adventure, too.
The beating lasted off and on for the better part of a half-hour before the Hit Man said anything of substance.
“You know, Mark,” he had said, lounging back on Mark’s sofa as he methodically unwrapped a stick of gum, “I did a little research on you, buddy. You come from money. It pisses me off that you’ve got millions in the family, yet you expect Mr. Slater to believe you can’t pay back a mere six hundred thou. Oops, this is Thursday, isn’t it? Make that six twenty-five. Now, before I rip out your windpipe, you want to tell me why you’re holding out on us?”
Though a month had passed, Mark still felt the pain of that afternoon; how new jolts of agony would self- generate from various bruised organs without Pointer laying another hand on him. He could still remember the Hit Man’s exaggerated patience as he waited through the whole story of his banishment from the family. When Mark was done, Pointer had seemed genuinely disappointed that there really was no choice but to cut his throat.
It was the sight of the straight razor that made Mark think the unthinkable.
There was a way, he’d gasped hurriedly as Pointer prepared for surgery. Mark had remembered a clause in his father’s will—a paragraph that had caught his eye years before, during the first reading. Dear old Dad had established a trust for his grandkids, of which Nathan was the only one.
Valued at just over three million dollars, the trust was supposed to send the grandkids to college and then to give them a jump-start on their lives. But there was a back door. As he lay there on the floor, sucking in carpet dust, he’d been able to remember the clause with perfect clarity. Looking back, he felt ashamed.
“In the event that any grandchild dies prior to his thirtieth birthday and prior to having completed an accredited course of study as defined in Paragraph 8(A)(c)(ii) above, the bequeathed amount shall be distributed to the child’s father, or, if such distribution is not possible for whatever reason, said share shall be distributed among my surviving progeny, per stirpes.”
When the unthinkable had first occurred to him in the lawyer’s office, Mark had seen the potential, but Christ, he’d have had to kill the whole family. Nobody needed money that bad.
Not until you’d spent some time with a pain expert, anyway. Jesus, that razor looked sharp.
It turned out that Lyle was a survivor, too, with a keen eye for his own pocketbook. Within a minute of hearing about the backdoor clause, Pointer had developed a plan. Mark would be allowed to live a while longer, for the sole purpose of killing his nephew and taking delivery of the inheritance money. Pointer, meanwhile, would shelter Mark from the wrath of Mr. Slater in return for a $200,000 fee.
The details were left up to Mark, but Pointer made it clear that he expected a clean job. Recognizing that details can be expensive, he had even returned the twenty grand down payment.
The rest had been shockingly simple. Mark found Ricky by following the guards as they left the JDC at shift change and gathered at the Woodbine Inn for drinks. They were not a happy lot, bitching constantly about every aspect of their jobs. Of all the guards, a young skinny one named Ricky Harris was the most vocal.
“I’d do anything to get out of that fucking place,” he’d said.
Mark bought Ricky a drink. Over the course of the evening, Mark bought him a lot of drinks. It was nearly midnight when Mark made his pitch. All Ricky had to do, he explained, was kill the kid and skip out of the country. Twenty thousand dollars went a long way in some parts of the world. As luck would have it, twenty grand was more money than Ricky Harris had ever seen in one place, and with that much cash up front, he didn’t seem especially bothered by the prospect of killing one of the worthless pukes under his care. When he found out that the target was that pussy Bailey, he seemed thrilled.
And so it had started.
As Mark now sat alone in the sweltering heat of his soon-to-be-repossessed house, he marveled at just how wrong everything had gone. The stack of legal ‘sheets’ strewn on the table served as yet another monument to his shitty life. And in the sureness of his own approaching death, he grew terrified of his appointment with hell. Somewhere deep within his self-pity, there was even a growing tumor of remorse for what heed forced Nathan to endure.
He was pulled from the past by a knock at his front door. He was frightened at first, until he realized that it was impossible for Pointer to have gotten back so soon. He considered for a moment that it might be a cop. In his stupor, he was unable to decide if that would be good news or bad.
By the time Mark staggered to the door, the visitor had grown impatient, pounding with his fist.
As he swung the door open, a large man, maybe six-three, stood silhouetted against the brilliant white background. Mark winced in the wash of sunlight.
“What do you want?” Mark demanded.
The man stepped in without being asked. “I came to talk to you, Mark,” the man said. “Mr. Slater sends his regards?’
Chapter 35
In the car, Jed and Harry listened to The Bitch on the radio, and her ongoing interview with Nathan. Warren was right, Jed realized. If you listened to Nathan’s side of the story and accepted it at face value, Warren’s hit man theory explained it all.
Jed suddenly felt terribly guilty. He’d allowed himself to get so wrapped up in the boy’s escape and the events surrounding it that he hadn’t taken the time to look at the obvious. In his heart, he’d always believed that Ricky Harris probably deserved to die; that he was caught in the act of something despicable, perhaps even sexual. But until his conversation with Mitsy, he’d never considered that his sole purpose was to kill the boy. And even then, it didn’t make any sense.
In an effort to manage the frustration, Jed had written off such details as irrelevant in the short term. The whole department had. All that mattered was the boy’s capture. They’d all rationalized that whatever motivation Nathan might have had for killing the supervisor was between him, the prosecutor and the jury.
Jed silently berated himself and his colleagues as he realized that this collective myopia had nearly cost a young boy his life. The very police force that was supposed to protect him had in fact eased the burden on his killer. That thought—and the thought of those poor cops in New York—sickened him. Soon, though, they’d set it all straight.
The first thing Jed noticed about Mark Bailey’s untidy little house was the drawn curtains. They gave the structure a haunting, abandoned look.
“I wonder if anybody’s home,” he thought aloud.
Things didn’t look right. A Ford Bronco sat in the driveway, its image shimmering in the heat rising from the driveway. Nothing moved this day but the thermometer. It was barely noon, and the temperature had already topped ninety-eight degrees. The weatherman on the radio said to expect a new record at 104. Jed longed for the fall.
“That’s his car:’ Harry offered. “In the same spot as yesterday.” “Does the place look odd to you?” Jed asked.
Harry studied the front of the house for a moment. “No,” he said. “Looks like a house. What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” Jed mused. “Looks odd to me for some reason. Like nobody’s home. All the blinds are shut.”
“Well, his car’s still in the driveway,” Harry reminded him. “My guess is he’s just trying to keep the place cool.”
Jed said nothing else. He opened the car door and walked silently up the sloping front yard toward the porch. Harry followed, three steps behind. The younger man was startled when Jed withdrew his big nine- millimeter Glock from the high-hip holster under his sportcoat.
“What’s up?” Harry asked as he drew his own weapon.
“Don’t know,” Jed replied, whispering now. “Just doesn’t feel right.”
Standing off to the hinge side of the door, out of harm’s way in case someone blasted bullets through the door, Jed knocked loudly enough to draw a look from the neighbor across the street. There was no response.
