Authors: Bradley Ernst
L
ochlann Blackshaw
carried the parcel to the opulent desk. Scotland’s top lobbyist, he kept his
escritoire clear of rubbish. No pictures or paperweights. When he brought
someone in to his study, he wished for smooth surfaces to greet the eye.
Expensive books were shelved in even rows. Leaded glass framed his pruned rose
garden and square hedgerows. Each bibelot his lovely wife tried to place in the
room was immediately discarded.
This is a place of business, dear.
Clutter cannot stay.
When
politicians visited Blackshaw at his home, many times at odd hours or
unannounced, whether to give a drunken confessional—to plead for his help
or ask advice, to hide a skeleton (figuratively or actual)—Lochlann must
be able to accommodate that guest. And that was more effective if lighting was
low. If a cigar could be offered from a drawer, the tip cut fresh, ready to
pull a sweet fog around them while Lochlann “made a few calls.”
A rare scotch you say?
His
hutch held the
rarest
.
A place to sleep?
Let
me ring for Betine. She can turn down your bed.
And more.
The
lobbyist usually opened his mail standing at the small table near the door where
the housekeeper placed all parcels, large and small, in a drawer. Most of which
he ran, unopened, through the shredder in the cabinet below. Mail didn’t belong
in his study.
If he let a bit of it in, with the
intent to deal with it later, soon he’d be afloat in garbage.
The
box on his desk, however, was postmarked from a place he didn’t know.
Podgorica
?
The
ink was smudged. He slid the parcel to the rear of the gleaming workspace and
pulled out his laptop.
“Christ.”
He’d forgotten.
Such habit, now, to turn to the Internet for
answers.
Both Atwell and the papers predicted a return to normalcy soon. The
Internet
did
work, but not well. It
was faster to look things up in a book.
“Podgorica
…”
Blackshaw spun to face the even rows of
leather bindings.
“Ah.”
He pulled an atlas from a shelf with damp hands and placed it on the desk,
stalling, squaring it even with the thin box with smeared ink from Podgorica.
Now the parcel and the book shared the desk. Edges two centimeters apart: book
on the left, parcel on the right. Pleasing parallel lines never to touch. If
what he thought was in the box WAS—well, it couldn’t touch anything else
in his life.
He needed a drink.
Blackshaw
glanced at his watch. 10:30
AM
.
Close enough.
He
poured the water first.
Just a splash—enough to coat
the inside of the glencairn.
Then he poured the whisky.
Closure awaited
.
He’d
hired the killer to do a job, to avenge his misguided son, and the box likely
held proof that the deed was done. The lobbyist remembered the craggy man’s
eyes and huge hands. How quietly he could move. It had seemed too easy to find
the bottom dweller—almost as if the predator had been waiting just below
the glassy, bright surface of Lochlann’s life for the opportunity to chase down
the woman who had killed his son.
But that was a foolish notion
.
He
had hired the man on Atwell’s advice, when Atwell—his aide in most dark
matters and fellow golfer—had called his condolences … to see how
Blackshaw fared after his son, Marcus, was murdered by the girl.
“Son
of a bitch.” Drink in hand, he paced, glancing at the desk, feeling a surge of
adrenaline wash him in heat. His heart fluttered too fast, which happened when
he felt anxious, and he coughed, which always slowed it down again.
If anyone knew he got anxious, he’d be
fucked
.
Icons
couldn’t afford anxiety. It would blow his whole game.
“Atwell.
Alec Atwell, did you set this up?”
Lochlann
thought aloud when alone, coughing, chewing on his lips—all
were
anxious tics he only practiced solo.
No. Couldn’t be.
Atwell wouldn’t
.
He
decided to open the atlas first. “Podgorica … Podgorica… Pod—here we
are…” pushing his glasses down his nose to read “‘…Podgorica, capital of
Montenegro.’”
He
clapped the book shut. “Montenegro. Shit. Where the hell is that?” Blackshaw
opened it again. “South of Bosnia on the Adriatic.” Coughing,
Lochlann tossed the book
,
open, onto the
desk
.
Escritoire? Fuck. It’s a desk.
The
book bumped the box and seemed to stick.
“Fuck.”
Atwell did move his ball when he thought
no one looked. He always got a lucky drop on the links
.
Did he broker death as well as mansions?
Quickly,
Blackshaw moved the book. He even took a moment to wipe the atlas with his
handkerchief where it had touched the package from Montenegro—a fourth
tic—that his much-younger, French wife loved to point out when he did it.
Wiping, are we? Have a drink, Lochlann.
His
wife, who loved to use archaic French words like
escritoire
instead of desk and
Puissant
instead of powerful
.
“I
am, you painted harpy,” the lobbyist boomed, throwing his sullied, monogrammed
mouchoir
into the fireplace. “I AM
puissant, and DON’T FORGET IT.”
She wasn’t, but she had the look he
needed for the job.
Madame
Blackshaw had stuck her head in a hole in St. Lucia—or more likely near
some broad-shouldered bellhop’s zipper—after Marcus was killed: her
approximation of appropriate grieving for her angrily bisexual skinhead
stepson’s death. She’d never accepted Marcus. She’d never known him as a child.
But to be fair, Marcus had only been two
years younger than his third wife
.
She
was good at spending money, though.
Nearly $50,000 a week.
If she didn’t come home draped
De La
Renta
, he’d have to run her back through the clinic for STD screening; she
bought lovers with rippling abdomens and dreamy Spanish eyes whenever she
could.
“I’ll
have Atwell take her—” Lochlann stopped …
Atwell.
How
did Atwell have the number—so handily—of a man like the one who had
sent this box? Fuming, Blackshaw tipped the whiskey glass, pulling the amber
fluid into his mouth, clucking his tongue into the pool of smoky peat.
Atwell called out fours when he’d golfed
a seven. He did too, but Atwell did it to win. Did his friend use him for a
lucrative referral?
“Fuck
you, Alec. Fuck.”
Chewing
at his lip, tapping at the sides of the package, he breathed out through his
nose before he swallowed—as was his habit to fully experience the
whiskey—then pursed his lips and sat.
Neither the book nor the whiskey had
helped. He still had to open the goddamned box.
“Happy
day, happy day—” The lobbyist nodded, his jaw undershot, attempting to
convince himself.
This was what £5,000,000.00 given to an
untraceable hitman—that Atwell knew—yielded.
A
box on a desk.
Proof of a job well done
.
The
thing wouldn’t have been mailed, of course. Most likely transported by courier
to his box.
What was your fee, Alec?
Perhaps
there was a dead postal clerk in Podgorica. Did the killer have a collection of
rubber stamps? It didn’t matter, really.
Speculations both
grim—and moot.
It
was a light, oblong box. The size a manuscript might fit into.
Atwell had made this choice, not him.
This wasn’t on him
.
Lochlann
reached into a drawer and pulled out a dagger. Not a letter opener, but an
actual dagger: a gift from a member of parliament, another golfer. Sharper than
Madame Blackshaw, the thin blade was set into a carved silver handle. The head
of a snarling bear raged opposite the tip. With beryl eyes, the bear glared at
the bookshelf as the Scotsman cut through the tape. A bundle inside lay wrapped
in tissue paper. As he tugged it free, out fell a handwritten note—just
one word.
Burn
Whether
advice or command, Lochlann did, making a special trip to toss the paper next
to the charred handkerchief. Returning with a cough and his top lip between his
teeth, he unfolded the ominous bundle.
A lock
of hair tied with ribbon lay inside—a totem—proof … a momentary
trophy.
Red hair.
An
envelope held 8x10 photographs. Lochlann poured another drink before tackling
them. He skipped the water.
At this point the whiskey was medicine.
He’d
asked the assassin to make the girl’s death painful, but as he flipped through
the images, he wasn’t prepared. The muscles in his scrotum tightened, his hands
felt frozen, and he dropped the images on his desk, rubbing wet palms on his
expensive wool slacks as though the friction would clean them, wishing for a
second
mouchoir.
Blackshaw
took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Sucking at the backs of his bottom
teeth until they felt loose, he swept the bundle together and strode to the
fireplace. The hair crackled and a deeply repugnant smell filled the room as it
burned. The photographs curled and warped. Each distorted image piped blue
flames terminating in fluid black whips, the tails of angry wasps.
“For
you, Marcus, you idiot…” Lochlann held aloft the bell-shaped glass and tossed
the remaining fluid into the fire to speed the immolation “…wherever your
misanthropic soul rests.”
The
powerbroker jumped as the front door rang. Pouring another scotch, Lochlann
leaned against the door of the study, listening for the girl to deal with the
caller.
The bell again.
Usually the round-assed Swede was prompt
—more so than the
Brazilian humanities major who had answered his door and provided other
services before Betine. Her name slipped his mind. Lochlann hadn’t answered his
own door in twenty years.
Perhaps Betine was indisposed.
Blackshaw
set down his drink. The compressed leather heels on his custom monk-strap shoes
slapped down the hall then clapped across the newer marble in the foyer.
Through the glass door, a pale fellow reached for the bell again.
Not the usual gardener, but the same
uniform.
In
his hand was clenched—of all things—a five-tined manure fork.
“Go
around back!” The man held a hand to his ear as though hard of hearing.
“Goddamn
it—”
Lochlann turned the
lock.
It had come to this? Now he would
supervise the spreading of exotic shit on the rose beds.
“T
he rear entrance is
what you want, assuredly. Don’t EVER—”
Ryker
swung the fork in a sweeping arc. Two tines entered the lobbyist’s double chin,
piercing his tongue, soft palate,
the
base of his
skull, then Blackshaw’s brain. Ryker leaned back to carry the jigging corpse
inside.
A well-dressed scarecrow on a pike.
He tossed
the body onto the marble in a heap and left the door ajar for cross draft.
Softly, he explored the stone mansion. Expensive artwork adorned the walls, in
themes the German detested.
Fox hunts and horse races.
He
was familiar with the artists, and if they had been there with their awful
paintings, he’d have driven tines into their skulls also.
A
blonde woman in the kitchen froze when he entered. Initially she seemed
prepared to offer salutations, though his unaccompanied presence made her uneasy.
She had spectacular glandular responses, and the nightmarish figure guessed
that she was Blackshaw’s sexual outlet.
Something
inside him had changed.
He couldn’t retract his inner eyelids.
With
human lids reduced to slits, Ryker laid his ears back against his skull and
shot something from beneath his tongue like a spitting cobra—yet missing.
The Swede fell, scrambling back to her feet, and fled with her hands aloft,
buttocks bouncing, through a door to the garden. Stooping to wipe a finger
through his unexpected secretion, he rubbed the liquid between his fingers. A
tank with tropical fish adorned one wall, and experimenting, Ryker dipped his
wet fingers in. In moments, the dazzling array of crimson and cobalt fish began
to jitter, floating to the surface.