Zero at the Bone (2 page)

“You mean you haven’t had one that lived long enough to testify.” The suit sighed. “You’ll live. I promise.”

JOSEY was waiting at the drive-in where they’d arranged to meet. The place was straight out of the Twilight Zone. It looked like it had been abandoned for years; everything was bleached white from the desert sun. Listless brown weeds clumped around the bases of the empty posts that had once held the speakers, planted in regular rows like grave markers. He wouldn’t have been surprised if some of them were.
Be a good place to bury
some bodies,
he thought.
No one watching except this big blank eye of a movie screen.

She was sitting on the hood of her car. “You’re late, D,” she said as he approached.

“Pick a meet site that ain’t in the middle a fuckin’ nowhere, then we’ll talk about bein’ late. What ya got fer me?”

“Nothing you’ll take, probably.”

“Must have somethin’. Ya called me here.”

“I swear, I don’t know why I keep you on the list. So fucking picky.”

“Rules is rules.”

She sighed and opened her briefcase. “Biggest ticket today is this one,” she said, handing him the folder. He glanced over the file and knew within five lines that he wouldn’t be taking it. “D, it’s a hundred large,” Josey beseeched him, as he handed the folder back to her. She always tried to palm off a few up front on him, although he 4 | Jane Seville

couldn’t imagine that after all this time she’d think that just this once he’d cave in and take it.

“I ain’t doin’ no woman just cuz her asshole husband’s embarrassed that she fucked the pool boy. Next.”

“This one?”

The second one only took two lines before he was handing it back. “Don’t do cops.”

“Okay, Mr. Fucking Moral Superiority, how’s this one?” He started reading, and kept going. This one was… possible. “Hmph.”

“Oh, you’re actually gonna consider this one? I might just piss my pants for joy.”

“Never done no art dealer.”

“Oughta be a walk in the park. A guy like this thinks he’s untouchable.” He sighed. “How much?”

“Fifty.”

He tucked the folder into his jacket. “Three days.” He started to walk away.

“You know,” Josey said. “All these other ones that you won’t do? I just give them to one of the others. They get done anyway.”

D stopped, but did not turn. “Yeah?”

“So if they’re gonna get done, why does it matter you’re not the one doing them?” He shook his head. “You gotta ask why it matters, I ain’t gonna bother answerin’.” JACK was sitting in his dim living room. Well, not
his
living room, technically. It belonged to Jack Macintosh, whoever that was. He had Jack Macintosh’s driver’s license in his pocket, and the mail in the hallway was addressed to this mythical man, wherever he’d come from. Who was he? What did he do for a living? Jack Macintosh was a professional at waiting. Waiting for it to be time to take an oath and tell a jury what he’d seen. At the moment, however, Jack Macintosh was scrolling through the cable guide, looking for something interesting on TV. Dr. Jack Francisco wasn’t here just now. But Jack Macintosh had all the time in the world to reflect on the events that had led him here to this impersonal, pre-furnished home in Henderson, Nevada.

You had to have a cookie.

A cookie had landed Jack here, thousands of miles away from his old life. He’d been on his way out of the office when one of the nurses hailed him. “Have a cookie, Dr.

Francisco!” she’d said. He’d hesitated. It was possible that this was just the latest assault in the ongoing campaign being waged by various nurses and fellow doctors to seduce him via baked goods.

He hadn’t even been hungry. But mmm… cookies. So he’d had one. What was his rush, anyway? To get home to his dark apartment where the companion of his evening would probably be whatever was airing on TCM that night?

If he hadn’t had that fateful cookie, he’d have missed Maria Dominguez’s murder and he’d still be in that dark apartment, with his own furniture, and his own books, watching Robert Osborne introduce a film from the oeuvre of Bette Davis or Joseph Cotton. George Sanders, if Jack was very lucky.

Well, I still have Robert,
Jack thought, changing the channel. If there was one thing you could count on in this world, it was that at any given moment, Robert Osborne would be talking about film from his fake living room at the TCM studios.

Zero at the Bone | 5

The Dominguez brothers knew that the state had a witness. Lucky Jack had seen Tommy Dominguez and Carlos Alvarez kill Maria. So now here he was in Las Vegas, his driver’s license bearing a stranger’s last name. “No one is from Las Vegas,” his contact had said. “It’s easy to hide there.”

He was hiding until it was his turn to testify. And after that, he’d have to hide again.

He was trying not to think too much about leaving his career behind. The idea of no longer being a surgeon, of not being able to do what he’d spent most of his adult life training to do, was heartbreaking. But what choice did he have? He had to help convict these men. He might have to give up everything he knew but he’d still be alive, which was more than could be said for Maria or the dozens of others these men had killed or would kill in the future if Jack didn’t help stop them. This was what he kept telling himself. Sometimes it even worked. It wasn’t much comfort when he lay awake in the middle of the night feeling sorry for himself, but it was all he had and he’d stick to it.

He put down the remote and settled back.
All About Eve
was just starting. Jack smiled. At least something was going his way tonight.

JOSEY had been right. The art dealer job was a walk in the park.

He waited in the man’s bedroom, the last guest this man would ever entertain here.

He sat on the bed, breathing evenly. It was a very nice bedroom. He wondered if the art dealer ever had sex in it, or if he just jerked off to his fancy art books. He wondered if what visitors there might have been were men or women.

The contract was simple. Obtain photographic proof of this man’s misdeeds, then dispose of him. He’d already found the workroom and documented everything. It was a cold, bloodless little scam the man had going on here. He wasn’t clear on the details, but from what he’d been able to gather, the guy took art with a shady paper trail, mostly pieces that had been looted by the Nazis, and laundered their histories so that collectors and art dealers could make a fortune selling it out from under the survivors’ families.

That shit ain’t right.
It was what he needed to make it okay. It was enough…

barely.

He heard the front door open and close. He waited. Patience was not a problem for him.

It took the little man an hour to come into the bedroom. He was barely in the door before D had the dart in his neck. He dragged him to the bed and laid him out. “You ain’t gonna be able ta move,” he said, “but you’re sure gonna be able ta talk.” He got out his iPod, plugged in the mike, and the man talked. They always talked. They never knew that D didn’t care what they had to say. They never knew that it wouldn’t help.

The man’s eyes rolled in his head. D was put in mind of a deer he’d had to kill when his first shot hadn’t gotten him clean. His father had stood at his shoulder, saying

“Gotta finish what ya started.” He’d used a knife, right to the animal’s heart. “Finish it, son. ’Til the blood ain’t pumpin’ no more.”

Sometimes he wondered about that, in light of his choice of profession. Sometimes he dreamed about it too.

The art dealer started trying to bargain with him, as they often did. He offered him double what he was being paid. He apologized for whatever he’d done to piss D off. D

didn’t bother to answer. It wouldn’t do the man any favors to know that it wasn’t D that he’d pissed off.

6 | Jane Seville

Two shots to the heart. D never went for the head; it was too messy.

He went to a Starbucks around the corner; he hated their coffee, but loved the Wi-Fi. He e-mailed Josey a blank message through an anonymous remailer, with the subject line “Get BiggER TITTTS ASAP!!!” That meant the job was done. The penis-enlarger subject line was for an abort, and the Hot Asian Sluts were for a delay. He downloaded the photos and the MP3 of the art dealer’s confession, then saved everything to a stick drive. He slipped it into the envelope Josey had given him with the contract, then wiped the laptop’s hard drive. He tossed the envelope into a mailbox on his way out, then the laptop into a passing garbage truck. The camera and the iPod were his; they went back into his pockets.

Walk in the park.

JOSEY wasn’t at the next meet. He waited for an hour, but she didn’t show up. D felt a fluttering of uncharacteristic worry in his gut. Supposedly such things had been trained out of him, but his rusty emotional core still sent up the occasional signal flare. They weren’t exactly in a low-risk business, and any one of a number of unpleasant fates could have befallen his only compatriot.

He headed home to find an e-mail from her. The subject line was “Get VIAGRA Cheap!!!” That meant something was wrong.

He loaded up and got in his car, headed to the safe house. If there was trouble, Josey would meet him there.

There was, indeed, trouble, in the form of three large men who looked like they’d stepped out of the
Hired Muscle Weekly
catalog. D was hardly in the door before they were on him. He had a split second to wonder how they’d found the place before they’d pinned his arms and were dragging him inside. D whipped his head backward into a nose and heard a satisfying crunch. He pushed against the one still holding him and kicked upward across the jaw of the one in front of him. Clearly, they hadn’t been expecting him to put up a fight.

Unfortunately, the element of surprise didn’t last very long, and within a few seconds they had tossed him onto the living room couch. He stared up into two gun barrels, and was forced to rethink his thoughts of resistance. Josey was tied to a chair nearby, bruised and bloody. “You okay?” he asked.

She nodded. “I’m sorry, D,” she said. Her voice sounded scratchy, like someone had been strangling her. “I don’t know how they found me.”

“Don’t say nothin’,” he reminded her. Probably unnecessary. Even beaten up and bound as she was, Josey was likely thinking three steps ahead.

The shortest of their new friends, probably the brains of the outfit, approached him.

“We got a job for you,” he said.

“I pick my own jobs, asshole,” he snarled.

Brains tossed him a folder. “She says you wouldn’t take this one if you had a choice. So we’re not giving you a choice. You’re taking it.” D started to open the folder.

“No need to open it,” Brains said. “All you need to know is that you’re doing it.”

“Or what?” D said. It almost didn’t matter. They were now in a position to threaten him in almost any way they chose. His own life, his identity, Josey’s life, the target’s slow, painful death against the quick one D would mete out.

Zero at the Bone | 7

As it turned out, they’d come prepared. Brains tossed D another folder, motioning for him to examine its contents. D opened it. “Fuck me,” he said, clamping down on the dull horror that rose in his throat. The folder was full of pictures. Of him. Coming and going from the scene of every job he’d done in the past six months. All of them time stamped. He glanced over at Josey, the thought occurring that she might have sold him up the river, but the look on her face dispelled his doubts.

“You’ll take the contract. We have evidence to tie you to half a dozen contract killings this year alone. You’ll get six months in the electric chair.” Brains smiled, and D

thought again of that deer he’d killed. “You’ve got one week. After that, those photos and a number of other salient pieces of documentation will find their way to the FBI.”

“And after it’s done? I ain’t gonna be your monkey forever,” he muttered.

“My employer has no interest in you. You can go back to your regular… schedule.

When it’s done, it’s done.” He arched one eyebrow; D knew at once that this guy was one of those that was always imagining himself in a Tarantino movie. He knew the type.

Same kind of guys that thought it was cool to hold their guns sideways, the way no one actually did in reality.

Brains and his pets left. D went to Josey and released her from her bonds. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “They made me bring them here and send you the trouble message.”

“Don’t matter,” he said, his attention already turning to the contract they’d dumped in his lap. He opened the folder and started reading, knowing that he wouldn’t like it, and he didn’t.

Josey was watching his face. “I wasn’t even going to show you that one.”

“A fuckin’
witness?
” D snarled. “So now I’m killin’ innocent bystanders on the say-so a some drug lords? Fuck.” He tossed the folder aside and dragged a hand across his close-cropped hair. “How they been fuckin’ tailin’ me, anyhow?”

“I don’t know. They must have been hacking my records.”

“Thought that couldn’t happen.”

“Didn’t think it could.” He stood up and went to the window, feeling Josey’s eyes on his back. “You have to do it.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean you have to.”

“I said I fuckin’ know.”

“D… it’s what you do.”

“I know what I fuckin’ do, and this ain’t it.”

“You get paid to kill people.”

D ground his jaw. “When they deserve it.”

Silence. “What’s this guy’s name again?”

He didn’t have to consult the folder. One read-through and it was in his head.

“Program got him in as Jack Macintosh. Real name’s Jack Francisco.” He shook his head. “Dr. Jack god-almighty-damn Francisco. Saw somethin’ he wasn’t s’posed ta see

’n’ has the balls ta stand up ’n’ say so. Now I gotta put a bullet in him for it.”