The Devil's bounty

Sixty-six

Hector parked around the corner and made a final check of the address. He should have been happy. For one, he was alive, not chopped into pieces in the bathtub of a rent-by-the-hour motel at the edge of town. For another he was back to his regular job, working as a sicario. He had been granted something rarely afforded by his boss: a chance to redeem himself. Two weeks ago, he would have welcomed it, and in some way he still did. A man doing a job he felt ill-suited to couldn’t be happy and Hector was a man who had defined himself, like so many men, by his work. He enjoyed the fact that he was useful and that his work was valued. But ever since the American girl’s kidnap something in him had changed.

Walking up to the entrance of the apartment building, he tried to put this shift in his thinking to one side. Second chances in his world were a rarity.

He pressed the buzzer above the one he needed. I have a chance to redeem myself, he thought. A woman answered, and he muttered something about delivering a parcel to one of the other apartments. He waited. A few seconds later a window opened above him. He kept looking straight ahead so that all she caught was the top of his navy blue baseball cap. She called down and buzzed him inside.

There were four apartments on each floor, two at the front and two at the back. The one he was looking for was on the front right-hand side if you faced the building from the street. He knew his target was there because he had seen her a few minutes before, watering the plants on the tiny balcony.

He rested his hand on the balustrade at the bottom of the staircase and started to make his way up. After only one flight, he was sweating. It wasn’t hot but the stairwell was stuffy and he’d had to wear a jacket, plus he was carrying the big brown leather bag that usually accompanied him on a job like this. It held his special knives. For the most part there were two broad types of job. In the first they wanted the person dead quickly with the minimum of fuss. This one was of the second type, in which they wished to send a message. Message killings were messy.

On the landing, he stopped to catch his breath. That had been the other problem with babysitting Charlie Mendez. All the sitting around had left him out of shape. Once this job was done, he would change that with a few workouts. He had a friend with a boxing gym in the south of the city. He would go there. He made it a promise to himself. It took more than strength to kill someone, it took stamina as well. People fought, and the ones you least expected to be a problem were often the most difficult to kill.

He took the second flight at a steadier pace. This time he didn’t stop on the landing but kept going. He stayed out of sight of the door and took a moment to compose himself. It was only when he looked over that he saw it was already ajar. Immediately, he was on guard.

He glanced around and saw that the apartment door diagonally opposite was also open. He could hear women’s voices. He tuned into the conversation. One woman was saying how she had to go out of town and would the other take a key.

Hector looked at the two chains dangling by the door and the two deadbolts. He knew better than to hesitate. He walked into the apartment, and pulled the door back to the position it had been in when he had arrived.

Inside, the apartment was neat. A damp towel lay over a stool next to the kitchen counter. He didn’t want the woman screaming if she saw him as soon as she walked in so he decided to wait in the bathroom. Locks and chains worked in two ways: when he heard the apartment door close and the chains go in he would emerge. He crossed to an iPod docking station. The woman’s iPod was already in it. He cued up a track, hit pause and lifted the volume by five or six notches. He found the small white remote control for it on a table next to the couch and picked it up. The music would cover him long enough to place the tape around her mouth. She would fight, he knew that for sure. A woman like her knew where this would end.

The remote in one hand, he retreated to the bathroom. The floor was still wet around a white mat laid on the floor and condensation fogged the mirror. He was glad. He didn’t enjoy looking at himself. He sat down on the toilet and waited for the woman to return.