The TANNER Series - Books 13-15 (Tanner Box Set) Page 16

  For the first time, Durand looked surprised, as his eyes widened.

  “Mon Dieu, you have feelings for this man, Tanner, don’t you?”

  “No, but I am tied professionally to him.”

  Durand stared at her with his sleepy brown eyes and a slow smile crept over his face.

  “I researched you, Sara, and I know of your hatred for Tanner, as well as the reason for it, his assassination of your lover, Brian Ames. How is it that you can stand to work with the man?”

  Sara had been sipping on a glass of white wine. She gulped down the rest of it before answering Durand.

  “My hatred for Tanner inadvertently brought about the death of someone I loved. His loss left me empty, and later, Tanner helped me to save my sister from the people who abducted her. We’re not friends, but we’re able to work together.”

  Durand signaled for more wine, after the waiter poured it, Durand let out a sigh.

  “Scallato versus Tanner, now that is interesting, however, I would have to say that Scallato will come out on top.”

  “Why do you believe that?”

  “I have a theory that I’ve been working on, and if I’m right, Maurice Scallato may already be in Connecticut, and in fact, you may know him.”

  “Explain that?”

  “I’m here in California doing research on the late Lars Gruber. Gruber fulfilled a contract in Santa Barbara right before he flew to New York City to kill Tanner. Tanner killed Gruber instead, yes, but Scallato already had Gruber in his sights, and I believe that he had infiltrated his inner circle.”

  “You have proof of that?”

  “Just a theory, however, I do have a photo of a man I believe to be Maurice Scallato.”

  Durand took out his phone, and after several seconds, he turned it towards Sara to show her a photograph. In it, Sara saw Lars Gruber standing to the right of a petite young woman with blond hair, to the woman’s left was another man. He had an arm draped over the woman’s shoulders, but his face was turned around. All that was visible was the back of his head and his right ear. However, the man had a slim, but muscular build.

  “The man with his head turned, it’s my belief that he is Maurice Scallato. The woman in the picture was Gerda Gruber, Lars Gruber’s cousin. She is dead now, and I believe that Tanner killed her as well.”

  “Why would Tanner have killed her?”

  “At the time she went missing, Gerda was working for a man named Bruno Heinz. Like her cousin, Gerda was an assassin. The man in the picture with his arm around her was her boyfriend. He went by the name Gregory Shultz, and he disappeared the day that Gerda lost contact with her cousin Lars. I’m certain that Gregory Shultz was actually Scallato, and once Lars Gruber went missing, Scallato knew that Tanner had killed him.”

  “And that made Tanner his next target?”

  “Possibly, if not, he certainly got Scallato’s attention during his trouble with that cartel leader in Mexico. When Tanner emerged victorious from that contest, he placed himself as a direct threat to Scallato’s claim as the world’s top assassin.”

  Sara stared at the photo again.

  “Scallato has killed other assassins? Did he infiltrate their lives as you believed he did with Gruber?”

  “Yes, I’ve come across two other instances where major league assassins were killed under mysterious circumstances. In both of those cases, a man who had recently joined their inner circle later vanished without a trace.”

  Durand held up his phone.

  “I found this photo by going through the apartment that Gerda Gruber shared with her boyfriend. There were no other photos there, and someone had wiped the place clean of fingerprints, and vacuumed as well. Luckily for me, this photo had been stuck between the pages of a magazine I found in the trash.”

  “Can I have a copy of that?”

  “Certainly, what’s your email address.”

  Sara told him, and soon had the photo.

  “I know you can’t see his face, but do you recognize him, Sara? And remember, he would likely be a new acquaintance.”

  “No, I don’t recognize him, not from this photo, but...”

  “Yes?”

  “I just might know who he is.”

  “What name is he going by?”

  “Jake Vincento. His build and height match the man in the photo, and both men have the same jet black hair. He was also brought into Burke by a man I suspect may have knowledge of Scallato.”

  “And what role is Jake Vincento playing?”

  Sara gave a little laugh.

  “Actually, he’s a wannabe assassin.”

  Durand chuckled.

  “A method actor, hmm, but if you’re right, I would not expect him to excel in his role. He will want to be seen as an incompetent. That way, when he makes his move, no one will even imagine that he could have killed a master such as Tanner.”

  Sara cleared the photo in order to make a call.

  “I have to warn, Tanner.”

  “Before you do that, may I make a suggestion?”

  “Of course.”

  Durand shrugged.

  “Let it play out on its own. You say that you no longer hate Tanner, still, I can’t imagine that you hold any affection towards the man. After all, he did kill your lover, correct?”

  “Yes,” Sara whispered.

  “Then you have nothing to lose. If Scallato is masquerading as this Vincento and he kills Tanner, fine. Expose him and offer him Tanner’s slot in the wet works program. And if Tanner kills Scallato, then nothing has changed.”

  Sara stared down at her phone for a moment, then placed it back in her purse. Durand’s mention of Brian Ames reignited a small flicker of hate within her towards Tanner, but she pushed it down, knowing that it would destroy her if she let it blossom into an inferno.

  However, Durand was right. She owed Tanner nothing.

  But if that was true, why did she feel like she was betraying a friend?

  CHAPTER 6 – Walk like an assassin

  Hours earlier, Jake Vincento had stood with his head held high as Conrad Burke studied him from behind his desk, at the Burke Corporate Campus in Connecticut.

  “Do you think you’re ready?” Burke asked Vincento.

  “Yes sir. I’ve killed in combat. Eliminating this gun dealer will not be a problem.”

  Standing beside Vincento was Sloane Lennox, who was smirking.

  “Once Jake returns here successful, you’ll kick yourself for ever putting up with that hoodlum, Tanner, Conrad.”

  “We’ll see,” Burke told Lennox. He then looked at Vincento. “Any questions?”

  “No sir. I know exactly what to do.”

  With Tanner taking time off, the government grudgingly agreed to pass on an assignment to Jake Vincento. Of course, as an unknown quantity, Vincento was being paid a fraction of what Tanner collected for fulfilling a hit.

  As contracts went, on paper, it was an easy one. Vincento was to conceal himself at the location where an arms dealer was to meet with a representative of a neo-Nazi group that called themselves Planned Anarchy.

  The arms dealer was named Michael DeLillo, and DeLillo was known to have supplied militant groups with guns, rifles, ammunition of all types, grenades, and even M72’s, the one-shot disposable rocket launchers that were also lightweight.

  Electronic monitoring by the FBI revealed the time and location of the meet, as well as the list of arms that the militia wanted to buy from DeLillo.

  The list was extensive and contained enough military-grade weaponry to arm a platoon. And while it was bad enough that the militia would be getting the weapons, the arms dealer was also known to have supplied a terrorist cell.

  It was that last act that earned him a place on the kill list, and it had fallen to Jake Vincento to eliminate him.

  ***

  Vincento had left the Burke Headquarters before noon and driven to the city of Elizabeth, New Jersey.

  The arms dealer, DeLillo, was not going to meet with the
representative of Planned Anarchy until after midnight of the following day, but Vincento had wisely gone to New Jersey a day early to reconnoiter the location of the meeting.

  Vincento checked in at a motel that was near Newark Airport, and then went to get a look at the site where the meeting was to take place the following night.

  Although it was daytime and there was traffic and people moving about, the area for the meeting was still rather quiet overall. It was the parking lot of a factory that faced the water of Newark Bay, and far above it was a long highway overpass that was constantly busy.

  Several people spotted Vincento, but no one seemed interested in him, and he took the time to scout out a hiding place he could use to observe the meeting.

  It was assumed that the arms dealer would arrive early and that he would not be alone, but would have a bodyguard or two. Facing three men would normally seem daunting to Vincento, but he knew that the element of surprise would give him a huge advantage.

  He planned to kill the men before they ever knew what hit them, or rather, who had hit them, and then he would flee the scene before the representative from the neo-Nazis arrived.

  Vincento found the perfect place to conceal himself and wondered if fate were on his side.

  It was a space just large enough to hold him, and it was hidden from view by a jumbled stack of old broken shipping pallets, wooden reels, and scrap wood. It really looked as if someone had arranged it all to be an observation post, as simply sliding away a piece of plywood revealed the cavity within the pile.

  To his surprise and pleasure, once seated inside atop a wooden reel, Vincento saw that the plywood had a large hook screwed into it. After moving the plywood back in place, Vincento found that he could secure the hook to any one of three old rusty nails protruding from a broken pallet. It wasn’t much in the way of security, but anyone casually inspecting the pile would be unable to find him.

  Vincento sat in his shooter’s hide and saw that the view was perfect. With the sophisticated flash suppressor Deke Mercer had given him to use, DeLillo and his men wouldn’t even be able to tell where the shots were coming from.

  Also, any sounds the AK-47 made would echo off the building and over the water, and confuse the targets.

  Vincento sat inside his place of concealment as a pair of office workers from the factory came outside to smoke. It was a man and a woman, and they puffed away while bitching about their boss and their spouses.

  Vincento saw that the two had eyes for each other, and if they weren’t already having an affair, he thought that they soon would be.

  The parking lot was slanted towards the bay. The future lovers strolled down to the chain-link fence and tossed their cigarette butts into the water, before going back inside. That was when Vincento emerged from concealment and walked to his car.

  He was smiling as he drove back to his motel, envisioning the ease with which he would fulfill the contract.

  Although he had heard of it, Vincento wasn’t a believer in Murphy’s law, which states: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

  Vincento would come to be a believer in Murphy.

  CHAPTER 7 – Darkness visible

  On the other side of the park that Tanner and Alexa lived beside, there were dozens of older homes that had been abandoned by the former residents of Killburry. They were the former abodes of those who fled the area for greener pastures after the sudden closing of the chemical plant.

  There were few residents left in the town from the old days, as most longtime citizens had lost their homes to foreclosure in the period between the chemical plant closing and the technology center opening.

  The houses on the southern edge of town were old, most were large, and with few exceptions, they were being kept livable. A fifth-generation resident named Burt Hodges had bought the homes for a song from the banks in the hope that the town would someday revive.

  That day had come, but Silicon City ignored the old creaky homes in the south end of town and built their own modern single-family houses, condos, and townhomes. Still, Hodges held on to his aging homes and paid a small fortune in property tax each year to do so. He still believed that someday the homes themselves, or the land they sat on would turn a profit for him.

  In many ways, the south side of Killburry was like a separate town and the only remaining section that hadn’t been drastically changed. The park and the strip of forest land separated it from the rest of the town, where all was shiny and new.

  Hodges managed a number of laundromats in the area. That was what the IRS was told.

  In reality, until the plant died, Hodges, like his father before him, had made a fortune by supplying hookers, drugs, and other illegal pleasures to the hundreds of factory workers that once populated the town.

  When the factory closed, the town’s small businesses began to fold one after the other, including Burt Hodges’ various enterprises.

  With his drug customers fleeing the area, his operation shrank to a shadow of its former glory, and even the members of his gang moved away.

  However, being a thug at heart, he needed to be seen as a man not to be messed with, and so he still kept a couple of street soldiers around him. Pot sales made small change, but Hodges moved a little coke in the area, did some loansharking, and he also ran a high-class call girl service. The call girl service was Internet–based, as all of the clients were acquired through a website.

  Hodges could never be tied directly to any of his illegal ventures. While it was true that he owned a string of laundromats, he was merely listed as their manager. The owner was fictitious, and the profits that the company earned were never placed into a bank account with Burt Hodges’ name on it.

  He was a salaried employee, and if the tax man ever discovered that drug money was being, pardon the pun, laundered through the all cash business, Hodges’ lawyers would have him back on the street in no time, while his fictitious employer would leave a trail that would have the cops chasing their tails for years.

  Chief Ellison knew that Hodges was dirty, because he had known the man’s father was a crook, and Burt had followed in the old man’s footsteps. But Burt Hodges was strictly small time, and Chief Ellison considered the man to be a gnat that he would someday swat.

  Hodges never spent a day in jail in his life, and had no plans to do so. Although circumstances had conspired to rob him of the criminal kingdom his father had built, he was a man of ambition and intelligence.

  His son, Dexter, had apparently not inherited Hodges’s intelligence, because not only was he sitting in a jail cell after having been caught doing something as common as stealing an old lady’s purse, but he had also had his wrist broken for his trouble.

  The stupidity of snatching the purse was something that Hodges would take up with his son once his lawyer got the kid released on bail.

  The breaking of his son’s wrist? That was another matter, and was something that Burt Hodges wanted to attend to personally, but knew that he shouldn’t. Instead, he would send one of his men along with the lawyer to learn who had broken Dexter’s wrist. The man was a Salvadoran named Choa, and he was a former member of a street gang called Los Treinta.

  Choa was a singularly ugly man with burn scars on his face. It had not been a pretty face before the flames, and in fact, the burn scars might have been an improvement. They at least lent his face character.

  Choa spoke in a raspy monotone. He was Hodges’ collector whenever a customer decided that they didn’t want to pay their loan back on time, and he was always up for violence. Hodges knew that if he asked the man to kill a cop that he would do so, all that would have to be discussed was the price to commit the act. But to Hodges’ surprise, the cops had nothing to do with hurting his son.

  ***

  “It wasn’t a cop that broke Dexter’s wrist. It was some white-bread do-gooder from the other side of the park. A man named Tom Myers.” Choa said.

  “A citizen? Is he one of those neighborhood watch numbnuts?” Hodges
asked. He was an average sized man with receding brown hair and gray eyes.

  “No, but he lives on that dead end street. You want I should cap him?” Choa asked.

  Hodges thought it over and shook his head.

  “No, I want to have a talk with this guy first. I want him to know that he fucked with the wrong man’s son. Did you get his address?”

  “Yeah, your pet cop slipped it to me while Chief Ellison was busy with the lawyer.”

  “Good, you and me will go have a talk with this Myers once it gets dark. If he’s not someone I can use, then I’ll let you have him.”

  “Use him how?” Choa asked.

  “Our cop has been telling me that there’s some sort of vigilante group in town. So far they’ve just been going after the known child molesters, drunk drivers, and people like that. But it’ll be just a matter of time before they decide to stick their noses where they don’t belong. Our cop says that the chief thinks the vigilantes all live over on the other side of the park where this Myers lives, and that they’re really this neighborhood watch group. So maybe I’ll use Tom Myers as a spy.”

  “All right, but are you going to let him skate after what he did to Dexter?”

  “Hell no, Choa. The second I think this Myers is useless, that’s when he becomes your project.”

  Choa grinned, and it was not a pleasant sight.

  “I can’t wait to meet him. I hate do-gooders.”

  ***

  Tanner was watching Alexa as she snuggled Anna Vitale’s six-month-old baby girl in her arms. It was early evening, and they had been sitting out on their front porch having a beer, while enjoying the feel of the warm spring air.

  When Anna had walked over to say hello, she had been carrying her baby daughter, Elena. Alexa lit up and cooed at the child when she saw her.

  Alexa looked blissful as she held the infant and Tanner knew that she would not want to go much longer without having her own child. Meanwhile, fatherhood was a prospect he dreaded.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like children, but his lifestyle was not one compatible with typical family life. It seemed as if the very thing that had brought him and Alexa together might very well tear them apart.