“Look, I don’t know who you are, but—” Bank said, and never finished the sentence. Instead, there was an angry snap-snap-snap-snap.
The reports from the gun were loud inside the van. Bank made an ungh sound and stopped struggling, except for a reflexive tapping of his fingertips on the back of the passenger seat that sounded for a moment to Nate like Morse code. Then it stopped.
The inside of the van smelled sharply of gunpowder. Small-caliber or partially silenced, Nate thought. It was unlikely the neighbors would have heard anything, since the door to the van was closed and the shots had been muffled by the muzzle pressed hard into Bank’s ball cap.
Whip looked up, and Nate saw his face for the first time. He was young, boyish, pale, with high cheekbones, brown hair brushed straight back, a red slash of a mouth parting to reveal perfect white teeth, and close-set, piercing eyes.
“Go,” Whip said. “Ease out and don’t burn rubber.”
Nate started the van, pulled out, and drove the half-block through the green light on Columbus and beyond. There were no shouts, no sirens, no one peering out the apartment windows or gathering on the stoops of the brownstones.
He heard the sound of a body bag being unfurled, and felt the van rock slightly as the body was rolled into it. The zipper sang as it was closed, and within half a minute, Whip was in the passenger seat, reaching for the buckle of the seat belt.
“I got him into the bag before he bled on the floor,” Whip said. “Still, we’ll need to wipe down every inch of this van.”
Nate nodded, and noticed Whip still had the gun in his hand, although it was resting on his right thigh.
“You can put that away now,” Nate said.
Whip reacted with a slight grin. “I will when I’m ready. You worried?”
“No.”
“Are you wondering about this weapon?”
“A little.”
“Ruger LCR double-action .22,” Whip said. “Hammerless, so it doesn’t snag on clothes. Eight rounds in the cylinder. I load the first four with .22 smalls. Four through eight in the cylinder are .22 long-rifle hollow-points. Not that I’ve ever had to use four through eight.”
“Why .22 smalls?” Nate asked.
“No one ever uses them anymore, but they’re deadly little rounds at point-blank range. Very little noise, as you noticed, so no need for a suppressor. And the bullets don’t exit the skull, so there’s no messy exit wound. The slugs penetrate and just bounce around in there through the brain like bees in a jar.”
He paused and looked down at his gun. Whip said, “No spent casings ejected, of course, because they stay in the cylinder.”
Nate grunted.
Whip said, “I hear you use a wheel gun as well, but a hell of a lot bigger.”
“Yup.”
“Bigger isn’t always better.”
“No, just bigger.”
Whip seemed to be weighing what he said next, then apparently let it go. In a few minutes, he addressed the inside of the windshield without looking over.
“Do you know where we’re going in Jersey?”
“Yes.”
Whip withdrew his cheap phone and pressed out a ten-digit number and brought it up to his ear.
“It’s done,” he said. “We’ll be there in an hour.”
He listened for a moment, then terminated the call.
“What did he say?” Nate asked.
“He said I just did some good.”
“Does he always say that?”
“Yes, he does,” Whip said softly, while he shoved the Ruger into his outside jacket pocket. “Because he believes it.”
“Do you?” Nate asked.
“Take the George Washington Bridge,” Whip said, gesturing ahead.
“I said I knew how to get there.”
“I’ve got one question,” Whip said after a few moments. “Do we want to get to know each other or not?”
Nate wasn’t sure how to answer.
Twenty minutes of silence later — Nate was grateful Whip didn’t mind silence, either — at the Hackensack exit onto I-80 from the New Jersey Turnpike, Nate noticed in his rearview mirror that Jonah Bank was sitting up in the back, listing unevenly from side to side inside the body bag, as if he were drunk.
“Hey,” Nate said.
“What?”
Nate chinned over his shoulder, and Whip turned around and said, “Oh shit.”
Then, without hesitation, Whip unbuckled his seat belt and drew the pistol and turned in his seat and extended his arm toward the swaying head inside the body bag. The single report was much louder than the previous four, and Bank’s dead body flopped straight back and landed with a thump.
“That never happens,” Whip said, turning back around and buckling his seat belt. “Really, it doesn’t. We’ll not speak of this again,” he said, shaking his head.
“That’s why I use a bigger gun,” Nate said.
On the New Jersey state highway 208 North, Nate said, “Do you know who commissioned this?”
“No,” Whip said quickly. “I never ask, and I don’t want or need to know. And, frankly, I don’t care. Jonah Bank was the lowest of the low, the way he fleeced all those old Jews. He had a lot of enemies, and he probably had some friends who didn’t want him talking.”
“So you never ask?”
“Never. I know by the time the job gets to me, it’s been fully vetted. All I ask is to have enough time to do the recon properly and figure out the vulnerability. Once I’m satisfied I’ve done both, and only then, do I move.”
Nate asked, “Have you ever gone after someone who might be innocent?”
“No,” Whip said, as if the question were ridiculous. “Never. That’s not what we do.”
Nate nodded, but he wasn’t sure he was satisfied with the answer.
Whip seemed agitated, though, by the question itself. He leaned forward in his seat and turned his head toward Nate. “What I can’t figure out is just why you’re even here.”
“Me either,” Nate said. “I guess because he asked me.”
“But why? We do three or four operations a year. Each one requires lots of time, money, and planning. This one took two and a half months. I’ve never botched a single operation and we’ve attracted zero attention or heat. The reason it’s always gone so perfectly is because the target is completely vetted and we don’t try to do too much or rush things…”
Nate noticed that as Whip spoke more heatedly, his accent became more pronounced, and he said thangs.
“We keep our heads down, is what I’m saying,” Whip continued. “We stay under the radar and do good work. But all of a sudden he feels the need to recruit some kind of ponytailed nature boy… I don’t know what is going on. No offense, of course.”
“Of course,” Nate said through gritted teeth.
Whip said, “Bringing you on means one of two things. One is that he thinks I’m losing my edge, but that doesn’t make any sense. I have not lost my edge, as you can see from what happened back in the city. So if he’s looking to replace me, he’s got to have another reason than that.”
Whip raised his hand in the air with two fingers extended.
“The other possibility is he wants to expand operations, double or triple the number of jobs. But more people and more jobs means more chances of exposure. That’s too many damned pots to watch over for anyone, and something’s going to boil over, if you catch my drift.”