The Killing Kind

37

Saturday afternoon, and the New York Thruway was slow going. It seemed to Hendricks as though the entire stretch from Syracuse to Albany was being paved. The roadway was reduced to one grooved lane for miles on end. Hendricks rolled along at twenty miles an hour, cursing the traffic. At this rate, it would be midnight before he got home.

He planned to spend the night at his cabin and head to Portland in the morning. He figured hunting this guy could wait a day, at least-and the way his last forty-eight hours had gone, Hendricks thought he’d earned a little peace and quiet.

Traffic moved at a crawl. Hendricks played chicken with the Civic’s gas gauge, watching the needle tip toward E and hoping he’d make it to a gas station. The thruway was bumper-to-bumper as far as he could see in both directions.

He coasted into the Guilderland Plaza five minutes after the indicator light came on. The electronic road sign in the median told him he had five more miles of construction to look forward to.

Hendricks was gassing up the Civic when his burner phone vibrated in his pocket-one short burst, signaling a text. He fished it out of his pocket with his free hand.

The phone’s screen read 911.

It was the message triggered by the panic button behind Lester’s bar.

A helpless dread gripped Hendricks. Lester was in trouble, and here he was five fucking hours away.

He climbed back into the Civic and eyed the backup on the thruway. Saw cars trying to leave the plaza’s parking lot idling as they waited for the chance to merge. Knew he’d go out of his mind sitting in traffic like that for the next five miles.

At the far end of the parking lot, there was a metal gate separating the plaza’s lot from the one its employees used, there to keep people on the toll road from leaving without paying. It was a risk. He could be seen. Reported. Chased. Arrested. And if that happened, Lester would be on his own.

With gritted teeth, he jerked the wheel toward the gate and hit the gas.

The gate slammed open, and he drove through-leaving the traffic jam behind and disappearing down the narrow access road.

Engelmann worked on Lester quietly and without urgency. His expression was one of both care and ecstasy-a master composer conducting his opus before a rapt audience of one. He’d told Lester at the outset that Lester was going to tell Engelmann everything there was to know about Hendricks. It wasn’t a question, Lester noted at the time, but in the agonizing hours that followed, it was as close as Engelmann ever came to asking one.

Lester, unlike Engelmann, was far from quiet. He screamed. He cried. He begged. He pleaded. Most were muffled by his makeshift gag-the lemon, at first, though he bit through it within the hour, at which point Engelmann replaced it with his own belt.

Not that Lester’s protestations mattered much. The Bait Shop was a sturdy old brick building, made to withstand Maine’s hard winters. The bar next door played host to a reggae band most Saturdays, today included. And once the dinner hour hit, the Old Port came alive, its streets full of tourists, buskers, and barhoppers. Anyone who heard Lester’s cries over the din failed to take notice.

Lester told himself all he had to do was stay strong. That Engelmann didn’t know about the panic button, or hadn’t realized Lester’d triggered it. If he could hold out long enough, Michael would come for him-even though Lester always told him if he ever got that message, he should run.

Mikey was still a soldier at heart-he’d never leave a man behind.

That thought carried him through the first excruciating hour. Taunted him for half the second. But eventually, Lester realized Michael would not come soon enough, so he began to root for Engelmann to get carried away and kill him inadvertently.

For a time, that grim strand of hope sustained him. But Engelmann was talented. Exacting. Creative. And Lester, for all his resolve, was no match for him. There was no shame in it. No betrayal. There’s not a man alive who wouldn’t sell out his own mother after two hours of Engelmann’s ministrations. Most wouldn’t last five minutes.

As the sun glinted orange off the western faces of the low-slung Portland skyline, Lester Meyers began to talk.