The Blonde Read online

  “No, I’m not from Philadelphia.”

  “Goody. I hate Philadelphia.”

  “You’re from here, I take it?”

  “I’m not from here, and yes, you can take it.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  “What’s there to like?”

  “The Liberty Bell?”

  “Funny you should mention that. I was reading about it in the airline magazine. They have this back page where they tell the story of some famous national monument every month. Or however often the magazine is published. Anyway, the Liberty Bell cracked the very first time it was rung.”

  “Back in 1776.”

  “Wrong. You should have read this story, my friend. Philly’s been trading on a lie for, like, years. It wasn’t rung in 1776. And worse yet, the bell? It was forged in England. You know, uh, the country we revolted against? Like, hello!”

  “You’ve just ruined Philadelphia for me.”

  “Sweetheart, I haven’t even started.”

  Jack smiled and finished the rest of the beer in his pint glass. There was no rush. He might as well order another—minus the whiskey. He’d already had two boilermakers, and it hadn’t helped any. The drama of the past few months hung heavy in his mind. Might as well take it slow for a while, check out the people in the airport. The ones with a purpose in life. With a clear idea of where they were going, what they were doing.

  The only thing waiting for Jack Eisley was a night in a bland hotel room and an appointment at eight o’clock in the morning. He was in no hurry to get to either.

  The blonde was looking at his hand. At first, Jack thought she was looking at his wedding ring. Which he was still wearing, for some dumb reason. But then he saw that she was focused on the glass in his hand.

  “You finished your drink,” she said.

  “You’re very observant. Still working on yours?”

  The girl smiled coyly. “Why? You offering to buy me a drink? Even after I poisoned yours?”

  “It’s the least I can do. What are you having? A martini?”

  “Never you mind that. Though I think I should tell you what to expect. Symptomwise.”

  “From the undetectable liquid poison.”

  “Right.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It works in stages. At first...” She glanced at a silver watch on her wrist. “Well, about an hour from now, you’ll start to feel a knot in your stomach. Not too long after, I hope you’ll be near a bathroom, because that’s when the power vomiting starts.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “Think about your worst hangover ever. You know, where you’re sitting on the cold tile of your bathroom floor, begging God to show mercy on your poor alcoholic soul? Telling him how you’ve seen the error of your ways, and you promise never, ever to touch the demon rum again? Well, that’s a tenth of what you’ll feel when this poison hits you. And in ten hours, you’ll be dead.”

  Jack knew his mind was screwing with him—of course he knew—but damn if his stomach didn’t tie itself into a little knot right at that moment. Ah, the power of suggestion. The power of suggestion of death.

  Okay, this girl was fucking psycho. Last thing he needed was another one of those.

  “Um, can I ask why you did this to me?”

  “Sure, you can ask.”

  “But you won’t tell.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “If I’m even alive.”

  “Good point.”

  If this was a con game, she had strange ideas about running it. The bit about the poison would be enough to scare away most people. Which is not the reaction con artists want from their marks. They kind of have to be around for a scam to work.

  So what was her game? Or was this a pick-up?

  “Okay, you’ve poisoned me.”

  “You catch on quick.”

  “Do you have an antidote?”

  “Sweet Jesus on the cross, I thought you’d never ask. Yes, I do have an antidote.”

  “Would you give me the antidote, if I asked nice?”

  “Sure,” she said. “But I can only give it to you somewhere quiet.”

  “Not here?”

  “No.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Your hotel room.”

  Yep, that sealed it. This was a con game—probably a bizarre variation of the old sweetheart scam. Take the woman to a hotel room, expect sex, get knocked on the head, wake up with your wallet gone, your kidney missing, your naked body in a tubful of stinky ice, whatever. Whichever way, you were fucked, all because you thought you were going to get a sloppy blow job in an airport hotel.

  “That’s a kind offer,” he said, “but I think I’ll take my chances with death.”

  Jack scooped up the loose bills on the bar—a ten, two singles. He reached down and grabbed his overnight bag, which had been resting between his feet.

  “Good luck with that poison thing.”

  “Thanks, Jack.”

  After a second, it hit him.

  “Wait. How did you know my name?”

  The woman turned her back to him and started looking through her purse. She removed a plastic eyedropper and placed it on top of the bar. She then lifted her head and swiveled around to look at him.

  “Weren’t you leaving?”

  “I said, how did you know my name?”

  Her fingers played with the eyedropper, spinning it on the surface of the bar. He leaned in closer.

  “You tell me or I’ll bring airport security back here.”

  “I’ll be gone by then. And even if they did catch me, it’s my word against yours about the poison. I won’t know what on earth they’re talking about.” She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows. “Poison? An antidote?”

  “We’ll see.” He turned to walk away.

  “Oh, Jack?”

  He stopped, turned around.

  “Your name’s on a tag attached to your bag.”

  He looked down at the carry-on in his hand.

  “Paranoid much?”

  He could feel it already—the knot forming in his stomach. It wasn’t sickness. It was anger.

  After leaving the airport bar, Jack followed the signs to baggage claim. He didn’t have luggage to pick up—he made it a point to live out of one bag, no matter how many days he traveled. Lost luggage was too much a pain in the ass. But according to the airport’s Web site, the taxi stands were to the left of baggage claim, and sure enough, they were. Cabs to Center City Philadelphia were a flat rate—$26.25, so said the Web site. He climbed into the back of the first available taxi and tried not to think too much about the strange girl in the bar.

  Strike that.

  The strange, pretty girl in the bar.

  It was just as well he’d left her behind. Considering his morning appointment with his wife’s divorce lawyer.

  Poison me?

  Sweetheart, I wish you had.

  9:59 p.m.

  Adler and Christian Streets, South Philly

  One squeeze. One hell of a mess to clean up. But that wouldn’t be Mike Kowalski’s problem. These days, it wasn’t even up to the police. No, this pleasure would fall to one of the crime-scene cleanup outfits. For fifteen dollars an hour, they’d hose down the blood, mop up the bits of bone and tissue, return things to normal. Or back to normal as possible. In Philadelphia, crime-scene cleanup services were a booming industry. Thanks, in part, to guys like Kowalski.

  And right now, he had his night-vision sights trained on a nice little head shot. Yeah, it’d be messy.

  In fact, depending on how the bullet impacted and exploded, it could mean an extra couple of hours’ pay for the crew that worked this part of South Philly.

  Which would be the Dydak Brothers. Couple of nice, strapping, blond Polish guys based in Port Richmond. They’d been cleaning up a lot of Kowalski’s scenes recently. Weird that they worked South Philly, traditionally an Italian stronghold, now full of mixed immigrants and twenty-something hipsters priced out of downto
wn.

  But whatever. Kowalski liked seeing some of his own people get theirs. Sto lat!

  He’d make this one a gusher. Just for the Dydaks.

  See ya, cheeseball.

  The guy whose head was covered by a professional assassin’s sights had absolutely no fucking idea. He was eating a slice of white pizza—uh, yo, dumb-ass, it’s the dough and cheese that make you fat, not the sauce—and sucking Orangina through a clear plastic straw.

  Savor that last bite of white, my friend.

  Steady now.

  Index finger on the trigger.

  Set angle to maximize blood splatter.

  And...

  And Kowalski’s leg started humming.

  There was only one person—one organization—who had the number to the ultrathin cell phone strapped to Kowalski’s thigh. His handler, at CI-6. When they called, it usually meant that he should abort a particular sanction. He would feel the buzz and immediately stop what he was doing. Even if the blade was halfway through the seven layers of skin of some poor bastard’s neck. Even if his finger had already started to apply pressure to the trigger.

  But this sanction was personal. There was nothing to abort. Only he could abort it.

  This was capital V—Vengeance.

  Still, the buzz troubled him. Somebody at CI-6 was trying to reach him. Ignored, it could mean more hassle. More explaining to do, which was bad, since he was supposed to be on extended leave of absence. No operations, no sanctions, no nothing. The last thing an operative like Kowalski needed was to explain why he’d been systematically wiping out what remained of the South Philadelphia branch of the Cosa Nostra. That was seriously off-mission.

  The Department of Homeland Security kind of frowned on the idea that their operatives—even supersecret ops, like Kowalski—would use their training and firepower to hunt down ordinary citizens on a mission of vegeance.

  They might secretly applaud it, get off on the details, but approve? No way.

  So okay, okay. Fuck it. Abort.

  Your lucky day, cheeseball. I’ll get back to you later. In the meantime, go for some sauce. Live it up.

  Rifle down, glove off, roll over, pluck the cell phone from the thigh.

  “Yeah.”

  The voice on the phone gave him another cell phone number. Kowalski pressed the button to end the call. Added six to every digit of the new cell phone number. Dialed the result. A male voice said, “You mean to say you’ve got a thirst even at this time in the morning?”

  Kowalski said, “It’s so hot and dry.”

  Wow. It’d been awhile since a relay used Rhinoceros. Kowalski had almost forgotten the reply.

  The voice gave him another number, which Kowalski memorized—after adding a seven-digit PN (personal number, natch) to every digit. He packed up, stashed the gear in a nearby warehouse, then made his way down from the rooftop and walked six blocks before catching a cab. A $3.40 fare took him to the nearest convenience store, a 7-Eleven, where he purchased three prepaid calling cards in the amount of twenty dollars each. He wasn’t sure how long the phone call would take.

  Kowalski stepped outside the 7-Eleven and found a pay phone. He punched in the toll-free number on the back of the card, then dialed the number he’d memorized. By using a prepaid card and a pay phone, the call was untraceable, buried under a sea of discount calls being placed across the United States. Nobody had the technology to sort through all of that. Not even CI-6—a subdivision of Homeland Security they didn’t discuss much on the evening news.

  A female voice on the phone told him to fly to Houston. Kowalski immediately recognized the voice. It was her. His former handler. They hadn’t worked together in months; they’d had an awkward falling-out. But it seemed they were to be paired up again. Ah, fate.

  Kowalski thought he should say something friendly to break the ice, but she didn’t give him the chance.

  A university professor named Manchette had died earlier that morning, and Kowalski’s employers needed to check something. She wanted Kowalski to bring back a biological sample.

  “Some skin?”

  “No.”

  “Blood?”

  “No, no. We need the head.”

  “The whole thing?”

  But of course. Pity was, Kowalski didn’t know any crime-scene cleanup crews in Houston. It would be a new city for him. Shame it couldn’t have been in Philadelphia. The Dydak Brothers would have had a field day with a head removal.

  “We need something else.”

  “Anything for you,” said Kowalski, but immediately he regretted it.

  Keep things professional.

  “We’d like you to pin down the location of a woman named Kelly White. Want me to spell it?”

  “White as in the color?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do I need to know about her?”

  “She may have come in contact with Professor Manchette within the past forty-eight hours. We’d like to know if this is true.”

  Kowalski said fine, and thought about asking his handler to meet for dinner when he got back. Just to catch up. He wanted to say, Hey, it’s not as if I’m tied down to any broad. Not anymore. Nope, not as of a few months ago.

  And I’m not going to be a father, either.

  But he let it drop.

  Kowalski caught another cab and told the driver to take him to Philadelphia International Airport. The interior was blue vinyl. It smelled like someone had sliced a dozen oranges and then baked them to mask the aroma of sweat. A square red CHECK ENGINE was lit up on the dashboard.

  “There is no flat fee,” the driver said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only apply Center City. We are twelve block south. You must pay what’s on meter.”

  “But South Philly is closer to the airport than Center City. Hence, it should be cheaper.”

  “No flat fee.”

  Kowalski considered asking the driver to take him to Dydak Brothers turf and then shoving him up against a wall and blasting his head off—that’d be a nice little cleanup job for the Polish boys. Bet you didn’t know you were messing with the South Philly Slayer, did ya pal? Too much to risk, though. Kowalski had to return to this city soon enough, and he didn’t need additional complications. The press was already writing stories about a psycho with a rifle hunting down gangsters. He had to finish this before he was caught and had to cash in too many favors.

  “You know what? I’m not worried about the flat fee. Let’s go.”

  10:35 p.m.

  Sheraton Hotel, Rittenhouse Square East, Room 702

  After he finished power vomiting in the bathroom, Jack was finally willing to admit that okay, yeah, maybe it was poison.

  At first, he didn’t want to believe it; had to be nerves. His mind playing tricks. Obsessing over his trip to Philadelphia.

  And his morning appointment with Donovan Platt.

  Jack had done some checking up on Platt. A local mag had voted him the city’s “most feared divorce attorney” and noted that he’d “hacked off more testicles than the Holy Roman Empire.” Nice. There was a little black-and-white photo on-line: The fiftyish bastard had black beady eyes and a beard of burnished steel. Jack was going to have to face the real thing at 8:00 A.M.

  That was enough to make someone vomit, wasn’t it?

  But his second attack was even more brutal than the first, and Jack started to realize that this wasn’t simple nerves. This was a full-on assault.

  The third trip to the bowl was the worst yet.

  Could he have any food left in his stomach? That greasy spinach and cheese airline stromboli had been the first thing to go. He wasn’t sure what was worse—the agony of vomiting or the fact that he recognized his in-flight meal in the toilet. The second time was mostly liquid. And now, the third... yes, now there were globs of tiny blood floating in the water. His stomach was tearing itself apart.

  This was fucked.

  Jack slapped cold water all over his face, then looked a
t his watch: 10:36 P.M. He’d left the airport bar around 9:30. He’d vomited for the first time about forty minutes ago. If that girl was to be believed, the poison was working according to schedule.

  And in ten hours, you’ll be dead.

  The smart thing would be to call the police. But even if he did, what would he say? A strange girl in an airport bar had given him poison, and then he’d said, “Hey, okay, thanks, catch you later”? Why hadn’t he called the police right then? Because she was too pretty to be taken seriously?

  Come on now. Think.

  Maybe tip off the police with a vague description—he was bad at height and weight, and come to think of it, he couldn’t even remember the girl’s eye color. Most he could say was that her chest was huge. Yeah, that would narrow it down.

  Clearly, he needed to go back to the airport, find her himself. Make her tell him what she’d dropped in his boilermaker. Get help. Swear never to drink in an airport bar again.

  Or maybe he needed to go to a hospital. Have his stomach—ugh—pumped. Let the professionals figure out what was wrong. Move on.

  Unless the poison was already coursing through his veins. How long would it take for the doctors to pin it down? He could die in a plastic waiting room chair long before a nurse so much as stuck a thermometer in his mouth. Besides, he needed more than a cure. He needed to find this girl, figure out why she’d done this to him. Maybe she was doing this to other people, too.

  Which is why you should call the police, Jack.

  Enough of this. Get in a cab, get back down to the airport, and find the girl. Now. Leave your bag here. Take your wallet and cell phone. Go.

  Wait.

  It was 10:38 P.M. He was due for another vomiting session in five minutes.

  How was he going to survive a cab ride? The trip from the airport to the Rittenhouse Square Sheraton took at least twenty minutes. What, was he going to have the driver pull over halfway to the airport?

  Figure it out, then. Leave now. Before you lose your chance to find her.

  And you never see your daughter again.

  He was suddenly struck with the desire to stay in his room and call home. Hear her voice. But even though it was only a little after 9:30 back home, Callie would have already been in bed for an hour and a half.