with him, the brassy clink of expended cartridges rolling away from their shoes, “we’ve done good business with you in the past, and we’ll make all this go away. We’ll make what’s in Stockton go away, too. But I want to be sure what you want us to do in Pinehaven. We don’t operate the way these two meatheads did.” With disdain, he indicated the riddled bodies of Sergetov and Gatz. “A town like Pinehaven, strangers are noticed and remembered. We just wouldn’t storm a house in a quiet hickburg and blast away.”
“You wouldn’t, and you shouldn’t,” Ludlow said. “I want Megan Bookman and her son alive, and within the next twelve hours. I want to break her down, take her apart piece by piece, find out what she knows and who she’s told, if anyone. If I’ve got the boy, I’ll break her by breaking him.”
Verbotski suggested approaches, involving two men in addition to him and Knacker, and Ludlow offered refinements.
Being Alexander Gordius, Haskell Ludlow made his way out of the decaying mall, where the reflections of his flashlight in the dusty shop windows shaped stalkers in his peripheral vision. He knew his imagination was plaguing him, but he kept nervously turning his head left and right, to confront what wasn’t there.
Although he had paid for killings before and thought little of it, he had never until this night been present when the contract was fulfilled. He found the experience far more unsettling than he had imagined he would.
When he returned to the open-air four-story parking structure in which he’d left his Lexus SUV, a sudden rattling noise inspired him to pivot and play his flashlight across the forest of concrete columns. Out of the darkness swooped several sheets of a discarded newspaper, animated by the wind, whirling together along the parking row, like some creature of pale wings and hooded form, with lethal purpose. This storm-crafted presence lacked a scythe or sickle, but with a sudden seeming leap, it sprang on Ludlow, enwrapped him in crackling crispness, masking his face, blinding him. He cried out and thrashed free of its embrace, slashing viciously with the flashlight as if the thing could be wounded.
He clambered into the SUV, pulled the door shut, started the engine, switched on the headlights, locked the doors, and sat in a cold sweat. He watched the sheets of the newspaper billow away into the dark, embarrassed by the panic that had seized him.
Stress. He was stressed out. The violence in the mall. The possibility that Megan Bookman had linked him and Dorian to Tragedy on the Dark Web. Since he had nothing to do with Refine and knew nothing about what had happened in Springville, he didn’t worry much about that, except to the extent that he was concerned how Refine’s troubles would affect Parable’s stock price.
Ludlow drove out of the parking garage, off the mall property, into the street.
It would be three thirty by the time he returned to his hotel. This Tragedy job had cost him sleep he badly needed after days of playing with Zoey and Chloe in Vegas. He wanted a martini with the merest whisper of vermouth, followed by a superb cabernet with an early breakfast, although not breakfast food, dinner fare instead, so that he might reset his circadian rhythm. Then eight hours of sleep to prepare himself for the interrogation of Megan Bookman. He had a suite at a four-star hotel. Sacramento, the capital, was home to a wonderfully corrupt state government, with an ocean of dark money washing around, which meant there were a great many good hotels to choose from. His suite had three bedrooms; when he woke in the night and went to the bathroom, he liked to return to a fresh bed with crisp, clean sheets, where he hadn’t yet left any bad dreams under the pillow.
83
Behind the sheriff’s department headquarters and town jail lay a city-employee parking lot. Beyond the parking lot stood a brick building, a garage, with small, high-set barred windows that were at the moment full of pearl-gray light, a backwash from the hooded lamps that hung below the glass line.
In this structure, vehicles associated with a serious crime and permitted to be seized for investigation were impounded until they must be released according to timetables established in the law or until a court ordered that they be returned to the rightful owners. In generally peaceful Pinehaven County, law enforcement was not impoundment crazy or reliant on