The Boyfriend Read online

  It was then that he realized that these girls had lonely lives. The reason they were escorts was that nobody cared about them enough to make that work uninviting and unnecessary. No matter how beautiful they were—and a surprising number really were—they didn’t get much joy out of it. A good experience with a client was an exception.

  He left the next morning while she was asleep. He placed a note on her kitchen table that said “Call me” and gave the number of the cell phone he carried.

  It rang at noon, but when he answered it, the voice on the other end was the Broker. “I guess Holcomb’s dead, huh?”

  “It was a freak accident. He dropped his gun out the window. When he went to pick it up, the guy popped him.”

  “What happened to the target?”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to let him go just because he got lucky.”

  “You killed him?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I owe you money,” said the Broker. “Sorry about your partner.”

  “Thanks,” Joey said.

  “He was a son of a bitch,” said the Broker.

  “I know.”

  “At least you’re still alive.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Want me to deposit your money in a bank account or send it to you at your apartment?”

  “I guess the apartment this time. ”

  “I’ll also send you a clean phone.”

  “I can get a phone.”

  “Not like this. It’s scrambled. After you’ve had it for a few days, I’ll call you.”

  “Okay.”

  They hung up and his phone rang again. He heard Rebecca’s voice. She said, “When I woke up I was sad to see you were gone.” She added, “When I saw your note I was happy again.”

  “I’m happy you’d feel that way.” It was true. He could feel the power flowing from her to him.

  Two nights later she said, “I wish you didn’t have to go home.”

  “I wish I didn’t too.”

  “I mean at all.”

  He gave a chuckle. “I can’t afford to see you every night.”

  “I wouldn’t charge you. I won’t. Starting now, everything is free. I just want you to be with me when I quit at night. Sleep with me, so I’m not alone. Then spend the morning with me.”

  He moved some of his clothes to her apartment, but he kept his own apartment in case the arrangement didn’t work out.

  After a week his money arrived in the mail at his apartment and so did his new cell phone. After a second week, it rang. He was just walking in Rebecca’s door. The Broker said, “Listen carefully.”

  “I am.”

  “I’m going to give you a list of ten targets and their addresses. You can do them when you’re ready. Your schedule is up to you. I’ll give you fifty thousand for each one. Open a couple of new bank accounts in fake names in different states—nothing that might be associated with Holcomb. When you cross off your first target, wait forty-eight hours and then call me with your bank information. I’ll get the money transferred right away.”

  “Why forty-eight hours?”

  “It’s the news cycle, kid. By then I know it’s done and you got away with it. After the second hit, you do the same. Kill the guy and call me. Tell me what to do with your money. This all okay with you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Just have the last name crossed off by January first. Ready for the names?”

  “Give me a minute to find a pen.”

  He found one on the kitchen counter where Rebecca made her grocery lists. He took the pad and wrote down the list of ten men. He was pleased to see that the first couple of addresses were in Southern California.

  Moreland spent a week finding the first target, and studying the area around his neighborhood. He contemplated different ways of getting him alone. At the end of each day, he went back to Rebecca Coleman’s apartment. She changed her online ads so she was available from noon until nine p.m. At ten he would arrive at her apartment. By then she had bathed and cleaned the apartment. They would go out to a restaurant and return around midnight.

  The first name on his list was Thomas Hennessy. His address was a bar in Bakersfield, which was about a hundred miles from the ocean, but the bar was called The Captain’s Table. The biggest sign on the building was an ancient one that read under new management.

  When Moreland was inside he ordered a draft beer and nursed it while he studied the other people at tables or perched at the bar. The customers were nearly all men, most of them about forty to sixty, with a group of six in their twenties at a table in the corner near the front door.

  The place was too popular at midday for him to think of taking out the owner and walking out the front door. In a dive like this he couldn’t even be sure a few of the other daytime drinkers weren’t carrying concealed guns.

  Moreland watched and listened while he finished his drink. He was about to leave when an older man emerged from a room behind the bar. He was muscular, wearing a black T-shirt with “Gold’s Gym” on it. He was about fifty-five years old with a short, bristly gray beard and a balding head. He was carrying a case of whiskey bottles that was heavy enough to make his biceps bulge. When he set the case down behind the bar he went back to the door, picked out a key on a ring, and locked it again. Moreland saw tattoo script on his arm that read “Hennessy.”

  Hennessy’s face was expressionless, but his eyes scanned the room as though he was looking for something in particular, and that was not a good sign. He knew he was being stalked.

  Moreland regretted coming inside the bar. It had been a foolish, lazy impulse. He should have found an observation point outside the bar and watched from a distance until he identified the target. Holcomb would never have allowed him to make this kind of careless mistake. Now the target had seen him. The next time he saw Moreland he would know it wasn’t a coincidence.

  When Hennessy went to the back hallway where the men’s room and the rear entrance were, Moreland got up and walked out the front door. He got into his car and drove up the street past body shops and carpet stores and around the long block, then did what he should have done before. He pulled up near the fence at the back of a paint store, sat in his car, and watched the parking lot of the bar, memorizing the cars. He paid special attention to the ones closest to the door, where the employees, who arrived first, probably parked. Hennessy’s car could be one of the four parked in the first row. There were a brownish Acura, a new blue Mustang, a black BMW, and a white Toyota SUV.

  Moreland drove off and went to a restaurant for dinner, then went to a movie. He called Rebecca at ten to tell her he’d be very late tonight. He returned to the street outside the bar at eleven. The four cars in the front were still there. He had already committed himself when he’d let Hennessy see him. He had to make his move tonight.

  He watched the parking lot of the bar for two hours. Men came in and went out, but none of the four cars moved. At two a.m. the bar’s electric sign went out. A half hour later, two men came out, got into their cars, and left. Moreland got out of his car, walked close to the side of the building, and waited. He heard the front door open once more, and two men’s voices. One of them said, “Got to get the cleaning done by ten, and the restocking done before noon.”

  Moreland stepped around the building, held his Beretta 92 in a two-handed aim, and fired. He put two bullets into Hennessy’s chest and fired twice at the second man, whom he recognized as the bartender. Both men went down. The bartender was lying half in the doorway, and Hennessy was sprawled on his back, his eyes open to the night sky. Moreland stepped close and fired a round into Hennessy’s forehead. In the corner of his eye he caught movement. He fired once more at the bartender’s head, then returned to Hennessy. He took Hennessy’s wallet and the key chain on his belt. He dragged the bartender i
nside the bar and turned on the light switch. Then he dragged Hennessy inside and locked the door.

  Moreland went to the back room and looked for the surveillance system. He found the video recorder, disconnected it, and took it with him. Then he took the bartender’s wallet. He turned off the light, locked the door with Hennessy’s key, and drove to his apartment. He counted the money he’d taken, threw the wallets and the recorder into a Dumpster a few miles away, and then went to see Rebecca.

  For the next couple of months he was extremely careful and professional. It was essential to a shooter that he be the one to choose the time and place to pull the trigger. He had made one careless mistake, and the realization had surprised him so much that he felt a residual fear whenever he thought about it.

  When danger came it was from another source. He came home one evening and found Rebecca sitting in the living room. Her strawberry blond hair was washed and blown dry, but left natural and wavy so it seemed to take up a lot of space, like an aura. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, with her feet bare. He could see she had set the furniture up so the only place to sit was right in front of her.

  He said, “Hi. I was afraid you’d be asleep.”

  She said, “We need to talk, so I waited.”

  “Okay. Let’s talk.”

  She watched him warily. “I think I’ve been good to you.” Moreland could tell she was establishing grounds for a complaint.

  He decided to blunt the argument before it started. “Of course you have been. You’ve been great.”

  She said, “I think you haven’t been honest with me.”

  “About what?”

  “Just tell me the truth. Have you been doing something you haven’t told me while you were here?”

  “Probably,” he said, and laughed. “Narrow it down.”

  “I found a shitload of money in that backpack you keep in the closet. Also two guns and some bullets.” She started to cry. “While I’m saying it I realize how stupid I sound. What answer can there be? You’ve been doing really bad stuff, and you didn’t give a shit if I got hurt or killed or sent to jail for, like, forever.”

  He sighed. “Since I met you I’ve been spending money in front of you. For a while I was even paying you. It’s always been cash. Didn’t it occur to you that somewhere there must be a shitload of cash that I got it from? And people who have a lot of cash around tend to have guns within reach so they can keep their cash.” He shrugged.

  “Don’t act like I’m stupid.” She was angry.

  “I’m just doing what you asked—telling you the truth.”

  “I may be a dumb whore, but I’m not as dumb as this. I’m an independent person, and I don’t need some john to talk to me like I was a child.” Her face reddened in anger.

  She swung her arm to slap him across the face, but he didn’t think, just snatched her hand out of the air. She instantly swung the other hand, but he caught that one too. “Please stop this,” he said. “I’ll go away and leave you alone now. I’ll leave you some money so you don’t feel that I cheated you or something.”

  She began to struggle again, trying to free her hands, but he knew it was only a distraction so she could knee him in the groin. He turned his body to the side suddenly so her knee harmlessly bumped his thigh. She took her next try with the other knee, but he had known it would happen long before she did. He pulled both her arms hard to his right toward the bed. Her head pounded into the wall and she fell on the bed, dazed and possibly unconscious. He took a pistol out of his backpack, wrapped a pillow around it, and shot her in the head.

  As he put the pistol away he checked his backpack to be sure she hadn’t taken anything, then began to search the apartment. He found forty thousand dollars in cash hidden behind an air-conditioning vent near the head of the bed, and put it into his backpack. He covered her body with the bedspread so she appeared to be asleep.

  He made sure he was leaving nothing in the apartment. He wandered through the apartment wiping every single surface he might have touched—faucets, light switches, doorknobs, counters, window latches. He knew he was being overly cautious, because there would be hundreds of male prints all over the premises, but he didn’t want his to be among those collected. When he had cleaned every part of the apartment he remembered Rebecca’s jewelry. There was a box hidden in the kitchen inside a set of pots and pans so none of her in-call clients would see it. He used a dish towel to open the cabinet and lift the top off the pot. He opened the box and saw that everything he remembered was there.

  He pushed a few sets of earrings aside and saw one of his favorites. It was a gold chain with a gold oval disk. On the disk was a two-carat diamond she had told him was placed to show the position of the earth on her birthday.

  In another minute or two he was outside, on his way to his car. This had been a shocking, unexpected night, but he had learned that he couldn’t just tell a woman he was leaving her and expect her to behave rationally. He put his backpack with all the money into the farthest corner of the trunk of his car, and drove out of Los Angeles.

  A year later he gave the necklace and the matching anklet to a girl in Miami named Jenny McLaughlin. He’d known he could take it back when she was through with it.

  14

  Jack Till spent his thirty-fifth morning in a row staring at escort ads on the screen of his laptop. He clicked on each ad that said “blond,” “red,” “ginger,” “redhead,” or “strawberry blond.” He would stop every fifteen or twenty minutes to rest his eyes. When he had gone all the way through the escort ads in one major city, he would put a check mark next to it on his list and move on to the next city. Over the past month he had been through the list of major cities several times. Each time he returned to a city, he would recognize a number of girls, but there would be as many new ones he had never seen before. He had admitted to himself that he wasn’t working just for Catherine Hamilton’s parents now. He was working for Kyra, the girl he had hired at the Biltmore in Phoenix and then followed home. He was also working for the next Kyra, the next girl who would come into the sphere of this killer. He wanted to find her before she died.

  This morning he had moved his search to Boston. After so many days it was tempting to pass over groups of ads without looking at the photographs. Then, there she was. The girl looked very much the way they all had looked. She was tall and slender and very pale, with hair that couldn’t be called blond or red, but was something in between. She called herself Kelly. She presented herself in the usual poses, approximating the views a man would have of her in various sexual positions. Then he saw the glint of gold where the flash of the camera was reflected, and he held his breath for a moment. He put his fingers on the screen and enlarged the image.

  Hanging from her neck was the gold oval with the diamond on it. There was the chain at the ankle. There was no question that this Kelly was wearing the custom-made necklace and anklet that Catherine Hamilton had worn in Los Angeles and Kyra had worn in Phoenix.

  He closed his laptop and opened the two gun safes that were bolted against the wall in the office. He opened a couple of drawers at the bottom and found what he was looking for. He took out the two Ruger LC9 compact nine-millimeter pistols. They were only six inches long and nine-tenths of an inch thick, and each weighed seventeen ounces. He reached into the drawer again and brought out two spare magazines for each, then loaded the magazines.

  Two compact pistols were the best choice for the kind of action he was expecting. Most people didn’t think clearly about concealed weapons because they didn’t know what worked and what didn’t. The human body didn’t conceal weapons well. A man walking around with a three-pound .45-caliber model 1911 under his coat wasn’t hard to spot. The man’s torso bent toward the weapon when he tried to hide it, and he bent away from it when he thought he might have to use it. A man carrying two small, thin polymer pistols was evenly balanced. He wasn�
��t leaning one way or the other. The eye didn’t pick up the width of the two LC9s on a man’s body.

  At close range there was virtually no advantage to firing a nine-millimeter round from a bigger gun. At twenty-five feet he could place his rounds within a two-inch circle. The gun would do that at a hundred feet.

  Till reserved a seat on a flight from LAX to Logan airport for that evening, and a room at the Intercontinental with an estimated arrival of eight the next morning. He prepared four packages for mailing. Each contained parts of two LC9 pistols. One had the slides, recoil springs, barrels, and one trigger and sear in a metal windup toy. He put the four loaded magazines between two external computer drives. He mailed the four packages to himself at his hotel.

  He didn’t like doing things this way, because smuggling handguns around was risky. But he also didn’t like his odds of finding the weapons he might need in another state within an hour of landing.

  He drove to the flower shop where Holly worked, parked on the street, and entered. As he did, he saw Holly emerge from the cutting room with a vase of flowers she had arranged. Mrs. Carmody, the owner, looked at the arrangement and said, “Beautiful, Holly. But think how much fuller it would seem if you added a little baby’s breath here and here.” He caught himself looking at Mrs. Carmody for longer than he should have.

  Holly said, “Okay” and turned to go back into the cutting room, but then saw him. “Hey, Dad.”

  “Hi, honey. I thought you might like to go to lunch. Do you have plans?”

  “No,” she said. “Mrs. Camody, can I go early?”

  “Hi, Jack,” said Mrs. Carmody. To Holly she said, “Finish that arrangement and you’re out of here.”