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As promised, Francisco Aguilar had invited him to one of his restaurants for a steak dinner. Zbirak had been too polite to deny it was the best meal he’d ever had. The meat was juicy and medium rare, with plenty of seasoning. And most impressive of all was the portion. Enough to fill him up and then some. He may have eaten too much, but he regretted nothing. There was no reality in which he wasted a gift like that.
The conversation had been adequate. Aguilar was not one to mince words, spending only a few minutes on pleasantries before sending his men out of the room and getting down to business. Zbirak spent most of the remaining hour in silence, enjoying his food and soaking up every detail Aguilar could give him about the present situation.
Aguilar had hired Tony Stoll to kill Randall Sherman, the accountant who had betrayed him by going to the police. He had wanted the deed done quietly and set up to suggest that Sherman had killed himself. Stoll had followed through on neither promise. Instead, he pulled his weapon in front of a crowd, killed the accountant, and wounded the detective who had ultimately taken him down. Now, Stoll was in police custody. Dozens of witnesses had stepped forward, willing to testify in court, both for the murder of Randall Sherman and the attempted murder of the detective.
It did not take an intelligent person to see that Stoll was cornered. Aguilar had considerable power in this part of the country, but Stoll‘s confession to having been hired by the kingpin provided the police enough information to arrest Aguilar, even on a minor charge. And that just wouldn’t do.
Aguilar had fluffed Zbirak’s ego. It was something Zbirak liked about the other man—Aguilar was proud, but could admit when he was wrong. The kingpin had made a mistake in not hiring Zbirak to kill Sherman and the other detective, and he was looking to rectify the situation.
Zbirak pulled himself from the memory and looked down at his phone. Earlier in the day, he had placed a tracker on the prison transport vehicle that would take Stoll from the local prison to a detention center. Aguilar did not want to give the man a chance to breathe a word of what had transpired between them.
Zbirak’s heart quickened just a fraction of a beat when he saw the illumination of headlights. A normal person would describe it as nervous excitement, but Zbirak had trained his mind and body to avoid such emotional rebellion. No, this was a prescribed dose of adrenaline, allowing his muscles to move more quickly and without fatigue.
He glanced down at his phone and frowned. The location of the tracker did not match the location of the headlights. The truck was another minute out, and these headlights looked smaller and lower to the ground, like they belonged to a car.
Who was it? Was someone lost? Had the city hired a detective to escort the truck, afraid that Aguilar would live up to his reputation and attempt to cut out the cancer before it spread? Zbirak didn’t like the complication.
It was too late to change his plans now. He had already laid out the spike strip, and sure enough, the car hit the unexpected obstacle. The tires exploded like a gunshot, and even from his vantage point, he could hear someone scream.
Without wasting any time, Zbirak bolted from the shadows. The woman in the car was alone. It was not the detective who had arrested Stoll, and upon closer inspection, he realized it was simply a civilian who had ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Zbirak felt a moment of pity. Unlike some of his colleagues, he did not revel in murder. It did not provide him with a sense of gratification, sexual or otherwise. He was just good at it. When one has a talent, one puts it to good use.
Still, this woman had interrupted his plans. He was at her side within seconds of her car veering off the road. When he wrenched the door open, she screamed again. Momentary relief was replaced by terror when he pulled out his hunting knife and plunged it under her chin and through her brain. A swift death was the only gift he could give her.
But his job did not end there. He placed his hand along the open wound and smeared the woman’s blood across his forehead. As the lights of the truck crested the hill behind him, he rounded the vehicle and got inside the passenger seat, adjusting the woman’s body to hide the wound he’d inflicted.
As expected, the truck came to a halt as soon as it spotted the car protruding halfway out of the ditch. Zbirak would have preferred it if the transport had been parked a little closer, but he’d make do with the situation. In fact, he thought wryly, the introduction of the woman in the car offered a new element to the story. The police would scratch their heads for weeks, wondering how she could possibly be connected to Stoll and Aguilar.
Zbirak watched as the passenger side door opened and a man hopped down to the asphalt. He could hear him yelling over the rumbling engine, but the words were indistinct. When the guard realized no one was answering, perhaps because they were injured, he made his way to the driver’s side door.
The predictability of human nature was tedious.
Zbirak molded his current feelings of disgust until they looked more like terror. He widened his eyes. His jaw went slack with fear. He made his hands shake, and when he spoke, his voice was high and shrill and full of pain he did not feel.
“Please,” he begged the man. “Please help. I don’t know what happened. Sh-she’s hurt. She won’t w-wake up.”
The man opened the door. He took in the situation, including Zbirak’s bloody face and trembling lips. “It’s okay. I’m an officer. I’m here to help.” The guard leaned inside the car. He placed a pair of fingers at the woman’s neck. “Ma’am, can you hear me?”
Zbirak was swift. He reached out his left hand as if to shake the woman awake, but grabbed the guard by his shirt collar and pulled him further into the car. With his right arm, Zbirak plunged the knife into the man’s temple, burying it to the hilt. The guard slumped, and Zbirak pulled him closer so his dead body wouldn’t fall outside the car and tip off the driver behind them.
A minute or two ticked by. Curiosity got the best of the other man. In the rearview mirror, Zbirak watched as the driver opened his door and jumped down to the asphalt. The truck was left running, but that didn’t matter much. Perhaps it gave the man a sense of security.
Not that it would do him much good.
Zbirak waited until the driver was halfway to the car before pushing open his door and stumbling out of the vehicle. He held a palm to his forehead and staggered around the car, toward the other man. The officer said something, but the engine was too loud to make out any words. When Zbirak looked up, he was peering down the barrel of a gun.
“I said stop where you are.”
Zbirak froze. He lifted trembling hands, noticing the exact moment the other man clocked the blood on his face. The gun dropped an inch or two, but it was not enough. At this distance and this angle, a bullet would find its target.
Zbirak dropped to his knees to defuse the tension further. The impact sent a tremor through his body. His knees stung, but he felt the pain as though it were someone else’s. He didn’t break eye contact with the driver. He merely allowed two tears to streak down his face.
“Please,” Zbirak begged. “M-my wife. Sh-she’s—”
“Whoa, there, buddy.” The driver dropped his weapon another few inches and took a step forward. “What happened?”
“I-I don’t know.” He swallowed audibly. The man took another step forward. There was eight feet between them now. Still too far. “W-we were l-lost. I should’ve looked at the map. B-but I thought I k-knew where we were. I should’ve listened to her. I should’ve—”
