The Last Family (27 page)

“The man up there had to leave early,” Martin said.

Lallo’s face melted toward his tie, and his lips trembled like his knees. “Marty, they made me do this! They threatened my family!” Lallo beat at his chest.
Don’t give up the spooks unless you have to
. “This was Ramon’s order from Pablo! That evil man was his personal assassin. I’m glad you killed this pig, because he was forcing me into this. They threatened my family. Even my grandbabies.”

Martin pulled a knife from his ankle and reached
down and worked on the dead hit man with the blade. Lallo retched deeply when he saw what Martin was doing.

Martin finished, stood, and Lallo was horrified at the sight of his blood-covered hands, the knife reduced to a darkly wet conical shape extending from the right fist. “I knew this man Ramon, Lallo. A student as poor as this shouldn’t be sent against his teacher. He looks awfully good in a tie, though.”

Lallo could hardly breathe. He hoped his heart wouldn’t explode.

“What do I smell?” Martin said as he sniffed at the air loudly. “Shit? You ruined a thousand-dollar suit? Are you so afraid of me, who is like your own son? I thought we were friends. What, fifteen years I’ve known you? We have had some times, Lallo. You introduced me to my love, Angela. You were to be godfather to my baby, Macon. You know,” he said softly, “the anniversary of his death is coming up very soon.”

“Please, Marty. I can help you. I can get you almost a million dollars. Now, tonight. I wanted to bring you your money, but they would not allow it. I swear.”

“Who put you up to this? Perez?”

“Not Perez. A man named Spivey.”

“Spivey? Who is he?”

“A company man, I think. He got Ramon and the man on the roof.”

“Lallo, I find it difficult to trust you in light of all this.” He spread his bloody hands eloquently. “Someone who forgets who I am … what I do? I can’t be killed by fools like these. I’m bulletproof, Lallo. I can smell the breath of my enemies at a thousand yards. I can see their nostrils flare, their eyes move. I can hear their thoughts, I can feel them, Lallo.”

“There is a million dollars in my office—in the place under my desk. You pull the rug back and there it is. I give it to you. Just let me go. We forget this and stay friends. For Angela and Macon’s sake.”

“Angela is with the dead, Lallo. Don’t speak of her here among this shit.” With the dripping blade he indicated
the
pistolero
. “Here’s the deal, Lallo. You are right that we are good friends. So climb into the trunk, and I’ll send my pal to your office to get the cash. If the money is there, we can say good-bye as friends.”

“Excellent,” Lallo said, nodding rapidly. “Combination is three-two-four-four-five-oh. Here are the keys to my office in Place St. Charles.” Lallo pulled a set of keys from his pocket and handed them to Martin.

“Security?” Martin asked.

“The system has a forty-second delay after the door opens. Keypad is on the other side of the door, and it is set for one-one-one-one. Then we say it’s even?” Lallo’s face was running with sweat. “I will explain these bodies.”

“We’ll just toss them into the river. So I can forgive you for the money. The other cash in your safe I will put to good use. Fund an orphanage, maybe. You know how much I love children.”

“I deserve your disdain because I am a weakling.” Lallo frowned. “I trust you, Marty. You have always been a man of your word. The money is there. I swear on my mother’s eyes.”

“All we have is our honor, my friend,” Martin said as he opened the driver’s door and reached over the dead man for the keys. He walked around and opened the trunk and Lallo climbed in. He looked up at Martin, a frightened bird in a dark nest. “I trust you, Martin. I trust you,” he said. He watched as the other man joined Martin and stood just behind him.

“And I trust you. Haven’t you seen my face? You are the only man on earth, aside from my compatriot there, who knows what I look like. We must trust each other. Watch your hands, Lallo. Will you be comfortable in there?”

“Yes.” He nodded rapidly. “I will be just fine, Martin. And your friend—Steiner, Kurt Steiner. Of course,” Lallo said. “Now I remember him. It was nice to see you again, Mr. Steiner.” Lallo stared at the other man.

Kurt Steiner nodded formally. “My pleasure, Senor
Estevez. Maybe we will meet again under more pleasant circumstances.”

“I’ll put in some holes so you can breathe better,” Martin said, taking the shotgun from Kurt and swinging it up to his shoulder. He aimed it at Lallo’s chest. Lallo jerked his arm up and covered his eyes. Martin shrugged, raised the barrel to the open trunk lid, and fired both barrels, the pellets punching through the sheet metal and shattering both the rear and front windshields en route. The short gun’s discharges sounded like dynamite going off; the sound overflowed the small trunk. Lallo was sure his ears were bleeding as he pulled his arm away from his eyes. There might have been some relief in his expression, but very little. He was a man separated from his Maker by the thinnest of threads, and they were being held by a psychopath.

“Sorry about your pants,” Martin said as he closed the trunk gently until the hydraulic mechanism caught and sealed it tight. Martin put the shotgun on top of the car, grabbed the
pistolero
’s legs, and dragged him to the side of the dock, leaving a wide, dark trail. The body of the short, thin sniper from the roof was now lying beside the Cadillac, having been recovered by Kurt Steiner. The rifle he had been carrying was tossed into the water without a second thought. The sniper’s throat was opened like a mouth. Martin reached into the slit in the man’s throat and pulled his tongue out as he had the
pistolero
’s. Then, after admiring the thick purple necktie, he rolled the would-be assassin off into the Mississippi River. Martin and Kurt maneuvered Ramon to the side and pushed him in as well. They watched him float away, shoulders above the waterline, for a few seconds before he sank.

“See that, Kurt? Proves a very important point.”

“What point, Marty?”

“Shit doesn’t always float.”

Martin walked back to the driver’s open door, reached inside, started it, and then put the Cadillac into drive. He cocked his head slightly and watched the car roll slowly toward the ship’s stern, gathering speed as it
went. It rolled off the pier at an angle, the front passenger quarter hitting first, and sank in a fury of bubbles. Lallo’s muted screams escaped the holes in the trunk as the car bobbed and the rear end moved along the pier, pulled along by the current. Then it slipped under for good, leaving a momentary churning of bubbles that moved downriver.

“I didn’t touch you, Lallo, old friend,” he said. Then he tilted his head back and filled the night with his deep, black laughter.

Martin changed into clothes he had in the trunk of the Caprice. He strolled out of the parking garage off Canal Place, crossed Canal Street, and walked to St. Charles Avenue, where he stopped to look at the displays in the windows of Rubenstein Bros. He slowed to savor the elegance of Italian suits, linen shirts, and sports coats as he walked toward Lallo’s building. The expensive clothes appealed to Martin. He wondered why he had not worn such suits before now. He thought he would adopt a personality with a sense of style and taste. After the smoke cleared on this deal, if he was still alive, he’d come back to this store and outfit himself for just such a life—a new identity. Maybe he would rent an elegant house here for a few months and relax.

By the time Martin passed the final shop window, his thoughts were back to his business. His reflections on fine clothing and a house uptown no longer existed; they were as completely forgotten as the bodies he had slipped into tike Mississippi River an hour earlier. His mind had locked on his errand again.

Lallo’s office was located on one of the top floors of Place St. Charles on St. Charles Avenue, a block uptown from the French Quarter. His family owned coffee plantations, and he was officially a coffee broker. Lallo’s brother had introduced him to the money to be made in the powder trade on the cleaning end, and with the friendship of certain American-government accommodations it had seemed perfectly safe. Money shuffling for both ends meant a percentage of the gross. A nice pad for
a man with so many businesses set up all around the world and so many accounts in so many places. Lallo had banking relationships in the Bahamas, New Orleans, Miami, New York, Panama, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Honduras, London, Tokyo, and Paris.

Martin slipped easily into the building and up the stairs without being seen. He used Lallo’s keys to open first the receptionist’s office and then Lallo’s. There was an alarm, but it wasn’t on.

The office was large and expensively decorated. The desk, the entertainment center complete with leather couches, and the conference table were set on a carpeted platform—a platform built expressly to hide the floor safe under Lallo’s desk. The combination worked perfectly. Martin stared in at the blocks of cash. He roughly counted the money, using the desk to stack the bundles.

Pablo would know Martin had killed his most valuable money man and taken many times what was owed him. And the drug king would spend the time when he wasn’t looking over his shoulder for the Colombian army, instead looking over his shoulder for Martin. Martin knew he would haunt Pablo’s dreams, because Pablo had seen him at work, had hired him for the wettest jobs he’d had—work where sophistication was necessary, where the target was covered over in security. The trouble with Latin muscle was that there was no finesse. Cut throats, sloppy torture, like the raping of proud, macho men by lesser men, machine guns, bombs, and chain saws. Martin believed that the Colombians and the Peruvians were pie-faced Indians without the imagination God gave frogs. Inferior beings. Martin knew this because he had trained them—or tried to—but they were, for the most part, ruled by their emotions. Most men were inferior to Martin. Most men had emotions to deal with. Martin had exorcised all but a few.

Martin put the money into a plastic garbage bag he had brought along and went back out into the night with the cash slung over his shoulder.

Back in the parking garage he handed blocks of the
money to his comrade. “One more big job before we close this one, Kurt.”

“No sweat,” Steiner said.

“There can be no mistakes. You have everything you need. The package is waiting for you.”

“I understand, Martin. I’ve done lots of shit harder than this cakewalk.”

“You have never had a more important job in your life. The absence of danger may give you a false sense of safety. Remember, you are the only one I would trust with this.”

Martin embraced the man and hugged him tightly. The killers put their heads together.

“I won’t fail you,” Steiner said.

“Go,” Martin whispered. “Go, now, and make me proud.”

Martin watched as Kurt stepped from the car and made his way to the elevator. He knew that the younger man was in awe of him. It wasn’t a physical love, but a worshipful love, a reverence of the student for the master. Martin put two pills on his tongue and swallowed them without water. “Of course he won’t fail me. Because I’d cut out his fucking heart if he did.” He smiled at the thought that soon he would be traveling lighter than he ever had before. After this was done, he would have no further use for Kurt Steiner.

28

K
URT
S
TEINER DROVE UP
M
AGAZINE TOWARD THE
G
ARDEN
D
ISTRICT
. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, the windshield clearing the final drops of water. He thought about the money in the trunk, and for a split second he fantasized that he would leave for the airport and simply be gone. He could be home early with a king’s ransom. Then he dismissed the thought and cursed himself for such a treacherous idea.

He turned his mind back to the airport in Dallas, where he had been dispatched on an errand by Martin. As usual he had no idea why the trip was important, because Martin never told him more than he absolutely had to know. Kurt didn’t blame Martin; secrecy kept him alive.

Martin put seemingly unrelated pieces of an operation into play at different times. The envelope affair a month before had been another mission that had made
sense only to Martin. Kurt had been dispatched to Pueblo, Colorado, armed with an address that matched a barren-looking, garbage-strewn, and junk-stacked piece of land in the middle of nowhere with a distressed-looking trailer parked on it. Martin had given him an unsealed business envelope that held ten crisp ten-dollar bills, and a separate manila envelope with what appeared to be an advertising brochure for a condominium project. There was no vehicle in evidence, and no shade, except for a few small trees with a minimal amount of leaves on them.

He had tapped at the door, and an elderly man holding a shotgun had appeared behind the torn screen. The old man, dressed in baggy jeans, didn’t allow Kurt inside but placed the shotgun against the wall. He opened the door slightly, held out his hand, took the envelope with the cash, and opened it to count the bills. Then he took the manila envelope and peeked inside, nodded to himself, and closed the door in Kurt’s face. They had not exchanged a single word.

He was sure he wasn’t being followed, but he glanced in the rearview mirror, watching the faces and mannerisms of the people moving through, and thinking about Martin. He had met Martin while he’d been at Fort Benning learning counterinsurgency techniques as a representative of the police from a South American country. Kurt’s father was a retired diplomat and had vast cattle holdings in Argentina.

From the moment the two men had met, Kurt had felt drawn to the older man, the instructor. In Martin Fletcher he saw the kind of man one could give loyalty to. Martin was a man who deserved loyalty; he was a master of his own mind, spirit, and body—a born leader. In short, Martin was someone to swear an oath to. My
loyalty is my life
. Martin had taught him so much that no one, not his schools, his grandfather, his father, nor the army, had. He had learned to ignore pain, to kill without compassion, to create multiple identities and disguises, and to live dual lives comfortably. His lives were like
little compartments, each with a different story, different feelings, and different motivations.