The Last Family

14

The Martin Fletcher who sat alone in a Bourbon street strip club, nursing a drink, was nothing like the cocky lad with ears like open car doors. That young man was long gone. A lot of the old Martin had been incinerated in an oven behind a clinic in Madrid along with the blood-soaked sponges, disposable dressings, and slivers of bone and tissue. Martin Fletcher’s old face had been erased, and an artist in a bloody white smock had designed him a new one that bore no resemblance to its predecessor. Only three things about Martin were unchanged: he had the same mother, the same fingerprints, and exactly the same dark thoughts.

He hadn’t altered his fingerprints because he didn’t plan to be fingerprinted. Ever. Altered prints would send an immediate alarm through the system. Because of his many identities it was doubtful that he would ever be placed in jail long enough to have his prints run. If he was apprehended while committing a murder or selling a bomb or anything of like seriousness, he would kill to escape or he would die. Let them try. Martin Fletcher was not of a mind to be caged ever again, period. In any case there was no real resemblance between the man who sat at the small table in Big Daddy’s Strip Club and the man who had escaped from prison.

Martin looked around and was comforted that there were so few people in the place. The girl on stage, a thin redhead with the slightest hint of a pooch belly, was dancing to an old rock-and-roll number. Her bare breasts were medium-sized, and the nipples were almost certainly accented with rouge. She did her steps and moves on a stage that was an island in the center of the space. The bar circled the stage and in effect acted as a moat to separate the performers from the customers. The forty tables were scattered about in a horseshoe around the bar. The music was loud and had the scratchy quality of a poor recording robbed from vinyl disks. The girl might have been standing behind a cosmetics counter somewhere for all the emotion she was showing.

Martin Fletcher shifted in his chair, conscious of the padded clothes that hid his well-maintained muscles. He had always loved disguises, a holdover from his days of playing masquerade to entertain himself. Halloween had been his favorite. As a child he’d spent months preparing for the holiday. The old Martin Fletcher had been five foot ten, but lifts could make the new Martin six feet tall in a second. Often Martin walked with a limp aided by the difference in height of the soles of his shoes. Sometimes he carried a small knife, the blade filmed with a potassium cyanide grease. Any cut, no matter how small, would bring unconsciousness and death in seconds. Martin Fletcher was an intimate of death. He had looked at it from angles most people could never imagine possible.

Martin’s perfect white teeth could be covered by one of several prosthetic sets he owned-from rotten and broken to discolored and overlapping. He owned contact lenses in four colors and a dozen different wigs and facial-hair rigs. He had a suitcase full of stage makeup and latex for molding complex masks. Everything in the kit was strictly first-class, Hollywood quality.

During the months he had studied Joe McLean’s family, he had been Alex Potter, a traveling salesman who wore Brooks Brothers suits, drove a Lexus, lived in a condominium three blocks from Joe McLean’s home, and listened to classical music.

In Deerfield Beach, while he had stalked the Greers, he had endured country music, lived three months in a narrow house trailer, and driven a Jeep Cherokee with a great circle of the bronze-colored paint peeling off the hood. He had made friends with her new husband, a witless cop, and had had a few meals with them. He had started an affair with her easily because her cop was not much in bed. He could have killed them any way he chose. He liked the idea of water, and drowning her and her son had turned out to be a breeze. After the woman and child were down, he had moved on to Nashville.

In Nashville, during the time he had studied Rainey Lee’s family, he had worked for an alarm company as a salesman-technician and had spent almost a year designing alarm systems. As Wendell Jackson of ADC, he had met with Doris Lee and, under the guise of trying to sell her an updated alarm system, had gotten a look at her existing security and had been able to plant the bugs in the bedroom.

Martin Fletcher was worth three and a half million dollars. That was enough money to live out his life in comfort. He had a million dollars invested in Latin institutions, two million in Spain, and a half million spread around in hiding holes. There was also a hundred thousand and change his mother was holding for him. He had enough to last him if he lived to be seventy, though he doubted he would ever get close to that age.

Death was no big deal to Martin Fletcher, because old age held no attraction. He believed that he could survive in any world beyond this one, and the closer that world was to the classical image of hell, the better he figured he would do.

Martin ate healthy foods, drank fruit juices, and exercised for three hours every other day. On the off days he ran, often through the woods, staying off the beaten path. He did that so that if he ever had to escape through unfamiliar territory, he could move like a scared rabbit, depending on his reflexes to get him over logs or whatever. It was reflexes and timing that mattered in all things, especially in killing.

Martin took amphetamines to maintain his edge, and like a cat, he never slept the same hours two days in a row, nor for more than two or three hours at a time. He spent the majority of his waking hours staying ahead of the people he knew had been hunting him, knew because he had outsmarted them.

He was haunted by the fact that his mother was his one missing piece of armor plating-and if the right bowman caught sight of the spot, a single well-aimed arrow would finish him. And he knew that they knew. He was, however, confident that he had devised a plan that no one could anticipate. He had sworn to her that he would see her at least once a year, and he never broke a vow.

“Promise, Marty? Each year until I’m dead?” she’d pleaded.

“I promise, Mother,” he’d replied. “I swear it. Until you are dead and gone.”

He had maintained a relationship with some of the cocaine-cartel honchos, and it had always been good for some traveling cash for a hit here, a bomb delivered there, or information he could buy and resell. Martin had been able to make a few hundred thousand a year on contract hits alone. He kept twenty to thirty thousand in ready cash for emergencies, but he used a lot of money. Too much.

Now so much was happening at once. Perez, a man who had made use of his services for two decades, was double-crossing him. Martin understood what the cartel thought-that he was on the run and in hiding and could be put off. Martin believed that the deal he was owed for had been negotiated in good faith and the Colombian had reneged. It wasn’t the money, though he wanted it. He could not allow anyone to stiff him, or he was through. The money, which was to have been delivered to a numbered account, hadn’t arrived. Lallo Estevez, the cartel’s American-based money collector, who moved cocaine funds through his network of companies, had been making excuses over the telephone. Martin had to let other potential clients know that business was business and collections had to be made. Normally he would have killed the Colombian in his jungle hideout to make the point, but he couldn’t exactly run all over Central America beating the foliage, and the debtors knew it.

Lallo had always been a friend to him, having smuggled him into Spain with forged papers. Things change. Martin planned to see Lallo face-to-face and try to reason with him.

Martin’s thought train was derailed by a loud voice a few tables away, where three men, probably tourists from some place like Ohio, were whooping it up. The dancer, the bored-looking girl with jaws that worked chewing gum to the beat of the music, seemed not to notice the catcalls. Martin watched as a large, muscle-jammed man, almost certainly the bouncer, stepped over to the table and spoke to the men sternly. One of the men handed the bouncer a bill that had been rolled into a small cylinder and patted him on his back as he unrolled it and tucked it into his pocket. As soon as the bouncer was out of sight, the men began making even more noise.

Martin might have finished the drink and left quietly, but the amphetamines had his teeth clenched, and something about the men at the table a few yards away made him angry, sickened him. Not overtly angry-quietly angry. It was a smoldering resentment that seemed almost comfortable to Martin. He needed to do something. Not that he minded that the girl on the stage was being used as a verbal punching bag by these men. Not that they were making lewd suggestions or that they were drunk. The thing that angered him was the fact that they thought their money was a shield. These were men who used their wallets to insulate themselves from their surroundings. They were slumming and felt they could do whatever they chose here. Martin realized that these men were looking down their noses at the girl, the bouncer, the surroundings, and at him. One of the men glanced at Martin and dismissed him with his porcine, intoxicated eyes. Martin was the man seated alone by the wall, dressed in a leisure suit and worn cowboy boots, with hair reminiscent of Elvis. A tourist disguise he had worn all day to wander the French Quarter.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he said to himself as he stood and made a show of finishing his drink and placing the glass on the table. He staggered a bit as he passed the men’s table, and as he lost his balance, he bumped the table, sending the drinking glasses horizontal and the contents cascading over the table’s surface and waterfalling into a man’s lap. The men stood as one, their faces reflecting horror that would give way to anger. Martin staggered again and fell into the largest of the men, then righted himself, apologized, and as the man cursed him loudly, made uncertainly for the door.

“You Hee Haw motherfucker,” the man called after him. “You dress like a goddamn pimp.”

The other two laughed.

At the door Martin turned to see the men taking over another table and raising their hands to get a fresh round.

Martin smiled as the man he had bumped into made a face of alarm, started to stand, and then fell over onto the floor and went into violent convulsions as his friends moved to offer aid. As he watched, Martin carefully slid the small knife from the sleeve of his jacket and put it back into the holster under his right armpit. He was satisfied that the man hadn’t even noticed the scratch of the blade in the excitement of the moment, the chill of the cold drink. Martin wasn’t a man easily impressed, but he was always impressed by the speed of the toxin that coated the tip of his blade.

Martin stepped out into the bright sunlight and slipped on his large sunglasses. Then he strode off down the street, cheerfully whistling a Patsy Cline standard.