“The hit business?” asked Gurney blandly.
“Yeah. His profession. Anyway, he does the job. Clean, quick, no problems. Then he shows up at the man’s place of business to get paid. The man he did the job for. The man tells him he has to wait—a cash-flow problem. Peter says, ‘No, you pay me now.’ Man says, ‘No, you gotta wait.’ Peter says this makes him unhappy. Man laughs at him. So Peter shoots him. Bang. Just like that.”
Gurney shrugged. “Never a good idea to stiff a hitter.”
Angelidis’s mouth twitched into what might have been a split-second grin. “Never a good idea. True. But the story don’t end there. Peter goes to the man’s house and shoots his wife and two kids. Then he goes around town, shoots the man’s brother and five cousins, wives, kills the whole fucking family. Twenty-one people. Twenty-one shots to the head.”
“That’s quite a reaction.”
Angelidis’s mouth widened, showing a row of glistening capped teeth. Then he uttered an eruptive growling sound that Gurney thought was probably the most unnerving laugh he’d ever heard.
“Yeah. ‘Quite a reaction.’ You’re a funny guy, Gurney. ‘Quite a reaction.’ I got to remember that.”
“Seems like a chancy thing to do, though—from a business point of view.”
“What do you mean, ‘chancy’?”
“I would think, after that—after killing twenty-one people because of an overdue payment—potential customers might worry about dealing with him. They might want to deal with someone less … touchy.”
“ ‘Touchy’? I’m telling you, Gurney, you’re a fucking riot. ‘Touchy’—that’s good! But what you don’t understand is that Peter has a special advantage. Peter is unique.”
“How so?”
“Peter takes the impossible jobs. The ones other guys say can’t be done—too risky, the target is too protected, shit like that. That’s where Peter comes in. Likes to prove he’s better than anyone else. You see what I mean? Peter is a unique resource. Highly motivated. High determination. Nine times out of ten he gets the job done. But the thing is … there’s always the possibility of some collateral damage.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“Example? Like maybe the time he was hired to hit a target on one of them high-speed Greek island ferries, but he didn’t know what the guy looked like, only that he was going to be on the boat at a particular time. So what did he do? He blew the fucking thing out of the water, killed about a hundred people. But I’ll tell you something else. It ain’t just that he produces collateral damage—the word is he likes it. Fires. Explosions. Bigger the better.”
That started Gurney wondering about a lot of things. But he kept coming back to one central question: Exactly what was it that made Panikos seem like the right choice for the Spalter hit? What made that job seem impossible?
Angelidis interrupted his train of thought. “Hey, I almost forgot, one more thing—the thing everyone who was there still talks about. The thing that really got to them. You ready for this?” It wasn’t really a question. “While little Peter was going around the town, wiping that whole fucking family off the face of the earth—guess what he was doing.” He paused, real excitement in his eyes. “Guess.”
Gurney shook his head. “I don’t guess.”
“Don’t matter. You couldn’t guess it anyway.” He leaned forward another inch. “He was singing.”
Before Gurney left the restaurant garden, he looked out again through the open doors in the back wall. He could see the Spalter plot clearly—all of it, with no light pole obstructing any part of it.
He heard Angelidis’s fingers tapping restlessly on the tabletop.
Gurney turned toward him and asked, “Do you ever think about Carl when you look over at Willow Rest?”
“Sure. I think about him.”
Watching Angelidis’s fingers drumming on the metal surface, Gurney asked, “Does knowing that Panikos was the paid hitter tell you anything about the buyer?”
“Sure.” The drumming stopped. “It tells me that he knew his way around. You don’t go to your phone book, look up ‘Panikos,’ and say, ‘Hey, I got a job for you.’ It don’t work that way.”
Gurney nodded. “Very few people would know how to get in touch with him,” he said, sounding like he was talking to himself.
“Peter accepts contracts through maybe half a dozen guys in the world. You have to be well placed to know who those guys are.”
Gurney let a silence build between them before asking, “Would you say that Kay Spalter was well placed?”
Angelidis stared at him. He appeared to find the suggestion surprising, but his only answer was a shrug.
Turning to leave, Gurney had a final question.
“What was he singing?”
Angelidis looked confused.
“Panikos, while he was shooting everybody.”
“Oh, yeah. Some little kid song. Whaddya call ’em—nursery rhymes?”
“Do you know which one?”
“How would I know that? Something about roses, flowers, some shit like that.”
“He was singing a nursery rhyme about flowers? While he was walking around shooting people in the head?”
“You got it. Smiling like an angel and singing his little song in a little-girl voice. The people who heard that—they never forgot it.” Angelidis paused. “The thing you got to know about him—most important thing—I’ll tell you what it is. He’s two people. One—precise, exact, everything a certain way. The other—very fucking crazy.”
Chapter 42. The Missing Head
Gurney stopped at the first gas station he came to on the route from Long Falls to Walnut Crossing—for gas, for coffee (having barely touched the cup at the Aegean Odyssey), and to send another email to Jonah Spalter. He decided to take care of the last item first.
He checked the wording and tone of his previous message and purposely made this one more jagged, definitely unsettling, less clear, with an amped-up level of urgency—more like a harried text message than an emaiclass="underline"
Increasing flow of new data, obvious corruption. Conviction reversal and aggressive new investigation to come. Family dynamics key issue? Could it be as simple as FOLLOW THE MONEY? How might CyberCath financial stress play into the investigation? Should meet ASAP for frank discussion of new facts.
He read it over twice. If its edginess and ambiguity didn’t provoke some communication from Jonah, he had no idea what would. Then he went into the shabby little convenience store for his coffee and a plain bagel, which turned out to be stale and hard. He was hungry enough to eat it anyway. The coffee, however, was surprisingly fresh, giving him a fleeting sense of okayness.
He was about to pull over to the gas pumps when he realized that he still hadn’t told Hardwick about his meeting with Mick Klemper at Riverside Mall and the subsequent arrival in his mailbox of the Long Falls security video. He decided to take care of that immediately.
The call went into voice mail, and he left a message. “Jack, I need to fill you in on some developments with Klemper. We had a little discussion about the various ways the story could end, some less painful for him than others, and, magically, the missing video turned up in my mailbox. The man may be trying to cushion his fall, and we need to talk about the implications. Also, you’ll want to see the video. No obvious inconsistencies with the witness reports, but it’s sure as hell worth a look. Get back to me as soon as you can.”
This reminded him of another urgent task that had been side-lined—viewing the video segments from the other three cameras in the four-camera array, particularly the two labeled EAST and WEST, since they would have captured images of individuals approaching or leaving the building. Pondering the potential boost such evidence might give the investigation pushed Gurney’s driving speed well above the posted limits for the rest of the trip home.