He'd gotten the wood from the oak trees on the property when branches broke off in the winds and fell to the ground, and he was slow but steady with his hobby, good for a couple of pieces every now and again. The tool he used was a hunting knife he'd been given by his commanding officer long ago and talk about oldie, but goodie. The thing was a masterpiece of weaponry that was deceptively humble, with no identifying trademarks, serial numbers or initials, and nothing to tip off the fact that it had been handmade by an expert for use by an expert. And Jim knew the thing like the back of his own hand, the stainless-steel blade a vicious piece of work, the handle wrapped in leather that had been aged with his own sweat.
Lifting it up, he measured the flash of the overhead light on the blade's patinaed surface. Funny, he thought, here in this one-room apartment, being used to transform wood into a game piece, it was just a knife. In most other circumstances, it had been a deadly weapon.
The purpose was everything, wasn't it.
As he went back to work, the blade made a soft scraping sound as he used his thumb to pull the knife toward himself, his hand carefully guiding each stroke, reducing the wood by increments to reveal the chess piece trapped inside.
Over the last twenty years, he'd spent hours like this: By himself. No radio, no television. Just a piece of wood and a knife. He'd made birds and animals and stars and letters that spelled nothing. Carved faces and places. Trees and flowers. There were many advantages to his hobby. Cheap, portable, and he'd always had his blade wherever he'd been.
Guns had come and gone. Other kinds of weapons, too. COs as well.
But the knife had always been with him.
God, the day it had been presented to him, its flank had been mirror clear, and the first thing he'd done was take it outside of his quarters and rub dirt on both sides of it: Dulling all that bright-and-shiny, like sharpening the business edges, had been part of enhancing its utility.
The weapon had never failed him. And damn if he didn't say so himself, but it cut up a nice piece of wood, too -
His cell phone went off, ringing from over on the bedspread. As he went to go see who it was, he put the oak branch down and kept the knife with him out of habit.
Flipping open the phone, he saw that it was an untraceable number and knew exactly who it was. Pushing his thumb on the send button, he brought the cell to his ear. "Yeah?" Silence. And then that deep, cynical voice: "Which piece are you working on?" Fucker. Matthias the f**ker always knew too much. "The queen."
"Old habits die hard, don't they."
As did former bosses. "Thought you said I couldn't call you anymore."
"Your fingers didn't do the walking this time, did they."
"And to think you wasted all that effort just to find out what I was doing."
There was a pause. "The license plate number. Why do you need to run it and why do you care about the vehicle's owner."
Ah, so that was the why of the call. "None of your business."
"We don't condone freelancing. On any level. You pull shit like that and you're not just off active duty, you're going to be retired."
Which meant there was a pine box, not a gold watch, in his future: His bosses didn't send you off into the sunset with a Rolex. You just woke up dead one morning.
"Whatever, Matthias, I know the drill, and if you called just to double-check on that, you wasted
"So what's the plate number?"
Jim paused, and thought, Guess the debt was still owed. As he recited Marie-Terese's tag number and detailed what little he knew about the woman, he was confident the search wouldn't get flagged as inappropriate, even though it was going through government channels. Matthias was smooth, for one thing. For another, there was only one other guy with more power than he had.
And that SOB worked out of an oval office.
Yup, there were times when it didn't hurt to have the big dog owe you his life. "I'll be in touch," Matthias said.
When the phone went dead, Jim looked down at his knife. Matthias had gotten one at the same time Jim had, and the guy had been damn good with it - but he'd also been excellent at "office" politics, whereas Jim, with all of his antisocial tendencies, had stayed in the field. One path took Matthias to the top; the other had landed Jim...in a studio over a garage.
With a new set of bosses.
Jim shook his head as he compared those four aristocratic nancies with their croquet balls and their wolfhound and their castle to Matthias and his ilk: It was like putting a bunch of ballet slippers up against hiking boots outfitted with ice spurs. No contest - at least on the surface. Jim had the distinct impression, however, that those boys on the other side had shit in their back pockets that would make all the conventional and nuclear weapons at Matthias's disposal look like toys.
He went back over and sat down on the cheapy chair next to Dog, except this time he took his cell with him. As he resumed carving, he thought about his new line of work.
Assuming that Vin followed through and broke things off with Devina, and provided the guy managed to get through Marie-Terese's shell, Jim had to wonder what the hell his own role was with the whole "crossroads" bit. Yeah, maybe he'd managed to get the pair of them in the same place on Friday night, but other than that, what had he done?
This was either the easiest gig on the planet, or he was missing something.
A little later, Jim glanced at the clock. And then a half hour after that he looked again. Matthias worked fast. Always. And on its face, the request was a simple one: Verify the registration and owner of a five-year-old Toyota Camry and perform a criminal background check. It was the kind of thing that took two sweeps of a mouse, six strokes on a keyboard, and about a nanosecond.
Unless a national security emergency had occurred. Or something had been found in Marie-Terese's records.
There were reasons why people felt the need to look behind themselves in dark alleys. Good reasons why most tended to hurry along, even if it wasn't chilly. Excellent reasons why lighted streets were much preferred at night.
"Oh...God, no...please - "
The downward sweep of the tire iron cut off the pleading and it was a sharp extinguishing, like turning off a light: One moment there was illumination, the next nothing but blackness. One moment there was a voice, the next nothing but silence. Blood was on both their faces now.
As he set about killing the man, rage lifted his arm more than any conscious thought did and his anger gave him the kind of strength that meant this wasn't going to take long. Just one more strike, if even that, and there would be more than a temporary silence.
Shifting his weight to get the most out of the downward trajectory, he -
At the far end of the alley, the headlights of a car swept around, the twin paths of beams hitting the brick of the building to the left and pouring down its rough wall.
No time for another strike. In a split second, he was going to be lit as clear as if he were on stage.
Wheeling around, he shot over to the opposite side of the alley, running as fast as he could. As he gunned around the corner, they were going to catch sight of his jacket and the back of his baseball cap, but there were a hundred black Gore-Tex windbreakers in Caldwell, and a black hat was a black hat was a black hat.
There was a screech of brakes and then someone yelled something.
He kept going with the hightailing for only three blocks, and when there was no more shouting and no roaring sounds of a car chasing him, he slowed his pace, then ducked into an inset doorway that had no overhead light. Shucking the windbreaker, he buried the tire iron in it, making knot after knot with the sleeves to tie the thing up while he caught his breath.
His car was not far away because he'd left it somewhere other than the Iron Mask's parking lot just to be safe. And hadn't that turned out to be the right decision.
Even after he was breathing slowly and steadily, he stayed where he was, hidden and safe. The police sirens came about five minutes later and he watched two marked cars speed by. About a minute and a half later a third one, which was unmarked and had its flashing light stuck to the dashboard, went tearing past him.
When there were no others, he took off his baseball cap, wadded it up, and shoved it into the pocket of his jeans. Then he took off his belt, pulled up his fleece, and secured the bloody tire iron and its wrapping against his rib cage. After covering himself up again, he ghosted out of the doorway and headed for his car, which was less than a quarter of a mile away.
Going along, he walked neither fast nor slow, and he looked around with his eyes but not his head. To the casual observer, he was just another pedestrian out after midnight, a young guy about to meet up with friends or maybe on his way to his girl's house: Nothing unusual, utterly unnotable as he encountered a pair of guys and a homeless woman and a pack of couples.