The Hit

Chapter





15





MORE POLICE TAPE. IN THE wind and rain it looked like golden strands of rope shimmying against the dark. FBI vans, police cars, barricades, press people trying to push through, uniforms pushing them back.

It was always the same.

At the center of it was always at least one dead body, usually more. It was getting to the point that every day brought a new slaughter for people to dissect.

Robie watched all of this activity with an informed eyed as he stood behind the barricades. He had thought about many things since nearly dying on the Eastern Shore. One in particular was nagging at him.

I didn’t clear the outbuilding before going into the cottage.

He imagined there might have been some interesting things in that outbuilding. But there was no way to go back there now. The police would be all over the place. He wondered what they might find.

He called Blue Man and asked that very question.

“The outbuilding is no longer there,” Blue Man said.

“What do you mean it’s no longer there?”

“About two minutes after you left, it disintegrated into flames. Accelerant plus perhaps a phosphorus-based incendiary component. The temperature would have been so hot it would turn metal to liquid. I just watched the feed from one of our satellites. The police are there now, but finding nothing.”

“She covered her tracks well.”

“Did you expect anything less?”

“I guess not.”

“Don’t forget to come in,” said Blue Man.

“You’ll see me at some point.”

Robie clicked off and watched the police and FBI go about finding nothing.

The Town Car sat in the same spot, but it was partially blocked from view by a blue plastic tarp shield that had been erected around it.

Blue Man earlier had filled Robie in on the details of the execution, for that’s what it had been. Some kid had come to clean the windshield. First the driver’s-side and then the passenger-side windows had come down, through which the security agents had warned the kid off.

The shot had come through the passenger side, hit Gelder in the forehead, and ended his life. Neither of the security guys had been touched.

It was only Gelder she had been after. That made sense. He was number two. If he were the number one guy at the agency, Robie would have started to feel more than a little nervous, because he might be next on the list.

The kid had run off. They were looking for him, but even if they found him Robie was certain he would have nothing to tell them. He’d been paid to do what he’d done. But there was no way he ever would have seen who paid him.

To go from a desk banger like Douglas Jacobs and leapfrog all the way up to the man holding down the number two slot at the agency was a jump of impressive length. Robie wondered about the rationale behind it. For he figured Reel had to have some reason. He didn’t think she was simply picking her targets out of a jar.

And that meant that Robie had to come to understand her logic. And to do that he had to come to understand not just Reel, but also the men she had killed.

He figured Gelder’s file would be much thicker than Jacobs’s, and most of it would be classified. Robie wondered how much of it would be kept from him. At some point he might have to start pushing back against the natural secrecy that the personnel of the agency carried in their DNA. He couldn’t solve what he couldn’t understand.

He glanced up at the traffic light. It was green now, but no cars moved through because the road had been closed down.

He looked back at the car and then at the traffic light.

He nodded. She’d covered that as well.

He made another call to Blue Man. “Have someone check the cycles on the traffic light the car was stopped at. I’m betting she interfered with it to get the car to stop where it did when it did. Otherwise, she’s shit out of luck if the light was green.”

“We already did. And they were manually overridden, presumably by her.”

Robie put his phone away and started walking off. But he kept looking back over his shoulder to judge the likely path of the bullet, reversing that route to get where he needed to go.

He stopped near a tree. It was far away from the crime scene, so the police had not gotten to it yet, but they would.

He eyed the lowest branch, looking for any recent marks where a gun barrel had been laid. He saw none, but that meant nothing. He next examined the little dirt patch the tree was set in and the sidewalk around it.

Blue Man had said there were no witnesses. Well, actually there were three: the two security agents and the kid. But the guards had seen nothing. Didn’t even know really from precisely which direction the shot had come. The kid would be of no help because he would know nothing.

Robie did a sight line to the car window. A fine shot on a diagonal line between two stationary objects at distance.

At night.

In less than ideal conditions.

The margin of error he calculated to be nonexistent.

She had to have used a scope and a hybrid weapon, something between a pistol and a rifle. This was not the Eastern Shore, after all. There were potential witnesses everywhere. Pulling out a long-barreled rifle was problematic at best.

She’d gotten the shot off and then was gone. Like smoke. That didn’t just happen. You had to make it happen.

His gaze went to the bushes surrounding the tree, and he saw it on his second pass. He knelt down and picked it up. It was white, falling apart. He put it to his nose. It had a scent.

His mind went back to the town house where the kill shot on Jacobs had come from. Same thing.

He put it in his pocket. It was the only clue he could see and he was not going to leave it for the police to find. They were not his ally in this.

He looked around. There were four directions on the compass, and they translated into thousands of potential escape routes for Reel to take.

His phone buzzed again.

He hoped it was Blue Man, maybe to finally tell Robie why he was acting so funny.

Only it wasn’t Blue Man.

It was Jessica Reel.