Here and Gone(25)

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.

From: RedHelper

Subject: Re: Items for sale

Message:

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your offer. We have carried out checks and believe your goods to be genuine and safe. Our offer is three million dollars ($3,000,000). We note that both the items show some minor damage. An additional amount of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars ($250,000) will be paid, provided no further damage occurs. These terms are final and non-negotiable. We trust they are to your satisfaction.

Exchange must take place between 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. On Saturday; no other timeframe will be acceptable. Please confirm acceptance of these terms and we will be in touch within twenty-four hours to make arrangements for transfer.

We need not remind you that any attempt to disrupt our operation will be met with swift and harsh retaliation.

Regards,

RedHelper



‘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.