“You’re right, I don’t. But somebody has to know. Somebody has to stop him eventually.”
“What can I tell you—welcome to the wackadoo world of the rich and famous. Can you say wood chipper?”
Chapter 41
REMY WILLIAMS DIDN’T trust these two guys at all. Never had, not from the start of the contract. When they pulled up to the cabin and didn’t even get out of the car, he knew something was up. Something more than the usual dirtbag routine.
“How’s it going, fellas?” He shuffled on over like the piece of white trash he was supposed to be. “What’ve you got for me this time?”
“Two female.” The driver looked up, though not quite into his eyes. What was this: Did the Latino have a conscience? “One of them has a bullet in the chest. You’ll see.”
>
“Oh, yeah? What’d you shoot her for?”
“I don’t know, maybe because we’re still chasing down the last one who ran off.”
The guy was baiting him, Remy could tell, but he wasn’t sure why or, really, what these murders were all about. He was just a cog, didn’t have all the pieces, figured probably no one did. Like JFK. Like RFK. Hell, like O.J.
“Seems to me you shot the last one too,” he said, playing along. “Maybe she didn’t run off a’tall. Might just be lying out in those woods somewhere, turning into mulch. As we speak. Coulda just been found by hikers.”
“Yeah, maybe.” The ex-agent took a deep breath, starting to get a little showy with his aggravation. “Listen, if you could just clean out the trunk, we’ll be on our merry way.”
Remy scratched at his crotch—a little overkill, maybe—and then shuffled around to the back of the car. The driver popped the trunk for him. Jesus! Look at this.
The two bodies were double wrapped in black poly sheeting and sealed with packing tape. These guys were pros at what they did; he had to give them that much. But who the hell was hurting these girls in the first place? What was the big picture here? Who was the killer?
He dragged both “packages” out of the trunk and onto the canvas tarp he’d already spread. His tools were laid out on a big hickory stump, and there was an extra gallon of gas next to the chipper.
“Which one’d you say was shot?” he called over to the spooks.
“Tall one. Left chest. What a waste. Girl was a real looker.”
He rolled her over and slit the plastic down the middle, pushing just hard enough with the tip of his bowie knife to leave a thin red trail in its wake. When he pulled back the wrapper, he found a small crater just above the very well-formed left breast. The body was still warm—in the nineties or high eighties. Dead only a few hours at most.
“Okay, got it. You want me to pull the slug or do you care?”
“Pull it. Get rid of it.”
“All righty. Done. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Close the trunk.”
A few seconds later, the two smartass bastards were gone.
Distrust aside, Remy didn’t mind their arrogance, mostly because he knew it worked in his favor. It probably never even occurred to those two how expendable they were.
Or how vulnerable.
In fact, they’d already done a good bit of the work for him when they erased their own identities. Now they were just a couple of spooks, and Remy knew as well as anyone that when the time came, there was nothing easier to make disappear than a ghost.
He could do that—hell, he’d done it before. Made a career of it, actually.
He unwrapped the second girl—another real looker. Seemed like maybe she’d been strangled. And bitten? He massaged the girl’s lukewarm breasts, played around a little bit more, then took the two of them up the hill to the chipper.
What a waste was right. Who the hell would do such a thing? Somebody even crazier than he was?
Chapter 42