The Interloper Read online

  “We did. But he came home while we were there.” Another pause, then, “The fucker had his apartment wired with spy cameras. These little quarter-sized devices that fed a cell phone app he had. Because of that he knew we were in his apartment.” Another pause, and when he continued his voice sounded as if he were fighting to keep from crying, or maybe laughing, Willis wasn’t sure which. “He killed Jared. I’d be dead now also but I got lucky.”

  “You left Dunson dead?” Willis asked.

  “Yeah, he’s dead. It’s funny, I tell you that he killed Jared, and that’s all you’ve got to say?”

  Willis’s frown grew more severe over the nonsense that Hendrick was telling him. The guy didn’t sound stable, but five hundred and fifty grand was at stake and he knew Luce wasn’t going to be a pushover. “It’s a tough break,” he conceded. “Look, I’m going after Luce now. You can either join me or not. But if your head’s not in it, stay away. You’ll get your cut regardless.”

  Hendrick laughed bitterly at that. “You’re going to decide what my cut’s going to be?”

  Willis didn’t bother going over the obvious. That Hendrick wasn’t calling the shots, and the split was going to be either a third each if McCoy was still alive, or an even fifty-fifty if they were the only two left. But Willis could wait until they had the money back before he reminded Hendrick.

  “Forget it,” Willis said. “Are you up to helping me or not?”

  “Fuck you. Just tell me where he is.”

  “He’s on Route 3 driving south to Cape Cod. Right now he’s entering Plymouth. Where are you?”

  Hendrick’s voice cracked as he told Willis that he was just getting into Quincy, which put him about five minutes behind Willis.

  “Keep this line open,” Willis said. “I’ll fill you in with where he’s going. The odds are good he’s got the money with him.”

  “I want more than the money,” Hendrick said, his voice trembling slightly. “I want time alone with him.”

  “You can have all the time you want.” According to the GPS tracker, Luce had pulled off Route 3 and was driving along a residential street in Plymouth. He told Hendrick, and then focused his attention back on where Luce was going.

  *

  Hendrick once more replayed the scene in his mind of the back of Jared’s head exploding, and once more flinched because of it. He wished he could stop thinking about it. It certainly wasn’t doing him any good to keep running those images through his head. There was nothing he could do to change that Jared was dead, and it was just his dumb luck that he was the one still alive.

  His knuckles showed bone-white as he tightened his grip on the wheel, his shoulders hunched. A muscle along his left eye began twitching which made him wink involuntarily. By all accounts he should be dead. Dunson fired two shots at him from less than fifteen feet away, both bullets flying close enough to his face that he felt their heat. What saved him was he was still holding the stun grenade he had picked up earlier, and he had enough presence of mind to pull the pin and toss it over his shoulder. It turned out the grenade was a dud, but Dunson didn’t know that. He also didn’t recognize it as a stun grenade, which was reasonable since he had plenty of fragmentation grenades also in his hidden arms cache, and he must’ve thought the grenade was one of those with the way he dove over the sofa for protection. The Factory hit man didn’t land quite right and ended up knocking his head against the hardwood floor, the impact jarring the gun out of his hand. Hendrick saw it out of the corner of his eye, and he turned in his tracks and dove after Dunson.

  The blow to the head didn’t knock the hit man out, but it dazed him, and it was a good thing it did. As it was, the man nearly fought Hendrick to a standstill with the two men grappling on the floor, both breathing hard as they tried to do severe damage to the other, but neither of them saying a word, neither of them wanting to make any noise that could bring a passerby from the hallway into the room. So they fought like that until Hendrick was able to jab his forearm into Dunson’s throat, which left the hit man momentarily helpless and gasping for air. Hendrick then climbed on top of Dunson, grabbed the man by his ears, and slammed his head into the floor enough times to knock him out.

  The door to the apartment had been left open. Dunson had been in too much of a hurry to shoot Jared and go after Hendrick to bother closing the door. Fortunately, no one had walked by. Hendrick got up, looked out into an empty hallway, closed the door shut, then searched through Dunson’s bedroom until he found the necessary material to gag The Factory hit man and used the duct tape to bind him. After he had the man properly prepared, he dragged him into the bathroom and pushed Dunson’s face into the toilet bowl until the man sputtered awake.

  Hendrick did things to Dunson that he would never want done to himself. Really awful grisly things, and it turned out to be surprisingly effective for someone who was supposed to be as hardened as the Factory hit man. Hendrick could tell from the panic that danced wildly in the man’s eyes that he would’ve talked much earlier if Hendrick let him. But Hendrick kept it going for a full half hour before he took the gag out of the man’s mouth. And when Dunson babbled his answers to Hendrick’s questions, he knew the man was telling him the truth. He also found that it didn’t bother him at all the things he did to Dunson. In fact, he would’ve been happy spending much more time with him, but he knew that Dunson had nothing to do with the money or Cam, so he needed to go after the other one, the one that Burke was chasing. He dragged Dunson back to the toilet and drowned him in it.

  The effort of fighting, torturing, and killing The Factory hit man had left Hendrick’s muscles limp and rubbery, like he barely had the strength to do anything. He took his leather gloves off so he could wash his face. The cold water helped invigorate him somewhat. His stomach, though, felt like a bottomless pit, and he felt if he didn’t eat something he’d pass out. He made his way to the galley kitchen off to the side of the living room, and foraged through the refrigerator. There wasn’t much there that he could eat quickly other than olive loaf, which he found unappetizing. Reason enough to have killed the sonofabitch, he thought as he chewed on one of the slices of processed bologna and pimento-stuffed green olives. As he ate more of the slices, he stared at Jared’s dead body and all the gore and blood and brain matter that was left splattered on the floor and on the wall. He was going to have to get rid of Jared’s body. Even if the police failed to connect Jared to him, he knew The Factory wouldn’t miss that connection. He didn’t have time to clean the place, and even if he did, it was doubtful that he’d be able to scrub the floor and wall of all of Jared’s DNA. So the police and The Factory would know someone else was killed here. He’d just have to hope that Jared’s DNA wasn’t on record in any law enforcement database. He didn’t think it was. At least Jared never said anything to him about it.

  He found two blankets that he used to wrap up Jared. It was obvious that a body was inside them, but it didn’t matter. He wrapped duct tape around both ends and the middle, then went back to Dunson’s bedroom and the dead man’s hidden arms cache. He used the gym bag that Jared had brought and filled it up with guns, ammunition, and explosives. It wouldn’t help the police or anyone else by ditching the crowbars there. There were no prints on them and no way of tracking them back to him, so he didn’t bother leaving space in the gym bag for them.

  When he went back to the living room, he noticed the two bullet holes in the wall between Dunson’s apartment and the old woman’s. With the fucked up way the day had gone she’d probably been hit by one of the stray bullets. Hendrick thought for a moment about checking on her, but he didn’t have time, and besides, if she’d been hit, what was he going to do? He checked that the hallway was empty, and then with the gym bag slung over his shoulder he dragged Jared into the hallway and to the back stairwell. Once there, he proceeded to drag Jared’s body down the five flights of stairs. It went fast and wrapping him in the blankets made it easier to move him. When he got to the bottom of the staircase, he left J
ared by the door and then sprinted to where he had left his car. At least it was still where he had parked it. With everything else that had happened it wouldn’t have surprised him if it had been towed.

  After he drove his car to the back of Dunson’s building, he loaded Jared’s body into the trunk. It was tough squeezing him into the available space, but with some effort he was able to get the corpse in there and the trunk closed. It didn’t appear as if anyone saw him getting the body out of Dunson’s apartment and into his car, and presumably no one had walked in or out of the back of the building during the four minutes it took him to retrieve his car. At least he caught a break that way, otherwise the police would’ve been there also. If the police had shown up, Hendrick had enough weapons and explosives to have made it a slaughter.

  Hendrick had never killed anyone before. As he drove out of Revere and toward Scituate, he had the thought that before he’d join Burke to chase after the other hit man he’d first drop Jared at his home so that his friend’s body could be discovered and that Jared’s mom would be able to hold a funeral for him. Of course she’d be distressed knowing her son had been shot to death, but a funeral would be better than never knowing what happened to him. For stretches, Hendrick’s mind would blank out before he’d snap back to attention. By the time he approached Quincy, he realized he badly wanted to do more killings that day, especially killing the sonofabitch responsible for all this. Not just with what happened to Jared, but to Cam and Bud. He decided he could wait on returning Jared’s body to his home until after he caught up with that other hit man, Luce. That was when he called Burke.

  After he got off the call with Burke, he hit the gas harder, pushing his Malibu to ninety and then a hundred. He had ground he needed to catch up. If anyone was going to put a bullet in Luce’s head, it was going to be him, and not Burke, but only after he had time to do worse things to Luce than he did to Dunson. He tightened his grip on the wheel as he darted in and out to pass cars. A grim smile hardened his lips. If any cop tried pulling him over, it would be that cop’s rotten luck.

  Chapter 17

  McCoy chose to break into the house directly behind the one he was in. From looking out the windows, both front and back, he couldn’t tell whether any of these houses were empty, but at least with the house he picked it would be less likely that a neighbor would see him running outside wearing only his boxer shorts. So he left through the back door of the house which Luce had brought him to, and keeping low, he ran to the wooden fence separating the two properties, climbed it, and ran to the back door of the house he picked. Using his elbow, he broke a pane of glass, then reached inside so he could unlock the door. He prayed silently that he wouldn’t hear a security alarm go off. He didn’t, and he entered the house.

  At least they had the heat on. He was shivering badly after spending hours in that other house with no heat and no clothes. He grabbed a man’s coat from the closet and put it on to help him warm up, then made a quick search of the house. It was a small, boxy colonial. On the first floor: a modest kitchen, living room, and dining room, and upstairs, three bedrooms. No one was home, but there were also no landline phones. Of all his crappy luck he had to pick a house where the owners decided to go with only cell phones! Fuck it. He had no choice in the matter. He’d get something to eat, because he was fucking starving, then he’d find some clothes to put on and break into another house.

  He couldn’t fucking believe it as he searched through the refrigerator and found only yogurt, fruits, vegetables, and salad shit. He took out some of the bowls half-filled with leftovers and wrinkled his nose with distaste over what he smelled. Only fucking health nuts could eat the shit they had in there. There was nothing edible for him in the freezer either—no steaks or hotdogs or anything else he could defrost, just leftovers from vegetarian hell. Stuff that made his stomach queasy just thinking about it. The only things he found with any meat were jars of baby food that were supposed to be chicken and gravy. It was nasty stuff, but at least it would tide him over until he broke into the next house and found some real food. He was on his fourth jar of the shit when it occurred to him that baby food usually meant stay-at-home moms. Fuck. He was so crazy with hunger before that he ignored the empty bedroom that had been made up into a nursery.

  He went back upstairs and found her hiding in the closet inside the master bedroom. She was in her early thirties with short, blonde hair and on the scrawny side. Her complexion was ghastly white and her eyes were liquid with fear as she stared at him. She held a baby in her arms that she was trying to keep quiet. McCoy saw that she was also holding a cell phone in one of her hands.

  “I called the police,” she told him, defiantly.

  “How long ago?”

  She didn’t answer him. Instead, she looked away, cringing, as if she were trying to shrink her body so that she couldn’t be seen.

  “Goddamn it!” he near exploded. “When did you fucking call them!”

  “When I heard you break the glass in the door.”

  She burst out crying. McCoy’s head was spinning. The cops had to be on their way. He went to the window and looked out toward the front of the house, and sure enough he spotted a police cruiser driving toward the address. His only chance was to go out the back and make a run for it. He went back to where the woman was hiding in the closet.

  “Give me the phone,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm.

  She looked dumbly at him, but acted as if the words didn’t register. Her sobbing became something hysterical.

  “Give me the fucking phone before I beat you to death with your own kid,” he growled at her with every intention of doing what he had just threatened. Her color paled even more as his words registered, and she threw the phone out of the closet, but not to him. It skidded along the floor and under the bed. She then used her slight body in an attempt to shield her child from McCoy.

  He could’ve killed her at that moment he was so angry. The fucking bitch! She couldn’t just hand him the fucking phone? But the sound of tires squealing to a stop outside knocked him out of his murderous fury. He moved fast and nearly flipped the bed over in his attempt to push it aside so he could grab the cell phone. He peeked out a window that faced the front of the house, then he was racing out of the room, down the stairs, and out the back door. He was nearly across the yard and only ten yards or so from jumping the fence, when a cop yelled at him to stop. Even though he had his back turned to the man, he would’ve known from the tone that it was a cop even if he hadn’t seen a police cruiser pull into the driveway thirty seconds earlier.

  He almost kept going. He might’ve made it if he did. But the cop barking at him to stop slowed him down enough where it would’ve been impossible to get his momentum back, and once that happened he wouldn’t have had a chance of outrunning the cop. With his shoulders slumping, he stumbled to a complete stop. He forced a half-hearted smile and turned slowly to face the cop.

  “I know this doesn’t look good, officer,” he started, which he knew was the understatement of the year. How could it look good with him running out of a strange house wearing only a coat and boxers in cold mid-October weather with bare legs and feet. “But it’s not like it looks. I swear.”

  The cop was about his age and was staring wild-eyed at him, his service revolver pointing at McCoy’s chest as he held it out in front of him with both hands, the muscles visibly straining as he gripped the gun. He looked scared, as if he never imagined himself being in this situation. “What did you do to the woman living here?” he asked, his voice shaking.

  “I swear, I didn’t do anything to her,” McCoy said, talking fast so he could get it all out while the cop was still struggling over what to do next. “She’s fine. Look, I’m a victim here. Some psycho nutbag kidnapped me, brought me out here, and tortured me. I don’t even know what town I was taken to—”

  “Shut up,” the cop ordered, his composure returning. The fear in his eyes faded as they narrowed to slits. He glanced at McCoy’s bare
legs and then were back meeting McCoy’s eyes. “Just shut up and lower yourself onto your stomach. I don’t want to hear what you have to say.”

  McCoy did as he was told. The cop’s eyes had become little more than dead ice, and McCoy knew the cop would shoot him dead if given any excuse. That in his mind McCoy was nothing but a pervert who broke into the house so he could rape the woman living there. While he lay facedown on his stomach, the cop jerked both his arms behind his back to cuff him. The cop hesitated on seeing the bloody mess making up the front of McCoy’s right wrist.

  “I told you I was kidnapped,” McCoy grunted out, his face pushed partially into the dead grass. “The fucker who did it wrapped my wrists with duct tape and I had to break a window so I could cut the tape loose using the broken glass. That’s how my wrist got cut up. You got to listen to me—”

  “I told you to shut up. I don’t want to hear what you have to say.”

  The cuffs were slapped on and tightened to where they bit painfully into McCoy’s damaged wrist, and he was jerked to his feet. As the cop ordered him to walk toward the front of the house, McCoy tried again, desperation edging his voice.

  “Forget my wrist,” he said. “Look at my thumb. The fucker pulled the nail off with a pair of pliers. If you look in the house behind this one, you’ll find evidence that I was brought there. You’ll see the torn duct tape that I was able to get off my wrists and ankles. Other stuff, too.”

  The cop slowed down a step, as if he were maybe starting to think that McCoy wasn’t completely full of shit.

  “Why’d you break into this house?”

  “I was scared out of my mind,” McCoy said, trying his hardest to sound sincere. “I didn’t know when that psycho was coming back to torture me more, or worse, so when I was able to free myself I came running over here. No one answered when I knocked on the door. I broke in only so I could call the police, but they didn’t have any phones in there—”