Work Done for Hire (3 page)

I
woke up out of a terrible nightmare, reaching for Kit, who wasn't there; she left early to go to Chicago on family business. The nightmare wasn't about the cartoon monster in the script, but a related horror I saw in the war.

Artillery support had gotten the new “shock” rounds for the 175s, and the first one they fired fell way short, and it went off above a thing like a Muslim day care center or orphanage. Our camp was right on the edge of town, a place we called Honeypot, so they ordered most of us to run over and render aid.

It was all children except for four women, and all but one were dead or barely twitching. The shock round had blown off all their clothing and most of their skin. Most of them must have died instantly of cardiac arrest, but one was walking, a girl of ten or twelve who looked like a medical-school diagram, flayed from the waist up, just bloody muscles, and from the top of her butt trailed a bright flag of bloody skin like a gory wedding train. She fell over and died before the medics could do anything, but what would they have been able to do? Whole body skin graft; just grit your teeth, sweetheart.

It was two in the morning. I got up without dressing and turned on all the lights in the kitchen and sat drinking a beer very fast. Then I put some ice cubes in a glass and poured in a few inches of Kit's vodka. That got me tranquilized enough to go back to sleep and not dream, or at least not remember the dreams.

Woke up groggy and went for a walk. I took the next section of the script and a notebook, so I could at least pretend to be working. Went by a bike shop, but it wasn't open till ten, so dropped in the twenty-four-hour pool hall and had a healthy breakfast of Slim Jims and beer. I read the paper for a while and then went back to the bike shop.

The Steve in the story gets a really nice touring bike, but I didn't need anything that fancy or expensive. Just something to replace the old clunker I'd bought from a roommate in college.

The shop's pretty upscale, and most of the bikes are almost weightless and cost as much as a used car. But they did have a section with cheap kids' so-called mountain bikes—like there were mountains in Iowa—and adult “commuter” bikes. I can commute to work in ten seconds, barefoot, but I got one of those, a bright blue Cambridge. With an accessory package of lights and lock and saddle bags, it was just under $500. One percent of my eventual Monster money.

It was gloriously easy to ride, compared to my rust bucket. It had automatic shift and springs and nice wide handlebars, so you could sit upright and see the world go by. The old one had dropped handlebars, so you rode hunched over, and was so rigid your ass felt every pebble in the road.

Perfect weather for bicycling, sunny and slightly cool, so I pedaled around for an hour and a half, and wound up on the other side of town. There was a new Italian restaurant with outside tables, so I sat down there and took out the script and notebook. I got a half carafe of white wine and started to work.

Stephen Spenser thought he had the world by the tail when he left his father's New York law firm and joined a small one in Florida as junior partner. He liked the little town of Flagler Beach, and was usually inside only half the day, helping to prepare briefs and going over old files with the firm's gorgeous administrative assistant, Arlene. The rest of the time he was outside in the usually beautiful seaside weather, interviewing clients and respondents—and occasionally doing repossessions, a profitable sideline for the firm.

It was not just picking up and returning delinquent cars and boats, but sometimes children, who legally belonged to the other parent. Sometimes it got ugly, and although Steve was a big man and not easy to push around, the firm thought it prudent to get him a private investigator's license and a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Half the men in Florida own guns, his boss said, and more than half of the men who break the law.

Steve was no stranger to guns. Like most combat infantrymen, he had carried one everywhere; even eating and sleeping, it was never more than an arm's length away. It had been a comfort, even though he never fired it at anybody, and ultimately it didn't protect him from the enemy. On what turned out to be his last day in the army, an IED, improvised explosive device, filled both his legs with shrapnel in the form of dirty rusty nails and screws that had been mixed with human feces. He eventually recovered enough to finish pre-law and law school and join his father's firm—and then get tired of the other employees' attitudes and move to Florida.

He picked up a snub-nosed .38 Special, not very accurate or powerful, but small. He also got a 9-mm Beretta like the one he had carried in the army, but that size cannon is hard to conceal in light summer clothes. He'd never fired either one except at an indoor range in the local gun shop. The first of every month, he'd go there and run a couple of dozen rounds through each one.

After about a year, he proposed to Arlene and was overjoyed when she accepted. His mother sent a $250,000 “nest egg” check and his boss promoted him to full partner.

A couple of weeks later the boss sent him to the university law library in Gainesville to do a few days' research in tax law, and when he came back, the firm's office had a FOR LEASE sign on the door. He went home and found annulment papers on the kitchen table. His new wife had taken his new car and cleaned out their joint bank account. All their credit cards maxed for cash. The $2,000 rent was due, and he had less than a hundred bucks in his pocket.

The two disasters were not unrelated. She'd gone to Mexico with the boss and all the firm's liquid assets.

His parents' unlisted number was no longer in service. In the waiting mail, there was a note from his mother saying that Dad was furious about the unauthorized $250,000 gift, but he would get over it. Maybe not, Mom, under the circumstances.

The man who came to repossess the furniture, a fellow Steve had worked with a few times, was sympathetic and bought his old pickup truck. He also sold the expensive Beretta and his Lance Armstrong road bike, keeping the .38 Special and the rusty beach bike he kept for riding on the sand. With some reluctance, he sold his state-of-the art iLap, after downloading its files into a winkdrive. That gave him enough money to renew his PI license and rent a one-room office with a foldout couch. He had some cards printed up, whimsically calling himself “Spenser for Hire,” and took out an ad in the weekly advertiser.

He'd been bicycling an hour or so a day, before work, both as therapy for his legs and to cut down on his smoking. He didn't desire tobacco while he was on the bike, so with no money for cigarettes and plenty of time on his hands, he started bicycling constantly. If he could give up a dangerous habit, one good thing would come out of this debacle.

Two good things, actually. For better or for worse, he was finally free of his father.

He got into a routine. He'd get out of bed at first light and take off on the bike for a long loop south of Daytona Beach and back, using his cell to check for calls back at the office every hour or so. There were never any really interesting calls, maybe one repo deal a week, but it did keep him from smoking. When he got home after sixty or seventy miles he would collapse into bed, where he also didn't smoke. He got to where he didn't even fold it back into a couch.

Some of the areas he biked through were not particularly safe, so he usually carried the .38—not in the shoulder holster, which would be a little conspicuous in a T-shirt, but in an innocuous zippered bag in his front basket. He had two big rear baskets for groceries, and he took to filling them up with aluminum cans, tossed from cars, worth about two cents apiece. It amused him to be beautifying the environment in exchange for lunch money.

After about a month of this, he was pedaling along with a few days' beard, old shabby clothes, on a squeaky rusty bike loaded down with trash, and a young cop stopped him and asked whether he could produce evidence that he shouldn't be arrested for vagrancy. In fact, he had left his wallet at home, so he didn't have any ID or money, but he did unfortunately have a gun, and the young fellow didn't want to listen to a lecture about unlawful search and seizure, least of all from a vagrant who claimed to be a lawyer.

Back at the police station, fingerprints and a retinal scan quickly verified he was Stephen Spenser, a lawyer with a PI ticket and a gun license. Why was he biking around looking like a penniless bum? A police reporter who was loitering around the station overheard some of that, and asked whether he would trade an interview for a steak dinner. Good human interest story, and it might drum up some business for Spenser for Hire.

The steak, at the local Denny's, wasn't too bad, but the story made him wince. It was in the Sunday edition of the Daytona Beach paper, leading off the People section. There was a big picture of him above the fold, scarfing up that cheap steak like a starving hobo. The story was sympathetic but condescending. He almost went out for a pack of Winstons.

But the story had his phone number, and that would change his life.

He read through the rest of the paper and was about to get on his bike when the phone rang. It was a man named Bayer Steinhart, who said he might have a job for a private investigator with a gun and a bicycle. Could they meet this morning? He gave an Ormond Beach address on A1A—Millionaire's Row—and Steve said he could be there at ten thirty.

He put on some decent clothes and pedaled south, going down the A1A sidewalk. He stopped and stared at the ocean just long enough to be five minutes late. It wouldn't do to appear too pathetically eager.

It was a mansion with architecture so idiosyncratic that Steve had stopped to look at it before. It was in the style of the twentieth-century Spanish architect Gaudí, the corners flowing as if melted. Fantastic gargoyle ornamentation. The lawn featured topiaries of unicorns and dragons, and there was a fountain where three beautiful nudes, life-sized and meticulously accurate, embraced laughing. The three Graces, having a better time than usual.

So the man had a surplus of money and a shortage of taste. Steve could live with both.

An attractive black maid a little older than Steve answered the door and escorted him through the house to a terrace that overlooked the ocean. Not too many people on the beach yet. Mr. Steinhart was scanning the horizon with a compact Questar telescope. Steve recognized it; his father owned one. They were built like a Swiss watch but cost considerably more.

He was wearing faded jeans and a light flannel shirt. Forty or fifty years old. As tall and muscular as Steve, he shook hands gently.

Without preamble: “One thing the article didn't say. When you were betrayed and lost everything, why didn't you just find a position with another firm? Law degree from Princeton?”

“I don't like lawyers. I've been around them all my life, and really wanted to do something else.”

“What if I'm a lawyer?”

Steve paused. “I'll take your money.”

He smiled. “Rest easy. I'm a mathematician, sort of. Self-taught. This all came from computer games.”

“Of course. I thought the name sounded familiar.”

The maid brought out a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses. She set it on a glass-covered wrought iron table.

“Thank you, Selma.” To Steve: “If you biked here, you must be thirsty.” They sat down and he poured two glasses.

“You've heard of Hunter.”

“The assistant governor?” Slimeball.

“No. The serial killer.”

“Oh, of course.”

He rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes. “Five years ago . . . almost six now . . . my only son was his first victim.”

“My god. I'm sorry.”

“They found, the Georgia police”—his voice cracked—“they found his, his skin and insides. He'd been dressed out like a rabbit or a deer.”

“I've read about that. I had no idea it had happened to you.”

“We paid a lot to keep our identity secret. We thought it might have been a kidnapping, for ransom, that went awry. I had two younger daughters to protect.”

“They're not here?” The place had a bachelor feel.

“No, they live with their mother up north. The marriage sort of fell apart. Understandable.”

“The police weren't able to . . .”

“No, nothing. Of course it's federal now. Homeland Security and the FBI. They have no leads at all. And I just found out there was a new one, the twelfth, last week. A jogger in Alabama.”

“I didn't know.”

“Nobody does. The man had no family, so they kept it under wraps. If the murderer is after publicity, they think maybe not getting it might make him do something stupid.”

“I read that he's pretty . . . not stupid.”

“He's never left prints or DNA. He's left tire tracks, but no two are the same.

“I'll give you the FBI dossier, everything they gave me. I don't want to look at it anymore. Pictures.”

“So . . . what do you want me to do? Find him when the FBI can't?”

“Basically, well, I want you to be a lure.”

“Lure him to you?”

“To yourself. And then capture or kill him.”

“Why would he want to come after me?”

“Everyone he's killed was alone, on a country road or path. All athletes, either jogging or running or, like my son, biking. All in Florida or Georgia or Alabama.”

“I bike sixty miles a day in Florida. He hasn't come after me yet.”

“My son and three others seem to have been on the same trail. It can't be a coincidence.”

“What trail?”

“It's the Southern Tier Trail, three thousand miles of back roads and bike paths from St. Augustine to San Diego. Thousands of people bike it every year.”

“You'd think the authorities would have it staked out. Parts of it.”

“You'd think. But they call it ‘weak circumstantial evidence.' None of them died near the trail, but they all were on or near it the day they died. My son's bike was found right off the trail outside Tallahassee, but he was taken to a remote part of Georgia to be killed.”

“Well, I'm not a criminal lawyer. But I'd call it circumstantial evidence myself.”

“Whatever, I'll pay you two thousand dollars a week to ride that trail by yourself, alone and apparently vulnerable, but armed. A hundred thousand if you capture the bastard. Two hundred if he's killed. It beats picking up cans off the road.”

It was a crazy idea, but hell, the man could afford an expensive hobby. A quest. “Well, I'm not camping. I had enough of that in the army.”

“I'll give you a credit card. Sleep in motels, eat in restaurants, best you can find out there in the sticks.”

Steve rubbed his chin. “That piece of crap I'm riding wouldn't make it to Tallahassee. Need a new bike—and a new gun, more effective than the little peashooter I'm carrying now.”

He reached into a beach bag and pulled out a fat wallet. “New bike.” He counted out fifteen hundred-dollar bills. “New gun.” Ten more. Then he put the wallet back and pulled out a thick manila folder that had “Dup. Hunter Case File” scrawled on it.

“Thank you, Mr. Steinhart.” He stacked the bills together and folded them and put them in his pocket. “You've got a deal. Do you have a contract?”

He smiled. “I don't like lawyers, either. But if you draw something up, I'll sign it tomorrow.” He stood up. “And then you'll be on the road.”

Steve stood and shook his hand. “You've bought yourself the most expensive piece of bait in the state of Florida.”