But not Ben Ingram. I believed every word he said. There were things he wasn’t telling me, but I couldn’t even put the words together to ask about them.
In a way he was a paragon, a state of humanity to emulate.
In Ingram’s sense of the world my fate had already been sealed. I was a dead man, a shadow burned into the concrete by a light a thousand times brighter than the sun.
“I’m sorry that we can’t come to some kind of agreement, Mr. Longerman. You seem like the kind of man that one could trust. You’re educated and confident.”
“Thank you. I’m not very political and whatever powers I have are small. But be that as it may, you’re right about me.”
“How do you mean?”
“You and yours can bleed and die just as well as I and mine can.”
18
Walking down the sweltering streets of Buckhead, I felt exposed to attack. This wasn’t paranoia. Ingram could very well have called an assassin to follow me, to shoot me or run me down as I waited for red to turn to green. Maybe the message he left, hold my next two, was code for get ready for a kill.
My tongue was dry despite the humidity. My feet felt as if they might tangle up from the simple act of walking.
As disturbing as my situation was, it was not unfamiliar. I’d spent a good deal of my work life conniving against the machine. I could have, I should have, said no to Roger Ferris. When Monica came to me crying about Tesserat, I should have told her to call Art Tomey and mention my name — period.
There were other jobs, other ways to pay the rent. Aja was right about that.
So, turning on the residential block where I’d parked my rental car, I accepted that there was no one to blame but myself.
The forest-green Kia Rio was parked at the far end of the block, under, of all things, a peach tree. I was half the way there when I realized that there was a man seated behind the steering wheel. I couldn’t make out his features but he was either Black or deeply tanned.
I stopped and considered running while feeling around for the pistol.
Neither response made sense, so I straightened my shoulders and forged on.
Eight steps along I saw that it was Rags sitting in the car.
“Hey, Joe,” a man said from a step or two off to my right.
I flinched before recognizing Gladstone Palmer.
“You scared the shit out of me, man.”
“We were waiting for you to come,” he said, ignoring my flightiness. “It was a good idea your cousin had to put that tracker in your car.”
“Why?”
“Right this way.”
Glad walked up to my car and peeked through an open window into the cramped back seat. There was something there under a large black plastic tarp. Rags turned to wave at me and then pulled the edge of the cover up, revealing the face of a very dark-skinned Black man. The tops of the definitely dead man’s cheekbones had equivalent horizontal scars on them. His left eye was open and sightless.
Rags covered the corpse over again.
“You should get in,” Glad said to me.
A little stunned at the sudden bewildering spectacle of death, I did as my old boss suggested. Glad closed the passenger’s door behind me and then immediately walked away down the street.
“I got an Airbnb on the outskirts of Smyrna,” Rags said as he ignited the engine and pulled from the curb. “A house with an attached garage kinda half in the country, you know.”
“I thought you were staying at Ingram’s hotel.”
“I am,” he said, giving a smirk. “It’s just the kind of work I do often needs a pressure valve.”
“Like when you suddenly find a dead man in the back seat?”
“Me and your friend set up a camera in his car and parked it across the street from this one. When I saw Fayez—”
“You know this guy?”
“Knew him back when I was a merc in Southeast Asia. He was the deadliest motherfucker I’d ever seen. One time I saw him kill four out of five men using stealth and a homemade machete. So, when I saw him climb into the back seat of your car I knew that Ingram was serious.”
“He just climbed in?”
“Jacked the lock like a pro, slipped in the back, and disappeared. We came at him from both sides. I knocked on the window and when he rose up with a Glock in hand Glad shot him from the opposite side.”
“That shattered the window?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t anybody call it in?”
“Silencer.”
“Whose?”
“Gladstone shot him but I gave him the gun.”
“You run around with a silencer for reconnaissance and backup?”
“Zyron International,” he said, as if those two words were the Eleventh Commandment.
Making it to the highway and then toward the suburb, I was on high alert. What if we got stopped? How do you explain a dead man with a bullet in the back of his head?
“What happened to the fifth man?” I asked the question as a distraction.
“Fayez knew how to put pain to work. He bled the soldier till he gave up the information we needed.”
“Then he killed him?” Some distraction.
“I stopped doing that kind of work.”
It took less than an hour to get to the house my cousin had rented. The garage was big enough for two cars the size of mine. Gladstone was already there. He’d made us lime rickeys in tall frosted glasses that were designed for that libation.
“How the fuck Rags get you to shoot a man in broad daylight in Georgia?” I asked Glad.
“Well,” he said, grinning. “If I’m gonna do somethin’ like that, it should be down south, don’t ya think?”
“I think it’s murder.”
“He was hiding in the back seat and had a gun in his hand. I am a cop, you know.”
“You need to get out of Georgia,” Rags said to me. “And wherever you go, it should not be New York. You say Aja and Grandma B are with Ferris?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I can go check out the security and either stay there with ’em or take ’em someplace else.”
“Uh-huh. What about Fayez?”
“Who?” Gladstone asked.
“We’ll stay here and dissolve his contract.”
“Who’s this Fayez?” Gladstone asked again.
While Rags explained, I wondered what I could do. I had to go back to New York, had to.
“Joe,” Glad said.
“What?”
“What you gonna do?”
“Rags is right. I shouldn’t go home, but I have business there. I’ll make sure our family is safe and keep a very low profile.”
The handsome Irishman looked at me, still grinning.
“What’s funny?”
“Some people have heart attacks,” he said. “They get cancer or too drunk and fall down the stairs. All kindsa ways a man could get killed. But you, Joe, you walk through a fucking minefield with blinders on and never even step on a pile of shit.”
“I got a gig in Munich in three days,” Rags said. “I’ll leave you my number but that’s still twenty-four hours away.”
“I can’t be doin’ this shit in my own backyard,” Glad added.
“That’s okay. Both’a you boys have done enough.”
In the taxi to the airport I made the reservation from yet another of my burners. After that I made another call.
“Who’s this?” Melquarth said over the line. I was at the departure gate, drinking coffee.
“It’s me, Mel.”