The man in black waited until Elise had left to use the restroom before he sat down at our booth in front of her half-eaten plate of country fried steak and mashed potatoes.
“This spot taken?” he asked, his voice like shuffling footsteps over a crypt’s floor.
The man was middle-aged, with salt and pepper hair, and looked about as out of place with his suit and overcoat in this diner full of working class people as I would have if I’d been standing as a wolf in the middle of a flock of sheep. His face was normal and clean-shaven, but he had a scar right at the base of his neck, like a long slit had been stitched back together. He had full lips and a medium-sized nose—basically what you would expect half the middle-aged white guys in America to look like. All but his eyes. There was something about those unfeeling blue eyes of his. They reminded me of the mornings over the SoCal desert, as blasted and faded as the space where the horizon goes white just around the edges of the sun.
I knew who he was. I knew the people who employed him. And I knew why they employed him.
Most murderers I’d met, I could smell the remorse on them. I could smell the regret they carried in their souls, the knowledge that they’d removed a mother or father, son or daughter, brother or sister from this world. Peter, Richard, Matt, and Frank? They were soldiers, but each death they’d inflicted on the world sat in their breast day in and day out. And it weighed heavily on them.
This man, though? This man was a killer. A cold-blooded killer, no doubt about it. He looked at people the same way my pack mates and I looked our prey. Just creatures, nothing more than a part of the food chain. Lower parts of the food chain, to be exact. Specimens.
Before I could respond one way or the other, he slid his long leg beneath the booth’s table and took Elise’s spot.
I settled back in my seat, already having a good idea of who he was. “And you are?”
“Oh,” he rasped, “I think you know, Mr. Wayne. Just as surely as I know who you are.”
“Trigger Thomas, then?”
“Jacob Wayne. Work with Frost Security, former Marines Force Recon, ex LAPD, Homicide division. You’ve been around, Mr. Wayne. Quite the illustrious career for one man. Thought that was the list of commendations for your whole platoon when I saw it, not just you.”
“Well, then, Trigger, now that we’re all acquainted, to what do I owe this pleasure? Need to me flag down a waitress, get you a cup of coffee? Gotta be a long drive back to Denver from here. Maybe a glass of tea? You look like an iced tea drinker.”
“No. Certainly won’t be necessary.” He didn’t crack a smile. “Came here to give you something, Mr. Wayne.”
“What’s that?”
“Reprieve,” he said. “Reprieve from retribution by me and mine on both your girl in the lady’s room, and her little sister.”
He knew? I kept my face straight. Who were we kidding, of course he knew.
“Think I wouldn’t figure it out?” he rasped, the slightest of smiles curling his lips. At first that little curl seemed so out of place on him, it was like his whole face would crack. But then, quickly, it somehow changed, like his face almost remembered what it was like to smile. “That a black haired girl shows up in the last town we’d seen Lilith? From New Mexico? Spitting image of the girl we’re looking for? Come on, Jake, what do you take me for?”
I shrugged and gestured to my food. “Do you mind? Food’s getting cold.”
His eyes traveled down and took in my food. He gave a wave as if to say, “Be my guest.”
I dug into my lunch with gusto, picking up the burger and taking a huge bite out of it. Not as good as Dixie’s, but still pretty decent.
Trigger Thomas continued despite my chewing. “I know all about that little trick you pulled yesterday before you left town. Finding Kevin. That come from all your time in Homicide, you being able to find him like that? Thought we’d might make it till spring before our former partner began to reek.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Did I? No, of course not. Think I would have let you find him if I had?”
I grabbed my napkin from my lap and cleaned my mouth as I shook my head. “You’re a little more professional than that, I think. Aren’t you, Mr. Trigger?”
He nodded. “Professional. Exactly. So, let’s make a deal. Ever see that show with old Monty Hall?”
“A little before my time, but I caught it on Nick at Night a couple times.”
“Old Monty, he’d give someone from the audience something to trade, then they’d decide to trade them or not without seeing what they were trading for. Bad prizes? They called those a ‘zonk’ or some stupid shit.”
“This got a point?”
That little bit of a smile again, like the last sliver of moon before the sky goes dark except for the stars. “Getting to it. Now, what I’m offering you here is by no means a ‘zonk,’ Mr. Wayne. What I’m offering you is the lives of these two women.”
“In exchange for what?”
“Lilith took those drugs from her boyfriend. Disappeared with them.”
I took a bite and chewed my mouthful of burger slowly as I considered his words.
“Her biker buddies up here made her disappear. You find me those drugs and deliver them, we wash our hands of the deal. Kevin’s dead already, he’s paid for his sins.”
“His sin of getting in business with you?”
“More accurately, his sin of being careless. You get me what belongs to the family, we consider the debt paid.”
“What if Lilith doesn’t have the drugs, though? Those bikers didn’t seem to think she did.”
“In that case, I suppose you better find some. Despite that used pickup of yours, I know you’re worth a pretty penny. What’s the price of two young, attractive women’s lives to a man like you?”
So that was the deal. Find the drugs for him or they got whacked. I eyed him carefully as I ate a French fry. Trigger here might have been the blackest of black hearts I’d met, and I had more than enough experience in that realm, but he was also a man with his ass on the line.
“You say Lilith’s biker buddies helped her run off? Why don’t you go ask them about where she went, then?”
“Because you’re already hot on the case, Mr. Wayne. Why start a turf war with some biker gang over some girl who happened to lift our product? Why do that when I’ve got a professional already looking for her?”
“Only problem is I don’t work for you or the Florentino family.”
“You should consider it. We haven’t got a 401K, but the pay is top notch.”
I flashed him a toothy smile. “Thanks, but no thanks. Think I’ll stick to this side of the fence.”
He chuckled, a sound like arid bones sliding over one another in an open grave. “Suit yourself.”
“I’ll take your offered deal under advisement, though.”
“Just remember,” he rasped, “you ensure the package is delivered in as close to its complete form as possible, I ensure both Lilith and Elise walk away from this like it never happened. No problems. No fuss, no muss.”
I took another bite of my half-pounder as he stood.
“One last thing, Jake. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can protect them. You can’t. Well, maybe you can, you seem the resourceful type. But for how long? You’ll have to pull some real wit-pro level maneuvers to keep them from harm’s way. That girl Lilith going to be prepared for it? Or her big sister? Are you prepared to watch over them every hour of every day, always looking back over your shoulder, just so you can make sure they’re both safe?”
He turned and left before I could give my response, his long black overcoat nearly dragging on the ground behind him as he breezed through the diner like the Angel of Death. I almost expected patrons to start choking on their French fries as his coat almost brushed them.
“Was that…was that Trigger?”
I’d been so taken aback by his sudden departure that I hadn’t even heard Elise come back from the restroom.
“God, it was, wasn’t it? He knows Eve is my sister, doesn’t he?”
She came around and sat down in her seat and looked down at her food like they’d mixed cockroaches into her country fried steak’s batter.
I nodded slowly as I finished chewing.
“What are we going to do, Jake?”
I shook my head, trying to think of the right thing to say. When the right thing wouldn’t come to mind, though, I just admitted the truth. “I have no fucking clue.”