Wild Justice

CHAPTER 18

The guy led me ever deeper into the forest, stumbling on the unfamiliar terrain. A city boy.

As we walked, he kept saying, “I last saw him just over here.” Then, “Wait, over there.” And, “Just a little farther now.”

“What does he look like?” I asked.

“He’s brown.”

“Big? Small?”

“In between.” The guy turned. “Why don’t you take your dog off-lead? She might find mine that way.”

“I don’t do that in the forest. Much too dangerous.” I paused. “But why don’t I go ahead? I know the lay of the land better than you do.”

He struggled not to smile. “That’s an excellent idea.”

“Great! Come on, girl. Let’s find us a missing puppy.”

I passed the guy and got ten paces before I heard the whir of his jacket being unzipped. I turned so quickly he jumped.

“Oooh,” I said. “You might want to leave that zipped up. The deer ticks are bad this time of year, and we’ve had a few cases of Lyme disease.”

He looked at my undone jacket.

“I’m wearing spray.”

“So am I.”

There is no such thing as anti-tick spray, but I grinned and said, “Carry on, then.”

I turned back and tugged out my gun. I waited for the telltale whisper of him starting to unholster his weapon then wheeled.

He stared at the Glock pointing at his chest.

When his hand moved under his jacket, I barked, “Stop!” but he kept drawing his weapon. As soon as I saw the butt, I fired.

The shot hit him in the right shoulder and he staggered back, releasing his grip on the gun. I lunged, dropping Scout’s lead as I grabbed his right arm and twisted it. I threw him down. I kicked his gun aside.

“On your stomach!” I said. “Hands behind your back!”

“You shot me,” he said, gasping in pain. “You fucking—”

“On your stomach!”

I rammed my foot into the small of his back, knocking him into position. Scout jumped on his back, growling. I ordered her off, which she did, seemingly with reluctance.

“Hands behind your back!” I said.

“What are you? A fucking cop?”

I grabbed his right arm and pinned it against his back. He yowled but stopped struggling. I patted him down. There was a switchblade in his pocket. I pulled that out. Then I found a zip tie in his jacket pocket.

“You bring your own handcuffs?” I said. “Now that is convenient.”

He resisted having his hands cuffed behind his back, but a slam to his injured shoulder stopped that. I got the zip tie on his wrists and then used Scout’s leash to bind his legs. Once he was secured, I did another pat-down search, making sure I hadn’t missed any weapons. Finally I removed his wallet.

He had a New York State driver’s license. A decent fake. He had a credit card in the same name—Douglas Leeds—but the cash-stuffed wallet told me he preferred to pay that way.

“Why were you following me?” I asked.

Silence.

I did another pat down, as thorough as possible now. When something crinkled in his windbreaker, I realized he had an extra pocket sewn in the liner. Inside was a folded sheet of paper.

I pulled the paper out and opened it. It was a computer printout with two photos on it. One was a slightly blurry photo of me in disguise at the bar in Newport. The other was an equally crappy photo of me leading a group of rock climbers near the lodge—likely something he found online. Below that was my name, address, date of birth, and information about the lodge.

“Are we going to talk about this?” I said, shoving the paper down beside his face.

He turned his stony gaze to mine. “No.”

“All right then.”

I took off my shoe and then my sock, and I stuffed the sock into his mouth. He fought then, teeth gritted against the pain in his shoulder. But I managed to get it in without being bitten.

When I started to walk away, he decided he was feeling chatty. At least, that seemed to be what he was trying to tell me, grunting and wriggling madly as I abandoned him to the bunnies and squirrels.

As I turned the last corner near the lodge, I was confronted by yet another armed killer on a mission to track me down.

“Hey,” I said to Jack. “Did you start worrying that a hired gun had attacked me in the forest?”

He rolled his eyes and jerked his chin back toward the lodge. “Emma’s baking. Should be ready.”

“Great, but I’m going to suggest you get your cinnamon roll to go. I shouldn’t leave that guy bleeding in the forest.”

“Guy?”

“The hired gun.”

Jack stared at me. “You serious?”

“Also, I’d like my sock back.” I gestured down at my bare leg. “I just hope he hasn’t chewed any holes in it.”

“Fuck.”

“Agreed. All these times when I mocked you for telling me to take extra precautions on my jog and now you get to say ‘I told you so’ forever.”

I handed him the page I’d taken from my would-be assassin. As he read it, his expression changed. If I was the guy in the woods, I’d start gnawing my arm off.

Jack folded the paper, carefully and deliberately, running his nails along the edges before he looked up.

“If I’d had any idea—” he began.

“—that Drew Aldrich’s killer would presumably send someone here after me? It’s a completely unforeseeable turn of events, Jack.”

His grim look said it should have been foreseeable. He jerked his chin toward the road. “Let’s go.”

“You aren’t wearing a disguise,” I said.

“Don’t need it.”

I could have gotten my would-be attacker to talk without Jack’s help. No matter how inclined a guy might be to discredit a woman’s potential threat, it’s possible to beat the sexism out of him. But I didn’t need to do that when I had a partner who was a lot better at getting reluctant people to talk.

Bringing back male reinforcements did not bolster my attacker’s opinion of me. He lifted his head as we approached, saw Jack, and managed a snort, as if to say “Figures.”

Jack walked over, gun at his side. With his free hand, he grabbed the guy by the hair and lifted him as he crouched to study his face. Then he dropped him and shot him in the other shoulder. The guy let out a strangled squeal through the sock gag and the stink of urine wafted over.

“He didn’t piss himself when I shot him,” I said.

“Saw yours coming. Gotta be faster.”

The guy writhed on the ground. When Jack bent again, he tried shimmying backward.

“Stop moving or I shoot you between the shoulders.”

The man stopped. Jack hunkered down in front of him, gun dangling so casually it might have been a half-empty beer bottle.

“I need to talk to you. I’m going to take that sock out. You yell, scream, holler? I shoot you. You don’t answer my questions, I shoot you. Basically? You piss me off, I shoot you. Understood?”

The guy nodded.

Jack pulled out the sock gag, tossed it aside, and looked up at me. “What’re we calling him?”

“His fake ID says Douglas. Dougie works for me.”

Dougie followed our exchange, gaze slightly narrowed, as if not sure whether to be offended by my casual tone or take it as a sign that the situation wasn’t as dire as it seemed. He opted for number two. He asked Jack, “You a cop, too?”

Jack looked at me.

“My throw-down tipped him off,” I said. “Apparently, he didn’t know his assigned target was a former law-enforcement officer.”

“Fucking idiot,” Jack muttered.

“He’s not too bright,” I said. “Did I tell you how he got me into the woods? He convinced me to help him find his lost dog.”

Jack snorted. “How old does she look to you? Twelve?”

Dougie’s eyes narrowed as he looked up at me. “She tricked me. Fucking bitch—”

Jack shot him in the leg. When he screeched, Jack grabbed his hair and slammed his face into the ground.

“Shut the fuck up.” He lifted Dougie’s head as blood surged from the man’s broken nose. “Didn’t I warn you not to piss me off? Calling her names is going to piss me off.”

“You crazy . . .”

Dougie trailed off, watching Jack’s emotionless face. He seemed to decide that crazy wasn’t quite the word he wanted. He swallowed hard and dropped his gaze.

“What’s the job?” Jack asked.

Dougie was having trouble focusing. “Wh-what?”

“The job. This.” He shook open the page with my information. “What were you supposed to do?”

“Just . . . uh, find her. Get a look and see if she was the woman in the other photo. Which, obviously she’s not, so I’ll say there was a mistake and—”

“Stop babbling.”

His teeth clicked shut.

“And if she was this woman in the photo?” Jack said. “What were you supposed to do?”

“Tell the guy who hired me. That’s it.”

“So you were only supposed to confirm whether Nadia Stafford was the woman in the photo. Which required a gun, handcuffs, and fake ID.”

The man decided not to answer, instead shifting and wincing, trying to find a less painful position.

“Who hired you to check her out?”

“I don’t know. That’s not how I work. I have this other guy, like an agent, who takes the, uh, job requests.”

“A middleman? Who?”

“He’s just a guy. It’s not like you can look him up in the Yellow Pages. Hell, even I don’t know his—”

“—his real name. Yeah, I know. I’m asking what he goes by.”

Dougie eyed Jack. I could see the wheels turning, hoping this was just idle curiosity. Knowing if it wasn’t, that meant Jack might recognize the middleman’s nom de guerre, which would mean Jack wasn’t just some petty criminal I’d brought along for backup. One should hope the guy had figured that out by now.

“He goes by Roland. All I have is a phone number and even that changes—”

“Roland? Out of Pittsburgh?”

Sweat rolled down Dougie’s cheek. “Maybe. I only know it’s a Pennsylvania area code.”

Jack turned to me. “I know him. Runs a pack of lowlifes and losers. Third-rate pros. Like this dumb fuck. Ask Evelyn. She’ll know more.”

Jack wasn’t explaining this for me—this was for Dougie. It took him a minute to piece together that Jack knew his middleman, and he knew Evelyn. Pretty much everyone in the business knows Evelyn’s name. She makes sure of that. All that added up to one conclusion—Dougie was dealing with a fellow hitman. And not some “third-rate pro.” He looked at Jack as he tried to figure out who he was. Jack might be a legend in the business, but he wasn’t nearly as interested in getting his name out as Evelyn.

“Let’s back up,” Jack said. “I asked what the job was. I already know, but I want to hear you say it. And if you don’t?” Jack didn’t raise the gun or threaten. He just shrugged.

“It was a hit,” Dougie said. “The job was to hunt down this Nadia Stafford chick, and if she was the woman in the other picture, then I was supposed to kill her.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“We have time. And it’ll make me happy.”

Dougie wanted to make Jack happy. His life depended on it. He told his story—or as much of it as he knew.

Aldrich thought he’d recognized me in Newport. Yet he’d been uncertain so he’d snapped a shot with his cell phone, then called “this guy.” That was all Dougie knew—Aldrich called “this guy.” Aldrich was freaked out because he thought the woman in the pictures was from his past. Someone who could ruin his present. “This guy” then contacted Roland to hire a hitman to kill Nadia Stafford, if she was the same woman.

“Kill me and then what?” I asked. “Make me disappear?”

“The client offered extra if I could make it seem like a suicide. Otherwise you had to disappear.” He looked around the woods. “Which would have been easy out here. I could have done the suicide part, too, if I’d known you had a gun.”

“Real fucking tragedy,” Jack muttered.

The guy didn’t have the sense to look abashed. He just shifted again, struggling against the pain.

“Look, we’re on the same team,” Dougie said. “Clearly Roland had no idea the target was your girl. But now it’s all been straightened out and the job is over. I’ll drop it. As a professional courtesy.”

“Big of you.”

Jack hunkered down again, meeting Dougie’s gaze. Sweat streamed down the man’s face now as he audibly swallowed.

“What else you got?” Jack asked.

Dougie told him everything else. It wasn’t much, but his life was on the line. He gave his name as Mark Lewiston, from Cleveland, along with some other personal information that may or may not have been true. When he was done, Jack turned to me.

“Nadia? Take the dog. Start heading back.”

Scout had been sitting beside me, growing impatient, and was happy now to be moving again. As we walked away, I glanced back. Jack noticed me looking. He tensed, a muscle in his cheek twitching. He didn’t want me watching him kill a man. It didn’t matter if that was his job, or if we both knew it had to be done.

I turned away. The shot fired. I kept walking.