Chapter TWENTY-THREE
The controller was pissed. His angry voice penetrated Jeff Worthington’s eardrum, accompanied by a low, regularly spaced tone from the cell phone he held. His battery was low. He hoped it wouldn’t expire before the controller finished his rant. He could be executed for such a breach of protocol.
“What the f*ck do you mean, you went on the mission? You dumb ass. Your job is to coordinate the idiots I’m saddled with, not get involved with them. What if you’d gotten caught? I set you up to be our goddamned lawyer, the man who can get into the jails and take care of any of these idiots dumb enough to get arrested. You can’t do that if you’re in jail yourself.”
“I thought it’d be better for me to oversee the operation from close-up. You know, after the first f*ckup.”
“Qualman did okay,” said the controller. “He almost had the bitch detective, but he couldn’t have anticipated that a man with a gun would be in the parking lot. Did you ever find out who he was?”
“The local newspaper said two men were involved. One of them is a lawyer on Longboat Key named Matt Royal. The other man was unidentified. That was it.”
“I’ll see what I can find out about him. In the meantime, if you so much as think about going on another operation, your life will be over. Do you understand that?”
“I thought—”
“Your answer is ‘yes, sir’ or ‘no, sir,’ nothing else,” the controller shouted. “You don’t take initiative, you don’t make plans. You do exactly as you’re told. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll be in touch.” The phone went dead.
Worthington thought it was a good thing that the controller didn’t find out that he’d gone with Qualman, too. He, not Qualman, was the one who took the woman from the house on Longboat Key, killed her, and tied her body to the tree on Sister Key. How was he to know that old rope wouldn’t hold her when the tide started moving.
Qualman had set up the meeting, but it was Jeff Worthington who was in charge. The controller had told him where to leave the bodies, but he couldn’t have known that he, Worthington, had to do the killing. It was not something he would delegate. His involvement had always been part of the plan. The plan drawn by the master himself.
The only reason he’d told the controller about his involvement in the most recent fiasco was that he was sure the controller would read about the operation in the papers. He’d want to know who the second man was, and Worthington thought it prudent to get ahead of the bad news. It hadn’t gone as badly as it could have. The controller would get over being pissed, but Worthington had no intention of bowing out of the operations.
He needed to make the kills. It gave him a godlike power, knowing that the person he killed had no inkling of what was happening. One second they were alive, and the next second they were dead. No warning. No time to get ready. Just life one moment and death the next. And he needed the excitement that came with the kills. He’d first tasted that rush when he killed the bouncer so many years ago at the club called The Place, and he’d dreamed about that moment during the fifteen years he’d spent as a guest of the Florida Department of Corrections. Once, when he was pretty sure he could get away with it, he’d killed a young druggie during his first few days in the system.
Now he was building memories. Later, after the kills, while the bodies were cooling in some medical examiner’s morgue, he would stare at the photographs and remember each detail of the kill and feel the power it brought him. A power that most mortals never tasted or even understood. It was as simple as that. He needed to make the kills. But he was good for now. He could wait a few more days before it was time to start hunting. He breathed a sigh of relief and plugged his phone into its charger.