Authors: Daniel Judson
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Suspense, #Fiction, #Thrillers
The Betrayer
THE BETRAYER
THE BETRAYER
Daniel Judson
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Daniel Judson
Originally published as a Kindle Serial, December 2012.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
PO Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN: 9781611091786
For Wendy
Table of Contents
Johnny wakes, his heart a dead
thing in his chest and his lungs empty. He reaches out fast, grasping for the
redheaded woman beside him. Stirred from her deep slumber and immediately
sensing his fear, she clutches at him with an urgency that matches his own.
But there is calm,
too, in the way she grabs him, something reassuring, and the instant she does
so, the instant she has a solid hold on him, his heart shudders back to life
and his aching lungs gulp in air.
Out of the
darkness, she whispers softly, “We’re safe. We’re safe.”
He is still
holding on to her — his powerful hands grasping her upper arm — and has to tell
himself to loosen his grip. Still, it takes a moment for him to actually do so.
“We’re
safe,” she repeats.
He nods,
then says, “Good.”
“Do you need
the light?”
“No, I’m
okay.” It’s close enough to the truth.
He begins to
sense the room around them — a good sign. Their bedroom is tucked away in the
back of their Brooklyn apartment. Quiet, dark, secure. A locked door stands
between them and their apartment door, which is also locked. A dark hallway,
three flights of unlit stairs, and yet another locked door stand between their
apartment and the street.
And, finally,
a continent and ocean are between them and Bangkok, the place where they were
almost killed, and the location of his recurring nightmare.
Neither own
very much. When they returned to the States a year ago, they had agreed to keep
themselves as free of possessions as possible — and therefore as mobile as possible.
All the things standing between them and Bangkok could easily be bridged by
anyone who cared to, so the idea of having little to leave behind, and even
less to carry, seemed the prudent thing to do.
All that this
room contains, then, are a mattress and dresser, which itself contains precious
little. The walls and floor are bare, and the only “homey” touch they have
allowed themselves is the heavy curtain hanging before the only window in their
bedroom, to block out daylight as they sleep.
The window
is open now, the curtains swelling like ghosts in the early morning breeze.
“Do you need
to talk about it?” she asks.
Johnny looks
for the clock they keep on the floor beside the bed. It’s an old windup thing they
picked up at a sidewalk sale. He trusts cogs and springs more than batteries,
and the ritual of turning the winding peg at bedtime pleases him.
The glowing
hands tell him it is not yet six a.m. Neither has to leave for work till the
afternoon, so there is no point in waking now.
“No,” he
says.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
The
intensity of Johnny’s dreams has been lessening lately, to the point where he
no longer sees the faces of the three men who had tried to kill Haley.
He no longer
hears the threats they’d spoken, the things they said they would do to her
prior to killing her.
Lately, he
only dreams of killing those men — for him the easiest part of the whole ordeal.
Or the easiest to accomplish, at least.
Sometimes,
though, he dreams of fleeing for the border with Haley, the days it took them
to reach it, the fact that they had barely made it out of that forsaken country
with their lives.
He has come
to consider the memories of Thailand nothing more than a virus he has carried back
with him and has yet to shake. Maybe the infrequency of his dreams means his
body is at last purging itself. Maybe one day he’ll wake up and realize he hasn’t
dreamed that dream in a long time, and maybe never will again.
Haley’s hand
rests on his bare chest. He can tell by the lightness of her touch and the way
her fingers are curled that sleep is close to reclaiming her. He hopes it will
do the same for him soon enough.
His eyes
have grown accustomed to the dark, and he can see the tattoo that covers her
right arm like a sleeve. One of the men had threatened to take her arm as his
trophy. Johnny had gone after him first, breaking the man’s neck and feeling
his body, pressed against his own, go instantly limp.
Johnny
pushes all that from his mind now.
We are our thoughts
. Isn’t that what
the Buddha tells us? His heart is steadier now, he is calmer, and he wants to
remain that way. He proceeds to count his breaths, just as Haley had taught him
to.
As a onetime
soldier, he’d endured some of the toughest training a man could, and yet
meditating is easily the hardest thing he has ever attempted.
It feels a
little beyond him right now, so he listens instead to the ticking clock and
focuses on the smell of Haley’s hair.
These are the
things that matter
, he tells himself.
He repeats
that again and again till he once more believes it deep down, till he trusts it
in that way we trust in things that are bigger than ourselves.
All war is deception.
— Sun Tzu
“I’m going to need you to go
somewhere and lay low until your next job,” the man on the phone said. “When I do
call, I’ll need you here within a matter of hours, not days. Understand?”
Vitali, sitting
on the edge of a worn mattress in a motel outside Boston, answered that he did.
He knew very little about the man who employed him — a disadvantage,
considering that the man knew more or less everything about him. The only thing
Vitali did know for certain was that this man — his benefactor for the past
three years — was located somewhere in New York City. So the comment about being
there within a matter of hours and not days meant that wherever Vitali did go
to lay low and wait, it couldn’t be too far from this part of the country.
There was a
pause during which Vitali looked toward the only window and allowed his thoughts
to drift to the still-vivid memory of this morning’s kill.
A middle-aged
male who worked as a therapist. But Vitali didn’t care what the man did for a
living. He didn’t care whether or not the man had deserved to die; he was no
avenging angel. Nor did he care that the man had a wife and children. Vitali
made a point of learning everything he could about his targets, so he had known
all this going in. Still, while pleading for his life, the man had mentioned
his loved ones, had even tried to show Vitali photographs of them that he kept
in his wallet.
Vitali had simply
told him that it didn’t matter. Once he was in possession of the item he had
been sent to retrieve, he shot the man in the temple with a stolen handgun,
then proceeded with his trademark professional calm to stage it so the death would
look like a motel suicide.
The man on the
phone spoke again, pulling Vitali from his memory.
“There’s a good
chance this is the job you’ve been waiting for.”
Again, Vitali
simply stared into the glare of the east-facing window and said nothing. The steady
sounds of speeding trucks and cars coming from the highway just beyond were a
white noise he found pleasing. It also helped sustain his dreamlike trance.
Though this
morning’s kill had taken place just a little over two hours ago, he was still
high from it. He felt a lightness in his head and a surging in his chest. Now
that he was back in the relative safety of his own rundown motel room, he could
allow himself to experience the euphoria fully.
Allow it to slow
his responses and reflexes, allow himself to savor the sense of being just a
little outside of time and space.
Remember the
feeling of having held complete dominance over another being.
All too soon
this would be gone, and only the memory of it, as vague as the memory of a
dream from long ago, would remain.
Till the next
time, that is.
“Do you
understand what I’m telling you?” his benefactor said.
Vitali sensed
that the man was irritated. Maybe he thought his comment about this possibly
being the job Vitali had been waiting for deserved some kind of display of
gratitude, but Vitali didn’t care about that, either. All that mattered to him
at this moment were the chemicals awash in his brain. He needed to feel their
effects for as long as he could.
No drug — nothing
in this world — was quite like it.
“I understand,
yes,” Vitali said finally. “So the item was what you were hoping for.”
“Better than
I’d hoped.”
“Good.”
“You’ll know
more as soon as I do,” the man said. “In the meantime, stay out of trouble.”
The line went
dead.
Vitali closed
his cell phone, lit a cigarette, smoked it down, then lit another. He always smoked
heavily in the days that followed a job, less so in those leading up to it. He
preferred French cigarettes — Gauloises or Gitanes, though Spanish Ducados were
also good. His father’s brother had introduced them to him. As proud as Vitali
was to be Russian, he deplored his homeland’s cigarettes, but he had learned long
ago that devotions such as these were luxuries he simply could not afford.
How many like
him were in prison or dead because of the brand of cigarette they smoked? Or
the expensive clothing their egos demanded they wear? Or the designer shoes?
No. American
cigarettes — Parliaments now, as dreadful as they come — were fine with him. He
could endure any hardship or pain, was most proud of this fact, was in this way
as disciplined as a monk.
By the time he was halfway
through his second smoke, Vitali had decided that he would head up to
Portsmouth. It wasn’t all that far away, according to a map he’d found in his
hotel room, and it was a place he’d never been to before but had wanted to
visit for a while now. He moved around a lot — for his job, and because of it,
too. A moving target was harder to hit. He wandered from city to city, staying
sometimes just a night, sometimes days, and on rare occasions for a week or even
longer.
He loved
America for that reason (and maybe that reason alone), loved the freedom to
roam from state to state unchecked. It made a great deal of what he did, for
work and for pleasure, that much easier.
As much as he
loved America, though, he was eager to get back home.
He remembered
now that someone had told him not too long ago that there was a pub in Portsmouth
where, on certain nights during the week, jazz musicians wandered in off the
street one at a time, unpacked their instruments, and started to play,
sometimes joining in midsong. He couldn’t remember who’d told him that, or
when; he crossed paths with a lot of people — some faces he could see clearly, and
always would, but most he couldn’t. He wasn’t particularly a fan of jazz, or
any kind of music for that matter, but his father had been a devotee of the art
form, and so Vitali wanted to see this place, if only as yet another in a
series of acts meant as loving memorials to his old man.
The man who had
taught him everything he knew about killing and not getting caught.
So Vitali left
Boston that night by bus, occupying himself for most of the journey north by
watching the pretty college-aged woman seated across the narrow aisle. Listening
to her iPod, often with her eyes closed, she never once looked his way, so he
didn’t get the chance to strike up a conversation with her. He was good at
conversation, at putting people at ease, and could hide his Russian accent easily
and adopt one that was as reassuring — and as distinctly nonregional — as an American
TV newscaster.
When the bus
arrived in Portsmouth four hours later, the woman who had caught his eye was
met by a tall, skinny, awkward-looking guy. Vitali watched as the reunited
couple kissed, and continued watching as they headed arm in arm toward the
terminal’s exit.
Of course, he
was thinking of killing them both. He craved that now, knew exactly how he could do it: Ask for a ride, offer them money when they hesitated, the kind of
money two kids couldn’t refuse, then flash the cash (he carried large sums with
him always). He would push this couple, always with a hapless smile, till they
said yes, and once in their vehicle all he would need to do was wait for the
opportunity to present itself. It invariably did. And what would follow was
simply a matter of him being true to his nature.
But I need to
lay low, he thought. Especially now.
It looks like this job might be the job
you’ve been waiting for.
So he paused
and let these two go on without him. Once they were out of sight and the need he
had felt while watching them was gone, he resumed walking. Exiting the
terminal, a single duffel bag over his shoulder, he headed on foot through the small
city in search of a hotel.
Something
better than that dive outside of Boston.
After all, this
was pleasure now, not business.
Vitali found the pub — it was called
the Press Room; the hotel desk clerk, a pretty woman with long brown hair and fashionably
geeky black glasses, claimed with a fond smile to know it well.
And it was
there, early into his first night, that Vitali met a woman.
He was handsome
enough, despite a few minor scars on his broadly boned face — a Russian face,
but there was nothing he could do about that. He had lifted weights regularly
since he was a teenager, had wrestled in school, and excelled in hand-to-hand combat
in the army (he’d gone AWOL after killing a neo-Nazi bunkmate who’d annoyed him one too many times). His build was one that promised raw power, and he
exuded a quiet confidence, displaying it with even the slightest move he made, even
as he was sitting still on a bar stool in a strange bar in a strange city.
More than that,
he had a friendly and easygoing smile.
Every rattlesnake has its charm,
his
father had told him.
And that is yours.
Vitali spent
what would turn out to be a week with this woman: Dinners after she got out of
work, drinks after that, though never in the same bar — a precaution that he
disguised as a desire to experience every flavor her beautiful city had to
offer. Each night ended with the two of them returning to his downtown hotel
room, where he secretly videotaped their raucous lovemaking with a high-definition
surveillance camera he’d hidden in the room shortly after checking in.
She was a tall
woman, athletic, as good of a match as he’d found in a long time. Blonde, fair,
a good drinker, and bold in bed, even from the very first moment he got her
clothes off, when they were still little more than strangers to each other. He
could see a man wanting to hang on to a woman like her. He could see himself
wanting that. Almost. He truly enjoyed the contrast of her skin next to his — hers
fair, his so dark. He enjoyed, too, the bands of muscle that ran along the sides
of her spine, the look of them in the near-darkness, and the feel of them
beneath his strong hands as he took her from behind.
But just minutes
after he had finally gotten the call he’d gone there to wait for, he phoned the
woman from his disposable cell phone and requested that tonight she drive him
to the ocean. He knew the moment he made the request what it meant. He knew even
as he’d punched her number into his phone what he desired.
He suggested that
she bring him to a secluded stretch of beach, which she did. Once there, they sat
in her car with the engine and lights off and drank from a bottle of Polish
vodka he’d brought along. It was high tide, and each falling wave, muffled by
the closed windows, sounded like the roar of some distant animal. Eventually they
exited the vehicle, carrying a blanket she kept in the backseat, and, under the
moonlight, engaged in one more round of rough sex, after which he easily
subdued her with a wrestler’s hold, retrieved the syringe he kept hidden in
a nylon sleeve secured inside his boot, and expertly injected her with a dose of
ketamine, then dragged her unconscious body into the turbulent surf and waited till she drowned.
He stood there
for a while, as naked as she was, and watched the now-lifeless body tumble within
each dark wave. Striding farther into the cold salt water, he let the force of
the ocean wash all traces of her from his skin. Back onto the beach, he bundled
up his clothes and boots and grabbed her blanket, letting it drag behind as he walked,
to erase his footprints.
He carefully
followed the trail he’d made on his way in, then used the blanket to dry off. Dressed,
he put the blanket in a garbage bag — he always carried a few with him — and
drove her car to a hotel by the highway interchange, parked in its crowded lot,
and walked to a nearby diner.
Within fifteen
minutes he had disposed of the blanket down a storm drain, stolen a late-model
Ford sedan, and was on his way south.
I probably
shouldn’t have done that, he thought as he watched the empty highway ahead. I
should have just slipped out of town. I’ve waited too long to risk blowing it
now.
But it was
done. And it wasn’t that the kill hadn’t been thrilling. He particularly liked what
he called “naked kills” — both he and his victim stripped bare. Very
satisfying, as personal as it gets. He usually favored strangling, but too many
people had seen him with this woman. He needed her death to look like an
accident, and there wasn’t a killing he couldn’t make look like an accident.