The Killing Kind (6 page)

The sound of a beer bottle being opened.

Lester spun, his gun hand swinging toward the noise, and coming to a stop aimed precisely at the bridge of Michael Hendricks’s nose.

“Hiya, Les.”

Lester let his hand drop. “Jesus, Mike—you scared the hell outta me! I coulda shot your fucking face off. Which—I don’t mind telling you—mighta been an improvement. You look like shit. You get out okay? Was worried I stayed in the system too long after all and got you nabbed.”

“Nope,” said Hendricks. “Job went fine. Your trick with the lights worked like a charm.”

The fact was, though Lester’s hack worked perfectly, Hendricks wished they hadn’t had to go that route. He preferred his kills to be a little less of a tightrope act than the Cruz job had been. If he’d had his druthers, Cruz would have been in the ground long before he ever got within striking distance of Morales. But then, he hadn’t had much time to prepare; Morales had taken his sweet time scraping together Hendricks’s fee.

Michael Hendricks had a unique business model. He didn’t accept contract kills. Didn’t work for any criminal organization. And he never killed civilians. He only hit hitters. He wasn’t the kind of guy you called if you wanted to pop somebody who’d pissed you off or done you wrong. In fact, he wasn’t a guy you called at all—
he
called you
.
And when he did, you’d be advised to take the call, because it meant someone, somewhere‚ wanted you dead.

Morales’s hesitation was understandable. It was clear he thought at first that Hendricks was trying to shake him down—and even for a billionaire, two hundred thousand dollars isn’t exactly chicken feed. But the price the Corporation had placed on Morales’s head was $20K, and Hendricks’s rate to make a hitter disappear was ten times the hitter’s payout. Always up-front. Nonnegotiable.

The smart ones paid. The ones that didn’t weren’t around too long to regret it. And until the text came through from Hendricks’s bank in the Seychelles six hours before Cruz was to make his move, Hendricks had no idea which Morales would prove to be.

Guess he’d done his homework. There were plenty of rumors of Hendricks’s existence for those who knew where to look—not to mention examples of his handiwork. And now Edgar Morales would live to piss off the Corporation another day. Most hired guns wouldn’t touch a job that got a predecessor popped, for fear they’d wind up meeting the same fate. Killing was a whole lot harder once you took away the element of surprise—and the scrutiny a failed attempt attracted from law enforcement made finishing the job damn near impossible.

Still, Morales ought to consider beefing up his personal security for a while. Or maybe flee the country in one of those fancy charter planes his company owned until things back home cooled off. Hendricks’s services were one-time offers; in his business, it didn’t pay to offer lifetime guarantees.

“Cruz wasn’t any trouble?” Lester asked. “I hear tell he was supposed to be one nasty motherfucker.”

Hendricks shrugged. “Emphasis on
was.
”

“Then why the holdup getting back? And what’re you doing
here
? Not that I ain’t happy to see you—but I figured you’d be eager to get home.”

“Needed to recharge my batteries,” said Hendricks, too dismissively. “Decided I’d take my time. Drive up the coast. See the sights.”

“Yeah, you
look
recharged,” said Lester, his words dripping sarcasm. “This drive of yours didn’t happen to take you through Virginia, did it? Past Evie’s place, maybe?”

Of course it did. And of course Lester knew it. In all the world, the only person left who really knew Hendricks was this man—now that Evie thought him dead.

“She looked good,” Hendricks said—his expression pained.

“It’s Evie, dude—of
course
she looked good.”

“How far along is she?”

Damn it, thought Lester—so
that’s
why Mike came straight here, instead of going home. He decided to play dumb. “Come again?”

“Don’t pull that shit on me, Les. You really expect me to believe you didn’t know? You and Evie are Facebook friends. She and
Stuart,
” he spat, as though the man’s name was an epithet, “invited you to their fucking wedding.”

“Ain’t like I went,” he said, giving the chair a twirl. “Not much for dancing these days.”

“How far along, Les?”

Lester sighed and looked at his lap. “Gotta be five months now, almost. She’s due in January. And shit like this is exactly why I won’t let you see her feed.”

Hendricks set his beer down on the bar. Hard. Foam rose and ran over, like the bile rising in his throat. He kept the latter down by force of will and mopped up the former with a bar rag.

“Look, I’m sorry, man, but what did you expect? Poor woman thinks you’re dead. She went outta her head mourning you—we all did. The day you walked through that door,” he said, nodding back toward the front of the bar, “it was like the clouds had parted; you got no idea the weight of guilt you lifted offa me when you came back. I know you’ve got your reasons for not seeing her, and as much as I think you made the wrong damn choice, I understand it ain’t my place. But you can’t leave a girl a widow at twenty-six and not expect her to move on.”

“I didn’t,” Hendricks said.

“You didn’t
what?
”

“Leave her a widow.” It was true. They never married.

Lester snorted in dismissal. “Why, because you didn’t have a fucking piece of paper? You think that mattered to her? You made a promise, and so did she. The rest is nothing more than, you know, fodder for the bureaucrats.”

Lester was right. Of course he was. But it didn’t mean that Hendricks had to like it.

Hendricks and Evie met their sophomore year at Albemarle High, which was nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Evie’s parents were Southern upper-crust types; her father taught law at the university, and her mother didn’t work, insisting a woman’s place was in the home. Home was a sprawling redbrick mansion Evie’s three-greats granddad built before the War of Northern Aggression, as her family still called it, and her mother’s idea of playing housewife was bossing around the team of servants it took to tend it. Hendricks— then a skinny kid in ill-fitting thrift store clothes—had never seen such opulence. Evie’s parents were genteel enough in their disdain for him to hide it behind a veneer of Southern charm—supposing, perhaps, the whole affair would blow over soon enough.

By the time Hendricks’s relationship with Evie reached the six-month mark, her parents weren’t speaking to him.

And when, after graduation, Evie agreed to marry him, they weren’t speaking to her, either.

Evie and Hendricks ran off together—just hopped into his old pickup truck and headed north. They moved into her father’s family’s summer cabin in New Hampshire, unused for decades on account of Evie’s mother’s disdain for the wilderness. That summer, Evie worked weekends slinging soft serve, and Hendricks—who aimed to enlist as soon as his eighteenth birthday came around—picked up the odd construction gig. They had barely ten dollars between them and not a care in the world, lounging and laughing and making love in their shabby forest home.

They talked of using his meager soldier’s salary to get Evie a degree. They talked of making it official and starting a family once his tour of duty was through. They talked of nothing at all for what seemed like days, lost in lust and love.

Looking back, it was hard for Hendricks to imagine how it could have all gone wrong. How he could have gone from love-struck, duty-bound kid eager to fight for God and country to cold-blooded killer-for-hire.

Truth be told, the progression was simple enough. But simple wasn’t the same as easy.

There was a dream that plagued Hendricks every time he closed his eyes. No matter how hard he tried to change the outcome, it always played out the same way.

In the dream, Hendricks is a fresh-faced patriot straight out of basic training—a soldier so green, he barely knows which end of his rifle is which. He brims with pride as he’s given his first assignment downrange: guard duty for a dignitary and his family. The dignitary is a kindly older gentleman, beaming as he introduces Hendricks to his wife and children and thanks him for his protection, his dedicated service.

The men arrive at nightfall. Silent. Lethal. Clad in black, cowards operating in darkness. He watches, helpless, as they kill his brothers-in-arms; the dignitary he’s sworn to protect; the dignitary’s family.

He’s helpless because his throat’s been slit, a vulgar smile, warm blood pooling on the floor beneath him.

And as his life slips away—just before he returns gasping to the waking world—he can sense the fresh ghosts of the cooling dead all around.

Hendricks is that soldier every night—honorable and dying—but in life, he never was.

He was the black-clad man who killed him.

In boot camp, Hendricks was identified as having certain qualities. Qualities the military finds valuable in a covert operative. To this day, he wasn’t sure what put them onto him. He supposed it could have been his instinctive understanding of military tactics, his knack for firearms and bladed weapons, or his talent with shaped charges. But it seemed likelier to him their barrage of psychological examinations revealed some dark aspect of his psyche, like the shadow of a tumor on an X-ray, that told them he was the killing kind.

Whatever it was, they weren’t wrong. Hendricks took to the training like a dog to the hunt, and why wouldn’t he? Special Forces was his chance to make a difference. To tip the balance. To make the world safe for democracy.

But his idealism didn’t last long.

The job itself proved just the antidote.

His was a false-flag unit, operating under orders of the US government, but without the safety net of military backup or diplomatic support. They specialized in missions the details of which the Pentagon didn’t want to see the light of day.

Most of those missions were political assassinations.

Even now, Hendricks was forced to admit he and his team had done some good. Many of the threats they neutralized were legitimate. But some weren’t. Some were murders, pure and simple.

Hendricks honestly couldn’t say whether that dignitary needed killing or not. He
could
say they didn’t need to kill his wife and kids. Or his entire security detail, who weren’t any more a threat to an elite team of commandos than the wife and kids had been.

But they did. They killed them all.

Hendricks wasn’t sure why—given all he’d seen and done—the young soldier was the one who haunted him. He’d kicked the door in to find Hendricks standing over the dignitary, knife in hand, and Hendricks got to the kid before he could unsling his rifle from his shoulder. Cut him ear-to-ear, clean through his windpipe, and listened to his strangled cries as he died. Poor kid looked so surprised
,
Hendricks recalled, as if he couldn’t square exactly how it had come to this. For that matter, Hendricks couldn’t square it, either—but something told him that would’ve been cold comfort to the boy as he lay dying.

Maybe Hendricks felt some kinship with him. Maybe he’d just had his fill of taking orders from those who refused to get their hands dirty. Hell, maybe it was the phase of the fucking moon.

Whatever it was, after he killed the kid, Hendricks withdrew into himself. He stopped writing Evie. Stopped calling. He didn’t figure he was worthy of her love on account of what he’d done.

He wanted to die. To disappear. And when a roadside bomb outside Kandahar destroyed his unit, Hendricks got his wish.

They were returning back to base after a mission. Recon in the hills just north of town. Seventy-two hours without rest and a sort of delirious exhaustion set in. Lester was running point—walking ahead of the team’s two Humvees to scout the unmarked dirt track on which they were traveling. Hendricks was tasked with bringing up the rear, slowly surveilling their perimeter.