If you’re liking what you’re reading, Kill Well is available as a Kindle book and paperback through Amazon and through other ebook stores at Books2Read.com, or order the paperback through your favorite bookstore.
Learn more about Kill Well here
Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828
Larry Larsen sits in a hotel room that could easily be in one of any number of such hotels, and he takes a moment to double check which one he’s in, happy it’s indeed a Hampton Inn as he had thought.
He runs memory checks like this all the time.
Still, he likes that these rooms pretty much look all the same.
What he isn’t liking is having to tell Rocky the assignment has gone sideways.
The boss is going to be furious, is the first thought that comes to mind after Larsen has finished talking to the freelancer on the arranged burner phone.
A complete and utter fuckup, is his second thought, furious with the freelancer who had fucked up badly.
Larsen decides he has to speak again with the freelancer out in Barstow—Well, somewhere the fuck around there, out on Route 247 or parts thereof, he corrects himself—and he’s using the burner for this specific purpose. He’s calling from Anaheim, there ostensibly and provenly at a conference, not that he’ll get to any sessions today, but instead is scrambling like an idiot trying to run herd on his hired talent for this assignment. His so-called talent can’t seem to get anything right.
Talent, he thinks, all but rolling his eyes. The guy is proving to be a big-ass problem. The situation may be fucked beyond repair, and that will not make the boss happy.
Larsen is operating out of Anaheim because this provides good coverage. He is close enough to act under emergency situations, but far enough not to be a possible involvement trigger if it ever comes to an investigation.
He knows a burner makes for some protection too, but he’ll use the second burner when he’s in Barstow trying to un-fuck the situation. It’s perhaps paranoid, but cell tower pings can bite you on the ass, so he’ll leave the current one here.
He knows it should never come to an investigation, not one that goes anywhere anyway, but meeting the objective of this operation looks less and less like a win. But perhaps not all is lost. He’s got some contingencies he’s mulling. It shouldn’t have come to contingencies if his talent had half a brain, but it looks like this is too much to hope for despite the care and thought he’d taken vetting this guy and then mapping out the play.
He admits to himself he should have listened to that little nagging doubt in the back of his mind when he’d decided to go with a complicated play, but it had seemed a solid plan.
Set up as local law, pull over the targets before the meeting, shoot them, at least one close up, the phone texts telegraphing murder-suicide from a lovers’ quarrel.
He had even taken the trouble to discuss abort points with the talent.
What talent? he mentally scoffs, but then, really, this is his own screwup since he hired the guy, judged him competent, or competent enough anyway, and from a talent agency that had previously proved reliable. The freelancer should have simply let the target go on his way the very instance he discovered the young woman wasn’t with him. But instead, the target had gotten suspicious while made to wait, at least that’s what he assumes from the freelancer saying that he’d only been trying to keep control of the situation while he waited for the other target. Control of the situation turning into shooting the man in the head.
By accident, of course, the freelancer tried to make clear repeatedly.
But there is his own judgment to second-guess too. He’d thought he’d taken the guy’s measure during their one video call, all with the necessary precautions of using the VPN and the encryption, and the guy had struck him as smart, attentive.
That’s why I get the big bucks, after all.
But what he’s going to get this time around is a lot of shit for what happened, and he’s not enthusiastic about what he’s doing to try to fix things.
But sometimes you got to wing it.
Of course, winging it was exactly what the idiot had done.
Larsen makes the call.
The guy’s poor decision is why Larsen is now yelling at the man.
“So, if target one was not with target two, why didn’t you just walk?” he asks the man on the other end of the call.
Why didn’t you think that the plan was already off the rails, you fucking idiot, is what he’s thinking.
He interrupts the man on the other end of the phone. “—no, I sent that slip text because you asked me to, not that I’m not sorry I did, considering.” The other man is saying something more, but Larsen cuts him off.
“No, goddamnit! The whole idea was to wait to see if she showed up, and see if it was clear, and then proceed with the original action.”
He shuts his eyes. He mightily regrets the follow-up texts he’d inserted in the hope the woman would show up. He’s usually good with improvising, but his most recent example of improvisation is not so good.
Should have aborted, you asshole, he thinks, but holds off saying it, not entirely sure if his anger is directed only at the freelancer. He really wants a cigarette, but he’s not going to have this conversation huddling outside with other smokers where he could be overheard. That would be poor operational hygiene.
God forbid I smoke in the room.
He finds it funny that he worries about violating the hotel rules, considering all he does, including the present operation to kill a couple of greenies inconveniencing his boss’s clients. Probably billions of dollars’ worth of inconvenience.
“Yeah, I heard you that she never showed up, and I’m sorry as shit that I ever considered trying to finesse the texts to get her there,” he says.
He is indeed sorry. His gut had screamed Abort! but he himself had overthought the situation, probably because he’d picked up from the boss a species of delight in the undertaking, back when the operation was assigned, although he might have simply read that wrong.
“Yeah, the gun just went off,” he replies, but adds silently, You fucking moron, although he is now clearly directing this judgment as much to himself as to the idiot in the field. If this had been called off instead of waiting to see if the girl would show up, then the freelancer wouldn’t have killed the man, no harm, no foul.
“Yeah, sure the target tried to grab the gun, uh huh,” he replies tonelessly.
If you weren’t in the guy’s face, asshole, in the first fucking place! he keeps from screaming out loud.
Larsen can hear the wind over the phone. The freelancer is on the move, driving, but the guy’s not thinking, and for some reason Larsen simply can’t imagine, the guy is on his way toward the meeting location.
In a stolen law enforcement vehicle, he reminds himself. Fuck.
“Obviously,” Larsen says, “you’re not going to the meeting.” He is speaking calmly, even if he’s shouting in his thoughts, Idiot!
He tells the freelancer talent he needs him to ditch the vehicle and gives him the coordinates he had determined in his earlier planning would be a good place to do so.
“Let me see if we can pull a delicious donut out of this pile of shit,” he tells the man on the phone, instructing him to keep the same extraction coordinates, about a two-hour hike from the vehicle ditch point.
Always a bad sign when I find myself using my father’s old expressions, he thinks. He half remembers his old man telling him it was some translation from a Norwegian saying.
It will take Larsen a little more than two hours to get out to the extraction coordinates, but he’s got no choice.
He tells the freelancer they can still find the girl after he picks him up. He tells the freelancer they can surveil the girl and see if they might wrap this up without further trouble. It doesn’t matter, Larsen tells him, if her suicide is in the original car or not. The murder doesn’t have to be followed immediately by the suicide, Larsen tells the man.
Larsen knows this is a stupid longshot. She’s at the meeting, according to the freelancer, and Larsen had immediately confirmed the text she’d sent claiming that, using his cell-server-installed shadow program. Craigson sure isn’t there at the meeting, being dead, so she’ll think something is wrong and the cops will be called, and so, over and out.
But he needs to get the freelancer thinking they can still pull this off. He texts the man with a confirmation of plan, telling him to lie low at the extraction point and wait for a rendezvous.
If law enforcement finds Craigson sooner rather than later, then even being out that way gets tricky.
Best not overthink any further, is what he’s decided. He has the hotel room for another two days, a day past when the security conference ends. He can get to Barstow and back, two hours each way, plus whatever other time needed.
The operation, he thinks, is now only cleanup, so he’ll have to buy a shovel.
Rocky is going to be unhappy.
Larsen’s interactions with the boss are minimal, and on this side of his work for Rocky the interactions are always carried out through encrypted channels. The rare face-to-face meetings are only for the public side of the relationship when he sometimes serves as a digital security consultant for the boss’s business management consultancy, but even then, he almost always meets with others in the company.
Sometimes his two roles cross over. A recent job involved installing a backdoor on a server while doing a security audit as part of the process his boss undertakes for client corporations, something to do with business efficiency and management improvement. That job was at a law firm, and he can guess that firm handles many of his boss’s big clients.
They’ve got a clerk there on board just in case, not that the clerk actually knows Larsen since he always works asymmetrically with such assets, and they’ve never met.
Thinking about this isn’t getting anything done, he decides, trying not to scold himself.
He’s not succeeding.
The boss won’t be happy he’ll head to the Barstow environs, but there’s no other option at this point, he’s sure. The operation has badly screwed the pooch, and cleaning up the occasional pile of shit is also part of his job.
Not causing shit for Rocky is the point of my job, he reminds himself. The freelancer had looked good, and had been vouched for, but no references, of course, by the nature of the work being unattributed, but then you don’t go shopping for killers in the Sunday paper classifieds. And using the same freelancers too often carries its own risks, so he had decided to try again one of the other services because that was best practice, but he had ended up with this idiot.
He’s willing to admit the plan may have been a bit too complicated with too many moving parts, although the targets taking separate vehicles to their meeting was unexpected.
Unexpected! he thinks.
Fuck, he thinks.
Has he perhaps loved the application of planted phone texts a bit too much, he is finding himself wondering. One of his newer tech tools he’d been too eager to try.
I do love my fucking tech, he admits to himself.
He knows he has to get out there for the rendezvous, but before he goes, he takes a minute to write up a job submission for some BOLO locate services just in case he needs them.
I sure as hell hope not, he tells himself, but he knows he’ll need to find the young woman if there’s any chance to come up with something he can figure to fix the fuckup.
He also puts together a job request that will go through a heavily encrypted TOR routine to access one of the kill services he’s used before with never a problem. Now he wishes he’d started there.
Fuck.