part0045

VAUGHAN LOCKHART LAY on the bed in the master stateroom of the Dead or Alive , staring up at the ceiling. With his hands behind his head and his ankles crossed, he had the look of a man without a care in this world or the next, bobbing gently on the calm waters of Bird Key Harbor with nothing but the sound of the sea lapping at the side of the boat to disturb the tranquillity.

His mind was as far from tranquil as could be. He picked up his phone from the bedside table where it sat on top of yesterday’s newspaper, next to the Glock G19 with its reassuring 15-round capacity. Except it could have been a 115-round capacity and he still wouldn’t have felt reassured knowing who was on their way.

He watched the video again. Paused it again at the same point where the unidentified man came crashing through the front door of the house on Passover Lane, his face obscured by the young couple taking the selfie.

If he could only identify him, he might still have a chance.

He knew what went on in that house, knew who owned it too. Phil Kovitz. Big-time property developer with links to organized crime and a reputation for intimidation and bribery and crooked land deals.

The house was a honeytrap. Politicians and state legislators and aldermen, men good at opening doors and even better at opening their zipper, lured into compromising situations. He even knew the girl they used, the one who’d died. Kovitz’s one-time mistress, Eleanor.

Normally that was all it took. The threat of the gutter press and jealous wives, of photographs and videos of a proud man caught with his pants around his ankles, sharing a mistress with a criminal like Florida Phil. It worked a damn sight better than weeks or months wasted around a negotiating table.

And this time there was an added bonus.

The unidentified man had gone too far. Eleanor had ended up dead. And in a very nasty way. Now that was a politician in your pocket for life. Men might risk the loss of their reputation and influence, maybe even their career, if pushed too hard. Few would risk spending the rest of their life behind bars.

That’s what you call a valuable business asset.

So it was something to be protected at all costs. If the unknown man who’d killed Eleanor was unlucky enough to be caught by everyday police work, the asset was worthless. You can’t pull many strings from a six-by-eight prison cell. The only thing that a man grown soft on the comforts that money brings is going to pull in prison is a train.

Hence the clearing of the decks. The elimination of anybody and everybody who might be able to identify Eleanor’s killer. As well as anybody linked to them. He was okay with that. Sometimes things have to be done for the greater good. The trouble was, you could go on forever. Where did it stop?

And therein lay the crux of the matter. He’d expected it to stop before it got to him. His righteous indignation burned like a flare in the night sky. And his guts turned to ice-water.

With thoughts and emotions that raw running through his mind and hijacking his body, it was a miracle that he fell asleep. But he did. Even though he’d popped more pills than he could remember, determined to stay awake during the hours of darkness, grab a few hours’ sleep during the middle of the day when he could.

But the body’s a strange thing. It rarely does what you want it to. So his eyes were closed, his mouth open, snoring softly when the Topaz 28 Sportfish nudged the Dead or Alive as it drew alongside. Then Bormann proved the people who mocked him wrong, chewed his gum and laughed at the same time when he read the name of the boat. The sign painter could’ve saved himself more than half of the ink.

In the master stateroom Lockhart stirred, some atavistic, subconscious survival instinct that still exists within us all despite the safety and comfort of our everyday lives responding instinctively to the subtle change, a movement that was out of rhythm with the waves.

Then he snapped wide awake.

He’d heard a sound that shouldn’t be there. It was one he’d been expecting. Just not so soon. A careful footstep. A leather-soled careful footstep. Good for a city sidewalk or for kicking a man, the hard leather breaking delicate facial bones or rupturing internal organs. Not so good for creeping around the wooden deck of a boat in the middle of the night, surrounded by a silence so thick you could cut a piece of it with your knife to carry home with you.

Feeling stiff and unrested, he swung his feet off the bed, picked up the Glock from the table, its weight comforting in his hand. He wasn’t going to sit and wait like some pitiful victim, hiding and hoping for the best until it was too late to do anything but die.

Outside, Bormann made an unexpected but welcome discovery. One that put a smile on his lips and a spiteful gleam in his eye. Because Bormann liked to hurt people when he got the opportunity. He picked it up, tested the point with his thumb. He couldn’t have told you what it was called—a fishing gaff—but he could tell you what he was going to use it for.

It was a simple tool for a simple job, just a sharpened hook attached to a long wooden handle. Designed for hooking into fish to haul them from the water, swing them into the boat. And because fish are slippery slimy things that like to flap around a lot, the point was needle sharp. He swung it through the air, imagined the solid jerk as it bit into a man’s arm or leg or even his neck.

Inside, Lockhart climbed the stairs from the master stateroom up to the salon. At the top he wiped his hands on his pants, switched to a double-handed grip on the Glock. Then crept stealthily towards the rear of the salon. The fighting chair was visible through the sliding glass doors. Beyond that lay the flat blackness of the night sea.

Then a sound from outside. He froze, head snapping to the left. Suddenly his resentment and anger flared again. He stared at the framed photograph on the wall, a copy of the one that seventy miles away Evan held up to the light in a bar in Key West, all but oblivious to what waited for him outside.

Was that what this was all about?

After all this time?

He couldn’t drag his eyes away from the photograph even though it saddened him to look at it, the young man that he used to be, the heavy M60 machine gun balanced on his shoulder, a one-hundred-round bandolier wrapped around his hard body. He choked back a laugh at the Glock in his sweaty liver-spotted hands, imagined the weight of the M60 juddering in those same hands as he fired from the hip, cartridge links spewing into the air, the sound of five hundred rounds per minute moving through the chamber melding with the scream climbing from his throat. He saw himself, pivoting from the waist in a three-sixty-degree arc, spraying the walls of the salon and the ceiling and the flybridge above with a murderous rain of hot metal. Not stopping until the men who had dared come after him lay dead on the decks or blown away over the side, bodies shredded, their blood running between the deck boards and staining the sea. Didn’t they know who he used to be?

Then his eyes shifted to the man in the photograph standing beside him. Hatred almost fifty years old stared back at him. Like a cold wind had sprung up sucking the warmth from his flesh, chilling his bones. Suddenly he felt like the old man he now was. Every damn day and minute of it. A pathetic figure, a man whose future was all behind him. And he felt afraid as he stared at the man he used to call a friend. The man who had sent the killers who waited for him somewhere outside.

Unlike Evan who didn’t know and couldn’t guess at what he held in his left hand, he knew exactly what it was. And he wondered if that was what waited for him, felt his scalp tighten as if a man had wound his fingers into his hair.

Looking for the last time at his erstwhile friend’s arid features, he understood how a man’s hatred can be nursed and kept alive, as fresh and vibrant as the day it was spawned, while the body that contains it withers and dies.

All you have to do is feed it.

He stood at the glass doors, listening, staring out at the Topaz 28 Sportfish tied up alongside. He cursed himself at having fallen asleep. If he’d stayed awake, he’d have heard it approach. He’d have had time to climb up into the flybridge or the tuna tower above it, shoot the bastards as they clambered awkwardly from one boat to the other. But he had fallen asleep. Now the roles were reversed. They were waiting for him. When he stepped outside there were likely two men and three directions he had to cover—port, starboard and immediately above.

He took hold of the handle. There was no way to slide it open without whoever was outside hearing, however well-oiled it might be. He stood, the Glock in one hand, the other on the door handle, listening hard. They weren’t moving now, already in position. Waiting for him to make some pointless move against them. Like a cat waiting for a mouse to leave its hole, time on their side. No use trying to be cautious.

As he stood straining for any sound that might narrow the impossible odds, he heard something that at first made him think that he was indeed too old and it was high time he shuffled off this mortal coil.

He imagined that he heard music coming from outside.

Then when he realized that his mind wasn’t in meltdown, that it was real, a spike of hope surged through him.

Only to die again just as quickly, replaced by a dread that was worse than before.

Because the music was too close. It was coming from the fighting chair. Played through a phone or some other portable device, placed there by the men who waited outside.

He knew the song. Could’ve quoted any statistics about it you cared to know. Sung the lyrics too if that’s what you wanted.

Eleven minutes forty-one seconds long.

Released January 4, 1967.

Written by Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors.

And long before Francis Ford Coppola chose it for the soundtrack of the movie Apocalypse Now , the man who’d sent the killers after him had taken it for his own personal anthem. It’s surprising what a man with a sharp knife and a cruel streak can get done in eleven minutes and forty-one seconds.

He’d have laughed if his mouth wasn’t full of dust. If it wasn’t the final proof—as if he needed more—that he wouldn’t live to see the sun rise. And that he’d pray for a merciful death long before that time came.

He threw the door wide open, took two fast paces. Launched himself through the air. Up and over the padded bench between him and the fighting chair, aiming at the gap between them and the small protection that it afforded, diving headlong into the music and the wilderness of pain that awaited him.

From somewhere behind him and to his left a different sound, a whistling, the sound of something moving fast. The gaff cutting through the still night air in a murderous arc. Then an eruption of pain in his lower leg. The razor point digging into the meaty part of his calf, ripping through flesh and muscle and tendon as his momentum carried him onwards against Bormann’s greater weight. A sudden jerk stopped him dead in mid-air. He hung suspended like a skydiver, arms extended in front of him, the Glock flying out of his hands. Then crashed to the deck, the searing white-hot pain of his ruined leg that colonized every cell of his being tearing a scream from his throat, melding with Morrison’s crazy lyrics.

Then it was as if a man had thrown himself from the tuna tower, landed with his full weight on his back and shoulders. Mashing him into the wooden slats of the deck, pinned him squirming in the bottom of the boat like some record-breaking four-limbed wailing fish. The unforgiving deck came up hard and mercifully fast. Met his face with a bone-jarring impact, knocked the consciousness from him, music fading to black silence as Bormann twisted the gaff, hooked it deeper into his calf and dragged him along the deck.

This from Bormann. He worked the gaff free, a look of disappointment on his face. The fun was over. For now. Until it was time to take the trophy. He stuck his large fingers in his large mouth, pulled out the gum he was chewing. He rolled it into a ball, stuck it on the bloodied point of the gaff.