lars asked.

“I was on the North side with some buddies, y’know. Surf every wave on the islands kind of thing. They wanted to head back, but I still had the rest of this island to go, so y’know, I let them leave. But then I got hungry.”

The kid looked ashamed. Lars felt sympathy for him, just enough to keep him from getting shot.

“Well, it looks like you’re not going to get to every wave this time, kid.”

“No, no, I get it,” the kid said. “I’m outta here. I’m gone, man. Back to Oahu. No worries.” He started putting down all the food he’d taken.

“This mean I don’t get to use him for target practice?” Shaine asked.

“Not this time,” Lars said.

The kid backed toward the front door, still unsure of the two gun-toting residents. “Thanks, man. I’m sorry. I thought it was abandoned.”

“With a fully stocked fridge?”

“Yeah, I know. Stupid. I was hungry. Look, I’ll just go.” He reached the door.

“Hold up,” Lars said. He took three quick steps forward, raising the gun as he did. A momentary flash of a time he took similar steps right before shooting a Cuban pimp who had been working a corner reserved for Nikki’s girls. The Cuban wore a hat which thankfully kept most of his brains from spreading too far and wide.

The teenager shrank, folding in on himself and starting to whimper. “Please, man.”

“Leave the beer,” Lars said.

The kid looked down, noticed the beer bottles in his pockets and seemed relived. “I totally forgot. Sorry, man. My bad.”

He took the bottles out and set them on the floor next to the door. Lars motioned him away with the barrel of his Beretta. The kid ran. Lars saw his shadow move by outside and he could tell the kid had picked up a surfboard he must have been carrying with him during his walk across the island.

When the kid had gone, Lars tucked his gun in the waistband of his sweatpants and turned to Shaine. “Nicely done. I didn’t even see or hear you.”

“Yeah, you either.”

“Good thing we didn’t shoot each other.”

“Seriously.” Shaine laughed. “You like my little tough girl line?”

“Yeah. Maybe a little much.”

“Yeah, I saw how badly that kid was shitting a brick and wanted to mess with him.”

Without thinking, Lars shifted into mentor mode. “We’ve talked about being able to back up everything you say. If you draw down on someone serious, they’ll know if you’re only saying a line.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Shaine said.

Lars realized he’d begun to lecture. They both smiled. “So,” Lars said. “We up now? You want something to eat?”

“No,” Shaine said. “It’s the middle of the night. I’ll take one of those beers though.” She smiled innocently at Lars, knowing what came next.

“No way, kid. You got three more years until you’re twenty-one.”

“I know.”

“Besides, I seem to recall a little girl in Las Vegas who swore off drinking for life.”

“I swore off drinking long island iced teas with assholes.”

Lars laughed and began putting away the food left scattered over the kitchen counter. He slid the two beers into the door pocket of the refrigerator when the phone rang.

Almost as rare as someone on foot wandering through their property, was a phone call.

Lars looked down at his hand and noticed the gun again, lured out by the phone call without him consciously knowing it. He said to Shaine, “You expecting a call?”

She shook her head. Lars checked the caller ID. A New York number. It made him curious enough, so he answered.

“Hello?”

“You using enough sunscreen out there, ya old son of a bitch?”

Lars relaxed a little hearing Nikki’s voice, but not completely. If Nikki was calling, it meant more than a social call.

“How are you, Nikki?”

“I’m coughing my lungs out bit by bit and I got the friggin’ FBI breathing down my neck and checking my garbage for clues. How should I feel?”

“Same as ever, I suppose.”

“You got that right. So how’s things? What are you—laying on the beach, watching the girls go by?”

“Well, right now it’s kinda the middle of the night.”

“Aw, shit, the fucking time difference. Aren’t you ahead of me?”

“No, we’re behind.”

“Son of a—hey, I’m sorry about that, pal.”

“It’s alright. I was up anyway.” Lars palmed over the receiver and whispered to Shaine. “Nikki.”

She nodded with pursed lips and went back to her room.

“Hey, listen,” Nikki said. “I’m sure you’re wondering why I called.”

“I was, yes.”

“Lars, I need you do to a job for me.”

A job, he’d said. Nikki only ever called about one kind of job.

Lars waited, listening to the sound of Nikki’s oxygen machine breathing mechanical breaths. Nikki had been more than a boss, he’d been a friend. Nikki trusted Lars and gave him more responsibility than anyone had before or since. Lars didn’t feel comfortable talking about it, but deep down he also considered Nikki a father figure. Telling him no had been out of the question for over twenty-five years.

“A job?”

“One more for an old man, eh? What do you say?”

“I don’t really do jobs any more.”

“Don’t bullshit me. You can take the gun out of your hand, but that don’t mean you aren’t still locked and loaded.”

Lars often wondered if this day would come. He had a choice to make. If it was anyone but Nikki, the decision would be simple—No. He shuffle stepped in place, thought about the beer in the fridge.

“Don’t you think you’d be better off with a local?” he asked Nikki.

“Not on this one. It’ll be your retirement party. I’ll buy you a gold watch and everything.”

I thought I already retired,
thought Lars. He asked, “What is it?”

“Not over the phone. You’ll come here. We’ll sit and talk, like old times.” He spoke in that way of his—telling, not asking.

“It’s not just a drive down the Hudson Parkway anymore, Nikki.”

“I know that.” Nikki voice sounded old to Lars, older than normal. He’d started the conversation strong, but now drew shorter breaths, a gravel in his voice growing more ragged the longer he talked. “You know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need it.”

The only reason Lars made it to Hawaii, a big part of why he was still alive and Shaine was out of danger, was Nikki’s help. The money they lived off—Nikki. The assurance no one else would be able to find them—Nikki.

Lars owed Nikki everything. And yet, he found himself not saying yes.

“Nikki, I . . . I’m out of practice.”

“So you’ll practice.”

“I’m getting older.”

“Who isn’t?”

“I didn’t exactly slam dunk the last job.”

“You’re alive. I’d say that’s a slam dunk, touchdown, jackpot win all rolled into one. You got some kind of magic, son.” Then, like he was reading it off a billboard, “The man they couldn’t kill.” Nikki chuckled.

Lars was glad Nikki wasn’t in the same room, or close enough to drive over to see him. He was glad Nikki knew a number, but not where he was calling. Lars knew there was no risk of Nikki sending out a car load of guys to convince Lars to take the job.

“Nikki, I’m going to have to pass.” Lars waited as his words traveled down the wires, over oceans and across the states. He waited to see if he’d broken Nikki’s heart, or made him angry. He felt like an ungrateful son, like he’d told his old man he wouldn’t be coming to the nursing home for Christmas this year.

“Lars,” Nikki said. “I can’t say much over the phone. But, maybe if you knew who . . .”

Lars waited. Nikki waited longer.

“Who?” Lars asked.

“The one who killed Lenore.”

Lars shuddered at the name. A chill ran through the phone line like a blast of winter air. A name he hadn’t heard in years. Decades, almost.

“You know for sure?”

“I do.”

The very mention of Lenore’s name twisted his stomach. A dormant anger flared to life inside Lars. A painful regret. This changed things.

“I’ll be there,” he said.

“Good, good.” Lars heard Nikki cough violently, a wet sound in his throat. “Thank you, Lars. I need someone I can trust right now. My list is awfully short these days.”

“Not as short as mine,” Lars said.

“Maybe true, maybe true. I’ll explain the rest when you get here. See you soon, okay?”

“Yep. See you soon.”

The two old friends hung up. Lars clenched his eyes closed, trying to force out the invading memories of a woman he once loved.