The Killing Kind

13

McKay Pond was still as glass in the chill morning air, a fine mist rising off it and shrouding the reflected image of Mount Washington that graced its surface. It looked to Michael Hendricks like a Japanese landscape painting hung upside down.

Hendricks checked his GPS and nodded slightly to himself. This was the place. He scanned the dense New Hampshire forest, its massive pines so tall they appeared slender from a distance-the needled branches jutting from their trunks suggesting feather more than Christmas tree. But up close, those trunks were big enough that a grown man couldn’t wrap his arms around them if he tried. Hendricks drank in their scent and smiled at the thought that these trees had stood for centuries, yet may never have been seen by anyone but him. And as his eyes followed one trunk upward, spotting the dull glint of fiber-optic camera hidden in its branches some twenty feet off the ground, he hoped they never would be.

Though it was barely six a.m., Hendricks had been up for hours, hiking the length of the perimeter he’d set up around the cabin he called home since he’d returned from Afghanistan-checking pressure sensors, ensuring his cameras were still hidden. It was a ritual of his-something he did whenever he came home from a job. He told himself it was a necessity. That his line of work made him a target. But the truth was far simpler than that. The truth was, those days spent in the woods quieted his mind-allowed him to leave the baggage of the job outside the cabin.

He followed the sight line of the camera to the spot that he was looking for-his footfalls silent on the thick mat of needles below. The cameras were too numerous for him to remember their precise placement; he’d hung two hundred of them in a perimeter that stretched for five square miles of forest. So instead, he relied on GPS and instinct. Locating them was simply a matter of assessing the landscape and determining the optimal placement. Invariably, that was where he’d placed them.

Hendricks was as competent as he was consistent. He had his Uncle Sam to thank for that.

Fresh tracks pitted the earth all around. Fresh, but not human. Hendricks knelt and ran his fingers through the churned up loam.

There. The broken wire, just as he’d suspected.

He removed a tool kit from his belt, and set to work stripping, splicing, and re-shielding the wire. When he was finished, he covered it over with a thin layer of soil and pine needles, and took a big step forward-over the wire.

Instantly, the satellite phone on his belt began to buzz.

Hendricks waved at the camera in the tree, so small as to be nearly invisible. He knew when he returned to the cabin, there’d be a video of that wave waiting for him.

The wire led from the camera to a series of pressure-sensing mats, one of several he had wired up throughout the forest. They didn’t span the full circumference of the perimeter-that would have been too great an undertaking, even for Hendricks-but as far as he was concerned, they didn’t need to. New Hampshire’s White Mountains provided ample protection in the form of treacherous terrain; Hendricks’s sensors simply monitored the most likely ingress points, the spots anyone with any tactical training might identify as attractive for an approach. Step on a mat, activate a camera-and give Hendricks fair warning that you’re coming.

In the three and a half years he’d been living out in Evie’s abandoned family cabin, though, any protection the system afforded was merely psychological. All his cameras ever captured were wildlife. Take today, for example: a mother moose and calf strolling through the woods set off the camera overhead, then bolted suddenly just before the feed cut out. The scene was worrisome enough to Hendricks that he packed a firearm for the hike- something had startled them into flight, after all-but it appeared his worry was unfounded. The tracks suggested they’d been startled by a black bear, and the absence of blood at the scene indicated they’d parted ways without incident.

The thought pleased Hendricks. He’d never been much of a hunter. He didn’t care to see animals suffer.

Hendricks’s stomach grumbled. He realized he’d been up for hours without food, that he’d hiked for miles without pause. Pushing himself a little harder than was typical. Usually, his post-job rounds were leisurely, leaving his mind refreshed and his body loose, relaxed, responsive. Today, though, all he felt was a knot of tension between his shoulders that made breathing an effort. He wondered not altogether idly if that tension was the result of the Long Beach trip proving so unsatisfactory-or if it had more to do with seeing Evie pregnant by another man.

The throbbing in his temples at the latter thought was answer enough to that.

No point dwelling, Hendricks thought. You made your choice-now you have to live with it.

The problem was, in some deep, self-pitying corner of his mind, he didn’t believe it.

Didn’t believe he’d been given any choice.

Or that you could call this living.

The faint ozone scent of the gas burner gave way to smoke and salty rendered fat as the bacon in Hendricks’s skillet began to sizzle. Three rashers-thick-cut, uncured-from a smokehouse just north of Ossipee. Once they were cooked just shy of burnt, he moved them to a paper towel, then cracked a pair of fresh eggs from a local farm stand into the hot grease. Whites bubbled as they hit the bacon fat, and the eggs cooked up quickly. As soon as the whites set, he transferred each egg onto a fat slice of tomato from his plot out back, then set the skillet in the sink to cool.

Hendricks ate standing at the butcher-block kitchen island, washing down his country breakfast with two cups of French-pressed coffee, black. The cabin-a sprawling post-and-beam log home with heart-pine floors, vaulted ceilings, and an open floor plan centered around an enormous stone hearth-was quiet and still, but to Hendricks, every corner of it echoed with memories of his fiancée. The kitchen where she’d fumbled her way through dinner after lousy dinner, playing grown-up and conjuring suspect recipes from the canned food her parents had stocked the cupboards with years before. The sleeping loft where he’d fumbled, too, unskilled and impatient-until her body, once so mysterious and unfamiliar, became an extension of his own, their rhythms synching as they began to understand each other. The hearth they’d huddled around, their only source of light and heat as autumn descended upon the mountains and they found themselves too poor to afford propane for the baseboard heaters or gas for the generator. Even his rusted old Chevy outside seemed to hold on to her scent-impossible, Hendricks knew, but still true enough in his own mind for him to keep it after all these years. He’d stash it in a public parking lot when he left for a job so that it would be waiting to carry him back home, and swap its plates with some other rust bucket’s every couple of months.

Back home. A funny way of thinking about a place he had no rightful claim to-a place owned by two people who hated him so much they disavowed their daughter just for taking up with him. A place where happy memories were just that, a literal lifetime away for the woman who filled them.

Yet it was the only place Hendricks had ever been that felt like home to him.

And so he haunted it as surely as if that roadside bomb had really killed him.

When he was here, surrounded by the echoes of his past, so close yet so out of reach, he could half-believe it had.

“Hey, pal-how’s life at the villa? I hear Tuscany’s lovely this time of year.”

Hendricks smiled. Though Lester was his closest friend-a title that sounded like faint praise from a man who had no others-he hadn’t the faintest idea where Hendricks hung his hat. It was a security measure, like the panic buttons Lester’d rigged up at his bar and his apartment to warn Hendricks via text if anyone came looking for him. They were Lester’s way of ensuring he could never compromise Hendricks’s safety-even under duress. Lester had no intention of harming a member of his unit ever again if it could be avoided, and he’d seen too much during his tours of duty to think he could hold out indefinitely if tortured-he’d seen too many true believers sell out God, country, family, and anything else they could just to end the pain. When pundits tell you torture doesn’t work, they’re only half right. It’s not that people can withstand it. It’s that they’ll tell you literally anything they can-true or not-to make it stop.

Les was not without a sense of humor, though. He teased Michael mercilessly for having a secret lair. Lately, he’d taken to guessing its location when Hendricks called. As Lester’s guesses went, Tuscan villa was kind of tame. Last time, it was an arctic Fortress of Solitude. Time before that: moon base.

“Overrated. All I can get delivered is Italian.”

“Yeah,” said Lester, “sounds awful.”

“It is when you’ve got a hankering for lo mein.”

“Ain’t it a little early in the day for lo mein?” It was barely nine a.m.

“Not in Tuscany, it’s not,” Hendricks said. Lester laughed. “You got anything for me?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Some rumblings about a gig that may prove up your alley. We clear to talk?”

Hendricks tapped a couple keys on his laptop, and a diagnostic screen came up. Lester’d built the laptop for him from scratch. It looked like a cheap off-the-shelf Dell. Its insides were anything but. “Clear on my end. No signs our encryption’s been compromised, and I swept the place for bugs this morning. I assume we’re clean on your end?”

“No, we’re not, on account of I was born just yesterday on the back of a turnip truck.”

“Okay then, smart-ass-what’s the job?”

The target was a guy by the name of Eric Purkhiser. From what Les could gather via the Council’s coded communiqués, Purkhiser was the Atlanta Outfit’s very own IT guy-at least until he took them for a cool twenty-eight mil in some kind of computerized wire-transfer scheme and then turned stoolie for the Feds, decimating their operation in the process.

The bounty for the hit was $25K. The instructions were to make it as public and as messy as possible-and they wanted Purkhiser dead by the weekend. Guess the Atlanta mob wanted to discourage the employees of their so-called legitimate business interests from pilfering the office supplies-or ratting them out to the FBI. They get so touchy about that.

“You get the name of the hitter they’re sending?”

“Yeah. Leonwood. You heard of him?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. See what you can dig up on him- pics, also-knowns, MO.”

“Will do.”

“They know where this Purkhiser is?” Hendricks asked.

“Yup. Missouri.”

“How’d they find him?”

“Dumb fucking luck,” Les said. “As in Purkhiser ain’t got none. Check your e-mail.”

Lester had forwarded along an attachment that proved to be a scan of Purkhiser’s Georgia driver’s license, now long expired, as well as a URL. The URL led to a piece in the Springfield, Missouri, News-Leader, dated yesterday, about a local Gadget Shack employee named Eddie Palomera who’d hit the jackpot playing slots at a Kansas City casino to the tune of over six million dollars. Article asked him how he felt. “Lucky” was his reply.

Only Eddie Palomera of Springfield, Missouri, didn’t seem so lucky to Hendricks. Because Eddie Palomera’s stupid mug was smiling back at him from his computer screen, and he looked an awful lot like a stoolie IT guy named Eric Purkhiser.

Hendricks guessed WITSEC figured if they stashed a guy in a town called Springfield, even if somebody let it slip, the bad guys’d have to search every Springfield in the country before they found the right one.

Then again, maybe Purkhiser was lucky. After all, between what he stole from the Atlanta Outfit and what he won playing the slots, he had enough money to cover Hendricks’s fee sixty times over.

Which meant he might live long enough to spend the rest.