provide it.
“So why are we here now?” Risina asks. “You want the files for yourself?”
“Not the files. File.”
“I don’t understand…”
I’m already ripping through the cabinets, looking for the stack Smoke slid over to me when we were trying to find an anomaly in the contracts over the last couple of years.
I had found an anomaly all right, but I didn’t realize it at the time.
Accidents don’t exist in this business.
“Help me find a file with the name ‘Hepper’ at the top. First name was something like ‘Jan’ or ‘Janet.’”
We start pulling stacks out of the cabinet and blitz through them. I’m only looking at the names on the first page, the names of the targets. If it’s not a match, I toss it to the floor and pick up the next.
None of the names in the initial stack look familiar, must not be ones I fished through the other day. I grab another batch and start flipping pages when Risina pipes up, “Ann Hoeppner?”
“That’s it!” I say, more excitement in my voice than I meant. She hands the dossier over and I open the cover. “Yeah, this is the one.”
Risina blows a stray hair out of her face and places her hands on her hips. “Can you please tell me what this is about?”
I hold up the file. “Accidents don’t exist in this business,” I tell her. And in a few minutes, to prove my point, I’m going to set this office on fire.
In the contract business, hit men employ various methods to kill marks. There are guys who specialize in long-range sniper rifles, guys who work in close with handguns or knives, guys who ply their trade with car bombs or poison or good old-fashioned ropes around the throat. There are experienced vendetta killers who’ll carve up the target or take a piece of the body to bring back to the client, but Archie stayed away from that type of play. Vendetta killers leave an unseemly mess. Mafias like to contract these kinds of hits, but mafias have long memories and hold grudges. Archie knew it’s best not to step into that particular sandbox unless you’re prepared to get dirty.
But Ann Hoeppner’s killer utilized a different method.
Ann was a thirty-eight-year-old college English professor in Columbus, Ohio. She wasn’t married, had no kids, and lived alone just off the Ohio State campus. Normally, college professors don’t make a lot of money, don’t have fancy cars or houses, but Ann had a bank account that would make most Wall Street brokers buckle at the knees. Her grandfather had been a scientist and inventor whose most famous creation was the self-starter for automobile engines. When he retired, he held one-hundred-and-forty-three patents, owned two companies, and was one of the richest men in the Northeast. Ann gave her high school valedictorian speech in a crowded auditorium at the age of eighteen. She told her grandfather’s life story to a bored audience, the exception being the ninety-four-year-old subject of the speech, who watched with moist eyes and rapt attention. He died seven days later.
When an attorney read the contents of the will the following week, everyone in the family was shocked to learn Ann was the sole beneficiary. Even as precocious as she was, the amount of the inheritance humbled and terrified her. Her parents, who had thought the old man senile, were genuinely delighted. Her cousins, aunts, and uncles were not.
Ann spread the money around to her extended family, though open hands were stretched in her direction for the rest of her life. She put most of the windfall into various investments and savings plans and bonds and retirement funds and went about her life as though nothing had happened. Sure, she paid for her tuition, room, board, and books, but never spent extravagantly. She drove a small SUV, lived on campus and ate in the dorm cafeteria. None of her fellow students knew she could have bought and sold the campus ten times over.
She wanted to be an English teacher and nothing, not even the kind of money that determined she’d never have to work a day in her life, deterred Ann from her goal. Nine years of school later, she received not only a doctorate degree but also an offer to teach at her alma mater.
Ann was in her tenth year of teaching when she died. The English building, Denney Hall, is a five-story glass and stone building on Seventeenth Avenue, not far from the football stadium. It has functioning elevators, but Ann liked to walk the stairs to get to her office on the top floor.
There were signs clearly indicating the stairs had recently been mopped, that pedestrians should be cautious, that the surface was slippery. The signs had graphics, too-the familiar yellow triangle accompanied by an exclamation point-“caution” it said. “Cuidado.” But Ann must have had her head in a book (a common occurrence, and a conclusion the police quickly reached). At the landing between the third and fourth floors lay a copy of John Donne’s sonnets. Next to the open book lay Ann Hoeppner, a gash in her forehead and her neck snapped. She wasn’t discovered until an hour after her fall. The death was ruled accidental after a cursory police investigation. Later, her estate was divided amongst her many family members-those same envious aunts, uncles, and cousins-as designated in her will.
But Ann Hoeppner’s death was no more accidental than Smoke’s. Her neck was snapped by a fall, but it didn’t happen the way the police wrote it up, didn’t happen because she had her nose buried in a book, didn’t happen because she failed to pay attention to the caution signs placed at each stairwell entrance. A professional assassin named Spilatro, one of Archie’s contract killers, performed the hit.
Like I said, bagmen use different methods to kill their marks, and Spilatro has a rare specialty: he makes his kills look like accidents. There has to be a direct line between this man’s specialty and the way Smoke just died. Has to be. And I’m willing to bet you can connect the dots from Ann’s file to Archie’s abduction to the note that summoned me out of hiding.
“According to this, Archie used Spilatro three other times. Let’s find those files and hustle out of here.”
We locate two of the three before a large man enters the office through the front door. I have my Glock up and pointed his way before he can step another inch into the room. He keeps his hands in his pockets and meets my stare with blank eyes.
“Who’re you?” he asks, his face unreadable.
“Nobody.”
“Well, Nobody, what’re you doing rifling through the boss’s stuff?”
“The boss is gone.”
He greets this news with the same disaffected expression. His eyes flit to Risina, but I won’t look her way.
“You gonna put that gun down?”
“No.”
He nods now, sniffs a few times. Despite his attempt to play it cool, I take the sniffs for what they are, a nervous tic.
“I think you and your lady friend best vacate.”
“I think you better watch your fucking mouth.”
Those words come from Risina, not me. Now I tilt my head around to look at her, and for the first time I see she has her pistol up too. I expect to see anxiousness on her face, but I see that she’s sporting a half smile instead. It’s unnerving for me; I have no doubt it’s unsettling for the man staring down the barrel.
Slowly, he takes his empty hands out of his pockets and shows them to her…
“I apologize, ma’am…” he’s saying, but she doesn’t let him finish, interrupting-
“My friend and I are going to find the last thing we came to find and then you’ll never see us again. Now you can do one of three things
… you can sit in the corner and watch us until we go, you can leave and never come back, or you can make a play and see what happens. It’s up to you.”
I’ll be damned if I don’t break into a smile. The big man looks at her one more time, back at me, and then makes his decision.
“Don’t shoot me in the back on the way out the door.”
“Get the hell out of here.” Risina waves at the exit with the barrel of her gun. The man takes a last look at us, then nods, turns, and doesn’t look back.
As soon as he’s gone, Risina blows out a deep breath, like a kettle holding the pressure at bay as long as it can before it finally releases steam. When I look over at her, she ignores me and resumes her search for the files. I can see her hands shaking as she sorts through the stack.
