Kill Code Page 6

  “I found something that might help me figure out who is trying to kill me.”

  ###

  While she had been waiting for Leo to get done puttering around with his rifle, she had tried to call Patrick to find out the complete details on what he had found out. But, for some reason, he didn't answer and his voicemail box was full. Damn Luddites she thought—he had probably forgotten his cell phone at the office again. There was no reason not to be constantly connected to the rest of the world. Patrick was of the old school of accounting and running a business, still using green accounting paper to help run the business. While computers did occasionally fail, with a good back up, you wouldn't lose any work.

  So she was going to have to physically access the data rather than remotely. She wondered how this was going to fit into the grand scheme of things.

  Her allergies were starting to kick in with all the grass and trees around here and she could feel the pangs of hunger starting to gnaw at her stomach.

  Maybe Leo was almost done.

  She watched him fire again, the rifle slamming into his shoulder. That had to hurt. He was a spooky character and she wondered why the heck he was helping her, if that's what he was doing.

  When he looked up at her, she felt his sky-blue eyes pierce right into her soul, taking her measure—for what, she wasn't sure, but it still was unsettling.

  With her rather inexpert help, she helped Leo repack and load all of his equipment back into the truck. Everything had a specific place it needed to be put in and in a certain order. She figured that she was slowing Leo down more than she was helping.

  When the loading was almost done, he asked, “Can I see your pistol?”

  Wondering what he was doing, she retrieved it from her case. Carefully pointing it away from her, he dropped the metal thing out that held the bullets and pulled back the slide, kicking out a bullet. Using his thumb, he flipped the other bullets out of the clip and put them into a plastic bag. Then he put the pistol in a case.

  “I'm going to teach you how to shoot. We need to get some more ammunition first. I think there is an indoor range in Denver we can go to for you to learn.”

  “Why? I hate guns.”

  “That may be the case, but I can't do this alone. And you need to be able to defend yourself.”

  “What about you and your rifle?”

  “That won't do us much good as it's a single shot target rifle. It's very specialized, heavy and difficult to conceal. Besides, point blank range on it is like three hundred yards—any closer and I won't be able to use the scope as the magnification is too great.”

  “I'm hungry.” It came out like she was a pouting school girl, but it was true.

  Leo nodded.

  “Okay. But on the way back into town, you need to tell me what you found out about who is trying to kill you and why.”

  ###

  Brian Case walked to out to his pride and joy, a 2004 Cadillac CTS-V. It's highly polished sheen reflected not only the vehicle, but the owner. In a complex world, all things can be simplified. This was also reflected in Case's job, a building inspector for the City of Denver. Despite the morass of rules and regulations, it was the gray areas that he did his best work in; the opaque, tangled and confusing building regulations and rules. Brian brought order to those rules, and he knew that his reputation was one of being a hard-ass. He didn't care. The citizens of Denver were much safer due to his efforts. He was senior enough in the Inspection's Division that he was untouchable. He felt it no matter the heartache he brought to his bosses and co-workers, including threats and lawsuits.

  The car was as immaculate on the inside as it was out. The dash gleamed and the leather seats had been treated with softener to the point where they were more warm and comforting like that of a mother's embrace.

  Looking down, he saw a spot of dirt on the mat. How did that get there? He never wore his work boots in the car and kept a change of clothing and shoes in his work locker so as to not to take a chance at messing up his car.

  It wasn't a big problem—it had been three weeks since he had shampooed the carpets in the car anyway, so it was probably due for it again. He didn't have any plans for this evening, so that would work nicely.

  He noted the click of the car locks as he put the key in the ignition. That was something different—it was only supposed to lock when he got the car up to twenty miles per hour. Something he'd have to call the dealership about tomorrow. Yes, he had his oil changed at the exact intervals, paid extra for synthetic and the tire pressure was always within two PSI of what the manufacturer recommended. The dealer hated to see him coming, but his money was good. And, after a particularly vehement argument about his last vehicle and some of its problems, threatening to have their facility shut down due to building code and fire violations, helped them see things his way. He had power and knew how to wield it with scalpel-like precision, or ax-like—whatever the situation called for.

  He turned the key. There was a loud click and then the smell of something burning. What the hell? It seemed like it was coming from under the dash, on the passenger side.

  Then he realized that the car was on fire. He yanked at the door handle. It didn't open. He pulled and pulled on it until it came free in his hand. The car filled with smoke and fire licked at his legs.

  Pounding on the unyielding windows, they didn't give either. The smell of cooking meat and horrific pain threatened to overwhelm his senses. He screamed, his lungs searing from the choking smoke in the burning interior. Great pain. Then nothing but blackness.

  Chapter 8

  FBI Special Agent Jeff Silver looked into the open trunk. Whoever had cooked this victim had done a very good job. He could see there wasn't much left except for burnt meat with some white bones showing through. He'd been called in on his day off to deal with this crispy critter that the fire department had found.

  The Albuquerque Police had pitched the case towards the FBI when they determined that the cause of the fire had probably been an incendiary device. In the days after 9/11, anything like someone cooked in their trunk with explosives or other restricted materials could be part of a larger terrorist plot.

  Jeff figured that it was just an excuse to write the case off the police department books—it was going to be difficult to even determine an ID on the victim, much less track down who had done it and why.

  In one sense, he could understand where they were coming from, Albuquerque was crime ridden enough to keep the police department more than busy, why add a who-done-it to the mix? The FBI had more resources and didn't have to answer to the taxpayers for unsolved cases.

  On the other side, it was more crap duty for a junior agent. There were terrorists, home-grown and otherwise, everywhere if you read the daily briefs. Two years out of college with an accounting degree and a minor in Spanish—not that he had any interest in accounting. It was just something to do to get a degree since his old man—God rot his twisted soul—had paid for college, with the idea that he would take over the Mickey Mouse tax firm that had been in the family for years. Jeff hadn't minded being recruited by the FBI in his senior year. The recruiter had promised more excitement than doing tax returns for the rest of his life in Detroit. When the posting for New Mexico had been offered, he had jumped at it, looking to get away from the horrid winters.

  It had been a major mistake. He got all the shit investigations not wanted by anyone else in the office and was lambasted by the higher ups when he couldn't produce the desired results. Hell, most of the cases were unsolvable—and this looked to be another one.

  The smell was something he knew he'd never forget—sweet, burnt meat, nauseating and it made the hair on the back of his sweaty neck stand up on end. In the heat of the summer sun, it was enough to make a maggot gag, though there were flies buzzing around the body in the trunk.

  It barely looked human. Leg bones looked to be sticking out of one end and what might be a charred skull at the other. And animals didn't wear shoes.


  He glanced around where the car was parked, in a semi-abandoned industrial park. It had burnt itself out, without anyone noticing. A garbage truck driving by had noticed the burnt-out hulk and called the police. The patrolman who had pried the trunk open, against all crime scene procedures, would never make that mistake again. The smell of his vomit behind the car added a sour taste to the sense slamming odor.

  The fire had been so intense that it melted the rear license plate into unrecognizable metal. But the front plate was intact and had come back registered to a rental car company. The company would be faxing over the information that they had on the renter.

  He couldn't imagine what caused this amount of heat and fire. He could see that part of the frame under the trunk had melted and the tires were charred and flattened.

  Stepping back, he motioned to the flat bed truck driver to do the best he could to roll the remains of the vehicle to the crime lab where they would attempt to remove the body and start trying to identify it.

  That was going to be the tough part—what burned hot enough to destroy tooth enamel? The fingers had also received similar attention.

  Jeff wondered if this was an isolated incident or was a sign of something much bigger and worse to come.

  ###

  Leo wondered about the repercussions of the information that Jackie revealed. That they were going to have to make a trip back to her office was maybe something he could exploit. Could he use her as bait to lure the people trying to kill them?

  As hard as Leo thought he could be, hell, he used to kill people for money, it wasn't something he felt that he could do. He liked her. There was a naivete about her, hardened by something that he couldn't place. Maybe it was the recent loss of her boyfriend? Or was it that she had almost been killed today? More things to think about when he should be figuring the angles on how to keep from getting killed.

  Besides, she was cute. Not stunning, but she could be that way if she wore something besides her almost shapeless clothing and no makeup. Though he wasn't much better himself, pretty much having slept in his clothes last night, not shaving and spending several hours shooting. He agreed with Jackie about needing to get something to eat. His shooting session had taken a great deal out of him, besides the pounding he took from the brutal recoil. It took one hundred ten percent concentration to pull off the almost perfect shot and that translated into tiredness deep down into his soul—much more than physical and mental.

  She broke into his thoughts by saying, “I still don't want to learn how to shoot.”

  Leo, trying to maneuver through rush hour traffic, couldn't answer for a few minutes. Then he said, “You came very close to being killed today. It was the same for me two days ago. These people won't stop until they kill us both. But I suspect that our deaths are part of something a great deal larger.”

  “Why?”

  “If Nathan emptied out your accounts, that money went somewhere. And, while I have been out of the killing business for a while, the price of a hit probably hasn't grown that much in the intervening years. With the amounts you are talking about, you could pay to have a bunch of people killed.”

  He found it easy to talk to her about what he had done. It wasn't something that he had ever done—with anyone, including himself. When he had walked away from assassination, he thought he had closed that door on his life forever. He would have been happy to live out his days dealing with coin dinks. His days spent on the range with a rifle and the targets dancing in the scope influenced by humidity and wind. Forever on the quest to find the perfect rifle, bullet and load.

  All he wanted was to get back to that life. But now that he was involved in the hunt, the old, long forgotten thrill had come back. He knew it was intoxicating and could suck him back into the evilness. He would do only what was necessary to get his life back and nothing more. There had been too many bodies over the years and too many years filled with nightmares to get back into the killing game.

  “Like how many?” she asked.

  “They offered me a third of what I had been getting. Based on that and the money missing, whoever is pulling the strings could kill at least a hundred people.”

  “Are we talking individual hits or like a mass murder?”

  “I'm figuring singles. Multiple killings are another way of thinking and doing altogether.”

  “How many hit men would it take to do this?”

  He maneuvered around a car broken down on the side of the road. It was an early model Ford Escort, also known by people who had ever owned one as “Metal Roadkill.” The hood was up and no one was around.

  Considering what she had asked, “I don't know. Any large organization would show up on someone's radar, somewhere. Heck, even getting into contact with the right people would be difficult.”

  “How'd they get in touch with you?”

  “Most recently, one on one. But that isn't practical for the numbers we are talking about. It might work if you are only dealing with a few extremely high-value, high-risk targets. But, with those kinds of targets, the best practice is to have as little contact with the assassin as possible. If something goes bad, the cops and feds will then be able to justify the lone-nut-job scenario.”

  She seemed to consider this and then said, “You said most recently, how about when you did it however many years ago?”

  “The US mail. When the job was completed, you received a wire transfer of funds to the bank account of your choice. It was done so anonymously that I'm not even sure of the name of the place I was working for. It might have been for the government as far as I know—and given my reading, it probably was. But, then again, they might have been subcontractors. Or another organization with a mandate to enact political change. Who the heck knows.”

  Jackie was quiet for several minutes.

  This was fine with Leo. He probably already said way too much. It was something completely outside his realm of experience to have someone to confide in. Even more unsettling was that the person he was talking to was female—and attractive.

  The people that he dealt with on a regular basis were overwhelmingly male, and could only get a date if they paid good money for it. Yes, there were exceptions to the rule. Leo was probably worth almost a million dollars in hard, tangible assets—gold, silver, precious coins and outright cash. But he didn't care for a flashy lifestyle and lived as simply as he could. His true passion was shooting. Everything else in life was merely something to get him to that point. Yes, he did have an interest in coins, but how many 1912 S Mercury dimes in MS-65+ could anyone have? And who the hell would care, anyway? Yes, there were some coins that were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and he had even owned some of them, but did it matter to the coin? The coins themselves had seen history, some since man had started forming precious metals into easily tradeable forms. But they didn't speak to Leo any more—their stories, past and future, no longer had much interest to him. They were reduced to simple commodities, not the treasures that had transported him to different times and places. As Rob Gates once said, “At some point, it's just stuff.”

  This change in his life may have been sad, but he didn't have time to mourn that passing—he was in the fight for his life.

  ###

  Patrick Lackey held the key to his car in his hand, juggling a bag of groceries in his other, loaded with comfort food—a thick and juicy Porterhouse steak, a decent Chianti, a pre-made salad and some red potatoes. It had been a long and difficult day. But he felt a great satisfaction like he hadn't in a while and felt he deserved his well-earned treats.

  He had a good idea where the assets of the company disappeared to. It had been tricky and complex to figure it out, and in that, he felt akin to Sherlock Holmes, who said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

  It had been like that. Not that Jackie would appreciate his efforts. Though she was a great deal better at acknowledging his skills than Nathan had ever been. That bastard's dea
th hadn't been painful enough for him.

  They had been roommates in college. He was an accounting geek and Nathan had been a computer geek. It would have been perfect except that Nathan had cut a wide swath through the female population of the small university, including a couple of his professors. He always had the gift of gab—being able to talk to almost anyone at any level, including women out of their panties.

  He remembered numerous times when he had to sit in the hallway for hours, sometimes, waiting for Nathan to finish up 'entertaining' some coed or another. At least it was reasonably quiet; no one bothered him to help them with their homework—which is what would have happened if he had gone to the dormitory lounge.

  They had gone their separate ways, thank God, after college. Nathan had gone off to start a computer software company and he had joined an accounting firm. It was decent work, but mind numbing—hundreds of hours for weeks on end. As the junior, he was expected to produce at inhuman levels. The money had also been pathetic—less than minimum wage at the number of hours expected. The only hope for salvation would be if one of the more senior partners croaked, and since they had all the time off they needed to work out in the gym, that wasn't very likely.

  He was also expected to bring in new clients. Yes, the partners got all the money generated, but they promised that he would eventually have a chance to buy into the partnership—in say, ten or twenty years.

  One night, he was trying to drown his sorrows at a neighborhood hangout. All he could afford, given his slave wage, student loans and the need to eat and put gas in his falling apart jalopy, was to dink cheap beer in this dive. He was approached by a stunning blonde, dressed in a low cut but classy dress. As Nathan would have commented, “She was stacked, racked and ready to go.”

  She bought the next round of drinks and sat down to talk. Dorothy was her name and the smooth silkiness of her voice caused him to melt inside. He would have given everything to be able to pull a Nathan on her, but she didn't seem to be that sort of person.