Kill and Tell Part 1

KILL AND TELL.

By Linda Howard.

Chapter 1.

February 13, Washington, D.C.

Dexter Whitlaw carefully sealed the box, securing every seam with a roll of masking tape he had stolen from WalMart the day before. While he was at it, he had also stolen a black marker, and he used it now to print an address neatly on the box. Leaving the marker and roll of tape on the ground, he tucked the box under his arm and walked to the nearest post office. It was only a block, and the weather wasn't all that cold for D.C. in February, mid-forties maybe.

If he were a congressman, he thought sourly, he wouldn't have to pay any freaking postage.

Thin winter sunshine washed the sidewalks. Earnest-looking government workers hurried by, black or gray overcoats flapping, certain of their importance. If anyone asked their occupation, they never said, "I'm an accountant," or "I'm an office manager," though they might be exactly that. No, in this town, where status was everything, people said, "I work for State," or "I work for Treasury," or, if they were really full of themselves, they used initials, as in "DOD," and everyone was expected to know that meant Department of Defense. Personally, Dexter thought they should all have IDs stating they worked for the DOB, the Department of Bulls.h.i.t.

Ah, the nation's capital! Power was in the air here, perfuming it like the bouquet of some rare wine, and all these fools were giddy with it. Dexter studied them with a cold, distant eye. They thought they knew everything, but they didn't know anything.

They didn't know what real power was, distilled down to its purest form. The man in the White House could give orders that would cause a war, he could fiddle with the football, the locked briefcase carried by an aide who was always close by, and cause bombs to be dropped and millions killed, but he would view those deaths with the detachment of distance. Dexter had known real power, back in Nam, had felt it in his finger as he slowly tightened the slack on a trigger. He had tracked his prey for days, lying motionless in mud or stinging weeds, ignoring bugs and snakes and rain and hunger, waiting for that perfect moment when his target loomed huge in his scope and the crosshairs delicately settled just where Dexter wanted them, and all the power was his, the ability to give life or end it, pull the trigger or not, with all the world narrowed down to only two people, himself and his target.

The biggest thrill of his life had been the day his spotter had directed him to a certain patch of leaves in a certain tree. When his scope had settled, he had found himself looking at another sniper, Russian from the looks of him, rifle to his shoulder and scope to his eye as he tried to acquire them. Dexter was ahead of him by about a second, and he got his shot squeezed off first. One second, a heartbeat longer, and the Russian would have gotten off the first shot, and old Dexter Whitlaw wouldn't be here admiring the scenery in Washington, D.C.

He wondered if the Russian had ever seen him, if there had been a split second of knowledge before the bullet blasted out all awareness. No way he could have seen the bullet, despite all the fancy special effects Hollywood put in the movies showing just that. No one ever saw the bullet.

Dexter entered the warm post office and connected to the end of the line waiting for service at the counter. He had chosen lunch hour, the busiest time, to cut down on the chance of any harried postal clerks remembering him. Not that there was anything particularly memorable about him, except for the cold eyes, but he didn't like taking chances. Being careful had kept him alive in Nam and had worked for the twenty-five years since he had returned to the real world and left the green h.e.l.l behind.

He didn't look prosperous, but neither did he look like a street b.u.m. His coat was reversible. One side, which he now wore on the outside, was a st.u.r.dy brown tweed, slightly shabby. The other side, which he wore when he was out on the street, was patched and torn, a typical street b.u.m's coat. The coat was good, simple camouflage. Snipers learned how to blend with their surroundings.

When his turn came, he placed the box on the counter to be weighed and fished some loose bills out of his pocket. The box was addressed to Jeanette Whitlaw, Columbus, Ohio. His wife.

He wondered why she hadn't divorced him. h.e.l.l, maybe she had; he hadn't called her in a couple of years now, maybe longer. He tried to think when was the last timea"

"Dollar forty-three," the clerk said, not even glancing at him, and Dexter laid two ones on the counter. Pocketing the change, he left the post office as un.o.btrusively as he had entered it.

When had he last talked to Jeanette? Maybe three years. Maybe five. He didn't pay much attention to calendars. He tried to think how old the kid would be now. Twenty? She'd been born the year of the Tet offensive, he thought, but maybe not. 'Sixty-eight or 'sixty-nine, somewhere along through there. That made hera d.a.m.n, she was twenty-nine! His little girl was pushing thirty! She was probably married, with a couple of kids, which made him a grandpa.

He couldn't imagine her grown. He hadn't seen her for at least fifteen years, maybe longer, and in his mind he always pictured her as she had been at seven or eight, skinny and shy, with big brown eyes and a habit of biting her bottom lip. She had spoken to him only in whispers, and then only when he asked her a direct question.

He should've been a better daddy to her, a better husband to Jeanette. He should have done a lot of things in his life, but looking back and seeing them didn't give a man the chance to go back and change any of them. It just let him regret not doing them.

But Jeanette had kept on loving him, even when he came back from Nam so cold and distant, forever changed. In her eyes, he had remained the edgy, sharp-eyed West Virginia boy she had loved and married, never mind that the boy had died in a bug-infested jungle and the man who returned home to her was a stranger in all but face and form.

The only time he felt alive since then was when he had a rifle in his hands, sighting through the scope and feeling that rush of adrenaline, the heightening of all his senses. Funny that the thing that had killed him was the only thing that could make him feel alive. Not the rifle; the rifle, as true and faithful a tool as had ever been fashioned by man, was still just a tool. No, what made him feel alive was the skill, the hunt, the power. He'd been a sniper, a d.a.m.n good one. He could have come back to Jeanette if it had been only that, he sometimes thought, though he was years past trying to a.n.a.lyze things.

He'd killed a lot of men, and murdered one.

The distinction was clear in his mind. War was war. Murder was something else.

He stopped at a pay phone and fished some change out of his pocket. He had already memorized the number. He fed in the change and listened to the ring. When the call was answered on the other end, he said clearly, "My name is Dexter Whitlaw."

He had wasted his life paying for the crime he had committed. Now it was someone else's turn to pick up the tab.

Chapter 2.

February 17, Columbus, Ohio.

The package was lying on the small front porch when Karen Whitlaw got home from work that February night. Her headlights flashed briefly on it as she pulled into the driveway, but she was so tired she couldn't work up any curiosity over the contents. Wearily, she lifted her tote bag, crammed full with her purse and papers and the paraphernalia of her job, and endured the usual struggle of climbing out of the car with the heavy bag. It caught on the console, then on the steering wheel; swearing under her breath, Karen jerked the bag free, and it banged painfully against her hip. She slogged through the snow to the porch, gritting her teeth as the icy mush slid down inside her shoes. She should have put on her boots, she knew, but she had been too tired when her shift ended to do anything but drive home.

The box was propped against the raised threshold, between the screen door and the front door. She unlocked the door and reached in to flip on the lights, then leaned down to lift the box. She hadn't ordered anything; the box had probably been delivered to the wrong address.

The house was chilly and silent. She had forgotten to leave a light on again that morning. She didn't like coming home to darkness; it reminded her all over again that her mother was no longer there, that she wouldn't unlock the door and smell the delicious smells of supper cooking or hear Jeanette humming in the kitchen. The television would be on even though no one was watching it, because Jeanette liked the background noise. No matter how late Karen worked or how tired she was when she got home, she had always known her mother would have a hot meal and a quick smile waiting for her.

Until three weeks ago.

It had happened fast. Jeanette had complained one morning of feeling achy and feverish and diagnosed herself as having caught a cold. She sounded a little congested, and when Karen took her temperature it was only ninety-nine degrees, so a cold seemed like a reasonable a.s.sumption. At noon, Karen called to check on her, and though Jeanette's cough was worse, she kept saying it was just a cold.

When Karen got home that night, she took one look at her mother, huddled in a blanket on the sofa and shaking with chills, and knew it was influenza instead of just a cold. Her temperature was a hundred and three. The stethoscope relayed alarming sounds to Karen's trained ears: both lungs were severely congested.

Karen had always thought the best benefit of being a nurse was learning how to bully people gently and inexorably into doing what you wanted. While Jeanette argued that she had only a cold and it was silly to go to a hospital with a cold, Karen made swift, competent preparations and within fifteen minutes had Jeanette, warmly wrapped, in the car.

It had been snowing heavily. Karen had always enjoyed snow, but now the sight of it brought back that night, when she had driven, white-knuckled, through the swirling, blinding sheets of white and listened to her mother fight an increasingly desperate battle for oxygen. She made it to the hospital where she worked, driving up to the emergency entrance and blowing the horn until help came, but other than the snow, her only clear memory of that night was of Jeanette lying on the white sheets, small and somehow shrunken, rapidly fading into unresponsiveness no matter how much Karen talked to her.

Acute viral pneumonia, the doctors said. It worked fast, shutting down all the internal organs one by one as they starved for oxygen. Jeanette died a mere four hours after arriving at the hospital, though the medical team had worked frantically in their efforts to defeat the virus.

There were so many details to dying. There were forms to fill out, forms to sign, forms to take to other people. Calls and decisions had to be made. She had to choose a funeral home, a service, a coffin, the dress her mother was to be buried in. There were people to be entertaineda"G.o.d!a"her mother's friends who called and came over and brought more food than Karen would ever be able to eat, her own colleagues from work, a couple of neighbors. Her throat felt permanently closed, her eyes gritty. She couldn't cry in front of all those people, but at night, when she was alone, she couldn't stop crying.

She got through the funeral service, and though she had always thought them barbaric, she now understood the sense of closure ritual brought, a ceremony to mark the pa.s.sing of a sweet woman who had never asked much from life, who was content with the ordinary. Prayer and song marked the end of that life and paid homage to it.

Since then, Karen had gotten through the days, but that was all. Her grief was still raw and fresh, her interest in work nonexistent. For so long, she and Jeanette had been united, the two of them against the world. First Jeanette had worked, and worked hard at any job she could get, to keep a roof over their heads and give Karen the opportunity for a good education. Then it had been Karen's turn to work and Jeanette's time to rest, to do what she enjoyed most: puttering around their small house, cooking, doing the laundry, creating the nest necessity had always denied her.

But that was gone now, and there was no getting it back. All Karen had left was this empty house, and she knew she couldn't live here much longer. Today she had taken the step of calling a real estate agent and putting the house on the market. Living in an apartment would be better than facing the empty house, and her memories, day after day after day.

The box wasn't heavy. Karen held it tucked under one arm while she closed and locked the door, then let the heavy bag slip off her shoulder onto a chair. She tilted the box toward the light to read the label. There was no return address, but her mother's name hit her. "JEANETTE WHITLAW" was printed on the box in plain block letters. Pain squeezed her chest. Jeanette had seldom ordered anything, but when she did, she had been like a child at Christmas, eagerly awaiting the mail or a delivery service, beaming when the expected package finally arrived.

Karen carried the box into the kitchen and used a knife to slit the sealing tape. She opened the flaps and looked inside. There were some papers and a small book bound together with rubber bands, and on top lay a folded sheet of paper. She took the letter out of the box and unfolded it, glancing automatically at the bottom to see who had sent it. The scrawled name, "Dex," made her drop the letter, unread, back into the box.

Dear old Dad. Jeanette hadn't heard from him in at least four years. Karen hadn't actually spoken to him since she was thirteen and he had called to wish her a happy birthday. He had been drunk, it hadn't even been close to her birthday, and Jeanette had cried softly all night long after talking to her husband. That was the day all Karen's resentment and confusion and bitterness had congealed into hatred, and if she was at home the few times he had called after that, she had refused to speak to him. Jeanette had been distressed, but Karen figured that on the scale of things holding a grudge weighed a lot less than abandoning your wife and daughter, so she hadn't relented.

Leaving the box on the table, she trudged into the bedroom and peeled off her clothes, dropping the crumpled green uniform on the floor. Her feet ached, her head ached, her heart ached. The overtime she was working, in at six a.m. and off at six p.m., kept her mind occupied but added to her depression. She felt as if she hadn't seen sunlight in weeks.

She slipped her cold feet out of her wet shoes and hurriedly pulled on a pair of sweats, then some thick socks. She was cold and tired. She thought longingly of heat and sunshine. Once, when she was only two years old, they had been stationed at a base in Florida. Karen didn't really remember it, but when she closed her eyes, she still had the impression of wonderful heat, of long days under a brilliant sun. Jeanette had often talked of Florida, with longing in her voice, because those days had been relatively happy. Then Dexter had gone to Vietnam and never really came home. Jeanette had moved back to the mountains of West Virginia, where they were originally from, to be close to their families while she waited for her husband's tour of duty to be over and prayed for his safety.

But one tour had turned into another, then another, and the man who finally showed up on their doorstep wasn't the same one who had left. Karen had clear memories of those days, of his sullenness, his long bouts of drinking, tiptoeing around him lest she set off his temper. He had turned mean, and not even Jeanette's unwavering love could hold him. He began disappearing, at first just for a day or two, then the days became weeks and the weeks turned into months, and then one day Jeanette realized he was gone for good. She cried into her pillow a lot of nights; Karen could remember that, too.

They had moved from West Virginia to Ohio so Jeanette could get a better job. There had been those few phone calls, a couple of letters, and once Dexter had actually come to visit. Karen hadn't seen him; he was gone before she got home from her cla.s.ses. But Jeanette had been glowing, softly excited, and at nineteen Karen was adult enough to realize her parents had spent the visit in Jeanette's bedroom. That was ten years ago, and Jeanette hadn't seen him since. She hadn't stopped loving him, though. Karen couldn't understand it, but she accepted her mother's constancy. Jeanette had been infinitely loving, even with the husband who had abandoned her.

After a lonely meal of cold cereal, Karen made herself pick up the letter again.

"Jeaniea"Here are some old papers of mine. Put them in a safe deposit box and keep them for me. They may be worth some money somedaya"Dex."

That was it. No salutation, no "dear," not signed with love. He had just mailed his junk to her mother and expected her to keep it for him.

And she would have. Jeanette would have carefully followed his instructions and even kept that curt note, placing it with the pitifully small stack of letters she had saved from when he was in Vietnam.

Karen's instinct was to toss the box into the trash. Out of respect for her mother, she didn't. Instead, she carried it into Jeanette's empty bedroom and placed it in one of the boxes that held her mother's things. She couldn't bring herself to get rid of anything yet; she had rented storage s.p.a.ce and would keep it all there until that day came.

The packing was all but complete. There were only a few items left, sitting on top of the dresser. Karen added them to the box and sealed it with several strips of masking tape across the cardboard.

With luck, the house would sell soon, and spring would come, and she would be able to see sunshine again.

Chapter 3.

August 5, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Almost midnight. Someone was following him. Again. Dexter Whitlaw turned his head just enough to see the flash of movement with his peripheral vision. Excitement pumped through his veins, and he almost grinned. There was nothing like the hunt, even when he was the prey. They had been after him for almost six months, and he delighted in using his old skills to evade them. He had led them on quite a chase, zigzagging back and forth across the country, surfacing in the larger cities to place another call. He hadn't expected it to be easy, and he hadn't been disappointed, but he knew his man.

After the initial "Go to h.e.l.l" had sounded in his ear, Dexter had begun his game of cat and mouse. Blackmail could be as brutal as an amputation or as delicate as reeling in a world-record trout on gossamer line. First, he had established his evidencea"just a little of it, just a taste of what could be released if certain conditions weren't met.

As he had expected, the pigeon had reacted with fury. Far from being intimidated, he had called all his dogs and sicced them on Dexter. Most men would have been dead by now, but Dexter had spent a three-year lifetime crawling on his belly in Nam, learning patience and strategy and the ability to conceal himself so well that the unsuspecting dogs had several times walked right past him, just as Charlie and the North Vietnamese had done in Nam.

Dexter was having a h.e.l.l of a time. He hadn't felt so blazingly alive since he had looked down his scope into that Russian's scope and known one of them had only a split second to live.

The dog following him now was better than the others. Not as good as ol' Dex, he thought exuberantly, but good enough to give him a thrill. h.e.l.l, he even knew this one; unless he missed his guess, he was being dogged this time by no less than Rick Medina, one of the CIA's best wet men back in their old green hunting grounds, twenty-five years ago. Another time, another world, but here they were, the same old players playing the same old game of hide and seek.

Dexter blended into the shadows, hunkering down for a minute while he waited for his follower to make another move. A less cautious man would have shot first and checked his ident.i.ty afterward, but this guy was smart. a.s.sume Dexter didn't know he was being followed; a hasty killing of the wrong guy would send the real prey so far underground it might be weeks before they could pick him up again. And don't forget to factor in the unwanted attention of the cops. True, for the most part, the cops didn't worry much about the unexpected demise of a street b.u.m, even when said demise was caused by a bullet in the brain. But you could never tell; they might be having a slow day and want some excitement, or a TV news crew might happen on the scene, and the bright lights would prod the cops to reluctant activitya"the random occurrence of feces, as one erudite patron of a soup kitchen in Chicago had put it.

Dexter waited. Slowly, his movements ghostly, he smeared dirt on his face and hands to disguise their relative paleness. Then he ducked his head down and remained motionless, comfortable in the knowledge that he was virtually invisible to anyone peering into the deeply shadowed alley.

After several minutes, he listened to the shuffle of footsteps as they moved closer. Maybe it was the hunter; maybe it was just another b.u.m. Dexter didn't move.

The footsteps paused. Dexter pictured what anyone looking down this alley would see: scattered trash, broken bottles, a pile of malodorous refuse too small to conceal a man, except that it did. It had rained earlier; the street lights shimmered on puddles of water. Any empty cardboard boxes that had littered the alley a few hours ago had been taken to provide shelter from the rain. To the average hunting dog, the alley would look empty and unproductive, but Medina wasn't the average dog; he, too, had trained in Vietnam, so he knew how to be patient and wait for the prey to make a mistake.

Well, in this case, Dexter thought happily, he would have a long wait. Dexter Whitlaw didn't make mistakes, not in this. He might have screwed up everything else in his life, but he'd been a first-cla.s.s hunter. So he waited, long after the shuffling footsteps moved away, long after other sounds of other footsteps took their place. A rat sniffed around his shoes, and he waited, motionless. After a while, he was rewarded when those same shuffling footsteps made a return visit, once again pausing at the alley. The hunter was comparing the way the alley looked now to the way it had looked earlier. Nothing had changed. Satisfied now that his prey wasn't there, the hunter moved on, still using the shuffle because a good hunter never broke his disguise.

The deceptive gait might have worked, if Dexter hadn't once seen Medina use the same drunken shuffle to bait two bully boys in a Saigon dive, drawing them in with the false a.s.surance that the Yankee was too s.h.i.t-faced to put up much of a fight. The two specialized in drunk American soldiers and had fun beating the helpless boys to b.l.o.o.d.y pulps after stealing their money. The week before, one of the boys had died of internal injuries, and a certain American faction had begun a ruthless search for the two Vietnamese.

As the man who had found and identified them, Rick Medina had the honor of taking them out. Two clean shots to the head would have done it, but Medina had wanted to play with them first.

Medina was a neat, all-American type guy, good-looking and slim, with his brown hair cut in a short crew and his clothes pressed and creased even in the oppressive heat. He was intelligent and affablea"for the most part. When he was p.i.s.sed, or when he was working, the affability disappeared as if it had never existed, and in his blue eyes was the cold light of a killer.

Medina had lured the two Vietnamese out into a dark alley; they hadn't even tried to conceal the fact that they were following him, so certain were they of his helplessness. They closed on him like hounds on a rabbit, but at the last second, the rabbit had whirled, all signs of drunkenness gone. The knife in his hand had a dull black blade, so it wouldn't reflect light. The two Vietnamese likely never even saw it. All they knew was that suddenly their bodies were licked with fire, Medina's hands darting and leaving behind slashes that never went quite deep enough to killa"not yet, at least. Medina had shredded the two, all the while whispering to them in their own language, so that they would have no doubts about what was happening and why.

They tried to get away but found the alley blocked by several blank-faced Americans, all holding pistols. Trapped, hysterical, they reckoned Medina the least threat and turned to fight him. Big mistake.

Rick Medina was a regular Veg-o-Matic that night. He sliced and diced with mechanical precision. He weaved and darted, and each flick of the knife relieved someone of a body parta"an ear, a finger, a nose. The two were hoa.r.s.ely screaming before he finished them, neatly slicing their throats and letting them drop. Stepping over the bodies, he rejoined the silent group at the head of the alley, his face set and expressionless.

Medina had gone off by himself, shrugging away the offers of company, and when he surfaced the next day, he was his old affable self again, the killings handled and put behind him.

That was it about Medina, Dexter thought. He was a stone killer when the occasion called for it, but not a murderer. As brutal as the executions had been, they were just that: executions. A lesson taught. After that, the young American soldiers had enjoyed a bit more safety when carousing in the Saigon bars and wh.o.r.ehouses. Medina had known he would pay a personal price for doing the two kills and accepted the cost.

Whatever line was drawn in Medina's soul, he had never crossed it. All of his kills had been righteous.

When Dexter considered it, he realized he probably respected Rick Medina more than any other person in the world. Medina had held to his code; Dexter himself had not, and he had spent all these years paying for his lapse.

If anyone could catch him, Medina could.

Knowing that gave extra life to the game.

Dexter finally rose silently to his feet. A glance at the stars told him roughly two hours had pa.s.sed.

It was time to lose the street b.u.m disguise. It had worked for a long time, but Medina was on the scent now. The alleys and soup kitchens would be the first place he looked, so Dexter would have to make it a point not to be there. Too bad; street b.u.ms had an anonymity that almost no other group possessed, because people actively avoided looking at them. The cops didn't waste any time on them, and they in turn weren't likely to talk to cops about anything they saw. But there were other disguises that would serve him almost as well; the trick was to blend in with his background, whatever that background might be.

New Orleans offered a rich variety of possibilities, and Dexter considered several of them as he took a circuitous route to the Quarter, which was always awake no matter the hour or the day. After crisscrossing St. Charles a couple of times, doubling back, always checking, he finally reached Carondelet. All the time, he watched his flank, alert to any sign of a tail, but saw nothing suspicious.

He now went straight down Carondelet and crossed Ca.n.a.l, where Carondelet became Bourbon Street. Tourists still strolled the uneven pavements, newly emerged from the restaurants and bars and strip joints. Some were obviously drunk, holding plastic cups sloshing with beer or Hurricanes. More than a few wore cheap plastic necklaces in a variety of colors, and sequined masks were evident as well, though Mardi Gras was months past.

The bar lights glittered on the wet pavement, and jazz wailed out of the open doors of the bars, colliding with the more discordant, driving beats coming from the strip joints, where bored-looking dancers, both male and female, gyrated their hips and humped poles and pretended to be s.e.xy.

Laughter rippled from one group of tourists, three prosperous-looking young men whose arms were clutched by glittering young women in c.o.c.ktail dresses. As Dexter watched, a briskly walking man brushed past the group and went on his way, turning at the next street and disappearing from view, with at least one of the young men's wallets inside his shirt. Not one of the tourists realized anything had happened.

It was like watching a movie, as if he didn't inhabit the same world as the tourists. They were oblivious to him, looking past him, through him. Dexter shivered suddenly, despite the thick heat of a New Orleans summer night. He had been disconnected since Nam, but abruptly he felt even more distant, as if the tourists wouldn't be able to hear him even if he shouted.

It was a peculiar feeling, making him shiver again. He walked down Bourbon, glancing in the open doors as he pa.s.sed, the music and laughter echoing as if from a distance. The foot traffic was heavier here, and cops on horseback clopped by, steel horseshoes ringing on the pavement. Dexter walked faster, looking for a dark alley where he could hunker down for a minute and shake this spooky feeling. This wasn't downtown, though, this was the Quarter, and alleys were usually entrances to courtyards. If they were private courtyards, the entrances were gated and locked. If the courtyard belonged to a restaurant, he wouldn't find any privacy there.

He reminded himself that he hadn't come to the Quarter for privacy; he had come precisely because Bourbon Street was so active, and he could lose himself in the foot traffic. All he needed to do was ignore the weird feeling and get on with business. Maybe leave New Orleans entirely, now that Medina was on his trail.

Medina. Dexter thought about it and realized what felt so wrong, what had spooked him. Medina wasn't anybody's dog. The man had principles. Things happened to people over the years, changed them, but it would take a real sea change to turn Rick Medina into a kill-for-hire man.

Three alternative possibilities presented themselves. One: Medina had been lied to. That was the easiest explanation but possibly the most implausible because of Medina's personality. He wouldn't take kindly to being used, and if he ever found out, there would be h.e.l.l to pay.

Two: Medina was definitely hunting him, but for a third, unknown party. Perhaps the secret wasn't as well kept as he had thought. G.o.d knows it would make great ammunition. This possibility was way out there on the edge of conspiracy, but as someone had said, even paranoids have real enemies.

Three: Medina was here for another reason entirely. It was mere chance that Dexter had seen and recognized him.