One More Kill

By Matthew Hughes

"Fans of Lawrence Block's Keller stories are going to love One More Kill. I certainly did. Matt Hughes kept me up all night, turning pages."
—George R.R. Martin

He was a trained killer, an orphaned kid who rose from raw recruit to the rank of major in the US Army Rangers. He was looking forward to retiring at the end of a thirty-year hitch, but when he developed a low-grade form of leukemia, the Army pushed him out and left him feeling alone and useless – until a fluke encounter with a rogue doctor tipped him into a new hobby: killing those who had done great harm and gotten away with it.

But then a police detective starts to dig into his "operations," while a vicious old enemy resurfaces with a scheme to draw the Ranger into a web of contract killing and gun running. Pushed too far, the Ranger means to solve his problems with bombs, bullets, and his own bare hands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Jul 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786362353

Matthew Hughes

The name I answer to is Matt Hughes. I write science fiction, fantasy and suspense fiction. To keep the genres separate, I now use my full name, Matthew Hughes, for sff, and the shorter form for the crime stuff. I also write media tie-ins as Hugh Matthews. I’ve won the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award, and have been shortlisted for the Aurora, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, A.E. Van Vogt, Endeavour, and Derringer Awards. I was born sixty-four years ago in Liverpool, England, but my family moved to Canada when I was five. I’ve made my living as a writer all of my adult life, first as a journalist, then as a staff speechwriter to the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment, and — from 1979 until a few years back– as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia. I’m a university drop-out from a working poor background. Before getting into newspapers, I worked in a factory that made school desks, drove a grocery delivery truck, was night janitor in a GM dealership, and did a short stint as an orderly in a private mental hospital. As a teenager, I served a year as a volunteer with the Company of Young Canadians (something like VISTA in the US). I’ve been married to a very patient woman since the late 1960s, and I have three grown sons. In late 2007, I took up a secondary occupation — that of an unpaid housesitter — so that I can afford to keep on writing fiction yet still eat every day. These days, any snail-mail address of mine must be considered temporary; but you can send me an e-mail via the address on my web page: www.matthewhughes.org. I’m always interested to hear from people who’ve read my work.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

It had been a routine day, just like the one that came before it and just like the one after. But the one that came next changed everything, forever...

––––––––

FOR SEVEN YEARS, I’d thought of myself as a dead man walking.

Yes, I know it’s a cliché, but that was how I felt. Before those seven years of real-life zombiehood, I had spent more than twenty years as a US Army Ranger. The basic job of a Ranger is killing, so most of my army years had been taken up with preparing to kill people or teaching others how to do it, interspersed with some brief periods actually devoted to taking lives.

But besides making me into a highly effective killer, the military had also made me a creature of routine. So once a month, during those dead-man-walking years, I would take the subway downtown to the VA center and wait in a big room full of plastic chairs and half-filled with people who didn’t talk to each other much, though some of them talked to themselves. I would wait until my name was called, then go into a small room where a youngish, moonfaced MD named John Oliphaunt—everybody called him Doc Ollie—took a few ccs of my blood. He slipped the vial off the needle and held it up to the light and said, Well, you’re still a red-blooded American boy.

Which was what he always said. And I always answered, Then why didn’t the army want me anymore?

He wrote a few words and numbers on an adhesive label then stuck the paper to the little container. We’ll call you if there’s anything... He left the rest of it hanging. Right where it had been hanging for every month of those seven years.

After that, I would leave the VA center and go on with the rest of my routine. I had been running a small travel agency in Midtown Manhattan since the army had cut me loose on a medical discharge. So on this day like any other day, I rode the subway back, got off at the stop near the deli where I usually bought lunch, picked up four sandwiches, and took them back to the office. Marj, who pretty much ran the business for me, looked a question at me when I handed her her ham-and-Emmental on pumpernickel. I shook my head and shrugged, told her, Same old, same old.

Another cliché, yes. But there could be nothing new in my life, so there was no reason to find new ways to say the same old things.

Shelley Cooper and Rosaline Amberson, my other two employees, were at their desks in the travel poster-decorated open area out front, both on the phones. I gave them their lunches, got smiles and nods of thanks, then went to my own little cubicle in the rear. I ate my roast beef on whole wheat and washed it down with black coffee from the carafe beside the sink. There was paperwork to do, so I did it. When I finished, I tidied my desk, got up, and told Marj I was going for a walk.

Be back before closing? she said.

I didn’t know. If I’m not, close up, okay?

No problem.

I went out into the fall sunshine. A few blocks east and I turned onto Eighth Avenue and went up to Columbus Circle then continued on to Central Park West. It was a toss-up whether I’d go into the park or stay on the sidewalk until I got to the Museum of Natural History. I’d had a thing about dinosaurs when I was nine or ten; it was the only part of my childhood I cared to revisit.

But today it was the park. I walked about with no particular destination in mind, turning from one path onto another at random, thinking about nothing much because I had nothing much to think about. From the day of my discharge until my present age of fifty-three, I’d been like the man in the old Ian Tyson song: just getting up every day and walking around. Sometimes I’d sit on a bench to watch the passers-by, the tourists and the New Yorkers. They were all strangers to me. I had only ever made one friend in my life, and after he’d sold me the travel agency and arranged for me to take over the lease on his apartment, he’d headed south to play golf, drink whiskey, and let himself be chased by widows.

When it started to get dark, I walked home. It had been a routine day, just like the one that came before it and just like the one after. But the one that came next changed everything, forever.

––––––––

Call for you, said Marj.

I picked up the phone, pressed the flashing button, said my name. It was Doc Ollie.

There’s a problem with your numbers, he said.

Big problem? I said.

You need to see a specialist.

Is this...how it happens? I said.

He ignored the question. Where are you located? I told him. He was quiet for a moment, but I could hear the clicking of a computer mouse. Then he said, There’s a Dr. Christopher Anselm on Central Park West. Here’s his number.

I wrote it down. You’re not going to tell me anything, are you? I said.

This point, there’s nothing to tell. See the specialist.

I hung up then called the number, told the woman who answered who I was and why I was calling. I was conscious of Marj outside my cubicle. She took an interest in me; I appreciated it even if I couldn’t return it. When I was finished with the call, she appeared in the gap that served as my doorway. Trouble? she said.

I let my shoulders rise and fall. Maybe. I’ll know tomorrow.

Listen, she said, if you need anything...

Thanks. I’ll be all right.

You don’t have to face it alone.

If it’s what it sounds like, I said, yeah, I do.

––––––––

It’s one thing to know that, one day, life intends to yank the rug out from under your feet; it’s something else to find out that that one day has actually become today. For seven years, I’d known that I suffered from chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a low-grade form of the lethal blood disorder. This version liked to lurk in the body’s back pastures, sometimes for years, even decades. Then, for no discernible reason, it would suddenly come out blasting. When that happened, there were treatments, but they were worse than the disease. And, for most people, they didn’t work—you just died a more miserable death than you would have without the chemo and radiation.

Dr. Anselm, the blood specialist, drew just a red bead from my fingertip, smeared it on a slide, and crouched over a microscope lit by the autumn sunlight that flooded his office. In his hand was some device that clicked when he pressed a button on its side. I stood next to him and looked out at Central Park, ten stories below. There were kids on the playground equipment and boats on the lake.

Your chart says you were a professional soldier, Anselm said, without looking up from the instrument’s eyepiece.

I made major in the Rangers, I said, until the leukemia. I’ve run a little travel agency since 2009.

He straightened and looked at me. Then I’ll give it to you straight.

I took a breath, let it out. How long do I have?

I can’t pinpoint the day, or even the month. All I can give you is an ‘at least’ and an ‘at most.’

All right.

At least two months. At most five.

So there it was. Somewhere in the next two to five months, my red blood cell count would take a drastic, permanent slide, and I would ride it down to oblivion. Although I’d read up on the internet about the treatments for the end stage and had long since decided against them, I asked the blood man if there was anything new in the research pipeline.

He looked at me without emotion. No.

I said, Didn’t think so. I had decided long ago that I would pick my own stop to get off the train. Anything I can do? I mean, to make it more likely it’s the five instead of the two?

Nothing but the obvious, he said. Don’t go on a weeklong bender or play chicken with a Mack truck.

––––––––

The appointment had been for late morning. By the time I came out I was hungry. There was a hot-dog cart near the entrance to the park and I got myself a footlong and a Coke, found a bench, and ate without tasting. I was waiting for the impact, for the emotion I knew I ought to be feeling. But nothing came. I threw the paper holder and the can into a wastebasket and headed up Central Park West to the Natural History Museum. Pretty soon, I told the T. rex, you and I are going to have something in common. Trying it out, just to see if it would kick something over inside, pull up some kind of reaction. But nothing came: I wasn’t mad, I wasn’t sad, I wasn’t scared.

Maybe it’s shock, I said to myself. Couple days to sink in then we’ll see. But I’d been waiting to die for so long that parts of me were already as good as dead. The funny thing was, I had turned out to be one of those chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients that showed no real symptoms apart from a slight deficiency in producing red blood cells. As a Ranger officer, I’d been one of the fittest late-middle-aged North Americans you were likely to find. I could walk, run, take a flight of stairs without breathing, do pushup and sit-ups till I got bored.

If, almost eight years ago, a routine blood test as part of my annual medical checkup hadn’t thrown up a red flag, I would have worked through to the end of my thirty-year hitch, likely mustering out as a light colonel, maybe even a full bird on my shoulders. Instead, I’d been dumped on the side of the road and left to rust.

I waved goodbye to the T. rex, went down the steps of the museum, out onto the street. Now what? I could go home and inventory my belongings: a wall full of my old friend’s books, some maps, a few medals. I could wonder who on earth I might leave them to. There was one elderly cousin left from my mother’s side of the family, somewhere out in Wisconsin, but nobody else. The army had been my life before I’d got sick; there had never seemed much point in building anything afterwards.

I’d had a bad upbringing: the only child of a hard-case father who related to my mother and me with his fists instead of words, and who dragged us around from one town to another, one state to another, for no good reason I could ever see. A drunk driver had relieved me of him—and, unfortunately, of my mother too—one afternoon when I was sixteen. After two years in an orphanage, I’d pitched up at an army recruiting office the moment I was legal. I’d volunteered for the airborne then for the Rangers, and been accepted into both. The lieutenant colonel who commanded Ranger School when I went through its ordeals took an interest in me, and set me on the road to an officer’s career. The attention Col. Jack Griggio had paid to me was as close as I’d ever come to paternal guidance. He helped me set a direction in life, and I continued along it even after he was killed in a plane crash in Guatemala.

Until the age of forty-six, I could say I was serving my country, not always liking the things I had to do, but always doing my duty. I had a life that suited me, a career I was good at—more than just good. Then had come the illness, and my life slid into a gray limbo. I’d meant to do a lot of things—go back to school, read some more good literature, maybe learn to play music—but I’d done none of them.

And now I’d have two months, maybe five, to do something. Trouble was, I couldn’t think of anything worth the effort. I was walking south, heading back to the office, on automatic pilot. But I couldn’t bring myself to face Marj and Shel and Ros, though I knew that if I didn’t show up or at least call in, Marj would figure it out. She could read me. So when I got to West Fifty-Fourth, I swung west and walked a few more minutes to the old redbrick building where I lived and climbed to the fifth floor. When I closed my apartment door, the cross-town traffic noise was subdued, and none of the neighbors was playing music. It was about as quiet as it ever got, but I couldn’t settle. I made myself a mug of coffee, put on one of the blues CDs Gil Zipp had left behind, then turned it off and stood at the window looking down at the cars and pedestrians. By the time I remembered the coffee it had gone cold; I put it into the microwave but didn’t bother to turn it on.

I sat in the old armchair and picked up the phone, dialed a number from memory. It rang several times, then a recorded voice said, Hey, this is Gil. Not here or not answering. Now comes the beep.

I couldn’t think of a way to say it, so I hung up. I sat in the chair for a while, picked up a book on ancient Assyria that I’d put down beside the chair three days before. I looked at the pictures of kings and warriors in conical hats with spears resting on their shoulders. Wonder if I’ll meet any of these guys on the other side, I said inside my head. We could talk shop.

But humor wasn’t working for me today. I sat in the chair until dusk. The hot dog had worn off so I put a frozen something into the microwave and when the chime sounded I ate it standing up, even though parts of it were still cold. I realized as I finished it that I hadn’t even noticed what I’d been eating, but I couldn’t be bothered to retrieve the packaging from the garbage can and find out.

What does it matter? I thought. And when I couldn’t think of an answer, I turned off the lights and went to bed.

––––––––

Line two for you, Marj called.

Who is it?

A Dr. Anselm.

It was the afternoon of the day after I’d seen him. And now, as I looked at the flashing plastic button, I finally felt something—a lot of somethings, one after another. He’s calling to tell me he made a mistake, I’m not going to die; no, it’s worse, I’ve only got two weeks; what if there’s a new treatment, maybe a cure? Or he just wants to put me in a study.

And each little shunting thought came towing its own little tender full of emotion—hope, despair, surging optimism, deflated resignation—until I pushed the hold button just to stop the bouncing. I was never at ease with strong emotions.

I hope you don’t mind, he said. There’s something I’d like to discuss with you. A non-medical matter.

What? I said. I’d gone flat again.

I’d prefer not to talk about it over the phone.

I didn’t like the man. His voice was nasal and I’d had the impression he was used to talking down to people. On the other hand, there was the prospect of another evening sitting in Gil’s old chair and looking into a future as blank as the apartment’s cream-colored walls. Anselm told me what train to catch and what station to get off at. It was a town in Connecticut that I’d never visited, but I’d heard of it and what I’d heard evoked an association with serious money. He’d meet me and drive me to his place.

He was waiting in the parking lot, behind the wheel of a Rolls Royce, the first I’d ever seen up close. The leather upholstery was as buttery soft as advertised and I really couldn’t hear the engine when he put it in gear and pulled out onto the road. We didn’t talk as he steered through leafy boulevards past gated communities then out into real countryside where the homes sat in spacious fenced grounds so large I couldn’t see the houses for the trees that surrounded the curving driveways.

Anselm’s house was an old-fashioned mansion of gray stone with an actual pillared portico. He led me up the marble stairs and into a spacious foyer that opened onto a huge sitting room.

Quite the place, I said.

The wife decorated it. My private turf is down here. He indicated a short hallway that ran under the big curving staircase. I followed.

Mrs. Anselm’s preferences ran to track lighting, rose marble walls, and dark tiled floors. The tiles were interrupted by monochromatic rugs with starkly geometric designs, the foyer walls by niches that held angular bronze sculptures, all triangles and thin struts that might have been crafted by talented social insects. The doctor’s lair, when we came to it, was from another century: shelved in mahogany and unjacketed books, with a carved sideboard displaying antique medical instruments. An old Persian carpet covered most of the stone-tiled floor and the two overstuffed leather armchairs were of the same vintage. The light was mellow from parchment-shaded lamps.

Anselm waved me to a seat and went over to an ornately carved drinks cabinet. What’ll you have? he said.

Bourbon, I said, but should I be drinking, my condition and all?

Won’t make any difference, he said. Ice?

Straight up.

The glasses were crystal, like the decanter that he brought over and set on a side table. We sat across from each other and he raised his glass and said, Here’s to you.

Likewise, I said. The whiskey was the kind that even the best liquor stores keep on the highest shelf, smooth and dark. I took a sip and waited for him to get started on whatever had motivated him to bring me out here.

He drank more than a sip before settling back in his chair. I had a fleeting impression that he had rehearsed this moment, then he said, So how many people would you say you’ve killed?

I looked at him straight. I wouldn’t say. It’s not something I talk about. Or think about.

He leaned forward and poured another inch from the decanter into his glass. I gestured to let him know mine didn’t need topping up. It was time to change the subject. Nice den, I said.

I’m not asking out of morbid curiosity, he told me. Humor me on this.

I drank some more of his bourbon and thought about it. I can’t tell you, I said, at last. The ones who were close up, I know about. A lot of the others were two hundred yards deep in the Nicaraguan jungle, and I wouldn’t let my men hang around to collect souvenirs. In Panama, there were some face-to-face kills, but for the rest, we were all shooting and who knows who hit what. I killed only one in Desert Storm. We were on deep-penetration missions to identify SCUD launching sites so they could be taken out by cruise missiles from ships offshore. The idea was not to let the Iraqis know we were there.

That was all I was going to say. I was definitely not liking this man. He had a soft sleekness about him. "So, how many have you killed?" I said.

He kept his face still. Take a look at this, he said, reaching for a file folder that had been sitting within reach atop a row of shelved books beside his chair.

It was a manila folder full of photocopied newspaper clippings. They went back several years and the datelines were from different parts of the country, but they all had one thing in common: each clipping reported a violent death.

I read a few. The phrases, police are baffled or no leads or suspects cropped up more than a few times. Most of the victims were alleged to be linked to organized crime, including a prominent attorney who had just been acquitted of jury tampering when an unknown gunman had walked up to him in his driveway and blown his brains all over the roof of his BMW. I remembered that one, plus maybe a couple of the others.

I closed the file and said, So?

He looked at me over the rim of his glass. So, now I put my life in your hands, he said. If he was waiting for a response, I wasn’t prepared to give him one yet. I thought about telling him that I had more important things to think about these days than his amateur theatrics.

He put his glass down and took back the file. All of these were people who had done a lot of harm, and would have done more. They thought they were shielded from justice—mainly by money, and by the influence money can buy.

I waited.

Well, it turned out they were only shielded from the law. Justice came and got them after all.

And you’re going to tell me that you had something to do with that? I asked. Nut-job vigilante, I was thinking. Then, No, just a wannabe.

A little, he said. Mostly, though, it was people like you.

That took me by surprise. I had thought he was going to tell me he’d been playing the Masked Avenger—old radio-serial melo-dramatics would have suited the atmosphere of his den—but my growing irritation must have finally got through to him, because now he laid it out for me quickly and efficiently.

For several years, he said, he had been enlisting the aid of terminal patients like me to kill—eliminate was the word he used—criminals who’d been able to thumb their noses at the law. He said that four of his patients had accounted for eleven of them. None had ever been caught, or even suspected.

The most difficult killing to solve—I noticed he avoided the word murder—is the killing by a stranger who has no discernible motive. Unless the assassin leaves a videotape or the weapon with fingerprints on it, there’s nothing to connect him to the corpse.

You’re telling me you’ve arranged the murders of eleven people? I said.

The executions of eleven vicious criminals.

Whatever. What’s to stop me from going to the police?

He poured us more whiskey. I’ll deny everything, and say you’re out to punish me because I’m the one who gave you the bad news about your condition. Terminal patients sometimes do strange things.

I lifted my glass. You’re the one who’s nuts, I said.

That’s just what your four predecessors said. Until they thought it over. He drank. Why don’t you think it over?

I didn’t feel like thinking. Or drinking with the too-smooth doctor. I put down my glass and stood up. No thanks, I said.

He remained seated, looking up at me as if I were another kind of specimen. You’re perfect for the job, he said.

I almost smiled. I’m nobody’s idea of perfect.

Now he rose with me, leaned in closer than I liked. It’s just one more kill, he said. And in a good cause. Besides, what else have you got to do?

And there I had to admit he was right. Didn’t want to. Didn’t like the smugness that peeked out from behind his simple question. But there was no doubt I had nothing on my agenda. I’d head back to my neat and tidy apartment, probably one of the last rent-controlled units in Manhattan. My apartment, which was always completely empty when I wasn’t there, and only a little less empty when I was. But it was better than this man’s foolishness.

You can call me a cab, I said. I’ll wait outside. I got up and crossed Anselm’s den. It had lost any feeling of coziness.

Just think about it, he said, following me across the Persian carpet. His voice was full of the confidence of a man who wasn’t dying.

I put my hand on the doorknob and said, All right, sure, I’ll think about it, just saying it to be out of there.

But even as I opened the door, I felt some subtle balance shifting. Something came up from deeper down in me than the surface waters I usually paddled in, came up and took hold of me. In that moment, I discovered that now that I was definitely dying—no longer just waiting for the final word—I had a perverse desire for something to live for. I wasn’t going to acknowledge that the doctor had figured that out—I was liking him less with each moment—but I didn’t go out into the marble hall.

We stood together in the doorway. He handed me another folder. Here, he said, it might be easier if we don’t leave it in the abstract.

This one was thinner. There were some sheets of paper dense with single-spaced typing, and a newspaper photograph of a jowly man with thick eyebrows who was giving the camera the finger and a sneer. It took only a moment for the face to register.

That’s Torres, I said. Anybody who had owned a TV or read a tabloid recently knew about Little Tony Torres. His pretrial maneuverings had been a six-week wonder, until the narcotics importing charges had suddenly been dropped for lack of evidence. Despite police protection, the witnesses who were supposed to connect the New York underboss to a container-load of cocaine seized on the docks had all ended up severely dead. There were rumors the executioners might have been cops themselves.

You’ve got to be kidding, I said. He has bodyguards, an armored limo.

Does that mean we’re past the moral issues and into the logistics? Anselm asked.

That stopped me. Again, he was right. The balance had definitely shifted, sliding me all the way across to the doctor’s side of things without my noticing. I looked into myself and had to admit that I had killed people who had more right to live than Little Tony. I had no moral objection to relieving the world of the stain of his presence, if I could do it without getting caught or killed.

I realized something else: the part of me that had for decades been a first-rate tactician, a part that had lain idle for eight years, was standing up and dusting itself off. And it felt good. Lay it out for me, I said.

He started to speak, but just then we heard the front door open and close, a clicking of heels on marble, and a woman’s voice softly la-la-ing a song that I vaguely remembered hearing sung on TV, years ago, by the world’s three most overexposed tenors.

The wife, said Anselm, back from the opera. He drew me back inside the den and shut the door.

––––––––

Something’s happened, Marj said.

I came back from the far back reaches of my head, looked around the office. What? I said.

"Something’s happened to you, she said. Her eyes brightened. The diagnosis, it was wrong?"

Nope, nothing’s changed.

"Something’s changed. I haven’t seen you like this."

Like what?

I dunno. Energized. Like you used to be forty watts, now you’re...well, not a hundred, but definitely sixty.

I smiled at her, showed her my palms. You never noticed my mercurial nature until just now?

She wasn’t buying the act, but she also wasn’t prepared to push it. Long as you’re happy, she said and went back to her desk.

The phone rang before she got there so I punched the lit-up button and said the name of the agency. A familiar voice said, Hey, pardner. You called me. What’s up?

Gil? How you doing? While I was saying it, I made a decision. No, I didn’t call.

"Pardner, I know your phone number when I see it. Used to be my phone number, chrissakes."

Must’ve been an accident, I said. Probably sat on the speed-dial button.

There was a silence on the line. I could imagine Gil mentally shifting gears. Oh, he said, I thought maybe, you know...

Nah, it’s all good. How’s the golf?

Balls gettin’ in the holes. What more can I say?

I heard the slight slurring. He’d had a few before making the call, in case he needed to be insulated from big bad news. Then another pause and I could picture him pulling it together. How ’bout you come on down one of these days? he said. There’s a new casino down by the beach. We’ll shoot some craps.

I made a noise in the back of my throat. That was more your thing than mine, Captain. But, yeah, I’ll try and cut some time loose here, get down and see you.

Do that, pardner, he said. The two amigos, together again. I heard the rattle of ice in a glass, then he came back. Gotta scoot. There’s this widow wants to fix me dinner.

Watch out she doesn’t fix something else, I said.

It ain’t broke yet, he said. So it don’t need fixin’.

This conversation’s gone sideways. Take it easy, Gil.

Take it any way I can, pardner. I heard the click and hung up the phone, looked over to see Marj watching me.

You didn’t tell him, she said.

He’s got enough troubles of his own, I said.

She moved her mouth sideways. His own making.

We do what we can, Marj.

She left me alone then and I went back to my thoughts. I’d scoped out the target area, mapped my ingress and exit routes. The operation was doable. On the way home I’d stop at a phone booth, call Anselm, and speak the code words we’d agreed upon.

––––––––

The clinic was in an exclusive neighborhood on the Upper East Side, with a doorman to buzz patients through the thick glass doors. But in the alley behind the building was an unattended entrance whose lock opened to any plastic card with the right data encoded into its magnetic strip. Anselm consulted at the clinic from time to time. He’d lifted a spare key card from the security desk a few weeks before.

Torres came in once a month to be attached to a machine that helped undo some of the damage that booze and a boyhood fondness for amphetamines had done to his liver. He would lie on a couch in a locked room while the equipment gurgled next to him for twenty minutes. His bodyguard would hang around drinking coffee and hitting on the nurses.

At 5:30 that morning, I’d let myself in and done a final reconnaissance. Now, at 10:30 a.m., a half-hour before Torres’s scheduled appointment, my passkey let me into a basement storage room. There I found a pair of latex gloves and a .45-caliber Colt AR1911 automatic pistol in a box whose markings said it contained tongue depressors.

I put on the gloves then fieldstripped the weapon and reassembled it. It was used but clean and in good order, a dependable design that had been decommissioned from US military services in the 1980s after decades of effective use. Counting firing-range practice, I had shot this model thousands of times, and had killed with one at least once that I knew of.

I checked the loads: some kind of highly engineered slugs that would expand into razor-edged, hooked shrapnel once they penetrated flesh. I’d never used such rounds before: there was a Geneva Convention banning them from warfare, but they could be bought in gun shops or ordered from mail-order catalogs.

Satisfied that the weapon would do its job, I worked the slide to ease a round into the chamber, put on the safety catch, then slid the pistol through the belt at the small of my back. I slipped into a white jacket that was hooked on the back of the door. There was a stethoscope in the tongue depressor box; I hung it around my neck.

At 11:10, I climbed the fire stairs and stepped into a hallway at the rear of the first floor. The passkey let me into a consulting office that had a connecting door to the treatment room where Torres should be lying. I cracked the door an inch and peeked through. The mobster was face up on a padded gurney, his sizable gut making a mound under a hospital blanket. Clear plastic tubes connected him to a machine mounted on a wheeled cart—it looked like something an auto mechanic would use to test