J. Black - The Shop

Until Landry found him.

If Odell was executed, or if he spent the rest of his life in prison, Landry wouldn’t lose sleep over it.

If he was going to lose sleep, it would have been over Nick Holloway, ignominiously wrapped in plastic and stashed in the Aspen murder house. But if you looked at it from a karmic standpoint, Nick had cheated death once already. He couldn’t stave it off forever; Landry was merely the instrument of his fate.

He sat on his heels and regarded the weapons in the closet Jackson would be using. Jackson was the strongest. He was smart and skilled. Levelheaded—not easily distracted. A professional. No hesitation in him.

Green was like his name. Green. He was somebody’s cousin. He’d never been in the military, never known hand-to-hand combat. He did have a black belt, but his black belt was earned in a Bushido storefront at a strip mall in El Cajon.

Davis was a hothead. When he was angry, he had the strength of three men. Not ten men, not two men. Three. He was dangerous the way a wounded bull in the bullring is dangerous. Unpredictable. Like Landry, he was a SERE graduate.

Still, Jackson was the most like Landry.

Jackson would go first.

47

Jolie sat at a table at the Burger King in Port St. Joe. Her neighbor Ed was on his way to pick her up. She fiddled with the realty card with the words “Belle Oaks” scribbled on it, now crushed into bad origami, her mind going back to the interminable time she’d spent in her parents’ house.

Jolie thought she’d had it all figured out. She could take a shower but not a bath. Needed to be careful around ponds. But this time, there was no water involved at all.

But something must have happened there, in the bathroom of their little house. Just the three of us .

It had taken her an hour to get to the Burger King, mainly because she didn’t go in a straight line. She’d managed to get out of the house and then walked for miles, forcing herself to keep from breaking into a run. After putting block after city block between herself and the house, Jolie began to feel better. The feeling of doom finally dissipated.

She must look like a crazy person.

This is your life . You’re about to be fired from your job. You are rendered completely helpless by panic attacks that can come on at any time without any warning. You’re willfully disregarding orders and planning on investigating a sitting vice president of the United States. You’ve alienated your closest friend.

That alone was a revelation. Kay was her closest friend. If you went further, you might say Kay was her only friend. The only friend who had stuck around to get past her defenses, if you didn’t count her father’s pal Ed, whom she’d known since she was in high school. Jolie realized she’d changed since Danny’s death. She’d withdrawn from people. Okay, big revelation. Who wouldn’t change after someone you love commits suicide? But Kay had managed to break through.

And this is how I reward her .

But there was no going back now. Jolie was sure Nathan Dial had been lured to Indigo. She was sure he’d been killed there. She was almost sure that the vice president of the United States had something to do with it. Think about that. The vice president of the United States.

Kay’s own words: He likes boys.

Jolie doubted Owen Pintek had planned to kill a young man. Maybe it was a choking game that went too far.

And then there was the cover-up.

She uncrumpled Kay’s card and looked at it again. Belle Oaks was a place in Tallahassee. She could go look it up right now on her phone, but she had a feeling—and this was all it was, a feeling—that doing so would derail her investigation.

Kay was angry with her, and she’d lashed out. She’d never once mentioned a place called Belle Oaks. Never said anything bad about Jolie’s parents, either. But Kay knew something, and whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.

Loved each other! The contempt in her voice.

Jolie itched to look it up. She wanted to know what Kay meant.

Outside, she heard a big diesel engine as the black Dodge Ram rumbled into the parking lot.

Ed was here.

48

Jackson, Davis, and Green all came in together, which surprised Landry. For one second, he felt he was on the outs. As if they had all lined up against him, as if they knew what he was planning.

But logic won the day. There weren’t that many flights into Panama City. It was likely they would have all arrived on the same puddle-jumper from Atlanta, since Atlanta was the closest hub. The Panama City airport was small and never crowded, so common sense would dictate they’d end up at the same place, the rental car desk, at about the same time.

Of course Jackson, Davis, and Green didn’t drive up in the car. The rental car was parked somewhere in the neighborhood, many streets away. They had walked in, separately, from different directions. But all of them arrived about the same time, so he knew they’d come together.

They went through the instructions on the kitchen table and gamed a few scenarios, landing on the simplest. Come in quietly by boat. Put someone on the road, command and control. The presence of a vehicle would also provide a second means of escape if the first was blocked.

Set up before midnight, come in around four a.m. Everyone asleep, probably in a deep sleep. This mission would be closeup work—knives—with automatic rifles afterward for window dressing. A fire. Make it look like Congolese rebels. Landry told them he had already rented the boat and laid in the necessary materials.

But they would never get a chance to accomplish their mission. Landry knew that if they reached the island, they would carry out their orders or die trying, as they had been trained to do. But Jackson, Davis, and Green would never get a chance.

The first rule of warfare: kill the enemy before he kills you.

In this case, he would kill the team before they had a chance to massacre the people on Indigo. Landry felt responsible for them—everyone with the exception of Franklin Haddox was innocent. If they died, they would be collateral damage and he could live with that. But he would do his best to make sure that didn’t happen.

Franklin Haddox’s days were numbered, but Landry would not kill him yet. He still needed the former attorney general.

And so Landry and his team went over the probable number of people on the island, including the help and the security team the Haddoxes had hired, and where they would be.

On paper, the raid would be simple and clean. Nobody anticipated any trouble. Jackson, Davis, and Green for one reason, and Landry for another.

When they were through planning the raid, Jackson, Davis, and Green got settled in their rooms, and Landry went to his. After ten minutes, Landry walked to the kitchen. His room was at the back of the house, at the end of the hallway. Jackson’s room was on his right, and Davis’s was on the left. Also on the left, closest to the living room, was Green’s room. Landry walked past the open doors to the other rooms. All three men were preoccupied with their weapons. In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, took a drink from a bottle of water, returned it to the refrigerator, and walked back. He glanced in at Jackson. Jackson was on one knee, breaking down an AR-15. The rifle would be no use to him except as a club, but there were plenty of other firearms lying within arm’s reach. Landry didn’t expect it to get to that point. He gave the doorjamb a quick tap with his knuckles, and Jackson, instantly alert, looked up. Smiled.

“What do you think?” Landry asked.

“Good stuff.” Jackson was not a man given to hyperbole.