Derek Haas - Dark men

Risina frowns. “But he thought to do it that way. It has to be a sign of… well, at least affection if not love.”

“Maybe. But it’s not enough for what we need.”

She starts to speak, but I get there first. “When I first understood which way this was breaking, I thought maybe I could enlist Carla to help us find Spilatro and hurt him. The way he treated her, faking his death, bringing this world into her life and then walking away? He left her holding the bag. I thought maybe she was bitter and we could use that bitterness. But she’s not. And she’s not the opposite either. She’s not accepting. She’s just… finished.”

Risina nods. The old man stands and collects his pieces. His lips move, but his words are lost in the wind.

“So we still have nothing. After all this?”

“I didn’t say that. She gave us a great deal more than we had before we found her. We know Spilatro was married, we know he was in the army, we know he worked in software sales, at least for a while. We have ways to find him.”

“And we know how he thinks.”

I smile. Risina’s intuition continues to surprise me. “That’s right. Now we know how he thinks.”

We’re going to get to him through his friend, the army buddy who brought him into the game. I notice I’m thinking in plural pronouns again, “we” instead of “I,” and I like the way it sounds in my head. The tandem didn’t work for Doug and Carla, but they’re not us, not even close to us, and Carla served only as a convenience to him. He was using her for cover, that’s it. That was her utility for him.

We’re not like them at all. Carla said she saw a future for them in the moments before that future was wiped away, but he was the one who caused that plan to fail. It’s different for Risina and me. We can pull jobs together, back each other’s play, watch each other’s back. I fell in love with Risina because of the animal inside her, just below the surface. She has more sand than I imagined back in Rome. She demonstrates it over and over. It’s like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, even though she’s not wearing any. We’re not like them. We. Not I. We.

A tiny piece of information can be like a keyword to unravel a code. Based on Carla’s story, I know approximately how old Spilatro is, and I know his army buddy’s name, Decker, and I can guess a pretty accurate timeline of when they must have been in the service together. From there, it’s a reasonable amount of digging to cross-reference the two names, and if the names are false, as I’m sure they will be, then it’s a bit more cumbersome but not unconquerable to find similar names who served in the same unit. Most hit men aren’t too creative in coming up with their aliases.

This is fence work, but most of the fences I know seem to be missing or dead. About that, K-bomb was right. I do have bad luck with fences.

Still, there is one I know who can be of service and is alive and free: the one in Belgium who has a new appreciation for handing out favors.

Doriot meets us two days later in a barbershop in the basement of the St. Regis. A pair of brothers own the joint, having taken over from their father, good guys, and when I reached out to them to use their place for an after-hours meeting, alone, they didn’t hesitate to give me a key. A thousand-dollar tip on a shave and a trim didn’t hurt to solidify the deal.

“I told you providence would smile on me for treating you respectfully, Columbus, and here I am in New York City, the Big Apple, so what can I do for you and how much can I be expected to earn? Not that I am only in it for the money since I like you so much, but business is business as I’m sure you understand.”

“I need a file on a guy.”

“Twenty thousand,” he says immediately.

“Give me a fucking break. Twenty thousand…”

“I have a ten percent relationship with my hitters, Columbus. This is what I make…”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay, fifteen…”

I could press him to twelve but I don’t want to hurt his feelings before he goes to work for me. I’d rather cough up a few extra grand than have to worry about his effort.

“Fifteen’s a deal but I don’t want to decide on a play from your file and then find out the information is lacking.”

He shakes his head vigorously, feigning offense. “I do this right for you, you maybe come back to me for more work. I see how this goes. You’ll have a file so filled with truth you can lay it on top of the Bible.”

“All right then.”

“So who must I find for you?”

I give him everything I know about Decker and Spilatro as I regurgitate my conversation with Carla.

“How much time do I have?” he asks when I’m done.

“Three weeks enough?”

He frowns as though he’s thinking about it. “Are you sure you can’t come up to eighteen?”

“Fifteen.”

“Okay, okay. I’m just asking the question. I’ll start right away. You’ll see. You have never worked with a fence like me. This file will be like Brussels chocolate.” He does that chef thing of kissing the tips of his fingers.

“I need one other thing.”

He pauses at the door, then surveys the barber implements surrounding us. “If you tell me you need me to trim your hair, then I’m afraid you will have to come up with the twenty thousand after all.” He produces a short laugh that sounds more like a smoker’s cough.

“I need to rent a house upstate until your file is ready. Somewhere in the country, somewhere back from a road, somewhere no one’s gonna visit, even a mailman. Leave a key and an address for Jack Walker at reception tomorrow and you can have your twenty.”

He smacks his lips and raises his eyebrows.

“You sure you don’t want a haircut too?”

“Just the keys.”

He smiles and heads out the door.

I want to see her kill something.

The house is a good find, a fifteen-minute drive inside the property line from a dirt road only marked by an unassuming gate. I walked the fence line on our first few days and it’s over five miles from front to back and side to side. Doriot suspended mail service while we’re renting the place, and I have yet to hear a car engine anywhere in the vicinity.

The woods surrounding the house are as thick as a blanket and teem with life. Deer, badgers, squirrels, woodchucks, robins, sparrows and quail go about their days foraging and fighting. I need to see her kill something. I don’t care about the hunt or her ability to keep silent or her ability to hold the gun steady or her nerve in pulling the trigger. It’s the after I’m worried about, the after I need to see. How she reacts to blood spilled by her own hand. Will she be like Spilatro and shy away from the mess? Or will she be like me and seek out another opportunity? And which do I really want?

“Why do you carry a Glock?”

“It’s a good, lightweight semi-automatic that’ll hold seventeen bullets in the clip and one in the chamber. It’s made of polymer so it doesn’t warp in bad weather and it takes just a second to slam in another clip if you’re in a spot.”

She smirks and racks a round into the chamber. Her eyes narrow in a mock display of gravity, like she’s playing a character in an action film, and then she laughs.

“You still think this is fun and games?”

“I think you need to break the tension sometimes or this would all be overwhelming.”

“Sometimes you have to rely on that tension, use it to heighten your senses.”

“Or break it to relax.”

“Who is teaching whom here?”

“Oh, come on. Don’t look at me like that. You want me to say I’m scared, I’ll say it without shame. I’ve been scared since the moment you came back from the bookstore with that look on your face. I haven’t stopped being scared. If I paused to think about it, I’d probably start screaming and I don’t know that I’d be able to stop. But I’ve always been good at learning and I’ve learned by watching you. I keep the fear inside and I make jokes and I laugh and I talk back and I try to look cool and all of that is to keep the fear choked down. So let me do this my way, please. I don’t ask much of you and I pay attention, but you have to let me do this my way.”