Primary Threat

He stared at the man. Sniveling bastard. He hated guys like this. Vermin. The guy was a cold-hearted murderer. A bully. A wannabe tough guy. A man with the words BANG and POW! tattooed across his knuckles.

This was the type of guy who killed helpless innocent people—partly because that’s what he was paid to do, but also partly because it was easy, and because he liked doing it. Then, when he ran across someone like Murphy, he fell all to pieces and started to beg. Murphy himself had certainly killed a lot of people, but as far as he knew, he had never once killed a noncombatant or an innocent party. Murphy specialized in killing men who were hard to kill.

But this guy?

Murphy sighed. He had no doubt he could make this guy crawl across the floor like a worm, if he wanted.

He shook his head. It didn’t interest him. All he really wanted was information.

“Some weeks ago, right around the time our dear departed President first disappeared, you killed a young woman named Nisa Kuar Brar. Don’t deny it. You also killed her two children, a four-year-old girl and a babe in arms. The four-year-old was wearing Barney the Purple Dinosaur pajamas at the time. Yeah, I saw pictures of the crime scene. These people you killed were the wife and daughters of a cab driver named Jahjeet Singh Brar. The whole family were Sikhs, from the Punjab region of India. You bluffed your way into their apartment in Columbia Heights by claiming you were a DC Metro cop named Michael Dell. That’s pretty funny. Michael Dell. Did you think that was funny?”

The man shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. None of that’s true. Whoever told you all that was a liar. They lied to you.”

Murphy’s smile broadened. He shrugged. He almost laughed.

This guy…

“Your accomplice told me. A guy who was calling himself Roger Stevens, but whose real name was Delroy Rose.” Murphy paused and took another deep breath. Sometimes he got worked up in situations like this. It was important he stay calm. This meeting was about information, and nothing else.

“Any of this starting to ring a bell with you now?”

The man’s shoulders slumped. He sobbed quietly, his body shaking.

“No. I don’t know who that…”

“Shut up and listen to me,” Murphy said. “Okay?”

He didn’t touch the man or move closer to him, but the man nodded and didn’t say another word.

“Now… I already interviewed Delroy at length. He was helpful, but only up to a point. Things got a little messy, so at the end of the day, I’m willing to believe he told me everything he knew. I mean, who would go through all that suffering just to… what? Protect you? Protect someone else like you? No. I think he probably gave me everything he had. But it wasn’t enough.”

“Please,” the man said. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”

“Yes, you will,” Murphy said. “And hopefully without a lot of foolishness.”

The man shook his head, emphatically, energetically. For a moment, he was like a mechanical doll, one that you wind up and its head shakes until the key in the back winds down again.

“No. No foolishness.”

“Good,” Murphy said. He walked to the man and lifted the bloody rag from his eyes. The man’s eyes gaped and rolled in their sockets, then settled on Murphy.

“You can see me, right?”

The man nodded, very helpful. “Yes.”

“Do you know who I am?” Murphy said. “Yes or no. Don’t lie.”

The man nodded again. “Yes.”

“What do you know about me?”

“You’re some kind of Special Forces dude. CIA. Navy SEAL. Black ops. Something like that.”

“Do you know my name?”

The man stared straight at him. “No.”

Murphy wasn’t sure he believed him. He threw out a softball to test the guy.

“Did you kill Nisa Kuar Brar and her two children? There’s no sense lying now. You’ve seen me. All the cards are on the table.”

“I killed the woman,” the man said without hesitating. “The other guy killed the kids. I had nothing to do with that.”

“How did you do the woman?”

“I pulled her into the bedroom and strangled her with a length of computer cable. Ethernet Cat 5. It’s strong, but not sharp. It does the job without a lot of blood.”

Murphy nodded. That was exactly how it was done. No one without inside information about the crime scene would know that. This guy was the killer. Murphy had his man.

“What about Wallace Speck?”

The man shrugged. “What about him?”

Now Murphy’s shoulders slumped.

“What do you think we’re doing here, you moron?” he said. His voice echoed through the darkness. “You think I’m out here in this concrete shoebox with you, in the middle of the night, for my health? I don’t like you that much. Did Speck hire you to kill that woman?”

“Yes.”

“And what does Speck know about me?”

The man shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Murphy’s fist pistoned out and connected with the man’s face. He felt the bone across the bridge of the man’s nose break. The man’s head snapped back. Two seconds later, blood began to flow from one nostril, down the man’s face and across his chin.

Murphy took a step back. He didn’t want to get any blood on his shoes.

“Try again.”

“Speck said there was a black ops guy, special ops. He had an inside track on the whereabouts of the President’s Chief of Staff. Lawrence Keller. The special ops guy was going up to Montreal, he was part of the team that was supposed to rescue Keller. Maybe he was the driver. He wanted money. After that…”

The man shook his head.

“You think I’m that guy?” Murphy said.

The guy nodded, abject, in despair.

“Why do you think that?”