The COVID-19 pandemic had been great for Leo Sealy. For Sealy’s whole life up until then, if a man was walking around wearing a mask covering everything between his eyes and his chin, he’d better be in a hospital, or someone would call the police. After people started dying of Covid, a man with a mask was barely noticed.
Leo had hidden his face on a few jobs before then, but it had required specific conditions. He had noticed while he was casing one job that the target lived a block from a big construction site, so he had arrived wearing a hard hat and one of those stiff white round masks made to protect workers from inhaling dust. Another time he had done a hit in a ski town in the Sierras wearing a knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows and a scarf wrapped around his face. He liked the post-Covid world even better. A man wearing an KN95 over his face was a model citizen, and the death people were most scared of wasn’t the one he had in mind.
People were herd animals. Anybody who wanted to move among them had to remember that. The herd was self-protecting and merciless. It was always detecting, isolating, and eventually ejecting any creature who wasn’t quite right—the weak, the injured, the sick—because those conditions might be contagious, or weaken the herd. It was important for him not to seem to be any of those things, because they drew notice, and notice was always dangerous. “Another buffalo” was his term for the right look—one of thousands that looked about the same.
Whenever Sealy actually went out to make a kill, he liked to have two firearms on him. One of them was the killing instrument, and it was usually a .357 magnum revolver. When he used it, the brass casings stayed in the cylinder instead of being ejected all over the place. His second weapon was a reliable semi-automatic 9-millimeter pistol with a double-stack magazine that held at least fifteen rounds, like a Glock 17. That was the weapon to bring out if there was trouble, because it would be best for getting him out of it and on his way home quickly. He usually brought three extra loaded magazines for it in his car, but things had never gotten crazy enough to make him reload.
For Leo Sealy, everything was about speed. He was in, did the job, and was already out while bystanders were still paralyzed with confusion and shock. This required efficiency and economy of movement, and he knew he had to remain in motion no matter what. Even if he ever got unlucky enough to be shot, it probably wouldn’t kill him, and if it did, he’d have nothing left to worry about. For him there was no stopping, no hands up, no being the lifer in prison who limped when he walked.
Sealy was thirty-six, and he’d learned the value of planning by living through unplanned jobs when he was starting out. He had walked close to the target and relied on his own agitation and ability to think faster than anybody who happened to be nearby. That had worked several times, but barely. Planning every move was better. It was what pros did.
If you weren’t a pro you were an amateur. Most amateurs didn’t think a killing all the way through. Most of them only thought up to the moment when the gun would go off or the knife plunge in. Then it was as though they woke from a dream. They had no idea what to do next. Each second that they put into thinking over their options after the fact, the more of those options disappeared.
The most dangerous person in this work wasn’t the target, but the client. The client had a reason, often a justification, to get this person killed. If the target was the guy’s wife or girlfriend, he already had one foot in a prison. If the target was a business partner or a competitor or an enemy, the client was on a very short list.
The client could almost certainly be broken down and made to talk. Every police department had at least one or two guys who were good at persuading the client that their only hope was to tell the cops all they knew about the “real” killer, the one who had taken a human life for mere dollars—like taking money was the height of perversity. It was like saying you shouldn’t pay an exterminator for getting rid of your rats—that he should do it because he hated rats. Sealy supposed that reasoning would sound more sensible after about ten hours in an interrogation room.
His usual solution was to make sure the client didn’t know anything about him that was true, so the client had nothing to offer the cops. Lying and minimizing contact had worked so far, but there was always some risk of an accidental disclosure. That was why he loved working for someone like Mr. Conger, who was never going to tell the authorities anything. Mr. Conger had a history that would make a scorpion get up and run, so nobody was likely to say anything about him either.
Having Mr. Conger pick him over all the people he could have was a big compliment. In Sealy’s profession, the only opinions that mattered were the judgments of bosses and shot-callers. Many of them had spent their teens and twenties doing wet work themselves, and they knew what it took. Mr. Conger was one of those men, and one who was particularly feared.
Mr. Conger was unusual among bosses because he still knew how to fade in. He had a comfortable house and nice cars, but nothing that ordinary people didn’t have. He had never done what some of the others did—try to build some stupid empire with a lot of flash and a string of clubs, getting his picture taken with music people. He seemed to Sealy to be like some of the old-time bosses that people had told him about. He invested in things like laundromats and hardware stores and gas stations and apartments, always with partners who did the work and paid him a cut. He kept those places separate from the illegal stuff, paid taxes on the profits, and kept everybody in the dark about everybody else. That made doing business with him a lot less uncomfortable than dealing with the adventurous ones.
Sealy drove back to his apartment in Van Nuys, brought the golf bag in with him, and found the money in banded five-thousand-dollar stacks of hundreds. He hid the money in his gun safe, which he’d bolted into the broom closet off the kitchen. He would figure out how to spread it around later. He knew that if he deposited that much cash in banks, ten thousand dollars at a time, it would be reported to the government, and smaller chunks would be reported as possible attempts to avoid the regulations. What he usually did was pay for things like groceries, restaurant meals, gas, haircuts, escort services, and clothes in cash, and run tabs at places like his gym and his cleaners that he paid off in cash, so over time the money would disappear into businesses that had no reporting requirements, or ones where the proprietor would simply pocket it. The rest he stored in safe deposit boxes. He put the golf bag in the clothes closet for the moment and turned to the process of finding out who he had just been hired to kill.
First, he would need to learn what he didn’t know about the company the bodyguard worked for. Everybody in LA had heard of Spengler-Nash, but he liked to know whatever he could. The worst case would be that this woman was something Mr. Conger had not ruled out—an experienced armed bodyguard who knew what she was doing and was simply smarter than Mr. Conger’s home invasion crew. If it was true that she had just survived a gun battle against five men, that would be his leading theory. He had to make that assumption until he knew something more encouraging. He hoped that she wasn’t so smart that she already knew the battle hadn’t ended yet, only paused until he found her.
Sealy expected that her identity would not be released today, but he also knew the cops wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret for long if she’d shot two guys. Cops who shot somebody were usually kept anonymous for as long as possible, particularly if the shooting was found “within policy” after a preliminary in-house inquiry. A shooting by a security guard was a different story. The cops wouldn’t give a crap about a civilian who was paid to protect millionaires.