The Good Guy with a Gun (Jim McGill series Book 6) Page 14

  Somebody talked, though not to the cops.

  A week after Galtero Blanco had departed the thug life, Jerry received an envelope in the mail that had been postmarked in Miami but bore no return address. In it was a password to a numbered account at a Singaporean bank. The balance was a million dollars. A friend of his grandfather’s later told him a rival had placed a bounty on Blanco’s head.

  Jerry never tried to retrieve the money.

  He focused on dealing with the after-effects of taking Blanco’s life. He felt no remorse. Just the opposite. After years of training and imagining what it would feel like to take someone’s life, now he knew. At least in the case of Galtero Blanco, it had been wonderful.

  As deeply satisfying as completing a perfect suit.

  The question that preoccupied him was: Would it feel as good again?

  Several weeks later, he got an opportunity to find out. Another envelope arrived at his shop. In it he found an anonymous query asking whether he might be available to kill a Latino jockey who regularly got mounts at Gulfstream Park. Jerry didn’t follow horse racing. He didn’t know if the man won or lost too many races. Maybe he just ran up a big debt at the casino next door to the track.

  The offer of payment was fifty thousand dollars. Even if the jockey weighed only a third of what Galtero Blanco had, the fee wasn’t competitive on a per-pound basis. More important, it was possible, he thought, that someone was trying to set a trap for him.

  He couldn’t call in sick, so he simply burned the message and envelope. Let the jockey work out his own fate. Still, without any personal effort, he was getting a reputation as a killer.

  That both frightened and intrigued him.

  Someone in the exile community had to be nudging him toward a new profession.

  Before he’d bite on any offer, though, he had to be sure he didn’t put his foot in a snare. There was a lull of several months, and Jerry tried to content himself with his tailoring. For the most part, he succeeded, maintaining his high standards. When he wasn’t working, though, the idea of becoming a paid killer buzzed around his mind like a housefly that refused to be swatted.

  Then, a month before Christmas, a sly and very sophisticated plea reached him.

  After dining alone, some unseen person attached a note to his credit card receipt. The message asked if he’d be willing to kill a very important young man who enjoyed nothing so much as beating up the beautiful women he dated. If he did, there would be a payment of $250,000 for him. He was given an email address to which he might reply.

  Jerry tried to find the young woman, quite lovely herself, who had served his meal. She’d taken the imprint of his credit card and had returned it to him. Along with the note. He couldn’t find her, no one at the restaurant even admitted knowing her. She wasn’t the kind of woman who would easily slip from memory.

  There had to be some sort of conspiracy at work.

  But he couldn’t smell the involvement of any cops.

  He waited a week before sending a one-word answer from an Internet café: More. He left unsaid whether he wanted more money or more information. If the other party was smart, they’d know it was both. Then he pretended for the remainder of the night that he wasn’t interested in whether or how he got a response.

  The next morning, he found a shoebox in his parking space behind the shop.

  Contrary to a multitude of misgivings, Jerry opened it.

  He found not only everything he needed to know but more than enough to pique his interest and persuade him to take the job. The target was the playboy son of an agricultural baron, a sugarcane billionaire. A series of before-and-after photos in the attachment showed that he had indeed brutalized a number of young women.

  The bastard had avoided a prison cell by either paying off his victims or having his lawyers prevail in court. He’d also been busted for drug possession three times. Two offenses were dropped on technicalities, the third resulted in a stint in rehab. Then he made the mistake of running down a British tourist while intoxicated.

  That was the miscreant’s downfall.

  The victim’s family was as rich as his own. Their lawyers were every bit as good as his lawyers, and maybe a bit better. While criminal charges were pending, the opposition lawyers were amassing evidence for a civil suit. They were also feeding every scrap of damning evidence they found to the state attorney to use in the vehicular homicide trial.

  The outcomes of both trials should have been a foregone conclusion.

  But the fact that an unnamed party had reached out to him told Jerry that someone was worried the cabrón might wriggle free yet again. The only way that could happen would be if the fix had been put in. That wasn’t hard to imagine. Judges in Florida had been bought before. And when was the last time anyone from a truly wealthy family went to jail?

  The fee for making sure existential justice was done had been bumped to $350,000.

  Jerry took the job. Did so without the courtesy of replying to his anonymous patron.

  To make it look good, he did so after the target’s criminal charge had been knocked down to involuntary manslaughter. The British tourist, it had been shown, had also been drinking that unfortunate night. A newly produced witness swore that the tourist stumbled off the curb into the path of the oncoming vehicle. The court’s sentence was a hundred hours of community service.

  The civil suit was still pending, but it would be contested for years.

  The overprivileged prick who caused all the trouble didn’t give that a second thought. He threw a party for himself and hundreds of people who didn’t mind being seen drinking, dancing and groping with him. It was no problem for the handsome, young, exquisitely tailored Jerry to slip into the affair. He offered his target a drink and toasted his deliverance. “Salud.”

  Health.

  Jerry’s training and one of the scenarios envisioned for having him kill Castro was to poison the dictator. The glass he handed his target contained a colorless, odorless, tasteless but powerful muscle relaxant. The initial effect would only make him seem drunker but within fifteen minutes his heart would stop beating and he would be judged to have died of a myocardial infarction. That was exactly what happened.

  Jerry was already home before his victim died. He never fell under suspicion because the death was ruled to be from natural causes. He kept working at his chosen craft, building a reputation for exquisite tailoring that grew with each passing year.

  The client he’d never billed needn’t have paid him, and several months passed without any compensation. Then, once again, he received a message attached to a restaurant receipt. Not at the same restaurant. Not from the same waitress. But in similar fashion to the job he’d rejected, Jerry received a password and the number of a bank account.

  This time the funds had been deposited in the Cayman Islands, a British possession.

  For a five percent commission, an intermediary in the exile community moved the money for him to another account, this one in Venezuela — and Jerry was in a whole new business. From that point forward, he followed the same pattern. The clients remained anonymous. There was no confirmation the job had ever been accepted. Payment was expedited by a third party who never knew how the money had been earned.

  Added to that, Jerry decided to do hits only in locations where he could use his tailoring business as a legitimate cover, should he ever need to explain why he’d been in town.

  Nothing was ever foolproof, as anyone hoping to kill Fidel Castro could tell you, but Jerry felt his methods provided more than a comfortable margin of safety for him. Without ever having left evidence that he’d ever killed anyone, there was a steady demand for his services. His only problem was the thrill had gone. The housefly in his head had been swatted.

  That or boredom bred of repetition had killed the bug.

  Money wasn’t a motivation. He had more than he’d ever need.

  He thought the job he’d done in Washington might well be his last hit.

  Unt
il he saw Auric Ludwig appear on his television.

  Within minutes, Jerry felt he might have one more job to do.

  WWN News Studio — Washington, DC

  Auric Ludwig, CEO of FirePower America, made WWN the first stop on his Sunday morning rounds of news programs to defend the broadest imaginable interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that would keep profits flowing to his employers and earn him an ever increasing year-end bonus.

  Even in the face of gruesome, wholesale violence, Ludwig knew he held the high ground. Strategically if not morally. A majority of both houses of Congress was either bought and paid for or intimidated. The most recent Supreme Court ruling had completely discounted a well-regulated militia as being the predicate of a right to bear arms. All fifty states now had concealed carry laws.

  There were only two possible hostile blips on Ludwig’s radar.

  Congress recently had extended for ten years a ban on plastic guns that could go undetected by metal detectors and X-ray machines. None of his employers manufactured such weapons, yet. The damn things were churned out by 3-D printers in people’s homes and offices. But who knew? Within a decade, the big boys might decide they wanted to enter the plastic-gun market. Turn out sophisticated models.

  Beyond business considerations, there was a principle at stake. You let Congress get away with passing one gun-control law, it set a dangerous precedent. In the future, the cost of buying off or scaring off Congress could skyrocket. Ludwig had wanted to fight the plastic gun ban, but he’d been told no.

  There was an even larger concern to occupy the minds of Ludwig and his bosses: A new chief justice and a new associate justice had taken seats on the Supreme Court. Previous rulings concerning the Second Amendment could be reversed. That would cause a huge uproar, but the high court was the toughest part of government to lobby, the trickiest place to influence votes with blandishments.

  But all that was something to worry about another day.

  At the moment, Ludwig was telling WWN Reveille Roundup host Jack Landon how yesterday’s tragedy at the Winstead School could have been averted.

  “The coaching staff of the football team should have had their assailant outgunned.”

  Landon managed to keep his jaw from dropping, but he allowed his eyebrows to rise.

  The host asked, “Are you saying —”

  “I’m saying that Abel Mays had a legally purchased weapon. If the three adult males to whom the well-being of that football team had been entrusted had been similarly armed, they would have had a three-to-one advantage and the outcome would have been far different.”

  Watching from just off-camera, Ellie Booker looked up from the notes she was taking.

  She thought Ludwig was either a terrific actor, spouting crap like that with a straight face or he was bedbug crazy. As a betting proposition, the choice was probably a push.

  “Is that your answer to any potentially violent situation, Mr. Ludwig?’ Landon asked. “Everyone should be armed at all times.”

  “Well, look at what happened on the National Mall,” Ludwig said. “Mays killed one last man.”

  “A jogger,” Landon interjected. “Should people out for a run carry guns, too?”

  “Probably would have helped that poor guy, but look what happened next. Someone who was armed took Mays out. That individual was the hero of the day. The good guy with a gun who stopped the bad guy with a gun.”

  “If that’s the case, Mr. Ludwig, why hasn’t that noble man or woman come forward to have his or her heroism acknowledged and to receive the acclaim of a grateful nation?”

  Ludwig offered a reptilian smile. “Probably because he doesn’t need the grief he’d catch from bleeding hearts like you.”

  Landon returned Ludwig’s volley and put a note of personal topspin on it. “So you’re saying this — let’s call your good guy a man — this man has the courage to face off with and kill an adversary armed with an automatic weapon but he’s afraid of being questioned by the press? That characterization is a little inconsistent on your part, wouldn’t you say?”

  Goddamn liberal, Ludwig thought.

  He missed the old days when WWN was dependably right wing.

  Ludwig said, “Maybe the good guy just needs a little time to catch his breath.”

  Landon persisted. “No chance he might be worrying about his legal jeopardy? Of course, if he truly acted in self-defense or was defending an innocent third party, there would be nothing for him to worry about. Maybe your good guy is simply looking out for his own backside.”

  “You think so?” Ludwig asked. “Well, how about this?” Looking straight into the camera Ludwig knew he was about to take a big risk, but felt he had no choice. Not if he wanted to sustain his good-guy narrative. “If you’re the hero I’m talking about, the man who shot Abel Mays, FirePower America will give you one hundred thousand dollars to show up at my office first thing tomorrow morning. We’ll give you that money free and clear, and we’ll pick up any legal fees you might have. You know, in case somebody like this guy,” he hooked his thumb at Landon, “tries to put you in trouble with law enforcement.”

  The show went to commercial.

  Ludwig directed a smirk at Landon.

  “Watch what happens now,” he said.

  “And if no one comes forward, Mr. Ludwig?”

  By way of an answer, Ludwig unclipped his microphone and tossed it aside.

  He got up and left the set, hoping he hadn’t just shot himself in the foot.

  If he knew how his call to identify Abel Mays’ killer had been received in Miami, he’d have had far greater worries than a foot wound.

  Nebraska Avenue, NW — Washington, DC

  Metro Homicide Detectives Meeker and Beemer took Auric Ludwig by his arms the moment he stepped out of WWN’s Washington Bureau building. Ludwig might have reached for a concealed weapon to defend himself against a brazen, daylight kidnapping attempt except for a couple of things. He never carried a gun; he had an armed bodyguard. And Meeker and Beemer had their badges on display. Adding to the detectives’ advantage, they’d already warned Ludwig’s entourage — a personal assistant, driver and makeup artist as well as the bodyguard — not to interfere, and there were four patrol officers present to back up the detectives.

  Ludwig’s PA used his iPhone to video the cops taking Ludwig away.

  Meeker leaned over as he went past and exhaled on the camera’s lens, fogging it.

  The personal assistant reacted with an outrage at the assault on his phone even greater than the one he felt seeing the boss hauled off to … well, they didn’t know exactly where Ludwig was being taken. The patrol cops wouldn’t let them follow the detectives.

  Seated in the back of the detectives’ car, his blood pressure redlining and his wrists free of handcuffs, Ludwig wondered if he dared to jump out of the vehicle when it stopped for a red light. He looked over a shoulder to see if his people were following to aid in an escape attempt or to document this travesty of justice. Seeing that help was not close at hand, his sense of derring-do waned.

  If he tried to escape, all he might do would be to piss off these two cops.

  As if reading his mind, Beemer looked over his shoulder and said, “You’re not under arrest yet. Do something stupid, that’ll change fast.”

  “Is that a threat?” Ludwig asked.

  “It’s an explanation,” Meeker told him. “You understand it?”

  Ludwig sat back and sulked in momentary silence.

  “I always thought the FBI would be the ones to come for me,” he muttered.

  Beemer smiled. “Give ‘em a chance. The day ain’t over yet.”

  Meeker laughed. “Maybe we’ll call the CIA, give those boys a crack at you, too.”

  Being the butt of the detectives’ humor only darkened Ludwig’s mood.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To see a lady who’s got some questions for you,” Meeker said.

  “And if I don’t want to answer them?”


  “Then we do arrest you and you get to call your lawyer.”

  Ludwig said, “This isn’t going to end well for the two of you and whoever this ‘lady’ is.”

  Meeker looked at Ludwig’s reflection in his rear view mirror.

  “That so?” he asked. “Well, tell me, who is it got put in the back of a police car?”

  “And who’s ridin’ up front?” Beemer added.

  Ten minutes later the two detectives and Ludwig arrived at police headquarters.

  Chapter 10

  The National Mall — Washington, DC

  McGill thought he was in pretty decent shape, but in recreating Jordan Gilford’s last run, along with FBI Deputy Director Byron DeWitt, Special Agent Abra Benjamin and Deke Ky, he was starting to feel gassed by the time they reached the Mall. That was the nine-mile point. None of the others seemed to be bothered a bit by the run. Of course, McGill knew he had at least ten years on DeWitt, and Benjamin and Deke were even younger.

  That was small comfort. McGill decided he’d have to up his cardio routine.

  Get Patti to run with him whenever possible.

  McGill stopped adjacent to the point where Gilford had been shot. Leo had been pacing the runners in an armored black SUV the FBI had provided. He came to a halt on Madison Drive. There was room enough for everyone to scurry inside the vehicle, if they had to run for cover. But the Sunday morning was peaceful, even though there was still blood on the grass from the day before. A lot of it. The crime scene had been released to public use. McGill wondered if the Park Service was going to hose the area down or just wait for the first rain storm.

  Trying to keep his breathing from sounding labored, McGill said to the others, “I don’t see any gouges in the grass. When Mr. Gilford was cut down he was facing the direction opposite that of his run. He must have seen the threat to his life and changed directions, presumably by planting a leg hard. He should have left a mark.”

  Benjamin walked on ahead, looking down. “Here’s a divot.”