Here and Gone by Haylen Beck (11)

12

SHERIFF RONALD WHITESIDE followed Deputy Collins out through the side door onto the disabled access ramp. The sun hung low in the sky, promising heat to come, glinting off the metalwork of their parked cruisers. Collins took a pack of cigarettes from her shirt pocket, and a lighter. She lit one, took a long drag, tucked the pack away as she exhaled blue smoke that hung still in the air, no breeze to move it along.

‘You want me to stick around?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Go and check on the other two. Make sure they’re okay. I’ll say you’re out on patrol.’

She took another pull. ‘That boy might be trouble.’

‘Not if you handle him right. Give me one of those.’

Collins stared at his outstretched hand. ‘You don’t smoke.’

‘I’m considering starting.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Come on, give me one.’

She retrieved the pack from her pocket, handed it and the lighter over. He took one, gripped it between his lips, and flicked the lighter’s wheel. The smoke filled his lungs, and he couldn’t help but cough it out again. He gave her back the pack as his eyes watered. It had been twenty years since he had last smoked a cigarette, and he savored the nicotine crackle in his brain. Another lungful, and this time he kept it in.

‘It’s not too late,’ Collins said.

Whiteside shook his head. ‘Don’t.’

‘We give her back the kids, make her promise not to say what we did, and we can just forget the whole—’

‘Goddamn it, shut up,’ he said, regretting his anger as he spoke. ‘We’re in it now, and we’re going to see it through. You had your chance to back out yesterday when I radioed. You remember what we agreed.’

The call for the tow truck, for Emmet. They’d talked about it for months. If and when he found the right kids in the right situation, he’d radio her to ask for Emmet’s tow truck. All she had to do was say Emmet couldn’t be raised, if she wanted to back out.

‘I know, but …’

‘But what?’

She shook her head. ‘I just never thought we’d actually do it. It was one thing talking about it. Even yesterday, when you radioed. It didn’t feel like a real thing. But last night, when I went up there to bring them food, I thought, Christ, this is for real. And I don’t know if I’m strong enough for it.’

‘It’s done,’ Whiteside said. ‘We quit now, we might as well hand ourselves over to the feds.’

Collins went quiet, staring up at the hills, flicking ash from her cigarette. It had burned halfway down to the butt before she spoke again.

‘You should’ve killed her,’ she said.

‘I should’ve? Not you?’

‘All right, we should’ve killed her. Out there on the road. Buried her someplace and got rid of the car.’

‘That’s not how the buyer wants it done,’ Whiteside said. ‘He wants it so the trail ends with the parent. Otherwise there’s a hunt out for the bodies. This way, there’s someone to blame it on. All we have to do is keep her scared, see if we can force her into a breakdown. Any luck, she’ll do the job for us.’

‘Even so,’ Collins said, ‘it’d be simpler if she was dead.’

Whiteside took the revolver from his waistband, held it out grip-first to Collins. ‘All right, then. There’s a box of .38 rounds in my desk drawer. You go on and load this up, go back in the cell, and put one in her head. Better yet, go out to the desert and do it.’

She glared at him.

He pushed the pistol against her hand. ‘Go on. Go and do it.’

Collins dropped her cigarette to the ground, crushed it with her heel. She gave Whiteside one more hard look, before walking down the ramp and over to her car. The engine roared as she sped out of the lot. He returned the pistol to his waistband, tucked it into the small of his back. Another drag on the cigarette, the gritty heat becoming more pleasing with each inhalation.

She was right, of course. The simplest thing would have been to drive the Kinney woman way out into the wilds, put a bullet in her head, and let the crows and the coyotes have her. But that wasn’t how the buyer played these things. And there was a detail he hadn’t told Collins. He’d heard that the buyer – the Rich Man, some called him – liked to watch things play out on the news. He enjoyed the anguish of others.

Whiteside wondered if there’d been any word.

He finished the cigarette, killed the butt under his boot, and went to the passenger door of his cruiser. Inside, he opened the glove compartment, reached back and up, found the pouch fastened to the underside of the dash. He retrieved the cheap cell phone and switched it on. Once it had powered up, he launched the web browser, opening a private window so that no cookies or history would be recorded. He navigated to a proxy server, then from memory typed out the forum’s URL, an obscure string of numbers and letters. The login screen appeared, and he entered his details.

One new direct message. He tapped the link.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Whiteside said.

Cold sweat prickled all over his body. Three million. No, three and a quarter million. The forum members had said there would be extra for a pair, but he hadn’t anticipated so much.

A year ago, Sheriff Ronald Whiteside had killed a man for fifteen thousand dollars, and it had seemed like a fortune until it all blew away. The same forum had brought him that job. A dark corner of the Internet, in the underbelly, where the perverts, the pedophiles, the snuff-hounds, all the worst filth of humanity met to trade in sordid pleasures. The Dark Web, they called it. A fancy name for a place where, no matter how bad you were, there was always somebody worse.

Within that place, in its own shielded corner, there lay a forum, a message board. A place for cops and military people who could provide certain services. You needed something done that only a connected man could do, you sent word to this forum. Whiteside had been introduced by an old army friend. Weeks of checks, and they let him browse the top layers. Another six months, and he was into the inner core. The place where the real money could be made.

The hit had been a low-level dealer in Phoenix. Whiteside never knew what it was over, probably a bad debt, or maybe the mark was threatening to turn informer. He didn’t really care. He simply accepted the job and got on with it. A few days of watching and following, then he blew the mark’s head off outside a lowlife Tolleson bar. He sped away on a motorcycle he’d salvaged from a scrapyard, the helmet hiding his face, not that anyone outside that particular bar would ever breathe a word to the cops. The money appeared in his offshore account the next morning.

Simple.

After that, another level of the forum opened up to him, one he hadn’t known existed. A core within the core. And there they talked about the big money. Hundreds, not tens of thousands. And there was a thread with a simple request. A buyer for a very specific kind of item, who was willing to pay into seven figures. A sequence of instructions, methods, requirements. And an email address, should anyone be able to fulfill the request.

Now, his hands shaking, Whiteside read the message again. Then he pressed reply.

He pressed send, waited for confirmation that the message had sent.

Done.

He switched the phone off and returned it to its pouch beneath the dash.