that looks like it was thrown into place with no more planning than a child scattering his blocks. This one isn’t hard to find; the man on the other end of the pay phone in Vegas gave me impeccable directions.
I find a discreet parking lot and roll my beige sedan to a stop. Before I left Vegas, I jettisoned the SUV at McCarran and rented a new car, a Taurus. Through my windshield, I have a view of the only door on the outside of the industrial building, a steel door, solid, with an electronic keypad affixed to the adjacent wall. As an assassin, I have learned about strike moments, about vulnerability, about timing. A fortified target is the most difficult to take down, like Richard Levine holed up in his mansion. A supplier like the one I wish to speak to, like the one I am currently waiting to see, will work out of a bunker, well protected, well guarded, difficult to assault. Which is why I will not attempt to enter the industrial building, the outside of which is just a facade for a fortress. Rather, I’ll lie in wait for as long as it takes.
A woman wearing a skullcap and wire-framed glasses emerges from behind the door several hours later. There is only one car in the parking lot, a vintage Mustang painted blue. She climbs inside, pulls the car out of the parking lot, and heads northwest, toward the mountains. She made a mistake choosing a flashy car; it’s as easy to follow as if it had a red light on top. I don’t know if she is going home, or meeting someone, or stopping at a grocery store, but it doesn’t matter; at some point this evening she will be alone, and I will be ready.
It doesn’t take long. The woman in the skullcap pulls into a Caribou Coffee parking lot, cuts her engine, and steps out of the car to go inside. Her guard is down; my guess is she hasn’t been in the supplier business long and has yet to understand the need for caution. When she exits the place holding a paper cup emitting steam, I am lying in wait.
“Tara?”
She jumps, startled, then searches my face, looking for recognition. “Yes?”
“I need you to come with me.”
A thousand thoughts sweep like storm clouds across her face, all of them dark. I see her eyes dart to the coffee in her right hand, the car keys in her left, and then back to me, sizing me up.
“I suppose you’ll be ready if I try to burn you or put these keys in your face?”
“Yes.”
“Is this about some business I did?”
“Do you want to have this conversation in a parking lot?”
She looks at me, processing the question, and then shakes her head. “What about my car?”
“You should think about driving something less colorful.”
HAP is less than a mile away. He is planning on meeting Tara in thirty minutes to make the exchange, a new gun for old money. He doesn’t realize I will be the one meeting him, but that doesn’t make him any less of a threat. Assassins are wary by nature, distrustful by training. He might’ve picked up on something in her voice, a slight rise in inflection letting him know this call was being made under duress, that there was literally a gun to her head. She might have slipped him a code word in the conversation, something agreed upon at an earlier date, a word that is seemingly innocuous, but would signal the true nature of the night’s exchange. I think she played it perfectly, innocently, but I’m not Hap on the other end of the line, and I’m not about to approach this confrontation lightly.
I have chosen the cemetery for the exchange, the place I passed on the way to Tara’s office. It is after midnight and darker than I expected; the moon is only a fingernail scratching at the night sky. I have been here for hours, adjusting my eyes to the darkness. Not much of an advantage, but sometimes you only need the scales to tip the slightest in your favor to make your kill. I’m not worried about Tara trying to contact Hap and let him know about the trap; she won’t be doing much talking for at least a month after what I did to her.
The cemetery is colder at night than I anticipated; the proximity to the mountains brings in a chill wind that seems to permeate right into my skin. The grave markers are small and spread out in neat rows, offering little protection from the breeze. I crouch on the cold earth, my back to a stone marker that reads: MICHAEL MATHESON, 1970-1979, as I watch the front entrance warily, two pistols cocked and loaded, folded into my lap. Hap has lived a few years longer than the boy on whose grave I sit, but I plan on having him join Michael Matheson tonight.
What I don’t plan on, what I haven’t foreseen, is that Hap is working this job as a tandem sweep. I know from Pooley that three shooters were hired to take out Abe Mann at his party’s convention in a little less than a month. What I don’t know, not for the next two minutes at least, is that two of them—Miguel Cortega and Hap Blowenfeld—are working this job together.
I am the odd man out, it seems.
CHAPTER 11
I am bleeding in a cemetery, a fitting place, as though the land itself is beckoning to cover me up like it has so many others. I have two holes in me, one where the bullet entered my side and shattered my rib, and a second where it exited my back. Pools of gore are soaking my shirt and I’ll admit I’m a little worried about the blood loss. I am not afraid I will die from this wound, not yet at least, but I am concerned about losing consciousness before I get a chance to take out the second shooter. I’m pretty sure I dropped one of them, at least I think I did. Fuck, I don’t know for sure. I am suddenly very tired, like my eyes are filled with sand.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been shot while working a job.
IT was my seventh assignment with Pooley. We had settled into a comfortable rhythm; he proved intuitive at setting up a network of contacts and contracts, and resourceful at finding the information I needed to execute my job. He was right. He
One client was particularly impressed. I had killed for her recently—a New York job—a Wall Street trader who must’ve bought when he should’ve sold. The man had hired a private security firm for protection, but they were sloppy and unprofessional.
Pooley showed up a few weeks after the mark was found in pieces scattered across the George Washington Bridge.
“That job was a big one, Columbus. Our client . . . she’s a whale amongst fishes . . . a leading player on the acquiring market.”
“Good . . . I don’t want you to have to work so hard.”
He smiled. “I was thinking I might take a trip. Get out and see the world.”
“You deserve a break.”
“I’m not going on vacation. This is a business trip.”
“Where to?”
“Italy.”
I looked at him skeptically.
“I told you . . . that last client was impressed. She wants to hire you again. Immediately.”
“The mark is overseas?”
“Yeah. I need a month to put the file together. Then you have six weeks to do what you do. She has a specific date she wants you to make the kill. June sixth. In the dead of night.”
“She’ll pay for the specificity?”
“It’s taken care of.”
I used the four weeks to get my mind right, as Vespucci had taught me. I fell into a routine; there was comfort in rigidity. I worked out hard, running five miles in the mornings, then several hours reading, flipping back and forth between contemporaries and classics: Wolfe and Mailer and Updike and Steinbeck
