Derek Haas - Dark men

He knew the colonel lived in a ratty one-story home near the base and so he rigged the building to collapse on him while he slept.

The plan worked, the roof fell in directly on top of the mark, and Doug even added a weight set in the attic so the death would be instantaneous. Except it wasn’t. The colonel died, yes, but only after two weeks in the hospital in the ICU as doctors fought for his life. Spilatro sweated those two weeks like his own life hung in the balance. Maybe it did.

When he showed up to his fence after the mark finally died, Doug expected to be reprimanded. But Kirschenbaum clapped him on the back and asked him when he’d be ready to go again. It turned out the client was ecstatic with the way it went down, with the way the police and the press declared it to be a sad accident.

Kirschenbaum apologized for not recognizing what Spilatro brought to the table. He understood now the value in Doug’s killing style. He’d like to increase his fee. He was seriously impressed with the innovation. He’d like to step up their relationship. Move Doug to the top of his stable.

Doug was pleased with himself. His father had never once complimented him like this. Nobody had.

So that’s how he got into it and that’s what he did. He hadn’t worked in software sales in years. He was a contract killer, one of the most sought-after Silver Bears in the game. He told Carla how much money they really had, how much he had hidden away in cash, where no bank, no taxman, no creditor could get to it.

“But what about collateral damage?” she asked him. What about the other people who die in these accidents? What about the innocents on the train in Cleveland?

He shrugged. “People die in accidents every day,” he told her. “I don’t care about them and I don’t think about them.”

Then he put his hands out across the table, palms up, imploring her to hold hands, as if those same hands hadn’t been around her throat two hours before.

“I overreacted,” he told her. “But it was such a surprise to see you standing there… it was like a violation, I guess. I really apologize for that.”

“For trying to kill me?” she whispered as she tried her best not to raise her voice.

“That wasn’t me. I promise. I was stressed out and off my game. I was seriously in shock. Nobody’s ever thought to catch me before and I guess I hadn’t prepared for it mentally. I saw you standing down there and an animal part of me took over. But I’m okay now. I see it now.”

Inexplicably, she softened and he pounced on it like a cat with a ball of string. “I love you, honey. That’s never changed. You mean more to me than anything. You tell me to stop, to get out, to drop this business and leave it in the sewer, then I will. We’ll just move away and be done with it.”

And she believed him.

We sat on a stoop on Warren Street for hours while Carla laid it out for me. If she forewent details, I grilled her to fill them in. If I thought she was holding back, I turned up the heat. That laser sight on her chest would disappear for a time, then reappear at various intervals, so it stayed omnipresent in her mind. But I couldn’t have pried half this information from her if she hadn’t wanted to talk, hadn’t needed to talk. I don’t believe most of it, especially the parts where she presents herself in the best possible light. But the kernels of truth are there, and it is those kernels I can make pop.

“And instead of asking him to quit, you joined him?”

“Not at first. God, no. But you’re right, I didn’t ask him to quit either. The money was insane, and the job kept him busy. I just put my hands over my ears, hear no evil, see no evil, you know?”

“So when did you start working tandem?”

She gazes at her feet and that laser pinpoints her chest. Dark circles have formed around her eyes now, and her face has gone pallid, as if unburdening herself of this story has discarded her soul with it. “I don’t know. Years ago. He asked me if I wanted to help him out once and I guess I said yes. He figured he could charge more for two of us. So I ran interference and helped move a mark into place, but I

… I never had the stomach for it.”

“Uh huh.”

She doesn’t bother looking up to see the doubt in my expression, content to leave half-truths hanging in the ether like wisps of gossamer.

“You’ve worked at least one job that I know of on your own since you guys split.”

“I have bills to pay.”

She blows out a long breath.

“Look, you going to let me go now?”

“I need you to tell me where to find your husband.”

“Oh… that’s right. You want to hire him for a tandem.”

I don’t say anything. She picks at a piece of gravel on the pavement, crushes it into chalk between her thumb and forefinger.

“All you gotta do is give me one piece of information I can use to find him…” I point to that laser sight on her chest, “and you’ll never see that dot again.”

“The truth is…” and for this she looks up, clapping her hands together to wash the dust off. “The truth is… you’re going to have a very hard time finding him.”

“Yeah, why’s that?”

“Because Doug’s dead.”

Their last assignment together was the one Archie brokered. Did my name come up during that job? Did Archie mention me casually and Spilatro pounced on the name and came up with a plan to lure me out? Why would he want to?

The answer probably lies in the same reason I turned Archie’s office into ash. I knew if those files were left behind, vultures would descend on them to pick over the pieces. There is value in those files, the same value Archie told Smoke about in a prison cafeteria. Information. I’ve pulled a lot of jobs over the years, some extremely prominent, some that changed the political landscape of this country. If someone knew where to find me, he could broker that information to the relatives of my marks who were looking for atonement. Maybe Archie mentioned he worked with me, and maybe Spilatro turned that into a job for himself, sold my name to the highest bidder while he promised he would be the instrument of revenge.

So why did Carla think Doug Spilatro was dead?

When I was a kid at Waxham Juvey in Western Mass, there was a board game we could check out as long as we played it in the library. It was called “Mousetrap,” and it involved building an elaborate, Rube Goldbergian machine to catch a mouse. A crank rotated a gear that pushed an elastic lever that kicked over a bucket that sent a marble down a zig-zagging incline that fed into a chute and on and on until the cage fell on the unsuspecting mouse. But over the years, a few of the plastic pieces went missing and the trap wouldn’t spring. We used straws and toothpicks and toothpaste caps to fill in the blanks, rigging it so the cage would drop. The mouse didn’t know the real pieces weren’t there, and it didn’t matter as long as the trap sprung.

I think Spilatro has built his own mousetrap. Psychologically, he takes no pleasure in the kill itself; in fact, it repulses him. So he’s thrown all of his passion, all of his expertise, into building elaborate killing machines, elaborate mousetraps. With a living, breathing target, the machine has to be able to contract or expand or adapt based on the movement of the prey. He can build miniatures and plan to his heart’s content, but at some point toothpicks have to replace plastic pieces.

So the question is: how much has Spilatro been thrown off of his plan to kill me? Was I supposed to die in the construction accident that claimed Smoke? Was I supposed to get caught in the crossfire at Kirschenbaum’s house, trapped between the bodyguards and the police? Or am I still scurrying my way through the mousetrap, tripping a rubber band instead of a crank?